Mandy

I love how most things in this movie can be explained by people either having supernatural abilities or just being really, really high. A simple pulpy story that's elevated to My Kinda Shit heights by intense colours and soundscapes, delicious weirdness and just going balls to the goddamn wall when it needs to. I loved the slow-ass buildup.

Weird slow burns are always the best burns. Script probably just read “Nicolas Cage reacts”.

I can't be angry at Cosmatos for fooling me twice, he seems to be trying his best, in his own horrible, niche way. The truth is that "Mandy" is everything a sophomore effort should be for a horror director, bigger budget, bigger names, and bigger and better gore. But the problem is that Cosmatos apparently has no ability to pen a cohesive story with even a grain of cogency. But he gets the aesthetics done so perfectly that by round three he'll probably trick me again.

I can't even... okay, look. It's like this: If you eat the most goddamn delicious cheeseburger you've ever had in your life, what do you care that they replaced the cheese with LSD?

I am a frog put in a pot of lukewarm water, and Mandy is the film that turns the heat on high and soft boils my mind.

Mandy opens like a creepy cult version of the crime brothers focus in the first half of From Dusk Till Dawn and then explodes into over-the-top violence like the second half of...Wait a minute! What this movie lacks in a vampire band playing instruments made of human body parts it makes up for with a goblin vomiting Mac & Cheese onto children.

Beyond the Black: Rambo. Cage has his own following so it's no surprise he was originally tapped to play the cult leader here, there's a scene where the guy starts channeling Ledger's Joker (LOOK AT ME), Patrick Bateman, and Frank Booth (DON'T YOU FUCKING LOOK AT ME) and you can just tell it was meant for Nic to go crazy with. But Roache did a fine job with it and Cage got to have a chainsaw fight so maybe it all worked out for the best.

For this viewer, this film suffers from competing aims: the crowdpleasing self-conscious humour at odds with the exercise in style. Some of the villain's dialogue is reminiscent of Frank Booth, but in a superficial way that serves only to show how much further Lynch was willing to go into the dark depths of the tortured soul. The fact that I saw it with an audience elements of whom were far too keen to show they were in on the joke only served to underline the general unpleasantness of crowds.

Finally, the ironic wolf t-shirt of movies.

Nicolas Uncaged.

I knew this film was up my alley when Cage lights a cigarette with a decapitated head that is on fire.

If I watched movies for anything other than violence, sex, and Nic Cage tripping balls, I'd probably have seen Citizen Cane, Gone with the Wind, and the Hannah Montana Movie by now.

In case anyone needed further testament to the power of film as a singular visual medium, look no further this year than Panos Cosmatos' intoxicating odyssey through the perilous realm that is the vast Belgian wilderness. A simmering gothic nightmare drenched in lush colour, rife with indelible imagery, and bolstered by a rich, ambient score. Think Saulnier meets Lynch as shot by Refn. While it might not go down as the year's best film, I'll be damned if it isn't the most memorable one.

A slow paced, psychedelic swirl of chrome battle axes, slimy bikerdemons, homicidal jesus freaks, cheddar goblins, chainsaw duels and some of the best music of the late, great Johannsons career. It's completely, gloriously over the top and I wouldn't change one damn frame of it.

If you appreciated Heavy Metal (the magazine) when you were a kid, chances are you'll love this wonderfully expressionistic tour-de-force as much as I did. I won't give too much away, just state that it's gloriously, unapologetically batshit out of hell crazy, yet coherent enough to be watchable.

One of the most metal things ever & I love it. Cultivates a curious fractal of subtextual spice through its stylistic conceit & then proceeds to not grow it at all, instead letting it boil inside a knowingly stale plot. For me it was a unique enough emotional cocktail to overcome such lazy pretense. A melancholic fever-dream about American counter-culture driven into "primal wilderness" in 1983. In other words Drive meets The Witch, applying an Argento method to 80's pop reminiscence.

Shaved my chest before watching and all my hairs were back after finishing Mandy. This is the action horror film of 2018 you need. It made me squirm, has a gratuitously crazy Cage and eye popping visuals. Think of it as sleep paralysis except fun...

When a woman is burned to death by a psychotic pack of acid soaked hippies, her boyfriend goes insane and murders everyone. Imagine if Roger Corman and Nicolas Winding Refn had a baby and baptized it in mescaline. The simple revenge plot is amazingly well served by the creaky, ominous score and frankly mindblowing psychedelic visuals. A physically draining but ultimately rewarding trip dripping with style, blood and LSD. Nic Cage is a goddamn monster, and this might be the best film of 2018.

I appreciate what this film was trying to do. Well, I shouldn't say it like that. It definitely accomplished what it wanted to do. Everything about this film is a hellish surreal landscape. Plays a lot like a rape revenge film. But, personally, I didn't enjoy the ride as much as I was expecting. Maybe this will be something I revisit in a few years and love (I have been wrong before, and will be wrong again)?

It's hard to get too excited about an atmospheric retro revenge slasher starring a crazy Nick Ca...hold on, let me rephrase: this is the greatest thing ever made.

Like a heavy-metal Snapchat post-horror filter created by Winding Refn. That was not a compliment. Atmospheric, but not engaging. Bloody, but not gruesome. Revenge movie loaded with the most artsy approach you can think of. Some substantial and cute Nic losing his shit material all over -- drinking and shouting after his wife died, engaging in a chainsaw duel, "you ripped my shirt!" -- in a midnight movie that should have been 30 minutes shorter. Beautiful, but not messy enough.

Can we stop with the 80s retro nostalgia? Please, professional movie critics, stop raving about every movie with overwhelming synths and vaporware color schemes. Yeah, the cinematography here is great and there's a certain sense of weirdness that's charming, but good god the self-aware pastiche of Hellraiser, Evil Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the literal corpus of Dario Argento's work is not novel, it's not clever, and it does little but pander to the Stranger Things fad.

Cage welds a giant battle axe, and the supporting cast includes both Riseborough and Duke, but this is not the sort of campy tribute I enjoy. I'm sure that the meticulously realized film is a labour of love and, thus, cannot write it off completely, but it doesn't even come close to appealing to my taste. I mean, I can enjoy unhinged Cage moments as much as the next guy, but I find them much more fun to watch in films where they don't belong. But by far the worst thing about the film was Roache.

Cosmatos sets out to out-Winding Refn Winding Refn, and with Nic Cage perfectly cast it's hard not to think he succeeds. I'm not sure if there's anything more to this beyond that, but godDAMN, it's gloriously weird.

It’s like David Lynch, Nicolas Winding Refn, and Rob Zombie made a movie together. But it's also like what might happen if you give a schizophrenic black metal guitarist LSD. The scene in that ridiculous, orange bathroom is in early contention for favorite scene of the year. It’s hypnotic, but a weird combination of visceral and totally unaffecting beyond a surface level spectacle. One thing none of its scenes are - predictable.

Visuals that blend Lynch and Winding-Refn, Nicolas Cage losing his shit and drinking in his underwear, gore, oneliners. King Crimson. Jóhann Jóhannsson. Wow.

"OK Nic, now b4 Bathroom Scene: Recall 1996: U won an Oscar, were RICH & married to Patrica A ...&.. GO"?? DAMN: NC sure didn't ? this 1 in! Bloody but ? vile leering. = More cartoony ??: not normal film AT ALL: ¼ woozy then ¾ NEON drenched nightmare lunacy. I fell into groove & had blast; as cast seem 2've done. 'Plot' = stock revenge but attacked with total intense loco cinematography, ? + acting. ? Lynch+Only God F+Inh Vice+MMax: Unique art-revenge-stoner pic????!