Three Films Make A Post: Willie and Kris? You better duck!

Songwriter (1984): Given the very self-serious nature of much of the following body of work of Alan Rudolph, it’s easy to forget he was perfectly able to make this kind of loose music-based comedy – with genuinely effective moments of drama – with Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson playing fictionalized version of themselves who are sticking it to the music industry, while also making up for past mistakes and becoming better persons in the process. If you like Willie and Kris – and if you don’t, you might think about your movie watching choices – this is a pretty joyous affair, simply based on watching guys doing (and singing) what they do (and sing) best; and even one that’s not completely uncritical of the way soft machos like these two tend to treat women.

There’s also a pretty damn great outing by Lesley Ann Warren as possibly up and coming country star - who already has the mandatory alcohol problem – Gilda that’ll end in a very, very Nashville kind of way.

Madelines (2022): The final third of Jason Richard Miller’s indie time travel movie with a lot of murder (or is it suicide?), written by lead Brea Grant and Miller is a pretty great example of lo-tech weirdness, reminding me of nothing so much as weird fiction great Jeffrey Ford’s trips into science fiction – which is a rather big compliment. Alas, to get to the brilliant and effective part of the movie, you have to move through a script so full of holes, even I got annoyed by them. Essentially, to get where it wants to go, the film needs its characters to act and react like no human being ever actually would to basically everything that happens to them; it needs to pretend this married garage science couple knows nobody in the whole damn world but their financier; and so on and so forth.

I only made it through the early parts of the movie at all thanks to the typically charming performances by Grant, Perry Shen and Richard Riehle – which is a bit of a shame given how wonderful the final act is.

Perrier’s Bounty (2009): In Ian Fitzgibbon’s very dark Irish crime comedy, a series of unfortunate events (including a bit of self-defence killing) leads to an unlucky guy (Cillian Murphy), his neighbour, friend and crush (Jodie Whittaker), and the guy’s dead beat dad (Jim Broadbent) having to go on the run from a gangster (Brendan Gleeson), his cronies and various other ne'er-do-wells. This being an Irish comedy, there’s much violence, more drinking, a lot of existentialist philosophy (that’s much funnier than the French version of existentialism), and an ironic sense of the tragic. Most of it is very funny indeed, always interesting, and at times even quite moving. And it’s very difficult to find fault in a movie whose main villain finds his demise because he broke the rule of how to handle dogs as a movie character. Hint: you don’t shoot them, unless they are zombie dogs.

After Midnight (2019)

Abby (Brea Grant), the life and work partner of small town bar owner Hank (Jeremy Gardner, who also co-directs), suddenly disappears from their house, leaving behind a note that’s too vague for a goodbye note but also not exactly promising a quick return. Hank loses himself in memories of better times, when things between the couple were simple because they were young and very acutely in love, so problem fields we’ll learn about later like Abby’s hatred of small town life and Hank’s own troubles with change and making decisions about his life didn’t really come up.

His bout of depression isn’t the only thing haunting Hank right now, though, for ever since Abby went away, he has had nightly visits by some kind of creature that wants to get into his – as is traditional – middle-of-nowhere house and clearly wants to do him harm. Not surprisingly, nobody in town believes any of Hank’s wild tales about the creature, so he has to try to fight it off alone, increasingly losing his grip on his sanity while doing so. How that’s going to turn out if and when Abby should return, and what will all of this do to their relationship?

For the longest time, I wasn’t at all sure about Jeremy Gardner’s and Christian Stella’s horror and romance movie After Midnight, feeling rather sceptical that the leisurely pace would ever let the film arrive at anything amounting to a point, and not too keen on watching yet another guy in a movie having very much self-caused relationship troubles, with a monster that only seemed to be in there to be a somewhat strained metaphor. Slowly, though, I began to appreciate how well, and sometimes funnily, the film drew Hank and his world, how elegantly the directors already implicated all the things that would become Abby’s and Hank’s relationship troubles in Hank’s happy flashbacks, just without Hank and the audience noticing at the time.

Once Abby returns, the film very much proves that all of what came before did indeed have a point, with some wonderful dialogue scenes now talking about the difficulties of love and relationships once the endorphin-driven parts of it are over and the parts start that can be rather a lot like work, Grant and Gardner doing great jobs keeping this believable, lively and real. Here, the film isn’t making the classic mistake of making one of the two the asshole of the relationship, even though it is clearly Hank who has to change if he wants to continue with Abby, instead working on letting the audience understand where each one is coming from; very atypical for a film from the last couple of years, it’s not about judgement and who is in the wrong but about what kind of compromise is viable for these two to stay together.

After that, the film makes utterly lovely use of a standard romance trope in an awkward family dinner scene that had me smiling like a loon, adds the perfect jump scare, and ends in a way that makes it impossible not to realize that the early film’s lengths were indeed in there for a reason, slowly preparing the ground for the rest of the film and trusting in the audience to be patient and have a bit of trust.


In the end, After Midnight, turns out to be the best horror/romance combo since Benson and Moorhead’s Spring (another film that takes a bit of time preparing the viewer). And wouldn’t you know it, those guys produced this film, Benson also taking an acting turn as Abby’s somewhat asshat-ish sheriff brother. That’s the perfect company for what turns out to be a quietly excellent little movie.

In short: Sleep No More (2018)

Warning: I’m going to spoil the film’s single (good) idea!

After a research project to “cure sleep” with some magical drug ends with the death of one of its subjects via eye mutilation and suicide, the medical – or pharmaceutical, the script neither tells nor has probably thought about it – researcher responsible (Yasmine Aker) convinces her grad students (Brea Grant, Keli Price, Stephen Ellis, and Christine Dwyer) to continue the experiment on a long weekend. After all, once they have reached 200 hours without sleep, they will reach a state of lucidity and will be feted as heroes of humanity everywhere, right? Of course, everyone involved quickly develops horrible hallucination, and starts to see a foggy CGI monster, while also suffering from various other psychological problems you might imagine to occur with drug-induced sleep deprivation.

There is, by the way, no connection to L.T.C. Rolt here, if you were asking yourself that. I rather enjoyed director Phillip Guzman’s previous film, Dead Awake, and I sort of dig the sleep themed horror thing he has going on, but the film at hand is pretty atrocious. It’s not so much Guzman’s direction – though the decision to show a CGI monster this crappy quite this often, as well as how the tonal shifts in the acting present don’t do the film any favours either and are certainly in the purview of the director’s job – but rather a script that gets basically nothing right apart from the cool, old school fantastika idea of dream-eating monsters living in symbiotic relationship with humanity until a couple of idiots decide to “cure sleep”.

The characterisation is broad and empty where depth and detail are needed for the story to have any effect on its viewers, and the tone shifts between awkward comedy and supposedly deadly serious horror at a moment’s notice. The actors seem to have been left without any guidance, so only Aker – who doesn’t have to go through these shifts – and eternal pro Grant actually seem to have any kind of grip on their respective characters. The rest of the cast wobbles and stumbles through the series of disconnected moments that goes for a plot here. The film’s basic problem is the complete absence of actual definition in characters and world, which is rather a heavy lack in a film all about horror based on the psychology and perceptions of its characters.

For some reason, this is also set in the 80s, so these aren’t just unconvincing characters, but also ones dressed up in “period” costumes who look exactly like that – costumed.


That Sleep No More’s idea of how medical research works, what a control group is and what it is there for, and so on, and so forth, has little base in even the most cursory research made by the writers seems to be par for the course for this sort of thing; that most of its deviations from reality – which make Flatliners look scientific – aren’t even useful in building drama, adds insult to injury.

Dead Night (2017)

One spring break, the Pollack family make their way into one of those all too typical cabins in the snowy woods, taking their daughter Jessica’s (Sophie Dalah) best friend Becky (Elise Luthman), too. It’s not just your standard vacation, though, but rather mom Casey’s (Brea Grant) last attempt at saving her husband James (AJ Bowen) from a brain tumour. The cabin, you see, is supposedly built on magical healing stones right from the realm of woo woo. However, something magical is going to happen when James finds an unconscious woman in the woods who is going by the improbable moniker of Leslie Bison (Barbara Crampton). Alas, it’s the kind of magic that leads to zombie families and axe massacres.

Speaking of axe massacre, while the increasingly demented plot unfolds, the film from time to time cuts into what a mysterious person or thing watches on a tower of TVs stacked up in the middle of the woods: an episode of a sensationalist true crime TV show about Casey’s axe-murder of her whole family. Well, and a TV spot for Leslie Bison’s run for Ohio governor.

That true crime TV show is one of the best parts of Brad Baruh’s pretty bizarre and terribly fun little horror film. It hits exactly the right tone with its over-earnest, sleazy presenter, the kitschy and melodramatic recreations, and the generally sanctimonious tone that comes with the business of making a quick buck out of terrible shit that has happened to people, without a care for boring things like truth, doubt, and responsibility. This part of the film is going to be even more entertaining than it already is once Dead Night comes around to telling the audience who watches it, when, and why, coming up with an answer that makes no logical sense (it’s not supposed to, mind you), the movie staring at its audience as if daring it to call it a damn liar. It’s pretty fantastic.

Also rather wonderful are Dead Night’s practical gore effects, a series of nicely done and excellently grotesque disfigurements that doesn’t really stop once the film has gotten going. As a frequent horror viewer, I did of course know where all of this was going in broad strokes very early on, but the film has a tendency to play with and audiences expectations at least a bit, coming up with improbable ideas and illogical little twists that certainly aren’t common.

That’s not the sort of thing everyone will enjoy, so if you need the plan of a movie’s villains to make much sense, even if it is only a ritualistic one, or things in a film to happen somewhat akin to the way things happen in the real world, you won’t find much joy here. In fact, Dead Night goes out of its way to present the violent supernatural as we know and love it from horror movies of the late 80s and the 90s as something that is at its core not logical and will therefore not act in manners that completely make sense. Or at least, that’s how its treatment seems to.


If you’re like me and go for stuff like this, you just might have a wonderful time, not only with the gory and strange bits but also some shots of wonderful strangeness, be it the TVs in the woods or Crampton’s behaviour in the cabin before the minor killing spree starts, including a fantastic bit of passive aggressive milk drinking. That last part again demonstrates how much of a treasure Crampton as a character actress specialised in all sorts of creepy, disturbed, or disturbing women has become in her return to horror.

Dead Awake (2016)

Having gone through various drug and related mental issues, Kate Bowman (Jocelin Donahue) seems to have come to grips with life again. Or rather, she would have, if not for the onset of a severe case of sleep paralysis. Kate experiences it every night, with the added bonus of hallucinations (or are they?) of a standard hag-style apparition crawling onto her chest to suffocate her. Which, one night, she indeed does, supposedly from an asthma attack; too bad she didn’t suffer from asthma. Her twin sister Beth (also Jocelin Donahue) feels there’s something wrong with what happened to Kate beyond the tragedy of an early death. For one, she had a dream of her sister being suffocated in her sleep at the exact moment when that actually happened.

Then, Beth and some of her sister’s friends begin to suffer from sleep paralysis with the exact same non-hallucinations, too, so it becomes rather difficult for anyone not to believe there’s something more supernatural going on than the (not terribly) scientific explanations Kate’s former physician, Dr. Sykes (Lori Petty) delivers. As a matter of fact, without anyone else knowing, Kate had been seeking help from disgraced sleep scientist Dr. Hassan Davies (Jesse Borrego). Davies is convinced that there’s a long-standing epidemic of people actually dying of sleep paralysis, and he’s also convinced that what they see in their hallucinations is a real entity trying to kill them. Beth and Kate’s boyfriend Evan (Jesse Bradford) – who will also suffer from his own bit of magic sleep paralysis soon – just might be better off following that angle, if they want to survive.

Dead Awake is a bit of a mixed bag: the script by Jeffrey Reddick (creator of the original concept and story of Final Destination, among other things) contains some wonderful ideas, and interesting characters but the pacing seems off, sequences of tension are followed by scenes that seem to have no actual reason to be in the movie at all, and the supernatural threat stays vague rather than ambiguous. Phillip Guzman’s direction certainly doesn’t help the viewer over the script bumps. While there’s certainly nothing terribly wrong with it, the scenes of horror are rather on the generic side, only quite late in the game really using concepts of dream and sleep in any interesting ways and even then not doing much that’s visually distinguished or moody. Visually, it’s a pretty bland film, dominated by shots and set-ups that certainly do their basic jobs in the plot well enough but only seldom create a world for the audience to believe in or do much for the creepiness factor.

There’s good stuff in here too: Jocelin Donahue is good as Beth and Kate) as I by now expect her to be. Dead Awake gives her a character arc from guilt to acceptance to anger (that’s sometimes the more productive sequence) to hag-butt kicking that feels perfectly appropriate and perfectly human, and is certainly one of the real successes of the film. I also liked quite a few of the small clever details: for example how exactly the belief in the supernatural threat is what kills its victims yet also – of course – the prerequisite to beat it; or how awkward and half-crazed Davies is as what could be the film’s Van Helsing figure without turning him into a joke. The finale is also rather effective when it brings an internal struggle to life.


So, while I don’t think Dead Awake is terribly successful as a whole, I did find enough of interest in it to make it worth watching. At the very least, it tries its damndest to do something interesting. And hey, that’s certainly more than I’d say about The Conjuring.

Beyond the Gates (2016)

Gordon (Graham Skipper) returns to his hometown because his father has disappeared. It’s not the first time the alcoholic has gone AWOL, but this time, it seems to have stuck.

So Gordon has to reunite with his brother John (Chase Williamson), who stayed behind when Gordon left town and their father for good, to pack up their father’s house and the obsolete video store he owned. Both brothers have obviously suffered from abuse by their dear dad. As a consequence John as a young-ish man has turned into the sort of charming fuck-up who might soon replace the “charming” with criminal, dead, or drunk, and Gordon has difficulties to not turn into his father, fighting alcoholism and a tendency to violent outbursts. His girlfriend Margot (Brea Grant) is coming to help sort through dad’s baggage too – after all, that’s what she’s been doing for Gordon for some time now, it seems.

Going through their father’s old office, John and Gordon find that most 80s of things – a VCR board game. There’s something strange going on with the game, though: the somewhat sinister woman (Barbara Crampton) on the game’s video tape tells the brothers the game is the only way to save their father’s soul, and might react to what’s going on around it, which is disquieting enough, but soon, board game and reality start to mix in sometimes bloody ways, turning the lives of the brothers and Margot into a fight for their life, limb and perhaps their very souls.

Jackson Stewart’s Beyond the Door is a lovely bit of indie horror cinema, paying homage to the aesthetics of certain parts of 80s horror like a lot of films do these days, yet without falling into the trap of becoming too much of a copy of the style. Well, I’m not sure the film could actually afford to become one – this is after all a film where stepping into a different dimension happens via the movie magic of blue and purple lighting and some dry ice fog – but it is clear that Stewart knows what he’s doing in looks and tone.

I imagine some viewers will be frustrated by the film’s slow beginning and the rather budget conscious way it builds up to its climax, but I found myself charmed by the character interactions between the leads, appreciated how lacking in melodrama the treatment of the brothers’ backstories was, and generally found myself interested in these characters as people to observe for a movie’s length. Stewart is a pleasantly economic director of these character interactions, never letting things become too concise but also not falling into the trap of confusing the creation of believable people with long, rambling and pointless dialogue scenes. The film’s central metaphor on the other hand is as on the nose as they get, but that works out fine in a film taking its time for its characters as this one does.


Stewart treats the supernatural elements (Jumanji light – but with gore?) equally well, obviously putting all of his tiny budget on screen in a way that mostly works fine, demonstrates imagination and never descends into smugness. There’s fan enthusiasm even for the hokier parts of the horror genre that still doesn’t get in the way of the film’s own story, some pleasant macabre details, a smidgen of wonderfully gloopy gore, and Barbara Crampton glorying in her new role as queen of indie horror character actresses with some classy, controlled scenery chewing. Everything going on is rather small scale, of course, yet Stewart works so well with what he’s got, I enjoyed Beyond the Gates thoroughly, with a pleased grin pasted on my cynical old mug for much of its running time.

Icy May (& SyFy vs. The Mynd): Ice Road Terror (2011)

We agents of M.O.S.S. defy your oppressive assumptions about seasons in the northern hemisphere. To prove you (yes you!) wrong, May will be all about ice, snow and everything cold for us. Everything is better in winter, after all. What better way for me to begin this exciting venture than by taking a look at those Alaskan heroes, ice road truckers?

Little do Alaskan ice road truckers and best buddies Jack (Ty Olsson) and Neil (Dylan Neal) expect their final haul of the season before the ice road is melting to be quite as dangerous. Sure, having one of two trucks full of explosives, and environmental scientist Rachel (Brea Grant) as part of their load while the road they're driving on is already turning to slush sure sounds interesting and dangerous enough, but it's also - except for the scientist - all in a normal day's work for the two guys.

However, things that happen at the site our heroes are driving to are a bit out of the ordinary. I do at least assume it's not an every day occurrence up in the icy north for illegal blasting operations to free a living and very hungry specimen of a giant lizard from Inuit legend that may or may not belong to the dinosaur species called "Predator X" (environmental scientists know just about everything). The lizard proceeds to eat everyone it finds (apart from two characters needed for exposition to our heroes, obviously) Soon enough, our protagonist trio find themselves in a race against the ill-mannered CGI beast, the weather, and everything else the script can come up with.

It's not difficult to imagine the thought processes that led SyFy Channel executives to this one. Everyone, they must have thought, loves ice road truckers (a phenomenon I only ever realized is a phenomenon thanks to the movie) and everyone likes Wages of Fear, so filming a variation of the movie taking place in Alaska (or "British Columbia", as we call it) and adding an evil giant lizard to it really must have been a no-brainer. And honestly, they weren't wrong about this one.

As TV veteran (a guy with particularly many films with the word "Christmas" in their title, so at the very least an expert in filming the best white thing I know, snow) director Terry Ingram films it, Ice Road Terror is a perfectly great little movie based on a perfect low budget movie idea. Ingram doesn't linger on the weaknesses - see all my reviews of all SyFy movies ever - of his CGI monster too much, and stages a few surprisingly dynamic monster attack and truck stunt scenes that are really rather on the exciting - if physically dubious - side.

After about half of the movie is through, Ice Road Terror turns into a more typical "characters hole up in a hut and try to keep the monster out" film, which may sound a bit disappointing but is actually a good decision. There is, after all, only so much cheap action you can stage with two trucks, ice, snow, and a giant CGI lizard before things start to get boring and repetitive. The change of pace also gives the movie space to include Michael "Colonel Tigh" Hogan and Merrilyn Gann in rather delightful performances as owners of the only truck stop in in ice road county, which helps with characterization as well as providing opportunity for a smidgen of gore.

When Ice Road Terror doesn't spend its time on the lizard action - and this is a movie going out of its way to include as much as possible of said lizard action - it does the expected clichéd character work in a perfectly likeable manner, assisted by a cast full of perfectly likeable actors being, well, perfectly likeable.

Surely, that's more than anyone can expect from a movie that marries Wages of Fear, the working class romanticism of idealized trucker-dom, and a frigging giant lizard.

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