So this was one of the top horror movies of 2025? The acting was pretty good and the fx looked good. The story isn't really that original but it's not terrible, what we get of a story anyway. Nothing is ever explained in the end, there's is no reason for anything give. This has some of the most bottom of barrel lazy bad writing I have seen in a while. Basically what you have is 17 kids all from the same class run away at 2:17 on the same night. The movie takes place over a week 30 days after the disappearance from multiple different people's perspectives that all merge together in the end. The very first one is Justine and I knew the movie was in trouble already. Why open your movie with the most irritating, annoying character that I hated right away. I started noticing
writing issues pretty much from the start. It's a little thing but characters kept saying the kids all walked off into the night, yet multiple ring cameras show them bolting out the front doors and running away at full speed. This brings up another issue, everyone has cameras now, there would be a ton of footage of these kids running down streets and through front yards all the way to the destination. Not here magically not one camera seems to exist other than the couple of plot
device required ones. It's only been 30 days yet theirs no police, no search parties, no FBI anywhere. Something like this would be national news. This town would be crawling with media not to mention all the nosy bloggers and internet types, yet here nothing, not a single one. Actually the entire movie feels very low budget, the whole town is oddly empty. Every scene is devoid of any life other than the character on screen, no background characters, no cars just completely empty backgrounds. This is also horror in the loosest sense of the word, there's a few jump scares and creepy moments mixed with maybe a handful of disturbingly bloody violent scenes but it's very few. Most of the runtime is slow moving drama to get all the characters to the end sequence. This brings me to the finale, what a letdown after all that. The final 20 or so minutes turns into a lough out loud comical sequence. I was literally laughing at how bad the ending was. For woke, as others have said there is the gay mixed race couple. It's maybe 2 scenes of them walking around together and that's it. It's never brought up or made into an issue but it's there. There is also way to much DEI overrepresentation for what's supposed to be small town PA. I would not recommend this at all.



Some spoilers follow that give more examples of how horrible the writing is......



While I don't believe their was any actual family relationship how Gladys was able to persuade, find or cloud the minds of the family is never explains or really makes any sense. She's introducing herself as the Aunt and sister of the mom to everyone including investigators, who by the way have no problem with catatonic parents sitting like zombies while the aunt just takes over the household. Nobody questions how this mid 70's woman could possibly be the sister of the 32 year old mom. An officer and squad car disappear for several days with his car sitting outside the house and the station doesn't notice? The neighbors don't notice the car for days outside the house? The parents just vanish of the face of the earth for over a month and nobody notices? No friends or work notices them missing? Neighbors don't notice they just vanish and some strange woman is now living there? A screaming man is dragged out of a car across the front lawn and into a house and no neighbors hear or see anything? Even worse, screaming, smashing around fighting and several gunshots and not one neighbor right next door hears anything. Even the child narrator at the beginning, who we never actually see anywhere in the movie and appears to completely random states the kids 'walked off into the night never to be seen again' is in the end just a blatant cheap lie by the director.

s1 woke-0 overall-4
I would say there is nothing woke in season 1. There are a few female officers but they are barely there and very few. The same with minority representation, very few and well within reality. Mostly good season with pretty good acting and only some minor writing issues.
s2 woke-1 overall-3
This is a step down from the first season. The decision to use another copycat with the Ripper expert from season 1 returning and is an expert again on this one is a bit implausible. The writing overall is not as good and there's a good bit that's just not believable. The police are a bit frustrating at how cowardly and ineffectual they are but I guess that's what happens when you have an unarmed police force. It's still watchable but not as good as season 1. Woke creeps in a bit here as well. There seems to be an effort to cast females in a lot of the supporting roles. There is a storyline where one of the original killers was gay so the copycat is pretending to be gay too. He is messing around with another character who is a girl pretending to be an underage boy. It's a minor plotline that takes up very little time and is not the focus of the season.
s3 woke-2 overall 2
This season goes to a new format, where the previous ones were 3 episodes with one case across the whole season now it's 6 episodes with 3 cases each taking place over 2 episodes. The writing takes another hit this time with characters doing dumb things and some pretty big stretches in believability. They also decide to stick with every case tying into a past case gimmick. This makes everything even more unrealistic and would of worked better to just go with a normal murder case instead. The ripper expert is now hired on as a research expert and becomes more annoying and out of place. The first case or
episodes 1-2 permanently introduce a new overweight body positive female to the team and a mixed race Asian female forensic expert for the arc to add to the female morgue attendant already in the cast. Getting even heavier on the female casting now. There is also a nasty entitled feminist type character for this arc and the usual overrepresentation of females and blacks in the secondary and background characters. The killer is so obvious and easy to pick out in about 2 seconds in this
arc. The 2nd case or Ep 3-4 introduce yet another female detective for the arc. The writing seems to be getting worse as it goes along. Ridiculous leaps in logic and highly unlikely coincidences keep happening. They are now investigating murders based on random world history murder cases with magically exact circumstances most of which are completely made up. 2nd case or Episodes 5-6. At this point the researcher character has become very annoying and I actually can't stand him anymore. The constant linking of cases to the past and using that to steer investigation has become ridiculous and makes every investigational procedure absurd. It's become tired and
overused. This season seems to want to push further away from the original police procedural and into supernatural/horror territory. A victim that almost is killed is a completely unrealistic for the situation angry feminist type. More and more of these types are showing up this season. The writing in this arc is completely absurd, lazy and unrealistic. A scene with a dead victim that is visibly breathing comes to mind. This season was a struggle to get through and I'm not going to bother with season 4. I would suggest watching season 1 maybe season 2 if you like detective stories but stop after that. It's unfortunate as the 1st season had so much promise.

I really was hoping this would be at least watchable as I like pirate movies. But it's not. Hollywood loves to latch onto minorities with limited to no talent and just shoving them down everyone's throats. Chopra Jones is their newest DEI project they seem to be pushing as a female action star and like usual her acting sucks. The movie is filmed competently enough but the acting is pretty bad all around, even Karl Urban is pretty bad here. The action scenes are decent but unfortunately this is nothing more than a girl power feminist fantasy. Even though the movie is heavily black casting it takes place in the Caribbean in
the 1800's where there was an actual large population of Black as well as Indian so the Indian/black couple and black casting is probably realistic. There are also bad and good portrayed black and white as well. The Chopra Jones character however is so over the top superhuman its laughable. She has no problem physically fighting and overpowering multiple large male pirates at once. She gets clubbed in the back while laying down at full swing from a standing pirate and just shrugs it off then hits him in the leg with a seashell and he collapses to the ground. Pirates can't manage to shoot her from 20 feet away with a clean line of fire while standing still. This is utter and complete feminist nonsense and I shut it down after about 45 minutes. Not recommended.

Another unneeded sequel ruining a good name. This is just an attempt to keep these movies going for the gen z crowd. There are 3 new young characters introduced to replace the originals. 1 black male, 1 white male and 1 Spanish mixed half n half female. So DEI. They are annoying and unlikable. Everything they do is obvious and unrealistic, they aren't sneaky and stealthy. All the tricks are CG this time and look bad and take you right out of any plausibility they originals had. Then there's the woke. The first scene has the gen z 3 as I will call them steeling from 3 white male crypto bros. The villain is a ridiculous nasty girlboss sounded by beta males. Her accent and performance are hilariously bad. Lots of woke social justice comments thrown around throughout the movie. The overall theme here is the gen z 3 are better than the originals. The originals basically stand around the entire movie while they do everything and think of everything. This is a staple of woke replacement. Introduce new amazing character that you prop up while dragging down the originals by making them stupid and unneeded. I would bet they are planning another one with only the new characters. The villains family history is those pesky white supremacist Nazis again. They just had to have a scene with the midget 5 ft. 90lb female beating up and evading 3 large male police officers in an enclosed room. I made it through the entire thing but it is not a good movie. Can't really recommend this one.


Spoilers....



The big reveal is the new DEI black kid is the brother of the white Nazi descendant female. Turns out her Nazi father was banging the black housemaid and had a kid and she thought she killed them. Yes really. Also DEI brother is the genius mastermind who set the entire heist and revenge plan up. Now that he has his birthright back he's giving up the diamond and all assets and giving everything to the South African communities. Wow.

I originally read the book back when it came out so it's been a while but from what I can remember this is incredibly close to the book. Great acting and writing, the FX are excellent and the humor is great. The book is fairly big and this sometimes feels a little condensed but at 2.5 hours it's already pretty long. Despite the runtime it never gets boring. There seems to be a divide here on whether or not it's woke so here's my response to some of the complaints. There is no climate change ever mentioned once anywhere in the movie. It is an invasive alien organism destroying the sun. That's it. The diversity in the panel is because it's a global initiative, this is not an America saving the world. This is on a global scale with many governments. Of course there will be
diversity, why would there not. The female lead is not a girlboss in any way. She's quirky and awkward, not nasty, vile, aggressive or violent. Referring to him by Grace. It's literally his last name, many people call each other by their last name. It's not unusual. The alien species is a non humanoid species that looks rock like. Gender is never once brought up. When asking about the mates name using 'their' one single time in this case is the same as saying he/she when asking someone their pets name or gender. If gender was brought up then I would agree it's woke. Adrian is male, Adrienne is female. The name is dual sex the same as
Nicky/Nikki or Danny/Dani or Terry/Teri. The only woke thing I saw was the black 'helper' Carl. He is not in the books and was added for the movie. This is clearly a DEI character put there for comedy and to help the white male lead. Not necessary and a woke point. I recommend both reading the book and watching the movie, they are both great.

Based on a true story from 2009. It's watchable but some lazy bad writing hurts this one a lot. The acting is pretty good but the story takes some liberties with what actually happened. There is a weird scene where the head of the coast guard makes a speech detailing hypothermia right after getting the call they are missing and before ordering the search. It's very out of place unrealistic and jarring to the flow of the story. There is also some editing issues where scenes change between night and day at odd times making the depiction of days versus the number of hours they were out there make no sense. There is also inconsistencies with the storm, sometimes torrential rain and the next scene barely raining and not storm clouds. Speaking of the storm it is called a tropical
cyclone in a news report and many times radar is shown where a tropical cyclone or a hurricane/tropical storm is depicted. They even talk about the storm making landfall. This takes place in Feb in Florida, there are no tropical storms in the U.S. in Feb. This was a very strong storm pushed through by a cold front called a bomb cyclone but they
do not move like cyclones. It is a straight line front that moves downward. Most of the acting is pretty good and the storm fix look good as well. The only woke I saw was the overrepresentation of females in the Coast Guard. Only about 15 percent is female but they are everywhere here including not 1 but both search pilots. The mixed race couple is accurate to real life so not woke and the race comment at the beginning I initially rolled my eyes at turned out to be a joke between friends so wouldn't really call that woke. Overall watchable if you are interested in the story but probably a one time watch.

The opening battle scenes sets the tone for the bad writing immediately. A city built literally right into the ocean surf deep enough to allow
large ships to sail right up to the walls unimpeded. There are no double walls to repel invaders as was common. Massive breach towers raise up
magically out of nowhere on the ships. Next is the laughable baboon gladiator scene. The CG looks terrible and the baboons look like something out of a zombie movie. It's historically inaccurate and baboons are many time stronger than humans, there is no way a shackled person is going to win in a 1 on 1 against an angry baboon. It gets worse when the Rhino riding gladiator shows up. Then the utter nonsense that is the gladiator filled ships battling it out in a shark infested water filled arena. WTF! This is NOT a sequel but a shameless remake and a soulless copy of the original. Pascal is horribly miscast and just not good here. His character is annoyingly pathetic and spends most of the movie looking like he's about to cry. Mescal as the lead is boring and a far cry from the performance put op by Crowe. Washington again is miscast and appears to embrace the stupidity by comically hamming it up most of the time. Everything is so over the top ridiculous and unrealistic it might as well have been marketed as fantasy
and throw in some dragons to fight as well. Then there is the woke. DEI everywhere again. Black people were not common in Rome at the time. The Numidian people shown as very diverse with a lot of blacks were not in fact black. Macrinus was North African and not black so casting Washington for a historical character is race swapping. While Rome did incorporate North African people into their empire they were white not sub Saharan as shown here and there were not black people in the Senate. There are also females shown in full legionnaire outfit fighting along side the men. There were no female Legionnaires in Ancient Rome.
I've seen people mention female gladiators. I didn't see any but maybe I missed it somehow. Overall unless you are one of those people that like to slow down to stare at a car wreck I would not recommend wasting time on this.

Nasty girlboss all the men are terrified of and is smarter than all the men. Actually all the men seem to be idiots or overemotional, while the
females are smarter and rational. Flamboyantly gay flight attendant. The usual DEI casting choices. Tiny females holding there own against large
men is a theme here. The script thinks its clever and funny but the dialogue and jokes are just eye rolling. The entire plot is ridiculous and silly and the writing isn't much better. By the halfway point everything devolves into silly slapstick stupid comedy.



Spoilers......


The all powerful genius terrorist 'Ghost' is exactly what you would expect from a woke script and I guessed it within 2 seconds of screen time.
A tiny 5' 100lb 29 year old Indian female. She is again an annoying arrogant snarky unlikable character. No surprise she's not really bad and just a victim getting revenge while the real villains are the American white girlboss gov agent and her white male beta American gov agent.
These woke movies are so predictable.

I don't understand why they decided to make this 4 26 min episodes. Take out the beginning and end credits each one is only about 22 minutes, this should of just been a 90 minute movie. The voice acting is mostly good but there are a few weak performances. The animation on the character models and background looks great but the character movements is pretty bad. It just looks off, stilted and jerky. While I didn't see anything I would consider woke there is some very suspicious political propaganda implications here. This was released in 2021 toward the end of Covid and the basic story is some corrupt American government official working with a pharmaceutical lab develop a bioweapon than attempt to falsely frame China for developing and releasing it. Naturally China is innocent of everything and are good and noble and trying to set everything right. Other than the suspect storyline this is about on par as the rest of the animated RE movies but the heavy handed politics makes it a bit hard to watch.

Netflix just keeps lowering the bar. This is as bad as it gets. If you watch this as a comedy meant to make fun of the genre it might be worth it.
Modern language, dialog and all the social justice tropes. Another show that feels like bunch of pathetic woke cosplayers making a YouTube short except that would probably be better than this. Fight choreography that looks like they used the practice runs for the final scenes. The elf ears look like glued on Halloween leftovers from the dollar store, I mean they didn't even bother blending the skin tone in, you can see how fake they are. I hesitate to even call
what they are doing 'acting'. The CG is poorly done and looks cheap.
Stupid amount of DEI overrepresentation, badass scrawny tiny women beating up groups of men, rapey white men. Rampant feminism with women better then men and of course the rainbow mafia makes an appearance. Typical of the woke garbage Netflix puts out.