Sorry, Unfriended: Benedict CumberGrinch is the creepiest thing in today's trailer happy hour
Welcome back to Trailer Happy Hour, where life—by which we mean promotional videos released by film and television studios in order to promote their upcoming projects—finds a way. Today we’ve got men brainwashing wolves, dads pitching CNN shows for their daughters, and the natural consequences of playing Card Against Humanity with strangers, so let’s dive in.
First up: A just-released trailer for the upcoming sequel to the surprisingly great laptop horror film Unfriended. As its name implies, though, the threat in Dark Web—out July 20—has less to do with malevolent ghosts, and more with the shadowy forces of the internet, coercing some poor doomed teenagers into playing games for their amusement. Our own Katie Rife didn’t love the film, giving it a C+ when she saw it earlier this year at the Overlook Film Festival. But she did note that it left her “unsettled for a solid half hour afterwards,” for what that’s worth.
But evil web developers don’t have anything, fear-wise, on CGI recreations of classic kids’ characters like The Grinch. To be fair, the Illumination-produced remake of the Dr. Seuss favorite looks gorgeous enough—and considerate enough to reassure you that this Grinch has a tragic backstory to explain away all his evil deeds—but there’s just something unsettling about hearing Benedict Cumberbatch’s American-ish accent come out of the scrawny green devil. We’ll have time to get used to it, though, since The Grinch won’t be out until November 9. (Just in time for the expanded holiday season its “hero” so off-puttingly bemoans.)
Moving away from horror and into the world of comedy, we’ve also got a trailer for W. Kamau Bell’s new Netflix special, Private School Negro. Out June 26, Bell’s new hour sounds like it sits somewhere between family material and the political work he’s best known for, riffing on kale, Trump, and why his daughter should have a CNN show instead of him.
Finally, we’ve got the trailer for Alpha, a caveman adventure which is either a heartwarming tale of man finding his best friend, or yet another horror movie, this time about humanity brainwashing a noble, dangerous species into being our loyal, unthinking pets. (As dog lovers, we’ll go with the former, but still, it’s kind of spooky from the wolves’ point of view.) Alpha hits theaters on August 17.