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That Won’t Break the Bank 💸

Published
February 12, 2026
12:05 AM PST

By Robert Scucci
| Published 1 second ago

Have you ever woken up the day after a crazy night out with little recollection of what happened the night before, how you got home, or who you interacted with? This is a safe place. It’s okay to admit that we’ve all been irresponsible at one point or another, and this is a pretty common story. You check your bank account and cringe at how much the surge-priced Uber ride home cost, then feel physically sick when you realize that despite your inebriated state you still ordered pizza for delivery. The same pizza that’s now sitting at your front door, untouched and uneaten.

While what I’m describing sounds like a college student blacking out after going a little too hard on a bar crawl, it’s not far off from what happens in 2025’s Ash, a sci-fi horror thriller centered on a disoriented protagonist who wakes up with no memory of what happened to her crew, why they’re all dead and she’s not, or what she did to end up in this situation. In this case, though, there was no party. Instead, there’s a mind-controlling alien infection that pushes its hosts toward violence. The anxiety is exactly the same, though. She was living her life, blacked out, woke up, and now has to deal with the consequences of whatever the hell happened at her station.

The Worst Kind Of Blackout

Ash does an excellent job forcing Riya’s (Eiza Gonzalez) anxiety onto the audience through her fractured memories and disoriented state as she wakes up to discover that everyone aboard her ship is dead. She doesn’t know who killed her crew, but she has flashes of violent confrontations that feel like out-of-body experiences. She digs through ship logs and crew notes, trying to piece together a chain of events that makes sense, but there’s simply too much missing information for her to form a coherent narrative.

When Riya is greeted by Brion (Aaron Paul), things begin to fall into place, at least on the surface. Brion explains that they’re stationed on a mysterious, Earth-like planet known as K.O.I-442, nicknamed Ash, and that the crew succumbed to a deadly alien substance that compromised the mission by overriding their behavior. Brion claims he observed the chaos from a distance, but now needs to understand exactly what Riya saw or did in order to reconstruct the sequence of events that led to this outcome.

Brion knows the crew died violently, but still has no clear explanation for how Adhi (Iko Uwais), Kevin (Beulah Koale), Catherine Clarke (Kate Elliott), and Shawn Davis (Flying Lotus) met their bloody ends. Brain scans and memory tests slowly suggest that Riya herself is responsible for the carnage, though the evidence points toward defensive actions rather than premeditated violence. The crew had been infected, and the infection makes its hosts unpredictable and aggressive.

As more memories resurface in Ash, Riya grows increasingly unsure whether Brion’s version of events is reliable. She becomes fixated on the fact that he only arrives after everyone else is already dead, which raises uncomfortable questions about his timing and motives. Unsure whether she can trust Brion or even her own fractured mind, Riya is left to piece together the previous days on her own, spiraling further as the details refuse to lock into place.

Low-Budget Sci-Fi Horror Done Right

Though the exact financials are not widely available, Ash has been reported to have been produced on a modest budget of around $500,000, and that restraint works in its favor. The film tells a harrowing, isolated story with very few locations, effectively functioning as a bottle movie set in deep space. Limited environments, flashing warning lights, and malfunctioning computer systems do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to generating tension and dread as Riya struggles to understand how her entire crew was wiped out.

Eiza Gonzalez and Aaron Paul elevate the premise through their effortlessly uneasy on-screen chemistry. They’re forced to operate as allies even though Riya has every reason to be suspicious of Brion, the only other person she can interact with. Communications are down, the station is compromised, oxygen is running low, and Brion seems far more interested in sedating her and running tests than in finding a clear escape plan. That imbalance keeps the tension simmering in every shared scene.

The violence in Ash is sparse but effective. Most of the bloodshed appears in fleeting fragments through Riya’s resurfacing memories, letting the audience imagine what happened rather than laying it all out explicitly. It’s a smart low-budget decision. You don’t need to show the monster in full until it’s absolutely necessary, and that restraint keeps the illusion intact.

Ash follows familiar genre rhythms seen in films like Alien and Underwater, but it never feels like a carbon copy. Its claustrophobic dread comes from uncertainty rather than constant action, forcing the viewer to sit with unanswered questions. As Riya slowly reconstructs the truth behind her situation, you’re left to determine what actually happened, who can be trusted, and whether there’s even a viable way home once the dust settles.

Ash is currently streaming on Hulu.

By Joshua Tyler
| Updated 1 minute ago

Roger Avary is a well-known Hollywood producer and director who got his start co-writing Pulp Fiction with Quentin Tarantino. He now co-hosts Tarantino’s film podcast, The Video Archives, but in addition to all of that, he’s also a major Star Trek fan.

How big a fan is he? Avary claims his family watches two or three Star Trek episodes nearly every day. He loves Star Trek so much that he offered to work on it, basically for free, when current Trek overlord Alex Kurtzman began launching new Star Trek television shows in the 2010s. What Avary learned after meeting with Kurtzman is the nightmare scenario every Trekkie has always suspected.

Avary told his story this week on The Joe Rogan Experience, saying of Alex Kurtzman, “I went in and met with the guy, I was like, I will write for scale. I will write on your new show. I just want to be part of it.”

If the writer of Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, Pulp Fiction, and Beowulf wants to work on your project for nothing, that would seem like a win. There was one problem, though: Roger Avary isn’t just an acclaimed writer; he’s also a huge Star Trek fan.

Kurtzman’s response was a hard no, and as Avary explains it, “He didn’t want anybody who had any kind of fondness for the original show. He wanted to do something new and create something new.”

Roger Avary has worked in Hollywood and helped write and direct some of the biggest, most successful movies of all time. Like his friend Tarantino, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of film and television. Because of that keen awareness of what’s good and what isn’t, he’s destroyed by what’s come of Star Trek in the wake of Kurtzman’s decisions.

Or as Avary put it: “This dweeb Alex Kurtzman just comes along and s**ts all over everything… Starfleet Academy is an abomination. I could not get through three episodes of Discovery. It’s just awful, awful storytelling… Picard was terrible.”

Roger Avary says he believes all film and television is, in some form, propaganda. Or as we sometimes phrase it on this site, screenwashing. The best movies, he suggests, are those that are personal propaganda in which a filmmaker has something personal or interesting he wants to say and delivers that message to the audience.

However, according to Avary, Alex Kurtzman’s Star Trek is corporate propaganda. Corporate propaganda is a form of screenwashing designed to deliver a pre-programmed message assigned by your overlords. Avary says of modern Star Trek, “They’re more interested in the corporate propaganda than they are any kind of personal propaganda.“

HGTV Star Nicole Curtis
I’m Sorry I Blurted The N-Word
… Comeback Canned

Published
February 11, 2026
4:52 PM PST
|
Updated
February 11, 2026
5:53 PM PST

As the hunt for Nancy Guthrie continues, several experts are weighing in on the importance of proof of life in her case.

“Ransom is often not paid without proof of life because paying without verification risks funding a crime with no chance of recovery,” Dan Donovan, the Founder and Managing Partner of Stratoscope Holdings, a security and risk management firm, exclusively tells Us Weekly. “Proof of life is critical: it confirms the victim is alive, validates that the communicators control the victim, and helps assess credibility and intent.”

Retired FBI agent Scott Curtis agrees and shares a warning about the alleged ransom threat Nancy’s loved ones — including her daughters, Today cohost Savannah Guthrie and Annie Guthrie, and son Camron Guthrie — received. (The 84-year-old’s alleged abductor or abductors demanded a reported $6 million by 5 p.m. MST by February 9).

“I believe they haven’t received proof of life. You’re not going to make a ransom payment unless you have proof of life because once that payment goes [through], you will never hear from those kidnappers again, right?” Curtis tells Us. “So you want proof. You want some kind of guarantee.”

He also warns that there is no technical guarantee with advanced technology.

“There still could be some doubt in that proof of life, especially in this AI generated world we’re living in now,” Curtis cautions. “It couldn’t be a still photograph. It would have to be a video with audio with some definitive date stamp on there.”

Former CIA officer and FBI special agent Tracey Walder stresses that it’s the Guthrie family’s decision to pay a ransom or not. (Multiple notes have been sent to media outlets, claiming to be Nancy’s kidnapper and asking for money, including Bitcoin. The FBI has not yet confirmed to the public if any of the ransom notes are real).

“I don’t think they ever received a picture or anything like that, but maybe in the second note it had (details of) something that may have happened to her or not happened to her,” Walder says. “Whether or not to pay that decision lies solely with the family, not the FBI.”

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Related: Why Nancy Guthrie’s Roof Camera Is ‘One of the Most Important Clues’: Expert

The camera discovered on Nancy Guthrie’s roof could be a crucial piece to her kidnapping investigation, according to an expert. “That’s not a throwaway detail — it’s potentially one of the most important clues,” Dan Donovan, the founder and managing partner of Stratoscope Holdings, a security and risk management firm, exclusively tells Us Weekly. As […]

She also sympathizes with the struggle Savannah, 54, and her siblings face.

“We don’t know what we would do in that situation. We may say, ‘Oh I am not paying $6 million without proof of life,’ but if it was your 84-year-old mother, and you had that money, then maybe you would.”

On February 10, the FBI released images and video from Nancy’s doorbell camera, showing a masked man armed with what appeared to be a gun outside her front door in Tucson, Arizona, on the night she disappeared.

The individual wore a backpack and gloves as they attempted to cover the camera with their hand and plants from the front yard.

Related: Security Expert Breaks Down Next Steps in Search for Savannah Guthrie’s Mom

Security expert Dan Donovan is weighing in on possible next steps as the search for Savannah Guthrie’s mom, Nancy Guthrie, continues. “The 5 p.m. deadline isn’t the end of the clock — it’s the start of the most dangerous window,” Donovan, founder and managing partner of security and risk management firm Stratoscope Holdings, exclusively told […]

Later that same day, a man from the neighboring town of Rio Rico was detained and questioned in connection with the disappearance of Nancy. He was subsequently released and has maintained his innocence.

Savannah has shared several emotional messages since her mother’s disappearance on February 1.

“We believe she is still alive. Bring her home,” she wrote via Instagram on Tuesday after the images of the masked man were released. “Anyone with information, please contact 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324) or the Pima County Sheriff’s Department 520-351-4900.”

Christine Quinn
Eyed for Possible ‘Selling Sunset’ Season 10 Return

Published
February 11, 2026
5:30 PM PST

A Pilot Designed for Focus

World-Building Through Iteration

Designed for Vertical Viewing

A Production Model Without Physical Production

Where Three Mediums Converge