Meat Kills (2025)

Known in its home market of Holland as Vleesdag, this film has also been marketed as Meat Day too (and maybe other titles on the theme)! The point is though that it's a day full of meat! Specifically pigs and the events around a farm in Holland being watched by an Animal Activist Group.

Our story starts as we witness some grizzly-looking activities on the pig farm where the animals are being fattened for slaughter and sale. A young girl, Mirthe, schoolfriend of the farmer's son Jonathan, gets taken on part time by his dad to help out so she can earn some cash. Little did they know, however, that she had designs on exposing the farm as a place acting outside the law in terms of their practices and being cruel to the livestock.

One day, the family catch her filming the alleged cruelty on her mobile phone, fire her, smash up (what they think is) the phone in question and sling her off the premises. Jonathan is upset because he had, since school, had a bit of a crush on young Mirthe. Anyway, next thing we know is that she's reporting into the local Animal Activist group via what appears to be her boyfriend, though she seems to be more interested in a place within the group than by his side.

The group is led by Nas and Ish, a couple of ruthless and seemingly bonkers individuals who appear to be capable of stopping at nothing in order to meet the aims of the group. So they form a posse and head for the farm, pig-masks on faces! They swoop in, in order to generally disrupt things, initially by spraying slogans on the walls of the farm. However, things soon get out of hand as we see what the nutty Nas and Ish are capable of! One of the group checks out the house and finds a little girl upstairs in bed, surrounded by bottles of medicine, clearly very unwell. Neither of these characters play a huge part, but we find out later why they are there!

This is the point at which it turns into a complete bloodbath as gruesome and grizzly scenes follow each other, group tackling the family running the farm - with dad turning out to be the most bonkers of the lot! The pigs are used as weapons against the invaders along with pretty much any piece of farm machinery the family can lay their hands on. Most of the characters at one time or another end up being tortured by the other side, strung up, marmalised and treated with acid and it becomes a bit of a survival film as we wonder who is going to make it to the end, breathing, and who is going to have their life hacked away by those around them!

It's all good horror/terror fun of course but it's really taking itself seriously in the quest! There's no tongues-in-cheeks here and everyone's in it for the gore, guts, blood and flying body parts! The first half of the film is actually pretty slow, feels quite low-budget (which it probably is) - and much like someone's hired a farm, a dozen unknown actors and a special effects team to play out an idea. But actually, when the tone switches to the more macabre and dark about halfway through the 90 minutes, it suddenly feels much better. The director who I've never heard of, Martijn Smits, seems to draw more convincing acting out of everyone, especially Caro Derkx and Emma Josten in the leads, as they head towards the blood-soaked finale.

It's a completely bonkers gore-fest, but hang on in there for it to kick up a gear part way through. I thoroughly enjoyed it and thought very much of Mason Verger and Hannibal in this kind of setting. I'm sure you'll get the reference and meaning there! Enjoy! At them moment if you're not in the USA you'll need to try some VPN style trickery to get to see it, available there via various streaming services.

Locked (2025)

This low-budget thriller has now arrived on Amazon Prime Video and it's, well, alright. Apparently it's a remake of the Argentinian thriller 4x4 (2019), which most reviewers seem to report as being much better. I'll try and track it down.

I think that most of the budget on this one went on engaging Anthony Hopkins, well, his voice anyway (until the last 10 minutes). He's a rich bloke who has this car which he can totally remotely control and is built like a tank. He leaves it in a carpark in a rough area of town with the door unlocked, goading some petty thief to get in and try to nick it or its contents. Which, spookily enough, is just what happens.

He then terrorises the thief by not letting him out, depriving him of food and water, zapping him with taser-equipped panels and seats as he tries to teach the yob life lessons around actions having consequences. He tries and tries to find ways out of the car but can't. He even has a gun and it won't break through - he merely ends up injuring himself with it.

Hopkins' character is clearly a fruitloop who we find out later has cancer, has faced trauma of his own and is prepared to behave anarchically on his way out. He doesn't care what he does to whom and uses his remote control car in order to do much of that.

Bill Skarsgård plays the trapped (Locked) chappie down on his luck, thieving from people in order to try to turn his life around, with a wife who has thrown him out and daughter who he keeps letting down - mainly because he is poor and can't get up on his feet. We see him trying, but circumstances are against him.

So it's a bit of a thrill ride, wondering what on earth William (Hopkins' character) will do next as he talks to him via the car's phone, teasing, abusing. It's a hugely dialogue-driven film, survival story, revenge tale which keeps the viewer entertained and on their toes.

It's all a bit extreme - hard to imagine that there really isn't a way out of this vehicle. I would be all for ripping out the dashboard between being zapped of course! It's fairly well shot, a lot of it dark and certainly claustrophobic. Moving at times as the stories of the two men unfold - and a fairly bonkers finale! Enjoy the ride!

How the UK Might Look Now... A What If Scenario...

I asked Gemini to give me an educated guess as to how the UK would look now if Germany had won WWII. I guessed that for a start we'd all be speaking German. And highly likely that I wouldn't be here at all as the chances of my mum and dad meeting and following the same path would be tiny. I bet the trains would run on time!

That is a truly profound "what if" scenario, and your initial thoughts are very much aligned with what historians and speculative fiction have explored. It would certainly be a profoundly darker and vastly different reality for the UK and the world. Here's an educated guess on how the UK might look, drawing on known Nazi plans (like Operation Sea Lion and the New Order) and the nature of the regime...

UK Under the Third Reich

🗣️ Language and Culture

Your guess about language is very likely correct, at least for official use and education.

• German Language: German would likely be the official language of state, administration, and higher education. It would be compulsory in schools, much like English was in parts of the British Empire.

• Cultural Purge: British culture would be heavily censored. Art, music, literature, and media would be purged of anything deemed "degenerate," "Jewish," or politically undesirable. German cultural products would be heavily promoted.

• Education: Schools would be completely restructured to indoctrinate children with Nazi racial and political ideology.

🏛️ Political Structure and Governance

The Nazis had a complex (and sometimes contradictory) view of the British people, seeing them as "Nordic" but also as a political obstacle.

• Puppet State: The UK would not have been fully integrated like some Eastern European territories. Instead, it would likely have been a highly controlled puppet state with a facade of self-governance, similar to Vichy France or the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

• Leadership: Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, would have likely been installed as a puppet Prime Minister or key collaborator. There were also plans to potentially reinstate the sympathetic Duke of Windsor (former King Edward VIII) as a figurehead monarch.

• The Crown: The actual Royal Family (George VI and Elizabeth II) would have either been captured, killed, or forced into exile (Canada was the plan in our timeline).

• Repression and Control: The Gestapo and other SS units would operate freely. A network of informers, surveillance, and arbitrary arrests would crush all political opposition, trade unions, and resistance movements.

📉 Society and Daily Life

This is where the darkest aspects of the regime would be felt.

• Racial Policy (The Horror): This is the single most defining and terrifying change. The full genocidal policies of the Nazis would have been implemented. Jewish, Romani, disabled, and LGBTQ+ people would be systematically rounded up and deported to extermination camps. Being here, as you said, would be a tiny chance for anyone with a "non-Aryan" background, and a life of terror for many others.

• Deportation and Slavery: Early German plans for an occupied Britain suggested deporting all able-bodied men between 17 and 45 to the continent for forced labour to prevent sabotage and use British industry for the German war machine. This would tear apart millions of families.

• Economy: Britain would be Germany's "main war workshop" (as per a directive by Field-Marshal von Brauchitsch), with resources and industries entirely geared toward the Nazi war effort and the greater German Reich.

🚆 The "Trains Running on Time" Myth

Ah, the common trope! It's a fun thought, but the reality of a totalitarian economy might be different:

• Short-Term: In the initial, iron-fist phase of occupation, the regime might have enforced a strict schedule.

• Long-Term: Nazi Germany's focus on military spending, forced labour, and pervasive corruption actually led to severe logistical inefficiencies and resource shortages in their own infrastructure. The British rail network would likely be run-down, overworked, and prioritised solely for military transport, leading to poor service for the general public, despite the threat of severe punishment for any delay.

So yes, the overall result would be an island nation, economically subjugated, culturally repressed, and under a brutal, genocidal dictatorship, completely cut off from its traditional allies in the Commonwealth and the United States.

Beast of War (2025)

This is now starting to arrive on streaming services, AppleTV first. It's not very good. It's an Australian low-budget film about a bunch of Australian soldiers who are on a ship in 1942 which gets sunk by the Japanese.

A handful of them survive and end up on a make-shift raft drifting around in a foggy sea hoping for rescue - unlikely in this thick fog anytime soon. Then a Great White appears and starts to terrorise them on their floating platform.

The saving grace I guess for the film is that is is "based on actual events" so it's hard, given that, to criticise. But I will anyway! The make-shift raft they are on in is absolutely rock-steady most of the time in the water. I know the sea is supposed to be 'still' in the fog but there would certainly have been some movement, certainly when people move around on it!

The whole set was clearly that - in a studio with a very controlled, unrealistic environment which kinda made if just feel, well, not real, I'm afraid. What budget there was, was spent on the shark footage and special effects when various limbs and body parts ended up in the shark, guts, gore, blood and severed tissue. The highlight of the film really.

I'd not heard of the director or any of the actors, one or two of them who were not too bad. So given all the above, the film has to sink or swim(!) on the tension, atmosphere and suspense involved in their plight. Sadly, because of all the above, that was blown out of the water(!) too. 

Sorry filmmakers, but this was a sad and terrible story that really needed to be made with a bigger budget - and if it had, it could well have been great. Instead, inconsistencies left, right and centre, plot holes aplenty, irrational outcomes even to certain sub-events. So much so that, and I haven't researched, it makes you wonder how much of any of this is close to the truth.

Oh, and the first half-hour of the film was totally wasted with a boot-camp training exercise on land for the soldiers as a getting-to-know the characters, which just falls flat and is not needed. Start at about 20 minutes in when their ship is about to get bombed, is my advice. Anyway, see what you think if you have a subscription to AppleTV and fancy a go. And I haven't put you off!

Predator: Badlands (2025) - A Guest Review by Chad Dixon

After being at the helm of the superb Prey in 2022 and the well-received Predator: Killer of Killers earlier this year (an animated anthology feature film that I've not seen yet), Director Dan Trachtenberg has definitely re-energised this epic franchise. Now with Predator: Badlands, he gives us the ninth installment of the series that started back in 1987. But this time it's set off-Earth and with no human characters.

We start the story on the Predator's barren home planet of Yautja Prime where, shorter than average Yautja, Dek is a disappointment to the bloodline of his clan, so is constantly trying to seek the approval of his domineering father. While onboard his much taller elder brother Kwei's ship, he boasts to his sibling that he plans to travel to the notoriously dangerous planet of Genna and hunt the ferociously unkillable creature known as the Kalisk.

However when their father dramatically arrives on his speeder outside, he ignores Dek's protestations and unanimously decides that, as the runt of his family, death is the only honourable outcome for his youngest son - and orders his brother to do the dirty deed there and then. At the last second, Kwei disobeys the order and pushes his younger sibling back aboard the ship and locks him there. For his dissent, he pays the ultimate price as his own father executes him on the spot. However, the elder son's final act is to remotely send his spaceship, with grieving brother trapped aboard, to fly autonomously to the planet Genna.

Shortly after crash-landing in a lush forest and narrowly escaping the clutches of some giant carnivorous vines, Dek comes across the trapped top-half of a talkative synthetic humanoid who calls herself Thia (Elle Fanning) who, through her programming, immediately understands his language. He frees her and decides she may be a useful tool for his quest. We quickly discover that as well as Dek, the Kalisk is also being hunted by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation and Thia is just one of an extensive team of synthetics sent to this planet to acquire the beast for medical exploitation.

With the lore of both symbiotically entwined now, I have been a big fan of both the Predator and Alien franchises since day-one and this film certainly moves that symbiosis forward to the greatest degree yet - and doesn't disappoint as it packs in lots of the best things we love about those films. This one is basically an alien/android "Buddy" film. It's set in impressive alien landscapes with many fantastically-designed flora and fauna, immaculately rendered, which we discover to be virtually lethal to any outsiders.

Newcomer Dimitrius Koloamatangi, at 6' 3" tall, is definitely the shortest actor to take up a lead Predator role as Dek and he is in almost every scene. Speaking completely in his own language throughout (with nice bold subtitles) he still manages to convey lots of emotion, even through all that amazing makeup and prosthetics. Fanning is excellent as the relentlessly upbeat android who is desperate to be seen as more than just a Tool. Look out for a number of memorable homages to both franchises and although the action comes thick and fast, it's definitely not overdone in relation to the storyline. The 1 hour 47 minute runtime feels bang-on and the final scene sets it up nicely for a tenth film in the franchise.