Devils Stay (2024)

If Devils Stay has the nerve to call itself a possession picture, why does the title lack a possessive apostrophe? Ba-dum-tss!

That joke is to prove to my English teachers I paid attention. Devils Stay, however? No laughing matter.

Schoolgirl So-mi (Lee Re, Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula) dies of cardiac arrest shortly after a heart transplant. Her father (Park Shin-yang, The Big Swindle) takes the tragedy hardest of all, because he’s also the surgeon responsible for her procedure.

Looking back, Dr. Cha notes his beloved daughter did act strangely after getting her ticker swapped out. What’s more, he believes his little girl is still alive. Say, you don’t think that secondhand heart could have something to do with it, do you?

Of course! We’ve all seen Body Parts.

A young priest (Lee Min-ki, 2009’s Tidal Wave) explains it all: So-mi is possessed by a demon who will rise again in three days, using her fresh corpse as a vessel. As Dr. Cha and his family grieve, So-mi’s “guest” kills some people and an oversized moth crawls from the girl’s cakehole. This is either the first feature for TV director Hyun Moon-seop (Nightmare Teacher) or the weirdest episode of ER ever.

Soused in South Korean customs and universal superstition, Devils Stay earns points for finding a new angle into the exorcism subgenre. The movie may not exist without The Exorcist, but minus one short scene, it’s not ripping off The Exorcist. One could argue the strangest element is its front-and-center embrace of Catholicism since Asian films usually default to Buddhism.

On one hand, Hyun cues up rote scares, accompanied by suddenly loud music stings as if he distrusts his own abilities. And he has abilities, because on that other hand, Devils Stay displays some arresting, imaginative visuals — none more potent than So-mi’s body hovering outside in mid-air. Still, with a drawn-out denouement, Hyun’s theatrical lacks the trickery to ascend to next-level special where recent Korean spookers Sleep and Exhuma reside. Maybe next time? —Rod Lott

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Mickey 17 (2025)

Let’s get the biggest letdown out of the way: Unfortunately, Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 doesn’t feature the 1981 pop hit “Mickey” by Toni Basil. The flick does, however, have Toni Collette (Hereditary) obsessing over various sauces. I guess that’s a decent enough consolation.

Beyond the sauce, Mickey 17 is a compelling, yet quite a bit weaker satire from South Korea’s best-known director. While it certainly won’t receive the same critical celebration as 2018’s Parasite, it still holds a comfortable place among a stellar filmography. That said, if you’d sooner watch Mother or Memories of Murder over Okja or Snowpiercer, this one might not be the Joon Ho joint you’d hope for.

Mickey 17 is a fairly close adaptation of Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel, Mickey7 (minus the 10 extra Mickeys, of course). On the run from a powerful mobster with a chainsaw fetish, Mickey (Robert Pattinson, The Batman) and his “friend” Timo (Steven Yeun, Nope) get jobs with a commercial space cruiser bound to colonize a mysterious ice planet. While Timo negotiates for a position as a pilot, Mickey becomes the ship’s only “expendable.” Possibly the worst gig imaginable, Mickey is employed to die and get reprinted so he can effectively gauge the dangers of space travel and colonization.

More so than Joon Ho’s other sci-fi satires, Mickey 17 excels in its casting. Pattinson channels his inner John C. Reilly to deliver a hilarious and endearing performance. His attention to physical comedy also excels, appropriately matching the energy of his character’s existential (and interplanetary) nightmare. Plus, Mark Ruffalo (Poor Things) and Collette carry the antagonism as the colony ship’s insufferable, corporate power couple.

That said, the film’s attempt at satire also works against it. Kenneth Marshall (Ruffalo) obviously pulls from Donald Trump and Elon Musk, but unfortunately, Joon Ho doesn’t say anything interesting about that. Sure, Marshall is a bumbling idiot who has more power than he should have ever been granted, but the film fails to actualize the consequences of that in a meaningful way. As entertainment, the character operates fine. As something genuinely interesting and resonating, on the other hand, he fails miserably.

While that miss eclipses most of Mickey 17’s commentary that lands, it doesn’t completely ruin it. The film’s critique on automating and replicating human capability to extinction works. And though the monstrous centipede-buffalo stand-in for Indigenous societies feels a bit gross, at least where the film’s heart lands doesn’t. In other words, it flounders as a modern, pointed satire, but saves itself as a dystopian black comedy.

Certain sequences thankfully save the film when awkward flashbacks and hallucinations cause it to stumble. It isn’t that those achronological scenes should’ve been removed outright. Rather, their presentation makes the film noticeably stumble toward its crescendo. Which feels bizarre, given the montages and dialogue push the movie forward so well.

To be clear, Mickey 17 is an entertaining, worthwhile ride. It just winds up among Joon Ho’s weaker works, fighting for a knife in the slush with Snowpiercer. Ultimately, that’s still pretty high praise. —Daniel Bokemper

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The Rule of Jenny Pen (2024)

Few things in life frighten me more than the prospect of “life” in a nursing home. (Knock on digital wood.) Sharing a room my freshman year of college was traumatic enough; add the forced fun, failing health and hovering scent of death urine, and I’m filing that under “DO NOT WANT.”

So when a judge (Geoffrey Rush, Mystery Men) earns placement in one following a courtroom stroke, I understand his surliness. Despite his stay’s temporary status for rehabilitation, he’s irritated to be trapped in an environment he can’t control with the tap of a gavel. And that’s before he attracts the ire of longtime resident Dave (John Lithgow, 2019’s Pet Sematary remake).

You know Dave, right? He’s the guy whose arm basically ends in Jenny Pen, the hand puppet of a baby doll with hollow eye sockets. The object’s inherent creepiness is nothing compared to the cruelty it inflicts upon the elderly. Your mileage may vary along Dave/Jenny’s reign of terror, but their particular shenanigans with a catheter gave my willy the willies.

Something within The Rule of Jenny Pen’s bones screams Stephen King to me. In actuality, it’s based on a short story by Owen Marshall, a writer unknown to my brain, but clearly a favorite of director James Ashcroft; the New Zealand filmmaker’s previous feature, Coming Home in the Dark, also adapts Marshall’s prose. (I can’t help but wonder if the source material also ignores why a facility with an investment in keycard entry would have no security cameras. Maybe they overspent on acquiring all the Matt Monro and Gene Pitney LPs?)

Ashcroft’s film doesn’t exactly zip along at the speed of the judge in his motorized wheelchair. Even acknowledging its slow-burn ambitions, I’d argue Rule runs 30 minutes past what the plot allows. But then we’d be denied the scene-stealing whole of Lithgow at his most sinister — even more so than his Emmy-winning run as the Trinity Killer on Dexter.

Even if the picture lacks a payoff as diabolical as the setup demands, it has a lot to say about bullies and the systems that allow them to keep terrorizing their targets. Watch with a morbid mix of fascination and curiosity. —Rod Lott

Satan War (1979)

Turns out, things aren’t always bigger in Texas. This homemade Amityville Horror coattailer chronicles the experience of newlyweds moving into an absolute bargain of a starter home in the Lone Star State. Because the devil, y’all.

Immediately, Count Floyd-level “spooky” frights occur. The crucifix on the wall does a 180. The coffee carat overflows with chocolate pudding. A kitchen chair hits the wife in the butt. The phone rings, yet no one’s on the line. You yawn.

Because Satan War is shot on 16mm — and mostly in the dark at that — things can be difficult for the eye to discern. In that way, it achieves an accidental artiness similar to the shaggy, lo-fi vibe of Skinamarink, but with 100% more macramé.

The highlight of Bart La Rue’s film finds the wife (one-timer Sally Schermerhorn) getting felt up while she’s scrubbing dishes. That’s the only element of the 64-minute movie that pushes the envelope — or rather, drags said envelope along the surface of the armoire by a string. 

Two longer versions of Satan War exist, at 77 and 92 minutes. The prospect of viewing either is more shiver-inducing than anything onscreen. —Rod Lott

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Rats! (2024)

As punishment for a graffiti-related arrest, community college slacker Raphael is sent to live with his drug-dealing cousin. And an overzealous cop demands Raphael provide intel on his cuz, believed to be stashing and selling plutonium warheads. 

Meanwhile, around Fresno, Texas, the FBI investigates a string of disembodied hands turning up. That these federal agents — and everyone else in Rats! — mispronounce the mitts as “haunds” with no explanation should clue you in to the movie’s peculiar wavelength. 

And if it doesn’t, sit tight for a toilet POV shot you won’t soon forget. That’ll do it. 

The debut feature for co-directors/co-writers Carl Fry and Maxwell Nalevansky, Rats! immediately distinguishes itself as a sharp celebration of bad taste. A slightly less transgressive The Greasy Strangler by way of Greener Grass, it’s very, very funny and really, really not for everyone. Its Barbie-bright colors belie the darkness of its gags, many of which hit with the blunt force surreality of a PTSD episode.  

For his first movie, newcomer Luke Wilcox lucks into the lead role of Raphael, but he’s essentially the straight man in an unknown cast of curves and zigzags. The most askew among them is the aforementioned cop, played with go-for-broke gusto by Danielle Evon Ploeger (2022’s Country Gold). Darius Autry (The Asylum’s Jungle Run) greatly amuses as the cousin, while Jacob Wysocki (Unfriended) is responsible for at least a dozen laughs in the first five minutes alone as an ineffective shoplifter.

But speaking of theft, this show gets stolen by burlesque artist Ariel Ash and Brian Villalobos (Scare Package) as, respectively, a sex bomb and henpecked husband who cosplay as a TV news team, hoping to nab on-the-scene exclusives regarding the suburban absurdity unfolding around them. And brother, does Rats! ever scurry up more than plenty, haunds down. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

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