Guilty Pleasure No. 91: No One Lives (dir. by Ryuhei Kitamura)

Posted on December 1, 2025 by Arleigh

Ryuhei Kitamura’s 2012 horror film No One Lives is a gritty, brutal revenge slasher that doesn’t aim for subtlety or depth but delivers a fast-paced, high-gore thrill ride. The story follows a couple traveling cross-country who are kidnapped by a ruthless gang, only for the man to reveal himself as a deadly predator on a violent rampage. Luke Evans, playing the mysterious and merciless Driver, leads the film with a performance that blends cold calculation and terrifying violence, keeping viewers glued to the screen.

What makes No One Lives stand out is how it leans heavily into its grindhouse and exploitation roots, which proves both advantageous and limiting. The film fully embraces the hallmarks of grindhouse cinema—fast pacing, gritty visuals, excessive gore, and an amoral story stripped down to revenge-fueled violence. This raw, unapologetic approach results in an intense, no-holds-barred experience that will satisfy fans of exploitation and grindhouse styles. The practical effects are impressively executed, with creative and shocking kills that maintain impact without descending into the ridiculous. This dedication to grindhouse aesthetics gives the film a charged energy and a cult appeal, making it a pulpy, heart-pounding experience for viewers who appreciate that sleazy, nihilistic flavor.

However, the grindhouse influence also shapes the film’s limitations. The focus on spectacle and shock means character development and thematic depth take a back seat, making the story feel thin and the characters largely unrelatable except as violent archetypes. Dialogue at times drifts toward camp, and some acting choices can feel a bit amateurish, which may pull some viewers out of the otherwise tense atmosphere. The film’s relentless brutality and amoral tone also create a polarizing effect; it’s unapologetically harsh and violent, which fits the exploitation tradition, but it’s not for everyone. Those expecting traditional horror with complex narratives might find the experience shallow and exhausting.

Luke Evans’s Driver is a compelling anti-hero/monster hybrid, a character who dominates the film with his cold efficiency and unpredictable savagery. The other characters—mostly the gang members—serve as fodder for the film’s violent set pieces, with minimal background or sympathy. This suits the film’s grindhouse style, where depth is often sacrificed for thrills and shock value. The script cleverly keeps some mystery around Driver, maintaining suspense about his origins and intentions, which helps to sustain interest amid the unrelenting carnage.

The film’s grindhouse and exploitation roots also explain its tone and style: it revels in zaniness and excess, the gore is gratuitous but skillfully done, and the revenges feel morally ambiguous and raw. The film doesn’t try to justify or soften its violence; it embraces the lawlessness and nihilism typical of exploitation cinema. While this results in a tight, entertaining 86-minute rush of thrills, it also means the film lacks subtlety or emotional resonance. The style is both a badge of authenticity for genre fans and a barrier to wider appeal.

No One Lives offers a high-energy, blood-soaked horror experience that fully embraces its grindhouse and exploitation influences. It is crafted with a strong focus on unapologetic violence, tight pacing, and a captivating anti-hero in Luke Evans’s Driver. This stylized approach gives the film its raw, relentless intensity that fans of exploitation cinema will appreciate. However, this allegiance to grindhouse aesthetics also means the film prioritizes style and spectacle over emotional depth and narrative complexity. While the movie is an engaging and brutal thrill ride for those who enjoy extreme horror, its minimal character development and abrasive tone might feel one-dimensional or grating for viewers seeking more meaningful storytelling. Overall, it succeeds as a wild, gritty exploitation flick but doesn’t aim to be more than that, making it ideal for audiences who like their horror unrefined and full throttle.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Here’s The Trailer For Nine Perfect Strangers!

Posted on June 12, 2021 by Lisa Marie Bowman

If you’re in the States, this David E. Kelley-produced miniseries will be premiering on Hulu on August 21st. If you’re outside of the States, it’ll be premiering on Prime at some point.

Here’s the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqqFJjvOh74

Playing Catch-Up With The Films of 2019: Ma (dir by Tate Taylor)

Posted on December 25, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Oh, Ma! I had such high hopes for you!

When I first saw the trailer, I assumed that Ma would be kind of a silly horror film where Octavia Spencer plays a woman who buys beer for a bunch of teenagers and then develops an unhealthy obsession with them and then freaks out when all the teenagers are like, “We don’t want to spend all of our time hanging out with a 50 year-old.” I thought it would be a nicely simple little film and I was looking forward to it because Octavia Spencer is a great actress who, far too often, gets typecast as everyone’s surrogate maternal figure. I really wanted a chance to see her just go crazy on film.

And, make no mistake about it, Spencer does get to go crazy in Ma and that’s fun to watch but the film itself gets weighed down by a plot that’s a hundred times more complicated than it needs to be. It turns out that Ma isn’t just someone who is a little bit too clingy for her own good. No, instead, Ma has got an elaborate scheme going so that she can get revenge on the children of the people who humiliated her in high school and …. well, who cares? I mean, this is a good example of a film that could have been a lot of fun except for the fact that someone decided to try to make a statement.

(Tate Taylor previously directed Spencer in The Help and if you think that there’s little in The Help that would suggest that the future director of Ma had an affinity for or understanding of the horror genre, you’re right.)

Octavia Spencer is obviously having a lot of fun with the role of Ma but the film, for some reason, spends a lot of time following a host of other characters, none of whom are as interesting. It all come down to yet another Saw-style torture chamber and that sort of thing really hasn’t been interesting for a while. In the end, Ma is a missed opportunity.

Oh well.

Here’s The Trailer For Midway

Posted on September 12, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Earlier today, the first trailer for Midway was released. Based on the famous World War II battle, Midway will be in theaters on November 8th. Judging from the trailer, it would appear that this adaptation has more in common with Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor than Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk.

Of course, we shouldn’t be too surprised by that. Midway is the latest film from Roland Emmerich and that’ll probably mean a lot of action, not a lot of character development, and maybe a half-assed debate about whether or not Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. (I have to admit that I have never forgiven Emmerich for Anonymous, a film that not only promoted a silly conspiracy theory but which also accused Shakespeare of murdering Christopher Marlowe.) Of course, Midway could still be a good film, even if it is a typical Emmerich production. Sometimes, you just want to spend a few hours watching stuff blow up.

Midway does have a big cast: Ed Skrein, Patrick Wilson, Luke Evans, Aaron Eckhart, Nick Jonas, Mandy Moore, Dennis Quaid, Darren Criss and Woody Harrelson. I don’t know if I’d say that was an intriguing cast, if just because Woody Harrelson and Dennis Quaid appear to be legally required to appear in ensemble war films like this. Still, it’ll be interesting to see if Midway can do for Nick Jonas what Dunkirk did for Harry Styles.

Here’s the trailer:

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women- (Dir. Angela Robinson), Review By Case Wright

Posted on June 24, 2019 by casewright

What does Wonder Woman, S&M, and Polyamory have in common? Pretty much everything. Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (PMWW) was…dull. You’d think with all the whips and ropes that the movie would pull some interest, but the scenes were shot hamfisted and clinical. I guess that makes sense to a degree because the stars were playing Harvard nerds who liked kinky sex, but man what a snore!

The movie was a Biopic about Professor Marston the creator of the lie detector test and I will forever know this because it was repeated over and over and over and over again. UGGHHHH. Professor Marston was a Harvard Professor who was married to fellow professor Elizabeth Marston. They are social psyche professors who are developing a lie detector test and are determined to bring Olive Byrne into their cult-like love life. This would be considered very creepy today, not for the S&M stuff, but because of the professor/student boundary crossing. They aren’t shy at all about their relationship, causing everyone to get expelled/fired. Honestly, I don’t blame Harvard on this one. He not only seduced a student, got her pregnant, and they all lived together. It reminded me of those separatist compounds.

Since no one is working, money gets tight. Eventually, Professor Marston puts his kink into high gear with ropes etc and this gives him the idea of Wonder Woman. He uses the two personalities of his two wives to give Wonder Woman a dual identity. It’s not a terrible analogy, just a terrible movie. Their unconventional marriage is discovered by their suburban neighbors and as a result; they split up for what seemed like 6 days. I blame the director on that.

There’s nothing wrong with being into an unconventional marriage or bondage, but I just didn’t expect it to be so boring. If anyone has an interest in S&M, just watch this film and you’ll be so bored of it, you’ll try something much more exciting like papier-mache! The movie concludes with a bookended plot line of him being investigated for using Wonder Woman to normalize bondage and polyamory and he even admits as much. So?? I don’t know if I’m supposed to care or not. Basically, I might be done with sex for good because I like a little excitement in my life and this apparently is a dead end.

HMM2

Film Review: Murder Mystery (dir by Kyle Newacheck)

Posted on June 15, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

There are actually two Adam Sandlers.

First, there’s the Adam Sandler that everyone knows. This Adam Sandler is the comedian who has won multiple Razzie awards and who has produced and starred in some of the most critically derided comedies of all time. This is the Adam Sandler who often seems to make movies specifically so he can either take a vacation or give some work to the less successful members of his entourage. This is the Adam Sandler whose movies were cited as a tool of patriarchal oppression in the “cool girl” speech during Gone Girl.

And then there’s another Adam Sandler. This Adam Sandler is a sad-eyed character actor who is probably one of modern cinema’s best portrayers of existential malaise. This is the Adam Sandler who starred in movies like Punch-Drunk Love, Reign Over Me, Funny People, Spanglish, The Cobbler, Men, Women, and Children, and The Meyerowitz Stories. Some of those films were very good and some of them, admittedly, were very bad but what they all had in common was that they featured Adam Sandler giving a surprisingly good dramatic performance. In fact, if someone only saw Adam Sandler’s dramatic work (and not his work in films like Jack and Jill or Grown-Ups, to cite just two examples), they would be justified in assuming that Sandler was one of the most acclaimed actors around. (One reason why we get so much more annoyed with Sandler’s bad comedies — as opposed to all the other equally bad comedies out there — is because we actually have evidence that Sandler’s capable of doing so much better.)

Unfortunately, almost all of Sandler’s dramatic films were box office disappointments. Punch-Drunk Love is now widely viewed as being a classic but, when it was first released, it failed to even recoup its production budget at the box office. Audiences consistently indicated they preferred silly Adam Sandler to dramatic Adam Sandler and so, Sandler continued to make silly theatrical films until even those started to bring in less money than they had before.

As of now, Sandler does most of his work for Netflix and the results have been mixed. His performance in The Meyerowitz Stories was rightfully acclaimed while his comedies have been considerably less celebrated. And then you have the just-released Murder Mystery, which seems to straddle the line between the two Sandlers.

On the one hand, Murder Mystery is just as silly and implausible as a typical Adam Sandler comedy. Sandler plays a New York police officer named Nick Spitz. Nick has failed his detective’s exam three times but that still hasn’t stopped him from telling his wife, Audrey (Jennifer Aniston), that he’s been promoted. Nick’s living a lie and he deals with his guilt by taking Audrey on a long-promised trip to Europe. On the flight over, Audrey meets the charming and wealthy Charles Cavendish (Luke Evans) who invites Audrey and Nick to a party on his family’s yacht. The yacht is owned by billionaire Malcolm Quince (Terrence Stamp) and, when Malcolm’s murdered during the party, it’s up to fake Detective Nick to figure out who is responsible!

Was it the glamorous actress, Grace (Gemma Arterton)? Or the handsome race car driver, Juan Carlos (Luis Gerardo Mendez)? Or how about the genocidal warlord, Colonel Ulenga (John Kani)? Of course, the local Interpol detective (Dany Boon) thinks that it was Nick and Audrey and he even threatens to reveal that Nick’s been lying about his job! Can Nick and Audrey solve the murder and rekindle the romance of their stalled marriage?

As I said, it’s all pretty silly. Most of the film’s humor comes from just how out-of-place Nck and Audrey are in the world of high society. Audrey is excited because the murder mystery is just like the plot of one of the paperback novels that she likes to read. Nick spends most of the movie trying to keep his wife from discovering the truth about his job. While everyone else is scheming and plotting and trying to kill one another, Nick and Audrey are literally searching Wikipedia for information on all the suspects. It’s dumb and occasionally amusing and it’s also rather innocent. If your grandmother ever wants to watch a comedy with you, Murder Mystery would probably be the one to go with. There’s nothing to offend grandma but, at the same time, the shots of Monaco and Italy are nice to look at and the film is occasionally amusing enough to hold your attention.

Interestingly, even though the film’s a silly comedy, Sandler gives one of his more grounded performances. There’s no silly voices or sudden yelling or any of the typical Sandler shtick. Instead, he’s rather subdued and it works for the film. He and Jennifer Aniston (another performer who often seems to settle for material that’s beneath what she’s capable of) make for a likable and believable couple and they both play off each other well.

Murder Mystery is a likable, lightweight comedy. It’s not necessarily something that you’re going to remember much about after you watch it, of course. It’s not that type of film. Instead, it’s a perfect Netflix film. It’s entertaining but you can do other stuff while you’re watching it without having to worry about accidentally missing a brilliant moment of cinematic history.

As for Adam Sandler, he’s following this up with Uncut Gems, a crime drama from the Safdie Brothers. The Safdie Brothers worked wonders with Robert Pattinson in 2017’s Good Time. So, who knows? This time next year, Adam Sandler could be the new Superman….

2018 in Review: 10 Good Things That I Saw On Television

Posted on January 19, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Moving right along with my look back at 2018, here are 10 good things that I saw on television.

Please note, I did not say that these were the ten “best” things on television in 2018. Instead, these are ten things that I enjoyed enough that, in January of 2019, they still pop to my mind whenever I ask myself, “What did I enjoy last year?” As always, this is just my opinion and you’re free to agree or disagree.

Got it? Okay, let’s go!

Showtime reran Twin Peaks: The Return

Okay, so maybe I’m cheating a little here. Twin Peaks: The Return originally aired in 2017. You may remember that, for about 6 months, the Shattered Lens essentially became a Twin Peaks fan site. Still, I can’t begin to describe how excited I was to discover that, over the course of a weekend, Showtime would be reairing the entire series. I binged every episode and I discovered that, even with the benefit of hindsight, it’s still one of the greatest shows of all time. Unfortunately, the Emmy voters did not agree. Bastards.

2. The Alienist

It took me a little while to really get into The Alienist but, once I did, I found myself growing obsessed with not only the sets and the costumes but the mystery as well! Daniel Bruhl, Luke Evans, and Dakota Fanning all did excellent work and I can’t wait for the sequel!

3. Jesus Christ Superstar Live

I was skeptical. I had my doubts. I thought I’d spend the entire two and a half hours rolling my eyes. Jesus Christ Superstar proved me wrong.

4. The Americans

One of the best shows on television went out on a high note.

5. Barry

Barry premiered on HBO and it quickly became a favorite of mine. While I agree that Bill Hader and Henry Winkler deserve all of the attention that they’ve received, I’d also say that Stephen Root continues to prove himself to be one of our greatest character actors.

6. Big Brother

The reality show that so many love to hate finally had another good season. Since I get paid to write about the show for another site, that made me happy. Seriously, some of the previous seasons were painful to watch so Big Brother 20 was a huge relief. (Plus, BB 20 inspired everyone’s favorite twitter game: “Will Julie Chen Moonves show up tonight?”)

7. Maniac

As much fun as it is to complain about Netflix, occasionally they justify the price of their existence by giving us something like Maniac.

8. You

Sometimes, I loved this show. Sometimes, I absolutely hated it. However, I was always intrigued and never bored. I can’t wait to see what happens during season 2.

9. Trust

For all the attention that was given to The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Trust was the best FX true crime series of 2018. Along with an intriguing story, it also featured great performances from Donald Sutherland, Hillary Swank, and Brendan Fraser. (Yes, Brendan Fraser.)

10. Westworld

I know a lot of people didn’t care much for the latest season of Westworld. I loved it and, in the end, isn’t that what really matters?

That’s it for television! Coming up next, it’s the entry in Lisa’s look back at 2018 that we’ve all been waiting for, my picks for the best 26 films of the year!

Lisa Looks Back At 2018

Beauty and the Beast Cordially Invites You

Posted on November 14, 2016 by Arleigh

Anyone who grew up during the late 80’s and through the early 90’s saw the return to it’s Golden Age of Disney animation. The Little Mermaid was the first to start it, but it was the follow-up animated film Beauty and the Beast which announced loudly that Disney was back after years upon years of lackluster and underwhelming animated films.

Disney is now in the midst of another era of dominating the film industry with both it’s live-action and animated films. Recent years saw Disney take some of its classic animated films of the past and adapt them into live-action films. We’ve gotten live-action version of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty (redone as Maleficent)

Next in line is the upcoming live-action adaptation of Disney’s own animated film (which itself was an adaptation of earlier films of the same title and premise) of Beauty and the Beast with Emma Watson, Dan Stevens and Luke Evans taking on the three iconic roles of Belle, the Beast and Gaston.

Beauty and the Beast is set to invite all as its guests on March 17, 2017.

Film Review: The Girl On The Train (dir by Tate Taylor)

Posted on October 12, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Before I get around to talking about The Girl On The Train, I’m going to tell you a little story about myself.

A few years ago, I used to make a point of riding the DART train. (DART stands for Dallas Area Rapid Transit. Large sections of Upstream Color were filmed on a DART train.) Every weekend, instead of driving out to the Dallas Angelika or the Dallas Museum of Art and contributing to climate change or whatever it was that I was supposedly doing whenever I drove my car, I would hop on the train. It was a little inconvenient but I was saving the world. Or something.

It was about a 30 minute ride from my local DART Station to downtown Dallas and I have to admit that I actually used to enjoy it. I would always look out the window and watch as Dallas passed by. I got to know all of the buildings and houses on the route pretty well. Thanks to riding the DART train, I discovered that there’s a house on Forrest Lane that’s been boarded up for five years and counting. Near Spring Creek, there’s a two-story house that I wouldn’t mind owning. It’s a two-story glass house and it has a really nice deck that looks out over the creek. I would always look at those houses and, in my mind, I would make up lurid stories about the people who lived there. For a while, it was great fun.

(Unfortunately, it eventually stopped being fun but that’s a story that will have to wait for whenever I finally get around to reviewing Ms. 45…)

As I watched The Girl On The Train, I started to think about those times on the DART train. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that every story that I came up with while sitting on my DART train was a hundred times more interesting than anything that happened in The Girl On The Train.

Emily Blunt stars as Rachel Watson. Rachel is an alcoholic. She got divorced from Tom (Justin Theroux) after she discovered that Tom was having an affair with their real estate agent, Anna Boyd (Rebecca Ferguson). Tom and Anna are now married and have a baby. Rachel, meanwhile, is a blackout drunk who has been unemployed for a year. She spends her time on a train, drinking and ride back and forth between Connecticut and New York.

Every night, the train stops near Rachel’s old house. Rachel looks out the window and she stares at her former home. Occasionally, she sees Tom and Anna celebrating their new life. Rachel also finds herself obsessing on the house next door. Megan Hipwell (Haley Bennett) lives at the house and works as Tom and Anna’s nanny. As Rachel discovers from looking out the train’s window, Megan is cheating on her husband with a mysterious, bearded man (Edgar Ramirez).

(Rachel has a really good view from her window seat. Admittedly, I’m notoriously near-sighted so I might not be the best judge, but I could never actually see what was happening inside any of the houses that I stared at. Rachel, however, must have super vision. Maybe she was Supergirl before she turned into an alcoholic. Who knows?)

One day, a drunk-off-her-ass Rachel forces her way off of the train and stumbles towards her former home. She thinks that she sees Anna jogging and chases after her. “Whore!” Rachel yells before passing out. When Rachel regains consciousness, she can’t remember anything that happened. But she has vague memories of being involved in some sort of struggle…

Eventually, Rachel learns that Megan is missing and presumed murdered. Even worse, Rachel is the number one suspect. The main detective (who is somewhat inevitably played by Allison Janney) suspects that Rachel mistook Megan for Anna. It turns out that Rachel has a history of erratic behavior. She even tried to kidnap Tom and Anna’s baby! Seriously, lock Rachel up!

Trying to figure out what happened and clear her name, Rachel approaches Megan’s husband, Scott (Luke Evans) and pretends to be a friend of Megan’s. It turns out that Scott was an abusive husband. Soon, he’s both confiding in Rachel and encouraging her to start drinking again. Rachel starts spending more and more time with Scott and it becomes obvious that she’s trying to live the life that she once imagined that Megan and Scott had. There’s an interesting subtext to both Rachel’s obsession with Megan and her attempt to start a new relationship with Scott but it’s never really explored. Instead, it’s brought up and then abandoned a few scenes later.

In fact, as a film, The Girl On The Train never really explores anything. (It only grudgingly hints at the complexity of the book on which it was based.) As opposed to similar films like Gone Girl or Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners, there’s not much depth or insight to The Girl On The Train. I’ve read some reviews that have complained that The Girl On The Train is “melodramatic” or “trashy,” but, if that were the case, it would at least be a fun movie to watch. This is one of those films that thinks it’s a lot deeper than it actually is.

The Girl On The Train was probably doomed as soon as Tate Taylor was hired to direct it. Taylor previously directed both The Help and a musical biopic called Get On Up. Tate Taylor is one of those directors who goes out of his way not to challenge his audience (The Help is one of the most positive films about systemic racism that I’ve ever seen) but The Girl On The Train needed a director with more of a subversive edge. The Girl On The Train needed a director who would embrace the film’s pulpy sensibility as opposed to one who would go out of his way to sand away the story’s rough edges and create an inoffensive and bland product that would be perfect for mass consumption.

And then you’ve got the film’s cast, which is full of talented performers who all seem to be uniquely uninspired by the material that they have to work with. Emily Blunt did such good work in Looper and Sicario so why is she so boring here? Why does Justin Theroux seem to be eagerly awaiting the end of the movie? Why are both Haley Bennett and Rebecca Ferguson reduced to playing characters who feel as if they’ve sprung out of a misogynist’s daydream? What is Edgar Ramirez even doing in the movie? Or Lisa Kudrow? Or Laura Prepon? Why is it that every world-weary female authority figure has to be played by Allison Janney? Why? Why? Why!?

So, I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed with The Girl On The Train. I think I would have been more entertained if I had just hopped on the DART train and let my imagination do the rest of the work.

Beauty and the Beast Teases an Invitation

Posted on May 23, 2016 by Arleigh

Walt Disney Studios continues to adapt their classic animated films into live-action and the next in line is 1991’s classic film, Beauty and the Beast.

This animated film was an instant classic and the first to be nominated outside of the Best Animated Film category in the Academy Awards. It was nominated for Best Picture and, for some, it truly deserve not just the nomination but should’ve won the Best Picture award that year.

The teaser trailer makes great use of the music written and composed by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman for the film. We get both the prologue and the title track from the 1991 soundtrack in the teaser trailer. For those who saw the original animated film during it’s original first run in 1991 should be taken back to those days when Beauty and the Beast enchanted a global audience.

With a stellar cast led by Emma Watson, Dan Stevens and Luke Evans, this live-action adaptation has a lot to live up to.

Beauty and the Beast is set to invite all as its guests on March 17, 2017.