I liked it. Its a horror movie at heart and Yarovesky allows the camera for one more second for brutality to sink in. The kills are surprising all haunting and brutal. The horror scenes always keep you on the edge of your seat and for such a small production budget ($7m I read) the visuals on this are great. The problem is that its is too short to build on anything, it brushes through a lot of concepts and the evil turn is not entirely believable. Still it is a very effective horror movie though it could have been better if they made a longer movie and the makers gave it more time to settle.

Oh what, it's released where you're at?

Yes it's released in Singapore and few other countries this weekend.

I was looking forward to this but was pretty letdown. Despite an interesting twist on the story it's actually pretty generic evil kid fare. They do absolutely nothing with it. It's honestly kind of dull. I'm glad it was pretty gory. At least it had that going for it. It's an alright watch. Just don't expect much.

C/C+

A mediocre execution of a fun, Superman-adjacent concept. It feels so rushed, almost as if it afraid to let any beat linger or any character's psychology be explored for more than a second. The film introduces its protagonists with a shot of a crowded shelf of fertility guides, assuming this is sufficient in lieu of showing them discovering a baby in a crashed spaceship and provocatively deciding to raise it as their own. Within the space of 30 seconds, Brandon/Evil Clark Kent discovers he has superpowers and tests them by inserting his hand into a spinning lawnmower blade. His arc in particular could be so much more compelling; show him torn between nobler and more primal instincts...show the volatility of cosmic superpowers in the hands of an impulsive adolescent (maybe he first uses them to gain popularity at school, but then becomes destructive when the plan goes awry)... Instead he just instantly becomes Damien with a cape. Unfortunately considering Troma acolyte turned Disney-Marvel bigwig James Gunn is involved as a producer and creative overseer, this is less a true horror subversion of superhero tropes than a typical evil-child film with glib superhero window dressing. And this year's The Prodigy is a more satisfying and eerie example of those well-trod Bad Seed/Omen clichés.

I will say the old-school gore is more bracing and extreme than I expected for a mainstream horror film, and the two central murder scenes (one in a diner, the other by the roadside at night) are rather effectively staged. I am not, however, fond of the jokey note the film ends on just so producer Gunn can include his favorite character actor, Michael Rooker, in a cameo.

Yeah this was a pretty big letdown IMO. They could have done so much more with this premise, but instead we just get another generic slasher flick except with a kid with superpowers. I couldn't get invested in any of the characters and my god were Elizabeth Banks and the husband morons. I honestly can't remember the last time I've seen such dumb parents make so many damn illogical decisions. For them to be pumping up the Superman connection so much they barely did anything with it since we never actually see the kid do anything heroic or struggle with becoming evil. He's just an evil, sadistic shit from beginning to end who likes killing people for pretty much no reason at all which doesn't make the character sympathetic at all.

If it wasn't for some of the great gore in the third act I probably would have ended up hating this, but great gore can't save a movie and that's no different here.

C-

Pretty underwhelming. It just chose to go in the horor-gore direction more than anything else, and there's little substance to get invested in. A shame because they had a pretty cool concept at hand to create something of a mystical story, but it never goes there. The acts of evil are pretty cool though, and they made the most out of the budget effects wise. Elizabeth Banks is good as a bizarro Martha Kent (but Dil is right that the parents thoughts and actions towards their alien son make little sense), but are mainly disappointed they didn't make more out of an evil superman kid.

C