Top Tens – Film: Top 10 Horror Films (Special Mention) (19) Weapons

Film promotional art (fair use)

 

 

(19) WEAPONS (2025)

 

“This is a true story that happened in my town. A lot of people die in a lot of really weird ways in this story, but you’re not gonna find it in the news. So this one Wednesday is like a normal day for the whole school, but today was different. Every other class had all their kids, but Mrs. Gandy’s room was totally empty. And do you know why? Because the night before, at 2:17 in the morning, every kid woke up, got out of bed, walked downstairs, and into the dark. And they never came back.”

2025 was a hit year for horror – Sinners, 28 Years Later, and Weapons – as the only films that lured me to the cinema (rather than streaming) were horror.

Weapons is a “horror mystery film with elements of black comedy”, in a non-linear narrative around the premise set up by the opening narration, albeit I had not expected the black comedy – the climactic scene might well have had the Benny Hill theme (Yakety Sax) playing over it.

Of course, that premise only works because the police and authorities in the Pennsylvania town of Maybrook are blind, incompetent or both – but who cares? The film “has achieved something remarkable here, crafting a cruel and twisted bedtime story of the sort the Brothers Grimm might have spun”.

 

RATING:

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

Top Tens – Fantasy & SF: Top 10 Books (Special Mention: Classic) (14) Oscar Wilde – The Picture of Dorian Gray

Cover 2021 paperback edition using promotional art from the 2009 film Dorian Gray

 

 

(14) OSCAR WILDE –

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1890)

 

Essentially Jekyll and Hyde but with Hyde in a portrait rather than a serum – the titular character remains young and handsome while his magical portrait ages and shows all the signs of his corruption and depravity. And we all know what that ‘corruption and depravity’ was, don’t we, Oscar?  Which makes it all seem somewhat coy and quaint today – so that the modern reader might want to imagine something more evil than gallivanting around gay London.

In fairness, Dorian does murder his friend and the painter of the portrait, before blackmailing another friend into destroying the body. (He is also responsible for other deaths, but more through callousness and melodrama). Ultimately, he stabs the portrait, fatally transposing the wound to himself while swapping their appearances (so that the portrait is now young and innocent while he is aged and corrupt).

Dorian woefully wasted his supervillain potential – one of the few good adaptations in the film of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where he is practically invulnerable, as any injury is transferred to his portrait.

 

 

RATING:

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)