Reviews
‘Downrange’ Review: Pure Exploitation Road Horror
Ryuhei Kitamura’s Downrange is a deceptive film. Its first fifteen minutes are mundane dialogue, a plain cast with a bland script to read off of, a desert road as their backdrop. But there’s an eerie stillness to it all, an ominous quiet, that is as foreboding as it is monotonous. The environment is one I can only describe as oppressively hot, exhausting to look at, as the cast simmers in the summer sun. It suggests a long haul and a slow burn, a quiet which will steadily grow to a crescendo.
How Kitamura actually breaks that silence early on is ear-shattering and unexpected: explosive, eviscerating gunshots that are the tamest part of a mean-spirited, 90-minute road horror rundown.
What is Downrange (2017) About?
Downrange’s puzzle box gets unlocked quickly and easily: an unexpected flat tire sidetracks a group of friends en route to a birthday party, but it turns out it’s a round of .223 that stopped them and not a nail. After losing two of their friends to the sniper, the group is quickly pinned down. All they want is to survive, and all he wants is to take out all of them before the sun goes down. Anybody and everybody caught in the crossfire is just collateral.
Exploitation Horror Goes Explosive in The Hands of Ryuhei Kitamura
Despite its very simple premise, it’s the way that it’s shot and hardly how it’s penned that will keep you hooked through to its final frames. Kitamura errs on the side of excess. It’s something that should probably be expected given his previous directing credits with the end-all, be-all kaiju showdown Godzilla: Final Wars. More likely horror fans might have seen his work with the gory Clive Barker adaptation The Midnight Meat Train.
Even when he’s directing something as simple as the characters sitting on a road talking or waiting for help, the itch for weird camerawork gets the better of him. He fills even the dull moments of this exploitation horror with an explosive charge. There are certain kinds of directors who can’t be chained. They need that motion, they need to do something odd, to visually fidget.
That’s not even accounting for when things kick into high gear, with new characters getting put in the sight of the killer’s scope; the situation immediately spirals out of control even harder than it did before. Another director might have conceived Downrange as a slow cooker of tense survival horror, but Kitamura wants a combustion engine. He gets what he wants.
Is Downrange Too Mean, Even for Exploitation Horror?
Granted, the film works against itself in how its story is structured, starting to feel ever so slightly predictable in its second act. The group spends much of the midsection of the film pinned behind a car and waiting for help, getting strategically messed with by our slasher. When they do try to respond or gain some sort of upper hand, it backfires almost instantly. By the third time it happens, it evokes less sympathy for the characters and more of an obvious shrug and a mildly bored “as expected” face.
The film is particularly self-indulgent when it comes to punctuating its bleak situation by dragging its characters in and out of the wringer. This isn’t an early-2000s low effort horror feature where the cast are all intentionally awful either, they haven’t even done anything to justify a fraction of the beating they receive. They’re just unfortunate victims of circumstance, placed on an intercept course with the slashers’ bullets. Even for exploitation horror, it feels like Kitamura is relishing in every blow to the face they take.
A Fatalistic Finale You Won’t Forget
Still, the finale of the film is so crazy violent, and wildly hopeless that it spins back around to being shocking. With an ending that I could only describe as fatalistic bummerfuel.
At the end of the day, Downrange is an auteur driven experience if there ever was one in exploitation horror. And doubly so when that auteur is mainly trying to show you how impressive the FX guy’s skills are and how bad things can really get. In a genre where the most boring way to kill people is with guns, Downrange is forced to be as volatile as possible with how it takes out its characters. It dances on their demise in a way that is cruel and excessive, but it’s clear Kitamura’s wheelhouse is the exploitation genre. It’s a shocking piece of travel horror that if you haven’t seen, and if you have the stomach for it, is worth watching.
Haunted house stories are a staple in the horror genre. But it’s not often that a haunted house film digs its way under your skin and stays there long after the credits roll. Enter Recluse, celebrating its world premiere at the 2026 Tribeca Film Festival.
A Disturbing Return Home Fuels Recluse’s Story
Joan Wyatt, a young and troubled audio engineer, is called back to her childhood home following a bizarre accident in which her father, the famous artist Lawrence Wyatt, was engulfed in flames and left in critical condition. Joan has been estranged from her father for quite some time, so when his longtime housekeeper Lydia leaves a voicemail telling her that he likely doesn’t have a lot of time left, she ignores it. But then Lawrence himself calls, telling Joan that he’s been seeing her mother—who disappeared when Joan was a child—around the house.
Joan arrives to find Lydia armed with a crossbow to ward off Lawrence’s obsessive fans. Her father is bed-bound with severe burns, and is being cared for by a hired nurse around Joan’s age named Emily. Lawrence, who notoriously experimented with psychedelics and occult practices during his career, is barely coherent and keeps his face concealed underneath a crude plaster mask. He keeps asking about his “little spider.” It’s disturbing and deeply upsetting, especially since Joan already has a lifetime of trauma associated with the house. Now that she’s back, she begins to suspect that these “ghosts” aren’t metaphorical. Lawrence was not a good man… but something even more sinister may be lurking in the house.
Henry Chaisson Reinvents the Haunted House Formula
Recluse, written and directed by Henry Chaisson, is a masterfully crafted debut feature that takes familiar elements of the haunted house genre—like a remote mansion as the setting, traumatic family secrets, and supernatural mischief—and twists them into something fresh and, well, twisted.
Sasha Frolova Leads an Exceptional Ensemble Cast
Sasha Frolova stars as Joan, delivering a performance that is both believable and compelling. She’s easy to root for throughout the film, especially as she contends with her father’s unwaveringly loyal housekeeper Lydia, brilliantly played by Toby Poser. Mia Vallet’s portrayal of Emily is also noteworthy, commanding attention from her first appearance all the way to the end. Kimball Farley plays Lydia’s son and Joan’s friend Todd with the perfect balance of levity and tension. Frankie Seratch is enjoyable to watch as the opportunistic nepo baby art dealer Tom. Rounding out the cast is Xander Berkeley as Lawrence; even from behind a mask, his performance is intense and chilling. Berkeley even provided some of his own art to be used in the film.
Sound Design and Cinematography Create Unrelenting Terror
The cast is far from the film’s only strength, though. Sound design by Matthew Rollins will have you death-gripping your seat in the best way, and serves as an integral part of the story itself. Production designer Yulanda Yo-Rong Shieh and art director Ana María Kalvo absolutely nailed the set and made the Wyatt family mansion simultaneously sprawling and claustrophobic.
Finally, we have the beautiful and (appropriately) haunting cinematography by Bryce Holden, supported by the editing prowess of Nik Voytas, Josh Lobo, and Henry Chaisson. Not only did they maintain an air of unrelenting suspense throughout the entire film, but they also executed some of the most disturbing and bone-chilling jump scares I’ve seen in recent years.
Seriously: One of those jump scares made me feel physically ill. You’ll know it when you see it for yourself.
Recluse had its world premiere at Tribeca Film Festival 2026.
One of my favorite special interests is the Mormon-millionaire-real-estate-tycoon-owned Skinwalker Ranch. Mormon millionaire Brandon Fugal has crafted a wonderfully apophenic history in his post-Bigelow ownership. His perfectly curated release of pseudo-information through the lens of a History Channel TV show did wonders not just for his wallet but for docu-dramas as a whole. Fugal did what The Curse of Oak Island could have only wished to accomplish. BUT, three years before Joseph Smith’s teachings made their way to the Uinta Basin, a group of filmmakers set out to capitalize on one of America’s strangest phenomena. Skinwalker Ranch is a film that is as perplexing as it is insufferable.
Skinwalker Ranch: Missing Children, UFOs, and Found Footage Chaos
In 2010, Hoyt’s (Jon Gries) son disappeared in a blinding ball of light. Some time later, Modern Defense Enterprises sent a team of experts to Hoyt’s property to study what happened to Cody (Nash Lucas). Upon arriving at the property, MDE sets up a reality-TV-like number of security cameras in the hopes of finding anything. But what they found may just make them wish they hadn’t set foot on this property.
The Real History Behind Skinwalker Ranch Lore
As stated, the story of and behind Skinwalker Ranch is one of my favorite bits of Americana. From the Sherman family’s story, through Robert Bigelow’s ownership, all the way to its current Mormon occupation, the history behind Skinwalker Ranch runs deep. Dire wolves, dino beavers, and disappearing orbs, oh my! Whether you believe in the stories or not, Skinwalker Ranch is one of America’s biggest pieces of lore.
One of my favorite theories is that a resource-observing beacon was placed by, for lack of a better term, aliens when Pangea existed. Throughout the years, the dissolution of Pangea shifted the location of where the aliens placed the beacon to what is now considered the Mesa on the northern portion of Skinwalker Ranch’s property. The said beacon could very possibly be what causes the mysterious 1.6 GHz signal on the ranch, or why there are so many UAP sightings around the Mesa.
How Skinwalker Ranch Wastes Its Fascinating Premise
Now, I know all of this has been discovered post-Skinwalker Ranch (movie), but Hunt for the Skinwalker and Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, by Colm Kelleher and George Knapp (and James T. Lacatski for Pentagon), had already been released. Dino beavers on Skinwalker Ranch had already been discussed. The true terror of Skinwalker Ranch had been disseminated by three highly regarded UFOlogists. So, for writer Adam Ohler (and story by Devin McGinn, Steve Berg, Ken Bretschneider, and Murphy Michaels) to craft such a plain story that doesn’t even scratch the surface of what makes Skinwalker Ranch even slightly interesting is confounding. It feels as if the writer/story creators heard the term “Skinwalker Ranch” and decided to focus on that, and that alone. Skinwalker Ranch has zero world-building, and hopes that the title is titillating enough to get someone to click ‘play’.
The singular great aspect about Skinwalker Ranch is the casting of Jon Gries (Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite) and Michael Horse (Deputy Hawk in Twin Peaks). Gries does enough carrying in this film to make up for dropping that winning pass. And it’s just wonderful to see Michael Horse in a film, even if he’s cast as a token Native American whose only purpose is to make the writers feel better for capitalizing on Native American lore. Besides that, the acting in Skinwalker Ranch is beyond atrocious. In fact, the acting feels so unnatural that I honestly thought the team from MDE was going to turn out to be the aliens that kidnapped Cody. Turns out, the story doesn’t even attempt to be 1% as clever as that.
A Massive Found Footage Failure
Skinwalker Ranch not only fails at being an interesting sci-fi horror flick, but it also fails at being a found footage flick. Full of awful CGI, bad acting, and an even worse script, Skinwalker Ranch exists as nothing more than a time waster. In fact, Travis Walton’s experience in Fire in the Sky would be more entertaining to take part in than watching even two minutes of this film–I’d rather get dry probed by the Hyperboreans than ever think of this movie again.
