Now Watching: Wake Up Dead Man (2025)

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025)
Directed by Rian Johnson
Starring: Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Jeremy Renner, Mila Kunis, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, Thomas Haden Church, and Jeffrey Wright

Synopsis: A young priest is sent to help a charismatic older priest in a small church. A seemingly impossible murder brings in Detective Benoit Blanc to solve the case. Every parishioner is a suspect.

Rating: 8/10

Released on Thanksgiving in 2019, Knives Out felt like a breath of fresh air. This was just before Covid kept us all home and right in the middle of Trump’s first term in office. It was a cozy little blanket that kept us warm from all the trouble brewing in the air. It was a lovely little Agatha Christie-esque mystery with an incredible cast and a terrifically twisty plot. I loved it. I still love it, as I watched it last week and found it to be just as delightful as ever.

Its sequel, Glass Onion, wasn’t quite as good. It felt a little too modern and a little less cozy, but it featured another great cast, and Daniel Craig had slipped perfectly back into his brilliant detective’s slippers.

I’ve been excitedly waiting for the third film ever since. Sadly, because Wake Up Dead Man is a Netflix film, it only got a limited theatrical release. The only theater anywhere near me that was showing it was an old, broken-down theater half an hour away. I really wanted to see this on a great big screen with an audience, but that didn’t happen.

Still, it was worth the wait. We get another great cast and a mostly great, twisty mystery. Josh O’Connor is terrific as a young priest with a dark past but a passion for compassion who comes up against a firebrand more interested in calling out the sinners than loving his flock. There are some interesting reflections on faith and the importance of finding your own calling.

At 142 minutes, it runs a little long, and not everything worked for me. The original is still my favorite, but I hope they keep making these movies for years and years to come.

31 Days of Horror: The Invasion (2007)

the invasion As I noted yesterday, there have been four adaptations of the Body Snatchers story – in 1956, 1978, 1993, and 2007, that’s roughly about once every twenty years. We are just about due for a new one, though the 2007 version did so poorly I expect we won’t get one. It is interesting to think about what new spins they could put on the story.

With smartphones and social media, one could easily make a connection between staring blankly into your phone and being an alien pod person.

The 2007 version entitled The Invasion is the worst adaptation of the four. Body Snatchers wasn’t great but at least it had a point of view. It was trying to say something interesting. The Invasion does nothing new and feels rather generic. It runs like a standard 2000s thriller.

Ok, it does do a few things slightly different from the other adaptations but none of them are particularly interesting. The alien spores are attached to a space shuttle that explodes high in the atmosphere scattering its parts (and with it the aliens) across the globe. In this version, the spores do not turn into pods that transform into clones of individual humans, but when ingested it changes each person in some fundamental biological way.

Nicole Kidman is Carol a psychologist whose patients are some of the first to recognize something strange is going on. People who have been infected by the aliens (and in this version, the invasion is very much like a viral infection) get a sticky substance on their skin when they are first infected but it doesn’t completely take control until they fall into R.E.M sleep.

Carol gets infected and so much of the drama comes from her trying to stay awake. She also has to find her boy because they got separated before she realized what was going on.

For that part, it isn’t a bad little thriller. There are some exciting action-oriented scenes but as a Body Snatcher adaptation, it doesn’t work at all.

The strength of this story comes from the paranoia of finding out the people surrounding you, sometimes the people you love have become aliens. The two most modern adaptations don’t seem to understand that. They substitute cheap thrills for something deeper and more threatening.

With three other adaptations to choose from, this sone is completely skippable.

Casino Royale (2006)

casino royale

One of the fun things about going through my old Cinema Sentries reviews is reading some of my old work. Ok, sometimes it is less fun than it is cringe-inducing, but I still enjoy reading what I wrote many years ago. I wrote a review of the first of Daniel Craig’s James Bond outings back in 2012. Truth be told I have no memory of writing this review. I thought I had only written a review of Octopussy for the Cinema Sentries Bond-a-thon, but I guess I wrote this too.

Weird.

Sometimes reading my old reviews sends me back to when I wrote them, but not this. It is literally completely lost to my mind. But hey, you can read it now too, if you like. Just click here.