A terrible fright / We’re scrounging tonight / for weapons in a winter wonderland!
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Horror won big at the Academy Awards! While Sinners and Frankenstein carted off a combined seven categories on behalf of the 2025 field, Zach Cregger’s child-abduction plot-twister Weapons darted out of its own dark corner and took home Best Supporting Actress for Amy Madigan — best known by Gen-X as Field of Dreams‘ Concerned Wife and Uncle Buck’s annoyed girlfriend — who was completely unrecognizable as the mysterious Aunt Gladys, a fiend who one day might be called “iconic” once enough time has passed that revealing her existence isn’t a major spoiler in itself. (I hated skating around her gloriously creepy performance in my own write-up, but knowing nothing made her entrance all the more unnerving to see.)
Like Cregger’s debut Barbarian, Weapons was a sharply crafted, time-shifting puzzlebox that didn’t even reveal the spooky subgenre at its core till you’re lured halfway inside. Its staggering box office performance was even more surprising, and heralded this year’s high-grossing horror wave that’s seen films like Obsession and Backrooms luring millions back to theaters without the sort of old-fashioned Hollywood star power that once made for reliable audience bait. It’s less surprising that some corporation would take heed and entice Cregger to inject new life and/or financial viability into one of their stagnant IPs.
The lucky winner of his undivided attention is Resident Evil, the long-running game series that scrounged up seven films’ worth of zombie-virus mayhem, some of which I watched on a DVD boxed set I bought at a yard sale for a buck, then paid it forward to Goodwill. (I don’t remember how many of ’em it had — at least the first two.) Of the games, I only played through a few levels’ worth of RE4 on my son’s old PS2 — maybe 15 years ago? — till I found myself wishing there were a Bethesda Studios-style option for Leon to shove the President’s daughter Ashley off a roof, accept the bad karma and keep playing through. So I’m not an authority on the world of Raccoon City or the Umbrella Corporation unless seeing dozens of RE cosplayers in every Dragon Con parade counts.
