Three Films Make A Post: They called it God's Country... until all hell broke loose!

Morgan (2016): Luke Scott’s film starts as a very pretty to look at SF film about a woman (Kate Mara) sent to a research facility to find out what has gone wrong with the artificial life form (Anya Taylor-Joy) they have built there, promising some exploration of what it means to be human. Alas, halfway through, the whole thing turns into a very standard AI running amok flick that’s still pretty to look at and competently directed but suffers from the banality of this approach after the film has promised something slightly more interesting.

The film wastes a fantastic cast (also including Rose Leslie, Michelle Yeoh, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Paul Giamatti, Toby Jones and more) by not giving them much to do with their underwritten characters and caps things with a so-called twist anyone in the market for SF films will have seen coming a mile away. It’s not a terrible film, mind you, but one that wastes so much potential it might as well be one.

Siren (2016): Speaking of banal, this spin-off of bro horror mainstay series VHS by Gregg Bishop is the kind of vaguely competent monster movie with a perfectly boring script (including about one somewhat interesting idea and of course not even doing something with it) that, while not being offensively bad, just isn’t worth the time invested into watching it. There are exactly one and a half relatively memorable scenes in here, the rest of this thing is the movie equivalent of a mediocre hamburger.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1994): On the other hand, there’s worse things for a film than being a burger, as is amply demonstrated by Kim Henkel’s abominable fourth and final film in the original TCM series, a film that starts out as a particularly dumb slasher movie, becomes an annoying camp fest that makes a mild-mannered boy like me think very bad thoughts about its director/writer, and finishes on whatever the hell that ending even is supposed to be, seeing as it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with the film that supposedly led up to it. If that’s the sort of thing that rings your bell, there are early career lead roles by Renée Zellweger (who is much better than the film she’s in deserves) and Matthew McConaughey (camping it up in what I can only read as an attempt at self defence) before they were famous. Apparently, both actors (or “their people”) tried to suppress this thing in a move I find even worse than the actual film.

Otherwise, don’t blame me if you watch this, for there’s really no sane reason to inflict this much pain on yourself.

The Last Witch Hunter (2015)

For killing the evil Witch Queen (Julie Engelbrecht) responsible for the Black Death, medieval flaming-sword wielding badass Kaulder (Vin Diesel) has been cursed with immortality.

He’s spent the seven hundred years or so since his Witch Queen killing days working as the Witch Police for a secret order of the Vatican tasked with the human side of operations responsible for protecting humanity from evil witches so that the rest of witch-dom and humanity can live in secret, yet peaceful co-existence. The script tells us that Kaulder is by now tired and lonely of his existence, though that sort of thing is unfortunately beyond Diesel’s thespian powers, him being Groot notwithstanding.

Anyway, things become more exciting for Kaulder when his handler, the 36th priest called Dolan (Michael Caine, who’s a Catholic priest guv’nor, right-o) is dying. What is supposedly a natural death turns out to have been murder. It’s all part of a dastardly plan to resurrect the Witch Queen, of course. Kaulder’s only help are Dolan #37 (Elijah Wood) and witch Chloe (Rose Leslie), and the cryptic hint of #36 to “remember your death”.
Breck Eisner’s urban fantasy film that starts promising to be an awesome bit of sword and sorcery got quite a drubbing from mainstream critics, who just love to kick perfectly fine popcorn cinema for the sin of being popcorn cinema. And this isn’t like one of the Michael Bay Transformers movies who deserve all the kicks they get for being just so damn badly made; this is a perfectly entertaining bit of silly nonsense, made for and succeeding in providing its audience with a bit over ninety minutes of dumb fun.

Sure, the film’s flaws are obvious: Vin Diesel is a wonderful physical presence, owns a really deep voice, and looks good in action scenes, but he’s as inexpressive an actor as they come whenever he’s supposed to express more than very basic emotions, so the whole “curse of immortality” angle falls flat, as does him convincing anyone to be several centuries old. The plot is rather on the silly side, with the film spending about half of its running time on Kaulder’s and Chloe’s adventures finding herbs for a memory potion, and the film’s big bads aren’t all that exciting either (I’d have hired British stage actresses and actors who’d go all Royal Shakespeare Company on being evil, instead of a hairy guy and a special effect).

However, these flaws aren’t terribly important for what The Last Witch Hunter is actually trying to do. Diesel is way more involved in kicking various supernatural behinds than being tragic, the film’s silliness is of an imaginative and fun kind that gets a lot of mileage out of throwing a bunch of urban fantasy clichés together, giving them a goth-y gloss, and calling it a movie, and the plot’s only an excuse to get Kaulder and Chloe to visit places like the witch model hive (all in truth disfigured in some form of course and just glamoured up the wazoo), the warlock who makes maggot cookies, and so on and so forth. I hate to go the old “if that sort of thing sounds enjoyable to you, you’ll certainly enjoy this” route, but honestly, if it does, you probably will.

You’ll also see some really cool moving fantasy airbrush art (because that’s what the production design goes for), watch a bunch of decent action sequences, see Michael Caine play a Catholic priest, and suffer through an ending that screams “we are trying to build a franchise here” as loudly as possible.

Honeymoon (2014)

Newlyweds Bea (Rose Leslie) and Paul (Harry Treadaway) are going on their honeymoon in the cabin in the woods of her family in Canady. Usually, you wouldn’t call the place isolated but outside the main season as the couple is going they might as well be in the real middle of nowhere.

Things start out well enough, but soon, a curious encounter with Bea’s local childhood love Will (Ben Huber) and his wife Annie (Hanna Brown) that might suggest anything from an abusive man to mental illness disturbs the happiness and the sex. The very next night, Bea disappears from the bedroom, and Paul finds her naked and in shock just standing in the woods.

Bea says she was just sleepwalking but Paul is increasingly disturbed by changes in her behaviour, peculiar holes in her memory, and a feeling of distance where once there was intense closeness. Paul isn’t exactly calmed by the fact Bea seems to have strange markings on her upper thighs she makes out to be insect bites nor by the way she very suddenly doesn’t want to have sex with him anymore. To say Paul reacts badly to the situation would be putting it mildly but then the situation will turn out to be one to which there isn’t any sane or healthy reaction in the handbook.

Leigh Janiak’s Honeymoon is quite an outstanding film, starting out with the so traditional it can induce eye-rolling set-up of two young pretty people in the proverbial cabin in the woods threatened by something mysterious but going into directions with it that are often as unexpected as they are clever.

There are a number of things Janiak does particularly well here. For most of the film’s running time, there’s a real sense of intimacy to the movie, an emphasis on this being a picture that gets as close as it possible can to its two protagonists who share an intimacy of their own that might even be too close, and that is then threatened by the strange thing actually going on I don’t want to spoil. There is, of course, an obvious metaphorical level to what happens, the film making a complex comment on togetherness and division in traditional couple structures, about intimacy and its borders. The threat our protagonists encounter is quite subtly and cleverly applied to make this comment. So cleverly applied, in fact, I don’t think you need to see understand this level of the film to enjoy it at all.

Because if you just ignore that level of meaning, you still have a fantastic and tense horror film that puts some very old ideas to new and subtle use, using various things I still don’t want to spoil from a perspective that makes them new and exciting again. Well, or new and disturbing, really, for the way into doom for Bea and Paul is quite painful to watch, seeing as it doesn’t hit your typical horror movie clichés but people so well-written, I don’t even know the jobs they have when they are not on honeymoon and still have the sort of sympathy for them you have for people more than for characters.

It’s quite painful to watch Paul’s and Bea’s deterioration, for – at least – two reasons: one, there’s really nothing at all insinuated about these two being punished for any transgressions, unless it’s for being genuinely happy; two, the performances of Leslie and Treadaway are excellent, selling the point when both of their characters act nothing at all like sane people anymore as well as they do the sweetness and light at the beginning – and in both cases, without overselling any of it.

Janiak’s direction is pretty fantastic too, eschewing all your standard “look I’m directing!” tricks, instead making a film that feels as focused and determined as it feels intimate, presenting even the slightly more outrageous final scenes of the film with a calm that gives them a true emotional effect. This subtle yet never squeamish approach to horror reminded me of the stories of Dennis Etchison more than of many other films, and is particularly beautiful to watch right now, when more films than not concentrate on jump scares, jump scares, and more jump scares.

I am really very excited about Janiak’s film, and I’m just as excited to see whatever she’ll do next.

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