Reviews
[REVIEW] ‘The Fly 2’: Less Surrealism, More Slime
You’ll never change my mind on this: handing over the reins of a horror movie franchise to a special effects artist is always the right choice. Case in point, The Fly 2.
The Case for Special Effects Artists as Horror Directors
Lighting the monsters, blocking them, choreographing their motions and how they pass through the sets they’re inhabiting, and even understanding character motivations and emotions and how to portray them. They have skills that transfer over to head-on directing and dealing with actors quite nicely that we often overlook.
Today we aren’t talking about Screaming Mad George’s foray into gooey sci-fi with The Guyver, or Alec Gillis’s viral crowdfunded Harbinger Down, although I do hope to cover both of those sooner than later.
Spotlight on The Fly 2: An Unconventional Sequel
We’ll be touching on the unsung and unsuspectingly great sequel to David Cronenberg’s classic, The Fly 2. Picking up where the previous film left off, Veronica’s nightmare has come true: her child by Seth Brundle, the genius scientist turned insect abomination by his own ambitions, has come to term.
Bartok Industries, the company Seth worked for, has taken the child Martin Brundle into their stead to study his rapid growth and abnormal intelligence. Suffering from the same symptoms as his father, Martin attempts to get the telepods working again in a desperate ploy to repair his damaged DNA. Things, as expected, go horribly wrong.
While this might seem like a straightforward sequel, its quirks make it anything but normal. The Fly 2 eschews much of its previous film’s more surreal and philosophical qualities, exploring the nature of humanity, and leans into the campy science fiction aspects to match its body horror.
Tonal Shifts and Quirky Energy
That doesn’t make it a less worthy sequel, but it does make it unexpectedly off kilter. Tonally, it’s a screwball, starting with some wildly nasty pregnancy horror as we see Martin’s birth in a larval form. Then, for roughly the first 30 minutes, it bounces between children’s adventure film energy, to a college romance, back to horror occasionally before settling into its sci-fi horror nest.
The sharp contrast between the especially dark moments like Martin interacting with a failed telepod experiment and him dancing with his girlfriend give The Fly 2 a very odd energy that in some aspects I’d describe as off the wall, which at the very least makes it more memorable.
Standout Performances Amid Script Challenges
Issues with the script itself become exacerbated by a lack of strong voices; with no Jeff Goldblum and a regrettably absent Geena Davis, the only really notably great performance is Lee Richardson who plays the mustache-twirlingly devilish Anton Bartok with all the corporate nastiness of Ned Beatty in Network.
Credit is due to a returning John Getz, whose portrayal of a now physically and emotionally scarred Stathis Borans is a fun challenge he embraces.
While the film does spin its wheels with an honestly completely uncompelling romance for a good chunk of its runtime (think Dan and Megan from Re-Animator with no Herbert to play off of; dreadfully unimportant in the grand scheme of things and not enough humor to derive a good time from), this is alleviated by the rest of the film focusing on the slimy degeneration of our main character, as Martin’s mutations are good and truly off the rails.
Stellar Makeup and Creature Design by Chris Walas
Director Chris Walas and the rest of Amalgamated Dynamics work here is every bit as fantastic as the first film, bringing us plenty of foul fluid and far-gone flesh to make you nauseous. Martin’s slow transformation I would argue is even better than Seth’s, even if the scenes of Martin lamenting and later accepting his change lacks a lot of the dark humor that came with Goldblum’s ambitions to become the first insect politician.
The technical skill on display with this makeup plays best on screen in the film’s climax, featuring the brand-new creature in the Martinfly; it has a greater range of motion than the original Brundlefly, and the sprawling industrial facility the finale takes place in takes advantage of that.
The Climactic Chaos of the Martinfly
Slamming through windows, spewing acid vomit, and swiping with chitinous claws should sell you on the twenty-some minutes of mayhem Martinfly causes.
The Fly 2 isn’t a masterpiece, but this is where my pedantic nature shows; as I said in the opening, it is a masterfully crafted film. It’s a truly admirable attempt at a sequel trying to follow up on one of the greatest horror films of all time, made by one of the most talented special effects artists in American film history. Cronenberg’s fingerprint may not be on it, but it shows a good deal of respect for the original creation it is working off of without turning into a complete retread.
And for that, it deserves much more attention and love than it gets.
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.
