Gavin Watches a Lot of Movies

Surprise, bitches! New movie review time, and this one hasn't even come out in theaters yet! Long story short, AMC sometimes does something called a Scream Unseen - a special one-night-only discounted showing of a horror movie ahead of its full theatrical release, with the minor catch that they keep the movie a secret until it starts. As someone who loves watching both good and bad horror movies in equal measure (extreme outliers like Skillhouse obviously excepted), I've been dying to catch one of these for a while, but this is the first time I've been able to squeeze one into my schedule. So, the question is, did I luck out or not?

Bone Lake

Bone Lake is one of those rare films I've been lucky enough to go into with absolutely no prior knowledge - including, as mentioned, the fact that I was going to be watching Bone Lake tonight. As such, my first thoughts as the movie began were "god I hope this isn't The Black Phone 2, I still haven't gotten around to watching the original and I really don't want the whole movie ruined for me because I accidentally signed up to watch the sequel first".

My second thoughts were "oh, so that's what it looks like when a crossbow bolt goes through a scrotum," followed very shortly thereafter by my third thoughts of "AAAAAAAAOOOOEEERRRRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!"

Once the... vivid opening sequence concludes, we're introduced to our rather stereotypical horror movie main couple, struggling writer Diego and supportive girlfriend Sage, as they attempt to spice up their rocky relationship by renting a mansion near the titular Bone Lake for a weekend getaway - presumably, the equally romantic waterside destinations of Homicide Falls, Cape Disembowlment, and You-Are-Definitely-Getting-Knife-Murdered-Here Springs were all fully booked this time of year. Jokes aside, it seems Bone Lake is a more popular spot for lovers than one might assume, as Diego and Sage's christening of their vacation home is unexpectedly interrupted by Will and Cin, another couple who were apparently double-booked for the same weekend by the mansion's owner. Despite the awkward circumstances, the couples happily agree to simply share the mansion between themselves for the weekend - but while things start off amicable, Will and Cin's behavior soon takes a turn for the manipulative, dragging Diego and Sage into a perverse game of mistrust and seduction.

Now, if you're like me and you saw a certain obnoxiously-overadvertised Blumhouse movie last year, you might be picking up some awfully familiar plot beats right now - and indeed, that's a large part of why I had such a hard time getting into Bone Lake. A troubled couple makes fast friends with a much more confident and outgoing couple, they're persuaded to share a home with them on a brief vacation, their relationship becomes steadily more uncomfortable as their new friends deliberately push the boundaries of their comfort zone more and more as part of a sadistic game, culminating in the other couple revealing themselves to be serial killers and chasing the protagonists around their home in a bloody action-packed finale? From beginning to end, the whole thing feels like a cheap, shallow Americanized knock-off of Speak No Evil - an especially damning comparison when you consider that Speak No Evil was already a cheap, shallow Americanized knock-off of Speak No Evil.

The movie does, at least, start to come into its own in the third act, albeit in a way that still feels clumsy and jarring. After an hour of maintaining a mostly serious and suspenseful tone, slowly building tension as Will and Cin weaponize Diego and Sage's darkest secrets and insecurities against them, driving a wedge ever deeper between the couple, the final half hour suddenly turns into a campy, ridiculous horror comedy. The villains drop about a hundred IQ points, bumbling around and mugging for the camera like they've been abruptly recast as Stu Macher and Billy Loomis, while the heroes put in their quota of knocking down the killer and then running away until the movie finally decides it's time for a spectacularly gory and over-the-top finisher. Is it extremely stupid and wildly incongruous with everything that came before it? Yes, obviously. Is it by far the most enjoyable part of the movie? Hell fucking yeah it is.

In the end, while I don't think I can give Bone Lake a good score, I find myself harkening back to my thoughts on Him from my last review: even if you don't enjoy it, you'll sure as hell remember it. For all that it's a shallow imitation of an already agressively-okay remake, Bone Lake does at least show a spark of something at the very end, and maybe that spark might be enough for some people to warrant sitting through everything beforehand... but let's be real, if you want to watch a horror movie this year that pivots between serious psychological horror and bonkers uber-violent horror-comedy, Weapons is right there.

5/10, upgraded to 6/10 by virtue of not being fucking Skillhouse.

And now for something completely different: a horror movie where I'm almost as scared of the main character as I am of the monster!

Good Boy (2025)

Probably unnecessary to add the year on this one, but I am aware of another unrelated horror movie from 2022 with the same name but a very different premise, so figured I might as well just to be safe.

Conceptually, Good Boy reminded me a fair bit of the very first horror movie I saw this year, Presence: a slow-paced haunted house movie with a shorter-than-average runtime, a focus more on drama than scares, and a titular but unconventional silent protagonist. But unlike that movie's Presence, there's no benevolent ghost righting past mistakes here - just one angry oiled-up motherfucker with a penchant for suddenly sprinting straight at the camera. Instead, Good Boy's story is told from the perspective of Indy, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever (yes I looked that up) whose chronically-ill owner Todd spontaneously moves out to his late grandfather's home deep in the backwoods. As Todd fights a continuous battle with the threat inside him, Indy is left to deal with the threat outside - a shadowy, incorporeal figure dwelling in their new home's cellar, invisible to all but Indy's canine senses.

On a directorial level, the movie commits unapologetically to its gimmick, minimizing the screen presence of the human characters whenever possible. Expository dialogue between humans is always treated as something in the background that Indy just happens to be present for, and is often muted or muffled when Indy becomes distracted by signs of the shadowy entity's presence. Moreover, there's a clear and deliberate choice to avoid showing a clear human face onscreen throughout the entire movie. Every scene of Indy and Todd interacting is carefully framed to keep Todd's face either out of view or out of focus, and on the rare occasions where a character's face can't be kept out of the shot, it's conveniently obscured in some way - one early scene in the woods outside Todd's house has his fox-hunting neighbor arrive behind Indy in a full ghillie suit. It's a really neat choice that does a lot to not only highlight Indy's emotions, but emphasize his partial disconnection from the human side of the plot - just as Indy is unable to communicate the danger of the dark figure to Todd, Todd's own struggle with his illness is outside the scope of what Indy can understand.

Honestly, there's a lot to love about Good Boy - it's got some solid scares, a powerful plot, and while it is very much a slow-burn build-up, the short runtime means it doesn't overstay it's welcome. That's why it sucks that I can't give this one a proper review in good conscience. Not because there's anything morally abhorrent about the movie's production or anything, but because I don't think I'm qualified to judge one of its strongest assets.

See, there's one little detail about me that some of you guys may already know me well enough to remember, and that I hinted at right at the start of the review: I absolutely cannot fucking stand dogs. Long story short, loud barking and a tendency to suddenly jump at me aren't traits that mesh particularly well with my brand of autism, and getting a chunk taken out of my face as a kid by a dog my family adopted very much against my wishes did not help any. It's not, like, full-on paralyzing fear or anything, but I get deeply uncomfortable around any dog I haven't been forced to get acquainted with over a long period of time, sometimes even to the point of fleeing the room entirely to avoid one.

So, the obvious question there is "Gavin you dumb stupid twink, why the actual shit would you go to a horror movie about a dog protagonist if you don't like dogs?" Well, the film was reviewing really well, and my fear isn't so bad that I freak out at seeing a dog in a movie or anything like that, so I wanted to at least give it a fair shake (no pun intended). And now that I have seen it, I can confidently say this is a very good movie that I am 100% not the target audience for. Technically it's very well put together, it's just that so much of the movie's quality rests on the strength of Indy's performance and emotions, and I can't read dog emotions well. I have a hard enough time reading human facial cues and body language with the autism, so I'm sure as hell not going to do any better with an entirely different species - especially when the self-preservation part of my brain is screaming at me to interpret all of their body language as "KILL MAIM RIP TEAR EAT GAVIN'S FACE SPECIFICALLY!"

So that's where I'm going to have to recuse myself. If I rated this one, I'd either have to rate it based on my personal experience with the movie or give it a hypothetical rating based on how much I think I would have enjoyed it if I could empathize with dogs better, and I don't think either of those would be a useful metric for anyone. Rest assured, though: if I had rated it, it would've gotten a bonus point by virtue of not being fucking Skillhouse.