Three Films Make A Post: If your skin doesn't crawl, it's on too tight!

He’s Out There (2018): I’m not usually someone beating movies with the morality club, but when a film like Quinn Lasher’s He’s Out There comes around and mostly wants to base its suspense on various “children in danger” tropes, and never uses this as anything but an intensely cheap way to try and get to its audience, it really deserves to be clubbed with it. I’m not even against films exploiting the automatic sympathy most audiences will have for children, but there really needs to be a reason to use this particular element as enthusiastically as this thing does. Otherwise, it’s just a cheap and unpleasant evening without much of a point. Apart from decent lead performances by Yvonne Strahoski and the kid actresses Anna and Abigail Pniowsky, there’s little else to recommend the film – it certainly has one of the uglier colour schemes I’ve seen in quite some time, and a script that’s not just heavy on the child exploitation angle but also on all grown-ups acting exclusively like “it’s in the script” horror movie characters.

Powwow Highway (1989): Jonathan Wacks’s (UK produced!) film about two Cheyenne (A Martinez and Gary Farmer) going on a road trip to get the sister of one of them out of custody is a bit of a mixed bag. Shot and told in a very typical late 80s indie style, it fluctuates between a somewhat abstracted (the director certainly isn’t a Native American) anger about the way the US were still treating people they’d beaten and betrayed again and again, some very generic odd couple friendship stuff, and moments that actually remind more of Burt Reynolds movies than anything else (only the characters’ car is crap). It’s not a terribly coherent and concise film, even as road movies go, losing any prospect of actually thinking any of its potential themes through early on and mostly getting by on Wacks’s generally solid filmmaking and the performances of Martinez and Farmer. The film also doesn’t seem to want to face the fact that nothing its characters do in the end will change anything about them or their lives at all, badly selling empty gestures as something profound.

Welcome the Stranger (2018): Finishing up this trio is this one directed by Justin Kelly. A sister (Abbey Lee) suddenly appears at the house of her brother (Caleb Landry Jones) whom she hasn’t seen for ages. Incestuous tension rises and both siblings are plagued by visions and dreams. Some time, the brother’s girlfriend (Riley Keough) appears, though she might be a figment of his imagination, or the projection of something; or the sister might try to bring him to share her own delusions. Apparently, closeness between siblings isn’t what it’s generally made out to be.


The film is obviously influenced by David Lynch, but there’s also more than just a suggestion of Ingmar Bergman in his least realistic mode. However, unlike with Lynch, the film’s various strangenesses never add up to a feeling of real disquiet, and where Bergman’s use of symbolism and the weird is incisive and sharp yet still ambiguous, Kelly’s film never really dives that deep.

In short: I Frankenstein (2014)

I can certainly see the attraction of trying to adapt classic horror creatures like Frankenstein’s creation into the language of the modern superhero blockbuster. Unfortunately, to do this successfully, you might want to put some actual work in, or you’ll end up like this stinker directed and written by Stuart Beattie (who has done some perfectly okay scripts in his time), a film that is indifferently stitched together from clichés (probably brought to life by lightning) without any care or thought of how to make them hang together so that they amount to anything like an actual narrative. The pacing’s completely off, too, so I, Frankenstein jumps awkwardly through exposition spanning years of background, completely forgetting to provide the audience with any reason to care for the fate of the perpetually growly-voiced monster with its one facial expression portrayed by Aaron Eckhart’s body while his mind was elsewhere. I am, by the way, also not a fan of the contemporary habit of making a guy literally sewn together out from a bunch of random body parts not look ugly (see also Penny Dreadful which unlike this turkey makes up for this failing by being pretty damn great in most other respects). It doesn’t help the script’s case any that the whole set-up of a secret war between demons and gargoyles (don’t ask me, I didn’t write this nonsense) carries little dramatic weight.

Of course, this is a film that seems to think that dramatic weight comes automatically as long as the ultra-generic music swells whenever the audience is supposed to feel something; producing that weight through writing, acting, or really anything visible on screen doesn’t seem to touch the film’s mind.

However, even writing this bad could still hold up as the base of a big dumb action movie, if only its action sequences were any good. Yet neither the set pieces nor their execution are of any interest at all; the film also clearly does not have a single clue about how to use CGI properly – but then, why should it be better at that than at anything else it does?


The rest of the affair is dismal, disinterested and blank, with a bunch of theoretically capable actors phoning in their work so that there’s not even much of the joy of outrageous overacting to be had, production design and camera work that’s there and doesn’t look cheap but also doesn’t do anything interesting, and so on, and so forth.