This Is Not a Test (2026)

Hated it. Got less than 2/3rds of the way through and fast forwarded. I wanted to bail on it immediately and should have.

Love me some shutting off a bad movie, so will probably check this out for the dopamine hit when I press X.

This was horrible. I’d rather rewatch The Strangers Trilogy.

Not even worth the bandwidth to download it.

I didn't realize it was adopted from a book until the opening credits.

This starts out doing something that I've really got no time for - single dad that's an abusive piece of shit. Do those people exist? They sure do and fuck them but in current year fem-coded fiction they've become they've become an easy way of giving our protagonist angst. We see it here in it's shittiest iteration. In the real world wives initiate the majority of divorces. They get custody almost every single time along with child support, the house, most of the assets, alimony, etc. Just having a deadbeat dad doesn't do enough for the story so we get incredibly contrived massive outlier circumstances. Mom left. Sister left. The main character is trapped but of course she loves her mother. Her sister was her best friend. They completely abandoned her to get physically and emotionally abused by a monster but we're going to do our absolute best to ignore that.

Last year I read the novelization for Alien: Isolation. Half of that book was made up of flashbacks of Amanda Ripley's horrible home life with her total useless fuck up of a father. It got downright Dickensian at times trying to demonstrate to the reader how terrible he was. The amount of page space spent on Amanda considering that her mother left her with this clown or even chose to be in a relationship with him in the first place approaches zero. Amanda's mother Ripley is awesome, loved unconditionally and Amanda will do anything to find out what happened to her. Dad's a lazy drunk that can't be counted on to do something as simple as sign a permission slip for a field trip. I did not play the video game but looking at a synopsis I don't think of any this was in it. The Black Phone had a drunk and verbally abusive single father. It was not a plot point of the short story.