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.
Luz: The Flower of Evil is a movie simultaneously charged with and mired in ambition. It’s genuinely comical how overly ambitious of a first-time film it is for writer-director Juan Diego Escobar Alzate: a microbudget, shot on location in the mountains of Colombia, character driven psychological horror film meant to explore the very nature of good and evil while also tackling cults and misogyny.
So, it’s shocking how much of it works. Not all of it works, not at all, but it is cohesive enough to serve as a surprising experience with the colorful aesthetic it employs and incredibly dark places it goes to.
What Is Luz: Flower of Evil About?
After the death of their mother Luz, three sisters in a rural cult community find their faith waning. The three are the centerpiece of an elaborate theology crafted by their cult leader father, a man who is becoming more difficult to deal with by the day. So, when he brings a mute boy into town, chaining him up and claiming he’s the people’s messiah, an already tense situation devolves into outright madness. What ensues is the slow dissolution of the cult, and the torturous end of an already fractured family.
Let this usual synopsis section also serve as a content warning: the film does depict sexual violence very early on, about 25 minutes into the film. It’s not Irreversible levels of horrifically long, but it’s also not particularly brief and still graphic content by its nature. It can be difficult to stomach, so I’m mentioning it now for those who would rather avoid that sort of thing.
A Ponderous Arthouse Folk Horror About Good and Evil
The film has shocking moments, but it’s not very interested in shock value. This is first and foremost a slow burn, a piece of arthouse folk horror that is more about bleeding out than it is about a violent demise. The most obvious comparisons are to The VVitch and Midsommar, but even that feels like an inappropriate mix, even when it leans towards Aster’s commercial darling or Egger’s colonial nightmare.
Fundamentally, Luz is a study about people who mythologize suffering and cruelty and excuse it as being driven by outside spiritual forces rather than their own decisions. It’s about deconstructing harmful religious and cult mentalities, and it wears its philosophy on its sleeve (aggressively so). Alzate creates a visually and textually fascinating meltdown of his characters and the community they find themselves within.
I would say it’s a “descent into madness” if it didn’t feel clear that the characters were already in a tailspin right at the film’s outset. The script, especially through its second act, starts to feel repetitive and a little simplistic, with a somewhat anticlimactic ending and dialog that starts to feel less naturalistic and more tedious. But it’s an interesting dissection of a family, even if it’s rough around the edges.
Hyperreal Sense of Color, But Shaky Directing and Writing
The film’s most obvious and striking feature is its hyperrealist palette, bearing a rich Technicolor aspect that permeates throughout the entire runtime. Colorist Felipe Martinez U paints the mountainous countryside with such vibrancy, a simple but very effective contrast to the dying days of a cult the story centers on; bleak, muddy times, punctuated by vibrant nature all around. Aesthetically, it’s pretty clearly visually inspired by the early works of Pedro Almodóvar and the visual warmth of Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man.
Even the naturalistic tendencies of Terrence Malick make an appearance here, though how much of that is just in the gorgeous location scouting and how much is actually emulated by Alzate is up for debate. All around, the film lacks polish. The camerawork is amateurish in some ways, slightly cramped and occasionally uninspired in its framing. Sometimes the oversaturated look of the film can feel a little saccharine and heavy, but the pop of color here feels purposeful enough that I can forgive it as being highly stylized rather than trying to mask the weak points of a first-time director.
Is Luz: The Flower of Evil Worth the Watch?
In the search for great Latin American horror, Luz was an odd duck to stumble upon to be certain. But I’m a champion of strange birds with a lot of character, so you do the math.
Luz: The Flower of Evil is a struggle of a film, hard to watch at points despite how visually appealing it can be. It’s a brutal, bleak piece of psychological folk horror that certainly has a thin audience and will test the patience of even those the premise appeals to. But it does have as much substance as it does style, even when it treads into murky waters, and for that I think it’s worth the watch.
If you’re not watching Indonesian horror, you’re missing out. The region is producing some of the craziest genre movies around right now, thanks in no small part to the efforts of writer-director Joko Anwar. His latest, Ghost in the Cell, which celebrated its North American premiere at Fantastic Fest 2026, combines everything we love about the filmmaker’s work—supernatural scares, inventive kills, and gnarly gore—along with a strong vein of comedy and political satire.
What is Ghost in the Cell About?
Ghost in the Cell centers around Dimas (Endy Arfian), a journalist whose life falls apart after he tries to run a story on corporate corruption and mysterious worker deaths. Wrongfully convicted of the horrific murder of his boss, Dimas finds himself with a one-way ticket to Cell Block C, where he quickly meets a colorful cast of prisoners—the good, the bad, and the seriously nasty. Among the good guys, there’s Anggoro (Abimana Aryasatya), who is constantly getting into trouble for defending fellow inmates, and Six (Yoga Pratama), who claims he can see people’s auras.
As if Dimas’ situation couldn’t get any worse, his arrival seems to trigger a series of brutal killings in the prison. Bodies are showing up mangled beyond recognition and displayed in positions that wouldn’t look out of place in Hannibal. It soon becomes clear that Dimas isn’t behind the murders, which begs the question: what did he bring in with him?
Anwar Embraces Horror-Comedy Whole-Heartedly
Prison is a scary place, and Anwar makes great use of the setting, with the action moving from the dingy showers where predators lurk to the bleak cellblock where inmates are at the mercy of their captors and the cafeteria where rival gangs eye each other up with ill intent.
But for all the human misery contained within the film, Ghost in the Cell is ultimately a horror-comedy, one that isn’t afraid to lean into broad slapstick and quippy dialogue when it wants to raise a chuckle. The tonal shifts can take a little while to adjust to, especially if your previous experience with Anwar comes from his more serious horror outings like Impetigore. This might be a problem if the film wasn’t actually funny, but Ghost in the Cell has enough laugh-out-loud moments to make you forget about any whiplash.
Ghost in the Cell Is a Genre-Bender to the Max
Comedy isn’t the only new flavor that Anwar has tossed into the mix. In Ghost in the Cell, dance sequences and martial-arts fight choreo sit side-by-side with some of the most extreme gore scenes seen outside a Terrifier movie in recent years. Then there’s the eerie way the spirit presents before it kills (trypophobia sufferers, beware) and the extensive critique of political corruption, power, and inequality. It’s an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach that shouldn’t work on paper, but under Anwar’s assured hand, it does.
It helps that for all the slapstick, the film lands a surprisingly earnest message, amplified by its vast ensemble cast. Dimas and Anggoro at times feel like main characters, but everyone in Ghost in the Cell has a big part to play, and that’s the point: in seemingly impossible circumstances, there’s strength in unity.
Ghost in the Cell Is an Endlessly Entertaining Blend of Goofiness, Heart, and Gore
If you’re looking for nonstop scares, you won’t find them in Ghost in the Cell. What you will find is a delightful blend of horror, comedy, and action that is apt to leave you grinning from ear to ear.
The film doesn’t skimp on the gore, throwing flesh and fluids at every surface. But it’s also charmingly goofy, with a cast that doesn’t take itself too seriously and a script that’s all too happy to devolve into a comedic dance scene when it feels like the spirit might strike. In every sense, Anwar is doing the most, and the end result is a film where there’s nary a dull moment in sight.
