Hate Watching with Dan and Tony

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A retirement home horror movie shouldn’t make us laugh this much, but The Home gives us plenty to fight about. One of us thinks it’s a secretly solid horror thriller with a nasty little twist and an ending worth the wait. The other thinks it’s a clunky mess that spends an hour dangling fake clues, then tries to talk its way through an explanation no human would ever say out loud. Either way, we go full spoiler mode and pull the whole thing apart. 

We talk Pete Davidson as Max...

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 Happy Halloween from Dan and Tony! This week on Hate Watching, we’re strapping on our clerical collars, hopping onto a vintage Lambretta scooter, and heading to Spain to tackle 2023’s The Pope’s Exorcist starring Russell Crowe.
Is it a gritty demonic possession thriller, or is it an accidental buddy-cop MCU setup where the Vatican assembles an Exorcist Avengers initiative to fight 200 demons worldwide? Tony argues Crowe’s deadpan quips make it a secret comedy masterpiece, while Dan tries to make sense of broken horror rules, priests who refuse to pray when they...

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A movie can look amazing and still feel weirdly empty, and Super 8 is our favorite kind of argument because it sits right on that line. We are supposed to be doing Halloween movies, but we take a detour into the mind of J.J. Abrams and pick apart why his Spielberg-style nostalgia machine works in flashes, then falls apart the second you ask it to make sense.

We talk through the big comparisons everyone makes: Super 8 versus Stranger Things, and why “kids on bikes” stories only hit when the kids actually seem...

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A quiet Midwest suburb in 1982 gets cut out of the world and dropped into dinosaur times. That pitch should print money. Instead, we spend this conversation picking apart why a great high concept can still collapse when the movie refuses to build clear geography, believable survival behavior, or any meaningful setup and payoff. We keep it spoiler-heavy, because the details are the whole point: the “two-mile perimeter,” the random wandering, the missing sense of destination, and the way tension keeps getting teed up and then ignored. 

We also get into what we th...

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A castle in the Carpathians. Edgar Allan Poe name-drops. Secret doors, earthquakes, torture devices, and a title that promises haunted hills. So why does Elvira’s Haunted Hills feel like it forgot to include a story, or even a consistent joke? We put on our bad movie review hats and hate-watch our way through the 2002 horror comedy, calling out the dead-air pacing, bits that vanish for an hour, and scenes that play like everyone is waiting for their turn instead of actually playing together.

Along the way, we untangle a big mi...

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One tiny detail can reveal everything that is broken about a movie, and for us it is this: the film cannot decide whether it lives in “Raccoon City” or the “City of Raccoon.” From there, we hit the gas and speed run Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021), the franchise reboot that aims for faithful video game adaptation and lands in a weird limbo where the references are loud but the storytelling is missing.

We walk through the orphanage setup, Claire’s return, the hitchhiking chaos, the zombie dog nod, and the sudden...

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M3GAN 2.0 should be an easy win: take a killer doll with attitude, push the horror, sharpen the satire, and give us a few scenes that people quote for years. Instead, we walk straight into a sequel that feels like it’s chasing a totally different movie, swapping dread for generic action beats and then forgetting to make those action beats exciting. We’re Dan and Tony, and we spend this one doing what the film refuses to do: actually look at what makes M3GAN fun, what makes a sequel work, and why...

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A Top Gun homage is a dangerous game, and Mayday plays it on hard mode. We walk through Apple TV’s action comedy and try to figure out why it feels so watchable in the moment, yet so hard to love after the credits roll. The big issue is commitment: the movie wants 1987 Cold War stakes and modern punchline rhythm at the same time, and that split shows up everywhere from the dialogue to the action to the music choices. 

We get specific about casting and character. Kenneth Branagh feels like he...

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A movie titled Disclosure Day practically dares you to imagine the one thing every alien story promises but rarely commits to: the moment the truth drops and the world has to live with it. We sit down as Dan and Tony to unpack why the trailer sells a sharp, high-stakes alien disclosure thriller, while the film itself drifts into vague vibes, strange plot mechanics, and a final message that boils down to one word: “listen.” If you’ve been searching for a Disclosure Day review, or you’re trying to make sense of what the...

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Supergirl left us with a weird feeling we couldn’t shake: not anger in the fun way, not confusion in the mystery way, just a movie that keeps reaching for big themes without doing the work to make them land. So we go scene by scene and ask the questions the film seems allergic to answering. Who is Kara when the story starts, what does she actually want, and what choice forces her to change? When those pieces are missing, every “important” moment feels like it’s happening in a vacuum.

We dig i...

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Tony says it first and he never lets it go: Under the Silver Lake is the most frustrating movie he has ever been forced to sit through. That reaction kicks off a surprisingly deep argument between us about what a movie owes its audience, and what “subversive” even means when the story seems determined to dodge emotion, consequences, and clarity.

We walk through the film’s conspiracy thriller setup in Los Angeles and the endless trail of codes, symbols, and “solve me” breadcrumbs. Dan loves the mood and the idea that the hunt i...

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To prepare for our next episode of Under the Silver Lake, we go back and revisit our discussion on It Follows. Still trash by the way....

A monster that follows you forever is a killer premise. The problem is when the movie can’t decide what its own rules are. We spend this whole chat arguing about *It Follows* like two people trapped in a car with the doors open, because once we start pulling on the thread, everything from the lighting to the pacing to the “timeless” props...

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A movie about endless yellow hallways should be pure nightmare fuel, so why did Backrooms leave us split between genuine admiration and total disbelief? We go scene by scene on what works, what collapses, and why the film’s biggest swing the “evil pirate” third act lands as either bold and terrifying or just plain silly, depending on what you want from horror.

We dig into the Backrooms lore problem: if the creator has a long web series and deep worldbuilding, how much should the movie explain for newcomers? We argue about...

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The Astronaut (2025) spends a long time whispering “something is wrong” and then, in the final minutes, it starts yelling. We go full spoiler mode on this Kate Mara sci fi thriller and try to figure out how a movie can feel like nothing is happening while also setting up one of the most unhinged twist endings we have seen in a while.

We talk craft the whole way through: what suspense is supposed to do, why thrillers need a steady climb of evidence, and how microbudget filmmaking can either feel inventive or l...

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94% on Rotten Tomatoes should feel like a slam dunk. Instead, Obsession (2026) sent us into full detective mode: how does a movie with gorgeous shots, impressive sound design, and strong acting end up feeling so slow, so consequence-free, and so weirdly safe?

We walk through the wish premise (a guy wishes a woman will love him more than anyone in the world), why that setup should be terrifying on a consent and agency level, and why the film keeps slipping away from its own most disturbing idea. We also get specific about...

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A world where you can literally spend your life on a cup of coffee should be terrifying. Instead, In Time (2011) somehow turns one of the best sci-fi dystopia premises of the last two decades into a story that keeps dodging its own consequences, and we could not let that slide.

We walk through Andrew Niccol’s time-currency concept scene by scene, from the moment Justin Timberlake’s character gets a life-changing windfall to the way the movie handles time transfer, surveillance, and the so-called Timekeepers. Along the way we get into the...

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A comedy can survive bad taste, broad jokes, even a ridiculous set piece, but it can’t survive refusing to commit. We kick things off with a very real spiral about money and sustainability, then take a hard left into a bigger fear that’s creeping into entertainment: AI likeness, synthetic commercials, and what happens when consent becomes optional. That thread sets up the core question we keep coming back to: in a world flooded with content, why does so much of it feel weightless?

Then we get into our main even...

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A future where your eyes record everything should make crime harder, truth clearer, and privacy basically extinct. That is the promise of Anon, the 2018 Netflix sci-fi noir starring Clive Owen. We wanted to love the premise. Instead, we end up asking the most brutal question a tech thriller can face: if the movie cannot follow its own rules, why should we believe any of its stakes?

We break down the filmmaking choices that constantly pull us out of the story, especially the stiff first-person POV shots that feel locked to a...

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The wild thing about War Of The Worlds (2005) is how quickly it earns our trust and how loudly it tests it later. We sit down on Heat Watching and walk through Spielberg’s alien invasion thriller beat by beat, starting with that terrifying, razor-tight opening stretch where ordinary people do the only “heroic” thing available: make one decent choice, then make the next one fast. The sound design, the crowd behavior, the dust-covered aftermath, and the sense of public systems failing all feel brutally real, and we talk about why the movie’s 9/11 allegory...

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Someone shows up in Grand Central, claims he’s from a planet called K-Pax, and calmly starts wrecking everyone’s certainty. That setup sounds like classic sci-fi, but the more we talk about the 2001 film K-Pax, the more it turns into a debate about story logic, emotional truth, and what “proof” even means when a person is clearly suffering. One of us watches Prot (Kevin Spacey) and sees a fragile psychological mystery with a trauma core. The other sees a movie that dodges tension, ignores consequences, and stitches together scenes that don’t quite clic...

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A movie can be harmless and still drive you nuts, especially when you can see the better version hiding inside it. We go back to 2001 and rewatch Corky Romano, the Chris Kattan comedy that lives in a lot of people’s nostalgia, then we ask the uncomfortable question: why does it feel like the script keeps forgetting to write the joke?

We walk through the big story beats and the bigger craft problems, from the “one folder of evidence” FBI premise to the endless string of classic gag setups that never escala...

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A spoof can be chaotic and still feel precise, but only if the movie commits. We just watched The Naked Gun reboot and ended up in a full-on argument about what modern parody movies need to work: clean setups, real escalation, and actors who play the moment like it’s life or death.

We dig into non sequitur comedy and why “random” isn’t the same as “surprising.” Tony loves the occasional left-field swing, Dan wants the jokes to build instead of getting tossed away, and we both agree performance is everything...

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Shaq in a DC Comics superhero suit should be an automatic good time, but Steel (1997) somehow lands in the uncanny valley between Saturday afternoon fun and “please take this seriously.” We rewatch it scene by scene and call out the exact moments where the movie could have leaned into camp, tightened the story, or just admitted the premise is ridiculous. Instead, we get tanks creeping through the LA hills, a sonic weapon demo that goes sideways, and cops who treat chasing a seven-foot armored vigilante like a casual commute. 

We dig into...

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A guy wakes up alone on a colony ship, stares at a sleeping stranger for a year, and then makes a choice the movie wants to frame as romance. That’s the moment Passengers (2016) loses us, and we can’t stop talking about why.

We walk through the film’s best ingredients: a slick sci-fi setting, a genuinely scary isolation setup, a talented Jennifer Lawrence, and a premise that could have powered a tense space thriller. Then we dig into the uncomfortable stuff the screenplay keeps sanding down, from consent and confin...

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Tron: Ares made us do something we almost never do: we hit play, heard the soundtrack kick in, and immediately wished we could keep the speakers on while turning the screen off. Dan and Tony break down the new Tron sequel with a very specific question in mind: how can a movie look this polished and still feel like nothing is happening? We get into Jared Leto’s Ares, why the “program becomes human” arc never shows up on screen, and how the movie leans on dialogue to claim growth instead of building it thr...

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Marty Supreme looks like a prestige movie, sounds like three different movies at once, and plays like a sports film that refuses to give you the one thing you came for: a reason to care who wins. We walk through the plot beat by beat, then stop and argue about why it feels so strange when the directing and performances seem competent, yet the story keeps slipping out of our hands.

We get into the loud, anachronistic soundtrack choices (80s and 90s thriller cues crashing into a 1950s table tennis world...

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A movie about condoms, cocaine, and the World Cup should be a layup for a wild studio comedy. Balls Up somehow turns that setup into a string of half-formed bits, missing reactions, and scenes that refuse to escalate. So we did what we do best: hate watched it closely and pulled it apart like a broken engine.

We talk through why the central buddy comedy dynamic never locks in, how Mark Wahlberg looks stranded without a co-star who can elevate the rhythm, and why “straight man” only works when the straight man...

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Dark Crimes wants to be a grim, prestige-leaning true crime thriller, but the further we follow it, the less it holds together. We sit down with our notes and try to track basic things a crime mystery should make clear: who wants what, what the evidence means, and why Jim Carrey’s detective is even making these choices. Instead, we find missing motivation, unclear timelines, and a “reveal” that feels like it changes the vibe more than the story.

The most heated part of our conversation is the adaptation problem. The real c...

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A three-hour sci-fi epic shouldn’t feel like you accidentally hit replay, yet that’s the vibe we can’t shake while breaking down Avatar 3: Fire and Ash. We’re Dan and Tony, and we watch the movies everyone’s already seen, then pull on the threads that the hype cycle ignores: character logic, story structure, and whether the emotional moments are actually earned.

We dig into the big question the movie flirts with and then seems to abandon: what’s the real moral dilemma here? From Jake Sully’s sudden turn toward “m...

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A sequel can be bigger, darker, and meaner, but it still has to make sense. We take on Greenland: Migration as a natural disaster movie and post-apocalyptic survival thriller that keeps sprinting past its own logic: rations that magically last years, bunker life that feels weirdly comfortable, and character deaths that happen so fast they barely register. We’re not asking for a documentary. We’re asking for cause and effect, stakes that stick, and a world that doesn’t collapse the second you think about fuel, medicine, or basic survival behavior.

We...

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An AI judge. A 90-minute timer. One chair that can end you. Mercy sells itself like a sleek future-court thriller, but the more we follow its rules, the less the world holds together and that’s where our review gets viciously fun.

We walk through the movie’s central idea: Judge Maddox runs the Mercy Court as judge, jury, and (indirectly) executioner, while Chris Pratt’s Detective Chris Raven has to prove his innocence with no lawyer and almost no real investigation happening on the system’s side. We dig into the “gui...

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A time portal opens on a soccer field, a future soldier somehow addresses the whole stadium without a mic, and the world immediately agrees to a draft that sends regular people into an alien war with barely any training. That’s the kind of logic we can’t let go, so we put The Tomorrow War (2021) on the table and ask what happened to the “streaming blockbuster” era where huge movies drop on Prime Video and vanish from everyone’s brain by Monday.

We walk through what works and what collapses: the video...

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A reboot can survive a bad budget, cheap CGI, and even a silly premise. What it cannot survive is refusing to be the movie it advertises. We dig into the Anaconda remake and the strange choice to set up jump scares, a Brazil jungle prologue, and a “we’re living the movie we’re making” hook, then drain it all of horror, tension, and consequences the moment the story gets moving.

We break down the biggest screenwriting and structure problems: the movie within a movie never becomes a real, trackable film with rea...

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Three timelines. One supposed “grand message.” And somehow we’re left asking the simplest question a movie can provoke: what was the point? We take on In The Blink Of An Eye, the Hulu sci-fi drama that jumps from a prehistoric survival story to a modern relationship to a far-future space mission, then expects the connections to feel profound just because the music swells.

We walk through what works, what absolutely doesn’t, and why the film’s structure keeps dodging real stakes. We talk about the acorn artifact that looks like a mea...

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A great heist hums like clockwork: clear motives, sharp reversals, and rules the audience can trust. Play Dirty aims for that swagger but keeps slipping on its own tone, ricocheting between hard-boiled grit and broad comedy. We dive into why that mismatch turns big swings—a racetrack robbery, a physics-defying train derailment, a billionaire kidnapping—into set pieces that don’t carry weight, and how characters without real wants leave tension on the table.

We start with Shane Black’s arc from Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Nice Guys to this Ama...

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Knights, Nazis, submarines, and a three-headed robo-dragon walk into a Transformers sequel… and somehow the wildest ingredients still feel weightless. We dig into Transformers: The Last Knight to figure out why the VFX slap while the story slips, how the Arthurian hook gets buried under MacGuffins, and where the franchise lost the character charm that made the first film sing. We compare Shia’s live-wire energy to Mark Wahlberg’s steady center, debate Cogman’s C-3PO-adjacent chaos, and explain why Anthony Hopkins turning exposition into mischief nearly steals the movie.

From the...

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What happens when a movie you once despised suddenly makes you laugh out loud? We dive back into Strange Wilderness and pull apart why some of its dumbest jokes still work—and why the “movie” around them often doesn’t. We set the table with the film’s sketch roots, the Sandler-adjacent cast, and the loose, improv-first approach that leaves scenes searching for an ending. Then we zero in on the bright spots: the nature documentary parodies that deliver clean, quotable lines with a confident, wrong-on-purpose voiceover. When the film sticks to that angle, the...

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What happens when a massive sequel forgets the one thing epics can’t live without—emotion? We take a scalpel to Gladiator 2 and dig into why the arena feels quiet even when the crowd is screaming. From a “last free city” setup that strains belief to a retconned bloodline that muddies legacy, the movie races for scale without building the spine that made the original unforgettable.

We talk through the action that should define character but doesn’t: a rhino fight with no ripple effect, a boat battle staged for fireworks over logic...

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A killer marionette, a sleepy music box, and a town that throws a FazFest for reasons no one can explain—welcome to our breakdown of Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, where the lore expands and the logic contracts. We dig into the 1982 prologue that binds Charlotte’s ghost to the puppet, the early-2000s reset that reopens old wounds, and the sequel’s habit of inventing rules only to ignore them when the plot needs a shortcut.

We walk through the set pieces that actually slap: the ghost-hunter incursion at the original...

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A ghost’s-eye horror should feel like slipping between walls, time, and truth. Instead, Presence hands us a floating wide-angle lens that wanders rooms, hides in closets, and forgets why it’s haunting anyone. We dive straight into why the concept is intriguing and how the execution leaves story, character, and suspense on the cutting room floor.

We unpack the core craft problems: a viewpoint with no rules, cuts to black that read like scene avoidance, and power limits that shift for convenience. If the ghost is the brother, anchor that earl...