All posts by Rod Lott

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Colony (2026)

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Although the zombie craze lie dormant from, go figure, oversaturation, that message never made it to the producers of The Walking Dead (seven separate series, guys?) or overseas. Particularly to South Korea, where Yeon Sang-ho keeps the undead movies alive. Colony marks the gifted director’s fourth such feature, but the first to exist outside his 10-year-old Train to Busan franchise. 

Inside a Seoul skyscraper, disgruntled scientist Dr. Suh Young-chul (Koo Kyo-hwan, Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula) commits an act of bioterrorism at his former employer’s annual conference: unleashing a zombie-outbreak virus, and he’s the human vaccine. Rude, but at least the doctor has the courtesy to give 911 a heads-up! 

Like a disaster spectacular in its 1970s heyday, Yeon (The Ugly) throws together a mishmash of personalities — tortured academics, vacationing siblings, millennial scumbags — who must work together to find their way to the roof for rescue. Naturally, teamwork is an alien concept to most, but hey, somebody’s gotta get zom-mobbed.  

Making Colony somewhat unique is our villain’s control over the horde via hive mind or collective intelligence; they share and exchange information through pheromones, requiring a network of mucus. This is why the tower hallways grow so gooey, they look like they harbor a sinus infection. To the movie’s credit, this isn’t some gimmick or MacGuffin. Seriously, name one other movie where slime mold research dictates plotting. 

In conjunction, these zombies evolve as the minutes tick by. They scurry and skitter on all fours like dogs, then graduate to head-butting glass and running, before climbing on one another like ants to form a more formidable foe. Whenever they communicate, their heads amusingly pop up and out, looking like the poster art for Scanners.

Once more, Yeon handles the high-scale, high-stakes action really well. Even with his script concerned with a madman’s desire for a populace reinvention, Colony is, all told, ultimately more conventional than the lightning strike that is the original Busan. This one bolts with a rip-roaring first hour before hitting a wall of repetition. Scenes begin to parrot the one before it, halting an otherwise consistent level of energy. At 122 minutes, it’s almost as if Yeon wanted the running time to match the building’s stories. If that weren’t merely hypothetical, finding a site with 30 fewer floors would rid the bloat and get to the hard-charging vehicular pursuit sequence sooner. 

Just not at the sacrifice of the laboratory’s zombie monkeys, please. —Rod Lott

In theaters Friday, Aug. 28.

Comedy

Buddy (2026)

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To my eternal gratitude, my eldest child slid out his mother’s birth canal a year or two tardy to fall victim to the late-’90s Barney indoctrination. Something about that PBS peppy purple dinosaur seemed … off.

Casper Kelly, subversive mastermind behind the Adult Swim classic Too Many Cooks, knows this. With Buddy, he explores what you always suspected lingering somewhere within those too-perfect wooden fences: fodder for a potential Dateline NBC investigation.

Buddy’s Barney is, duh, Buddy, an orange unicorn with a pear-shaped middle and the voice of Keegan-Michael Key (2015’s Vacation). As his theme song goes, he’s huggy and a li’l bit nutty. His show is your usual Easter egg-colored fantasia of cute kids, anthropomorphic objects, dance parties, safety tips, gaslighting, murder plots and — with the second act’s hard left turn around the block, onto the highway and off the ramp into everyday suburbia — existential crises.

To know any more is to deny yourself the pleasure of discovery. Admittedly, I was reluctant because while Kelly excels in short-form (e.g., the Cheddar Goblin commercial in Mandy, a segment of V/H/S Halloween), I found his first movie, the Adult Swim Yule Log parody, tiresome — inventive, yes, but tiresome, inevitably by nature of the format spoofed. With Buddy, he’s calculated how to sustain his unique stamp of surreality for the duration of a feature. Although the final showdown remains 10 minutes overdrawn, this black comedy is ingenious, unpredictable (mostly) and alarmingly funny, with the kid actors tuned in to its weirdo wavelength; lead Delaney Quinn (The Roses) is going places.

Barney may be the dead-center target, yet Buddy couldn’t exist as is without the crown jewel of children’s programming, Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Kelly owes a sizable debt to that series’ production design and puppetry. It wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine Kelly swiped the backpack, Strappy (voiced by Patton Oswalt), straight from the Playhouse closet coat rack. Thanks to the leeway of an R rating, Kelly gets away with things CBS would never allow Paul Reubens to attempt, like a Michael Shannon-voiced ventriloquist’s dummy making out with a disheveled, bare-bellied drifter played by Clint Howard — in front of children, no less!

America, we must protect Casper Kelly at all costs. —Rod Lott

In theaters Friday, Aug. 28.

Horror

The Dollmaker (2025)

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In a small town in Argentina where nothing bad ever happens, young women go missing. Because this mystery drives the film The Dollmaker, certainly the title character can’t be involved, can he?

That craftsman of crude, creepy-faced, burlap-sack dolls would be Tomás (Rodrigo Noya, Valentin), an adult virgin in unforgiving cola-bottle spectacles. He assists at the community clinic and clerks at the only video store, peculiarly Boy Scouts of America-themed. He also lives with his invalid mother — well, sort of.

Director José María Cicala (2021’s Shadow of the Cat) and co-scripter Griselda Sanchez sure do stack Tomás’ deck with weirdo cards. As if you can’t read the vibes, his house’s mailbox is marked “FAMILIA LYNCH,” yet The Dollmaker recalls as much Picket Fences and Northern Exposure as it does Twin Peaks. With so many characters introduced, most notably Sanchez as a troubled single mom and Dum-Dum-sucking diner waitress who falls for Tomás, it takes a while — too long, I’d argue — to get a bead on your surroundings and who’s even integral to the plot. All the while, Cicala’s intent to wrong-foot viewers is fully transparent.

The decoupaged opening credits suggest something out of the ordinary. Instead, The Dollmaker is average overall, albeit with above-average competence hampered by a comedic streak wobbling uncomfortably between absurdist and sitcom. Wild and wildly uneven, the movie fails to end in a satisfying manner, feeling like it planted a dozen mines along the way, but forgot to trigger eight or nine of them. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)

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As I learned from the 2011 horror anthology Little Deaths, the French term translating to “little death” is synonymous for “orgasm.” No wonder the Jason Voorhees stand-in at the heart of Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is named Little Death. In fact, that connection is so intrinsic to the film, I wonder if unfamiliarity with the definition might lessen one’s enjoyment.

Oh, well — I’ll never know. Just as the character of Kris (Hannah Einbinder, HBO’s Hacks) may never be able to recapture that childhood feeling of watching the Camp Miasma movies on VHS. Now a Sundance-lauded queer filmmaker (as was Shoenbrun theirself), Kris has secured a studio gig to revive the Friday the 13th-esque franchise with an origin story of Little Death (Jack Haven, née Brigette Lundy-Paine of Bill & Ted Face the Music), its culturally iconic, seemingly immortal serial killer with spear in hand and A/C vent over its head.

Kris hopes to recruit the original Miasma’s camp counselor-cum-final girl, Billy, to reprise her role, but the the mystery-shrouded actress has long left the biz. Traveling to talk her out of retirement, Kris is stunned to discover Billy (Gillian Anderson, The X-Files) lives on the abandoned campgrounds where the movie was shot. And no wonder — the place looks magical, thanks to all-aces production design that extends to all corners.

They bond, as all the single ladies are wont, over KFC and weed. Then, conventions warp in ways Shoenbrun excels: with enormous potential to make half of America feel astronomically uncomfortable. (To be clear, the half whose sphincters tighten in fear of seeing a same-sex kiss.)

A huge leap up and forward for the writer/director, Teenage Sex and Death is a worthy companion to their last film, the tube-obsessed I Saw the TV Glow. Like that 2024 pic, we’re served a multigenre stew boiling in a base of nightmares, this time with the recipe tweaked to allow a full-blown comic sensibility as deliciously rich as the British-style KitKat bars (trust me, yum) strewn across Billy’s bed. Break me off a piece.

And yet, even with all the good humor, to visit Miasma is to patronize a bazaar of the bizarre, from entire set pieces to offhand moments, like a videotape entering and exiting a gooey, lipped wall slit that four out of five learned OB-GYNs might dub a “Cronengina.” The movie’s midpoint massacre, the hands-down highlight, will grant Counting Crows’ “A Long December” an instant Spotify boost and, speaking long-term, one more generation of cultural relevancy. 

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is destined to enjoy longer life among queer cineastes and horror enthusiasts alike (not that their Venn diagram circles are near-separates these days), in largest part for Anderson’s performance. She plays Billy as the type of vampy, Southern thang Jessica Lange built a career upon. Anderson does it so well, the role could emerge as the other most-beloved character of her brilliant career. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Sex

The Girl, the Body, and the Pill (1967)

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Parents are in a wadded-panty uproar over Ms. Barrington (Pamela Rhea) teaching their high schoolers the birds and the bees and the birth control pill in class. Meddling complaints to the pushover principal (Otto Schlessinger, Flesh Feast) force Ms. B to stop dispensing carnal knowledge or face the school board’s wrath.

But if mum’s the word, “mom” will result, Ms. Barrington reasons. Her solution is to hold the S-E-X lectures at her home on Friday nights, as long as the students have parent-signed permission slips. She’s so naive, mass forgery doesn’t even cross her well-intentioned mind.

Meanwhile, good girl Alice Nichols (Kay Ross) is madly in love with a classmate (James Nelson). He’s an upstanding young man, as his sport coat’s professorial elbow patches signal; nonetheless, Alice’s ill-tempered pop (Bill Rogers, Love Goddesses of Blood Island) is like a junkyard dog on 24/7 hymen protection.

Meanwhile meanwhile, ever the hypocrite, Mr. Nichols is having an affair with the trampy single mother (Valedia Hill) of trampy student Randy (Nancy Lee Noble, Loose Shoes). Randy’s secretly stealing her mom’s birth control pills and subbing them with saccharine tablets on the regular. So you know what happens next, right? Pat yourself on the back if you guessed “couch abortion.”

Meanwhile meanwhile meanwhile, a 40-something senior (Roy Collodi, The Gruesome Twosome) is so hormonally supercharged after weeks of absorbing the hot Ms. B’s hot syllabus of hot sex talk, he tries to rape her.

How is Herschell Gordon Lewis’ The Girl, the Body, and the Pill not held in high esteem like his Blood trilogy? Its soapy, dopey mix of teensploitation and sexploitation proves irresistible to me, but I suspect its lack of imagery to trigger an R rating has something to do with that. By this point in his career, Lewis had, for example, removed a woman’s tongue in gory detail. In contrast, this film is as harmless as How to Make a Doll, another Lewis premise that sounds readymade for showing you things you hadn’t seen.

Regardless, this not-bitter Pill does more than its share of onscreen envelope-pushing. Louise Downe’s script is boldly progressive for its time (and, I would argue, today’s regressive times). Consider this a feature-length version of the postwar era’s classroom shorts designed to scare students into abstinence, but without the shock photos of, say, syphilitic genitalia in all their weeping-sore glory. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.