MCU Gen: Fic, fanart & recs

This is it. I have caught up with the entire backlog. Except the Oasis doc. Damn it.

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Night of the Comet (1984). Two teen sisters in LA navigate a strange, empty new world after a passing comet obliterates almost the entire population of the earth.

Going in, I had no idea what this was except that it was an 80s horror movie starring female characters. I was quite surprised that the titular night of the comet only takes up maybe the first ten minutes of the movie, and I was also surprised the night ended with a mass extinction event! Did not expect this random movie to go that hard!

What this actually is about is the aftermath as sisters Reggie and Sam look for signs of life, go shopping, fight off scary assholes and zombies (two separate groups), and join forces with a nice truck driver named Hector. Also there are some surviving scientists trying to invent a serum to reverse the lingering effects of the comet.

I really enjoyed having no idea where this was going at any point. I liked Hector a lot, and the fact that he’s Hispanic feels, idk, notable as a lead in a movie like this? There’s also a whole conversation between the sisters explicitly about whether he’s gay, which again feels kind of wild in a movie this old, although that may be my ignorance talking. I loved the sisters’ secret backstory of being raised by a marine father who gave them snobby opinions about automatic rifles. Apparently the younger sister was inspiration for Buffy Summers, so I have to love this movie for that alone. And I felt like it really stuck the landing emotionally and tonally.

Overall, definitely a time! I'm not mad I had it!

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Never After Dark (2026). A young woman who lives in her car and travels as a medium helping dead spirits to move on, with only the spirit of her dead sister for company, comes up against a new and more powerful spirit haunting an isolated hotel.

This is a Japanese-language movie by American director Dave Boyle, and it's my favorite ghost story movie that I have seen in quite a long time. Airi’s blasé approach to dealing with the dead is refreshing and also tragic, because it’s clear how isolated she is. “I’m more comfortable with the dead than the living,” she says at one point. “I never know what the living want.” Her relationship with her dead sister is the heart of the film, and the burden of guilt Airi bears over that death reminds me a bit of the arc of Adam Scott’s character in Hokum, except this feels so much more real and less manufactured to me. I found the ending really effective.

This movie also has fantastic vibes and great atmosphere. It's a very autumnal-feeling movie, great for Halloween season. The isolated one-time hotel turned house is an incredible set piece, especially the haunted upper hallway. If your favorite thing about Damon McCarthy’s movie Oddity was the house, then this movie is for you! I also enjoyed the partial genre switch partway through from strictly a supernatural haunting story to one incorporating other horror elements.

I will say this has a lot of teeth horror. I definitely was covering my eyes in the theater for a few moments. Even the sounds were a bit much.

In conclusion, I loved this. One of my favorite horror movies of the year, and I gave it a 4.5 on Letterboxd. If this sounds like your jam at all, definitely check it out—in the theater, if you can, although I think it’s probably almost gone.

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Fresh Meat (2026). An anthology film produced by the creators of the YouTube horror channel Dead Meat, featuring 13 short films and a wraparound segment written and directed by Dead Meat founder James A. Janisse.

I watched trailers/promos for the 30 finalists earlier this fall and voted on my favorites, so I was very excited to see this in the theater and find out what got through! The segments are a bit hit and miss, like all anthology films, but I think the segments are shorter than in V/H/S, for example, so there are more of them and you get wider variety. There are 1.5 animated segments, for example, and the one that’s half-animated is also in Japanese, which is neat!

I would say there were not any that worked absolutely 100% for me. However, my top favorites were:
• Psychopomp, about a guy at a carnivale offering "ten minutes of adrenaline" on a bus called the Demon Bus. Great makeup, I liked the conceit, and the lead actress was great. This is the one I voted for as my favorite.
• What's in the Bag, a faux TV segment about a woman showing what's in her bag. LOVED the actress and the conceit, it looked great, but I really needed a few lines to explain wtf happens in the second half.
• Jinx, about a married couple who finish each other's sentences and then find they're more connected than ever. Frankly did more with the theme in five mins than Together last year did in an hour and a half, and the ending really elevated the whole thing.

The wraparound segment stars James as a butcher whose daughter feeds meat to the freezer in the back, which shows her stories (the shorts) in exchange. I'm not sure I'm persuaded by James as an actor, but maybe I'm just too used to looking at his face. The short LOOKS great, though: great set design, great lighting, everything looked so delightfully grimy. Really good atmosphere. And the child actor is fantastic.

This showed one night only, so not on the level of Markiplier and Iron Lung earlier this year, but it made $288k in 564 theaters with no marketing budget, so hey, not bad! And if you're in Canada, I think it's showing tomorrow instead, so you still have a chance to check it out.

Primetime (2026). Robert Pattinson stars as Chris Hansen, one-time host of NBC show To Catch a Predator, which catfished potential child predators.

Apparently Hansen was a bit of a meme on the late-00s internet, but I missed that entirely and had no idea who he was when the trailers for this started coming out. Even the name of the show was only distantly familiar. And based on that movie summary, I was not expecting to bother with it. Child predators: not a fun movie topic! I was eventually persuaded by reviews and one of the later trailers, which suggested that this was going to be Pattinson at his unhinged best.

Friends, if what you want is Pattinson being a slimy weirdo, this is absolutely the movie for you. He is the worst in the best way, and this is easily my favorite role of his since at least The Lighthouse, or maybe at all. This movie is also not all that interested in straightforward narration of facts and in particular is not interested in seriously exploring child sexual assault. This is a character study not even of Chris Hansen but an impressionistic exaggeration(?) of him. According to director Lance Oppenheim, the portrayal was mostly inspired by an unhinged Cameo video Hansen did. (Oppenheim also co-directed the new Elizabeth Holmes documentary that comes out this weekend, which if anything looks even more unhinged than Primetime.)

The movie follows Hansen through the brief interval between when his show got promoted to a slot opposite LOST and when a botched sting orchestrated by the show resulted in a district attorney committing suicide. Hansen's foil is sweet naive wannabe actor Dan (Skyler Gisondo, recently Jimmy Olson in last year's Superman movie), who's hired as a "decoy" pretending to be a minor in order to lure targets into the house where all the cameras are. I think Dan is supposed to be 23 playing a kid as young as 14, depending on the situation, and meanwhile the RL actor is 30, which is just one more thing about the movie that feels offkilter. Hansen, who generally has the people skills and empathy of a rock, intermittently sets himself to re-convince Dan of the heroic work he's doing in a way that makes it feel like he's talking to himself. Their interplay is one of the best parts of the movie. I also really enjoyed Hansen's producer, played by Merritt Wever, who has her moments of frustration but ultimately concludes that she's as happy chasing scandal and sensationalism as he is.

I would say this movie overall is not quite as wild as it could have been, given some of the hype I heard. It's still overally pretty conventional, so don't expect anything truly experimental. In any case, I had a good time.

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The Incomer (2026). Domnhall Gleason stars as Daniel, an employee of the Scottish Council sent to a remote island in the Hebrides to inform the island's two adult sibling inhabitants that they're being evicted.

This is a comedy that derives its humor mostly from the three mains, who are all misfits in their own ways. The siblings have grown up with a family mythology instilled in them by their father, so they have a vicious fear of mainlanders and are convinced that a member of other generation must sacrifice themself to the sea to allow the family to continue to live there. Maybe it's even true, since the sister has frequent conversations with a humanoid fish creature who hangs out in a lagoon. Meanwhile, Daniel is a regular introverted nerd who loves fantasy stuff and is too shy to talk to anyone at the office. After he convinces the siblings to not tie him up anymore and let him sleep in the house, they cautiously become friends, only for things to be complicated when the Council sends various people to come rescue him.

I would say in general it's a fairly warmhearted movie. Daniel's efforts to convince the siblings to leave become progressively more genuine as the movie progresses, and the ending is good. I laughed at parts of it. I really liked Gayle Rankin as the sister and would absolutely watch her in more things. I also enjoyed the whole movie as an exercise in interpreting Scottish accents. There was only maybe one segment where I lost the conversational thread entirely, so I was proud of myself.

On the other hand, I really did not enjoy some of the broader humor. The brother is portrayed as an idiot manchild who variously sexually harasses Daniel, tries to strangle him for reasons, and tries to "give himself to the sea" as his father did before him. All this is just more awkward given that he is gay! The second mainlander to show up is also just too silly to be fun.

In conclusion, results: mixed.