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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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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Blu-Ray Review: The Haunting of Julia (1977)

APRIL 26, 2023

GENRE: GHOST, PSYCHOLOGICAL
SOURCE: 4K UHD (OWN COLLECTION)

As is often the case, I remembered liking The Haunting of Julia (aka Full Circle) when I saw it many years ago as a canon Horror Movie a Day entry, but nothing specific beyond that - I was even kind of hazy on the sub-genre it belonged to. But the most surprising thing about re-reading my review (now over a decade old) was that I saw it on Netflix "Instant", back when their streaming platform was still in its relative infancy (House of Cards didn't even exist yet). It's pretty easy to forget (and almost kind of hard to imagine) that their movie library used to be fairly robust with regards to obscure films; nowadays I assume the deepest cuts are probably DTV studio films from the aughts.

But I should have remembered that it had to have been streaming somewhere, because it never even came to DVD outside of a bootleg version that was released in France. That makes it an usual but highly appreciated choice for Scream Factory to add to their growing 4K UHD library, as the bulk of it is just upgraded versions of their own previous releases (the Carpenter stuff, Return of the Living Dead, etc.). The only other one I know of that came to 4K without a Blu-ray before it (either from their own history or the studio's) was Alligator, but at least that had a DVD to compare to. For this forgotten little gem, with the Netflix option long gone, the only thing to compare the transfer to would be either that bootleg French DVD, or the damned VHS tape.

I say that to note that it's not exactly the most mind-blowing ultra high def restoration out there - it actually looks rather soft to my eyes. But just having the movie at all is the real "get" here, and since most of SF's releases of late have been double dips, it's nice to see that there are still titles like this that they can rescue from out of print hell, and in this case complete obscurity. Despite the presence of Mia "Rosemary's Baby" Farrow and Keir Dullea (who once again breaks into a basement looking for the rattled heroine, as he did in Black Christmas - the man has a niche!), the film's unavailability has left it pretty much unheard of by most genre fans, and the fact that it's known by another title (neither of which are Julia, the name of the Peter Straub novel it's based on) doesn't help much. Long story short, it's a gamble for them to go down the more expensive 4K route with a title that most aren't aware of, and I laud them for it.

For those who didn't click back on my old review and/or simply don't know the story, it's very much in the vein of Don't Look Now or The Changeling (which came later), in that it kicks off with the hero (Farrow) losing their child and then being haunted by their memory... or is it an actual ghost? I've never read Straub's novel*, but from what I understand he makes things a little less vague than the movie, which as depicted seems like the filmmaker wanted you to draw your own conclusions as to whether or not she was just having a mental breakdown or if the ghost was actually committing the (relatively high number of) deaths in the film's second half. And if it was a ghost, which one? Her daughter? A little boy who was murdered? Or the evil child that killed him, who was later in turn murdered by her mother when she realized how wicked her daughter was? Again, it's unclear, but on the commentary track director Richard Loncraine spells it out, prompting his moderator to note that all he has to do is "tour the countryside explaining the movie to anyone who is about to watch it."

That's one of the many comments that makes the track an unexpected delight, as the two men are old pals and, as is quickly made clear, moderator/historian Simon Fitzjohn actually likes the movie more than Loncraine does, as the latter feels that Straub's novel itself had some issues (I poked around online and the consensus is that Ghost Story was his improved version of the same kind of story, a sort of "Four Flies on Grey Velvet compared to the later Deep Red" type situation) and he didn't do the best job of fixing them. So the two take little jabs at each other while running through the usual retrospective type commentary, with Loncraine talking about the production, working with Farrow and the others (apparently she caught Rosemary on tv a few nights before shooting started and suddenly decided she didn't want to do the movie in fear of repeating herself; Loncraine had to convince her to stay on), etc, while Fitzjohn gets into the "Where are they now?" sort of thing. It's the sort of track I wish I heard more often, as you usually get a moderator who is just asking questions to the director without bringing much to the table at all, or a historian who is by themselves and goes off on unrelated tangents to fill up the dead space since there's only so much they can know without someone who actually made the movie sitting there with him.

(So if they upgrade Shocker to 4K, I'll be the historian, but I want Peter Berg and/or Mitch Pileggi there with me. Thanks in advance.)

There are also a pair of interviews, one with Tom Conti who plays Farrow's friend/potential new love interest, and Samantha Gates who played the evil child Olivia. They're both fine, if a bit overlong considering their relatively minor roles in the film (Gates in particular is only onscreen for a minute or so, but the interview runs for over ten minutes). Of more interest is a solid critique from Kim Newman, which runs 25 minutes and acts as a sort of mini historian commentary, highlighted by his noting that Farrow's career is most famous for Polanski's Rosemary's Baby and her work with Woody Allen, which has to suck. There's also a fun little visit to the shooting locations as they exist today, a bonus feature I always enjoy as someone who visits such locations for personal faves (the first time I came to LA, I looked for Fletch's apartment in Santa Monica). Loncraine also provides an intro to the film, but like all the other extras (save the commentary) it's confined to the accompanying standard Blu-ray, which puzzles me - it's not even a minute long, could it really not "fit" on the 4K disc with a mere 95 minute film? I only found it because I decided to take the standard disc with me to work (no 4K there) to watch the rest of the commentary on my lunch break.

Other than that, it's a solid release for a film that could have easily continued to languish in moratarium; one of those releases where even a bare-bones presentation would have been enough to make fans happy since there was literally nothing better (unless you're one of those obnoxious VHS champions who find a murky/cropped tape of Die Hard or something and hold it up like it's a treasure as opposed to something that should just be thrown away). I hope it's a successful gambit for Scream Factory as I'd like to see them continue to "save" these movies as often as they can, as opposed to sticking with safe bets like upgrading Army of Darkness or whatever to 4K. Not that I'm against that sort of thing, especially if it keeps the lights on (and you know damn well I upgraded my Halloween releases), but I feel there should be room for both, preferably in equal measures!

What say you?

*I have it here though; I was planning to actually do a comparison when this disc came out, but got swamped on a much larger "book vs movie" project that will hopefully appear in a certain horror mag later this year!

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Overlook 2023 Wrapup!

MARCH 30th-APRIL 2nd, 2023

GENRE: HORROR MOVIES!
SOURCE: OVERLOOK FILM FESTIVAL

My man Kurt Cobain said it best: "Weather changes moods." After I had a great time in 2018 I planned to go to Overlook as often as possible, only for 2019 to not work out for whatever reason (I honestly can't recall why) and then 2020/21 being torn asunder by covid. So I went in 2022 and... it was just OK. I still enjoyed the conversations and accompanying libations with pals of course, but they moved it further into spring (practically summer) that year, and the excess heat/humidity just made it kind of a drag at times. It's a spread out festival, which is usually fine - it gives you an excuse to see more of New Orleans! But a half mile can feel like a marathon when you're sweating through your clothes *before* you sit down for two hours to watch a movie. So I was on the fence about returning, but when they moved it back to the end of March/beginning of April (i.e. barely out of winter, technically), I decided to give it another chance.

And man, I'm glad I did. I honestly think I enjoyed this one even more than that first one that made me like it so much in the first place. The weather was better (I think I only felt hot/sticky once the entire time), there were more friendly faces than last year, and - oh yeah, it's a film festival - the lineup was much more to my liking. The "worst" movie I saw was still pretty decent, and I think I saw more than ever which meant my chances of a stinker would go up. Of course, in order to devote more time to the movies that means I missed out on a lot of the immersive/live event kinda stuff that makes the festival all the more appealing to attend (as opposed to watching the movies via screener from home), but I still had a great time which is all that matter. AND I managed to gain a few pounds from all the food, so that's... well, not GOOD, because now I need to lose it, but yum! Crawfish! Shrimp 'n grits!

Also, as with last year, I wasn't there on assignment like I was the first time around, where I was tasked with filing reviews ASAP, which meant taking more notes and having trouble focusing on movie #2 when I was trying to think of what to say about movie #1 (and so on). So this was like the best of both worlds scenario: good movies and weather like in 2018, and no need to "work" like last year. I didn't even bring my laptop! Bless. That said, I planned to write a few reviews in full, but my mom came out to visit us in CA the day after I got back from New Orleans, so it's only now, a week after I returned, that I have been able to find time to write anything. So... yeah, you're getting paragraph mini-reviews. I might still do one for Renfield (which I enjoyed!) since that's coming out next week, as opposed to these others which are mostly undated; hopefully I find time for that this week. But other than that omission, here's everything else I saw, in order!

THE ELDERLY
This was described as body horror, but that's kind of misleading - other than a brief scene of a man cutting himself open to put a little light up battery pack thing in his chest, there's nothing Cronenberg-y going on here. Instead it's about a massive heat wave that is seemingly driving all the elderly people crazy; the film opens on an old woman committing suicide, prompting her husband to move in with his son and his own family so that he wouldn't be alone. However the old man is increasingly disturbed, talking nonsense and even making threats toward his son's new wife (he preferred the first wife, who has died). The rapidly increasing temperature is depicted with full screen graphics, so you know it's building toward some kind of unbearable/dangerous temperature, which is accompanied by an epic thunderstorm for good measure. At this point all hell breaks loose, with all the titular Elderly going all "rage virus" like on the younger folks, bringing some shockingly brutal moments along with it. Very little is really explained, but that's OK - it works as a slow burn toward tragic/unsettling violence, while also saying a few things about how the elderly begin to lose control of their minds (and yes, bodies - I guess that's where the "body horror" thing comes from but it's still rather misleading to use it as a genre depiction) and how even their own children see them as nuisances. If you're a fan of Adrian Bogliano's work (particularly Penumbra), or simply enjoy seeing creepy naked old men, you should be into this one.

BROOKLYN 45
A well executed period piece about grief and paranoia. Set a few days after Christmas 1945 (so, not long after the war ended), the movie takes place in real time as an Army man (Larry Fessenden in a terrific performance) who recently lost his wife has invited a few of his fellow soldiers over for a reunion, which doubles as a well-wishery for one of them, who is about to face a court martial for war crimes. The nature of his crime (and specifically, whether it was intentional or not) is one of the film's many mysteries that unfold over the 90 minutes, with things kicking into gear as Fessenden's character attempts a seance to contact his late wife. Director Ted Geoghegan (who wrote the movie with his father) does a fine job recreating the look/feel of the films that were made at the time (the credits in particular* really sell the Capra-y era), and the script keeps you guessing over who is telling the truth until the end, giving you just enough reason to believe either party. I was also amused that one of the quintet was played by Ron E. Rains, who I am most familiar with as "Peter Rosenthal", the film critic for The Onion. It also contains a face smashing scene that rivals any "torture porn" era film for how disturbing it is, so that was nice. I believe it's coming to Shudder, so keep an eye out!

TRIM SEASON
I almost didn't see this at all because I got the wrong idea from the plot description, which referred to people hired to trim marijuana plants - I got it in my head that it was a stoner horror comedy, which isn't anything I'd rush out for. I'm so green (heh) when it comes to pot that at a key moment in the film, when a character steals a red colored bud from their boss' special stash, I thought it was a strawberry (if you're baffled: it kinda looked like this, but also in the dark because it's a horror movie). Anyway, I'm glad I was corrected as it turned out to be tied for my favorite movie of the fest. Our group of trimmers (including Alex Essoe from Starry Eyes) are all new to the gig, and mostly don't know each other, and the people who run the joint (sorry for these puns!) are suspicious and creepy, so you're probably thinking it'll be some Texas Chain Saw type thing, but that's not what it is! I mean yeah most of them die, but the vibe is more straight up folk horror; I was reminded of things like Midsommar and Lepterica than any "five young folks get lost and run afoul of _____" type movie. But fear not, it's also gory at times - there's a scene that rivals the puking bit in Fulci's City of the Living Dead! - and even dips into body horror territory as the villains exert a puppet-like control over their victims, leaving their minds intact as their bodies betray them into killing each other. So while it may remind you of this or that other movie at times, it all gels to be its own unique, disturbing, but also weirdly kind of optimistic thing. A true gem, can't wait til the rest of you can see it.

TRIVIA
Not a movie, but I took a break from the theater to compete at horror trivia. Our team did quite well! Of four rounds/twenty or so teams, we won one and lost a tiebreaker for another. I won a blu-ray of Orca. And I took a lyft there but walked back, getting to see parts of the city I hadn't seen in the two other times I've been (trivia is always at a different location for whatever reason), so that was nice.

APPENDAGE
Oh man. I don't even want to say anything about this one as it's coming to Hulu soon and I myself didn't know anything about it - it just happened to be the only film that I could make it to on time knowing I'd be coming from trivia (which was about a mile from the theater) and wanting dinner/possible change of clothes after the walk. I'll tell you the basic plot setup: a woman's birthmark starts to spread/hurt, so she gets it checked out. And that's it. That's all you should know before watching (if Hulu advertises it, don't look!). The surprise happens at like the 20 minute mark, so if you're like "Oh, no way, that's not for me" you've only lost 20 minutes of your life. For everyone else, just enjoy the rest! I had a blast, though the ending did drag a bit and they lean too hard into the main character's paranoia that her bestie is hooking up with her boyfriend. Otherwise it'd tie for fave with Trim Season and the other one which I'm getting to soon (and is also from Hulu, weirdly).

TALK TO ME
This was the "secret screening" which I was assured by one of the festival organizers would be something I would like. I usually don't bother with these secret things at festivals; I don't like walking out of things and if it turns out to be something that's just not for me (a rape revenge movie, for example) I'd feel stuck. Plus it was 10pm, which is never ideal for my damn near narcoleptic ass. But it turned out to be a pretty good entry in the "play with a cursed object and then try to get un-cursed" genre, focusing on an embalmed hand that, when held while saying "talk to me" would allow you to communicate with the dead. Our teen heroes of course use it as a dare for parties, but naturally things go wrong and our heroine's best friend's little brother ends up putting himself into a coma after the spirit causes him to smash his own head in (two in one day after Brooklyn 45!). So the girl, who is like part of the family to these people and now blamed for his accident, is now racing against time to free him from the spirit that is still haunting him, but thankfully it didn't involve finding out who the ghost was/how it died/what it wanted, like most of these things do. My issue with that kind of story is that it's never anyone we care about, so the movies kind of stop cold to solve a mystery that we in the audience are not invested in. Here the focus remains on the girl and her attempts to just free him/herself through other means, and whether they work or not is naturally not something I'll spoil here, but I will say it results in a knockout final scene. It could have been tighter, but the scares work, the characters are engaging (Miranda Otto as the kid's mom is a particular delight), and it kept me awake at 10pm after three other movies and a lengthy walk, so that's gotta count for something. Coming this summer from A24 (who just bought it - they didn't make it themselves, which is probably why I can say things like "it has a great ending").

RING, RING
Not really a movie, but a presentation from the good folks at Museum of Home Video, which streams online every Tuesday night. The theme was creepy/insane footage that was captured with people's Ring cameras, something I own myself but rarely manage to get even the deliveries it should be capturing, let alone someone doing anything uncouth. Anyway, as one can expect some of the footage isn't all that interesting (most of it was culled from Youtube channels devoted to such things, so I guess they occasionally have slim pickings), but there were some genuinely unsettling ones. One in particular started with a woman and her son coming home like normal, only for the door to shut and reveal a dude had been following them and was possibly only seconds away from entering as well if they hadn't shut (locked?) the door in time. It was an excellent little diversion, highlighted by an intro piece (unrelated to the Ring stuff) with random remix videos, such as a four minute cut of Poltergeist III that just focuses on the excessive number of times people in that movie say each other's names to one another.

KINGCAST
As with last year, the Kingcast boys did a live recording after a viewing of a Stephen King movie. But this year's choice was Dead Zone, which I watched not too long ago, so opted to just hang out with pals and get a meal until the podcast portion began. It was fun and I got a shoutout when Phil (who was subbing in for Bryan Fuller, who himself was set to sub for Scott Wampler, who couldn't make it at all) ranted about how every time he was on the show he was making people angry, as this time they were expecting the creator of Hannibal and last time he was asking trivia questions that were hated by the guest (Kate Siegel), and those questions were penned by yours truly. Sorry Phil! Sorry Kate! The recording should be up this week if it's not already.

CLOCK
I was trying to get into Evil Dead Rise at this time, but it was jampacked and it seemed I didn't have much of a chance of getting in (as with other fests, your badge guarantees you get into *a* movie per slot, not necessarily the movie you want the most). But I know I'll see it in a theater soon, so beyond some mild FOMO afterward since I couldn't talk about it, I wasn't too upset about it - especially since I ended up seeing Clock instead, which was the aforementioned "tied for favorite" movie of the festival. It's about a woman with a "broken" biological clock, in that she just doesn't really want to have kids like (society assumes) most other women do by the time they are her age. But her husband wants children, her father wants to see the family line continue, and her friends keep egging her on, so when her gynecologist suggests a clinical trial to "fix" these broken clocks, she decides to give it a shot for the sake of everyone around her. Naturally, things don't go as expected for her, but whereas you might think you know where it's going simply because it's a horror movie, I assure you that you are likely incorrect. Again, I don't want to say too much for fear of spoilers (I'll say this much: it rivals the smash Smile for a scene where the troubled protagonist gives a gift that turns out to be horrifying), but it turns out to be a very dark but also very sad tale of the lengths women will go to just to feel "right" based on what other people think she should be doing with her life, and how devastating it can be. Just leave them be, people! Like Appendage, this is coming to Hulu and well worth your time/suffering through the commercials (that said, SO HAPPY I saw it in a theater!).

THE WRATH OF BECKY
I saw the first Becky at the drive-in, which is to say I *attended* Becky at the drive-in, as the screen was too dim to make out much of what happened in the darker scenes of the film (such as the entire climax). So I had to laugh at the Q&A after, when the director revealed that this one was supposed to have a climax at night too, only for them to change their minds only days before shooting to continue the style of the rest of the movie and keep it in the bright sunlight. Not only was this cost effective, but it tied into the material: this time around, Becky isn't trying to hide or evade the bad guys, she's openly egging them on. It's a different set of villains (obviously, since she killed them all) and thankfully not even related to them beyond the fact that they're also Nazis (think "Proud Boys" types as opposed to the skinheads of the original). So you don't need to see the original and in some ways it might even be better if you don't, as it'll dilute some of the novelty of seeing this teenager kill the crap out of some racist douchebags; the only real tie is that she's still trying to figure out the purpose of the key the bad guys were looking for. Seann William Scott is a surprisingly solid menace (the director also said they wanted to continue the "cast a comedian as a terrifying Nazi" theme after Kevin James' turn in the first one), and the whole movie revolves around her trying to rescue her dog, so it's pretty crowd-pleasing. It also has a cameo from Kate Siegel that is an all time howler, as it just fully leans into the absurd premise of the whole (now) series. Bring on a third one!

THE ACCUSED
Alas, my win streak came to an end with this merely "OK" movie. It starts off terrific: an Indian man in London takes the train to visit his parents in the countryside, pulling away only a few minutes after a terrorist sets off a bomb at the station he just departed. At first he just sees it as a shame/tragedy but is trying to focus on more positive matters, only for an old classmate to tweet about how the bomber - caught in a blurry surveillance photo - kind of resembles the man she went to school with. Within minutes, Twitter detectives find someone else's post proving that he was indeed in the building, and that's all it takes for the witch hunt to begin, with all of social media calling for his head (amidst a few - very few - "let's not jump to conclusions" pleas). Eventually he catches wind of this and panics, as his parents have left for the weekend (he's there to dog-sit) and he's unable to get in touch with his girlfriend. This is all the first forty minutes of the movie, and it's quite gripping/all too real, as we've seen this sort of thing happen with mass shooters more than once. Unfortunately, two "good ol boys" decide to take matters into their own hands and show up at the parents' house, which just leads into an extended/overlong home invasion sequence that barely has anything to do with the plot setup. The two attackers rarely speak about why they're there, and for some reason he barely even tries to reason with them in turn, even though he seems to know exactly why they're there. So it's just... you know, a generic home invasion thriller for the rest, albeit without much suspense as he's the only one home (and - spoiler - they kill the dog instantly, burning audience sympathy on top of it). It also never bothers to explain why the cops aren't showing up even after some news outlets name him as a suspect, so it's flimsy as well. The ending salvages some of it by hammering the point home about how these lives are forever altered/ruined by people who just forget about them the next day, but it's a shame that a full half of the movie is focused on such a bland chase scene.

LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL
Fans of WNUF Halloween Special should be pretty hooked into this, which takes a similar "actual broadcast" aesthetic, presenting the Halloween night 1977 airing of "Late Night with Jack Delroy", a Carson-esque late night talk show that is currently facing ratings declines as well as some personal struggles for its host, whose wife recently passed from cancer. The backstory is laid out by a narrator (Michael Ironside!) before the tape begins to play, but unfortunately they don't commit to it as well as WNUF folks did - in order to fill in the story, we are shown "behind the scenes footage" whenever Jack goes to commercial, a sort of found footage conceit that doesn't QUITE hold water (how many cameras are filming behind the scenes - in 1977 no less - to give us all these angles and private conversations?) but works well enough to keep the story going. Plus it's amusing to see how much what happens during those brief commercial breaks (such as the first guest's death after he left) affects Jack as he tries to keep things light and breezy for the audience, though as the supernatural possession plot ramps up he cracks fewer and fewer jokes. It could have been a little shorter, but it's an effective Tales from the Crypt type plot done well, and a fine showcase for David Dastmalchian, who also moonlights as a horror host so this is clearly a sort of dream gig for him. It won the audience award for the festival (my fave Clock was runnerup!), so clearly they have a winner here. Plus, it's from the guys who made 100 Bloody Acres, so I was happy to see something new from them.

And that was it, alas. That was the last movie on Sunday night, and while they showed some "encore" movies on Monday they were at night and my flight was in the afternoon, so I didn't get to partake. But since my flight was "late" in the day (last time it was at 6 am) I was able to enjoy one last outing in the city on Sunday night, drinking at a fantastic bar that had skeeball and the same "connected" jukebox service I use here, allowing me to quickly enrich everyone's lives with some Jim Steinman songs. Oh and spend another couple hours with friends who I probably won't see again until next year's fest, which I will definitely attend as long as they don't move it to June again. April or earlier? I'm there!

What say you?

*Not mine! I did the titles for Ted's first film, but not this one. I was a bit jealous of these! I rarely get to do anything that stylish!

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Fear (2023)

JANUARY 29, 2023

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

I spied a poster for Fear (stylized as Fear? on the poster, and changed (?) to Don't Fear at the end of the film - more on that soon) at my AMC way back in September, assuming it was some kind of Halloween season release that escaped my attention. I then basically forgot about it until I saw it listed on their app as coming soon, and realized that in the four months in between, I had yet to hear anything else about it. Intrigued, I decided to go see it completely blind; a practice I love but rarely get to exercise outside of festivals. Like, I am stoked for Scream VI, but I know the cast, the basic plot, one or two of its surprises... and have six weeks to go before it's released, so chances are I'll know more by then. But for Fear I remained unsullied until it began playing on the screen. It was kind of exciting!

But I quickly regretted my decision, because during the credit sequence (which was actually pretty well done, admittedly) I learned that the director was none other than Dean Taylor, helmer behind some of the worst movies I saw in their respective years: Chain Letter (2010), Meet the Blacks (2016), and The Intruder (2019). I'm not quite sure how this man keeps attracting funding with a track record like that, as not only are the films not particularly successful at the box office (perhaps they clean up on video?) they're also widely hated on an Uwe Boll-ian level, so I know it's not just me. A quick perusal of his filmography on Letterboxd shows that the highest rating he's achieved so far is a 2.9, which isn't exactly a "win". Most - including Fear - fall below a 2.0, so I know it's not just me walking out his movies wondering what else I could have done with my time.

As a bonus, this one isn't just merely bad, it's also irresponsible. The plot is about a group of friends gathering at an isolated hotel/resort to celebrate one of them having a best-selling book, and we are told that everyone has properly tested beforehand (some even isolated for two weeks) to prevent a covid spread. Which is the sort of thing you'd expect if the movie took place in 2020 or even 2021 before the vaccine became easily available, but for reasons that only make sense to Herr Taylor, the film is established as being set in 2023. So why is everyone so paranoid, you might wonder? Hell, by late 2021 even the most cautious people (such as myself, vaxxed and double-boosted, thank you) were going back to life as normally as possible - I even went out of town for a festival and a few Halloween parties without much worry. So why are these folks going to the two week isolation extreme?

(SPOILERS AHEAD!)

Because it turns out, while the title ostensibly refers to the overused concept of everyone sharing their fears (blood, cops, being in confined spaces, etc) and then being undone by it, the movie as a whole (spoiler, last chance) is one big F U to people who isolated, stayed at home for months (or still are), continue to wear their masks, etc. Early on we learn that there's a new strain of the virus that is more deadly and in the air, and thus no one should go outside for any reason, but one of the group has left her kid at home with a sitter for the weekend (hell of a sitter!) and is worried about him, so she opts to - gasp! - go outside and take her chances so that she can be with him. Meanwhile, pretty much everyone who stays behind (i.e. listens to the news and believes that it can be dangerous) gets killed, with the lone survivor (who escapes the supernatural force by also just going outside and also having faith in JESUS) finding a bunch of townsfolk just walking around normally, and her cell phone going off to show that the friend who escaped is perfectly fine.

Then there's a slam cut to the original "DON'T Fear" title and it really seems like Taylor has clear disdain for the people who holed up and didn't put themselves/others at risk in order to get brunch or a haircut. Again, the setting is 2023, but the film was actually shot in August of 2020, before the vaccine (even tests were a ways off from being easy to find), so it's unclear why they changed it when everything about the movie's setup would make much more sense if it was just set in 2020 (the recent Sick, filmed later, takes place in April of 2020 and really leans into it, so it's not like a "period piece" of 2-3 years ago is impossible). Per Taylor, the film was shot with strict covid regulations, so why the finished feature depicts a pretty cynical attitude about all the caution and rules is curious at best, but by changing it to 2023 it's easy to infer that he believes anyone still being cautious *today* is just a coward, and deserve to be murdered by our "fears" while the people who opt to just ignore the warnings will live happy and full lives. Did some folks overreact, stockpiling enough toilet paper for a decade? Absolutely. But I'll take them over the people who went around screaming about "MUH FREEDOM!" at grocery store clerks because they were asked to wear a mask. And the movie's message seems to side more with them than the TP hoarders.

It would have been the sort of thing that derailed a movie in the last few minutes (kind of like how The Devil Inside was playing just fine to my crowd until the URL at the end turned them against it), but it sucked all the way through anyway, so it was adding insult to injury as opposed to just making a last minute bad call. For starters it takes forever to get going; the "we will be undone by our fears" concept is clear at around the 30 minute mark at most, but it's over an hour before the first person is actually attacked by whatever supernatural/psychological grip the location has over them. It takes so long from the point where they all divulge their personal fears to the time that those fears come back to haunt them that you might actually forget what some of them were, and they're all poorly shoehorned into the proceedings anyway. My personal favorite is that the guy who was afraid of confined spaces isn't the one who ends up being locked in a storage closet - after spending the movie constantly getting lost in the hotel's hallways (so... why wasn't his fear being lost?) he dies when he goes into a bathroom, which I would assume is something he does every day anyway. (Ironically, his subsequent death is one of the few effective moments in the movie - go figure.)

It's also just sloppy and confusing throughout, with some plot points delivered as reveals despite the fact that we had already been given that information (some "dun dun DUNNN" music/editing choices accompany the lead telling us that the hotel was the site of some torture/sacrifices in the past, something he told the same people earlier in the movie). One character is afraid of cops because of the time he was pulled over and forced out of his car, and then near the end another character says they will call the cops, so it seems they'll show up and that'll be his undoing, right? Nope, the cops never come, but he starts going crazy anyway, and accompanying flashbacks to the source of his trauma show him stabbing the cop - is that what actually happened, or a hallucination? Hell if I know, or care. Another girl is afraid of losing her necklace (ok, fine) but her death has nothing to do with it, while also showcasing some kind of hazing gone wrong prank that wasn't clearly established beforehand. So basically, Taylor and his co-conspirators can't even stick to their lame/tired concept as they slowly (the goddamn thing is 100 minutes long) make their way to basically telling me and anyone else in the audience who wore a mask that day that we're losers.

I can give the movie credit for two (2) things. One was the aforementioned bathroom death, which involved the character repeatedly whacking their head into the sink while screaming "Let me out!" Said character was one of the few who were interesting, so having them go out in such gruesome fashion struck a tiny nerve. The other is that I was pleasantly surprised to discover that this group of late 20s/early 30s friends had no dark secrets between them. I thought for sure that the lead's girlfriend (who has seemingly been neglected lately due to his career taking off) would turn out to be having an affair with one of the other friends, or that there would be some bed-hopping at the very least, but nope - everyone is pretty cool with each other outside of conflict that occurs within the narrative (i.e. one guy starts coughing, so some want to isolate him while others think it's inhumane). In a movie that steals from Evil Dead, The Shining, The Mist, and who knows what else, I have to begrudgingly respect that they had the relatively original idea for a modern horror movie to let the group of friends actually like each other for a change.

But that's, you know, not nearly enough to give this even a "OK for background noise" pass. I suspect the success of Terrifier 2 will mean seeing more indie stuff like this on the big screen as theaters look for something/anything to get butts in seats in between Marvel movies, and that's great, but I also suspect a lot of it will be really bad, like this. They won't recall that Terrifier was a viral/word of mouth hit, playing single showings to packed crowds and gradually expanding it once it was clear that people wanted to see it, as opposed to dumping it out on nearly 1,000 screens at once as they've done with this thing. So for the sake of all the good indies that deserve their shot, let's hope there aren't any movies as bad as Fear in the pipeline, and that the next chance taken by the likes of AMC is on a movie that is actually more entertaining than their endless pre-show reel and trailer collection. I'd rather watch the GD Morbius preview again than suffer through another film as insulting and inept as this.

What say you?

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From The Pile: Boo! (2018)

SEPTEMBER 21, 2022

GENRE: GHOST, PSYCHOLOGICAL
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

While most "Pile" movies are acquired for free (trivia, unsolicited mailings) every now and then I head over to the local Dollar Tree and scoop up a few. It's not the main purpose of my journey; I don't want to sound mean but it's often a place I can find movies I did the credits for, and since "end title creator" is not on the shortlist of people the producers will gift a copy to, I grab them when I see them here (or Big Lots, or whatever) for my pitiful little collection of movies I worked on. And so since I'm there anyway and will be waiting in line, I occasionally grab something like Boo!, which looked reasonably entertaining enough to hand over the princely sum of one dollar to find out if it was.

Alas, it was not.

The concept is fine: it's Halloween night and someone has left a chain letter (called a Boo) at their door, with the standard "Pass it on or you'll be cursed" message. However, this particular house's patriarch is a righteous Christian man (real fire and brimstone type) who refuses to celebrate Halloween due to its pagan connections, and promptly burns the letter. This being a horror movie, creepy things will now happen to him, his wife, and his two children (one college-aged, the other like 12) until they pass the curse on or whatever, right?

Well, sure (emphasis on the "or whatever"). Unfortunately it takes a very, very long time for this to happen, and in the meantime we just watch endless scenes of the younger kid drawing, the mother smoking or drinking, and the teen girl sneaking out with her boyfriend. Sometimes they have visions of scary things happening (for example when the mom, out for another smoke break, sees a baby carriage in the middle of the street out of nowhere) but after a couple we realize that they're just that: visions. Nothing ACTUALLY happens in this movie until the final few minutes, by which point any reasonable viewer - even those who only paid a dollar for the damn thing - would have checked out.

It doesn't help that it shares surface details to Hereditary (whether they're coincidental or, well, NOT coincidental is unknown; it's shot almost entirely in one house and had its first public screening nine months after Ari Aster's film did, so it's certainly possible), right down to the four family members looking absolutely nothing alike. And as with that film, the family has some secrets and resentments, all of which come out in stressful situations, but not ONCE does anyone go for a car ride and get their head knocked off, or crawl on the ceiling, so I kept wondering why I was watching a very low key wannabe when the real deal (which I didn't love either, to be clear) had enough memorable insanity for two or more movies anyway.

Ultimately I walked away with two things. One: the Madea Boo! might have actually been scarier (it was certainly more fun to watch) and two. the DVD cover's blurb "From the executive producer of Insidious" was doing them no favors, because this film's director is no James Wan, and its cast lacked anyone with the presence of Rose Byrne or Lin Shaye, and the writer wasn't Leigh Whannell, and... you get the idea. Not that I ever put any stock into those things ("From the producer" is second only to "From the studio" when it comes to the most worthless attempts at a selling point), but certainly others were duped into thinking it'd be of the same level of quality or scare quotient. And some of them might have paid more than a buck.

Oh and it barely has any Halloween flavor whatsoever so it's not even worth it on that level.

What say you?

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FTP: Olivia (1983)

JUNE 26, 2022

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

Some of the worst movies I've ever seen are from Ulli Lommel, so it means almost nothing at all to say Olivia (aka Double Jeopardy) is, in comparison, not too bad. It's more competent than most of his work that I've seen, not QUITE as dull as some of his other films of the era (Devonsville Terror comes to mind since it shares star/Lommel's once-wife Suzanne Love), and has an all timer nonsense kill involving a toothbrush (!) that would be enough to keep the blu-ray if the movie as a whole was slightly better. It's a good example of why it's good to overdose on these things; had I not seen the likes of Return of the Boogeyman and Curse of the Zodiac, I might not be able to appreciate what little the movie has to offer. Compared to most movies? Bad! Compared to the average Lommel flick? A masterpiece!

I'll give it this much: it's impossible to tell where it's going from one scene to the next, but not in an incoherent way. No, it's hard to do that because the script is so aimless, with each 10-20 minute stretch seemingly just setting up the next one, as if they took the "exquisite corpse" approach to crafting the narrative. It starts off in the past, where a young girl named Olivia sees her prostitute mother beaten and murdered by a john, then cuts to the present where she is now a young woman (Love) who is married to a real jerk, one who won't even let her get a job to experience some independence. One night when he's out working, she decides to try being a hooker like her mom, killing the first customer. So you're thinking, OK, this is gonna be one of those sympathetic serial killer kind of movies where she kills a bunch of dudes and then finally her husband, right?

Nope. She doesn't do that ever again. A short while later she meets Mike (Robert Walker Jr., aka "Charlie X"), who is kind and caring, and they fall in love. The husband sees them kissing on London Bridge, and goes out to attack them both. In the scuffle, the husband goes over the railing and plummets to his seeming death, at which point a frantic Olivia runs off into the night. Then we cut to a few years later (again!) where Mike is overseeing the transfer of the London Bridge to Arizona (a plot point that I've seen in ANOTHER horror movie, the David Hasselhoff vehicle Terror at London Bridge!). One day, while on the bridge, he looks down at a tour boat hundreds of feet away and - using some kind of eagle eye vision I didn't know he had - zeroes in on the tour guide, recognizing her as Olivia. But is it really her?

I mean, yeah. Why wouldn't it be? It almost seems like Ulli got confused and meant to seemingly kill HER on the bridge instead of the husband, and then have her reappear later as a reincarnation or lost twin or whatever, some kind of Vertigo riff, but there's no reason to believe Olivia was ever dead anyway. Nor does it make much sense that she pretends not to know Mike for a while, so it just adds to the "What is this movie ABOUT?" feeling. Then the husband comes back and the horror/thriller element finally returns, but it's too late to make up for the fact that the first hour of the movie feels like a prologue. I can't even imagine trying to watch it again, because now it'd seem even slower as I just wait for the toothbrush kill.

I actually got more out of the bonus features, with (apart from some behind the scenes super 8 footage of minimal interest) is comprised of four people who worked on the movie and others with Lommel, telling stories about his odd behavior and filmmaking style. Love's is the most revealing, as she explains that Lommel's father discovered his wife/Ulli's mother was having an affair, and drove his young son to the hotel that they were having their rendezvous. When the lovers came out and Ulli (being 8 and not understanding the concept of an affair) tried to run over to see his mother, his father refused to let him, explaining that she was a "WHORE!" and not worth their time. So that explains why a lot of his movies tend to have rather insane misogynistic streaks (particularly The Raven), as - per Love - it clearly made an impact and made him kind of crappy to women in real life (she notes that their marriage dissolved over him having his own affairs). One of the other interviewees (the editor I think) tells a story of how he swindled an actor out of ten grand by promising him a role in the movie if he invested in it, only to pretend shoot some made up scenes over a weekend without even putting film in the camera. We also learn he hated Nixon, so at least he wasn't totally crazy.

Some friends gave this surprisingly strong reviews on Letterboxd, so maybe it's a "just me" kind of thing - feel free to check it out for yourself, maybe you'll like it a lot, too! But my theory is that their expectations were even lower than mine to start, because the above average competence and coherence on display didn't nearly make up for the shaggy plotting, and I can't imagine anyone thinking this was a must-see. The extras were more engaging! Indeed, Lommel died in 2017, so this and any other future releases will be lacking his insight, but that's fine - I think if any more come my way I'll just skip the movie and head right for the candid interviews. His collaborators will have the better stories anyway!

What say you?

P.S. In lieu of the usual trailer (which I couldn't find), here's someone's video essay as a defense. They didn't convince me, but hey! Good effort.

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Men (2022)

MAY 19, 2022

GENRE: PSYCHOLOGICAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

I am a (straight) white man. I'm sure that's obvious to anyone who's read my nonsense for a while now, but just to be sure it's clear, since "guys like me" are the target of Men, which takes the idea of how we're "all the same" to its absolute extreme by (spoiler for anyone who hasn't seen the trailer, or just suffers from face blindness) writer/director Alex Garland's idea to have all but one man in the film be played by the same actor. It's a fascinating concept, and I could spend the entire review praising the performances of both Rory Kinnear as (well, the title character!) and Jessie Buckley as Harper, the woman who is terrorized, gaslit, menaced, etc by them all after the death of her husband.

Unfortunately, I can't do that. Yes, they are terrific and make the movie worth seeing; Kinnear is so adept at making different characters I suspect someone who hadn't seen the trailer (which makes it clear with a rapid cut montage of all his characters back to back) might not even realize they're all him until the one scene where split screen technology is employed to let a few of them interact, where it seems even a child should be able to pick up on it. One of them is a "m'lady" type with horrid teeth, one's an aggro cop, another is a child (I got real Clifford vibes from that one), one's a soft spoken vicar... they couldn't look/act more different, which is of course part of the point when, as it turns out, they are ultimately all the same. And Buckley (who I am unfamiliar with) has to walk a fine line; we're never sure if she doesn't realize the men are all the same, or simply doesn't care, and that particularly ambiguity is one of the movie's strengths. Similarly, she is playing a tough role of a woman who lost her husband to suicide (so she's grieving!) but said husband was an abusive jerk she was leaving (so she's... glad he's gone? Maybe?). Through Facetime calls with her bestie (or sister? I couldn't tell) we get a bit of her inner turmoil, but otherwise she plays most of the movie just reacting to the increasingly unsettling events around her while maintaining her composure, as if she allowed herself one outburst she might never stop. There's a scene where she does finally let go and it's downright gutwrenching, with Buckley totally selling the idea that this may in fact be the first time she fully broke down since the husband died.

But their performances are kind of all it ultimately has going for it, because it feels oddly stunted, as if they shot a first draft of the script. I wasn't annoyed that I was being targeted, I was annoyed I wasn't made to feel guiltier about my own actions over the years. Let us have it! Instead it's just... well, what I've already said. Men are all the same! Yes, and? It almost feels like Garland could have popped up in the corner like the "Toasties!" guy in Mortal Kombat every ten minutes or so to shout "You're all the same!" without digging deeper or doing much else with the idea. The lone surprise that the trailer didn't reveal is a bravura, rather disgusting trip into body horror territory that highlights most of the film's final ten minutes or so, but it feels like that should have been the midpoint, or at the very least the end of the second act, prompting further developments. Instead it just kind of ends a few minutes later without fanfare; granted the theatrical experience has been curtailed over the past two years, but not since The Turning have I felt an audience genuinely confused that a film ended when it did.

In fact, it prompted me to do something I never do for a movie I planned to review myself: I read other takes, assuming I missed something. Like, imagine how the ending of something like Inception would play if you missed the earlier explanation of the top spinning, or something to that effect. I specifically looked for women's takes on the film, figuring their experiences with us idiots over the years would allow for insight that would go over my head (and I consider myself to be fairly attuned to this sort of thing; I can think of a few male acquaintances who will watch the entire movie, particularly the Vicar scene, without realizing how much of a jerk the guys are) and "unlock" the movie for me. But amusingly, the female takes I read were, on average, less enthused than the males' own responses. So alas, it didn't help much, everyone seems to agree that it was a movie where the ideas were solid but the execution not so much. Even the most positive reviews note that the film is more of an experience than a narrative.

And that's fine! But I prefer the latter, so I couldn't help but feel disappointed, both as a fan of Garland's previous films (Ex Machina and Annihilation) and as a man who wanted the movie to really rake my gender over the coals. I mean really, I can go on Twitter and say something mildly misogynist (as a joke/experiment to be clear!), and get dressed down more effectively in half the time. Instead, I walked out thinking I just saw the first hour of what was a pretty great little old school Hammer-esque "the town is *off*" kind of film, and then an effective makeup FX reel (there's an arm injury that might top the one in Green Room for "THINGS I ABSOLUTELY NEVER WANT TO SEE AGAIN!"), without enough cohesion between the two to come out fully satisfied. In that regard, the film is perfectly successful as a metaphor for men: we have our strong points, but the whole package leaves you feeling underwhelmed and possibly even angry. Your mileage will of course vary, and I hope whatever gender you are, you are able to take more from it than I did.

What say you?

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Fantastic Fest: Day 3

SEPTEMBER 25, 2021

GENRE: DOCUMENTARY, PSYCHOLOGICAL, THRILLER
SOURCE: FANTASTIC FEST!

Day 3 was the "busiest" on my schedule; it was three movies like the day before, but one was twice as long as the average movie and another was a late-starting world premiere, which meant it would undoubtedly start later than scheduled, but also wouldn't be something I could easily rewatch (via screener link or the like) if I were to pull a Collins and doze off. Luckily I stayed awake (and this would be true for all the features I saw at the fest - a first!), so it seems this new approach of going back to my room and relaxing whenever possible (since there was little to nothing else going on, and a staggered schedule which meant even seeing friends in between movies was a crapshoot) instead of standing around drinking and singing karaoke or whatever was a wise one!

Movie #6: WOODLANDS DARK AND DAYS BEWITCHED

Full disclosure: I did the end titles for this documentary on the history of folk horror films, so I didn't rate it on Letterboxd and won't be saying much here, because that feels icky to me. That said, I found it to be an incredibly informative doc about a somewhat off the radar sub-genre; indeed, I don't even have a "folk horror" tag on the site (I usually just lump them in with "Supernatural" and/or "Cult"). Not only did I learn some history (always a plus), I walked away with a nice handful of new (well, technically old!) titles to check out, a few of which will be on Severin's upcoming boxed set centered on the doc, which will be available on its own as well for those who don't want to splurge for 20+ movies at once.

Movie #7: MASKING THRESHOLD

I'll have a full review up on WhatToWatch soon (unlike BMD, they have to go through a longer process from the time I submit something to when it actually goes live), so I won't ramble too much here except to say I kind of loved it, but know perfectly well it'll be a very polarizing film. Shot almost entirely in macro closeups with narration from someone who we never really see (someone said it was like a 90 minute unboxing video, which from an aesthetic POV is pretty accurate), the film tells the story of a man who is driven insane by an extreme case of tinnitus he has tasked himself with curing on his own after the doctors proved to be no help. Unfortunately his experiments are increasingly uncouth; he starts off with determining the aural qualities of everyday objects and ultimately - through his own actions - discovers that his affliction can react to the "sound" of something's (or, indeed, someONE's) life ending. A fascinating experimental film that was my favorite surprise discovery of the fest.

Movie #8: THE BLACK PHONE

One great thing about a festival is that every now and then you can find yourself seeing the world premiere of a fairly major film before there's even been a trailer to spoil its surprises. All I knew about Black Phone is that it reunited the core creative team of Sinister: producer Jason Blum, the writing pair of C. Robert Cargill and Scott Derrickson (based on a Joe Hill story), with the latter directing, and even star Ethan Hawke. As a huge fan of Sinister, I would have been there on day one when the movie opens in January, but it would have been after seeing a trailer or two and, most likely, even gotten a few cheers/jeers worming themselves into my brain and messing with my expectations. Instead I got to see it without even knowing the plot, let alone how well it was or wasn't received by my peers.

And yay, it was good! Not quite on the level of Sinister, but then again that film (concerning murderous kids) is more in my wheelhouse than this one, which is a period piece (1978 to be exact) about a local boogeyman named The Grabber (Hawke) who has already taken a few kids in the area and has now set his sights on our young hero Finney (Mason Thames), with The Grabber dumping him in a basement with only a mattress and the eponymous phone to keep him company until the villain does whatever he plans to do (since the movie is entirely from Finney or his sister's POV, we naturally don't know what The Grabber is actually doing until we see it happen to Finney). The Grabber insists the phone is broken, but it starts to ring... and that's where the fun begins.

The nature of the calls is something folks can discover on their own when the movie opens (or, likely, from the trailer) so I won't spoil it for now. I'll just say that Thames handles the material quite well, though he kind of gets the movie stolen away from him by Madeleine McGraw as his younger sister Gwen, who is quick to protect him from bullies (both of them suffer from an abusive father, so taking punches is sadly something they're accustomed to) and swears like she's been possessed like so many other little girls of '70s cinema. As for Hawke, his face is almost always obscured by a mask (designed by Tom Savini!) so it's mostly his voice informing the audience of who it is, but he is unnerving af - the man should play more villains.

The period detail is also terrific, largely depicted through the wardrobe and set dressing (dig that shag carpeting!) as opposed to obnoxious references and a greatest hits soundtrack. I like a lot of Blumhouse films, but production value isn't always one of their strong suits as they tend to take place in modern (read: bland) suburban homes, but here there are several exteriors and not once was I zapped out of the illusion (kudos to their location scouts for finding a North Carolina suburb that hasn't "enhanced" itself all that much for the past 40+ years). That aesthetic and the kid-heavy plot had me thinking that this would be a beloved fave for fans from my generation, had it actually been made in 1978 and allowed us to grow up with it. It's rated R, but mostly for language (The Grabber's more overt crimes are largely offscreen, thankfully), and Thames' appearance had me thinking of young Mike from the first Phantasm, another movie seemingly designed for young boys to transition into more adult horror and/or give them one last terrifying nightmare before they grow out of the adolescent idea that the movie monsters might be under their bed. Instead, it'll just be a great option to show our own curious kids.

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Kindred (2020)

JUNE 20, 2021

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

When Scream Factory said they were putting out Kindred, some (including me) assumed it referred to the 1987 movie with Rod Steiger, a mutant baby thing that's right in their wheelhouse. But no, it's a new film (coming from SF via their IFC partnership), a sort of Rosemary's Baby/Flowers in the Attic hybrid about a woman who is having a pretty rough month: first she finds out she's pregnant despite being on the pill, and then her boyfriend gets killed in an accident, prompting her would-be mother-in-law Margaret (Fiona "Aunt Petunia" Shaw) to decide to basically trap her in her stately manor until the baby is born, feeling she's got a right to be a part of its life as it's all she has left of her bloodline.

Not a bad plot for a film, and for the most part it works just fine, though it can feel a bit repetitive the longer it goes. And it does go long; it's over 100 minutes and yet what I already described is pretty much the extent of its narrative. Our pregnant hero, Charlotte (Tamara Lawrance) occasionally attempts an escape or tries to get someone to help her, but nothing ever works: she ends up back in the house and/or her would be saviors turn her directly over to the mother and her stepson, Thomas (Jack Lowden). The thrust comes from whether they actually mean to do her harm (i.e. will they kill her once the baby is born) or if they're actually right to be so over protective, as not only does Charlotte not want the baby (at first anyway) but she exhibits signs of some kind of mental illness that causes her to see things and forget things.

The way this is handled is pretty interesting. Early on she cuts her hand on a glass, and we see this, but she doesn't remember it the next morning - as far as she's concerned, they did something to her in her sleep. So any other developments, such as when she wakes up to find Thomas in her bed and he claims she asked him to be there for some kind of comfort, we are left not fully knowing if she is being gaslit or if Thomas is telling the truth. Apart from locking her in a room for a bit (after she becomes violent), they never really do anything harmful to her, so as far as we can see their only real crime is being overprotective of a child that they have no claim to but seemingly only want to ensure it doesn't die due to the mother's increasingly irrational behavior.

So we're dealing with a lot of gray areas here, essentially. It'd be easy to say Charlotte's the hero and Margaret is the villain, but (and perhaps actual parents like me - watching on Father's Day no less - will be more susceptible here) when it comes to the safety of the child, there is no question that despite her domineering attitude, the kid's got a better chance with Margaret. Charlotte, on the other hand, hallucinates a flock of birds attacking her car and ultimately crashes, the sort of thing that might have easily killed them both (she also repeatedly drinks and smokes after discovering she is pregnant). But your sympathies will likely lie with her anyway, because at the end of the day she is repeatedly having control of her own life being taken away. Even boyfriend Ben goads her into keeping the child when she discovers she's pregnant, waving off her hesitation and telling her she'd be a great mom.

The occasionally frustrating vagueness and circular plotting is more or less balanced out by the terrific performances of its central trio of cast members, in particular Shaw who gives an outstanding three and a half minute monologue about the double edged sword of parenting, and how she regrets being selfish when Ben was an infant - it apparently took her a few years for her protective nature to kick in. Director Joe Marcantonio lets it play out in an unbroken shot with an almost imperceptible dolly in, and it's far and away the best part of the movie, an almost literal centerpiece (meaning it comes around the halfway mark) that would have probably bumped the movie up a full star for me, if I were to give ratings here.

Marcantonio provides a commentary for the disc's lone extra besides the trailer, and while it's more technically oriented than I would have liked (as he cowrote the script I was hoping for more narrative insight) it's a pretty enjoyable track all the same. He notes that the presence of tea in the film was not an intentional reference to Get Out, as many have claimed, and also explains that the script was not written for a Black woman, specifically, but she just happened to be the best actress that he saw for the job (he notes he only made one change as a result: instead of the locked room she was originally chained to the bed, but he didn't want people to draw that connection). He also wonders if anyone would listen to it, to which I say "I did!"

He also, at one point, says that he didn't really cut much out of the movie, though he notes several occasions where something was removed, so I guess I should be grateful that the movie isn't over two hours long as it seemingly could have been. He could have cut MORE (there's a random bit with a groundskeeper that has no bearing on anything that I could see), but as this is also the sort of movie that demands a little patience, perhaps by keeping it over 100 minutes he is ensuring the sort of folks who will hate it won't ever bother with it anyway as it's "too long." Ultimately, there are better options for this sort of thing (I'm glad he mentioned Park Chan-Wook on his commentary, as Stoker came to mind more than once during my viewing, both in general atmosphere and in creepy piano usage), but it's not like we're being inundated with them, so there's no harm in a slightly lesser entry joining the field. It's better than that other Kindred, at any rate.

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