This March, if you have been following along on our Instagram, we have been doing a March Movie Madness bracket. Our criteria here are not based on which are the “better” movies but which are better at selling the madness and / or giving you the feeling that you are losing it.

We had 32 movies we started from. In the first round, we lost 16 of them. In round 2, the competition heated up and we lost a couple of surprises. Let’s look a bit more at who we lost:

• The depraved “artist” of House that Jack Built lost to mother!.

• Melancholia, with its stunningly accurate portrayal of depression, lost out to Black Swan’s study of the line between genius and madness.

• Fight Club’s inner struggle lost to The Shining, a favorite to win it all.

• Evil Dead is the better movie but Smile 2 won for driving us mad.

• Requiem for a Dream dropped to the now Oscar-winning Substance

• Dark City couldn’t compete with the unrelenting Mad God.

• Lovecraftian vibes battled as The Endless dropped to The Lighthouse.

• Finally, Cage took down Cruise as Vanilla Sky dropped to Mandy.

This gets us to our Elite Eight. But let’s get this down to our Final Four we will discuss on the podcast. First up:

• mother! vs Black Swan. In this match up, mother! gives us a great rollercoaster of a nightmare but Black Swan ultimately wins out with with its dream-like blending of reality and madness.

• The Shining vs Smile 2. Smile 2 puts up a good fight with its unreliable narrator but ultimately, The Shining’s Jack’s madness affecting both himself and the audience is hard to top.

• The Substance vs Mad God. If you want to peer into the mind of a madman, watch the Mad God. However, The Substance wins out for dragging us along on someone’s path to detachment from reality.

• The Lighthouse vs Mandy. as a character study of two men pushing each other to the brink and beyond vs one man’s journey for revenge. Madness wins as The Lighthouse takes this battle.

We are down to Black Swan vs The Shining and The Substance vs The Lighthouse. To see who wins, check out this month’s podcast! 

2024 - R - 8/10 - A solid follow up and another creepy trip.

I was pleasantly surprised by the first Smile. Stop reading here if you don’t want spoilers, I warned you. The first Smile has a great “unreliable narrator” twist to it as the protagonist loses her mind and we go with her. This movie doubles down on that bit and pays off in a lot of the same ways. The one thing that I will knock here is that it feels like a remake of its predecessor with a larger budget, without pushing the lore or larger story much further. That is a nitpick though as this film delivers again on this premise.

• V/H/S Beyond - R - 10.04 - Often hit or miss but consistently entertaining, we’re ready for another installment. HAIL RAATMA!

• Terrifier 3 - R - 10.11 - Horror movies made to give horror movie fans that “pit of the stomach” feeling. Not recommended for humans, don’t blame us if you see it and it scars you for life.

• Megalopolis - R - 09.27 - We didn’t catch this in theaters but we gotta know how weird this is. 

• Smile 2 - R - 10.18 - The first Smile was surprisingly good and had a great third act, hoping this lives up to it.

• Nosferatu - R - 12.25 - Never too soon to get hype for an Eggers (Witch, Lighthouse) movie.