Talk to Me (2023) | A bunch of idiots find a creepy, embalmed hand that lets them talk to ghosts, and naturally, they turn it into a party game. #jackmeatsflix

My quick rating - 6.9/10. Well, Talk to Me has found a pretty damn effective way to make the ancient art of “summoning the dead for shits and giggles” feel fresh again. And, thankfully, it does it without dragging out the Ouija board for the 9,000th time.

Instead, a group of friends gets their hands on an embalmed hand that lets them communicate with the dead. Because apparently “hey, this creepy dead person's hand can let us see ghosts” is exactly the sort of thing teenagers hear and respond to with, “Oh, awesome. Let's absolutely fuck around with that.”

And, as you might expect, they fuck around. Then they find out.

The setup immediately grabs you, and the movie does a great job of slowly turning what initially looks like a fun party trick into something increasingly dark and dangerous. The scares are genuinely effective, too. There are some wonderfully nasty moments here, and while I can't claim I was hiding behind my hands, I can confirm there were several occasions where my face made the universal expression for “yeah, that's probably not good.”

Visually, Talk to Me is just as impressive. The cinematography and direction create a suitably eerie atmosphere without constantly screaming, “LOOK! THIS IS THE SCARY PART!” Shadows, lighting, and some seriously unsettling imagery do a lot of the work, giving the whole thing a grimy, uncomfortable feeling.

What I really liked, though, is that underneath all the supernatural nonsense, the movie is actually about consequences. The whole “don't play with forces beyond your control” thing isn't exactly new, but Talk to Me gives it some teeth. What starts as harmless fun spirals into something far more disturbing, and the movie isn't afraid to explore the guilt, grief, desperation, and mental damage that comes with it.

Basically, the dead aren't the only things these kids need to worry about. Their own terrible decision-making is doing plenty of damage already.

The cast is solid across the board, but Sophie Wilde stood out to me in the role of Mia. She pulls off a character that is charming and foolish in a way that makes it very clear that she can do some pretty stupid things. Her weakness creates an element of intrigue that allowed me to actually care what happened to her. That isn't something every potential final girl in horror manages to pull off.

And that's probably the biggest strength of Talk to Me. Beneath the creepy hand, demonic possession, and teenagers repeatedly making decisions that would get them immediately banned from my house, there are characters you actually give a shit about.

The movie isn't reinventing supernatural horror, but it does things that make it stand out. It has some gruesome moments, great visuals, and a plot which somehow seems both familiar and fresh.

It's also a hell of a first feature from Danny and Michael Philippou, the twins behind the chaotic YouTube channel RackaRacka. Going from making insane YouTube videos to pulling off a legitimate horror feature is one hell of a leap, and they joined that rare group before Obsession became a hit.

Talk to Me (2023)

For those who are looking for a supernatural horror movie with some truly good scares along with an intriguing concept and people who could use some parental guidance, then Talk to Me is worth watching. Just remember. If someone offers you an embalmed hand that lets you talk to dead people, maybe don't turn it into the hottest party game since beer pong.

https://jackmeat.com/talk-to-me-2023/

Yellow Eyes (2026) | I would've left that house before the title card finished, but I guess common sense wasn't included with the inheritance. #jackmeatsflix

My quick rating - 3.9/10. Yellow Eyes starts with an old man crawling toward a door, desperately trying to paint something on it before apparently meeting his maker. He tells us he can see now, which raises approximately seventeen questions before the movie has even introduced itself. There's an eye on the door, plenty more drawings of eyes during the credits, and eventually we learn an old relative has died and left our young couple a house.

Because horror movies have a standing agreement with inherited real estate. If a dead relative leaves you a house, burn the paperwork and run.

Instead, they go from “I wonder if we'll get the house?” to “Let's move in and dump all our money into it!” almost instantly. Never mind the creepy statue they discover walled up inside. Never mind the evil-eye imagery. Never mind the fact that the place is practically screaming GET OUT. They're homeowners now. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, the demon, obviously.

Julia starts having creepy dreams involving finger eating and yellow eyes, which seems like a pretty clear indication that the new fixer-upper comes with a supernatural pest problem. But she has an impressive ability to fall asleep through things that would have me sleeping in the parking lot of a police station. At one point I genuinely wondered if the movie forgot to mention that Julia is narcoleptic.

Nena Martins is fine as Julia. Not bad, not great, but she's stuck with a character making some questionable decisions. Michael Kunicki never sold me on Brad at all. When he tried to turn up the emotion, it somehow came across even worse, making it difficult to give a crap about his character.

And then there's the statue, which is really where the movie loses me. We're told it's haunted and houses something powerful, but Yellow Eyes never bothers to properly explain what the hell this thing actually is. Where did it come from? What's its history? What are its rules? What does it want? Why does it possess people?

I don't need a ten-minute mythology lecture, but when your entire movie revolves around a mysterious relic, maybe tell me something about the damn relic.

Instead, Yellow Eyes is a slow, unfocused horror movie that raises a dozen questions and lazily refuses to answer most of them. The scenes begin to merge into one another, the acting is low quality, and there are so many bad choices that I was more annoyed that they haven't left yet. That is assuming the characters can stay awake long enough to be dumb.

There is some wasted potential here. The creepy imagery works in places, and the Chicago-area setting is always a bonus for me. Unfortunately, the movie never turns its decent ideas into anything particularly memorable.

Yellow Eyes (2026)

And just when you're hoping the movie is finally going somewhere, it throws in a sequel tease that nobody wants, and certainly is not unearned.

https://jackmeat.com/yellow-eyes-2026/

Revelations (2025) | Revelations is a dark Korean thriller where a pastor's kid goes missing and more proof Yeon Sang-ho is a damn good director. #jackmeatsflix

My quick rating - 6.2/10. Revelations has been sitting on my Netflix watchlist for a while now. I couldn't remember why until I saw the name Yeon Sang-ho attached to it. You may recognize that one from Colony. Ah, right. Time to get to it.

A young girl wanders through an alley during a downpour while some suitably somber music plays. A mysterious man appears to be following her, so she smartly ducks into a church. The drenched dude follows her inside, staring her down the entire time. Just cutting from that to Pastor Min-chan (Ryu Jun-yeol) on stage singing his sermon and then to the title card is disturbing enough. The music was definitely setting something up.

The mysterious man gets roped into registering at the church before his ankle monitor is noticed, while we briefly meet Detective Yeon-hee (Shin Hyeon-bin), who happens to bump into the girl at a store. I could see that this is going to be a character-driven Korean thriller. Here comes the slight bit of mystery. Then the pastor's kid goes missing.

Which is, admittedly, one hundred percent his fault. He forgot to pick the kid up, and his immediate thought is the mysterious man from the church. He even has a printed copy of the photo he took on his phone. Apparently Pastor Min-chan is operating under the assumption that the printed copy is the only place that photograph exists.

It doesn't work like that, Pastor.

Yeon-hee has some unresolved grief of her own, and naturally these two miserable people are destined to collide. There are plenty of religious quandaries along the way, with the story digging into guilt, faith, responsibility, revenge, and mental illness. The main message seems to be pretty simple. Take responsibility for your own actions. Unfortunately, almost nobody here seems particularly interested in doing that.

It's tagged as a mystery, but I wouldn't really call it one. There's not much mystery to solve. It's more of a thriller and character study. The acting is quite good and helps keep things moving, although following a collection of constantly miserable people does get a bit exhausting.

Technically, Revelations is a very well-made film, and Sang-ho clearly knows what he's doing. The police work toward the end gets a little too convenient, and the result should probably be better considering the talent involved. Still, it could have been a lot worse.

No, it isn't another Train to Busan. But after that one, Yeon Sang-ho is probably going to be living in his own shadow for the rest of his career.

Revelations (2025)

https://jackmeat.com/revelations-2025/

Wrong Side of Dead (2026) | Wrong Side of Dead wasn't terrible, but it tried so hard to force a twist, I just stopped caring. #jackmeatsflix

My quick rating - 3.4/10. When behavioral science major Amber (Sabina Gadecki) investigates a series of murders at Capps Crossing, she finds herself caught in a tangled web of lies involving the local ranger and his son, David. And judging by the way Wrong Side of Dead starts, somebody has been lying for quite a while.

The film starts with overbearing music and the sound of an ambulance driving. Right away, it becomes clear that none of them had a good night. In a hospital, there is a man trying to seek help. There is also a mother and her son arguing because she has gotten tired of bailing him all the time. A badly injured woman is then brought in and everyone has a different version of what happened.

The son claims he's the one who was shot. Everyone else blames him. And, they probably should.

The movie packs all of this into the opening minutes, including a wonderfully questionable medical moment where the heart monitor waits to flatline until after someone runs out of the room. Apparently these monitors have a “you're out of the room, you're dead” setting.

Then we jump ahead a year and meet four girls going camping, which is always an encouraging sign in a horror movie. They get themselves settled in, and wouldn't you know it, the local ranger comes along to check on them. Because when you're writing a horror movie, sometimes the character most likely to be involved in everything suspicious is conveniently the guy who has keys to the woods.

From there, Wrong Side of Dead settles into its familiar horror-thriller routine. Everyone is hiding something, everyone seems suspicious, and the story keeps piling on secrets as Amber tries to figure out what happened at Capps Crossing. I was actually surprised to see Beverly D'Angelo turn up as Sandra, David's mother, which was probably one of the more interesting surprises the movie had to offer.

Unfortunately, the movie itself is kind of a mess. It is like the story is trying so damn hard to set up the twist, and we can actually hear the gears grinding. The characters do things for the sake of the plot, revelations are made on account of convenience, and the mystery itself doesn't gel well enough.

The acting is strangely adequate, though. Nobody completely embarrasses themselves, and Gadecki does enough with Amber to keep the investigation watchable. David (Garrett C. Phillips), on the other hand, feels noticeably flat for a character who should be carrying considerably more weight in the story. Considering how much of the mystery revolves around him, I expected a little more menace.

There is enough here to make it semi-watchable for a single viewing, particularly if you happen to be in the mood for a low-budget horror mystery where everybody has secrets, and nobody seems particularly interested in making good decisions. But the movie never comes together well enough to make the mystery feel worthwhile.

Wrong Side of Dead (2026)

Wrong Side of Dead isn't quite bad enough to become entertainingly bad, nor good enough to make you care all that much about figuring out what's going on. It's just kind of...there. A mildly watchable horror-thriller that you can finish, shrug at, and immediately understand why you probably shouldn't have gone looking for it in the first place.

https://jackmeat.com/wrong-side-of-dead-2026/

Colony (2026) | Colony isn't the next Train to Busan, but its bizarre zombies bring a hive mind with a body count. #jackmeatsflix

My quick rating - 6.8/10. I saw that Colony was directed by Yeon Sang-ho, the guy who made the insanely excellent Train to Busan, so naturally it got bumped straight to the front of my list. Because apparently I have learned nothing about the dangers of having expectations.

The movie begins with a phone call to the police reporting what the caller describes as a bioterror attack. He has injected himself with the pathogen and claims that makes him the only vaccine capable of stopping the outbreak. From there, a biotech conference becomes a very bad place to network when the virus is released, the authorities seal the facility, and Professor Se-jeong (Jun Ji-hyun) and a small group of survivors find themselves trapped inside with a rapidly mutating army of infected people.

For a two-hour movie, Colony wastes absolutely no time getting to the zombie business. Someone is attacked around the 12-minute mark, and after that, the infected basically become the stars of the movie.

And that is just fine with me.

These aren't your standard shuffle-around-and-bite-someone zombies. They move fast, contort themselves into increasingly ridiculous shapes, scramble back to their feet like their skeletons are merely a suggestion, and sometimes move with an eerie synchronization that makes them look less like infected humans and more like a particularly pissed-off gymnastics team. The acrobatic movements are impressive, undeniably cool, and occasionally make me wonder if the virus came with a free membership to Cirque du Soleil.

The hive-mind concept works particularly well, while the way the infected continue to evolve gives the movie some strange and unpredictable moments. There were several times when I found myself more interested in what the zombies were going to do next than what was happening to the actual characters. That's probably not ideal for the humans, but it does make for some entertaining zombie action.

There isn't a ton of gore considering the premise, but there is plenty of action. The infected are constantly moving, climbing, contorting, attacking, and generally making the building feel like the worst possible place to have attended a meeting.

Jun Ji-hyun makes for a solid hero as Se-jeong, particularly because she relies more on brains than brute force. Unfortunately, Colony doesn't give her a particularly strong protagonist group around her. The main antagonist and his increasingly bizarre collection of infected easily overshadow the human characters, and once the zombies start doing their thing, they're difficult competition for anyone.

Yeon Sang-ho's direction is outstanding, which brings me to the unavoidable problem: Yeon Sang-ho directed Train to Busan.

It's a little like what I was just saying about Spielberg and Disclosure Day. Once you've made something as excellent as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, every subsequent movie has to fight against your own resume. Sang-ho is now stuck in his own Train to Busan shadow, where every zombie movie he makes is inevitably going to get compared to the movie that put him on the map for so many people.

And Colony isn't Train to Busan.

I ultimately put it around the same level as Peninsula, but for completely different reasons. Peninsula went bigger and more action-heavy, while Colony has a much stranger, more evolutionary approach to its infected. This one has some seriously cool ideas, some excellent creature work, and sequences that are so bizarre they become difficult not to enjoy.

It's not the next Train to Busan, but thankfully, it doesn't need to be. It's a weird, fast-moving, occasionally bonkers zombie movie with infected people doing things that infected people absolutely should not be physically capable of doing. And that was enough bite for me.

Colony (2026)

https://jackmeat.com/colony-2026/

Shackled (2026) | I wanted to like Shackled more because the premise is great, but the movie keeps choosing the least interesting road possible. #jackmeatsflix

My quick rating - 4.5/10. Shackled opens with the kind of ominous ’80s synth music that had me thinking something serious is about to happen. Police line the streets to contain a robbery, bullets start flying, and a criminal gets dropped. Then we cut to a man having a nice dinner with a woman while apologizing for his past mistakes. The movie keeps bouncing between the two scenes, repeatedly focusing on the RAPP tattoos on their hands, because apparently subtlety was denied parole.

Then the thief gets taken out in a hail of bullets and some very enthusiastic CGI splatter. A cop searches for his RAPP “match” on a laptop, and suddenly the guy having dinner appears to have his heart explode. He’s dead too. Welcome to the future, where parole apparently comes with a built-in murder button.

In this dystopian setup, the traditional parole system has been replaced by R.A.P.P., the Recidivism Accountability Partnership Program. White-collar ex-con Greg (Graham Powell) gets paired with Max (Armen Garo), a sociopathic gangster with terminal cancer. Both men have explosive charges surgically implanted in their hearts, meaning one wrong move by either of them can result in both being turned into a very brief medical emergency.

The premise is easily the best thing Shackled has going for it. There’s a genuinely interesting movie hiding in here about forced partnerships, government control, second chances, and a system that decides the easiest way to prevent repeat offenders is to give them synchronized heart bombs. Unfortunately, the movie keeps finding ways to take the less interesting road.

The synth music also needs a mention because Shackled really, really likes it. It pops up so often that I was sure at one point somebody would saunter into the shot with shoulder pads on and holding a brick cell phone. The music is pretty good, but the film depends upon it so much that every scene seems to become about selling me a videotape copy of it.

Things get more interesting when human organ trafficking enters the story. That subplot opens the door to some much darker and more compelling possibilities, but Shackled doesn't do nearly enough with it. It feels less like a major development and more like the movie briefly discovered a much better plot and then wandered away from it.

Fortunately, however, the acting is quite good. Powell is the film’s focus as Greg, and Garo is sufficiently threatening as Max to make their pairing work well when it otherwise wouldn’t. Powell also wrote the screenplay, and he at least gives the ending a cynical edge that fits the world the movie created.

That’s ultimately my biggest frustration with Shackled. It has a good idea. Maybe even several good ideas. But all I could do was wait for it to do something more interesting with them. However, it settled on being just an okay dystopian thriller rather than something much better.

Shackled (2026)

https://jackmeat.com/shackled-2026/

Lockbox (2026) | Lockbox isn't reinventing horror, but Carla Gugino and Katharine Isabelle are so damn reliable they make vague demon nonsense more watchable. #jackmeatsflix

My quick rating - 5.3/10. Lockbox starts with a van driving down the road, which normally suggests a road trip, a kidnapping, or at least several people becoming part of the body count. Here, it's just one guy being held captive in the back, screaming, “I don't wanna see the boy.” Meanwhile, director Daniel Stamm alternates between showing a child in a wheelchair sitting in what appears to be a hospital. Of course, I have to ask myself just who this kid is and why everybody’s afraid of him.

After the title card, Carla Gugino's Ellen tells us she's going to share her story so this doesn't happen again. Famous last words in a horror movie.

Ellen was a caretaker who eventually couldn't keep doing it after her parents died, so she decided to reinvent herself. Then a relative calls and asks her to take in her cousin Winthrop, played by Lou Taylor Pucci. And because horror movies apparently consider “taking in the mysterious relative” a perfectly reasonable career move. Ellen agrees.

Enter Katharine Isabelle as Vahna, Ellen's strange neighbor who immediately feels like someone you should probably keep an eye on. I have been a fan of Isabelle since American Mary, so naturally I'm paying attention whenever she shows up. Vahna clearly has some ulterior motives, and Isabelle absolutely owns every scene she's in.

Remember that boy? Yeah, he is damn creepy. The movie does a good job of making you question what exactly is going on, particularly once the ritual starts and things get more supernatural. Whatever that creature becomes during the ritual toward the end may have been digital, but it looked pretty damn cool. There's also an arm injury involving skin being ripped apart that looks about as pleasant as it sounds.

Eventually, we learn that the lockbox isn't just some mysterious object. It's essentially a human demon trap. The film seems to be a murder mystery, and initially, that is indeed what I believed I was viewing. Then the weirdness starts piling up. Everyone behaves like something is slightly off, clues don't quite fit together, and the atmosphere keeps making you believe something really bad is happening.

That's where Lockbox works best. The movie creates actual dread, without having to throw shit at us all the time. The sensation is there that even if the story doesn’t explain what’s going on, there is something waiting out there beyond the frame.

Unfortunately, the explanation for the demon itself is where things get frustrating. The script keeps its cards very close to its chest, but eventually you realize it's holding back more than it's actually telling you. We never get a particularly satisfying explanation of where this entity came from, why it specifically wants Winthrop, or what the ancient rules governing this thing actually are. We're basically told it has terrifying powers and should be taken very seriously. Okay, got it. Terrifying demon. Very bad. Please continue.

The performances help enormously. Gugino once again proves she can make nearly anything watchable, while Isabelle is fantastic and more or less hijacks the movie whenever she appears. Even when the story gets a little too vague, the two of them give it enough personality to keep things moving.

Lockbox is well made, unsettling in places, and has a few genuinely creepy ideas. It just never feels like it's doing anything particularly new with the genre. The mystery and atmosphere kept me interested, but the demon mythology needed more meat on the bone.

Lockbox (2026)

Still, I'll happily watch Carla Gugino and Katharine Isabelle make supernatural situations considerably more interesting than they probably have any right to be. That's worth something.

https://jackmeat.com/lockbox-2026/