Grind (2025) – Mark Cantu.

Beleaguered employees, and organisers of a low-fi'd Grindhouse festival suddenly find themselves in a desperate battle for survival against a somewhat implausible, celluloid-inspired cosmic despot in spotty, retro horror spoof-a-rama Grind. This zeitgeisty B-movie trash compactor indelicately regurgitates musty Drive-in tropes and laboured badinage with ever diminishing results. Grind's episodic nature soon becomes wearing, while the retrograded parodies are zestily amusing, they unfortunately provide a stark contrast to the shrill, low wattage Lovecraftian shenanigans in the cinema. There are vestiges of interest for midnight movie fans, the savoury snippets of Subway Samurai, and preternaturally masculine super cop 'McQueen' are palpably choice, plus Grind may be the first contemporary horror that borrows heavily from Popcorn's demon-possessed film-within-a-film 'POSSESSOR'. Grind fizzled out pretty rapidly, the proliferation of digital FX, and the inexcusably hokey invocation of Lovecraft proved numbing.

There was potential here, but it was stymied by disposable dialogue, prototypical characters, WAY too many layers of conspicuously digitised post-production gimmickry, and a frustratingly fake-@ss looking cosmic monster! If voiced by Obituary's vocalist, and designed by a young protégé of Screaming Mad George, who knows? There were too many poor creative choices, and much of Grind is busily shot using generic Found Footage shaky-cam, which wasn't a good look. A clunky, uninviting hodgepodge of cosmic horror clichés and admittedly superior Grindhouse pastiches, sadly, does not a complete B-film make. In conclusion, I kinda just wish I'd binged on Andy Sidaris and watched In The Mouth of Madness for the zillionth time. At the film's conclusion, I wanted to jump through my own portal and alight in a time when every 2nd genre flick didn't have some schmingus wearing an eyepatch!