What’s It About

Set in Metropia, a retro-futuristic city as imagined from the perspective of 1939, private eye Raymond Gunn is hired to help world-famous multimedia singer Venus Nova, whose career and life are threatened amid a web of murder and aliens.

WHAT’S IT ABOUT

An uptight real estate climber makes a deal with a sharp mailroom clerk: help him win over a stunning club promoter, and he’ll help the clerk get a shot at the executive program.

WHY IT’S GONE

Look at this cast: Joseph C. Phillips, Tommy Davidson in his first movie, Halle Berry in her first co-starring role, and Samuel L. Jackson in a small part. Kevin Hooks directed, music mogul Andre Harrell produced, and LL Cool J recorded the title song. Warner Bros. released it in November 1991, and it made about $7.7 million. Warner put out a DVD in 2007, and a review at the time called it a throwaway release, even though the picture looked better than expected. That disc is the last stop. There has never been a Blu-ray. Think about that for a second. Halle Berry went on to become the first Black woman to win the Oscar for Best Actress, and Samuel L. Jackson became one of the biggest box office names in history. Normally, a studio would rush to repackage an early film with stars like that. Instead, this one is left alone. It isn’t a great movie, but it is a snapshot of Black professional life, nightlife, and music in 1991, and the cast alone makes it worth saving. When a studio won’t even cash in on its own stars, it tells you how little it thinks of the audience that watched them first.

WHAT’S IT ABOUT

A brainy honor student and a tough troublemaker get their school records switched, and each one has to survive living the other’s life.

WHY IT’S GONE

Between House Party 2 and House Party 3, Kid ‘n Play made this high school spin on The Prince and the Pauper for Warner Bros. Karyn Parsons, Doug E. Doug, Meshach Taylor, and Loretta Devine all show up. It is light and silly, and it never pretended to be anything else. For almost 20 years, Class Act did not exist on disc at all. It finally arrived in May 2010 through the Warner Archive, which back then meant a made-to-order DVD-R. Later it got paired with B.A.P.S. on a budget double-feature DVD. That is the whole history. No Blu-ray, no clean-up, no extras. Here is the part that stings: in January 2026, the original House Party joined the Criterion Collection on Blu-ray. Same two stars, same studio era, same audience, and one film is now treated like a landmark while the other is still sitting in a bargain bin. Fans keep listing it in the comment sections of Warner Archive’s release announcements next to other missing titles, and Warner keeps announcing other movies. If House Party matters, then the rest of Kid ‘n Play’s run deserves a shelf too.

What’s It About

After growing sick of living in Cinderella’s shadow, stepsister Lilith (Ali Wong) steals the Fairy Godmother (Bette Midler)’s magic wand and hijacks the Royal Ball alongside her sister Margot (Stephanie Hsu). The plan backfires, accidentally turning Margot into a frog and allowing a villainous schemer named Priscilla (Nikki Glaser) to seize control of the throne and doom the kingdom. To fix the broken story and save her sister, Lilith is forced to team up with Cinderella (Amanda Seyfried), a biker troll named Gef (Young Mazino), and other unconventional allies.

What’s It About

The movie functions as a capstone and crossover event, pulling together iconic classic monster archetypes and characters from Fessenden’s earlier indie horror films. The story kicks off in the small Upstate New York town of Talbot Falls. A young visiting writer and researcher named Cassandra (Laëtitia Hollard) publishes a local newspaper and online article asking, “Are There Monsters Outside my Window?” Her exposé drags hidden local secrets, generational guilt, and the concealed monsters out into the open, triggering a chaotic clash between the creatures, vengeful cops, local bigots, and a community trapped in its own unresolved traumas.

What’s It About

The story is set inside a high-rise biotech facility hosting a major conference. A disgruntled scientist releases a bioengineered mold-based contagion—described as an intentional act of terrorism—that quickly mutates and infects people into a violent, rapidly transforming horde with a connected hive-mind intelligence. As authorities lock down and seal off the building to contain the disaster, Professor Se-jeong and a small group of trapped survivors must fight their way through a vertical nightmare while dealing with fracturing human dynamics.

MOVIESinMO REVIEW

Let me just say this about Yeon Sang-ho: I was almost convinced he was done playing around with zombies. Back in 2016, he rolled out the zombie movie Train to Busan and turned everything upside down. Then came Seoul Station, which worked as a prequel in animation and had the grossness factor sorted out perfectly. I want to skip Peninsula cause I don’t want to spend too much time talking about the movie that everybody considers a flub, but I’d also say that people rightfully believed that Yeon had only one classic in him. But beyond everything else, it seems that zombies aren’t the kind of things that are easy to kill. With Colony, Yeon puts himself right back on the map, which is something I want to highlight for full clarity. Oddly enough, even the road to the movie was similar. Colony got premiered at the 79th Cannes Film Festival on May 15, 2026, in the exact segment of the Midnight Screenings where Train to Busan had its premiere ten years before. What makes Colony unique? Most zombie movies ignore the explanation behind the disease. One is bitten, then everyone flees, and that’s the extent of the scientific explanation! Colony does the opposite in that the disease is a lab-altered slime mold and has created a hive mind. All infected creatures are connected with one another and share everything they experience like one big brain in several human bodies. Watching them twitch and jerk in sync while they pass information back and forth is one of the creepiest things I’ve seen on a screen all year. That’s no accident. Yeon brought back choreographer Jeon Young, who shaped the movement in Train to Busan, Peninsula, and Hellbound, and teamed him with dancers Song Seung-wook, Lim Hee-jong, and Jung Eui-young. You can feel their fingerprints everywhere. The infected crawl, flip, and fold their joints in directions no body should bend. Real dancers and contortionists making your skin crawl hits way harder than any computer effect ever could. The story kicks off with a phone call. Biologist Seo Young-cheol, played by Koo Kyo-hwan, rings the police and basically confesses before he commits the crime. He tells them he used to work for a biotech company called Chains Bio and that today, at the Doongwoori Building, he plans to run an “experiment.” He flat-out calls it a bioterror attack and claims he already shot the only vaccine into his own veins. On the other hand, the man has a point. Young-cheol cracked the research on collective intelligence, a way for living things to heal at crazy speed, as long as they share one mind and follow one leader. Chains Bio fired him, and now CEO Kang Woo-chul stands on a stage in that same building, soaking up the credit. He plays a video of a lab mouse healing a busted foot after one green shot, then brags that this science will make society run smoother because people will finally stop arguing. Remember that line. It comes back to haunt everybody. Sitting in that audience is Kwon Se-jeong, played by Jun Ji-hyun. She’s a biotech professor that got fired because she refused to keep quiet about injustice, and she showed up hoping this conference turns into new work. Her ex-husband, Han Gyu-seong (Go Soo), set up the opportunity, and their back-and-forth ranks as my favorite small thing in the movie. He’s remarried to a biotechnologist named Gong Seol-hee (Shin Hyun-been), yet he still nags Se-jeong about her career. She fires back by asking whether his wife knows he looks after his ex like this, and he shrugs that his wife isn’t as sensitive as she is. It’s petty, it’s funny, and it makes them feel like real people before the building turns into a slaughterhouse. And so it starts. Young-cheol corners the CEO in a private room, and after the boss calls him a freak, Young-cheol very calmly explains that this isn’t the end of humanity but a birth. A new kind of people with perfect communication. Then he jabs a green needle into the man’s neck. Woo-chul screams, throws up something that looks like spoiled milk, and goes full animal, biting everyone in reach and charging on all fours. Suddenly that phone call makes sense. Young-cheol wanted a crowd outside. More bodies to infect. Trapped in the mall section of the building is our crew: Se-jeong, Gyu-seong, security guard Choi Hyun-seok (Ji Chang-wook), his older sister Choi Hyun-hee (Kim Shin-rok), counterterrorism squad leader Lee Bong-seok, and So-eun, a quiet high schooler who gets bullied at school. I want to give Hyun-hee her flowers. She uses a wheelchair and works in IT, and a lazier movie would treat her like luggage the others drag along. Yeon makes her the group’s eyes and ears instead, putting her skills to work when it counts, and Kim Shin-rok gives that role real weight. Just don’t get too attached to anybody. Yeon will take your favorite out mid-sentence, and he hasn’t lost that habit. Se-jeong becomes the hero simply by being the smartest person in the room. She saw how the infected get information the same kind of way that ants do, so she starts messing up their signal with strong smells and other tricks that jam the download. In the beginning, the swarm attacks mannequins, posters, and cardboard cutouts, anything shaped like a person. Then they realize those aren’t real, snap their heads in that awful way, and every last one of them learns the lesson at once. Those pauses are the only moments you get to breathe. In the command post, it seems people are trying to figure out whether to save someone whose case can still be cured or just bomb the building and forget about it because rescue teams flat-out refuse to go inside. To be honest, this seems a bit too outrageous. No matter how crazy the situation might seem in our normal life, established protocols become non-existent when the end is near. Yeon manages to convey the layout of the building meticulously, from the basement to the roof, so we are constantly aware of where everyone is and how much distance they have to cover. Thus, the geography of the setting raises the stakes. No need to look for hidden messages. The idea of collective intelligence sounds fancy, but it simply means that many people stop thinking for themselves and just repeat what their leader says. That’s the real horror that really resonates with the viewers. This is why Colony is definitely among the best zombie films of the year. Yeon Sang-ho is back on track.

OUR RATING – A COLLECTIVE 8

What’s It About

Set in a multi-occupancy Los Angeles apartment building called Paradiso Palms (filmed in Portugal), the story follows a catastrophic outbreak of venomous, fast-multiplying spiders. When the building is placed under a strict police-mandated quarantine and threatened with gassing, the residents—ranging from influencers and finance workers to an arachnology professor—must fight to survive. Serena (Matilda Lutz), the building’s pragmatic live-in manager and aspiring musician, uses her deep knowledge of the complex to guide the survivors while confronting her own arachnophobia.

MOVIESinMO REVIEW

Crawlers is too dumb to love. And I don’t mean dumb in that so bad it’s good way. I mean dumb as in “Why am I still watching this when I know I could be doing something else” way. That hurts, because the setup is free money. If spiders bother you even a little, if you’ve ever jumped off the couch because something brushed your ankle, then the idea of being locked inside an apartment building crawling with them should have you sweating through your shirt. A horror movie barely has to try with an idea like that. Director Ángel Gómez Hernández (Don’t Listen) and writer Jayson Rothwell know exactly which button they’re pushing, and they push it. Then they push it again. Then one more time, just in case you missed it. Matilda Lutz plays Serena, a young woman who dreams of making it as a singer but pays the bills as the live-in manager of the Paradiso Palms, a run-down Los Angeles building where the pipes leak and the tenants act brand new. Her landlord, Mr. Rossmore (William Miller), is a straight-up slumlord who jacks up the rent and makes Serena deliver the bad news herself. Classic. Things go sideways when a lonely professor named George (Chris Rogers) turns up dead in his unit. Health officials led by Dr. Woodward (Gary Anthony Stennette) roll in, bag the body, and slap the whole building under quarantine with everybody still inside. The tenants figure it’s some COVID-type situation. Nah. It’s spiders. Thousands of them, poisonous and multiplying by the minute, turning Paradiso Palms into one giant nest while the authorities cut the phones and internet and throw a bug tent over the roof. Serena’s new job is getting her stubborn neighbors to quit arguing long enough to stay alive. For about thirty minutes, I was with it. The building feels tight and sweaty, the tenants are loud and messy, and the first real gross-out moment, a dead man’s shoulder wound oozing nasty goo with tiny legs paddling around in it, had me going, “Ohhh, okay, we doing that.” The spider effects deserve credit, too. Whether they’re puppets or computer-made, those critters look real enough to make your skin crawl. That part works. The issue lies in the overwhelming surroundings. It seems like Hernández shot the film right after dropping from a music video and failing to adjust. The camera tilts, spins, and parks in impossible spots; we get a spider’s-eye view from inside a bag of chips and an open mouth of a sleeper! Seriously? Arachnophobia did that back in 1990, and here we are recycling it! Well, the copycatting doesn’t stop here! Serena is using a glue gun that is basically the Aliens pulse rifle and running from some flashing countdown. Everything has been done already! Nothing new to offer! The most disappointing part, however, is the fear exhibited by the movie itself. Hernández builds scenes that promise that some terrible thing will happen to someone soon but cuts it out. The good stuff happens either in the dark or off-screen. It’s just strange to be shy about the gore in such a grotesque movie! The people don’t help. Rothwell’s script barely hands these tenants a personality, much less a reason to care about them. Bernice (Isabella Egizi) is a lawyer with enough attitude to disrespect Serena but somehow not enough money to live anywhere nicer. Lance (Sam Lucas Smith) is a tech guy with a homemade AI girlfriend and a pet snake. Bradley (Gregg Sulkin) is a pierced-up content creator whose whole introduction is blasting paintballs at a mural for his livestream. That’s it. That’s the character. So when the spiders finally come for him, I didn’t cheer, and I didn’t flinch. I just sat there. Serena’s real circle is smaller. There’s Paul (Paul S. Tracey), a new dad; Molly (Andrea Scott Méndez), a lonely little girl whose mother is never around; and Lady Lash (Melina Matthews), the British dominatrix down the hall. Lady Lash is the best thing in this movie by a mile. She’s unbothered, she’s hilarious, she calls the whole end of the world a “three martini event,” and she deserves her own spinoff. Lutz holds her own, too, making Serena feel like a real person carrying real grief, which is more than the script earned. Even the sticker on her guitar that reads “Music will save you!” pays off later in a way that’s corny but still got a chuckle out of me. Despite this, the primary problem lies in tone. Crawlers cannot choose between being a humorous scenario such as Eight Legged Freaks or a bleak survival thriller, which would have been a satisfactory option either way; however, the fact that it switches from one to the other leaves it feeling wrong. The mean parts feel meaner through juxtaposing them with cute ones, and the cute parts feel cheesy because of the mean ones. The film hints at the fears in the pandemic and the ideas of distrust in the government and forgets all about them once the new swarm arrives. One scene shows what this could have been. A tenant, half-asleep, listens to self-help messages like “I am safe, I am protected” while a spider inches toward their open mouth, you saw the trailer. It’s tense, funny, and perfect. Then just like that, they scew up what could have been one of the best scenes in the movie. That’s Crawlers in a nutshell: it finds something good and immediately fumbles it. By the last act, the swarms stop being scary. When you’ve got a million digital spiders crawling everywhere, the kills lose their umph, so when everybody starts dying almost the same way, the deaths become tiresome. Sure, there’s a spider shoving out an eyeball and exiting through a skull, and another one flat-out holding a baby hostage, which is wild. But those moments feel like happy accidents instead of the standard. Crawlers keeps hanging on that edge of being that awesome B-movie people quote for years, then chickens out every single time. It’ll have you checking the corners of your bedroom tonight. It won’t have you thinking about it tomorrow morning.

OUR RATING – A WEBLESS 4

What’s It About

When Santa Claus’s magic red bag is stolen by a rogue, disgruntled elf with a grudge, Christmas is placed in immediate jeopardy. Unable to perform illicit or “naughty” tasks himself, Santa recruits Vance, a skilled thief from his Naughty List, to help recover the bag. Vance assembles a crew of misfits to pull off an unexpected holiday heist just in time for Christmas

WHAT’S IT ABOUT

A film student follows the rap group N.W.H. through feuds, scandals, a breakup, and a comeback in this mock documentary.

What’s It About

Set in 1974 New York City, a struggling and unknown actor named Sylvester Stallone writes the Rocky screenplay in just three and a half days after being inspired by the Muhammad Ali versus Chuck Wepner fight. Despite major studio offers to buy the script, Stallone refuses to sell unless he is allowed to play the lead role himself, leading producers to slash the budget and take a massive Hollywood gamble.