THE FADED SPOTLIGHT

The dialogue clicks like a lock being picked. It’s tight, sly, and unmistakably Mamet. But Heist is one of those movies where everyone seems to be playing three sides at once. It’s a twisty maze, with smooth operators winding their way through a labyrinth of double-crosses, triple-crosses, and false endings, but somewhere along the way, the game stops being fun. The third time someone reveals they weren’t working for who you thought they were working for, the story seems like it’s talking to itself.

Gene Hackman leads this crew of thieves, all of whom talk like they’re the smartest guy in the room. (Welcome to a Mamet movie, I guess.) A recent job almost went awry when he was caught on a security camera, which brings about some concern that the old man might just not have it any longer. But he wants to go out with one last bang, and that bang involves a ship full of Swiss gold bars.

There’s craftsmanship here—Mamet certainly knows how to build a con—but the seams are showing. Each twist exists mostly to set up the next, and the tension is never quite able to settle. The heist itself is sharp on paper but plays on screen as frictionless: nobody ever seems nervous, nobody sweats. And without that pressure, the whole thing feels like a rote exercise.

Compare that to Mamet’s near-masterpiece House of Games, a movie that roped you in and conned you along with the main character. Just like Heist, that movie was also stylized, but it was also grounded in human desperation. This is a movie with polish but little of that human reason to keep you holding on.

The cast is, at least, some consolation—Hackman, Delroy Lindo, Danny DeVito. But they’re no saviors—ultimately caught in a story that seems to keep resetting its terms. Even their best lines feel isolated—witty but isolated, like they’re spoken in a vacuum. While this is a sure-footed and technically tight plot-twister, it’s ultimately too confusing to leave a deep enough impression.

There are plenty of found footage horror films that stumble over their own conceits—cheap scares, hollow lore, camcorders that somehow capture high-stakes terror and high school drama with equal flatness. But Hell House LLC manages to thread the needle. There’s still hokiness here, but it’s just crispy enough to keep things fun without dissolving into full-blown parody.

The setup is simple: new occupants of a rickety, abandoned house gradually realize they aren’t alone. This time, it’s a group of entrepreneurial horror junkies who set up a haunted house attraction inside a crumbling, off-the-interstate hotel in upstate New York. The town is Abaddon. The hotel is cursed. The crew is blissfully unaware until it’s far too late.

Of course, none of this is new terrain for the genre, but the film’s low-budget, grainy, and convincingly amateur production makes the tropes feel spooked-up rather than played out. The actors, mostly unknowns, do about the smartest thing actors can do in a found footage film: act like they’re not in a horror movie. There’s some back-and-forth banter between them that isn’t brilliant, but it doesn’t seem staged either. And then when their peace and order in their world begin to unravel, the panic feels real.

Some of the frights: unexplained voices and loud bangs in locked rooms; towering shadows that creep over you and disappear; a life-size clown mannequin that seems to teleport from room to room. Director Stephen Cognetti stages these moments with a restraint that’s rarer than you’d expect. These aren’t scares that always leap at you. Sometimes it just stands in the corner until your stomach starts to turn.

While this doesn’t get my blood boiling quite like The Blair Witch Project, the scares are effective—drawn from unease and atmosphere rather than violence and gore. It also helps that the film never overreaches—the mythology is suggested rather than belabored. And while the ending tips toward the obvious, the path getting there is lined with unease and a kind of DIY conviction. Not terrifying, but undeniably unnerving. And in the wilds of found footage, that counts as a win.

Forget about capes. Hellboy is a superhero movie with noir flavoring and a demon as its protagonist—a six-foot behemoth in a trench coat who feeds on cats and has a hangover’s worth of attitude. The government keeps him like a pet, but he’s also the government’s best weapon—a contradiction the movie never bothers to resolve, which—to be honest—is part of the fun.

But the movie wouldn’t work half as well as it does if it weren’t for Ron Perlman’s performance as Hellboy. The red skin, the filed-down horns, the concrete fist—it all looks ridiculous until Perlman opens his mouth and sells it hook, line, and sinker. And what a compelling comic book character. He’s sardonic, bruised, and strangely endearing. He’s a guy who smashes tentacled horrors for a living but still spends his nights sulking in his room with a stack of comic books and a plate of pancakes.

The backstory is pure pulp gold. Hellboy came about from Nazis dabbling in occult portals. A botched experiment spat out a baby demon, and a kindly professor (John Hurt) raises him like an adopted son. Decades later, the same occultists resurrect Rasputin (Karel Roden) in a ritual, and he plans to reopen the gate and usher in the apocalypse. As usual, the fate of the world is held in the balance, and only Hellboy can stop it.

Hellboy is the ward of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, an organization that comes off something like a misfit clubhouse by way of a cabinet of curiosities. It’s staffed by Jeffrey Tambor as a perpetually flustered bureaucrat, Selma Blair as Liz who leaves scorch marks wherever she goes, and Abe Sapien—a melancholy, amphibious clairvoyant played by Doug Jones and voiced by David Hyde Pierce.

The middle act is a weak spot as it wades through one too many relics, keys, and muttered prophecies, but all in all, del Toro never loses the eye. Hellboy’s constant sparring partner here is Sammael, the so-called Hound of Resurrection—a demon dog that has a split jaw, lidless eyes, and a crown of tentacles where a mane should be. You might kill it once, but two more will crawl out of the shadows. Kill one of those, and you’ll just get two more—slicker, nastier, and more insectile than the last. The fights start to feel endless, but that’s by design. A plague that reproduces itself every time Hellboy gets the upper hand.

It’s a neat concept, even if it’s stuck in a plot that feels like it gets tangled in places. You can also feel the studio tugging at del Toro’s sleeve to not forget to keep everything palatable to the mainstream. But the Hellboy creature himself is a triumph of makeup and performance, and the movie around him has a comic-book heart with just enough pulp substance to keep the sentiment from going sour. A monster movie, a superhero origin story—and one of the stranger, more enjoyable ones we’ve had.