Hell On Wheels: The Car vs The Car: Road to Revenge

The Car  (1977) vs The Car: Road to Revenge (2019)

M.O.T. carried out by Matt Adcock (@Cleric20)

Sometimes at Darkmatters we ask the important question:

What if the villain… was a car?

Not a metaphorical car.

Not a car representing capitalism, patriarchy or Tottenham’s away form.

Just… a car.

And thus we have two gloriously daft, unexpectedly effective entries in the “vehicular malevolence” subgenre.

The Car

Directed by: Elliot Silverstein

A mysterious matte-black Lincoln Continental begins terrorising a small Utah desert town, running down cyclists, smashing through parades, and generally behaving like Jaws if Spielberg had swapped the shark for a two-ton demon sedan.

Sheriff Wade Parent (James Brolin) tries to stop it. The car has no driver. No motive. No brakes. No soul.

It is never explained. Which is precisely why it works.

It’s basically Jaws on land.

The town. The mounting dread. The sense of something unstoppable lurking just off-screen.

The car itself is shot like a monster — low angles, engine growls, POV shots bearing down on screaming victims. There’s no winking irony. The film commits. Fully. Which makes the absurd premise weirdly effective.

Delightfully blunt dialogue

When asked what it is, one character replies:

“Maybe it’s the Devil.”

No committee meeting. No exposition dump. Just — yeah. Sure. Devil car. Move along.

There’s also the dry Sheriff line:

“That car’s got a driver.”

“Who?”

“The Devil.”

Strengths

• Minimal explanation = maximal menace

• Incredible stunt work (pre-CGI, real cars, real danger)

• Deadpan ‘70s seriousness elevates the silliness

• Desert cinematography gives it mythic weight

Weaknesses

• Third act drags slightly

• Some performances are wooden enough to qualify as roadside fencing

Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters: 

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(3 -  Lean, mean, and enjoyably ridiculous. Not the classic I was hoping for but absolutely a cult petrol-fume delight..)

My Letterboxd review

Car: Road to Revenge 

Directed by: G.J. Echternkamp

A district attorney is murdered and fused with his experimental self-driving car in a neon-soaked dystopian future city. The car returns as a sentient revenge machine, slaughtering the gangsters who killed him. But after getting trashed the car is rebuilt with bit of the original killer car... more mayhem ensues...

Yes. It’s basically Christine by way of low-rent Blade Runner or Johnny Mnemonic.

And it’s greater than it has any right to be!?

Where the original was sun-bleached horror, this is cyberpunk B-movie chaos. Holograms. Corporate corruption. Self-driving AI. Revenge-em-up. Neon reflections on wet asphalt. Bastardised monster car made from parts of BOTH the original and the new one: nice! Cameo from Ronny ‘Robobcop’ Cox from the original film: win!!

It knowingly leans into its B-movie DNA, and that self-awareness gives it, for me, an edge the original didn’t quite have.

Thematically, it’s riffing on tech horror what if your autonomous vehicle decides you deserve judgment?

It has more plot, more lore, more silliness and is more fun.

At one point a character growls:

“You think you can outrun this car?”

Which, frankly, is cinema at its most efficient.

There’s also some wonderfully straight-faced tech babble about AI consciousness that feels like someone dared the script to say “revenge protocol” without laughing.

Strengths

• Cyberpunk aesthetic is surprisingly strong for a low-budget sequel

• Embraces its absurdity

• Revenge structure keeps momentum high

• Fun nods to possessed-car lore… very much in the shadow of Christine (which, yes, still reigns supreme in vehicular horror)

Weaknesses

• Acting occasionally wobbles

• Budget shows in some VFX

Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters: 

ööö1/2

(3.5 -  It shouldn’t work. Yet it kind of does.
And the cyberpunk twist gives it just enough personality to edge out its predecessor...)

My Letterboxd review

Magnum wasn't loving having to trade in his Ferrari...

Final Thoughts: Devil vs Digital Demon

The Car (1977) plays it straight and becomes unintentionally funny, which paradoxically makes it creepier.

The Car: Road to Revenge plays it pulpy and knowingly silly, which makes it more entertaining.

One is desert dread. One is neon nihilism.

Neither touches the holy combustion engine of Christine (please can we have cyberpunk sequel to that now??) But both deserve a spot in the late-night “cars behaving badly” marathon.

And honestly?

If your Tesla ever starts idling outside your bedroom window at 3am playing Roxette tunes…

Don’t check the app. RUN!

Darkmatters approves vehicular vengeance in moderation.

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A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Darkmatters Guide

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Episode 1: “The Hedge Knight”

Darkmatters Blog Review (spoiler-tempered, fire-forged by Matt @Cleric20 Adcock)

The Game of Thrones universe has grown so vast that its edges now fold back upon themselves like wings of a great, burning wyrm, and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is the newest fractal in that mythic flame. Where its predecessors Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon barbed us with politics and dread, this prequel premieres not with an Iron Throne forged of swords but with a pair of misfits marching straight into the mud and sun of Ashford Meadow.

Episode 1, titled “The Hedge Knight,” opens on a man burying his past and tripping into his future. Ser Duncan the Tall (played with guileless gravity by Peter Claffey) is a towering figure of noble ideals in a world that treats ideals like worn coin. Fresh from the funeral of his mentor, Dunk sets off toward a tournament, not because he thirsts for glory, but because dignity feels like the last decent sword left in his scabbard.

And then there’s Egg (who looks like he's escaped from The Last Airbender) a bald, quick-witted lad who clings to Dunk’s heels like a shadow that knows too much. Their meeting is less destiny and more accident, but as with all great myths, accidents tend to be omens in disguise.

The tone is… odd but brilliant. Not whimsical exactly, Westeros remains a land where fate bites hard but unmoored from the relentless doom of its forebears. This is Game of Thrones without the siege towers, or at least with siege towers replaced by amusement-park-level absurdity: tavern mishaps, tournament pageantry, and a physical comedy cadence that gives Monty Python a polite nod from beyond the grave.

Yet beneath the lightness, there’s grit: swords clash, horses sweat, and the first seeds of legend take root in stubborn soil. Dunk is a knight because he refuses to yield his sense of right, even when life nudges him toward cynicism. Egg’s secret...hinted, not handed to you like a gaudy bauble, promises greater truths to come.

In pure Darkmatters terms: this is Westeros with its armour off, sitting around a tavern fire, eating cold beef, telling each other the same old stories about dragons and king, except this time, the jokes are crude and the humanity is all too close to the bone. It doesn’t roar like wildfire; it simmers like broth on a hearth. Some will call it slow. Some will call it small. But under its modest surface flows the deep, dark river of what it means to be more than a sword in a kingdom that despises the humble.

Series Source Material... Tales of Dunk and Egg: Darkmatters Guide

To truly taste what this show is biting into, you have to crack open the soil of the Dunk & Egg novellas, the narrative bedrock of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. These stories, set nearly a century before Game of Thrones, chronicle the unlikely, unforgettable duo: Ser Duncan the Tall and his young companion Aegon V Targaryen, known as Egg.

The Novellas (Collected as A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms)

The Hedge Knight

The root from which all this sprouted. A hedge knight is a knight in name alone — no lands, no gold, no retinue, just rusted steel and stubborn pride. Dunk shows up at a tourney with hopes bigger than his coin purse, earning laughs, bruises, and an apprentice with secrets that could shake thrones.

The Sworn Sword

After their debut, Dunk and Egg’s path takes them to the turbulent marches between mighty houses. Here honour and duty clash with politics and pride, and our duo learn that vows mean little when the powerful lust for leverage.

The Mystery Knight

A feast of intrigue and betrayal. A wedding tourney becomes the perfect gilded stage for plots both subtle and savage. Old grudges, buried secrets, and unsettling truths about nobility’s appetites come to the fore.

These novellas feel lighter than the dense tomes of A Song of Ice and Fire, but don’t mistake levity for innocence: Martin’s world still bites, bleeds, and burns. Beneath the camaraderie are searing reflections on honour, legacy, and what it costs to be decent in a world that rewards cruelty.

Where the Show Fits in the Larger Mythos

The series unfolds roughly 90–100 years before Game of Thrones... a time when the dragons are gone but their memory still haunts every spire and keep.

Dunk is poised on the threshold of knighthood, Egg harbours a royal secret, and the stakes are human before they are epic.

Future seasons are likely to adapt The Sworn Sword and The Mystery Knight, deepening both the friendship and the political undercurrents that make Westeros bleed.

If Game of Thrones was song, majestic, thunderous, and often tragic, then A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is a ballad: modest, plaintive, but rich with melody and heart. 

Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:

ööööö

(5 -  promising and funny where you might expect grimness, and quietly poised to deeply move you.)

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Matt finds faith in The Carpenter's Son (review)

 The Carpenter’s Son

Dir. Lotfy Nathan

Reviewed by Matt (@Cleric20) Adcock

Holy dread

Here’s The Carpenter’s Son a film that leans hard into a deliberately unsettling act of theological imagination, one that reaches into the apocrypha, drags out a half-suppressed idea, and asks whether holiness itself might feel like horror when encountered without the cushioning of doctrine and distance.

Set during the Holy Family’s flight and exile, the film frames Joseph, Mary, and their child not as icons but as people living inside a mystery that refuses to behave. Nicolas Cage plays Joseph as a man straining under a responsibility he cannot rationalise, at once protective, bewildered, and quietly terrified. FKA twigs’s Mary is restrained and inward, a presence shaped by contemplation rather than spectacle, carrying a conviction that offers no immunity from fear.

And then there is the boy.

Played with unsettling restraint by Noah Jupe, this is not the glowing child of Christmas cards. This is a Jesus whose emerging power feels unstable; he’s not ‘Brighburn’ malevolent, but his powers are uncontained. The film draws inspiration from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a non-canonical second-century text long regarded as troubling precisely because it depicts a young Jesus performing miracles that feel abrupt, even punitive. In director Lotfy Nathan’s hands, this becomes the film’s theological fuse.

There’s a moment in The Carpenter’s Son that quietly explains the entire film.

Joseph fashions a wooden idol, an object of devotion shaped by his own hands. Later, the boy smashes it.

It’s a simple gesture, almost throwaway. But it lands like a theological hammer blow. Because idolatry, at its core, iis about trying to shape God into something manageable, something that fits our expectations, fears, and need for control. And that, more than demons or violence, is the real horror this film is circling.

The Carpenter’s Son is an unusual, often frustrating, sometimes compelling act of religious horror. This is not a film asking whether Jesus is divine. It assumes that he is. The question is far more unsettling:

What happens when divine power appears before it has learned restraint and when the people closest to it try to manage it?

Despite its apocryphal roots, The Carpenter’s Son is surprisingly orthodox in its fundamentals. The Nativity unfolds in a stable, recognisably drawn from Luke’s Gospel. Joseph receives angelic warning dreams that send the family fleeing to Egypt to escape Herod’s slaughter. Years later, Joseph doubts his own memory, but the film never implies these events are imaginary or symbolic. They are presented as real, grounding the story firmly within biblical history rather than alternative myth.

Likewise, Jesus experiences visions of his future: crucifixion, death, and resurrection. These aren’t framed as metaphors or psychological delusions. We’re invited to accept them as genuine foreknowledge. Destiny is not in question here, only how one lives while waiting for it.

This grounding matters, because it shapes the film’s approach to evil.

The Stranger (Satan) is played with earnest heart by Isla Johnston. She’s not a trickster abstraction or ironic metaphor, but a fallen spiritual being, clearly evil, clearly opposed to God, and clearly doomed. There’s no ambiguity about that and no invitation to sympathise with it.

What is interesting is its motivation.

This Satan isn’t trying to win a cosmic war. It knows how that story ends. Instead, it is driven by resentment, a desire to drag Jesus down to its own level, to infect him with the same bitterness and hatred it feels toward humanity. The goal is not domination, but corruption: to convince Jesus that people deserve punishment rather than mercy, and that power should be exercised through retribution.

There’s a faint echo of gnostic thinking in Satan’s rhetoric, talk of liberating humanity from flesh, of transcendence through rejection of the material world, but crucially, the film never endorses this. That worldview is presented as perverse, deforming, and spiritually dead. Matter is not the enemy here. Creation is not a mistake. The problem is resentment.

In that sense, Satan functions as a dark mirror, not just of what Jesus could become if he abandoned compassion, but of what humans become when they define themselves by grievance.

One of the film’s most theologically confident moves is also its biggest problem (as a horror film at least).

Whenever Jesus confronts evil spirits, he succeeds. They cannot resist him. His authority is innate and unquestioned. The danger Satan poses is not physical or existential, but moral.

This creates an intrinsic limitation on dread. We know where this story is going. We know Jesus will not fall. The film never seriously threatens the biblical arc, and because of that, Satan never quite feels like a source of catastrophic danger.

There’s a version of The Carpenter’s Son that might have generated far more terror by declaring early on that “all bets are off,” that this is a radical reimagining unconstrained by Scripture. That film would have been far more blasphemous but far more frightening.

Nathan doesn’t make that film. Instead, he chooses theological seriousness over horror maximalism. The result is a movie with moments of brutality (Roman tortures are depicted with stomach-turning cruelty) and some, mostly snake-induced, jump scares, but not enough to satisfy adrenaline junkies, and not enough sustained dread to rival slow-burn nightmares like Hereditary.

Where the film does generate genuine unease is through Joseph.

Nicolas Cage plays him as a man caught between devotion and fear, sincerity and control. Early on, he’s relatable: a father trying to protect his family, provide stability, and raise a son who frightens him precisely because he cannot fully understand him.

But as the film progresses, Joseph hardens. His faith becomes rigid. His protectiveness curdles into coercion. He tries to shape Jesus into something safe, contained, predictable, an idol rather than a mystery.

This is where the film’s most potent theme emerges. Joseph’s desire to control his son mirrors humanity’s desire to control God. When Jesus resists being shaped, Joseph responds with anger. When the idol shatters, Joseph lashes out.

The tragedy is that the film doesn’t quite give this arc enough room to breathe. We see Joseph become unpleasant, even cruel, but we don’t always feel the weight of the pressures driving him there. A version of the film told more squarely from Joseph’s perspective would have been bolder.

Instead, the narrative oscillates between Joseph’s story and Jesus’ “origin” story, diluting the emotional force of both.

Running quietly beneath all this is another recognisably biblical tension: law versus mercy.

Jesus shows instinctive compassion for those deemed impure… You know: lepers, the crucified, the outcast. He moves toward suffering rather than away from it. This places him at odds with the rigid purity concerns of his world, and increasingly at odds with Joseph’s fear-driven religiosity.

It’s a subtle but important thread. The film understands that Jesus’ ministry is not a rejection of holiness, but a redefinition of it, one rooted in proximity rather than separation.

As a horror film, The Carpenter’s Son is uneven. It lacks the raw terror to fully satisfy genre purists, and its tonal indecision blunts its sharpest edges.

As a theological provocation, it’s far more interesting.

This is a film about idolatry, not golden calves, but mental images of God we cling to because they reassure us. It’s about how easily faith becomes control, how quickly devotion curdles into resentment when God refuses to behave as expected.

And in its best moments, it reminds us that the most frightening thing isn’t demons, or Satan, or prophecy but the possibility that we might prefer an idol we can control to a God who refuses to be shaped by our hands.

Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:

ööö1/2

(3.5 - It may not be a great horror film. But it is a God-haunted one.)

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Matt's Top Ten Films of 2025

 Here are my favourite films of the year...

Weapons (Zach Cregger)

Cregger follows Barbarian by going bigger, darker and more structurally unhinged, folding multiple disappearances, small-town rot and a creeping sense of moral contagion into something that plays like a cursed multi-viewpoint fairy tale. Weapons understands that the scariest thing isn’t the monster (altho she is pretty fearsome) but the community that quietly reorganises itself around trauma. Precision-made dread, bleakly funny in places, and proof that Cregger is now operating as a full-on American horror architect rather than a one-hit disruptor. Some of the crowd I saw this with at the cinema were standing and cheering at the climax, that's such a rush!

One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)

PTA goes muscular and mischievous here, shaping a post-idealism America haunted by its own protest movements and ideological aftershocks. Looser than Phantom Thread but more focused than Inherent Vice, this feels like Anderson riffing on history as a looping argument rather than a straight line. There’s sweat, humour, and a low hum of paranoia beneath the talk, a film that knows revolutions don’t end, they just change fonts. And the cinematography is some of the best ever!?

Sinners (Ryan Coogler)

Coogler’s first outright genre pivot lands as a blood-soaked Southern Gothic with teeth and intent. Vampirism here isn’t sexy immortality but inheritance (think sin passed down, monetised, ritualised). Anchored by Michael B. Jordan in dual roles, Sinners fuses horror with blues history, racial memory and the idea that America never really lets anything die. Lush, angry, and mythic in the best way, saw this in IMAX and it blew my mind!

Bring Her Back (Danny & Michael Philippou)

The Talk To Me duo double down on grief-horror, crafting something meaner, sadder and more intimate. This isn’t about jump scares so much as the unbearable desire to undo a single moment. The brothers show a growing confidence in letting scenes rot in silence, and when the violence comes it feels earned and oh boy, that scene with the melon knife is one that will never leave you... Bring Her Back is a film that understands mourning as a kind of possession, one you invite in yourself, not for the faint of heart.

The Ballad of Wallis Island (James Griffiths)

Gentle, funny and unexpectedly bruising, this feels like a folk song discovered on an old hard drive, and instead of sucking, they take you places you didn't expect. Built around loneliness, fading friendships and the strange ache of unrealised lives, this film sneaks up on you with warmth before quietly breaking your heart. There’s a distinctly British melancholy here, rain, memory, missed chances, handled with such lightness you barely notice how deep it cuts. Plus Carey Mulligan is still my fantasy woman :)

F1 (Joseph Kosinski)

Do you feel the need? The need for speed... Only on four wheels rather than in the air!? Kosinski does for Formula One what he did for fighter jets: strips away the gloss to reveal the terrifying ballet underneath. Shot with punishing immediacy and physicality, this is less sports movie and more controlled experiment in speed, risk and ego. Brad Pitt’s ageing racer isn’t chasing glory so much as relevance, and the film understands that velocity is addictive precisely because it’s unsustainable. Big, loud, and surprisingly reflective.

The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson)

Anderson’s espionage fantasia plays like a diorama stuffed with double-crosses, deadpan assassins and emotional repression rendered in pastel. Beneath the symmetry and whimsy is a story about legacy, trust and the absurdity of inherited power. Benicio del Toro grounds the film with unexpected weariness, reminding us that Anderson’s brilliant dollhouse worlds increasingly function as mausoleums for broken men. But they are oh-so-much-fun!!

Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos)

Lanthimos remakes the Korean cult oddity Save the Green Planet! and leans fully into conspiracy as emotional illness. Wildly funny, deeply uncomfortable, and shot with clinical indifference, Bugonia asks whether believing the world is fake is any worse than accepting its cruelty as normal. Emma Stone continues her fearless collaboration with Lanthimos, operating at the edge of satire and collapse. One guy fainted in the screening of this I saw, hope he's ok (and has the chance to catch the ending as the answer to 'is she an alien' does get answered!!

Eddington (Ari Aster)

Aster’s COVID-era Western is his angriest film yet, a portrait of a town atomised by misinformation, masculinity and performative morality. Less horror in the traditional sense, more social exorcism, Eddington is deliberately abrasive, often hilarious, and deeply unsettling in how recognisable it feels. Joaquin Phoenix is a walking wound of authority and resentment, and Aster refuses the comfort of catharsis.

The Order (Justin Kurzel)

Kurzel returns to extremist psychology with grim focus, charting the rise of a white supremacist terror cell with procedural coldness and moral clarity. Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult turn the film into a duel of belief versus obsession, and Kurzel resists sensationalism at every turn. This is not a thriller designed to entertain but to warn — violence shown as banal, contagious and terrifyingly organised.

- - - 

Full disclosure I haven't seen Marty Supreme or Sentimental Value, both of which I have a strong feeling might have made it into my top ten!?

CHECK OUT MY 2024 TOP TEN

CHECK OUT MY 2023 TOP TEN

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