The Fantastic Pavilion presents a weekly recap with the most relevant news about the world of genre cinema.
News
MUBI is bringing No Other Choice (2025) to cinemas in January, in countries like Turkey, Mexico, Chile, Australia, England, and Ireland (watch here its new trailer). Directed by Park Chan-wook and based on Donald E. Westlake’s novel The Ax, No Other Choice is about “a man (Lee Byung-hun)” who “gets laid off from the paper company he worked at for 25 years. Some time later and still jobless, he hits on a solution: to genuinely eliminate his competition.”
IFC unveiled the official poster for Charlie Polinger’s thriller The Plague (2025), ahead of its theatrical release in New York City and Los Angeles on Christmas Eve (December 24). The Plague was named Best Picture at Fantastic Fest.
Synopsis: “At an all-boys water polo camp, a socially anxious 12-year-old is pulled into a cruel tradition targeting an outcast with an illness they call The Plague. But as the lines between game and reality blur, he fears the joke might be hiding something real.”
The Strangers: Chapter 3 (2026) has gotten a teaser and a U.S. opening date: February 6. In the final movie of Renny Harlin’s horror trilogy, “Maya (Madelaine Petsch) faces the masked killers one last time in a brutal, full-circle reckoning of survival and revenge.”
Festivals
The 2025 Mórbido Mérida – a spin-off of the Mórbido Fest – is taking place from December 4 to 7 in Mérida, Mexico. Some of the genre flicks that will screen at the festival are: Can Evrenol’s Sayara (2024) and The Turkish Coffee Table (Cam Sehpa, 2025), Alex Noyer’s Love Is the Monster (2025), Heinrich Sabl’s Memory Hotel (2024), and Omar Rodríguez-López’s Luna Rosa: The Seventh Ascension of Atabey (Luna Rosa: La 7ª ascensión de Atabey, 2025).
Home video
Arrow Video announced their February releases and some of the highlights are 4K UHDs of Jang Joon-hwan’s Save the Green Planet! (2003) – which served as the basis for Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia (2025) –, Michael Crichton’s Westworld (1973), and Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues (1986).
Jess Franco’s cult classic Vampyros Lesbos (1971) is now available on 4K UHD, thanks to Severin Films. The two-disc set includes the film on Blu-ray as well, plus “a Jess Franco career appreciation by Sean Baker,” among other extras.
In memoriam
Udo Kier (1944-2025). Legendary actor Udo Kier passed away on Sunday, November 23; according to The Guardian, he “died in hospital in Palm Springs, California.” Kier starred in Paul Morrissey’s cult pictures Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Blood for Dracula (1974). He worked with titans like Dario Argento (Suspiria), John Carpenter (Cigarette Burns), Lars von Trier, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Gus Van Sant. In more recent years he collaborated with S. Craig Zahler (Brawl in Cell Block 99, Dragged Across Concrete) and appeared in such other movies as Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich (2018) Iron Sky: The Coming Race (2019), and Swan Song (2021).