Three Films Make A Post: He's every parents' worst nightmare.

Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare (2025): For once, this is an entry in the typically boring PublicDomainsploitation canon I’d actually watch a second time instead of rueing the moment I pressed play. It’s still a movie that turns a public domain children’s story into a mid 2020s slasher, but it does so with a degree of competence, with decent acting, an actual script and direction – responsible here is British low budget regular Scott Chambers – that does understand the rules of straightforward horror films.

Even the characterisation is not without interest this time around, and the film’s interpretation of Peter Pan as a delusional drug user feels less tacky in practice than it sounds. The whole thing is an actually well-made low budget slasher, daring to follow through on some of its ideas.

Hotspring Sharkattack aka Hot Spring Shark Attack (2024): I went into Morihito Inoues sharksploitation film expecting a lot of sleaze and a bit of gore. What I actually got was very little sleaze but an absurdist and ambitious sharksploitation epic that lovingly mocks everything from urban development to amnesiac protagonists. The film’s reason for being is to turn everything shark movie up to eleven, make Sharknado look like a sensible little tale, and throw all kinds of genre elements and clichés on-screen with wild abandon, yet also a curious sense of control. This film knows where it is going: the dream underworld of bad CGI and hand puppet shark bites Joseph Campbell wrote about in his little-read sequel “The Hero’s Journey II: Sharks, so many sharks”.

Cult aka Sekte (2019): But let’s end on a comparative downer note with another amnesiac protagonist finding herself tucked away in an isolated house full of weirdoes who will turn out to be a Satanic cult. Director William Chandra manages a couple of atmospheric scenes here – I was particularly impressed by the one in which protagonist Lia (Asmara Abigail) finds the cult’s corpse depository – but for much of the running time, the film’s in the business of presenting as deeply mysterious a mystery its own damn title already reveals. So yes and alas, this is the kind of movie that climaxes on an endless series of flashback-filled “reveals” that bring every bit of the momentum the film might have developed before to a screeching halt with an astonishing amount of stupid ideas.