I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)

JULY 18, 2025

GENRE: SLASHER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

Before I discuss the new I Know What You Did Last Summer, I should make something clear, since I never wrote a review of the original: I do not think the 1997 film is very good. There is a fantastic chase sequence with Sarah Michelle Gellar's character and I think Ryan Phillippe brings the movie to life whenever he's around, but otherwise I didn't think too much of it when I saw it on opening weekend, and time hasn't exactly helped. The mystery is a total wet fart (not to mention comes with a confusing motive: he's angry at them for thinking they killed the guy he actually killed?), the leads are as dull as you can find in one of these things (Gellar and Phillippe were the real draws, and they die while the blank slates live? Boooo), and it's just not all that fun, especially in rewatches. The best part of rewatching a good whodunit like Scream or My Bloody Valentine is seeing all the little clues you may have missed, something that's impossible with the OG I Know when the character isn't even mentioned until he shows up in the final reel.

Thankfully, this new one corrects that problem, and even adds a bit of unexpected ingenuity in its 3rd act that left me surprisingly finding it the better movie. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a "good" movie, but considering my not particularly high expectations and the fact that the mystery is actually more or less well constructed, I was legit stunned to walk out and think "I hope this is a hit so we can get another one that delivers on the teaser."

I'll get into that stuff later with a warning, but first, alas, I have to vent about a few issues. One is that the heroes bizarrely do NOTHING WRONG this time, which is a baffling choice for a script when you consider how the entire movie revolves around this one incident. This time around, our group (of five; there's basically a stand-in for each of the original characters plus another friend who tags along) has stopped on that same road to watch the fireworks, and the new Barry (Tyriq Withers as Teddy) walks out into the road to make a "I love you guys and here's to us!" kind of speech, only for a car to speed along the curve and go off the road when it swerves to avoid hitting him. Teddy and the others make every effort to pull the driver from the car before it falls off the cliff into the rocks below, but to no avail. It's a total freak accident that Teddy (and Teddy alone) could maybe feel guilty about, sure, but they certainly wouldn't be on the hook for "manslaughter" as one character shouts before they, as is the law, make a pact to never tell anyone about it... except for the cops that they call and see arriving just as they're driving away.

Anyway, we cut to a year later and the group dynamic has changed a bit: Teddy and Danica (Madelyn Cline/new Helen) are broken up and she's about to be married to another dude (rebound!), and her and Ava (Chase Sui Wonders/new Julie) aren't as close as they used to be, with that 5th friend, Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon) taking up bestie role in her life. The new Ray is Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), who harbors a crush on Ava but doesn't seem to be able to pull the trigger. To the movie's credit, they do feel like a real friend group, but alas, none of them seem like folks I myself would want to hang out with. Well, maybe Stevie, since she works at a bar and thus could probably slip me a few free ones if I came in often enough.

But I'm an old! I'm here for Julie and Ray, right? Well, as anyone who has seen the trailer for this film can tell, they were clearly aping the structure (and thus hoping for the same success) as Scream 5, so it shouldn't surprise you that the legacy characters don't get introduced for a while. This is the correct move, to be clear, and a big part of why Scream 4 didn't really work for me: they let these new characters take center stage and make the movie their own *before* introducing our old friends. Scream 4 never let Jill, Kirby, etc. make this world their own before switching focus back to the people we already knew and (let's face it) wanted to be spending that time with, something they corrected with S5 and retained here. By the time Julie shows up (with Ray coming along a couple scenes later), we're already invested in this new group's plight, so it adds an extra level instead of feeling unfocused. And, again, I'm not a fan of their movie or them in particular, so honestly I didn't really care if they appeared or not, so I certainly wasn't getting impatient waiting for their appearance.

The main thrust here is that the town has become a big tourist destination, and Teddy's dad (the mayor or some other bigshot) has worked with the police to cover up these new things AND the original crimes from 1997, so that visitors wouldn't be scared of every fisherman that walks by. Julie has moved away and has put all this stuff behind her, but Ray still lives in Southpart, running a bar and annoyed that the town wants to forget the things that happened to him. I should note that in one of these conversations he says something like "This happened once before!" and I was annoyed that they were seemingly removing I Still Know from the canon (because it's happened *twice*), but thankfully I was wrong! Later on Ray makes a reference to it that almost seems more like a meta wink as opposed to actual acknowledgement, but without spoiling any particulars the film's events are brought up again later in a more concrete way, which delighted me since I also prefer THAT one to the original, thanks to its wacky cast (Jack Black! Jeffrey Combs! John Hawkes!) and faster pace.

As I mentioned, the mystery actually works this time. It's not hard to guess who the killer is, but that is certainly better than not being able to do so at all because they simply didn't exist in the story until they were revealed. I know Kevin Williamson was basically just riffing on Friday the 13th with the vengeful parent we never heard of thing (he couldn't copy the book's solution because the stalker there was two characters revealed to be one and the same to our non-seeing reader's eyes, which wouldn't work in a movie), so I get why he did it. But there's a crucial difference he didn't consider: in F13 no one is trying to figure out who the killer is, because they don't know there IS a killer until they're about to die anyway, so all the time we spend with Julie and Ray talking to Anne Heche and whoever else was all just useless padding and an unfair use of our detective brains. Here, the red herrings are fair game, something the OG never managed.

Plus many of them end up gruesomely murdered, so that's also a plus. AND they're spaced out evenly-ish, a vast improvement on the original which killed exactly one person in the first 70 minutes (Johnny Galecki) and then had the Fisherman wipe out the next (only other) four over a ten minute span. The body count here is, if my three day old memory is correct, eight (not including the car victim) and all but one of them are on-screen, which is a fair amount. Nothing overly spectacular, but there's a surprising viciousness to most that I appreciated, and unlike a certain other modern slasher, they commit to killing everyone - no unexplained epilogue "Oh they made it!" revivals.

Well, except for one, and now I gotta get into a spoiler. I don't really want to, but since it's kind of key to why I ended up giving the movie a pass I sort of have to. Skip the next paragraph if you don't want to know the reveal and also another weird thing about the movie's final scene!

OK, for those still here, it shouldn't be too much of a surprise that there are two killers, since that's seemingly the law these days (at least it's ONLY two; Scream 6's *three* just seemed lazy to me). One is the one I said you can probably guess who it is, but the other was a legit surprise, because it was one of our two returning characters. And this worked great for me, a. because (once again!) I do not have any attachment to these people, so turning one of them into a killer is pretty much the only interesting thing about them as far as I'm concerned, and b. they were leaning so heavily into copying Scream 5's beats that having this kind of switcheroo legit worked as a shock to me, because I know that's something the Scream series will never have the stones to do. I know this choice has made die-hard fans furious, but that's the benefit of not being one! I thought it was great! But it also came with a bizarre choice, when this character said that the other killer (already dispatched) wasn't really dead. It seems like they're saying this to introduce that person returning with an explanation for how they lived, but they don't appear again. So it's just that OG character messing with our hero's head, right? Nope! In the very final scene, said hero tells another survivor "Oh, _____ is alive!" as casually as she might mention getting a new phone or something, and then the credits start! It's the weirdest goddamn thing, and my only guess is that they're just taking a shot at Scream's endless discussion of whether or not Stu actually survived.

Honestly if the whole movie had this weirdo/ballsy energy I would have been raving and trying to convince everyone to see it, but until that point it's merely fine (and yet, by default, the best of this four-film franchise, imo). It's got some funny lines here and there (a surprise nod to the AMC Nicole Kidman ad made me chuckle, and the aforementioned joke about I Still Know's plot left me practically wheezing) and decent slasher energy (the climax is set during the daylight too, which is pretty novel), but it's also got another group of mostly uninteresting kids, copying a few too many beats from not only Scream 5 (without which this movie wouldn't exist, let's face it) and its original, leaving it feeling more like a remake than a sequel. And the decision to stage their "crime" in such a way that would have left them with nothing more than a jaywalking ticket kept them from feeling guilty, which is part of the point of this kind of revenge story, so there's a disconnect as well. Maybe if they manage to get the promised sequel going (it'll make money, but nowhere near the levels of even the originals, let alone the new Screams) I'll check it out for sure, but honestly, I only really wanted this movie to be a hit so it would be more likely they'd revive my beloved Urban Legend as well. As amused as I was with the final reel of this one, I can't say I really NEED another trip to Southport in my lifetime.

What say you?

Tweet

PLEASE, GO ON...

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?

Tweet

PLEASE, GO ON...

The Piper (2015)

NOVEMBER 2, 2022

GENRE: REVENGE
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

We’ve all seen trailers that have perhaps spoiled a film’s plot points, but The Piper is the rare one where the damn poster gave its 3rd act away. The cover of the DVD (which I got for a buck, so I can’t really get upset about this to be clear!) shows the film’s hero in bloody clown makeup, not wholly unlike The Crow or something along those lines, seemingly leading a charge of rats. The synopsis clarifies things, saying that a man is betrayed by the people who hired him and killed his loved ones, so... kind of obvious what this movie is about, right? A sort of hybrid between The Crow and Willard, more or less?

Well, I mean sure, eventually. But the movie is 108 minutes long and there are only 23 left (including end credits) by the time the thing that needs to be revenged actually occurs. So the poster image of the hero in his makeup, leading the rats, is akin to making a poster for Avengers: Endgame with everyone gathered at Tony’s funeral or something (to be fair, this cover is actually slightly less spoiler-y than the original poster, which shows the actual final scene!). Yes, you won’t have the context, but it only takes a few minutes of the movie, once you know who the guy is (and, more importantly, that he’s not one to wear makeup nor is he on the rats’ side) to put it together in your head. Instead, the first hour or so is completely horror free (other than a few grisly shots of the rat’s reign of terror on the local cat population and a few scattered flashbacks involving leprosy), telling a tale of a simple man and his ailing son who are trekking to Seoul in hopes of getting the kid treatment for his tuberculosis. Along the way they find a village where everyone seems unnerved by the presence of a stranger, except for their leader who welcomes the pair into his home so they can rest for a bit before continuing on their way. Learning about their rat problem, the man offers to help drive them out with his music in exchange for some money to help pay for the kid’s medical needs.

And so we watch as he tries some things, eventually succeeding, while also becoming friendly with some of the townsfolk and in particular a widow who takes a liking to him. Knowing that it’s a genre film (a Korean one at that!) we can be sure that something tragic (and likely brutal) will happen regardless of what the poster promised, but I must admit I checked the runtime more than once, curious when it would get to that point. Not that I was bored or anything, but I knew what was happening: the longer we spent with this kind man and his adorable son, the harder it would be to watch when the inevitable happened. I couldn't help but think of Pumpkinhead; even before I had a son of my own I was left kind of devastated by the inciting incident (as a dad now, I can’t even watch it), and that happened like 20 minutes into the movie! Here we get to know them so well that each extra minute just made it that much sadder when it happened.

Worse, they salt the wound not once but twice by giving us reason to think maybe the kid will be OK. First the townsfolk just drive the two of them out after cutting off a few of the Piper’s figures (presumably taking away his ability to play), giving them food that is poisoned – and the kid is about to eat it but stops, and you’re like “Phew, he knew better!” Then he realizes the flute is gone, so he sneaks back into town to retrieve it, so you’re probably thinking “Oh no, they’ll catch him and this time they won’t let him go!” But no! He gets his father’s prized possession and heads back out… only to then take a bite of the poisoned food after all (so we realize that he didn’t stop earlier out of suspicion – he got distracted by noticing that the flute was missing). It’s such a gut-wrenching moment, the sort of thing that if I were to rewatch the movie I’d be hoping that somehow it’ll work out differently on this viewing (a strange phenomenon that I experience on rare occasions; one of the most notable is in Cast Away when he loses Wilson. EVERY GODDAMN TIME I watch that movie I hope this time he’ll wake up and retrieve him in time!).

Making the whole thing sadder is that most of the issues start with the belief that the Piper is in fact a spy for the Communists, as the movie is set in the immediate aftermath of the Korean War. The chief is telling his people that the war is still going, to exert control and keep some secrets of his own from getting out, so he worries that the Piper will tell the locals the truth. And his main bit of “proof” is a mysterious note that neither man can read, which the Piper says is the address of the doctor in Seoul but the chief believes to be information for the commie spies. Only us in the audience know the truth: it’s just a mean slur at the Piper’s expense, written in English. There’s something kind of heartbreaking about both the hero and the villain going to extreme lengths because they weren’t educated enough to decipher a simple four word note, as you realize literally nothing in the movie would have happened if either of them could read it: the man wouldn’t have been traveling to Seoul in the first place, and even if he was, the chief would have known he really was just a poor outcast trying to care for his son.

Anyway, for what it is, it’s pretty good, though the slow pacing to get to the “horror” part of the movie will likely be too much to ask for impatient viewers, and admittedly there isn’t much inventiveness or excitement to seeing him get his revenge, as it’s quickly raced through and relies on not always convincing CGI rats swarming toward one of the town jerks. But as a tragic drama (based on the “Pied Piper of Hamelin” story, yes) it’s a solid little flick, and certainly worth the buck I paid. Hell it’s probably the best of the movies I’ve gotten at Dollar Tree! Put THAT on the poster, at least it ain’t spoiling the ending.

What say you?

Tweet

PLEASE, GO ON...

The Eleventh Commandment (1987)

SEPTEMBER 17, 2020

GENRE: REVENGE, SLASHER
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

I am low-key fascinated by the mid to late '80s slashers that were seemingly made for no one in particular. The sub-genre wasn't exactly lucrative at the box office anymore since most fans were moving on to monster/supernatural driven fare like The Fly and the Elm Street sequels, yet there was still a steady stream of movies like The Eleventh Commandment (aka Body Count - and both titles are offered on letterboxd as if they were separate films, weirdly) that I can't imagine anyone involved was thinking "This will be the one to bring the slasher genre back to box office glory!" Instead, these films tend to be a bit weird, almost as if they were daring body count aficionados to bother with them since they often went out of their way to avoid the things we liked (Slaughterhouse and Berserker come to mind as notable examples of the type).

Indeed, the one line summary for this one sounds very much like a standard bit of slasher mayhem: a guy escapes from a mental institution and leaves a trail of bodies as he makes his way home to get revenge on the person who sent him there in the first place. But it's quickly apparent that this isn't some Halloween/Terror Train hybrid, as the killer, Robert, is a religious freak who thinks he's a priest, quoting from the Bible and punishing those who break the commandments, though I'm not entirely sure where he drew the line there. The main impetus for his revenge mission is going after his uncle Charles, who killed Robert's dad (so, his own brother) and took the man's wife AND his fortune as his own - very much against "Though shall not covet...", right? But... he's killing everyone, and that's a commandment too? Also, one of the only ones he directly quotes: "Though shall not lie" isn't a commandment, so maybe that's the 11th one the title mentions?

Weirder is that for a revenge quest, he kind of sucks at it (spoilers ahead). You'd think after escaping from the hospital and murdering someone there in the process, he'd know that people will be looking for him and he should probably beeline for his uncle before it was too late, but nah. Instead he kills the totally innocent family chauffeur (Maybe there's a 12th commandment? "Thou shall not wear a stupid hat?") and picks up his 9 year old cousin from her ballet class, taking her out on a fun day around Los Angeles that includes a stop at the beach and serving dinner at a soup kitchen, which she legit loves. Then he takes her to a shitty hotel where he is seduced by the lady at the front desk, kills her, takes the kid to sleep in a parking lot somewhere, and then finally - a day and a half later! - heads over to his uncle's place.

And (spoilers continue here, for the record) even then he dilly dallies, practicing a play with the niece in the basement and such. But the real "come on!" moment is a scene where he kills the house butler, who has been far and away the most unlikable character in the film (and yes, I'm including the murderer). He looks like a Charles Gray stunt double, so he's already sort of antagonistic looking before he even opens his mouth, but throughout the movie he's just a total jerk to the film's lone sympathetic adult: the maid, who is also the only one who seems to notice that the little girl never came home from ballet. He's the kind of character you can't wait to see offed, but the movie makes it weird by having Robert show remorse about killing him (he came around a corner and got stabbed by Robert, who was expecting his uncle), denying us the sort of "Good, he had it coming!" reaction by treating it like the only time in the movie where Robert was unjustified.

Also, I won't spoil the particulars, but neither Robert or the uncle are a factor in the film's final ten minutes, which is just awkward af. Instead of a big showdown, we get an overlong prologue about the niece and some last minute exposition from a pair of supporting characters, giving the audience time to contemplate how we just spent 85 minutes watching this guy bungle the one thing he set out to do. The two characters never even share a scene! It's kind of amazing in its own stupid way, admittedly, but it also means you have to be in a very tiny cross section of "I am starved for a new slasher movie" and "I do not want a film that is well done in any aspect" to get the most out of this one.

Or, I guess, you could be the type of person who loved Dynasty but wish it had more stabbings. Robert's family (save the niece) is populated exclusively by rich jerks who all seem to hate each other; even his own mother uses him to further her own evil schemes, which she carries out in between attempts (some successful) in sleeping with just about every male character in the film, occasionally with the knowledge (and consent?) of her former brother-in-law/now husband (who, by the way, is played by Dick Sargent). This stuff borders on sleazy at times, but keeps pulling back; unless I'm forgetting F bombs the movie might even get a PG-13 today since the killings aren't notable in any way, nothing worse than is allowed on basic cable anyway.

I never saw it, but the team of Paul Leder and William Norton also made I Dismember Mama, which has a similar plot except the guy is going after his own mother instead of an uncle, and - far as I can tell - isn't a wannabe priest. And (icky alert!) the murderer actually forms an attraction to the little girl in that one, which thankfully isn't the case here as he merely wants to protect her from his awful family so that she doesn't end up being like them, which is admirable. It's weird that they were ripping themselves off (the girl's age is even the same), but sounds like it'd be an interesting double feature, since the two movies have similar setups but go in very different directions at a certain point.

Vinegar Syndrome's disc has a first for me: bonus features produced in the Covid-19 era! Or at least, the first to acknowledge them as such - there are two interviews (with the actors who played Robert and the little girl) and both begin with a disclaimer that they were produced by the talent themselves (via Zoom or whatever) and thus aren't up to the usual technical snuff. But they're fine, the recordings are clean and it's easy to hear them, plus the casual nature of it is kind of interesting. Otherwise they would be in the studio with the usual nothing background and canned replies, but there's a certain laid back quality that kept them a little more engaging than they might have been otherwise.

Like I said, you really gotta be slasher starved for this one, but there's something kind of endearing about how they seemingly refuse to satisfy the part of your brain that wants to see a revenge carried out, regardless of circumstances. If the body count was a little higher it might qualify for SNDN 2 kind of campy WTF-ery, but it's too low key in that department to qualify, so it's just kind of stuck in the middle of a bunch of bad movie extremes, never topping its first 20 minutes where Robert faces off against a Nurse Ratched type who is played by an abysmally wooden actress, as well as James "Uncle Phil" Avery as an orderly. I hate when a movie peaks early!

What say you?

P.S. IMDb says the movie was released in March of 1986, but that seems to be impossible as there is a noticeable Beverly Hills Cop II poster behind Robert as he walks down the street, and that movie didn't even begin production until November of that year (released in May of 1987). I hereby declare this to be the first and hopefully last time I ever read something incorrect on the IMDb. But I can't find a trailer for this movie so here's one for Axel's sophomore adventure.

Tweet

PLEASE, GO ON...

Phantom Of The Opera (1943)

SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

GENRE: MUSICAL, REVENGE
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

When I got the Universal Monsters Blu-ray collection a couple years ago during an Amazon sale, it was mostly out of a space-saving desire: my DVD versions (those green "book" types released in 2004) took up almost twice as much space as the boxed version, so I could get some shelf space back and improved transfers to boot. But when I took a look at its contents, I realized it also had a sort of bonus disc in the form of Phantom of the Opera, the 1943 version starring Claude "Invisible Man" Rains (or Claude "Wolf Man's Dad" Rains, if you wish). I don't think of him as one of the traditional Monsters, and I'm not a big fan of the Phantom story anyway, so I had never got around to seeing it before. But hey, it's in my collection permanently, might as well give it a look, right?

Instantly after hitting play I again bemoaned the film's inclusion in the set: it was in color! The only movie here that is, I think, making it stick out even more. I assume the fact that Rains was in two of their other films (the best two, IMO) gave it some connective tissue, but apart from the Robert Englund one none of these movies are full blown horror, and I kind of wish they used up that other disc (if one had to exist at all) to offer something like James Whale's Old Dark House or the 1932 Murders in the Rue Morgue. But oh well. The disc had a lovely bonus feature about the Universal Lot, which is the most fitting to put on a Phantom disc since the stage they used for the opera house was still there as of the supplement's production (ironically, after standing for almost 90 years, it ended up being demolished a year later).

As for the movie itself: eh. Again, not a big Phantom guy, though I must say that this one started off more intriguing than the others, as we meet the villain before he's the Phantom, which is unusual - the concept of his presence in the opera house is usually established at the beginning, filling in his history as we go. No, here we meet Erique Claudin (Rains), a violinist in the orchestra who is extremely gifted, but "not a good fit" or whatever. He is fired after working there for twenty years (part of his severance is a season pass, hahaha) and begins looking for new work, including trying to get his own composition published. And he comes close to realizing that dream, but a misunderstanding sends him into a fit of rage and he starts choking a guy who he thinks was trying to steal it. The man's wife picks up a handy tray of acid and throws it in his face, the choked guy dies, Claudin takes off into the sewers, and thirty minutes in, we have our Phantom!

From then on it's the usual stuff: Christine is too good to be in the chorus, gets a promotion when the headliner star falls ill, and becomes a sensation while the Phantom continues pulling the strings (some literal!) to keep her successful because of his obsession with her. A chandelier falls, a sewer rescue is mounted, a mask is torn away to reveal a hideous face... it's all the same, never that interesting to me story. And it's not even the lack of horror elements, because I've known about those for as long as I've been attempting to enjoy this particular story (my mom, when renting the Englund one when I was 10, told me they "turned it into a horror"); it's just a kind of thin story with a heroine that rarely does much, so there's no "in" really. And here, it weirdly gives us a reason to sympathize with him right off the bat and then doesn't use it to their advantage - he's just a murder-y jerk for the rest, and doesn't even go after the people he believes stole his music.

Rains is pretty engaging when he's on screen though; after he turns into the Phantom he's mostly seen in shadows (via cutaways that are never clearly defined with regards to their location in relation to the other people in the scene) for a while, and we only see the burn makeup for about nine seconds before (spoiler for 77 year old movie ahead) he is killed by dueling heroes Raoul and Anatole. Speaking of them, that's probably my favorite part of the movie besides Rains' performance - they're both smitten with Christine, for a usual love triangle kind of thing (the Phantom is not in love with her in this version - he was actually supposed to be her father but they dropped it), but the actors look alike as well, and as the movie goes on they play up the fact that they seem to be interchangeable. They both bring her the same flowers, they say the same responses to her simultaneously, etc. The final scene is downright wonderful as she turns them both down for a date, choosing option C (meeting up with adoring fans in the opera house), prompting the two men - bickering the entire movie - to become friends and enjoy the dinner together without her. Bros!

Back to the "Darth Phantom" thing though - even though they excised the reveal that Claudin was Christine's father who she never knew, there's a remnant left about how they both knew the same melody that was specific to their obscure small town, so it's a sort of sloppy removal and also makes the movie even less compelling than usual, since there's no reason for Phantom to be obsessed with her. And it's not the only "we changed something but not entirely" bit of confusion, as the opera staff begin talking about the Phantom as if he's already this urban legend in the place, in the VERY NEXT SCENE after Rains takes the acid bath! Someone even says something like "Oh, not those ghost stories again!", even though it's not only the first we've heard of it, but going by this adaptation's version of the story, the thing they're talking about (a missing mask) would clearly be the first thing he ever did there. My man wasn't going to start selecting his seat or prepping the chandelier to drop before getting the damn mask to hide his two-face.

Long story short, I appreciate the wrinkles they added to the basic narrative - honestly, this might be my favorite straight adaptation, for what it's worth - but this tale is just not for me, and I think at this point that will never change. I can maybe see myself giving the Schumacher one another look someday, if only for the now strange sight of seeing Gerard Butler in a "Handsome leading romantic role" to contrast with the glorified (and oft-AWESOME!) action junk he makes today, where he probably was second in line for Unhinged if Russell Crowe was unavailable. But otherwise, I think from now on I will insist on sticking to the ones that take the basic concept and move it into a mall or a rock venue (p.s. the Phantom's mask here was clearly an influence on De Palma's take) or something. The more they get away from Gaston Leroux's story, the more I seem to enjoy it. No offense, Gaston.

What say you?

Tweet

PLEASE, GO ON...

Universal Horror Collection Volume 6

AUGUST 18, 2020

GENRE: CLASSIC, REVENGE
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

Whenever I get a collection of movies in a set, I tend to watch them randomly instead of the order they're presented, depending on my mood (and also runtimes; an 80 minute movie is more likely to get picked than a 90 minute one). Of course, since I am basing my viewing order on personal preference, that means the set might peak early for me, and be a slog to finish up as all that will be left is a title that sounded the least appealing. However, in the case of Scream Factory's newest collection of old Universal films, the exact opposite happened - each movie was better than the one before it, so what started as a somewhat lackluster entry in this ongoing series of collections ended up producing one of my favorite of the 24 movies it's brought into my life since it began last year.

Or, in some cases, brought BACK into my life. The first one I watched was The Thing That Couldn't Die, which I had sort of already seen thanks to Mystery Science Theater 3000. Of course, as is often the case, my memory of the film is much murkier than my memory of certain quips levied at it; I couldn't remember much of the plot beyond something about a head, but I can probably rattle off a dozen lines if asked ("He might as well turn it into a den!" is a particular fave, in response to a character digging a hole that was shown to be a perfect cubed hollow). As it turns out, I kind of missed Mike and the 'bots, as the movie is kind of a snooze despite only being 69 (don't) minutes long. The "greed destroys everyone" plot that you can find in any number of Coen Brothers movies (or even better, their buddy Sam Raimi's underrated Simple Plan) doesn't quite blend well with a horror film involving possession, as it's hard to tell who has been put under the influence of the disembodied head that serves as the "monster" and who is simply just an asshole.

Plus, the heroine (Carolyn Kearney) spends half the movie with a divining rod, which is an even more ridiculous concept than the aforementioned villain and is in no way interesting to watch play out on screen. The most interesting character is a conniving ranch hand who wants the treasure they find, assuming it has gold or something (anything but a living head, I imagine), so naturally he's killed off by the halfway point, leaving just the dull folks and a lengthy, confusing flashback about how the villain came to be separated from his body in the first place. It's got a handful of fun moments, but for the most part, stick with the MST3k version.

Things picked up a bit with my next pick, The Black Castle, which was from 1952 - the oldest film on the set (which is, overall, the "newest" of the sets so far, as the other ones focused on '30s and '40s fare). So old that its flash forward intro actually works for a change; I tend to hate this device, but here it sets up an interesting scenario (a guy is believed to be dead but is merely paralyzed and about to be buried - very Short Night of Glass Dolls!) instead of merely telling us who will be left alive at the end. The guy is Ronald Burton, whose friends were seemingly killed by a count (Stephen McNally). He wants revenge, and thus he does what anyone would do - makes up a fake name and gets himself on the list to join the count's annual hunt (of a panther, no less) so that he can snoop around the grounds and also take down the count.

He also ends up falling in love with the count's wife, the scoundrel, so that adds a wrinkle to the proceedings. The plot machinations are fun enough, but the attempts to sell this as a horror movie are misguided, to say the least. It's a straight revenge drama, with the only horror elements (besides the panther fight, which lasts about 19 seconds) coming from a few establishing shots of the castle and some brief turns by Karloff (as the count's doctor, who may be an ally for Burton) and Lon Chaney Jr as Gargon, a sort of early model Hodor who does the grunt work for the count. Apparently this was his last film for Universal; it's hardly a great one to go out on but it's not without its charms, and in today's world where the haves treat the have nots like shit, I quite enjoyed that Burton is constantly looking out for working people - he insists his page ride in the warm coach with him during the ride to the castle, arranges for their driver to enjoy a hot meal with them, etc. We need more guys like this in the real world! And if they steal some asshole's wife in the process, so be it.

I then moved on to The Shadow of the Cat, which was way more my speed from the getgo as it featured a meanspirited murder in its first few minutes. As is usually the case, the person was murdered by folks after her inheritance, but what they didn't count on was her cat witnessing it and taking revenge. The conspirators wrangle in some family members to help them murder the cat, but one by one it manages to cause the deaths of the guilty ones. Yes, it's goofy, but I found it delightful, and the cat itself was pretty cute, which was nice since many of them in these kind of things are hissing/ugly jerks.

What's even more interesting about this one is that it's actually an uncredited Hammer production, which historian Bruce G. Hallenbeck explains on his commentary track. Funnily enough, I suspected something was "off" about it right away, as it just didn't have that typical Universal feel, though when I saw Andre Morrell (as the murderous patriarch) and Barbara Shelley (as the only person the cat likes) in the cast I actually thought "did I miss a Hammer credit?", so it was fun to have Hallenbeck confirm that (because of various rights/producer nonsense that's too boring to explain here) the Hammer name didn't appear even though it was clearly one of their productions, in the vein of Scream of Fear or Paranoiac, albeit coming about a decade earlier.

And then finally I reached Cult of the Cobra, which sounded like the sort of thing I'd barely be able to focus on, but as you might have guessed from the intro paragraph, turned out to be what might be my personal favorite film in any of these sets so far. It's basically a Cat People knockoff, except with (big surprise incoming) a lady who can turn into a cobra instead of a panther and - more importantly, at least to me - working under the basic template of a revenge slasher! In 1955! At the beginning of the film, set in "Asia" (that's as specific as it gets! Way to narrow it down), a group of six GI's about to be shipped back home decide to infiltrate a cult meeting because they want one last spectacle before returning to the States. When one of them takes a picture (complete with flash, even though they were told not to take pictures - way to be discreet, jackass) and causes chaos, the cult leader puts a curse on them - one by one they will all die!

Shockingly, they come close to finishing the job (spoilers for 65 year old movie ahead!). Only two of the guys are left at the end - a 66% success rate is nothing to scoff at in these days, when body counts tended to be low. Also, because of its Cat People-y ways, the ending is a real bummer, as our hero - who already lost his girlfriend to the only other GI to live - had fallen in love with the lady, and is now alone again now that she's dead. Most old horror movies end with the monster perishing ("The End" coming up over a shot of the burning castle or whatever) or the hero couple embracing, but this ends on the poor heartbroken sod walking off, alone once again. Such a bummer, and not at all what I would expect from this kind of movie from this era. I kinda loved it?

Tom Weaver provides commentaries on all of the movies (save Cat, covered by Hallenbeck), and he's occasionally joined by others who will talk about the music or something (none seem to be actually WITH him - just brief monologues that were edited in) to break up his usual dad jokes and fulfillment of his historian duties (listing production dates, locations, etc). As always, I find these things more fun when they're with someone instead of the solo tracks, but his dedication to tracking down things like early casting choices (John Saxon was up for a role in Cult of the Cobra!) and where now long-gone locations were is second to none, and on The Thing That Couldn't Die's case he thankfully doesn't try to sell it as anything more than what it is, so that's refreshing.

I'm going to start celebrating the Halloween season a bit early this year, because I'm miserable and stuck inside so I'm hoping it will offer a much needed spirit boost, and I definitely plan to revisit some of these (actually I never finished volume 3, so I can start there) and mix them up with the more traditional classics (Drac, Frank, Wolfie, etc) and Vincent Price stuff that Scream Factory also covered a while back. Now that I don't have to go to work and won't be going to any festivals, I'll certainly have the time to rewatch more than I have in years' past, and these sets make for an excellent option since the films have that old school spooky charm I associate with the holiday. Some folks love to watch the scariest/bloodiest movies for the occasion, but not me - I want lighter fare like this!

What say you?

Tweet

PLEASE, GO ON...

Bones (2001)

MARCH 29, 2020

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

As a huge fan of Demon Knight, I couldn't remember why I didn't see Bones (aka Ernest Dickerson's long awaited return to the horror genre) when it came out in theaters, so I took a quick check at the box office charts for the time and saw that it came out the same weekend as Thirteen Ghosts and K-Pax, both of which I saw instead (was basically dragged to the former, and as for the latter - I chalk it up to my crush on Mary McCormack). But I'm glad I didn't see it then, because at the time I hadn't seen any of the "blaxploitation" horror movies it was paying homage to, which provided some of the fun I got out of it now. Back then, Pam Grier's appearance would have probably yielded a "Hey it's better than Ghosts of Mars last month" type reaction, but now I can smile that her tarot-reading character was a bit of a nod to the mystical woman she played in Scream, Blacula, Scream, which is a much better movie to think about.

Unfortunately, it's also riddled with bad CGI for many of Bones' appearances, which I assume only looks worse now than it did almost twenty years ago and, more importantly, throws off the '70s throwback vibe it's going for. I don't know if Snoop Dogg couldn't offer enough of his time to play the part and forced the filmmakers to use a series of "Option B" solutions to fill in the gaps (I didn't use a stopwatch or anything but it sure seems he's on-screen much less than his younger, lower-billed co-stars), but every dodgy effect makes the film less effective, and since you see some pretty terrible ones in the opening sequence the movie never gets a chance to earn much goodwill on that front. If a movie has a few bad VFX near the end once we are hooked in then it's not too bad, but when they're telling us right up front "We kinda botched our monster" it's hard to get too invested.

It's also too slowly paced for its own good, which has one benefit I'll talk about soon but for the most part also made it very difficult to cement my interest. The basic story is simple (and somewhat generic) enough: Jimmy Bones (Snoop) was a hustler/number runner back in the 1970s and was murdered by a corrupt cop, his partner, and a rival dealer, who covered up his death and swore an oath to never tell anyone. 20 years later, some enterprising youths - who happen to be the children of one of Jimmy's murderers - accidentally uncover his corpse when renovating the building to turn it into a nightclub. Eventually he is revived with the help of a demon dog of some sort and the movie becomes a blend of Nightmare on Elm Street and The Crow, with Jimmy taking out the assholes who murdered him (sympathetic!) and also the youths who just wanted to make something of their lives (much less so!).

The confusing morality doesn't help much either; we kind of want to root for Jimmy since he was murdered and, for the most part, didn't seem like that bad of a guy (he was killed for NOT wanting to sell hard drugs in the neighborhood, so that's something), but he's also going after the club owner kids who never did anything wrong, putting him more in Freddy Krueger's territory than Eric Draven's. In one scene you're rooting for him to take out the asshole drug kingpin or slimy crooked cop, but in the next you're hoping he is stopped - it's just too disjointed. The flashbacks are doled out in chunks throughout the first hour (the point where Bones is finally fully resurrected, another for the "con" list - hell, it's almost 40 minutes before they even find his corpse), which keeps it afloat since you naturally want to know how he died, how the characters in the present day factored into it, etc, but since it's not particularly novel, it's hardly worth the wait. They might have been better off with a lengthy opening flashback - it least it would have kept the lame CGI off-screen for 20 minutes or so.

All that said, I was highly impressed with how damn weird the movie got at times (spoilers for 20 year old movie ahead!), so it's ultimately more or less worth the wait, and certainly wasn't as generic as the first hour lulled me into believing the rest would be. Bones doesn't just kill someone - he somehow uses his powers to rip off their heads but leave them with the ability to talk as he carries them to his lair, which is a giant wall of twisting blackened bodies that looks like HR Giger tackling that thing that grabbed Freddy at the end of Dream Master. And he feeds this thing the heads - one of which is still trying to bribe Jimmy into letting him... "live"? It's hilarious. There's also a kill where he murders two drug dealers at once; instead of showing the actual murder we watch a blank wall that is splattered with human outlines of blood, followed by the rest of the blood "coloring in" those outlines, which doesn't make any sense at all but it's a pretty neat visual.

However you feel about the movie, we can all agree that Scream Factory's blu-ray is pretty jam-packed. It carries over everything from the original DVD (a Platinum Series release!) and adds several new interviews, though none with Snoop, sadly. He is on the old commentary though, with Dickerson and screenwriter Adam Simon, though I think they all partook in his trademark stash as it's the mellowest goddamn track I've ever heard with three grown men sitting together. Usually this kind of setup results in a pretty spirited discussion, but they're all so quiet and soft-spoken it felt like they were recording it while their parents tried to sleep in the next room or something. As for the new ones, they got Dickerson, Simon, the DP, and the always great Tony Gardner, who reveals that the wall of bodies were using, among other things, Bruce Campbell's chin appliances! FX guys are always reusing things from their shop and such reveals delight me every single time (all time fave - the heart that they "pencil stake" in From Dusk Till Dawn is Jason's from JGTH).

All of the pieces are there to make a solid "Elm Street meets Candyman" kind of film, and I was surprised to see that the film rarely went for laughs (I knew it was Freddy-ish, but was thinking more of his jokey era than the earlier, darker version), but the weird pacing and confused "antihero" approach kept me at arm's length almost from the start. Dickerson gives the big scare scenes the energy you'd expect, and the kids are actually kind of fun in their way (Katherine Isabelle can't ever be boring, she's always "on" even in the background of shots), but ultimately my big takeaway was that my "eh, it's fine" reaction would have been even more subdued if I saw it in 2001. And not because it's aged all that well - it's because back then I wouldn't have caught all the references to better movies. Can't vouch for K-Pax, but I think I ultimately made the better choice with Thirteen Ghosts (which is also coming from Scream Factory!).

What say you?

Tweet

PLEASE, GO ON...

Ma (2019)

JUNE 5, 2019

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

First Brightburn, and now Ma - I am really getting tired of trailers that not only give away the best parts, but also focus heavily on things that are meant to be reveals in the narrative itself. To be fair, a couple (literally, two) of Ma's surprises were discovered in the film as opposed to its marketing, but I still spent far too much of my time being ahead of the characters, making it hard to get sucked into the story. And that's kind of a problem for a thriller; these movies are largely designed to only really work once, and yet it felt like I was already on my second viewing since I had already seen Ma do most of the crazy things she does in its 95 or so minutes.

Because, alas, this is not a movie about Octavia Spencer wiping out a group of partying kids like some kind of unmasked Jason Voorhees. There's a bit of a body count, though the R rating mostly comes from the language as opposed to violence (it never gets more extreme than the jogger being run over, which - broken record time - was in the trailer), with one curious exception that the MPAA didn't even really mention. The film's R rating was chalked up to "violent/disturbing material, language throughout, sexual content, and for teen drug and alcohol use", and it should be noted that "sexual content" usually means people discussing sex or maybe implying it, i.e. something that even a PG-13 could have. But one thing a PG-13 definitely can't have is a shot of a male penis, which this offers courtesy of Luke Evans, whose character is Ma's real target.

See, what this movie really is is one of those "outcast gets revenge on classmates who humiliated her" films, albeit a curiously structured one where it takes nearly an hour for the screenplay to inform us just exactly what happened all those years ago, unlike the similar movies that explain it up front before flashing forward. It's a really horrible prank along the lines of Terror Train (albeit without the corpse; young Ma, really named Sue Ann, was once tricked into performing a sex act on what she thought was her crush but was actually his buddy), but the long build up to it suggests it will twist our perspective and have us rooting for Ma. That is certainly not the case, and since her revenge plot makes little sense, it's hard to see the correlation when the reveal finally happens. The guy that she actually performed on isn't even mentioned again, for starters, even though that'd be an easy target (not to mention someone who could pepper in a little action early on). Weirder still, Evans' high school girlfriend, who was of course in on the prank, is still around in the present (played by Missi Pyle as an adult), but when Ma goes after her she chalks it up to defending Juliette Lewis' character, who Pyle had mocked in the present for having to move back home after a messy divorce. So was Lewis's younger self Sue Ann's only friend or something? Nope, we barely see her in the past and later on Ma seems to consider her part the same group of oppressors anyway.

Further, it makes me wonder why the filmmakers felt the need to wait so long to show it; in fact they actually build up to it with a series of flashbacks of young Sue Ann first catching the guy's eye, going to a party with him, etc. By the time we see what exactly happened, we've already learned in the present that Sue Ann is an outcast, has trouble making friends, and has some curious views on teenaged sex, so not only is the payoff kind of anticlimactic, but the movie would have worked better as a whole by seeing this incident up front and letting us sympathize with her a little and even wanting to see her get revenge only for her to take it too far and shift our allegiance. Now it occurs after it's fully established that she's crazy, which is obviously too late for us to start feeling bad for her. It'd be like waiting until Friday the 13th Part 4 to tell us Jason was a little boy who drowned.

Another wonky creative decision concerns the heroine, Maggie (Diana Silvers, one of the cheerleaders in Glass), whose is Lewis' character's daughter. She is new in town and has no friends, and on her first day at school she is eating her packed lunch in the library by herself when a girl named Haley storms in out of nowhere, introduces herself, and puts her number into Maggie's phone, and then the following day invites her to join them for some drinking. It's such a strange way for Maggie to make friends that I thought for sure she - like Sue Ann - was being tricked into doing something embarrassing by people who were only pretending to like her, and thus parallel Ma's story. Hell, there's even a moment where she tells Ma "I'm stronger than you!" or something to that effect, which practically seems left over from a draft of the script where that was indeed the case.

But no, Haley and the others are legit friends to the end, and furthermore Ma is barely interested in her at all, so I had to wonder why the movie even bothered kicking off with her arrival in town since her "new kid" status has no bearing on anything beyond the aforementioned bit about Pyle throwing shade at Lewis for moving back home. Maggie's irrelevance to the majority of the plot is really hammered home with a clumsy runner about Ma apparently taking their jewelry, which kicks off when a girl we've never seen before runs over to Maggie and Haley in the hallway to tell them about her birthday plans and Maggie zeroes in on her new bracelet. Maggie admires it and we get a lengthy closeup of it, and if you've seen a single movie before you'd know that this means later on Maggie will find that very same bracelet in Ma's basement or something, suggesting something happened to the girl. But when the bracelet does come back later, Maggie's not even the one who notices it - Haley does, even though she wasn't the one that was so fixated on it earlier. As for the bracelet's owner? Who knows, they never mention her again.

It's the sort of thing that had me wondering if the movie was re-edited and re-arranged from an earlier cut. Throughout the movie, the kids (not just Maggie) are put off by something weird Ma does, only to seemingly forget about it the next day and hang out with her again. Even after Haley broadcasts "everyone block Ma's number, she's crazy!" to all of her friends (including Ma! Learn how to hide your posts from specific people, Haley!) they all seem fine with each other a day or two later, as if the scenes weren't presented in their intended order. There are also baffling things like Ma using a dog's blood for a transfusion on someone she just kills a few moments later anyway - why? That, along with the go-nowhere subplots about the jewelry (the way the trailer cuts that stuff together actually works better, ironically enough) and Maggie's similarly erratic relationship with her mother makes me wonder if there wasn't some reshaping or a much longer cut that would have shown more naturally why these folks can't seem to make up their minds about anything.

Still, Spencer's performance keeps it watchable, even entertaining at its best. Since I didn't know the trailer had shown me so much until it was over, I was never quite sure what she'd be doing next, and she doesn't even really try to hide her "off"-ness from the kids; the second time they visit she holds one of them at gunpoint and makes him strip (something they all write off as a joke later even though, uh, it's the same sort of sexually driven trauma she was so broken up about, directed at someone who had nothing to do with it - weird decision #23). I also loved the scenes where she was at work as a veterinarian, because she was clearly terrible at her job and constantly berated by her boss, played by the great Allison Janney - even though I came for a horror movie, I probably would have walked out happier if it was just a workplace comedy about these two trying to keep a small town animal clinic afloat despite hating each other. There's also a hilarious bit where Ma is getting a pedicure and starts cussing on the phone, drawing the ire of an old lady next to her - I could have watched the two of them bicker for 90 minutes, easily.

But alas, with so few thrills, the janky pacing, and missed opportunities, it's hard to say I walked out a big fan of what I DID see. It was watchable for sure; the climax was reasonably suspenseful, and the kids were thankfully all likable (even Haley, introduced as a kind of "pretty popular girl" type, is caring about her friends and never seen being mean to anyone), so it's not a "bad movie" in the traditional sense. But it was like the makers couldn't decide if it was a trashy B movie about a psycho or a serious thriller about the long-term effects of adolescent trauma (something the company's The Gift did so quite wonderfully a few years back), and ended up somewhere in the middle, underwhelming on both fronts. Here's hoping the Blu-ray has a longer cut or at least a wealth of deleted scenes that can rectify one or both problems, though after a few years I wouldn't get my hopes up as Blumhouse stuff almost never gets extended versions (Truth or Dare is the only exception that comes to mind) and even when they HAVE deleted scenes they're often missing ones we know about (i.e. Halloween and its original ending). What you see is what you get, and while that's often good enough, here I needed a little more.

What say you?

Tweet

PLEASE, GO ON...

Friend Request (2016)

SEPTEMBER 22, 2017

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

I've seen a couple people make the joke that Friend Request looks like something one might mock up for a film that needed a cheesy horror movie playing in the background (you know, for the two or three movies per decade that don't just use Night of the Living Dead), but for what little it's worth, it's actually the best of this year's crop of college kid-centric horror flicks. Unlike Rings, Bye Bye Man, and Wish Upon, I didn't spend the running time rolling my eyes or trying to keep track of how many plot holes it already racked up - I was actually enjoying it in a low-key, timekiller way until its endless and misguided third act. Props for trying something a little different in one of these things, but it didn't quite work due to not being properly set up, and probably accounts for the film's low grades more than anything else.

And by "one of these things" I mean yet another movie where our heroes get freaked out by a vengeful ghost for an hour or so and then decide that the only way to stop the thing that's been killing their friends is to drive to the old _____ (burnt out commune, here) and put the body to rest or whatever. It's amazing how these places are always a couple hours' drive away from where the protagonists live - just once I want to see one where they discover the old factory/asylum/warehouse/whatever is actually located in another country and they can't find a flight. OR, less jokingly, they discover the place is a full day's drive away, but relatively early in the film, and turn the 2nd half or so into more of a road chase, so that we can at least get a change of scenery and a kind of ticking clock scenario that you don't often get in these sort of movies. But alas, they follow the template of The Ring fairly closely, which might have worked better if we didn't have a genuine (well, technically genuine) Ring movie just six months ago.

Hilariously, like Rings, this one's been on the shelf for a while - it was actually shot in early 2014, and released in Germany last year. Why it took so long to come here is unknown, but oddly enough the movie's approximation of Facebook is a pretty close match to what we have now*, so it didn't feel as dated as you might expect for a nearly four year old production about the internet. They never actually use the name "Facebook" (I call it Fauxbook), but the social media site that the ghost uses to spread her terror is pretty much identical, with little variations in the terminology (like "Spread" instead of "Share") to keep them from being sued I guess. It's a good choice, I think - previous films have built their versions from the ground up, which automatically disconnects the audience its catering to as we instantly recognize it as phony. Here, you might just assume it's the real FB, and so the movie's central concepts - accepting strangers as "friends", the jealous rage one gets when seeing their friends having fun when they weren't invited, etc. - work as intended, without the usual distraction of seeing all the characters being obsessed with a social media app the audience recognizes as fake.

Anyway, for those uninitiated, the central conceit is that a fairly popular college sophomore named Laura accepts a friend request (hey, that's the title!) from Marina, a "weird" girl in her class, feeling sorry for her as she has no other fauxbook friends. Marina's nice at first, but then becomes overly pushy, tagging Laura in all her posts and messaging her nonstop about hanging out, missing her, etc. After Laura has a birthday party that she doesn't invite Marina to, the latter freaks out and kills herself - but she films herself doing it and posts the video on Laura's wall. And then continues doing so, from beyond the graaaaaaaaaave! Or, you know, whatever. Anyway, Laura's social circle starts shrinking as the friends begin dying off one by one in mysterious ways, and videos of their deaths are also posted on her timeline. Because of this, the 800 or so other people start defriending her (after leaving comments like "U R SICK!" and such), and Marina's plan becomes clear - she wants Laura to be "friendless", like her.

It's not the worst concept for a movie, really (plus it's not just a generic online ghost - she's actually a witch!), and if they really dug into the psychology of our obsession with social media and used the ghost-y stuff as more of a backdrop, it might have been a really great little slice of social commentary. The 800+ randoms is something that they don't really explore; we get graphics every now and then showing her declining friend numbers, but who are these people? We only ever see Laura with her five besties and her mom - were the others just complete strangers as well? Does she care that these people, who can't even really be called acquaintances, aren't going to see her statuses anymore? There's a minor subplot about how they can't delete their profiles (Marina's ghost won't let them), but it would have been interesting if she simply WOULDN'T delete hers, because she'd lose all her virtual friends. I myself never take anyone on Facebook that I don't actually know, but I know a number of friends who accept every request they get and somehow notice when one of these folks drop them ("Who unfriended me? I had 895, now I have 894!"), so I wish the movie took more time on the idea that these "friends" aren't actually friends at all and Marina is just one of many who were inadvertently scorned by conflating real life friendship with a virtual one.

But instead we just get the usual shit: someone dies, it looks like an accident, there's a suspicious cop who wonders why our protagonist knows two recent victims of tragedy, then another one dies, lather, rinse, repeat. While I was grateful that their phones had nothing to do with their demises, none of the deaths are particularly interesting (or graphic; the film's R rating is mostly for the six or seven F bombs), and you can easily guess the order in which they occur to boot, so it makes it an even bigger bummer that they didn't spend more time on the online obsession angle. Laura is even enrolled in a psych class that is currently on the topic of social media dependency, and the professor has this John Hurt/Jared Harris kind of authoritative presence, making it seem like he might be a more important character down the road, but he's largely dropped from the proceedings after a while. To be fair she's eventually suspended due to being a seeming liability for the school (even though it happens every few minutes it seems, she never thinks to take out her phone or laptop and show the police that she isn't the one posting snuff films and that her account can't be deleted, so the school thinks she's nuts), but again, it seemed like a missed opportunity not to include this guy on the action, if they wanted to *say* something about the very thing the teenagers in the audience will likely start looking at before the credits roll (the opportunities for a meta sequel are RIPE!).

Now I gotta get into spoilers, so skip the next paragraph if you want more surprises.

All that said it's really not all that bad until the third act, where they make a choice that is laudably unexpected and even somewhat daring (for this brand of horror, I mean), by having one of the friends realize that they can be spared Marina's wrath if Laura isn't alive to be alone. So he tries to kill her, and the finale becomes more of a slasher film chase climax, with Marina just hanging out on the sidelines I guess. I admit I didn't see it coming, but that's largely due to the fact that it's not really set up at all. The would-be killer is her friend-zoned buddy Kobe, who is also the requisite hacker type who offers up exposition like "These posts aren't written with any kind of code that I've ever seen before!", i.e. the kind of shit that means nothing in time that they maybe could have spent hinting at his out of nowhere villain turn. He even kills one of the other friends, which makes even less sense, and this all goes down during an endless climax that has Laura travel to the aforementioned commune, but then to another location after discovering the commune is a dead end. When she's not being pursued by Kobe she's just wandering around dimly lit hallways, with Marina making precious few appearances - so when they have Laura go through these motions again at a different place, I felt my last bit of goodwill toward the movie fade away.

It's not a total failure like its aforementioned peers, however. For starters, they believe in James Wan's rule about fake scares, in that there shouldn't be any - two 'classic' ones are set up (a refrigerator door being held open for an unusually long time, and a fogged mirror about to be wiped away) without the expected BOO! moment after, and there are no sudden doorbell/phone ringing kinda ones, either. In fact, the closest the movie gets to one is not only kind of effective in its carnival funhouse kind of way, but it's also thematically appropriate - Laura watches one of those "Hey look at this cute video" things where the subject (a cat, in this case) suddenly morphs into a possessed demon and shrieks. And then there are a few subtle scare moments without any attention being drawn to them, like when a character turns away from his laptop but his reflection on the screen stays frozen in place. Nothing particularly earth shattering, mind you, but it at least shows they were trying to avoid the pratfalls of so many others, and not wasting the audience's energy on false scare moments. It also makes good use of the fauxbook layout/function to introduce us to all of the primary characters quickly, showing their profiles and an assortment of pics/statuses that inform us what they're like and how they relate to one another in a few seconds of mostly dialogue-free screentime, as opposed to awkward expository dialogue that takes a lot longer. It's a shorthand I've seen in other films, but since this one's actually ABOUT this social media platform, it also works as introduction for how *it* works, for the non-computer types in the crowd who might have little idea what Facebook even is, i.e. the parents that will have to bring their kids to this inexplicably R-rated movie.

So basically it's not a good movie but it's also not as bad as many reviews will have you believe, the ones that will be an unfortunate product of the tendency to grade everything on a "fresh/rotten" scale with no room for the middle ground that it actually occupies. Sure, in the wake of It it might seem like the bottom of the barrel, but comparing this kind of thing to that juggernaut is highly unfair. The film actually belongs in the same class as Bye Bye Man and those others I mentioned, and to my eyes it's an improvement on those (though not quite up to par with the similar Unfriended, which took full advantage of its cyber-scenario and didn't skimp on the death scenes, not to mention fleshed out all of its characters as opposed to just the lead), and after Annabelle: Creation I appreciated something a little quieter that didn't seem to have a mandate to throw a scare at the audience every five minutes. They were putting some effort into making an effective horror film in the vein of the 2002 Ring, so even though they missed the mark I can at least appreciate that I wasn't spending 90 minutes feeling like the filmmakers thought I was an idiot. Much obliged!

What say you?

*Unless they updated it digitally - there was an inordinate number of VFX companies listed in the credits, despite the fact that there aren't a lot of obvious CGI effects for the ghost or kill scenes, which are also very brief anyway. So it's possible they went back and updated the Fauxbook screens to be more timely, as we all know how often they change it.

Tweet

PLEASE, GO ON...