Fantastic Fest is an interesting combination of known quantities and unexpected discoveries. Everyone has an idea what something like “Black Phone 2” or even “Primate” is before they use their pass to score a ticket for it, but a lot of the schedule also consists of premieres that can feel more like throwing a dart at a schedule. Maybe this will be good? To varying degrees, all three in this dispatch are.
“Colors” meets “Sinners” in Ryan Prows’ intense “Night Patrol,” one of the most buzzed Fantastic Fest premieres of 2025, like it or not. Love it or hate it, and I heard from people in both camps, this brutal genre flick had people here talking about it, and that’s sometimes all that really matters when your audience is seeing five movies a day. You want to stand out. It’s an audacious genre film, a movie with a great pitch: What if the corrupt cops of an LAPD task force were actual vampires, sucking off the blood of the community they’ve sworn an oath to protect?
The director of “Lowlife” launches his film out of a cannon in the opening scenes as we meet Wazi (RJ Cyler) and his girlfriend sharing a moment in the middle of the L.A. night. Police officers approach the vehicle, demand that she get out of the car, and then one who’s clearly in charge (played by wrestler C.M. Punk) instructs the new guy named Hawkins (Justin Long) to shoot her in the head. He complies, setting a dark tone for a film that is willing to go there in terms of violence, language, and racial commentary.
The next day, we learn that Hawkins is partners with Carr (Jermaine Fowler), one of the LAPD officers, who may be a rare good apple (and who, of course, is the now-on-the-run Wazi’s brother). Their mother (Nicki Micheaux) still lives in a place called the Courts, preaching the values of her ancestors as protection, using Zulu imagery and practices to help her people. She hands out pamphlets to gang members and places African totems on the fences around her house. It turns out they will come in handy.
After his initiation into “Night Patrol,” Hawkins discovers the truth about the elite squad and a secret about his family’s relation to the group. He also undergoes a pretty gnarly, bloody transformation. Prows digs right into some fun practical effects and gallons of the fake red stuff, and Long is genuinely up for the challenge. You know those sequences in movies when the ordinary guy becomes a bloodsucker for the first time? The shaking, the terror, the transforming, etc.? Long is basically forced into one of those for half the run time here, and he gives a physically daring performance that’s unlike what is usually asked of him. He’s great. Almost everyone is good in “Night Patrol”—the “Master” of the group, whom I won’t spoil, feels a bit miscast to me—but it belongs to Long.
Prows has a lot of ideas that he’s willing to deploy fearlessly, but the movie gets a little messy in the final act, as chaos descends on the Courts, and we lose a sense of geography and continuity. It becomes hard to tell who’s going where, who’s still alive, and who’s found safety. At one point, some key characters seem to be running out, only to end up on a couch again. And then the final scenes are even clunkier. And while “Sinners” is a tough bar to reach, it does feel like “Night Patrol” raises some ideas about race and law enforcement without as much to say about white culture literally sucking the blood of minorities and their cultures as Coogler’s masterpiece.
Still, this is an original, ambitious piece of work that IFC should be able to turn into a buzz generator to start 2026.
A film that started to make that buzzy noise in Austin in the days before its premiere is Rod Blackhurst’s demented “Dolly,” which is basically an homage to Tobe Hooper’s “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” complete with a Leatherface-esque monster, twisted family, and grainy film stock. Co-writer/director Blackhurst is clever enough to literally place a signpost early in the film to make it clear that he knows you’re starting to suspect the Hooper connections, and you’re not wrong.
Chase (Seann William Scott) and Rachel (an excellent Kate Cobb) are taking a hike to a scenic overlook, where Chase is going to propose to his longtime girlfriend (although we know she’s not sure she’s going to say yes). On the trail to the view, they find some creepy dolls, most broken, some nailed to trees. That they don’t immediately run back to their car is a bit of a movie contrivance, but that’s the contract viewers sign when they watch a movie called “Dolly.”
It’s not long before Chase and Rachel meet the title character, a hulking beast played by a wrestler named Max the Impaler with a bloody dress and a doll mask on its face. Only making breathing and squeaky, sorta-baby noises, Dolly is nightmare fuel, especially after she captures Rachel and tries to make the poor woman her new “daughter.” This means a crib, diaper change, and, yes, feeding. “Dolly” flirts with what was once called torture porn as Rachel’s plight gets more and more disturbing, but Blackhurst knows just how long to carry out his grossest ideas before giving viewers a break.
His vision is twisted but also sometimes funny in its ridiculousness, making for a film that’s well-balanced tonally, even if it feels a little slight on plotting. I get the sense that Blackhurst and his team would like to turn this character into a franchise; if this relatively self-contained, small-cast version is just the introduction for the bigger and better adventures of Dolly, it’s a memorable one.
Finally, there’s Diana Mills Smith’s “Dinner to Die For,” which played as a part of the low-budget Burnt Ends program at Fantastic Fest. It’s a single-setting, cheaply-made piece of thriller filmmaking that feels a bit like a short that’s been barely stretched out to feature (and it’s only 75 minutes), but Smith has talent that’s worth keeping an eye on. She knows how to keep a three-character piece moving, even if I wanted another unexpected course or two on this fixed menu.
Shamilla Miller is solid as the intriguing Hannah, a chef who has been forced into the relatively unsatisfying work of food photography. You know the fancy shots that accompany overpriced cookbooks, which she wishes she could write herself. Her friend Evan (Steven John Ward) keeps coming over to try her cuisine and watch true crime episodes with her, clearly putting in the time because he hopes to escape the friend zone. When a new neighbor named Blaire (Nina Erasmus) catches Hannah’s eye, Hannah starts an unexpected role play with Evan, suggesting that she could invite Blaire over for a bit of dinner and a bit of murder. Is she just playfully incorporating their true crime obsession into flirtatious banter? That’s what Evan presumes at first, and he plays along until he starts to worry.
“Dinner to Die For” probably should have been a short or given a bit more substance to flesh out into a feature. It’s a film that takes too long to find another gear and then feels kind of like it rushes to its ending just as the stakes are raised, although Smith does get a few fantastic shots in her climax that had the audience at the Fantastic Fest premiere cheering. It matters, especially for films like these, when the last bites are the best ones.
