150 Word Review: 'Weapons' (2025)
Suffer, little children
Weapons is almost cathartic. Briefly, justice seems possible. But the narrator isn’t so sure. He tells us the story is true, but is it?
Director/writer Zach Cregger’s grim, disjointed Weapons is about a small town coming apart at the seams after an unexplainable tragedy. The movie is at its most haunting during the opening scenes: a flock of children runs through the moonlit streets of suburbia and vanishes into the darkness.
The characters are all in pain: Julia Garner is a troubled school teacher scapegoated by a grieving community. Josh Brolin is an angry father desperate for answers. Alden Ehrenreich manages to put a human face on police violence without excusing it. What is Weapons about? Abuse. Secrets. Grief. Locked doors and family members who lie. Cregger doesn't explain much, though. And there are a few jokes. The violence is sudden and awful. Black vomit, shattered faces. Aunt Gladys, grinning.
150 Word Review: ‘Barbarian’ (2022)
The real villains in director/writer Zach Cregger’s Barbarian are Airbnb hosts, and he isn’t wrong. Real estate in this country is a nightmare. Cregger’s low-budget horror movie is a stylish haunted house story that zigs and zags in unexpected directions.
His scare tactics are good old-fashioned fun: dark basements, bloody handprints on walls, gory head trauma — classic stuff. Barbarian also manages to mix witty social commentary with brain splatter successfully. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Cregger is a huge Wes Craven fan.
Georgina Campbell is our hero, who made the mistake of renting a house on a business trip to Detroit. Bad news: the rental is double-booked, and she has to spend a long, rainy night sharing the place with Bill Skarsgård’s creepy Keith. What happens next? I won’t tell, but there are monsters on the loose in Motor City, and not all of them are landlords.
Yeesh. Sounds like real good time, if by "good time", you mean "plunging 12-inch surgical steel needles into my eyeballs".
Curious to get your take on the mix of comedy and horror in "Weapons." At times, it worked; at times it undercut some effective scenes of genuine horror. Having the kids crash through fences and houses in almost sped-up motion--funny. But tearing the witch apart when they catch up with her--not so sure. As the guy next to me said, "I wasn't sure I should have been laughing at various points in the movie." I guess I felt if I wanted that blend, I would have rewatched "Shawn of the Dead." Come to think of it, "Barbarian" had a similar blend, but it wasn't overdone.