Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

APRIL 29, 2025

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (ADVANCED SCREENING)

When a franchise takes a considerable amount of time off, the results are often lacking; the initial excitement for a new entry tends to quickly fade as the runtime proceeds. Friday the 13th was at its best when they were just cranking them out, and it took THREE attempts at reviving Saw for them to come up with something that excited the fans as much as the once-annual entries managed. But no one told the makers of Final Destination: Bloodlines, which comes a whopping 14 years after the 5th film and is every bit as good as that one - possibly even better.

The subtitle isn’t just the usual “Let’s avoid numbers so we can get newcomers” gimmick, I’m happy to report (spoilers for the basic plot ahead!*). As opposed to the standard “someone has a premonition, saves a half dozen or so people, and then they proceed to die anyway” setup, this time around we open in the 1960s, with the opening of a skyview restaurant (between this and Drop, these things are having a cinematic moment!). The usual thing happens: we focus on a single person (Iris, played by Brec Bassinger) who watches as everyone around her begins to die in spectacular ways after a disaster, only for her to wake up after being killed herself, seeing it’s all a vision. But it’s not the girl in the sequence that wakes up! Turns out it’s her granddaughter, Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), who has been repeatedly plagued by this dream for the past couple months, wreaking havoc on her peace of mind. So Stefani grills her family about her (long-estranged) grandma and finds out what happened at the restaurant: Irish actually saved EVERYONE all those years ago, and then spent a life being so careful that she actually managed to have children, and those children eventually grew up and had their own children… Being a Final Destination movie, you should be able to figure out what happens now: Death is after them all, because they never should have been born in the first place! Iris has spent decades avoiding his tricks and spawned two children, each with multiple children of their own, giving the movie its usual assortment of victims but with the added wrinkle of none of them escaping death the first time around. Stefani's attempts to tell them what's going to happen has no benefit of the doubt, because they didn't witness firsthand her ability to see the future as the main characters in the five previous films managed to have. This is a great concept for two reasons. One is despite the subtitle’s attempts to make us forget, this is “Final Destination 6” after all, and the formula definitely got a bit repetitive (this is one franchise I would never want to marathon), especially without any returning characters (except Bludworth, more on him soon) to latch ourselves onto. The other is that it means every character only dies once, avoiding the occasional issue where someone’s premonition death was more interesting/fun than their actual one later.

We also get a fun twist to the standard “order”, in that they are dying in the order they were born, complete with a “wait, we had it wrong!” twist. It’s just enough of a tweak to the formula to give the film a freshness that the last couple entries lacked. I mean, I really liked FD5 a lot, but it was the ending doing a lot of that heavy lifting, as the rest was kind of more of the same (albeit with an improvement in quality over the two previous entries). Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a complete departure; we still get the Rube Goldberg sequences, the misdirects, and the gore, but the family dynamic and “bloodline” concept makes it feel just as unique as the first one did 25 years ago, giving the series a shot in the arm that another standard entry couldn't have managed after so much time has passed.

And it actually pays tribute to the other entries in some fun ways. A brief reprisal of the “If you kill someone you get their time” idea from 5 produces what may be the darkest joke in the entire franchise, and there’s a pretty good gag invoking one of the series’ earlier accidents. But it should go without saying that the film’s Bludworth scene is the highlight for such things, because as we know Tony Todd passed away last year shortly after completing his work here, forcing us to say goodbye to him after he utters his final line (if he has any other films in the can, we can be assured they won't be given IMAX releases). The scene itself is not much different than his others (popping up halfway through to offer cryptic remarks about death, mainly), but the weight the scene carries, knowing the actor’s time ran out in reality, makes it a true knockout. I’m not afraid to admit I actually teared up a bit, and the scene ended with a thunderous applause at my screening.

The characters are also more fun than they’ve been in the last few. 3-5 all focused on a group of younger friends, and they weren’t all that memorable on their own (I honestly can barely tell the male leads of 4 and 5 apart), but the family dynamic means we get the widest age range that we’ve seen since FD2, and the way they play off each other is also unique to the series. The standout is Richard Harmon as Erik, who featured heavily in the film’s first trailer (the tattoo parlor scene) and gets the most laughs as the obligatory skeptic character. But the drama of this somewhat estranged family was also compelling enough to keep my attention in between the death scenes; there’s a brief bit where one just holds out a spare key to his distant/not-well-off sibling that I found so sweet, which isn’t something I can remember feeling in the five other movies.

And the deaths! You'd think by now they'd run out of ways to kill these people, but nope. Each one is unique and has some kind of added bonus to it, with a healthy mix of the standard Goldberg sequences and what I guess we can call "Terry Deaths", after the shocking/amazing bus death in the first one. I don't want to spoil much of the particulars, except to say that the trailers have NOT spoiled as much as you might think, and that the movie will have you fearing a certain medical procedure in the same way the last one made us all weary (wearier?) of LASIK surgery. And there's a funny bit that almost comes off as a meta joke about the series' calling card, and it plays so perfectly I actually wanted to rewind the movie in the theater to see it play out again. Haven't had that kind of reaction in ages.

Long story short, they made it worth the wait, and it stands among the series’ best while also finding the most successful way to stand apart from the others. Even though it runs longer than any other one, it never really felt like that to me, and the death scenes are all terrific. It’s funny without going into FD4’s ridiculous territory (which I admit I liked on my first go around, but found less appealing on rewatches), and gives us a core cast of characters who we don’t necessarily WANT to die. Kudos to the new creative team for finding that balance and maintaining it throughout. Hopefully it won’t take another decade plus for a 7th film, but if Todd’s death has them deciding to maybe let it end here, at least it’ll be on an inarguable high.

What say you?

*I actually got yelled at for telling someone where the opening accident occurred, which made me think of the time someone (else) yelled at me for the phrase “a woman dies” (the context otherwise completely removed) in my review of the 4th one. People take spoilers very seriously with this series, I guess.

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The Monkey (2025)

FEBRUARY 23, 2025

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

As I find Osgood Perkins' output pretty hit or miss so far (and by that I mean the only one I've liked is Longlegs) and the original Stephen King short story left so little an impression on me that I can't even be fully sure I read it*, I wasn't exactly going to be first in line for The Monkey. But when I heard it had Final Destination vibes, I got a little more interested, and so carved out some time (and 45 bucks for the silly popcorn bucket) to check it out on opening weekend after all.

Interestingly, the movie ended up being a rumination on the randomness of death, which struck a little nerve with me considering the circumstances under which I first saw (well, "attended" might be more accurate) Longlegs. In the movie, a pair of 12 year old twin brothers named Hal and Bill find a strange monkey toy in their departed (perhaps dead) father's things, and quickly discover that winding the key on its back and letting it play its little drum solo will result in someone dying. However, they can't *control* it per se; winding the key while thinking about the bully at school or something doesn't mean the bully at school will be the one to suddenly die under freak circumstances. Once the kids figure this out (and we in the audience chuckle at a few outlandish deaths) after losing their mother and beloved babysitter, they dump it down a well in hopes that no one will ever find it.

That wouldn't make for much of a movie though. We flash forward 25 years and the now adult Hal (Theo James) lives a solitary life and works at a grocery store, not exactly making the most of his time. He is, however, about to spend a week with his estranged son before the boy's stepfather (played by a cameoing veteran actor who does a lot of genre work but somehow has never made a King movie before? ) takes full custody. Unfortunately, the bizarre murders start up again, and (spoiler I guess? If it's a "reveal" it occurs pretty early) it seems his twin brother Bill, also estranged, may be responsible. Can Hal put a stop to it again and keep his son safe?

Naturally I won't answer that question, but I will say that the film's strange tonal shift from "hahaha, these deaths are so wacky!" to "Hey, maybe you should learn to embrace life" didn't quite land for me. I enjoyed the movie overall, but the first half is notably more successful, and the attempt to impart a little life lesson seemed grafted in from a different/earlier draft of the screenplay. Frank Darabont wanted to make this movie for years, and while I'm sure his version wouldn't have had the Rube Goldbergian deaths (though some are merely insane, like a guy camping in a sleeping bag being trampled by so many horses that the remains aren't even recognizably human), I think the "live life to the fullest because you never know when your time is up" messaging would have felt more earned, maybe even poignant, in Frank's more (imo) dependable hands. As is, it came off a bit like someone saying "Hey that's not funny" after everyone else in the room enjoyed a good laugh at a dark joke.

And that's a shame, because Perkins is unusually qualified to make a movie about the randomness of death, especially in a tale about parents and their children. His father was HIV-positive and died of pneumonia, and his mother died in one of the planes on 9/11. That kind of covers the whole spectrum of death, from "a known disease with a common outcome" to "wtf, what are the odds?" But either in his attempt to make a slightly more commercial movie than even Longlegs (the film was produced by James Wan, whose audience-pleasing films makes this an unusual pairing) or just the usual pratfalls of expanding a short story in to a full feature, the film's strengths all come in the top half, buying enough goodwill to keep it in the "worth seeing" section while falling short of a full blown win.

But the thing I found most interesting was an inscription on the box that the monkey is found in: "like life." As Hal explains a bit later via voiceover, it's a bit of a warning that the monkey's actions are random, much like life itself. No matter how much they want a certain person to die, the monkey is just going to kill who he wants - he's not working for you, even if you were nice enough to turn his key and give him a little exercise. But—and maybe this is just the result of my way of thinking—when the message first appeared, prior to Hal explaining its meaning, I read it differently. To me, "like life" meant, simply "ENJOY life", because you do not indeed know when your time is up. In the past year alone I've had friends die from long illnesses and others drop dead while carrying out the most mundane tasks in their day to day, and yet there are certainly a few people out there who deserve the early grave and are thriving. And if you have a certain sense of humor about it (which I do, and it seems Perkins does as well, considering how silly the deaths here), there's no reason not to, well, LIKE your life. Do what makes you happy, and take the risks. Ask out your crush. Try a new restaurant. Ride a unicycle. Whatever you think you might enjoy, there's no reason to keep putting it off. The brain is far too random to risk seeing that bus coming for you with no time to get out of the way and have your last thought be "Damn, I never tried sushi."

And I can't help but think the movie might have been more successful in the back half if it actually went with this theme full throttle instead of just kind of tossing it in with moments left in the runtime. Instead, there's a very strange additional character named Ricky, played by Rohan Campbell from Halloween Ends, who is obsessed with the monkey and wants to keep it for himself. It seems like half of his role ended up being excised in order to keep focus on James' dual performance as Hal and Bill, especially when it comes to Ricky's own family, as he, like Hal and Bill, has a brother who doesn't seem to be a lot like him but also kind of completely spaced out. It felt like there might have been an attempt to draw parallels between Ricky's situation and Bill's (especially when you consider the similar physical appearance of their mother next to Bill and Hal's aunt, who raises them after their mother dies), but none of it really lands, and honestly they could have cut him out entirely and not really changed anything. Nothing against Campbell, to be clear, it's just a strange diversion to the narrative without much payoff, and coming at the expense of Hal and Bill's potential time together.

Third act blunders aside, it's a solidly entertaining way to kill 100 minutes, if nothing else. There's a laid back priest played by Nicco Del Rio who is almost worth the price of admission alone, and—if someone tracks these things—features the equivalent to Lawrence of Arabia's legendary match cut in terms of darkly funny reveals (if you've seen the movie, it involves a cut to a portrait of one of the male cast members). And even though a lot of the attempts at genuine emotion don't quite work, Tatiana Maslany does wonderful work with her role as the kids' mother, who seems to already be aware, without the monkey's unusual way of suggesting it, that life is too precious to waste. Maybe an extended cut (or at least a few deleted scenes) on the eventual Blu-ray will clear up some of its murkier narrative issues, but as is it's still worth seeing, and continues Perkins' current (and surprising!) transition into a guy who can keep his warped sensibilities while still telling a story that a general audience can get behind on the big screen.

What say you?

*I know I read "The Mist" before the movie came out, and remember a couple others in the same Skeleton Crew collection, so I must have read it all the way through x number of years ago as I'd have no reason to be skipping around. But I reread it after watching the movie and nothing rang a bell. At any rate, for those curious, beyond (most of) the characters and how they relate to each other, the story and movie are nothing alike. Even the title character is different; in the story he's got the cymbals and in the movie he's got a standard drum. Which worked out nicely for AMC, since the drum can double as a (tiny) popcorn bucket.

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Smile 2 (2024)

OCTOBER 20, 2024

GENRE: PSYCHOLOGICAL, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

In just about every way that matters, Smile 2 actually improves on the original film, which is a pretty good feat for any horror sequel, let alone one that’s following a movie that was itself a winner to begin with (comparatively, the reviews praising Winnie the Pooh 2 as an improvement on the original are not exactly saying much). But obviously, the novelty of its central gimmick has worn off some, so if you haven’t seen it yet and plan to, I urge you not to make the same mistake I did and rewatch the original a day before, because the déjà vu won’t help.

And really, as long as you remember the concept, you don’t need a refresher anyway. The opening scene (presented as one long shot) gives us the only link the movie really has to the first one, with survivor Joel (Kyle Gallner) at the end of his 6-7 day curse and deciding to at least pass it on to someone who deserves to die (a meth dealer, in this case). Things go awry and the curse ends up passed to a guy who was at the meth dealer’s house to buy some for himself, and THAT dude passes it to our new hero: Skye Riley.

Skye is played by Naomi Scott, an actual pop star/actress, and her character is far more interesting than the original’s therapist, who was sympathetic enough but just not a particularly compelling character (the question to always ask is: would I watch a movie about this person even without the horror aspect?). Not the case here; Skye is a recovering addict who unfortunately messed up her back in a car accident that killed her famous actor boyfriend, and needs to go through shady local dealers to score Vicodin to deal with the pain, because she can’t get a prescription anymore. We spend a lot of time showing how draining it can be being a pop star; yes you’re rich and blah blah blah, but you also feel the weight of everyone who is relying on you to make their own living – if the back pain and, then, mental turmoil of being cursed by smiling ghost people no one else can see take enough of a toll that she has to cancel the tour, that puts so many people out of work, not to mention ruins her reputation within the business as a whole.

And similarly, the entire movie hinges on Scott, who (outside of Gallner’s opening) is in every scene and just about every shot within those scenes. There’s a brief exception that felt weird at the time and feels even weirder given a later reveal (more on that later) where she walks out of the room and her friend (Dylan Gelula) has a brief encounter with Skye’s mother/manager (Rosemarie DeWitt), but otherwise every single thing we see is from her POV. If she doesn’t hear it/witness it with her own eyes, we don’t see it either. This adds to the intensity immensely, so even though we are familiar with this demon’s tricks, it still manages to be quite effective in that department.

Those who are hoping to find out more about this entity will be disappointed, however. We don’t get anything new; if anything the script seems to be geared towards those who saw the original and have retained what little we learned there. At around an hour or so we meet a character whose brother was one of the previous victims that Rose and Joel tracked backwards from their own experience, and he just kind of quickly sums up the “After a week you kill yourself in front of someone and they will be cursed in turn” concept, but it’s a Cliffs Notes version that seems more of a quick reminder instead of a full explanation for those who might be newcomers. But that’s a good thing! Writer/director Parker Finn seems to understand that the more a monster is explained, the less scary it is, but there are always people out there who want those kind of explanations. So to them I say: stay home and be wrong there!

That said, the movie also lacks a moment as horrific as the cat scene in the original. For me, the most unnerving thing was a scene where Skye was in a hospital bed hooked up to an IV drip, and then the ghost thing showed up so she tried to escape. The repeated closeups of her tugging on the needle in her arm really icked me out, as not only am I petrified of embolisms, but when I was in the hospital the nurse messed up and caused some brief nerve damage in my arm for like a week, so the memories of that came flooding back as she yanked on this (apparently very secure!) needle in her own arm. Gah!

My other main issue requires a spoiler, so skip this and the next paragraph if you don’t want to know details about the movie’s ending. Before I get into it I will say that it mostly improves on the original’s ending (which borderline angered me), and the actual last shot is an all timer, so it’s not a total loss. However, it involves a reveal that a certain chunk of the movie was actually hallucinated, but doesn’t make it clear WHEN this switch occurred. And did none of it in that section actually happen, or just the more horrific parts? I’m fine with not explaining the demon’s origins, but I definitely would have appreciated a sort of Saw-esque montage explaining how things were really playing out all that time.

And (again, skip this one if you don’t want spoilers) as I mentioned earlier, this causes an odd thing with that earlier scene with Gelula and DeWitt, because one of the movie’s big reveals is that the former character was the entity in disguise the entire time, so it doesn’t make sense that she was able to interact with Skye’s mom, making it feel like a bit of a cheat on top the aforementioned disruption to the whole “all through Skye’s eyes” approach. Also, the reason Gelula’s BFF character isn’t actually around is because her and Skye had a major blowout a year or so before, and there’s never any real explanation for what caused their fight. Not that it’s essential to the proceedings, but it felt like something designed to be a reveal that never came. (That said, as someone who loves when old text messages actually show up on people’s phones in movies, their last messages to each other, capping off their fight, are HILARIOUS.)

Those quibbles aside, I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed it, not even noticing that it was over two hours long (something I grumbled about prior to my arrival at the theater). As the first film was compared to The Ring, it’s not hard to imagine a scenario where this was a total disaster like that film’s sequel was, so the fact that it actually improved on it in several ways is remarkable. And that the climax recalled another recent genre film of note (can’t say which one without spoiling them both, though I can say I really liked that one too but got too busy to ever get around to reviewing it) was a delightful bonus. Furthermore, for whatever it’s worth: Skye Riley > Lady Raven.

What say you?

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The Crow (2024)

AUGUST 22, 2024

GENRE: REVENGE, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

Sometimes a movie tells you instantly that it's going to be a mess, and unfortunately Rupert Sanders' The Crow is one such film. Because after the usual laughable number of production companies at the top of the film, we are then treated to something like 25 executive producer credits - BEFORE the cast or "A Rupert Sanders film" or anything like that! I have never seen anything like it (and as someone who makes credits for a living, I tend to notice these things, so you can take my word here) and it told me right from the start that this is a movie that's been studio note'd and "what if we also do this?" until any semblance of a soul it once had was completely washed away.

At least it otherwise starts off OK. We don't know specifically what put Eric (Bill Skarsgård) into a fancy rehab center in the middle of the woods, but we know that he's a quiet, troubled loner type in a facility that forbids fraternizing between the female and male patients. So naturally, when the equally broken Shelly (FKA twigs) arrives, we know they're going to disregard this rule (not that it matters, no one on staff ever intervenes) and find in each other the love they've been denied throughout their shattered lives. So, you know, OK! Their chemistry isn't all that great, but on paper I buy it, and you want things to work out for them.

Of course there wouldn't be much of a movie if it did. Shelly got sent to this facility after being caught with drugs while trying to escape some people who were trying to kill her, and it isn't long before they catch up to her and murder her and Eric (via suffocation, which is always a brutal thing to watch). But then Eric wakes back up, not dead, and with seemingly immortal powers for good measure. A mysterious man named Kronos explains some of this to Eric and sends him back to the overworld, where he can track down the men who murdered him and his love to set their souls at rest. But unfortunately for the movie, we already know why they were killed and who did it, so there's no sense of intrigue to his journey. Before we even meet Eric, we meet Shelly and also her friend, who are in possession of an incriminating video of wealthy socialite named Roeg (Danny Huston, in a role he could play in his sleep by now). So our hero is a few steps behind us for a while, which is never a great method of hooking in an audience.

Weirder, Eric isn't even the first character to have supernatural powers. When we meet Roeg, he explains that he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for immortality, with the deal being he has to send fresh innocent souls down to Hell (he notes that rapists and murderers won't do; it's the closest the movie gets to giving him any dimension as a character). He then demonstrates this power: he whispers some sort of (not English) curse in their ear, at which point they commit a graphic suicide. An appropriately terrible villain move! Alas, he only uses it one other time in the nearly two hour film, which otherwise seems to forget he has immortality at all and just comes off as yet another all-powerful rich asshole.

But at least that's SOMETHING, as the other villains don't even get that much. There's a blonde lady, a guy with a scarred eye, an RFK Jr. looking guy (blonde lady's husband, I think?), and a dirty cop who is the first to go, even though there's some potential there. Oh and then a whole bunch of security guards, who I guess we have to believe are all evil and not just a bunch of dudes doing their job, because Eric wipes all of them out with a sword in the movie's centerpiece action scene, mowing through them at an opera house in what seems like a parody of the John Wick series, because (again: he's immortal) he gets shot dozens of times but barely reacts. There are some fine gore gags in these and the film's other two (very brief) action blowouts—I particularly liked when Eric is impaled through the back with a sword and then pushes the point of said sword into a guy's face—but Sanders never finds much rhythm in these scenes. A cool moment or visual here and there, sure, but nothing that ever gets the pulse racing. Worse, during that opera house lobby massacre, he occasionally cuts back to the ongoing performance, and here and there Eric's ballet-esque violent acts mirror the moves of the performers, but it happens so intermittently that it seems like something coincidental the editor noticed as opposed to a fully designed back and forth mirror sequence.

And I'm not exaggerating about the movie's curious low energy. I was fine with it at first, because we are meeting our heroes and watching them fall in love (albeit quickly, more soon), but even once Eric dies and is reborn for vengeance, not a lot of exciting stuff happens for a while, and when it does happen it tends to be brief. If the reported budget is accurate, this movie costs more than John Wick 2, which delivered nearly nonstop thrills (and a more famous cast), so along with the Bulgaria shooting location—a go-to location for a movie looking to get more bang for their buck—I have to wonder where that money went, because it sure as hell wasn't on big thrills. Perhaps that $50m it reportedly cost includes all the years of development? This has gone through a number of incarnations over the years, with actors like Bradley Cooper and Jason Momoa starring as well as directors like Stephen Norrington and Corin Hardy (this also probably accounts for why so many people are listed as executive producers); if the movie succeeds at anything, it's evidence of unbreakable persistence on the producers' part to see this thing through despite all the setbacks.

Some of those earlier versions sounded promising (or at least, baffling enough to draw my attention. Bradley Cooper???) but there's certainly nothing wrong with Skarsgård as an actor. Unfortunately he's let down by a script (or at least, the editing of said script in post production) that leaves far too many things unexplained. How long are he and Shelly together before they're murdered? It's unclear; it seems it's only been a few days but later flashbacks inform us they've seemingly been together for much longer. And if that's the case, what took Roeg so long to find them? They're in the same (nameless) city and not hiding at all. Similarly, at a certain point they have a group of friends, but where did they come from? Were they friends of one or both of them before they went to rehab? Given Shelly's backstory, it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense for her to hook up with her old crew (i.e. people who could tell Roeg and his minions where she is in exchange for some money and/or a fix), but their whole thing was that they felt abandoned by the world at large. So again: who are these people? Eric seems to have a close bond with a tattoo guy, but when (spoiler) the dude is executed by the villains, Eric just sits next to his corpse in a playful manner as if he was another villain, and certainly not a person he cared about (not to mention that it's basically his fault the guy is dead). It's fine to focus on the character work and love story over action, but when all that stuff is leaving the audience underwhelmed and even confused, it's not exactly the best tradeoff. Better to be drowned out with noise, especially when the villain himself is superpowered and yet does nothing with it.

So alas. All this time spent trying to make this movie (Norrington's version was announced in 2008!) and this wet fart is what they ended up with. There's a handful of nice visuals (absolutely loved the super wide shot of Eric trying to swim down to Shelly's corpse after the villains tossed them in the water) and some amusing touches with the immortality, like Eric snapping his broken leg back into place after being run over by a car during a chase. And around the end of act 2 (spoiler here) there's an interesting idea involving his immortal powers and how he can lose them, but instead of turning it into a sort of crisis of faith that drives the rest of the movie and his actions within it, he basically just shrugs it off and the movie proceeds toward an ending that is, at best, idiotic (and inches into the sort of ending that no genre fan ever wants to see, though I can't be more specific without spelling it out). And that's the movie in a nutshell, really: 110 minutes of uninteresting or downright bad ideas, peppered with occasional moments of inspiration that suggest at some point this might have been at least a decent timekiller.

What say you?

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Tarot (2024)

MAY 5, 2024

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL, TEEN
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

With precious little on-screen to engage me, I spent a little time during Tarot almost impressed that something so witless and uninspired could make it to theaters in the year 2024, because it felt like a movie we might have seen in maybe 2006 and said "Why didn't this go direct to DVD?" The movie was so bland that I also considered if the bigger studios decided to combat streamers by making their OWN forgettable pap that is best watched with your hands alternating between your laundry and your iPhone (and Sony would be a prime candidate for that considering they're the only one without a service of their own, which means most of their movies end up on Netflix anyway). I mean, we've all seen bad PG-13 horror movies before, but there's something particularly by-the-numbers with this one, to the extent that I momentarily theorized that they were going to spring some kind of Cabin in the Woods scenario on us and thus the generic feeling was intentional.

But no, it ends exactly as you'd expect it to, with the heroine running around a house dodging the film's villain while trying to enact her first/last/only plan to defeat it (any guesses as to whether or not it works?). Actually I take that back; the film's one (1) surprise moment is that it cuts to the credits after using its one allowed F-bomb, something most PG-13 horror doesn't bother to utilize as it (presumably?) gives them more leeway for the violence. But since pretty much everything happens off-screen, with a splash of blood flying on a phone or wall or whatever telling you the character died, they barely even hit those MPA-sanctioned levels. And it's not that PG-13 horror is inherently bad (Insidious and The Ring are a. great and b. among the obvious inspirations for this one), but from top to bottom everything about what we see on-screen feels like the result of asking a focus group what they'd like to see in a teen-aiming horror movie, without any semblance of genuine inspiration.

What makes that even weirder is the fact that this is credited as being based on a book called Horrorscope (this film's title until it was changed to Tarot, keeping in line with the film's stunning lack of ambition), but they completely changed the story. The 1992 novel by Nicholas Adams was a whodunit slasher where the killer was going after some teens, one for each Zodiac sign and killing them with something related to their sign (i.e. Aries, the ram, is strangled with a wool scarf). This is a full on "The Ring meets Final Destination" supernatural affair; our idiot college kids find a creepy tarot deck (more on this soon) and one of them uses them to read a horoscope, each one corresponding to their later death (so like one guy is said to rush into things and make rash decisions, and something about ascending numbers - when he sees the ghost later, he runs right into an elevator). It doesn't even use the whole zodiac; there's only seven of them so five signs are left out (consider yourself blessed to not have any character to immediately compare yourself to if you're one of the MIA signs; me being a Pisces, I got to say "Oh that's my counterpart" for the character with the stupidest death in the whole thing). So they had a story to go on with more victims, and decided to make up their own really idiotic one with half the numbers? OK, movie.

And where did the deck come from? Oh, you know, the locked basement full of antiques and oddities in the basement of the stately mansion these college kids have rented from Airbnb. Standard stuff. It was such a bizarre setup that I kept thinking (man, I sure spent a lot of this movie thinking about ways it could be better, huh?) that it had to be part of the plot, that either the girl who "rented" the place was actually setting all her friends up to die for some kind of sacrifice, or at the very least the owners would have been evil as well (this is what generated my Cabin in the Woods line of thinking, in fact, thinking that any object in the basement might have spelled their doom), but no. I guess in the universe that this movie takes place, people just rent out 10,000 sq. foot mansions in the middle of nowhere on AirBNB and hope that the randos who stay there don't steal any of their priceless artifacts.

Later when they start realizing that their friends are dying in a manner related to their horoscope readings, they google "Divination" or something basic like that and click on one of the first matches, leading them to someone who can help who thankfully only lives a few hours away. Upon realizing that the expert would be an older woman, I asked myself "Will it be Lin Shaye or Olwen Fouéré?", chuckling when it was indeed the latter (because again: zero inspiration here; in fact Fouéré appeared in one of the trailers beforehand as yet another of her exposition ladies). This whole section of the movie is either the result of some serious re-editing or just a total lack of giving a crap, because not only does the concept of geography cease to exist (they say her character is three hours away, yet when the car obligatingly breaks down on the way home, they are luckily only about a block from their front door, it seems), but Jacob Batalon's character, who on the way to her house repeated his horoscope and began fretting about ways to avoid any situation that resembled the ones in the reading, reacts to Fouéré's confirmation that they are indeed cursed by saying they're all crazy for beieving it. And then the main girl basically repeats his own theory back at him as if it's something that just clicked! I actually laughed at how backwards it was.

It's also one of those movies that seemingly exist in a world where everyone is asleep 24 hours a day, because I don't think there's a single extra on-screen. At one point a guy drops off one of the other friends at her dorm (no one else around) and proceeds to walk to the subway station, down the corridors, etc. without as much as a nighttime janitor sweeping the floors. And this is supposedly Boston (actually Serbia save for a couple of presumably licensed shots of the Boston cityscape), so the idea that you can walk a block in any direction without encountering other pedestrians and/or a Dunkin Donuts to run into for safety is beyond absurd. But it just adds to the phoniness of the whole thing, and again makes it feel like a Netflix production (famously frugal when it comes to hiring background extras; it's really noticeable and weird).

So what's good? Well, the design of the various ghosts is about the only thing on-screen that feels inspired; they're all based on the tarot cards (the Fool, the Devil, the Magician, etc) and if this movie was at least a 3/5 I'd even consider getting the NECA figures down the road if they existed. It's a shame it's so bad, because you can see the franchise potential here: there are 78 cards! Assuming they swapped them out and brought back favorits, there's plenty of sequel possibilities with these inspired designs. But alas, based on the box office there won't be a Tartwo, so we have to settle for this handful of ghouls who only get a scene each. Oh and despite bungling the Boston setting, they did at least get the name of one subway stop correct (Haymarket Station, on the Orange line), so I'll give them points for that. And I got the score on while writing this and it's quite good, but deserved a scarier movie.

"But you don't scare, so how can you say it's not scary?" longtime readers may ask. Because I went at a 5:30 showing on a Sunday, which means it had plenty of the teens the movie was aimed at, and apart from one "And then he pops into frame from around the corner" kind of scare involving Batalon's character, none of them uttered a peep during the entire thing. But it's not their fault; the first death, where a girl is basically beaten to death by one of those sliding attic ladders (the ghost, in the attic, keeps raising and then slamming it back down on the victim below) is as good as it got in the terror department. The film's C- cinemascore suggests it wasn't just a fluke audience, either.

Look, I take no pleasure in trashing the movie. I know it's hard to get a film made and theaters are hurting and all that, and I wish I could tell you something like "It's fine, your teenagers will love it at a sleepover" or something. But the on-rails presentation suggested that the studio just wanted to have a cheap horror movie in the pipeline to counter program whatever blockbuster it'd be opening against (The Fall Guy, in this case) and did absolutely nothing to ensure it would actually be, you know, good. I was not surprised at all to discover that the writer/directors are more often credited as producers (among their previous efforts: Moonfall and Expendables 4), as it certainly explained how the whole thing seemed reverse engineered from "We need a teen horror movie for under $10m" as opposed to any genuine inspiration. Even the whole "based on a book" part seems somewhat mercenary, like they acquired the rights to something that might have attracted the attention of people from my generation that fondly remembered the book from their school library, just to eke a few more bucks out of adults who'd otherwise steer far clear of such fare. Just a bit too much contempt for the audience for me. Even teens deserve better when they occasionally look up at the bigger screen.

What say you?

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Hellraiser: Inferno (2000)

FEBRUARY 28, 2024

GENRE: PSYCHOLOGICAL, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

There are currently 11 Hellraiser movies, and as many reviews tagged "Hellraiser" here on HMAD (well, 12 now if you feel like seeing for yourself), so I actually forgot that I never reviewed Hellraiser: Inferno back in the day, as it seemed "complete." I knew I saw it pre-HMAD, but same went for 1-4 and I got those taken care of along the way, so I'm not sure how/why Inferno (the 5th entry, if you've forgotten) got skipped over in those rewatches, especially considering in my memory I actually thought it was pretty good. So for anyone who has been waiting over a decade for me to finish up the Doug Bradley era of the franchise: today's your day!

The biggest complaint about the DTV ones (well, maybe not Hellworld) is that Pinhead doesn't appear in them very much. It's an odd complaint considering he's barely in the original, either, but I was amused that it's similar to the hate for the 5th Friday the 13th movie because Jason isn't in it. He's not in the first one either! How often do you hear fans complaining that a sequel is trying to bring things back to the original, which is usually the favorite? Wackiness. But yeah, he's barely in it, and his first appearance seems shoehorned in to try to rectify that, but it's a bad call.

Because really, the worst thing about the movie is that it's "Hellraiser 5" instead of a movie called Inferno. I get the "Where's Pinhead?" complaints in a way, but the film is structured in a way that doesn't rely on him the way the previous sequels did. The Lament Configuration gets more screentime, I think, as it appears almost instantly at a crime scene. Our protagonist is Joseph (Craig Sheffer), a corrupt cop who pockets the cash from victims' wallets, lies to his wife to go sleep with prostitutes, and does up close magic for other grown adults - in other words, he's kind of awful. Anyway he finds the LC at a crime scene and, as a bit of a puzzle nerd, keeps it for himself and maybe, just maybe, opens it.

Now, in any other Hellraiser movie, that would mean Pinhead would show up and start causing problems. But here his brief experience after Joseph fiddles with the box is treated as a nightmare, and as the movie continues following Joseph's investigation that started with the crime scene, feeling more like something like 8MM than a supernatural horror film. Not that the case isn't gruesome; a child's finger was found and the killer, known as "The Engineer", seems to be keeping the kid alive, so Joseph becomes hellbent on finding him. As the investigation gets more dangerous and disturbing (he has visions of cenobite type figures, the hooker he slept with is murdered, as is one of his informants, etc.) he starts to wonder if the box has somethng to do with it. And guess what? It does!

So unfortunately it's one of those sequels in which the audience is too far ahead of the characters, unless they for some reason are watching this as their first Hellraiser movie and have zero knowledge of the series when sitting down for it. If that's you, great, but you're also like 1% of the crowd at most. Curiously, writer/director Scott Derrickson (this was his debut as director) did the same thing with Sinister 2 (which he wrote but did not direct), giving the hero a mystery to solve that we already know the answer to. It's hard to recover from that sort of disconnect when it's treated as a "what's going on?" kind of mystery film, as opposed to Friday the 13th part whatever when a new group of idiots arrive at Crystal Lake without knowing anything about Jason. They're not exactly poring over newspaper clippings and police reports to figure out who the hockey masked guy is, you know? They're unaware and then they're dead, and it's fine.

But if you ignore the Hellraiser-ness and just go for the ride of this dirtbag getting what's coming to him, it's a solid time. The Jacob's Ladder/David Lynch-esque touches keep it visually engaging throughout, and Derrickson gets every bit of his meager budget on screen. Plus it's just enjoyably weird at times, in particular when Sheffer goes to a saloon in the middle of nowhere (already weird!) and proceeds to get his ass kicked by two long haired Asian cowboys. He also spends an extended (dream/hallucination/whatever) scene shotgunning his parents who have become cenobite/zombie things, and his own family ends up on a rotating pillar like the one from the first movie. And if you're a Nightbreed fan, please enjoy the fact that Craig Sheffer has now played two (2) Clive Barker characters who are set up by their psychiatrist, though here it's (spoiler for 24 year old movie ahead) actually Pinhead in disguise.

And keeping with the spoilers, while I'm sure it's not the first movie to do so, and also kind of changes the canon version of what Hell is in this world, I like the idea that he's stuck in an endless loop of being made miserable as his eternal punishment for the misery he inflicted on others when he was alive. He has to keep seeing his family die, chased around by demons, etc. and when he tries to kill himself to get out of it, he just ends up back at the beginning of the loop again. I try not to think about the afterlife too much, but the idea of hell just being in a cycle of reliving your worst memories for eternity sounds far worse than some kind of "you just burn forever" kind of scenario.

Plus I have to admire that it took efforts to return the series to its roots. I like Hellbound as much as the original, but I have little use for 3 or 4 (though in the latter's case it COULD have been good if the Weinsteins hadn't Weinstein'd it), and none of them really seemed to get that the Cenobites weren't supposed to be the main attraction. Like the original, this is a movie about someone whose endless thirst for hedonistic pleasure results in them delving into things they shouldn't, resulting in their very gruesome and supernaturally-charged death. It doesn't mention any of the other films' events; even when the history of the Lament Configuration is explained to Sheffer's character, it's more of a vague idea of what it's been through as opposed to "And then one time this douche who ran a nightclub got a hold of it...". So I appreciated that they were at least trying to get things back on track, even if it was kind of a silly thing to do now that the series was going DTV and thus only the most die-hard fans would likely be bothering to watch.

The blu-ray I have is paired with Bloodline, from an Echo Bridge release. Since I recently got Arrow's 4K UHD set of 1-4, I looked to see if Inferno had ever been available on its own so I wouldn't have TWO Bloodlines in the house (I mean, I only have one Godfather. It just doesn't seem right to have twice as many "Pinhead in Space!"s), but all I found was another EB multipack that added Hellseeker and Hellworld to the mix. I nearly bought that one before I realized Deader got left out, so it's a set of 4-6 and 8? Why? More annoying, Deader DID get its own release, also from Echo Bridge, but it's long out of print and goes for over 300 bucks on eBay, which... no. I'm not even sure what studio owns these movies anymore, but maybe since they did it for Amityville, Vinegar Syndrome (or someone like them) can make a nice set of Bradley's DTV era (so, Inferno through Hellworld) and I can get rid of this janky-ass disc that doesn't even have subtitles, let alone the bonus features from the DVD.

What say you?

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Black Circle (2018)

SEPTEMBER 22, 2023

GENRE: MAD SCIENTIST, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

If there was one benefit to watching horror movies every day for six years – and also, due to the point of the site, thinking about and then writing about them – it’s that I was able to fine tune my ability to tell the difference between a bad movie and a movie that just wasn’t for me. There was definitely a time in my life where I could have hated Black Circle and told folks to stay away from it because it was terrible or something, but now I know better. Now I know that there’s a select group of genre fans who will eat this up (and not because they’re drunk and having “so bad it’s good” fun), and I am simply not in that group. Thank the Beneath the Mississippis of the world for helping me learn the difference.

To be fair, this one had me hooked in at the beginning, at least. Our hero Celeste is your typical slacker in her twenties who isn’t making enough of her life, and apparently her sister Isa was once the same way. But now she’s doing quite well at her job, dressing nicely, etc – she’s got her shit together, in other words, and chalks it up to listening to a self-help record from the 70s (that’s what the title refers to, for you young “music is only available through streaming services and nothing else” types). Isa lets Celeste borrow it to see if it can yield the same results, and it does, but almost instantly Isa shows up all frazzled and insane sounding, claiming she’s being followed… is the record to blame? Well, yes, otherwise they wouldn’t have named the movie after it.

So for a while it follows the usual haunted object kind of movie scenario – Celeste sees ghostly figures, has weird dreams, etc. One can assume that she will have to track the record maker down to save her and her sister before it’s too late, like Naomi Watts figuring out where the VHS tape comes from, and they’d be right… but fewer could assume the hard left the movie takes into lo-fi sci-fi as opposed to supernatural horror suggested by the first half hour. At a certain point, out of completely nowhere, we meet a young couple who can communicate telepathically and have been sent by “The Supreme” (don’t ask, we never get much more info) to warn Lena (Christina Lindberg from Thriller aka They Call Her One Eye*), who is indeed the one that made the record, that Celeste and Isa are about to arrive. For a while this trio basically takes center stage of the film as if it’s been about them all along, and the film never quite recovers from the switch for me.

At least we start getting some answers as to what is going on. As it turns out, what the record does is separate all the negative parts of yourself (so that all that’s left is the ambitious and “good” parts, hence the life improvements), but those parts end up being a doppelganger that believes itself to be the original and wants to take over for good. Lena and her X-Men-like charges work to fuse the two back together, and naturally things don’t go smoothly. Not a terrible idea, but at this point the movie just tailspins into nonsense, with both of the sisters’ doubles making erratic appearances while the others carry out the experiment, drawing itself out until all the creepy stuff of the first act becomes a distant memory by the time it finally ends an hour later. The “70s self-help techniques are bad” backstory recalled The Brood a bit, but as the telepaths took over I started thinking more about the silly Scanners sequels instead.

Personally, I’d rather a movie be confusing at first and slowly start to gel together until I’m fully engrossed in its off-kilter vibes (Cloud Atlas comes to mind as a good example; I was almost ready to walk out after 20 minutes but I stuck with it and by the end of the first hour I was completely on board) instead of the other way around, but as I said, there’s definitely folks for whom this will check every box. It reminded me of things like Beyond the Black Rainbow or Altered States, i.e. trippy sci-fi without spaceships and laser guns, and again that sort of thing is fine, but I wish it hadn’t lured me in with the promise of a traditional curse/possession type horror movie. Maybe a second viewing would improve things, now that I knew what direction it was going, but not enough to completely change my tune, since the movie gave more than ample time to adjust to the cerebral slant of the back half. Sure, I was disappointed it forgot about being a horror movie as it went on, but I was also left cold by its confusing presentation and abrupt story turns. I actually rewound the movie for a bit assuming I merely missed something with the introduction of the two telepathic kids, but nope – they just show up out of nowhere and the reveal of their powers is given no fanfare, introduced as casually as one might inform the audience what kind of pet or job this new character has. It’s a lot to ask!

I should note that it’s also a curious film that probably works best late at night when your brain is operating at a different level (and you are perhaps stoned), but it also has several hypnotizing scenes (including a lengthy one that kicks the film off, before we meet Celeste) that are quite effective. And by that I mean I fell asleep the first time I tried watching, literally during one such scene. I course corrected and watched the rest around lunchtime the following day, so that I’d be safe from dozing, but it would probably take a month to get through it if I tried only at night. I’m sure this played midnight slots at festivals back when it was making its run, and for a properly wired audience it was probably quite mesmerizing. But I just had to take it as it was, and I just couldn’t ever get back on its wavelength after Lindberg was introduced, and the film practically daring me to fall asleep again at regular intervals didn’t help.

But if you’re a fan of Lindberg, you’ll probably a. be happy to see her again (this and another film from around the same time were the first features she made since 1982!) and b. be even happier that the blu-ray has an hour long interview with her, conducted by Bogliano. I wish it was a more traditional one where we don’t see the interviewer at all, since he is constantly saying “sure” and “right” as she speaks which gets incredibly annoying, but she covers a lot of her career, why she stopped acting, how Thriller is perceived then vs now, etc – it’s a pretty thorough chat. Bogliano also provides a commentary where he almost never stops speaking, name checking his influences and pointing out who did drawings or what crew member played this or that bit part in between explaining some of his choices, mentioning some post production trouble (some money never came through), etc. Then there’s the short film, which is basically just two early scenes from the film, albeit slightly truncated, with a different ending, giving it a traditional short film twist ending instead of proceeding with the narrative as the feature does. A featurette and trailer are also included, so it’s a pretty well rounded package that the film’s fans will certainly get their money’s worth from. But a blind buy is not recommended unless the above mentioned titles are all in your all time faves list.

What say you?

*Which was randomly the “pile” movie I watched before this one, having no idea she was in both. It wasn’t horror and it was just an unpleasant r**e revenge movie, but if you like that sort of thing, I guess it qualifies as one of the more interesting ones since it spends the middle of the narrative showing how she trains in secret to be the avenging woman of the finale that her peers just suddenly turn into.

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FTP: Bloody Knuckles (2014)

AUGUST 21, 2023

GENRE: COMEDIC, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

I must apologize to Bloody Knuckles, for I recently dubbed 11.22.63 as the oldest disc in the pile but according to Amazon, this film hit disc nearly a year before that. Now it’s possible I got it through trivia or something, but it’s from Artsploitation, and I was definitely on their list for a while (and to the best of my knowledge, they don’t donate anything to our monthly trivia game), so it’s a safe bet that it’s been there for a whopping eight years now, just waiting to catch my eye. But that’s the thing – the spine is so minimalist I literally never noticed it! I’ve obviously spent a lot of time looking at these discs over the past few years (since I became hellbent on finally watching them all – I’m down to the last 20 or so!) and I can’t even really see the title on the spine, so I have apparently just glossed right past it every time I went hunting for something to watch.

I mean, the runtime is under 90 minutes – SURELY I would have gravitated toward it by now as long runtimes are the very things that prevent me from ever pulling out certain titles (anything over two hours might as well punch me in the junk while they’re at it, since they’re obviously not trying to appeal to my interests). Plus it’s a Canadian horror comedy, which tend to be hit or miss but when they DO hit I find them pretty enjoyable one time watches, which again is an ideal “pile” movie: something I like watching but not so much that I want to keep it in the permanent collection. So the lesson here is to design spines that are just as attractive as the covers, because for space-starved folks like myself, the spines may be all we ever see.

Anyway it’s a pretty breezy movie about an indie comic book artist named Travis who has recently put out an issue that mocks the local crime lord, Mr. Fong. Fong doesn’t find it very amusing, as you might expect, so he cuts Travis’ hand off to teach him a lesson (and, yes, prevent him from making any more comics). Travis becomes depressed and starts drinking the day away, but one day wakes up to see his disembodied hand back in his room, moving around on its own and even communicating with him via a type-to-speech program on his computer. And then the hand starts going about taking revenge on Fong and his men, paving the way for a showdown where Travis and his hand must literally/figuratively come together and take down the bad guy.

Yes, it’s pretty dumb, but there’s an odd charm to the whole affair, due in part to how little the sight of a disembodied hand scampering around like Thing seems to bother anyone. Travis treats it as an annoyance and everyone else just kind of goes with it, which makes it funnier. Never like, falling out of your seat laughing-level funny, but (to use the word again) a breezy kind of funny; I found myself smiling through most of it, not to mention impressed with the hand effects on what was clearly not a big budgeted movie. There’s a lot of random humor (I like that the bad guys’ response to stealing a purse is to go to the movies with the cash), plus a surprisingly timely gag where a couple who is into S&M sex play has “Giuliani” as their safe word. This was 2014, pre-Trump stuff and here I am watching it just days after the dummy got a mug shot for his crimes. That’s just gold right there.

The only issue I had was that it’s a horror comedy with some unpleasant moments, which throws the tone off. Several of Travis’ pals are brutally killed in the film, and it seemed excessive and unnecessary for this kind of movie. It’s hard not to think about Idle Hands, and the way they handled his pals’ deaths in that movie worked for its slacker tone, but here the deaths – in particular a throat slashing – seem more in line with French extreme fare from the 00s. Maybe they just wanted to show off their FX work or something, but it really kinda bummed me out in what was otherwise a “hangout” kind of genre film. Because when you have brutal deaths of nice people in this sort of thing, it feels like you’re supposed to be taking everything seriously, which is a problem for a movie about a disembodied hand running around and occasionally flipping people off. To be fair there is some South Park-ian “let’s offend everyone” type humor at times (the movie starts off with a mentally disabled man melting and ends with a gag about a Nazi dildo, so…), but the deaths aren’t played for laughs, so it doesn’t quite fit the vibe.

Director Matt O’Mahoney offers a commentary, though it seems somewhat edited at times, as more than one stretch of silence made me wonder if I had accidentally toggled it off, and he checks out before the movie even ends. That said it’s a decent enough track; I was happy he acknowledged the Street Trash vibes of the opening, and he tells a story about an actor who bowed out of the movie at the 11th hour because he inexplicably decided to ask his church group for permission to act in it (!) and they unsurprisingly said no. He also gets a little bit more into the film’s underlying message of freedom of speech and artists’ rights, something I wish was a little more prominent in the movie, but at least he’s on the right side of such things so that’s fine. He also pops up in a series of interviews with various outlets, including a trip to DiabolikDVD, which is like the Criterion Closet for folks who like movies where peoples’ heads get cut off on the regular. There are also some short films and deleted scenes, so it’s a decent package but could have used some insight from O’Mahoney’s collaborators, in particular Krista Magnusson who played the hand.

O’Mahoney has made several shorts, so it’s not too shocking the film has some pacing issues that seemed like they were solved by just adding in other things at random, but it kind of fits the weird vibe so it’s easier to forgive than in some other “short filmmaker tries something longer” debuts. Another pile movie, Motivational Growth, had similar issues while targeting the same kind of audience, and they were both made around the same time – must have been something in the air around then, i.e. something I appreciate and mostly enjoy if not outright love. I find myself gravitating more toward offbeat stuff lately while getting less and less interested in traditional fare like Last Voyage of the Demeter, so I hope there are more in this vein coming along (I was disheartened to see O’Mahoney hasn’t made anything since, short or not), and also that they end up in my ever shrinking pile!

What say you?

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Insidious: The Red Door (2023)

JULY 9, 2023

GENRE: GHOST, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

I’m gonna pretend I don’t feel old AT ALL that Insidious: The Red Door* is essentially a “legacyquel” to the Insidious series, reuniting the Lambert family who we haven’t seen for ten years/two sequels (they were MIA from the simply titled Chapter 3 and 2018’s The Last Key). The baby is now a pre-teen! The kid who was haunted is now off to college! Rose Byrne… well, apart from a blonder ‘do looks pretty much exactly the same, bless her. And taking center stage is Patrick Wilson, who also directed this entry (his debut behind the camera) and even sang the end credits song, a shockingly good cover of Shakespears Sister’s “Stay”, accompanied by Ghost (if you know the original, you can probably guess exactly what part Tobias sings instead of Patrick). Alas, in the great pantheon of “Spooky movie sequels where Patrick Wilson performs a cover song”, this one doesn’t quite hit the highs of The Conjuring 2.

It’s not a bad movie, I should stress – but it’s a bit of a messy one, as the narrative essentially divides itself between Dalton (a returning Ty Simpkins) at college somewhere in the southeast and Josh (Wilson) back home in Los Angeles. Both are being haunted by traditional Insidious-y ghosts, but there’s zero interaction between the pair until the film’s finale, so it feels like you’re flipping channels between two spooky movies. Both of them engaging on their own, but every time it switches from one to the other, it deflates a lot of the tension, not to mention counts as a distraction – I wasn’t shocked at all that nearly every time it cut from A to B, I saw a cell phone light up nearby, as if it was a commercial break. And it seemed rather needless to send Dalton so far away; the ostensible reason was to give him and Josh a bonding experience as they took the three day drive together, but we see exactly one scene of their journey. No fraught motel room blowouts, silent diner meals…. the college might as well have been two hours away for all it mattered to their road trip, and then maybe they could have interacted more.

You might be wondering why the two would need a bonding experience. Well, since the events of Insidious 2, Josh and Renai have gotten divorced, with Josh only getting the kids every other weekend. Curiously, the movie doesn’t even come right out and say this much until quite later in the runtime; the film opens with the funeral of Josh’s mom/the kids’ grandmother (Barbara Hershey’s character) and Renai is there, but it’s not until everyone is ready to leave that you get the hint that they’re not together anymore. Which is fine, but it takes well over an hour for Byrne and Wilson to interact again, where they hash things out and explain why the divorce even happened in the first place. And it’s a shame, because it’s a story thread I would have liked to have seen explored: it’s basically because she remembers Josh being possessed and terrorizing the family, but Josh and Dalton don’t, and the other son has chalked it up to nightmares thanks to her assurances (the daughter, being a baby at the time, doesn’t have an opinion on the matter, and is written out of the movie after the opening anyway). I find this a pretty interesting concept, not to mention mildly amusing if you recall how much Insidious 1 and 2 mirrored the first two Poltergeist movies – we never got to see how Stephen Freeling’s tequila worm freakout affected his family down the road, so Insidious is finally having one up on them!

Spending more time on this idea would have also given Byrne more to do, as she’s really only in like three scenes of the movie and is treated rather thanklessly outside of this big clash with Josh, which again occurs too far into the story. It would have been nice to know earlier why they were divorced, because at the end of I2 Josh and Dalton are hypnotized into forgetting, and without Renai actually involved in the story for 75 minutes or whatever, it’s hard to get a real idea of where any of these characters ARE in their lives, as if we missed another entry in between. It just seems like Dalton is a typical teen who would rather sulk in his room and listen to music than hang out with his dad. Even when the family drama is finally being made clear, it’s still a bit murky: Renai tells Josh that Dalton doesn’t talk to her either, and again I wondered why we were only learning this information now instead of at some point in the first act, i.e. when such things are usually established in a sequel.

But of course, people don’t show up to these things for family blowouts, they want ghosts! And in that department, they’re pretty good, if nothing new for the series. My favorite was pretty close to tbe beginning of the movie, a scene where Josh is in his car texting Dalton, with a ghost slowly approaching his car (which we see through the back windshield, unseen by him). There’s another good one later involving Christmas lights, as a character is checking various strands and thus every time she plugs one in it lights up a face that is becoming spookier. Those more subtle ones are always more fun to me than the more overt ones, which is probably a good thing for me because… well, there aren’t a lot of overly overt ones. Perhaps the constant setting shifts reduced the opportunities? Because every time they cut back to Dalton from Josh, we kind of have to get up to speed again, delaying the potential for another spookablast moment. I mean I didn’t have a pencil or stopwatch to keep track, but I’d be willing to bet if someone were to count the number of scare moments in each film (not how successful they were, just their basic existence) that this one could come up last in sheer volume. They’re on point, but they’re not as frequent, which might be a sticking point for audience members who are primed to jump from their seats every five minutes.

It's also not as goofy/funny as the first two movies, which is more in line with the last two but felt off since the Lamberts were back. But the real reason for this is that Specs and Tucker – who usually bring the majority of that energy – are reduced to about 15 seconds of screen time via a Youtube video. With 3 and 4 being prequels to the first two films, it’s a shame we don’t get to see more of what happened to them going forward; the end of 2 set up the idea that they’d continue doing the investigations with Elise’s ghost to guide them, but for all we know they’re merely cheesy Youtube goons now. Speaking of Elise, Lin Shaye has two scenes; one as another Youtube video and another in ghost form, with the latter feeling tacked on and – vague spoiler here – kind of deflated the power of the film’s final scene with Josh and Dalton, which really worked like gangbusters and would have been a great moment to end this entry (marketed as the final chapter, but a spinoff movie has been announced), but the Elise epilogue just kind of dragged it out for me. Still, always nice to see Ms. Shaye doing her thing, and I had to chuckle that James Wan made two franchises (the other being Saw) that killed off an older character actor much to the chagrin of a far younger fanbase, who’d presumably care less about them than the younger leads, forcing them to utilize flashbacks and prequel storytelling to keep them around.

That said, there is SOME humor courtesy of Sinclair Daniel as Chris, who (due to her gender neutral first name) is assigned as Dalton’s roommate and stays with him for a few days while the housing folks sort it out. She brings an irreverent touch to the proceedings as she first tries to get the introverted Dalton to have more of a college experience and then gets drawn into his Further shenanigans, and it was very much welcome since every other character was so moody. And it’s a platonic friendship, which is always nice to see as I’m someone with plenty of female pals and roll my eyes at the cliché that such things are a unicorn instead of the norm. Some of the other attempts at humor fall way flat though; there’s a douchey fraternity character who we’re supposed to laugh at, but he’s mostly just annoying and doesn’t get any real comeuppance or even point to his scenes. Whenever they focused on him for a minute or two, I found myself wishing we were back with Josh or even checking in on poor Carl (Steve Coulter), who shows up in one quick scene and also disappears after. So if you’re keeping count, the movie brings back ten characters, but outside of Josh and Dalton, their total combined screentime is about ten minutes, and if you take Byrne out of the equation that number drops to well short of five.

(The tenth would be the Lipstick Face demon from the original, who shows up so briefly it should have been a surprise cameo instead of something in the marketing.)

So overall, it’s a mixed bag. I liked seeing the family again and the father/son stuff between Josh and Dalton is pretty well done, and while I don’t want to spoil the particulars, the backstory of this movie’s new baddie is, unlike the others who have haunted the Lambert family, actually tied into their own history, which was appreciated. And it’s got a few solid setpieces (the MRI bit you’ve seen in the trailer, an attack on Josh in broad daylight) that bring on the chills that show Wilson is up to the task for such things. But the script (or the edit) never quite manages to gel the two storylines in a satisfying way, making it feel like they had two ideas for a sequel (“What’s Josh up to now?” and “What happens when Dalton goes to college?”) and decided to do both without ever unifying them, making the film come up short overall. And I can’t in good conscience ever give a ringing endorsement to anything that sidelines Rose Byrne. The spinoff is set to star Kumail Nanjiani, so I can only assume that it will bring things back to the more humorous tone of the first two, which I think was a big part of why it was successful and also why it still stands out in a sea of modern ghost movies (some also starring Patrick Wilson!). But I can also appreciate that this series has been dormant for a while and yet still opened quite well despite the recent success of Boogeyman, which mined similar territory, so I’m glad it opened well to help prove, for the millionth time, that horror is the safest bet for studios. A horror part 5 knocked Indiana Jones off the top spot after only a week, at about a tenth of the cost. The studios want to make more money? Then they should stop with the megabudget tentpoles no one is really asking for, and greenlight every cheap horror script they have.

What say you?

*In some territories it's known as Insidious: L Street.

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The Boogeyman (2023)

JUNE 6, 2023

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

Knock on wood, but after three years, I still haven't gotten covid (at least, not to my knowledge; it's hard to tell when I battle allergies 365 days a year and have no sense of smell anyway), and I chalk at least part of it up to the fact that I have always tried to sit in isolated sections of the movie theater (i.e. the front section, so all the idiots with their cell phones will be behind me). I still wear my mask pretty much anywhere I'm going to be indoors with strangers, but that's not possible when you're a popcorn addict like me, so while I'm not worried about Target or whatever, the movies are the closest I get to living recklessly. To keep things safer, I no longer go to most movies on opening night, figuring a few days later will be less busy and I'll decrease my chances of sitting next to someone spreading their germs. But my usual move didn't work for The Boogeyman; the front section was empty when I bought my ticket earlier in the day, but those three rows were all nearly full by the time the movie began (and, with people being the morons they are, filled in even more throughout the first 15 minutes of the film).

And naturally, as you can probably guess, they weren’t the most considerate moviegoers in the world: talking, laughing when nothing was funny (including at a character’s grief), coughing... it all served as a stark reminder of why so many people have opted to skip theaters altogether. Which is kind of ironic, because Boogeyman was supposed to be a streaming movie anyway, only for strong test screening scores – and a rave from Stephen King, who wrote the short story it’s sort of based on – to have Disney/Fox change their mind and release it theatrically. So I got to watch it on the big screen, like I prefer, among a bunch of dumbasses who should have stayed home and watched literally anything else since they obviously weren’t engaged by the film. If I get covid on top of it, I’d almost have to laugh.

Luckily the movie was pretty good! As I’ve said a million times, I don’t particularly find this sort of movie scary in the slightest, but there are some well executed jumps scares (one, involving a smashed door, even got a jolt out of me) and the sections of the crowd that weren’t mutants were eating it up, gasping and muttering “oh no” whenever the telltale signs of a looming fright moment were offered. So even if I myself wasn’t exactly going to have trouble sleeping that night, I’ve been to enough of these things in theaters to develop a pretty good gauge for the ones that work and the ones that don’t. It’s part of why I keep going even when I know I’ll be rolling my eyes at certain crowd members (I mean seriously; it’s been a long time since a crowd was that annoying, and I see a lot of kids’ movies, too), to use the crowd’s reactions to sort of make up for my own inability to really tell the difference between a good scare and a weak one.

That said, I can’t help but feel some of its power was diluted by Lights Out, which covered the same ground, of a supernatural entity that thrives in the dark/can’t get you in the light (not to mention Darkness Falls, but that was 20 years ago now and hopefully forgotten by most anyway). King’s short story (which is in Night Shift, for the curious) is basically just one scene, of a troubled man named Lester who tells a psychiatrist about how he came to lose all three of his children, chalking it up to the titular boogeyman. King’s story ends on a little twist (the shrink is the boogeyman), but the filmmakers (Rob Savage of Host fame, with a script by Quiet Place/65 creators Beck and Woods) omit that and use the scene as a launching point, focusing on the doctor (Chris Messina with a fantastic beard) and his two children, a teen played by Sophie Thatcher from Yellowjackets and a younger girl played by Vivien Lyra Blair (young Leia from Obi-Wan). After Lester (David Dastmalchian, killing it in his one scene) tells his story and makes his exit from the film, the boogeyman attaches itself to Messina and his family, providing the film with all the child endangerment terror that sells tickets.

The boogeyman chooses them because, as Lester’s wife (Marin Ireland) tells us later, it’s attracted to the broken and wounded, and they’re all dealing with the recent death of the mom of the family unit, who died in a car accident. Messina’s character buries himself in his work, helping his clients deal with their problems while talking around it with his own children. It’s this stuff that I found most interesting about the movie; there’s a number of heartbreaking little moments about how Thatcher’s character is dealing with the loss of her mom that made this a cut above the usual “let’s make sure there’s a jump scare every five minutes” PG-13 horror. At one point she repeatedly refreshes her text chain with her mom as if a new message might appear, and when she finally returns to school after a month’s absence to deal with the loss, she opens her locker and finds the (now very spoiled) last lunch her mom packed, complete with a “have a good day!” kind of message; an everyday, forgettable kind of thing that nearly reduces her to tears as she realizes it’s the last sort of communication she ever had with her, while also reminding us how quickly someone can be taken from us - she went to school like every other day and got that awful call before lunch. Messina’s dilemma is also well handled; he sends the girls to another therapist because he is unable to talk to them about it, which comes to a head when Thatcher starts opening up about how she’s feeling and he cuts her off with “You should tell Dr (whoever) about this at your session this week,” prompting a teary-eyed Thatcher to reply “I’m trying to talk to YOU.” Teen girls in horror dealing with loss are usually presented as rebellious and withdrawn; it’s kind of refreshing to see one who is trying very hard to communicate with her remaining parent.

As for the other, younger daughter, she is mostly tasked with giving the movie its trailer moments, which is fine but – again, as someone who doesn’t find this stuff all that scary – left me feeling less invested whenever it focused on a young child being menaced by the monster in this PG-13 studio horror movie. Dastmalchian’s kid is offed in the opening scene and Thatcher has an F-bomb, so we can be assured that anything more intense would have netted it an R rating, and thus it’s hard to get too caught up in her plight during these scenes. But again, they’re at least well done, and with a minimum of *fake* scares to boot, so it’s all good. I know it’s this stuff that gets butts in seats, not someone freaking out that her dad is trying to get rid of her dead mom’s painting supplies - having those character elements in between the scenes instead of something more generic is what made the movie engaging to me, is the point.

And the boogeyman itself? It’s a pretty good creature! The concept means we rarely get a good look at it, but I liked that it was an actual creature (sort of like a humanoid spider?) as opposed to a human kind of thing, as the concept of “The Boogeyman” is a bit synonymous with Michael Myers so moving away from that idea helped me from thinking about my favorite movie during this one. On that note, the few references to other things are pretty subtle; their house number is 19, which should make any astute King fan smile, and Savage drops a little bit of Host footage into a key moment, which won’t register unless you’ve seen the film anyway. I mean, we’re at the point where horror movies are the only things that are successful in theaters outside of the predetermined blockbusters from Disney and Universal, so even if the crowd isn’t well behaved there’s something almost soothing about seeing a packed crowd for a movie that isn’t just an advertisement for the next movie in its franchise. The last two movies I saw in theaters before this (Fast X and Spider-Verse) both ended on cliffhangers, so I have to fork over more money next year to see how those events pan out – that’s kind of annoying! But The Boogeyman told a complete story (even the obligatory “it isn’t over yet!” tease at the end actually ultimately plays as more of a definite THE END) and almost never reminded me of other movies - that’d be worth my 15 bucks even if it was just 90 minutes of cats jumping out of cupboards.

What say you?

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