All through October, I’ll be posting reviews of the best of the best films in the horror genre released since October 1, 2023, through September 30, 2024. As an added bonus, I’ll be adding a secondary review that may be somewhat related to the main review or slightly missed the countdown by inches. Follow along the countdown every day in October. Feel free to agree, disagree, or better yet, give me your own picks for your favorite horror movies of the year. Happy Halloween!

#23 – ARCADIAN (2024)
Released on April 12, 2024, and is streaming on Shudder from RLJE Films!
Directed by Benjamin Brewer.
Written by Mike Nilon.
Trailer: https://youtu.be/HNARuSROxbM
Nicholas Cage plays Paul, who escapes a crumbling city in the opening moments of ARCADIAN, only to find two baby boys alone and crying in an abandoned home. Cut to fifteen years later and the trio have been living a quiet life in the countryside by day. But by night, They barricade the doors and windows against a horde of vicious and clever monsters who seem to be learning from their mistakes and slowly chipping away at the human’s defenses. IT’s Jaeden Martell plays Joseph, the smarter of the two boys who is attempting to understand the monsters that attack every night. Joseph’s brother Thomas (played by Netflix’s Will Robinson in LOST IN SPACE, Maxwell Jenkins) is more impulsive and is more interested in learning more about the young lass from the next farm over named Charlotte (Sadie Soverall). Thomas takes daily trips to the neighboring property to see Charlotte, but on his way back, Thomas falls in a hole in the woods, tossing a wrench in the tightly supervised mechanics of Paul’s rules.

Arcadian means a person who lives a simple quiet life, and I guess that applies in this derivative, yet powerful and downright terrifying monster movie. Yes, this is basically A QUIET PLACE with Nicholas Cage, but if you add Cage to anything, no matter what it is, it’s guaranteed that it is going to be different. Just Cage’s presence ensures that something different is going to happen, be it something he says or simply something he does. In ARCADIAN, Cage plays the father of the two boys pretty straight. He protective over his two sons and very strict about the rules that have kept this three-part family intact for fifteen years. And he’s willing to die to keep it that way. While there is a lot of batshit craziness, Cage is surprisingly even-keel for the most part here—though he does get a chance to unleash some righteous fury throughout the story.

ARCADIAN follows the template of A QUIET PLACE with the narrative taking the viewer through a typical day of the family, establishing what it takes to survive in this horrifying world, and then showing how that system falls apart. There is no clear explanation as to why the world fell apart. The monsters showed up one night and these people are simply surviving. So, you don’t get a big budget backstory on the origin of this problem. ARCADIAN also deviates from A QUIET PLACE in that it focuses on the story of two very different brothers growing up in extreme circumstances. One works hard to understand and come up with solutions to the problems. The other dealing with more emotional and more natural feelings of kinship and striking out on his own. The film handles this extreme difference between the brothers in a sophisticated way, with Joseph trying to examine the monsters outside, their behavior, and how to best take them on and Thomas more interested in leaving the nest and starting a relationship with the girl next door. This difference in mindset of course causes some rich conflict along the way and both actors portray that conflict very well.

But the biggest difference between ARCADIAN and A QUIET PLACE are the monsters outside. I always found the monsters of A QUIET PLACE to be rather confusing looking. They are spindly, fast moving, overly complex, and not really iconic looking. Basically, they are Xenomorphs who hunt through sound without the acid blood. While the monsters in ARCADIAN have a similar shape to the creatures in A QUIET PLACE, there are some distinct differences that make them so much more nightmarish. First of which is that they are smart. Learning from their mistakes and adapting new strategies to get their prey. But the second difference is the way these monsters attack. The monsters in ARCADIAN are all mouth. Their heads split apart and their jaws chomp together rapidly as they approach their prey. The filmmakers stated that they based this off of the way a shoehorned bird clops his bill together to scare its prey. The monster is something out of the worst of nightmares with unusual sights and sounds and odd parts put together that really shouldn’t be there. The filmmakers have also released designs to show that the original concept of these creatures were based on the Disney character Goofy, which terrified the director as a kid. Now, it’s not a direct translation, as the creatures are covered with dirt, mud, goo, bits of fur, and living cockroaches for some reason, but you can see the Goofy-esque influences in the face. There are also a few features left discovered that blew me away as well involving the monsters acting as a unit. All in all, if anything, ARCADIAN delivers on a truly terrifying monster that I would love to see more of. These mad monsters are truly cool.
While similar to other end of the world monster flicks, the potency of a truly unique monster, the brother angle, and of course the Nicholas Cage factor gives ARCADIAN enough to make it stand out and on its two feet. I don’t know if this film was meant to be franchisable, but I sure would love to see where this story goes next. And more of those truly strange monsters, please!

Plus – A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE (2024)
Released on June 26, 2024, and is streaming on Paramount Plus from Paramount Pictures!
Directed by Michael Sarnoski.
Written by Michael Sarnoski, John Krasinski, Bryan Woods, Scott Beck.
Trailer: https://youtu.be/YPY7J-flzE8
So a while back, I lost my cat. Lucy was a unique cat. We all think our own cat is unique and different from all others. But she was amazing and more importantly, mine and it was a devastating loss for me. It took a good five months for me to get over the loss enough to even think about getting a new one, but eventually I did. I got two in fact, because, why not? And since then, it’s been wonderful seeing these two kittens named Poppy and Willow grow, experience everything through new and inquisitive eyes, and go through that sometimes-arduous task of parenting a kitten again. It’s something I almost forgot about. The high-energy, late-night racing, knocking shit over, constantly pooping and meowing, and of course the development of the aloof and obstinate attitude that cats are best known for. It’s a lot. But still, it is something I was prepared for since I’ve had at least one cat in my life for almost the entirety of it. Newly in theaters, A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE has a cat in it, which means the whole time, I was wondering where the cat was and if it was okay during all of the carnage. So, let’s talk about that and maybe eventually get to a review of the darn thing.

Lupita Nyong’o plays Samira, a woman in hospice, dying of cancer and dependent on meds to deal with the constant pain. With her support animal Frodo (played by two cats named Nico and Schnitzel…love that word, schnitzel), Samira agrees to go with a group at the hospice to the city lead by nurse Reuben (played by HEREDITARY and MY PAL DAHMER’s Alex Wolff). But this trip to the city is interrupted when the military begins showing up in the background and the alarms go off. The sky is filled with meteors crashing into the city and on those meteors are the creatures we became familiar with in the first two A QUIET PLACE movies. But this time it’s different as it is the initial onset where no one knows anything about what’s going on. It’s just the world falling apart in real time.

Sort of…

Now, I’ll get to the cat in a minute. But this leads me to the biggest crime A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE commits. Samira is the lead protagonist with which we experience this entire calamity through. And while the initial seconds occur through her eyes, she is quickly knocked the fuck out and then she wakes up with a group of survivors hunkered down in a theater. All of them are silent and scared. So, basically, they all seem to instinctively know to be quiet so as not to alert the monsters outside. My question is, while yes, only a few minutes have passed, it seems that it doesn’t matter whether this is Day One or One Year Later when the first movie takes place, all of the knowledge that you need to be silent to survive is learned immediately. I get it. Staying quiet is instinctive, but I feel that the one thing separating this movie, and the first one should have been how we managed to make the rules that the Abbot family from the first film were following. But instead, this immediately common knowledge. Yes, later in the film, the military are announcing that the masses need to be quiet to survive. But in the initial moments, the fact that the monsters are drawn by sound and will tear apart anything that makes a noise is glossed over during the time our eyes and ears to the movie aka Samira, is knocked the fuck out and the film fails to deliver the promise that we would initial the invasion or more accurately, infestation of Earth by the aliens from Ground Zero.

But moving past that failed promise, I liked A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE. It’s a film we’ve seen in many an outbreak zombie movie before it, where everything is normal and then the world we know is upended in minutes. All of the initial things are there. Characters are established and then die when they break the established rules. There are those who listen to what the government is telling them and those who are suspicious. There are moments where real characters are put to the test as to whether they will help others or simply help themselves. And of course, the rules of survival are established. It’s something you’ve seen in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD all the way up to the present. As an outbreak movie, A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE works as it ticks all of those familiar boxes.

It also gives you some wonderful characters to root for to get through this predicament. Lupita Nyong’o is great as the lead, suffering from both a life-ending illness as well as character flaws which are addressed by the end of the film. She’s given up on life and obstinately rebuffs any attempts to connect at the beginning and is challenged with opening up and trusting others throughout the film. She plays a wonderfully nuanced character that stands out from your typical lead heroine you see in movies today. Having given up on STRANGER THINGS, I didn’t really have any experience seeing Joseph Quinn, who plays Eric, another survivor who pairs up with Samira later in the movie. He does have a lot of presence and plays second fiddle well. Though I wasn’t looking forward to it prior to this movie, I’m interested in seeing what he is going to bring to the character of Johnny Storm in the upcoming Fantastic Four movie. He even looks like a young Robert Downy Jr. at times. A QUIET PLACE II’s Djimon Hounsou returns or more accurately makes his first appearance in the story in DAY ONE as Henri and while the role is small, he provides some gravitas in key scenes, as does Alex Wolff who is essential in the development of Samira’s character. All in all, these actors elevate what would be a typical outbreak movie into something bigger and more watchable.

So let’s get to the cat. Yes, it’s an easy way to get someone invested, putting a cat into the mix. Unless you hate cats, but if you do, you have no soul. It also provides a sort of hinderance as the cat has to be referenced in every scene as to where it is, how it survived, and if and when it is going to come back when it or the leads wander off screen. The whole movie, I was fearful the cat was going to bite it, though this being a modern movie, I was pretty sure it was going to survive. But in order for that to happen, some mighty leaps in logic have to be hurdled. Samira keeps the cat on a leash at some times and in a carrier bag at others. Other times she is simply carrying the cat through the chaos. But if anyone who has had to clip a cat’s toenails would know, trying to get a cat to do something, even if it is for its own good, is like…well…herding cats. That term is there for a reason. Cats by nature are independent and to believe this cat would not only allow itself to be held during an alien monster invasion but run off in a crowd and somehow find its way back to Samira over and over again, stretches believability to lengths even my creative mind can’t imagine. There are scenes where the cat is taken under water and remains not only calm, but still stays with its owner without unleashing scratchy vengeance. Sorry, man. No way. Not even the most trained service cat, which basically functions as something soft to cuddle with in times of stress, would sit still and remain with its owner. Hell, I can’t even get my cats so sit with me on the couch for more than five minutes at a time, but they’re kittens, so I guess, they’ll grow into it. So, while the cat is easy to get you to invested in the plight of the characters, the obstacles and the pure nature of a cat makes the inclusion of the cat so heavily into the narrative unbelievable as well as emotionally manipulative.

And A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE is as emotionally manipulative as all get out. While there are some marvelously choreographed scenes of monster mayhem, there is also an abundance of quiet emotional scenes. An over-abundance, at that. Much of the movie is dedicated to getting to a specific pizza place in Harlem, which has a lot of emotional significance to Samira. This is fine, giving Samira an emotional goal, but I found there to be one or two too many scenes addressing Samira’s emotional growth by the end of the movie. One scene in particular, which takes place in an abandoned jazz club, is exhaustingly low and is in desperate need of a pruning. It has a point, but I feel by that time in the movie, Samira’s emotional conflict had been addressed enough and it was time to get back to some action. Director Michael Sarnoski did the excellent Nic Cage flick PIG previously and he transitions to big time moobie making pretty well, but there does seem to be some harsh transitions between big action set pieces and slow quiet moments that suggest there is need for improvement and restraint in instances where the film teeters on becoming overly schmaltzy.

A QUIET PLACE DAY ONE in its entirety is an overall satisfying big budgeter. I liked it much more than the redundant A QUIET PLACE II, but not as much as the epic first film. It definitely goes big and shows that the concept can go all over the place, inching its way to some kind of understanding of these monstrous librarians and why they arrived in the first place. We see a tiny bit more of the way these monsters communicate to one another as well as the added detail that they don’t like water. But before you start comparing them to the aliens in SIGNS, this is more of a biological dislike of the water as they seem to have limited lung capacity and with the aliens being all ears, it makes sense that drowning is going to be a weakness. I mean, have you ever tries to drain water from your ears after a dip in the pool? It’s maddening.
I’m recommending this one as it inches the story forward a little more, expands the scope of the franchise, and provides a big summer spectacle film in a character and emotional-centric way. A QUIET PLACE DAY ONE manipulates you, but the sheer talent in front of and behind the camera, and does so in an entertaining way.

The Best in Horror Countdown 2023-2024
#31 – HERE FOR BLOOD (DESTROY ALL NEIGHBORS)
#30 – THANKSGIVING (THE SACRIFICE GAME)
#29 – MILK & SERIAL (LOWLIFES)
#28 – PROJECT SILENCE (FROGMAN)
#27 – THE SEEDING (DARK HARVEST)
#26 – BEEZEL (THE FRESH HELL TRILOGY)
#25 – ABERRANCE (COLD MEAT)
#24 – OUT OF DARKNESS (ALL YOU NEED IS DEATH)
#23 – ARCADIAN (A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE)

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