M3GAN is a bit of sugar, spice and stab you twice. Housebound director Gerard Johnstone is no stranger to melding horror with humor despite his sparse filmography. And it’s not like the rogue AI is anything new, either. Between HAL 9000, Agent Smith or (my personal favorite) AM, it’s hard for a hostile ghost in the machine to get a circuit in edgewise. M3GAN doesn’t try to break new ground as much as it flosses all over it.

Violet McGraw (The Haunting of Hill House) plays Cady, a tween whose parents die in a tragic snowplow accident. She’s placed with her aunt, Gemma, played by Allison Williams (Get Out). Gemma’s career is built on AI, robotics and toys that can shit themselves. Unfortunately, the well begins to run dry as her CEO fears their company’s competitors — who announce a cheap knockoff with a reactive LED butt — will overtake the Tamagotchi-Furby monster market.

Her grieving niece and an unrealistic deadline pushes Gemma to complete M3GAN, an almost-lifelike doll portrayed in body by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis. M3GAN’s prime directive becomes protecting Cady’s physical and emotional well-being. The toy takes a few liberties — and heads — to ensure her purpose.

M3GAN is everything Lars Klevberg’s abysmal Child’s Play remake tried to be. It asks us to consider how we exploit grief and enable tech dependency without a heavy-handed, dogmatic message. Tech is comfort, and the film slices through how emotionally vulnerable it can make us with a sentiment akin to Spike Jonze’s Her. Granted, it’s not nearly as good as Her, but it ditches alarmist copouts to deliver something simple and telling.

This is also not much of a horror film. While you’ll see clear opportunities for M3GAN to be more unnerving and terrifying, the restraint is honestly appreciated. (After all, M3GAN’s eyes are unsettling enough; is there really a need to pile onto that?) Instead, it opens the door for humor. And it takes advantage of this with a surprising amount of tact.

M3GAN has a near-perfect balance of dark revelations and clever comedy. The story would fit snuggly within Black Mirror’s first and second season — you know, when the series was still pretty good. That’s not to say every joke lands, but it’s very hard to deny its wit by the time M3GAN converts Sia’s “Titanium” into a lullaby.

Unfortunately, M3GAN hits so many things right, its few weaknesses are as jarring as a Tickle Me Elmo with dying batteries. For one, in the era of Siri and Alexa, it feels outdated to lean on cheap tricks like overt voice digitization to remind us something is artificial. It wasn’t needed in Ex Machina, and it’s definitely not needed to sell M3GAN’s malice.

Second, she’s already menacing, and the implication she can cease control of electronics and infiltrate vast defense networks makes her more so. It’s just hard not to yearn for a little bit more storytelling to that end. It’s a stretch to suspect the full extent of her Wi-Fi enabled powers will probably be saved for a sequel. But that’s the double-edged sword of an emerging horror villain: You want so much of them before they’re spoiled by a half-baked franchise.

Ultimately, there’s no guarantee M3GAN will get a sequel at all. The character definitely deserves it, but if this is truly all the time we get with her, we’d be wise to cherish it. M3GAN isn’t the brand-new caboose to an ever-growing hype train. This diamond-studded droid does, in fact, slay. —Daniel Bokemper

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Prolific production company Mahal Empire gets Lost when an airliner bound for Puerto Rico is struck by lightning and goes down down down, in Bermuda Island. Washed up on the shore of what looks like paradise, the survivors face no food, no potable water, no aloe vera, no Wi-Fi and a band of green-hued, limb-ripping creatures on the loose and out for blood.

Looking not unlike homemade Predator costumes, these beasts treat the survivors’ tummies like your grandma does dirt when it’s time to plant petunias. Meanwhile, in hopes of saving alive, the humans split into two factions. One is led by a regular Robinson Crusoe (a fully OTT John Wells, The Penny Dreadful Picture Show) who claims to have been trapped in the Triangle for 100 years. The other, fronted by a surly ’n’ burly FBI agent (Wesley Cannon, who also produced) who just copies the other guy. And Mahal Empire regular Sarah French (Death Count) finds a reason to disrobe.

Although Bermuda Island is goofily constructed and unleashed on the cheap, first-feature director Adam Werth makes the trip a hoot. He even comes close to earning that proverbial extra half by not pretending the movie is anything other than a brainless B-level outing. With no shortage of goop and a squishy soundtrack to boot, it strongly resembles a modern-day addition to Hemisphere Pictures’ beloved Blood Island trilogy. Whether in daylight or the dead of night, scenes always offer clear views of carnage.

While not every actor is as comfortable on camera as French, Wells or the cameoing Tom Sizemore, who perishes before the plane crashes, several Mahal Empire players are legitimately funny in their roles. Sheri Davis makes for a commendable ever-complaining Karen type; Greg Tally is a near-riot as a pretentious Goth named Midnight; and then there’s Alexander Hauck, somehow able to tell a monster that just ripped his heart out, “I hope you get food poisoning.” —Rod Lott

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Judging by the viral noise on TikTok — a terrible way to live, IMHO — you’d expect the $15,000-funded Skinamarink to be the next Paranormal Activity. It’s not.

That’s not necessarily a negative. It all depends on the criterion being judged. To consider just the potential for word-of-mouth wildfire among the age groups reacting to its trailer on social media: Do you believe the average millennial or Gen Zer has the patience to sit through 100 minutes of an experimental film? Because that’s what Skinamarink is, one rung above pure abstraction. The majority of moviegoers of any generation don’t possess the palatability for something so mass audience-unfriendly; David Lynch’s Inland Empire finally can cede the title.

Again, not necessarily a negative. While clearly horror, the debut for Canadian filmmaker Kyle Edward Ball is the type of work that nearly defies criticism. Nothing about it operates by notions of convention, yet it represents a singular creative vision free of outside interference or concerns about commercial potential.

In 1995, two young siblings can’t locate their dad in the house. Stranger, the doors and windows — and even the commode — start to disappear; chairs sit on the ceiling. Thumps are heard, as is a disembodied, casually threatening voice. Sound scary? It should.

Through low angles, deliberate misframing and fuzzy imagery that simultaneously suggest surveillance footage and a pirate broadcast, Ball starts at a level of disorientation and builds trepidation from there. As the kids go about their mundane existence, no longer able to tell day from night, only the glow of the television — with its constant parade of public-domain cartoons — offers any comfort (not that “Cobweb Hotel” does). Jolts of terror disrupt that semblance of normalcy.

Ball’s lo-fi aesthetic extends to the sound, humming with the warm pop of vinyl. On its own, that aural element could offer womb-like comfort, but contributing to a whole, it helps make Skinamarink the closest approximation of a dream a feature has achieved. This is no catalog of jump scares; it’s art. —Rod Lott

Since childhood, I’ve admired the concept of the advent calendar more than using one — a case of each door revealing “That’s it?”-level disappointment after so much buildup. That feeling extends to Deathcember, a festive horror anthology constructed as such a calendar, with a short from a different director (Ruggero Deodato, Lucky McKee and Trent Haaga the most recognizable) waiting behind each of 24 numbered items in a 3-D environment.

The stories actually number more than two dozen if you count those nestled within the end credits, so Deathcember even betrays its own approach. It’s not like the Dominic Saxl-conceived collection faced a Sophie’s Choice of inclusion, because so few segments register as entertaining.

I counted three that do. The comedic “All Sales Fatal” pits a meek store clerk against an entitled customer (B-movie royalty Tiffany Shepis, Victor Crowley) attempting to return an item without a receipt. “December the 19th” pays homage to the ’80s slasher with gory results at an ice-skating rink. And putting a Santa spin on Reservoir Dogs is “X-mas on Fire”; cleverly, the jewelry heist leader is played by Steven E. de Souza, co-writer of the classic Christmas movie Die Hard.

On the spectrum’s other end sits “Aurora,” a pointless slice of sci-fi seemingly taken from a video game trailer. While “Crappy Christmas: Operation Christ Child” consists of wonderfully done stop-motion animation, it does so to depict clergy members repeatedly raping a young turd (yes, “turd,” not “turk”). Ha-ha?

Commendably, the movie’s two and a half hours run the gamut of genres, from the giallo and a rape revenger to a black-and-white Western and a silent Hunchback of Notre Dame parody. With so many tries at bat, it’s improbable for every piece to succeed, but it’s not out of the question to expect more hits than misses (as The ABCs of Death and its sequel achieved). And yet, a wide majority of Deathcember’s doors ring empty, either lacking a payoff, misjudging their scope or failing to tell a story at all. —Rod Lott

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In the late 17th century, Godfried Schalcken toiled as a painter of candlelit portraits. In 1839, lesbian vampire creator Sheridan Le Fanu cast the then-deceased artist as the protagonist of a ghost story. And in 1979, the BBC adapted the tale into the hourlong made-for-TV movie Schalcken the Painter.

While Schalcken (Jeremy Clyde, The Musketeer) serves an apprenticeship under Gerrit Dou (Maurice Denham, The Alphabet Murders), he also longs for the lovely petals and pistil of Dou’s niece, Rose (Cheryl Kennedy, The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins). As he pursues her hand in marriage, Schalcken is not without competition: an old guy (John Justin, Lisztomania) who looks suspiciously like a rotting corpse, albeit a wealthy one.

Written and directed by Leslie Megahey (The Advocate), the film looks appropriately stately and proper. Although elegant and elegiac, it moves at the pace of drying pigments. That renders the story as low-wattage as the candles Schalcken reproduces on canvas, with only the occasional beat of madness — too occasional, as my interest waned before evaporating.

In this spiritual realm, I believe the Beeb fares better with its Ghost Stories for Christmas. While Schalcken the Painter enjoys a reputation of admiration, it plays like Peter Greenaway were hired to helm an episode of Tales from the Darkside, which is to say the vision and execution are misaligned. —Rod Lott

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