Currently very sleep deprived because I had an unexpectedly late night and my wonderful neighbors decided 7 AM on a Saturday was a great time to start doing incredibly noisy yard work for three hours straight, so fuck it, channeling my anger into reviewing two of my least favorite movies of the year thus far.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
Okay, full disclosure, I technically saw this one after the next one on the list, but since I'm doing two in a row I wanted to save the real stinker for last. That aside... good god did I want to like this movie. If anything, as an obsessive lifelong Mario fanboy who practically did a backflip IRL when they revealed fucking Wart was going to be in this thing, I should have been the exact target audience for this movie. I am the exact kind of easily-pandered-to dumbfuck who would gladly overlook even the flimsiest excuse plot just as long as Illumination keeps putting That Guy I Recognize From The Thing I Like onscreen and making him do cool stuff, and I know this because that's exactly what the first Mario movie was and I fucking loved that shit.
The issue here, however, is that as jankily-paced and shallow as the first movie's story could be at times, it still had a fucking story. Sure, basically every scene was transparently designed to put as many Guys I Recognize From The Thing I Like onscreen as possible and give them cool shit to do, but they were at least coherently connected to the scenes directly before and after them. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, on the other hand, is structured like an actual Mario game - we get a quick princess-kidnapping at the start to spur the heroes into action, and then every scene after that is just a new setpiece that exists solely to provide one cool action scene and then be immediately forgotten for the next setpiece. There is no plot, just a collection of scenes occupying time between the opening and the final battle.
And I'll fully admit, if the fan-pandering had been good enough, the "obsessive Mario fanboy" lobe of my brain might have been able to override the "enjoyer of good movies" lobe, but it couldn't even do that right! Pretty much all of the cool cameo characters from the advertising and trailers are basically just that: cameos. They show up for a single scene and then do nothing for the rest of the movie. Now, to be fair, I wasn't exactly expecting the fucking Honey Queen to be an integral part of the central cast or anything, but given that Illumination hired big-name actress Issa Rae to voice her and put her in the big casting announcement, I figured she would at least do something beyond showing up for a single scene as a transparent plot device to split the party. Even the big-name Mario characters who are integral to the plot are used in some genuinely baffling ways - Yoshi basically just enters the cast right at the start with minimal explanation and then just kinda exists for the rest of the movie, Bowser Jr. is inexplicably elevated from a funny little recurring sympathetic miniboss to a murderous apocalyptic threat to the entire universe, while Rosalina is reduced from one of the most powerful beings in the entire Mario cosmology to... honestly, calling her a damsel in distress feels too generous, because even a damsel in distress in most movies would have more agency and screen time than the Galaxy movie gives Rosalina. Let's be real, she's a Macguffin.
To be fair, I'm not saying this movie is completely without value. The natural consequence of building a movie entirely around disjointed action setpieces is that some of those action sequences are going to be better than others, and there are some genuinely cool bits in here - the gravity-defying casino fight with the Subcon crew and the over-the-top Mario Maker sequence during the climax being some standout moments. I also really liked the dynamic between Mario and Peach throughout the movie - normally I don't really ship those two, but for a guy voiced by famous douchebag Chris Pratt, movie Mario is basically made of romantic green flags. And of course, while I'm still totally baffled by his presence and think forcing him into an already overstuffed movie was a stupid choice made solely for marketing purposes, I must begrudgingly admit Fox McCloud is cool as hell, because it is borderline impossible to make Fox McCloud uncool. But unfortunately, a few individual cool moments isn't enough to save the rest of the movie from feeling like a plateful of marshmallow fluff. It's fun to an extent, and I can't say I totally regret seeing it, but even its best parts just don't clear the bar set by the original. 3/10.
Hunting Matthew Nichols
I still remember the first time I walked out of a theater mid-movie. Back in my college days, I used to go to a lot of movies with my grandpa, because he liked spending time with me and sleeping in a dark air-conditioned room and I liked spending time with him and not having to pay for movie tickets. So in 2017, when a new western movie called Hostiles came out, I decided it would be nice to take him to a movie he might enjoy for a change instead of dragging him to one of mine. We went, we took our seats, we sat through an hour of bland, depressing, directionless dreck, and then finally he turned to me and whispered "are you enjoying this at all?" I admitted I was bored out of my mind and was only watching because I thought he was enjoying it, he said "me too, let's leave," and then we left and never regretted it.
And up until March of this year, I would have said that was the last time I walked out of a theater halfway through a movie, but unfortunately that's not true anymore.
Hunting Matthew Nichols is, as far as I can tell, the tragic result of a monkey's paw somewhere in the world curling a finger right after the line in my Shelby Oaks review where I wished the movie had fully committed to the faux-documentary framing device. As the title implies, it's a found footage movie taking the form of a documentary about Matthew Nichols, a Vancouver Island teenager who mysteriously disappeared on Halloween night over 20 years prior, and his younger sister's efforts to reinvestigate the case in the modern day. Naturally, the deeper she digs, the more apparent it becomes that her brother succumbed to the number-one cause of death among found footage movie characters: Fucking Around With Demons.
I feel like this is the point in my review where I should beat around the bush, talking about how so-and-so element has potential and could have made for a good movie if handled differently, but I'm tired and grumpy and cannot work up the energy to even pretend to be positive about fucking Hunting Matthew Nichols, so I'm going to cut to the chase: this movie is fucking boring. For all my complaints about Shelby Oaks's glacial pacing and flubbed landing, at least things occasionally happened and the central mystery was compelling enough to keep me hooked until the ending. Hunting Matthew Nichols, on the other hand, is just meandering interview after meandering interview with absolutely nothing to hook the audience beyond the implicit promise of "no trust me bro, there's gonna be some really scary shit at the end of this, just one more hour of telling with absolutely no showing and it's gonna get freaky, I promise!" Maybe I might have been more hooked if there had been a hint of originality in the plot, but no, once the supernatural stuff enters the plot it's just the exact same bog-standard demon shit I expected it was going to be from minute 1.
Eventually, I got to the point where I realized I was only still watching because I thought the movie was almost over and I might as well stick it out, so I checked my phone to see how much longer I had to go, expecting that after how long I had been sitting there watching nothing fucking happen I had to be down to the last 20 minutes... and that was when I learned I still had half the movie's runtime to go, and promptly booked it for the exit. I did eventually look up the ending on Wikipedia later, and surprise surprise, it ended exactly how I knew it was going to end the second I realized I was watching a found footage movie.
0/10. I was going to make a joke about this being the Skillhouse of 2026, but at least Skillhouse had the decency to be bad in a way that was fun to pick apart and talk about. Trying to critically dissect Hunting Matthew Nichols is like trying to dissect a soap bubble. If anything, I feel like I should retroactively bump Shelby Oaks up an extra point for at least waiting until the final act to fall apart.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
Okay, full disclosure, I technically saw this one after the next one on the list, but since I'm doing two in a row I wanted to save the real stinker for last. That aside... good god did I want to like this movie. If anything, as an obsessive lifelong Mario fanboy who practically did a backflip IRL when they revealed fucking Wart was going to be in this thing, I should have been the exact target audience for this movie. I am the exact kind of easily-pandered-to dumbfuck who would gladly overlook even the flimsiest excuse plot just as long as Illumination keeps putting That Guy I Recognize From The Thing I Like onscreen and making him do cool stuff, and I know this because that's exactly what the first Mario movie was and I fucking loved that shit.
The issue here, however, is that as jankily-paced and shallow as the first movie's story could be at times, it still had a fucking story. Sure, basically every scene was transparently designed to put as many Guys I Recognize From The Thing I Like onscreen as possible and give them cool shit to do, but they were at least coherently connected to the scenes directly before and after them. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, on the other hand, is structured like an actual Mario game - we get a quick princess-kidnapping at the start to spur the heroes into action, and then every scene after that is just a new setpiece that exists solely to provide one cool action scene and then be immediately forgotten for the next setpiece. There is no plot, just a collection of scenes occupying time between the opening and the final battle.
And I'll fully admit, if the fan-pandering had been good enough, the "obsessive Mario fanboy" lobe of my brain might have been able to override the "enjoyer of good movies" lobe, but it couldn't even do that right! Pretty much all of the cool cameo characters from the advertising and trailers are basically just that: cameos. They show up for a single scene and then do nothing for the rest of the movie. Now, to be fair, I wasn't exactly expecting the fucking Honey Queen to be an integral part of the central cast or anything, but given that Illumination hired big-name actress Issa Rae to voice her and put her in the big casting announcement, I figured she would at least do something beyond showing up for a single scene as a transparent plot device to split the party. Even the big-name Mario characters who are integral to the plot are used in some genuinely baffling ways - Yoshi basically just enters the cast right at the start with minimal explanation and then just kinda exists for the rest of the movie, Bowser Jr. is inexplicably elevated from a funny little recurring sympathetic miniboss to a murderous apocalyptic threat to the entire universe, while Rosalina is reduced from one of the most powerful beings in the entire Mario cosmology to... honestly, calling her a damsel in distress feels too generous, because even a damsel in distress in most movies would have more agency and screen time than the Galaxy movie gives Rosalina. Let's be real, she's a Macguffin.
To be fair, I'm not saying this movie is completely without value. The natural consequence of building a movie entirely around disjointed action setpieces is that some of those action sequences are going to be better than others, and there are some genuinely cool bits in here - the gravity-defying casino fight with the Subcon crew and the over-the-top Mario Maker sequence during the climax being some standout moments. I also really liked the dynamic between Mario and Peach throughout the movie - normally I don't really ship those two, but for a guy voiced by famous douchebag Chris Pratt, movie Mario is basically made of romantic green flags. And of course, while I'm still totally baffled by his presence and think forcing him into an already overstuffed movie was a stupid choice made solely for marketing purposes, I must begrudgingly admit Fox McCloud is cool as hell, because it is borderline impossible to make Fox McCloud uncool. But unfortunately, a few individual cool moments isn't enough to save the rest of the movie from feeling like a plateful of marshmallow fluff. It's fun to an extent, and I can't say I totally regret seeing it, but even its best parts just don't clear the bar set by the original. 3/10.
Hunting Matthew Nichols
I still remember the first time I walked out of a theater mid-movie. Back in my college days, I used to go to a lot of movies with my grandpa, because he liked spending time with me and sleeping in a dark air-conditioned room and I liked spending time with him and not having to pay for movie tickets. So in 2017, when a new western movie called Hostiles came out, I decided it would be nice to take him to a movie he might enjoy for a change instead of dragging him to one of mine. We went, we took our seats, we sat through an hour of bland, depressing, directionless dreck, and then finally he turned to me and whispered "are you enjoying this at all?" I admitted I was bored out of my mind and was only watching because I thought he was enjoying it, he said "me too, let's leave," and then we left and never regretted it.
And up until March of this year, I would have said that was the last time I walked out of a theater halfway through a movie, but unfortunately that's not true anymore.
Hunting Matthew Nichols is, as far as I can tell, the tragic result of a monkey's paw somewhere in the world curling a finger right after the line in my Shelby Oaks review where I wished the movie had fully committed to the faux-documentary framing device. As the title implies, it's a found footage movie taking the form of a documentary about Matthew Nichols, a Vancouver Island teenager who mysteriously disappeared on Halloween night over 20 years prior, and his younger sister's efforts to reinvestigate the case in the modern day. Naturally, the deeper she digs, the more apparent it becomes that her brother succumbed to the number-one cause of death among found footage movie characters: Fucking Around With Demons.
I feel like this is the point in my review where I should beat around the bush, talking about how so-and-so element has potential and could have made for a good movie if handled differently, but I'm tired and grumpy and cannot work up the energy to even pretend to be positive about fucking Hunting Matthew Nichols, so I'm going to cut to the chase: this movie is fucking boring. For all my complaints about Shelby Oaks's glacial pacing and flubbed landing, at least things occasionally happened and the central mystery was compelling enough to keep me hooked until the ending. Hunting Matthew Nichols, on the other hand, is just meandering interview after meandering interview with absolutely nothing to hook the audience beyond the implicit promise of "no trust me bro, there's gonna be some really scary shit at the end of this, just one more hour of telling with absolutely no showing and it's gonna get freaky, I promise!" Maybe I might have been more hooked if there had been a hint of originality in the plot, but no, once the supernatural stuff enters the plot it's just the exact same bog-standard demon shit I expected it was going to be from minute 1.
Eventually, I got to the point where I realized I was only still watching because I thought the movie was almost over and I might as well stick it out, so I checked my phone to see how much longer I had to go, expecting that after how long I had been sitting there watching nothing fucking happen I had to be down to the last 20 minutes... and that was when I learned I still had half the movie's runtime to go, and promptly booked it for the exit. I did eventually look up the ending on Wikipedia later, and surprise surprise, it ended exactly how I knew it was going to end the second I realized I was watching a found footage movie.
0/10. I was going to make a joke about this being the Skillhouse of 2026, but at least Skillhouse had the decency to be bad in a way that was fun to pick apart and talk about. Trying to critically dissect Hunting Matthew Nichols is like trying to dissect a soap bubble. If anything, I feel like I should retroactively bump Shelby Oaks up an extra point for at least waiting until the final act to fall apart.
