The Exorcism (2024)

JULY 1, 2024

GENRE: POSSESSION, RELIGIOUS
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

By my count, Joshua John Miller has written two films about growing up with a parent who is famous for a horror movie. One is The Final Girls, which is sweet and fun and taps into nostalgia for the era of slasher films, and the other is The Exorcism, which is... well, none of those things. Miller is the son of Jason Miller, star of The Exorcist, so one could kind of see Final Girls as the writer dipping his toes into autobiographical waters before diving in without a lifevest in the deep end this time around, as he not only directed this time as well, but also tackled his reality head on: it's about the child of an actor playing the priest in a possession movie.

Russell Crowe is the toplined star, playing disgraced actor Tony Miller, but the real protagonist is Lee (Ryan Simpkins) as his daughter, who is sent to live with him after being kicked out of her boarding school for the rest of the semester. Their relationship is not great—she calls him "Tony" instead of "Dad"—but she helps him practice lines for what is apparently his first good gig in along time: the Max Von Sydow role in a remake of The Exorcist. He gets her a gig as a PA (to ensure she's around for the film's events), but almost as soon as filming begins he starts acting strangely. Is he possessed, like the character in the film he's making? Or is he letting his own demons (with addiction, with his wife's death, with a repressed childhood, take your pick) get the better of him?

It's a solid idea for a movie, and one can't argue with the quality of the cast they've assembled to tell it (how often do we see David Hyde Pierce show up in a genre film?). But unfortunately, the movie feels incomplete from start to finish, as if Miller and his cowriter M.A. Fortin had some great ideas for scenes and began filming them before knowing how those scenes would end, or flow into the next. Sequences start and seem to be going somewhere, only to stop abruptly without being mentioned again. Certain co-stars show up for such minimal screentime that one wonders why they bothered to cast them (even Sam Worthington; he's third billed but I would be shocked if his screentime topped as many minutes, playing what is essentially Jason Miller's role in their possession movie). Even major plot points—such as the aforementioned PA gig—aren't even made clear with a line of dialogue or something, we just have to infer it after seeing Lee on set a half dozen times before a scene where she brings the director a coffee.

Worse, there's a phoniness to it all that is constantly distracting. They never come right out and say they're remaking The Exorcist; Lee looks at her dad's script and says "Wait, so they're remaking... (chuckle)", which along with the film's title ("The Georgetown Project") and what we pick up on of the film's plot through a few scenes of the actors filming it (two priests, possessed girl, head spinning) makes it very obvious what movie they're remaking without ever actually saying so. Later they even bring up The Exorcist, but as one of a few examples (Omen and Poltergeist being the others) of cursed productions, but even though it's already been stated that they're doing a remake of ("chuckle"), the reference dies there, without anyone noting the coincidence. All of this makes the movie feel insincere, like you're watching an Asylum mockbuster of a would-be exaggerated biopic.

Then again, it seems that the original idea was to just straight up set itself on the set of the original 1973 film, and after that didn't work out (I'm guessing the rights holders politely declined) they opted to say it was a remake in the present day and then never really fleshed out how that would change things, so a lot of the would-be trappings of a period piece remain. Lee, being a teenager in 2019-2024 (this sat on the shelf for a while; Crowe shot it before Pope's Exorcist) has a cell phone, but the one time she uses it is in one of the film's many confusing scenes (she is scrolling instagram when it starts buzzing as if she got a new message or something, but she begins panicking as if something was wrong, but we never see her phone again to understand why she's so upset). At one point she even grabs a landline (a corded one at that!) to try to dial for help. And the director of the film (Adam Goldberg) is so Friedkin codified (throwing his weight around the set, screaming at actors, saying horrible things to them just before calling "Action!" in order to get a rise out of them to improve their performance) it almost seems like no one told Goldberg he wasn't supposed to be playing the legendary auteur. They even have a cold room set, as if this was a necessary part of the production instead of just something Friedkin did because he didn't have CGI to add the actors' breath to sell the idea of the room being cold.

The whole "is he possessed or mentally ill?" angle makes no sense either. At one point Tony jumps out a window and returns to set the next day, and he also does a full backwards contortion (i.e. spider-walk) type in front of the entire crew. However these things are chalked up to "he's drunk/he's off his meds"? And while the actor Tony is replacing (played by Adrian Pasdar! Always nice to see that dude) dies from what appears to be a freak accident, the movie takes a brief trip into slasher territory by having Crowe straight up murder one of the other actors by smashing through his dressing room mirror, an act that causes the movie to be shut down but prompts no other investigation or suspicion. Where's the Lt. Kinderman standin when you need him? Even sillier is that his daughter sees all these things from the start and yet keeps showing up to work. What are those morning car rides like?

I am really baffled by this endeavor. Again, it's been on the shelf for a while, and I spied an "Additional Editor" in the end credits which tends to mean it was reshaped from an earlier attempt (ironically this makes it closer to a true Exorcist movie than anything else, as nearly every one of them has alternate versions). There are reports that Covid messed with post production, so I can only assume that they planned to do reshoots after the late 2019 filming and never got to do so, and re-edited the movie to make something more or less coherent out of it. And that sucks for the filmmakers, but if they're still charging the same price for a ticket, then the movie has to be judged on the same level as all of those "actually completed" ones showing on the adjacent screens. And this movie is nothing more than some scattered ideas in search of a pulse. Next time write a book, Mr. Miller - you can get away with more, clearances wise.

What say you?

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The First Omen (2024)

APRIL 10, 2024

GENRE: RELIGIOUS
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

In general, prequels rarely interest me. This goes double for horror, as the very nature of a prequel means filling in backstory, something few horror films/franchises benefit from. Even if I more or less like the movie, like TCM: The Beginning, the "prequelness" tends to drag the experience down (in that particular case: did I really need to know how Monty lost his legs?). So it's rather surprising that The First Omen works as well as it does, because not only is it telling the story of how Damien came to be conceived and thus keeping the series' marquee character out of it entirely, but it also kind of messes with established canon on top of it, which means it kind of fails at the one thing a prequel is supposed to do.

It's also surprising that it works considering it's essentially the same movie as Immaculate, and unlike other twin movies over the years (Volcano and Dante's Peak, Armageddon and Deep Impact, etc) I don't think it's just coincidence. As anyone who has listened to Immaculate's production history can attest, the script for the film has been around for years (Sidney Sweeney auditioned for an earlier incarnation that never got before cameras; when her star rose she remembered it and used her newfound clout to get it made) and thus very easily could have passed through the offices of the producers who made this movie. Not only does it have a generally similar plot (a very young American nun goes to a creepy religious group home in Italy and is impregnated with something unnatural), but a few scenes in this film are almost identical to ones we just saw in Immaculate (a nun's suicide in the courtyard of the building where the movie takes place, the heroine's roommate teasing her for being so conservative, etc.). It's enough to warrant looking into!

It also feels somewhat retrofitted into an Omen movie. The opening scene has a classic gory death like the older films offered, but this scene was added later after test screenings. And it also doesn't quite match up to what we learned of Damien's creation in the original movie, as if they skimmed a Wiki entry and fudged the details (I considered at first that they were actually just doing a reimagining from the ground up, but a picture of Gregory Peck as Damien's dad-in-waiting suggests it's meant to tie directly into Richard Donner's version of events). To be fair, I don't have any great affinity for the franchise; I don't think I've seen any of them except the original more than once, and even my rewatch of the OG was just to refresh for the one time I watched part 2. So I'm not gonna get all huffy about this or that change, just noting that it's kind of weird (and mildly suspicious) that it's so similar to an unrelated film already and then they bungle the things that could have set it further apart.

All that aside, it's another solid entry in the growing subgenre of body horror involving pregnancy, which smarter writers than me have already pointed out is probably the direct result of a government that seems so hellbent on rolling back certain medical rights of pregnant women. Our heroine Sr. Margaret (Nell Tiger Free, far more appealing and sympathetic than the actual Sr. Margaret I had in Catholic School, who was one of the absolute worst) comes to this Italian orphanage from America and almost instantly finds a kindred soul in Carlita, a young girl who is often isolated from the others there due to her sometimes disturbing behavior. As she digs deeper into Carlita's background, she also meets Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson in a rare non-villain role), the priest played by Patrick Troughton in the original movie. He suggests Carlita's behavior may be due to how she was born, and also that she may be targeted as the mother for the Antichrist.

More twists follow from there, so no sense getting into them (though if you think a major studio movie is going to let a 12 year old girl be the mother of a child, seek help and/or see more movies) except to say that the movie mostly works despite working toward a very obvious ending: the birth of Damien Thorn. The film's 1971 setting makes it very clear to those who remember the 1976 original that he will be born soon, though someone (my money is on producer David S. Goyer) felt we needed a moment where a character comes right out and says "They named the baby... Damien!" for audience members who hadn't made the connection yet, so maybe doing the "1971 plus five years" math IS indeed asking a lot of them.

But director Arkasha Stevenson (who also co-wrote) knows no one will wait until the end of the film for something scary to happen, so she gives us a few scares and deaths along the way; basically anyone trying to help Margaret discover the truth meets with a grisly end. One such death made me laugh out loud though, as the person is trapped by a crashed car at the waist and when someone tries to help them, they inadvertently rip the poor sod in half. And there's a little tribute to the "It's all for you" moment that adds a little fluorish (read: it's even more disturbing), so that was nice. Oh, there's also a Possession homage that comes at the tail end of Free performing an incredibly impressive/upsetting bit of physical acting, adding another highlight for those among us who know our horror of old.

Free is the highlight of what's already an impressive cast, including a trifecta of "Old UK guys who can make anything sound good" actors: Ineson, Charles Dance, and Bill Nighy. Dance is basically just a cameo (he's in that aforementioned tacked on opening), but Ineson and Nighy both get decently sized roles, offering some silly dialogue that still sounds good when it's coming out of their mouths (though the stupid "Damien" line is Ineson's, which puts that theory to its breaking point). It was also great to see Sonia Braga, as the head nun at the orphanage who may or may not be in on the Antichrist plans. Part of the fun of these movies, for me anyway, is that I believe anyone who wants to devote their life to the church must be unhinged and potentially evil, so when some kind of goofy villain plot is introduced, it's a joy to try to figure out which ones are part of it and which ones are just terrible in general.

Die hard aficionados of the franchise might be too annoyed by the minor changes to give the film a chance, and it's unfortunate that it's coming along so close after such a similar film (one that's a half hour shorter I might add!), but the tone here is pure horror, whereas Immaculate went for something a little more deranged/fun. I actually felt bad for laughing at that one part, as it was obviously not a film designed to get the crowd hooting and hollering (I just have a sick sense of humor!) and my outburst was not shared by anyone else in the room. But the point is, there's room for both right now, and we should consider ourselves lucky as genre fans to have two films in a not particularly common sub-genre in theaters at the same time. That they're both quite good and worth your time? That's some lottery level small odds.

What say you?

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Immaculate (2024)

FEBRUARY 27, 2024

GENRE: RELIGIOUS
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (ADVANCED SCREENING)

Before this advanced screening of Immaculate began, director Michael Mohan came out and listed some of the movies that influenced this one, such as The Devils and The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, but the title that really piqued my curiosity was Barbarian. Faithful readers of the site might wonder why there is no Barbarian review here, but the simple reason is I refused to, because it was so damn good but also benefited greatly from having no idea what it was about (for those still in the dark, I will say it's not about a barbarian), so I wanted to help as many people go in as blind as I did. This one isn't quite as surprising throughout, though the comparison IS apt, because like that film I am guessing few if any will be able to guess what the final 20 minutes of Immaculate are about based on its first half.

Since the trailer's been running for a while now I think it's OK to sum up the same thing it tells you: the movie stars Sydney Sweeney as a nun named Cecilia who has recently relocated to a sort of nursing home/convent in Italy where older nuns go once they can no longer care for themselves, making sure their final days on earth are as comfortable and cheery as possible. But being that Cecilia is a young American who has just arrived at a new isolated place in Europe you know damn well that there's something creepy going on and she will just as certainly be the newest target for whatever that is. And she also finds herself pregnant, despite being a virginal nun who took a vow of chastity, but if you think about the film's title and are caught up on Jesus Christ's wiki page you should know it's not much of a mystery what might be happening there.

That's all I'll say about the film's plot; there are some twists and surprises along the way that I wouldn't dream tipping you off about (though I can't help myself fully - I need to at least get it on the record that I was in no way expecting to be reminded of a certain polarizing '90s sequel when I sat down for the film. Once you see the movie you'll probably know the one I mean if you're a proper franchise aficionado). But I can say without spoiling anything that, at least for me, the film's pivots worked like gangbusters, and while a "Nunsploitation purist" (if such a thing exists) might cry foul that it doesn't follow the usual formula, I had an absolute blast and was full on cackling for most of the final reel, as the movie just WENT FOR IT in ways that made me quite pleased.

Because, and I'm sure you've surmised as much if you dutifully read my reviews (or at least, my letterboxd), I'm getting tired of the A24-ization of horror as of late. You know, the "elevated" stuff. I'm fine with seeing some of those every now and then, and some I quite like (The Witch, Midsommar, X...), but I feel there are now too many others competing for that same piece of the pie, and simply not enough fun horror movies coming along (not to mention attracting A list talent like Sweeney, whose star is on the rise and yet, per Mohan, loved the script so much she threw her weight behind it as a producer to make sure it got made). The last couple horror movies I saw in theaters were Out of Darkness and Stopmotion, both of which I'd describe with words like "grim" and "cold."

Again, nothing wrong with that! But we need balance, and based on the trailer I figured this would follow suit. I was not expecting to cheer and applaud a well timed bit of profanity. And given my own views on catholicism (due to my fairly strict upbringing and subsequent realization that this was no way to live your life), seeing the blasphemy on display—including a crucifix used to bludgeon someone—just kept me fully entertained, smiling and laughing as opposed to getting all bummed out like I figured I would. Not that the trailer is misleading, mind you—it's just that it focuses on the first half when it comes to what it shows in context, leaving the second half a complete surprise, at least to me.

It's also pretty scary! In a jump horror kind of way to be fair, but an effective jolt isn't the easiest thing to pull off. Believe me, I've watched enough James Wan wannabes (James Wannabes?) in the past few years to know that it can get far too easy to spot them coming, as if the directors only know one way to pull them off. Here there are at least three good ones, four if you count one that's given away in the trailer (though in context it kind of works again even though you know it's coming? Impressive!), plus some solid suspense and nail-biter type scenes, like an extended bit where Sweeney attempts to escape and Mohan's camera refuses to show you how close her pursuers are.

Speaking of Sweeney, I'm not as smitten with her as many of my contemporaries (more like downright obsessed in some of y'all cases) but I enjoyed her work here. I'm always impressed when a name actress fully commits to the nonsense one might endure in a horror movie (i.e. getting covered in blood, screaming her damn head off, etc.) and wasn't sure if she had it in her, but I was happily wrong. I can't spoil the particulars of course, but there's one long take that's essentially just her face for the most part, and even if it was the first and only take she deserves our respect. If she had to do it multiple times and that was like take six or whatever? Hell, give her the Fangoria Chainsaw Award right now. Or maybe even the Spirit Award, I think it qualifies.

(I know better than to consider hoping for an Oscar nom. Not that it's on that level anyway, but if they didn't even consider Toni Collette, ain't no genre actress getting a chance ever again.)

A few people walked out (including the couple in front of me and my friend, so thanks for the improved line of sight, losers!), and given the fact that this particular screening was a Beyond Fest-hosted one (i.e. a crowd who should be fully ready for anything) I'm guessing there will be some similar reactions at large when it hits release. If I'm right, it's their loss, and they can go home and watch Consecration if they demand their nun horror be all moody and dour. For everyone who isn't too precious about these things, I hope you'll check it out; I feel that a proper crowd (which we got, outside of those few sticklers) will aid greatly in the enjoyment. It isn't high art or anything, but sometimes it's just nice to see a horror movie that does the basics right (it has some scares! It has a couple of gruesome deaths! It's not something that'll ever actually happen!), and a rare genre heroine outside of the slasher film that does applause-worthy things to survive. AND it breaks like, three of the Commandments, for good measure.

What say you?

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The Exorcist: Believer (2023)

OCTOBER 6, 2023

GENRE: POSSESSION, RELIGIOUS
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

Obviously there’s no way to know for sure, but I’d be willing to bet that if David Gordon Green hadn’t made a trilogy of Halloween films, and if The Exorcist had maybe a few ripoffs but no direct sequels or fifty continued years of would-be successors, The Exorcist: Believer could come out frame for frame the exact same movie it is now and yet be met with much stronger reviews. Apart from a misguided attempt to strengthen its ties to the original film by giving Ellen Burstyn an extended cameo (her first appearance as Chris MacNeill since the original, so take that, Jamie Lee Curtis!), there’s nothing particularly bad about the film – in fact for the first hour it’s quite good, and it has a solid climax! But it’s got those two huge hurdles to clear, and people just like to hate things, so it has sub-Saw sequel ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. And also the sky is blue.

Of course, if you LIKED Green’s (Not “Gordon Green’s”, I keep seeing this in articles and it baffles me. Do these writers (or AI Bots) not know what a middle name is? Do you also say “Lee Curtis” or “L. Jackson”?) Halloween films, and I did, his signing on to this project wasn’t really an issue. But even I can admit there would be something kind of fascinating about the guy who was only mainly known for All The Real Girls and George Washington making a horror debut with an Exorcist sequel, much like the intrigue he was offered in 2017 when they announced he would be making a new Halloween (of course, having Curtis AND John Carpenter on board didn’t hurt his rep), whereas now he’s forever tied into the genre. Honestly, he’s an ideal choice to make an Exorcist sequel, just as Friedkin himself was, post-French Connection, not exactly the most obvious candidate for what would be dubbed the scariest movie ever made. But Green making four films in a row (five if he does the already dated Believer followup) kinda cements his place as a “horror guy”, a moniker that would seem baffling even five years ago. But alas, many did not care much for his Halloween movies (even a lot of folks who liked his first didn’t care for the two sequels), and so residual hatred of Corey Cunningham and “Evil Dies Tonight” makes him a target, so even if he was making a sequel to an Uwe Boll film folks would have their pitchforks and “How DARE he?” chants at the ready. An Exorcist sequel? Forget it.

(It didn’t help that Friedkin passed away not too long ago, making this an ill-timed release on top of it as he was not exactly supportive of the project.)

But even Friedkin (or William Peter Blatty, who made the mostly good Exorcist III) would have to contend with five decades’ worth of sequels, ripoffs, and exorcism-free possession movies that are inescapable to even a casual horror fan. The likes of Evil Dead, Devil, and even Paranormal Activity all exist under the umbrella that Friedkin and Blatty provided back in 1973, even though none of them have a priest shouting things about Christ’s power. So it doesn’t matter who is calling “action” on the set – there’s simply not much uncharted territory for these things anymore, and Pazuzu’s shadow is hard to escape even in an original movie (I bet I mention Exorcist in every single possession movie I’ve reviewed here). Doing a sequel just makes it that much harder for a filmmaker to create something folks can see as worthy of the crown (I suspect Exorcist III’s relatively good reputation is because Blatty was involved and thus got a pass. It’s not exactly a masterpiece either).

All that said, if you can leave all those things out of your mind (or even better, be unaware of them at all), you’ll be treated to what is a mostly solid movie about a man named Victor (Leslie Odom, Jr) who is raising his daughter alone after his wife died in an earthquake while pregnant (the doctors could only save one). So he’s very protective of her, and just to scare borderline helicopter parents like me, on the ONE DAY he lets his daughter hang out with a friend after school instead of coming straight home, she and the friend go missing. They’re found three days later, relatively unharmed but also not remembering where they were (and also thinking it’s only been a few hours as opposed to as many days). Before long both girls start acting weird, and after tests show nothing, a kindly nurse (Ann Dowd) makes a suggestion to Victor that it could be demonic possession, and gives him a book by a parent whose child was possessed. Guess who that is?

Alas, since Victor stopped believing in God when his wife died, he naturally thinks it’s all nonsense, but we know eventually he’ll start to open up to the idea. So he goes to see Chris MacNeill, and she agrees to help him. Unfortunately (spoiler here) she is seriously injured on the first encounter, more or less written out of the movie after that until the final scene, so anyone hoping she’d go full Merrin during the obligatory climactic exorcism will be disappointed. In fact I can’t imagine anyone will be particularly thrilled at how Burstyn is used here; the role is brief (as with Harrison Ford in Blade Runner 2049, they ought to have treated it as a surprise cameo instead of marketing them as a major supporting character) and it seems unnecessarily cruel to watch her get attacked the way she does. The film was working just fine as a standalone, and I truly wish Dowd’s gift of her book would have been enough of a connection to this world without stopping the movie cold for “legacyquel” stuff*. It’s a damaging misstep, to be sure, but not enough to ruin the movie for me. Instead I just went from “Wait, why are people hating this?” to “Oh, that’s why.”

But the last act got me back! There's a surprise reveal involving Victor that kind of floored me and recontextualized a lot of the film, and the intriguing idea that the demon agrees to only kill one child and spare the other, but leaves it up to the parents to decide ("It's Sophie's Choice meets King Solomon!" is probably something you don't hear in pitch meetings a lot). Also, instead of the usual “priest vs possessed” showdown, Chris suggests that there is no definitive exorcism ritual and that every religion has their own ideas, all of which are valid. So we get a handful of priests from several dominations – Catholic, Pentecostal, Baptist, and some kind of witchcraft/earth-based one (not quite voodoo, but they use roots and dirt and stuff like that) – all working together side by side to save the girls, along with their parents (as if you recall, and if not she reminds you anyway – Chris never witnessed the exorcism herself, but Victor and the other girl’s parents are right there with the priests). It’s a weirdly optimistic movie in that regard; we’ve all been living in an “us vs them” hell since a certain NY businessman announced his candidacy for President, and it seems like every day there’s something new to divide people. Even right now, as the movie hits theaters, I’m seeing “both sides” about an attack in the Middle East in which babies were beheaded. You’d think some things would be immune to a debate (such as, for example, BABIES BEING BEHEADED), but alas, that’s not the case anymore, and I don’t see it ever getting better in my lifetime. So to see a bunch of folks coming together despite their differences is good for the soul, in my opinion.

Unfortunately I do have to remember that I arrived late to this franchise (I was 19 when I saw the original and didn’t see any of the sequels until my late 20s), so I don’t come into these things with as much baggage. The Exorcist didn’t change my life, it didn’t give me nightmares, it didn’t make me a horror fan – it’s just one of many films in the genre I really enjoy despite not having any significant impact on my life or worldview. But that’s not the case for a lot of folks, so it’s only natural that they see these sequels (and the knockoffs, many of which I’ve also enjoyed more than many of my peers) as a massive letdown. They’re chasing a high that nothing can ever replicate, and any sort of memory that the new film might trigger of the untouchable Exorcist just makes the former feel that much lesser. It’s like eating a decent burger when the first meat you ever had was a prime sirloin – you’re only going to react to what it ISN’T instead of what it is.

And I’ll be honest – no, the film isn’t all that scary. There’s a terrific jump scare early on (it involves a scarf) that ranks up there with E3’s much lauded nurse moment for such things, and since a foul-mouthed child isn’t going to shock anyone anymore, Green wisely has one possessed kid carry out a pretty revolting act of violence that is somewhat shocking in its viciousness. But I feel Green actually remembered that the original film is more of a drama than a horror movie for large chunks of its runtime, and also one with lots of characters, to the extent that it’s more of an ensemble. And it’s those elements that Green and his writers are evoking with their film, instead of going for outright horror (an approach only Renny Harlin even kind of approached with his entry, which is no one’s favorite anyway), so it wasn’t really an issue for me. I was engaged with the story and the characters, so I didn’t really care that no one’s head was spinning. As with Chris, the weaker elements of the movie are the ones that remind me I’m watching Exorcist 6; when it’s a movie about a broken man trying to save the only thing he has left in the world, I was hooked in.

That said, I don’t know if I need to see a direct followup to it (it’s currently dated for April of 2025, though I don’t know what will happen now that this one has such negative reviews and only so-so box office – and that’s BEFORE Hurricane Swift takes over the multiplexes and scares everyone else away); the final scene has a nice moment but nothing that demands a “what next?”, and that’s coming from someone who mostly liked the movie. But I had a good time at my AMC that afternoon; the movie gave me a solid scare, which is one more than most movies offer, likable characters, some solid blasphemy (if you track what Dowd’s would-be nun character is saying, having an abortion and leaving the church set her on the path to save a child’s life, so… hahahaha! Eat it, right wingers!), an excellent performance by Odom, Jr., and a moment that legit made me tear up, so I’m not sure what else I could ask for. Green’s direction apes Friedkin’s at times; there’s some hard edits, big moments happening in a matter of fact manner, and relatively sparse use of music (even “Tubular Bells” is underplayed), all of which make it clear he (like me) probably prefers the original cut of the film vs the Spider-Walk/demon face-addled 2000 recut version. No, it’s nowhere as good as the original, but I wasn’t demanding it to be, nor did I go in with my review already written like, for example, a major horror site personality who has been trashing the movie since the day it was announced. Having an open mind is rewarding, I think! The movie's fine! It’s not even the worst Exorcist sequel with one of the actors!

What say you?

* It also would allow the TV show – in my opinion the best of the followups – to remain canon, since Chris writing a book at some point doesn’t conflict with that show’s version of events as far as I can recall. But the character died there, so her showing up in the present day here effectively wipes Fathers Marcus and Tomas out of continuity. Otherwise, unlike Green’s Halloweens, there’s nothing here that rewrites any of the other sequels’ events – they’re just not mentioned.

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The Nun II (2023)

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

GENRE: POSSESSION, RELIGIOUS
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

I assume it’s only because The Nun was released in September (i.e. the start of the spooky season) that it became the highest grossing entry of the Conjuring universe, as nearly all the of others were released in the summer and didn’t get that same “well it’ll give us a few scares, so let’s go” boost. Because I don’t think anyone would dare to claim it was their favorite entry – it was a pretty by-the-numbers jump scare machine with the flimisiest connection yet to the main series (even the otherwise cast off Curse of La Llorona had one of the supporting characters make an appearance). But it’s the big numbers on boxofficemojo, not user reviews, that decide whether or not a film gets a sequel, so here we are five years later with The Nun II, which brings back two of the previous film’s heroes along with (duh) the titular Nun.

But it does so awkwardly, and starts the movie off on a weird note that takes a while for it to recover from. It opens on a priest being immolated by the nun in a church in France, and then reintroduces Maurice, aka “Frenchie”, the kindly villager who has relocated to France himself, now working at a boarding school. If you don’t recall, the end of the first film had him being possessed by Valak the demon (the same spirit inside the nun, I think? I can’t really follow this gibberish across several years/installments), with a credits scene showing he was still possessed decades later as the Warrens attempted to exorcise him prior to the events of the first Conjuring. Since this movie takes place in between those two events, we know he’s possessed, but that is hidden from us until we also catch up with Irene (Taissa Farmiga), who is now living at a convent in Italy and trying to live a peaceful, demonic nun free life (aren't we all?). Alas, we learn that the priest we saw immolated at the beginning was merely the newest in a string of mysterious deaths of clergy folk, and the cardinal comes calling to tell Irene they need her help because they are pretty sure it’s the same demon she fought before.

And here’s where it gets confusing: after explaining away Demian Bichir’s character as having died of cholera in between movies, the cardinal tells Irene she’s the only other person alive who has dealt with this demon. But… she isn’t? And we already got reacquainted with the other one who did? It’s very awkward; it really felt like we should have met up with Irene first and then, when she gets the assignment, have her say something like “Well, there is someone else who faced Valak…” and THEN catch up with Frenchie/Maurice (he goes by the latter). But the way it plays out, it almost seems to be suggesting he’s a different character entirely for a while until his first “the demon takes over” moment. Which is another awkward thing about the movie, as we all know he’s possessed but he doesn’t become a full menace until the third act, so until then he just has these weird moments that affect no one else, so that he can keep being the handsome hero for the character scenes.

It also takes a while for Irene to get to the school, as she’s on a fact finding mission with another nun played by Storm Reid. Honestly I would probably prefer a movie about the two of them making their way through a spooky version of National Treasure or Indiana Jones (there’s a scene where they literally need to have a beam of light point the way to a relic!) than go through the usual jump scare motions with the girls at the school, but that wouldn’t sell tickets so I get it. At least once she finally gets there and reunites with Frenchie the movie kicks into higher gear, and the third act is actually pretty exciting as all hell is breaking loose. There’s a random goat devil beast running around, plus the possessed Frenchie and the Nun, all of them causing havoc as our heroes constantly run through the halls and smash through windows and what not. Sometimes it seems like a character disappears for too long of a time, such as the obligatory kindly teacher who has a burgeoning romance with Frenchie (poor Irene the nun can’t get any of that, so they just give each other longing looks), but it’s all exciting enough not to matter too much.

That said, I had to dock this section a point for not killing any of the mean girls who torment the teacher’s daughter, a soft spoken type who is also BFFs with Frenchie. Early on they steal a bracelet from her, and later they trap her in a room with the demon (not intentionally, but the intent was still the same – scare the hell out of her!), so along with the film’s R rating it really feels like they’re going to get a justified demise. But no! One of them is stabbed in the shoulder by the goat thing, and that’s it. Why even bother with all this mean girl stuff if there’s no payoff for it? They don’t apologize to her or anything, and the girl’s mom even puts herself in harm’s way to protect the jerks (as does Reid, who alas has nothing of her own to do once they arrive at the school). The R is earned from a trio of onscreen/fairly gnarly kills, but those brief moments are it – it felt very PG13 otherwise. To be fair, the first Conjuring famously got an R for simply being too scary (James Wan intended it to be PG13 but the MPAA wouldn’t budge), but at this point it seems they’re just slapping the R on out of tradition. There’s nothing in here that elevates it above Insidious 5 (PG13) in that department, so if they’re going to keep making this an R rated franchise, they should at least earn it. These films tend to outgross the PG13 Insidious ones, so the R clearly isn't hurting ticket sales. Embrace it!

But even if it was rated PG, I think I’d feel the same way: the formula for this franchise is getting pretty creaky after nine entries (three Conjurings, three Annabelles, two Nuns, and La Llorona). At least the Conjurings (and Annabelle 3, briefly) have the Warren characters to give them a boost, since they are so charming and Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga are endlessly appealing to watch, but the other films have yet to give us characters that engaging. Taissa’s Irene has a slightly meatier role to play this time, as she finds herself trying to mold Reid’s character into a good nun while also dealing with her spooky past and unresolved longing for Frenchie (who she also may have to kill to stop the demon), but nothing they can give her to say will ever really stop distracting us from the baffling casting choice to have “Lorraine Warren’s sister” take lead on two films when she’s not actually related to her. They even double down on it this time, with a series of flashbacks about Irene’s mother who was sent to a mental institution for babbling about demons and such, with Irene saying she hasn’t seen her since – a perfect opportunity to just say the woman got out of the hospital, met a man, and gave birth to a daughter named Lorraine. But no, they still do nothing with this connection, and it doesn’t help that Taissa looks more like Vera than ever in a few shots.

And too many of the films have the same structure, in that there’s a place where the haunting is and then our protagonist is elsewhere getting back story. Scare scene, exposition dump, scare scene, exposition dump, over and over until they finally all get together in the house/school/whatever for a third act blow out. Sometimes the heroes will have jump scare scenes of their own, with the filmmakers hoping we don’t notice the discrepancy of the supernatural force seemingly being in two places at once. Even the scares seem to be generated from a template, where they see a scary thing and then the scary thing makes a “surprise” second appearance, always after an extended quiet moment where the little girl looks down a hall or into a darkened corner or something. There’s a decent one here where the Nun suddenly turns into a bunch of birds that fly at the hero, but otherwise they might as well have just deep faked these actors’ faces over the ones in previous Conjuverse movies, save a few bucks.

Speaking of the Nun, she's curiously not in the movie all that much. I'd estimate Bonnie Aarons has less than two minutes of screentime in the 110 minute film, which is weird for a sequel in a series named THE NUN. I think we spend more time looking at *images* of her specter (like in that silly magazine article collage from the trailers, and another bit where the little girl thinks she sees her but turns out to be a distinctive pattern on a crumbling wall) than her as an actual presence, and when she does appear she's mostly just standing there. I momentarily wondered if Aarons actually returned at all or if they just deep faked her image over a double for the handful of shots they bothered to include the character, as the role is that minimal and inert. With the house full of teenaged girls (again, some quite mean!) this could have been a slasher of sorts with the Nun wiping them out one by one until Taissa arrived to stop her, but instead she's treated as an afterthought. Very weird.

I dunno. There are worse entries (namely, the first Nun and La Llorona), but the sameyness is also leaving me indifferent even though there are improvements here and there. Like yes, this one’s better, but it’s also pretty similar, so we lose the novelty. With so many stories to mine from the Warren’s basement collection, it seems silly to keep making sequels to the spinoffs, even if they tend to improve on their originals (Annabelle Comes Home remains the best of the entire spinoff collection in my eyes). At least with a different demonic entity and a new cast to meet, the genericness of the scare scenes can be offset by everything else being fresh – what happened to the Crooked Man movie? But instead the end of this one just reminds us that another Conjuring is coming. Maybe Patrick Wilson can direct that one too? At least we can maybe get a new Ghost song out of the deal.

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FTP: Darlin' (2019)

JULY 17, 2023

GENRE: CANNIBAL, RELIGIOUS
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

OK just to note quick before I ramble: I mostly enjoyed Darlin’, finding it the best of the loose trilogy featuring Polly McIntosh (who also wrote and directed this entry) as “The Woman”. But I find nothing about it as fascinating as the existence of this franchise, as the first film (2009’s Offspring) was based on a book that was a sequel to another book (Off Season) which has yet to be adapted, and then 2011’s The Woman was more of a spinoff from Offspring as opposed to a traditional sequel, as it only featured (you guessed it) The Woman and an otherwise completely different plot and mostly new creative team. And then Darlin' was a spinoff from that, once again retaining McIntosh’s character but going into different territory yet again. So it's a spinoff of a spinoff of a sequel to an un-adapted book! I kind of hope it keeps going, with McIntosh eventually inside the plot of a Bond movie or something.

Darlin’ also retains another character from The Woman, as Darlin’ was one of the daughters of the family that had her tied up in their shed. The Woman killed the son and the two parents in that film, taking off with their three girls (Darlin and Socket, with Peggy sort of just going along by choice), but since eight years have passed they recast Darlin’ and left Socket out entirely (Peggy is once again played by Lauren Ashley Carter, though only makes a couple of quick appearances in flashbacks, where – spoiler ahead – we learn that she died giving birth to the baby she was carrying). So this one is a two-hander, as Darlin’ and The Woman are split at the beginning of the movie and follow different journeys, with the now feral Darlin’ being taken in by a church orphanage and rehabilitated while The Woman makes (reads: kills and eats) her way around trying to reconnect with her. It’s MOSTLY standalone, but while you certainly don’t need to see Offspring it might help to at least read a Wiki on The Woman to really follow the story, as despite the long gap between films and the “spinoff” nature (not to mention this one doesn’t come from a Ketchum novel) McIntosh’s script doesn’t fully explain their relationship, and Darlin’s explanation of where Socket and Peggy went (which occurs far into the movie) is a bit hard to follow due to her broken English, so having the context of who they were will help fill in those gaps.

But what’s most important is that this movie is far less grim and unpleasant as the first two, with only scattered moments of on-screen violence and even less of the sexual assault that permeated those films. No one in the world will be shocked to learn that the Bishop who runs the orphanage is preying on his young charges, but thankfully we are spared any overt depictions of it, and the lone scene of a man trying to force himself on a woman is quickly interrupted by The Woman, who takes care of the jerk in rightfully short fashion. This allows the characters themselves to shine through without constantly alienating a chunk of the audience as the first two did, though if you’re squeamish at the sight of cannibalism then you should be warned that there are a few quick shots of such practices. I’d say the entire movie has about the same level of violence/face eating as Lecter’s escape sequence in (ahem, Best Picture Winner) Silence of the Lambs, so if you can handle that you should be fine.

That all said, the real issue here is that the two narratives don’t really complement each other all that well (two in a row!), and it’s never fully clear what one wants from the other. Early on it seems Darlin’ wants nothing to do with The Woman, but we don’t get enough of what happened between the end of The Woman and the beginning of this one for that to really land, and likewise with Woman’s communication skills rather lacking it’s difficult to parse out exactly what she plans to do once she finds Darlin’ again. It seems she wants to “rescue” her, which is understandable enough, but given that the movie seemingly takes place over several months it’s unclear why she’s taking her time with it. It finally becomes more clear near in the third act, when she tries to kidnap a baby, but that renders a lot of the earlier scenes feeling somewhat aimless. The script also pads itself out in a rather silly manner, as a caring nurse is taking Woman to Darlin’, only to get in a car wreck. The man survives, but The Woman just runs away and hooks up with a group of homeless women for a while rather than finish what she was doing. It’s like when you’re playing Zelda and are proceeding toward a tower to unlock or something, only to get distracted by a shrine and a sidequest to find someone’s horse.

Still, it’s always engaging enough; even though they’re both quick to tear off someone’s face or bite off their finger, both are still sympathetic in their own way, and it’s not hard to root for them against pedo church leaders and such. Both McIntosh and Lauryn Canny give excellent performances with a minimum of dialogue (McIntosh just has her grunts, Canny eventually speaks but in very short bursts), and I was also happy to see Nora-Jane Noone from The Descent (she played Holly, the young punk-y one) as the lone kind nun at the orphanage, as she’s basically playing the same role as Sister Margaret in Silent Night, Deadly Night, in that she wants to help this troubled sort but slowly realizes it may be a lost cause. Plus, again, it’s so much less unpleasant than its predecessors, I was mostly just happy to watch a movie in this world without feeling the need to shower after. I’d be very curious how someone who hadn’t seen the others would respond to it; I can imagine someone seeing this one first and then discovering this fact after. “Wait, so the movie where someone’s lip is eaten off is the LEAST disgusting of the series?”

The blu-ray has a few bonus features; one is called “Deleted SCENES” (plural) but there’s only one, and I had to chuckle when I saw it because I specifically noted “wow, that’s an awkward edit” at the point of the movie where it was removed, and it also makes more sense out of a later scene, so it really should have stayed in. Then there’s a 20ish minute making of piece, which is nothing special but it’s nice to hear McIntosh and Canny speak normally. McIntosh also provides a commentary, which is quite good but weirdly runs out of synch, seemingly getting worse as the film goes on – by the climax, she’s reacting to things that we saw 30 seconds earlier, which makes the comments somewhat confusing at times (“Her family rallies around her” she says over a shot of Darlin’ seeing The Woman’s homeless women pals for the first time, but actually referring to the nurse and nun characters who had run up to help her several seconds earlier). I also winced in sadness at a comment about a particular scene that had to be revised on the day because a storm hit their location and it would have been a safety issue for her camera crew… which was led by none other than Halyna Hutchins, the cinematographer who was unfortunately killed on (someone else’s) set in 2021 due to lax safety protocols. Truly a terrible reminder of the tragedy, but at least we were assured that McIntosh (a first time director) had enough brains to ensure her crew’s safety came first, unlike the dummies on the other project that I’ll never ever watch.

Basically it’s a decent movie, but I can’t help but wonder if part of my warm feelings are due to my dislike of the previous two entries, giving this one a little bump that it might not have received had I gone in completely ignorant of its predecessors. The script lacked focus and never quite found its footing when dividing lead character duties between the two women, and the geography/time was never clear enough to understand why they weren’t able to reunite sooner. These are things that should derail a movie for me, but I wasn’t watching anyone get tortured, and none of the film’s well-meaning characters are killed in meanspirited ways, so I walked away with “this is pretty good!” kind of feelings despite having several concerns. I guess it’d be like how you’d probably never drink Faygo if you had other options, but it would taste absolutely delicious after a week in the desert.

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FTP: The Unholy (1988)

NOVEMBER 29, 2022

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

For whatever reason, I saw but never got around to reviewing Prey for the Devil, which was yet another exorcism movie that I found more enjoyable than most (see also: The Rite, The Devil Inside, etc). As I’ve explained elsewhere, I feel the mix of being raised Catholic and also not seeing The Exorcist until much later in my horror life (I was in college, in fact – a full 12 years after I saw Texas Chain Saw Massacre and the like) allows me to be a little more endeared to these things than the average fan, who see them all as “bad Exorcist ripoffs!” and little more. At any rate, if I DID review it I’d probably have noted that it was fitting for Ben Cross to be playing a priest in his final movie (he died in 2020, but the movie had been delayed) since he had played so many others, so I had to laugh when I loaded up The Unholy and saw that it starred Cross as... you guessed it, a priest.

The movie has come up a few times at horror trivia and I’m always thinking “Oh yeah, I need to finally watch that” but I also had the wrong idea of what the movie was. I had it in my head that it was about a vampire terrorizing a church (my mental image was something like Demon Knight with a eurotrash-type vamp in the Billy Zane role? I have no idea where that movie concept came from) so I was kind of amused to see that it was sort of an Exorcist riff, or at least closer to one than any vampire movie. Cross is the new priest at a New Orleans church who is replacing the previous one, who was murdered (and we later learn he wasn’t the first murdered priest), and he is curious about the sexy nightclub next door that’s into some BDSM stuff. And he meets a “nice girl” type who may be trying to sway him into breaking his vow of celibacy – could she be the murderer?

That question is answered... somewhat hazily! It’s not a bad movie, but I’m glad I saw it on Vestron’s special edition, because the bonus features cleared up some of my issues with the film, and confirmed what I suspected: that it was reworked at some point. In fact in a way it was reworked twice; turns out the script was written in the ‘70s and would have indeed been something more dramatic in the Exorcist vein, but was rewritten in the ‘80s to give it modern sensibilities. And maybe that’d work, but it was also partially reshot/re-edited by the producers who wanted more horror, something like Nightmare on Elm Street and things of that nature, as opposed to the more serious thriller director Camilo Vila intended. So you have a movie that has not one but two tug-of wars with the basic idea of what kind of movie it’s going to be, so it’s not really surprising that it doesn’t really work as a whole.

But it’s not too bad. When I see Cross in stuff he’s usually playing supporting roles, so it was fun to see him as a lead and backed up by vets like Hal Holbrook and Ned Beatty, not to mention the lovely ladies throwing themselves at him and trying to get him to break his vows (this movie would be much shorter if I was the main character, I tell you what). They don’t use the New Orleans setting all that much, but there’s enough to give it a little more flavor than the average independent horror movie of the time, nearly all of which were shot in Los Angeles (not counting REAL independent stuff, i.e “regional” horror). And while they throw the movie’s whole vibe off and look kind of silly, I can’t deny that I was entertained by the two little rubber demons running around at the (reshot) end of the film, as if John Buechler had broken into the editing room and took over for the final reel.

Vestron’s release is jampacked with bonuses, including the original (and yes, superior) ending as well as a commentary with Vila, who obviously wasn’t thrilled about the final product. In fact he even notes that if he was asked to do the commentary a couple years earlier he would have said no, but luckily for us had softened enough on it over time to at least be happy with the parts that weren’t reshaped without him and accept that even as is, it’s not all that bad. And I discovered that this was, in fact, Vestron’s highest grossing horror movie of all time (2nd in their whole history after Dirty Dancing), which delighted me but also made me lament that once upon a time a movie like this could land on over a thousand screens and outgross a few major releases for the year (including Hellraiser II, which shares the work of Bob Keen). There’s a strong chance that Spielberg’s newest film doesn’t even get to play on as many screens as this weird little demon flick did back then! It’s charming and sad in equal measures, how much things have changed and not really for the better in my opinion. But hey, at least Vestron has saved it, and for Cross fans who (like me) were sad to see him looking so sickly in Prey for the Devil, it offers a chance to see him looking healthy and telling stories in his 20 minute interview. RIP sir, you always made little character parts that much more interesting, and I'm sorry it took me years to get around to watching you chain-smoke and try not to bang the hot redhead demon lady that kept trying to do just that.

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The Day of the Beast (1995)

MARCH 31, 2021

GENRE: COMEDIC, RELIGIOUS
SOURCE: 4K UHD BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

I vaguely recall reading about The Day of the Beast (Spanish: El día de la bestia) in Fangoria back in the mid-90s when it was released, but at that time I was still a good Catholic boy going to church every week, so its sacrilegious subject matter would have scared me off (longtime readers know I didn't even watch The Exorcist until I was in college). But now that I have a different view on organized religion, in particular Catholicism (long story short: if it works for you, great! I'm just gonna be the best person I can be and hope for the best), such elements don't phase me. Also, I'm aware that this particular film has been hard to find in the US, with some fans resorting to VHS quality bootleg DVDs, so I am tickled that it jumped a format or two and has been released on 4K UHD by the good folks at Severin.

(While we're on the subject: how about a 4K Cathy's Curse, Sev? Maybe in ultra high def it'll make sense?)

Ironically, after watching the movie I came to the conclusion that had I watched it as a teen, I not only might have liked it more, but it also might have sped up my exodus from committing nearly two hours of my weekend to going to church every week (I'm counting travel time). The plot is wonderfully inventive: a priest believes that the Antichrist will be born that evening (Christmas Eve, in fact) and thus begins committing horrible sins in order to invoke the devil, just so he can kill him and save the world. Along the way he teams up with a metalhead and a phony TV personality who writes about the occult, and the unlikely trio try to find signs and perform the necessary rituals in order to prevent the destruction of mankind in their own roundabout way. It's violent, very funny in spots, and ultimately (spoiler for 25 year old movie ahead) ends with the message that devoting one's life to Christ will leave you with nothing.

I mean, I don't think it's that dire in reality, but the sentiment of how thankless it is definitely rings true. When you add in all of the terrible beliefs they still try to impose on their members (i.e. "homosexuality is a sin") while routinely covering up ACTUAL sins like the sexual assault of children, not to mention the fact that living by their rules more or less confines you to a life of boredom (if you steal your neighbor's newspaper or shout "I hate you!" at your parents if they ground you, and die before confessing, you'll burn in Hell for eternity. Seems reasonable!), you realize that this is not a particularly great organization to revolve your life around when it's the only one you got. Alex de la Iglesia (ironic name!) takes it to the extreme here, yes, but again: the general idea is right on point.

As a movie though, I wish I liked it a little more. It starts off kind of amazing, with our hero Cura (Álex Angulo) telling his plan in secret to a fellow priest, who agrees to help him but is then crushed by a giant cross. We then watch Cura commit several crimes around the city, from petty theft (from a homeless guy) to what might be murder, as he approaches a street mime that is perched on a railing and tips him back, having him fall however far to whatever landing is below. Honestly I could have watched 90 minutes of this, but the damn plot has to get in the way and spoil things, and by that I mean he stops sinning at random and begins actively trying to invoke the devil with a ritual. Some of this stuff works fine (there's a great sequence where he attempts to extract virgin blood from a woman at the same motel, while the lady who runs it tries to stop him with a shotgun), but the film never quite reaches the outlandish highs of its first ten minutes.

It also takes a while to get to one of its best character beats. We know that Cavan, the aforementioned TV guy, is full of shit when we first meet him, but part of the fun is him not only gradually realizing that the Devil is real, but also becoming more assertive than Cura with regards to the "save the world" plan. At a certain point Cura gets disillusioned, but Cavan - who was beaten and kidnapped so Cura could force him to help - keeps fighting the good fight and even figures out the key piece of information on his own. The third guy in the trio, the metalhead who assists Cura throughout, never really does much of anything and is borderline annoying after a while (there's a bit where he keeps laughing and seemingly trying to kill himself, dragging out the sequence for eternity), so I couldn't help but wish it was just a two-hander between Cura and Cazan, giving the latter a little more time to shine.

Don't get me wrong, it's still a pretty good movie (and the transfer is immaculate, should go without saying), but after I saw and enjoyed Witching & Bitching a while back, everyone kept telling me that it wasn't anywhere nearly as good as this, and this was his masterpiece, etc. (even de la Iglesia himself says it's his best film), so maybe I was just expecting a little more. And again, perhaps I waited a bit too long to see it, not only for what it might have inspired in my own personal belief system, but also because I've been spoiled by an additional 25 years of content that also bastardizes these ideas. The Preacher comic (I didn't watch the show), movies like Dogma and mother!, and the aforementioned real world issues have already desensitized me to the idea of bastardizing their ideas. Also, even though this movie barely qualifies as horror in my eyes (the filmmakers call it one, so I follow suit), the pre-Scream mid-90s was hardly a high point for the genre, so it might have gotten a little boost simply for being unique at a time when such things were in perilously low supply, which again won't help it much *now*.

There's a full length documentary called Herederos de la bestia on the included standard Blu-ray (the UHD disc only has the feature, an annoying practice but the one the studios will be going with, I guess) which gets into that stuff a little bit, including the fact that Pedro Almodóvar was asked to produce but he chickened out over the content. But most of it is your standard retrospective documentary, about de la Iglesia's prior accomplishments, the casting, the issues with shooting in Madrid on their budget, the not-great critical reaction it got when it premiered, etc. There's a brief but lovely tribute to Angulo, who passed away a few years ago (in a car accident; unless I missed it the doc doesn't explain how he died), and some insight from other Spanish filmmakers like Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, so it's a well rounded doc and a nice complement to the feature. Severin also offers one of the filmmaker's old shorts titled Mirindas Asesinas ("Murderous Mirindas") that also stars Angulo, as well as a handful of interviews (including one with de la Iglesia), though I should note all but one are in Spanish (as is the doc) so if you're not fluent you better keep your reading glasses handy if you want to go through all of them.

Severin has also released de la Iglesia's followup Perdita Durango (released in the US in a cut form as Dance with the Devil), so fans of the filmmaker should be stoked that they're finally being given a proper presentation here. He's an interesting guy no doubt, and thankfully jumps around genres (sometimes within a single film) to keep things fresh for both himself and his audience, but the tradeoff is that not every movie is going to click. I was hoping to like this a little more, but it was still good enough to keep wanting to see what else I've missed (and no, I haven't watched 30 Coins yet, you don't need to comment! My queue is endless and I'll get to it... someday?). I'll always prefer to not connect to something from a filmmaker who is swinging for the fences than see something completely forgettable that's right in my wheelhouse (i.e. a slasher I can't remember a thing about a day later).

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The Vigil (2019)

FEBRUARY 21, 2021

GENRE: RELIGIOUS, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: STREAMING (ONLINE SCREENER)

One thing that is difficult for me (and I'm sure others) to remember when watching anything involving Catholic customs is that people who are part of another religion (or abstain from the idea entirely) might not understand the significance of this or that thing. The easiest example coming to mind is probably Dracula 2000, explaining that the title character was actually Judas Iscariot. For me, a good Catholic boy who had only recently stopped going to church every weekend after 20 years of following the practice, this needed no explanation, but someone raised without this story being recited to them a couple times a year might be like "Wait, who?" So with that in mind, I appreciate when a movie like The Vigil comes along to remind me how it feels to be completely unfamiliar with the customs and "laws" of other beliefs.

Luckily, the movie gives us enough explanation to get the basics (a Fangoria article about the film actually gave more context than necessary). The story hinges on the Jewish concept of the shemira, in which a body must be watched from the time of death until it buried. The watcher, a shomer, is supposed to read prayers of comfort for both the family of the deceased as well as the person's spirit, who may need the prayers to help them understand what has happened. It's actually kind of a lovely idea! No one does that for us Catholics, that's for sure. We just have a wake the day before we're buried, where people come nod at our corpse, shake hands and extend condolences to whoever is near the coffin*, and then make small talk nearby.

Anyway, being a horror movie, you might assume this is about creepy things happening during a shemira, and you'd be correct. Our hero is Yakov (Dave Davis), a man who has recently abandoned his Orthodox ways and even goes to a support group where he discusses the loss/change in his life with others who have done the same. However, his old Rabbi (I think? I apologize if I get the terms mixed up) waits outside the meeting and asks him to be shomer for a man named Litvak, who recently died and is set to be taken by the mortuary in the morning. Luckily for Yakov, the body just needs a watcher for the final six hours; his wife has been doing it, but suffers from dementia and needs to rest. However, the Rabbi has an ulterior motive, in that he hopes Yakov will rejoin their community and that this will give him the push he needs. Yakov doesn't really want to do this, for obvious reasons (he doesn't even know the family) but the man offers to pay him a few hundred bucks that he desperately needs as he is out of a job and rent is due. So he agrees, obviously. Otherwise there's no movie.

It doesn't take long for the odd things to start happening, and writer/director Keith Thomas ramps up the instensity at a fairly gradual pace. At first it's just lights flickering and things like that; he stages a great bit where a spider (?) scurries under the chair that Yakov is sitting in, prompting him to spend a few seconds nervously checking his clothes and trying to look behind his back, a feeling I believe all humans can identify with. Eventually he's seeing things and getting video texts of someone watching him during a brief period where he dozed off (which he is not supposed to do, if I'm understanding), and by the end we're into full surreal territory, with figures stretching out of the walls without actually breaking through (think Freddy coming out of Nancy's bedroom wall). Thomas also get a lot of mileage with a simple cracking sound that plays when the entity keeps mangling Yakov's hand; remember the sound of Mr. Glass' bones breaking when he fell down the subway stairs in Unbreakable? Think that but if it popped up several times in the film and without any indication to the audience that it was about to happen. Gah!

Along the way we also learn why Yakov has abandoned his faith, and it's not only heartbreaking, but also fairly justified in a way you don't often see in relgious themed horror (or even drama for that matter). It's not the usual "Someone I love died so how can there be a God?" kind of thing, but (vague spoiler) something happened specifically because of how Yakov looked as a Jewish man, attracting attention from some bullies that probably wouldn't have given him a second look otherwise. Thomas smartly keeps the details under wraps for a while, letting us just sympathize with Yakov as a young man trying to find his place in the world and scaring us a few times before letting us know exactly why he is seeking this huge change and what it has to do with his religion.

Thomas also gives us what is an increasingly common and welcome sight in modern films: letting us "see" someone's inner thoughts thanks to writing/rewriting text messages. It used to be we'd get those clunky scenes of someone practicing a phone call (and we still do; The Way Back had a good one just last year) but this is a tool they can use to get the same kind of brainstorming out but much quicker. Yakov has attracted the attention of one of the women in his group and she is texting him for the first time while he watches the body, so we not only see him Googling "how to talk to women" (heh, poor sod) but also struggling with basic small talk. When he replies "Hey" to her "hi!" and then pauses over whether to add a period, it's wonderful. In a second of screentime we get what might have been a page's worth of exposition about how he was nervous and didn't want to blow it.

Some of that shorthand doesn't always help the movie, though. There are a pair of flashbacks to a tragedy in Mr Litvak's past (tied into why there's an entity haunting him in death) and they really could have been fleshed out a bit, due to their significance to the story. The first occurs right at the top of the story and the other is near the end, so even though it's not a long film you might have even forgotten about the earlier appearance by the time the followup comes along, so that coupled with the vagueness of their context makes it feel underdeveloped. I also wasn't quite sure how Yakov got back inside the house after falling outside; the wife (familiar character actor Lynn Cohen, who has since passed away) bandages his wounds but she certainly couldn't have gotten him inside? With the number of surreal/hallucinatory moments in the film it's possible he never actually left at all, but his wounds are consistent with the fall he took, so a little clarification here would have been good.

Overall, it's an effective little chiller, nothing less or more. I am happy that Jewish horror fans can get a film of their own (one without a golem no less!) and found Yakov to be a solid lead, but I almost got the sense that Thomas had a banger of a setup but never quite figured out how to end it. It feels a bit padded at times too, which again suggests that the knockout premise was enough to get a greenlight without a fully fleshed out script (or perhaps budgetary restrictions forced them to gut parts of it). At its best (the first half) it gives the same kind of proper spooky vibes as The Autopsy of Jane Doe, with a dash of the (already forgotten) Possession of Hannah Grace; I'm a sucker for the "one night on the job" kind of genre tales and it more or less checks those boxes with the added Jewish element giving it some flavor. Just wish it had a little bit more so I could elevate it to "must see".

What say you?

*I will never forget at my dad's wake when someone who knew him from basketball (he was a volunteer ref and announcer for the local teams) came up to the coffin, said his silent prayer, and then proceeded to tell some of my father's old coworkers how sorry he was for their loss, while ignoring my mother and I standing right next to them. Really need a guest list for these things to keep out the randoms who might inadvertently make you burst out laughing.

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Grave Robbers (1989)

OCTOBER 28, 2020

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

As I've been going through the Friday the 13th boxed set (via the new bonus features, mainly) and jumping around based on my mood, it's easier to see how far the series went into supernatural territory from where it started. When you're watching them in sequence it's a pretty gradual shift, but going from, say, Part 3* to Jason Goes To Hell and then back to Part 2 feels like you're just going into two different series. I bring it up because the back of Vinegar Syndrome's Blu-ray for Grave Robbers (aka Ladrones de tumbas) specifies that it feels inspired by the "later" F13 entries, and it never really dawned on me that this is indeed something that should be specified, because "inspired by the F13 series" could mean something very simple, like the first few, or something very very silly, like the New Line ones.

But yes, the film seems specifically inspired by Jason Lives and New Blood, though thankfully in the latter case it's just the general appearance of its hulking killer (complete with chains!). The Jason Lives inspirations are plentiful, however - the killer is accidentally resurrected from his grave, the sheriff locks up our heroes believing them to be the killer (only for another recent murder to prove their innocence as they were behind bars at the time), his daughter is in the line of fire, etc. There's even a random bit about how excited one of the cops is to get a new gun, shades of Deputy Rick Cologne and his fancy new laser sight ("Ja-bang!"). You see movies influenced by specific slashers all the time, but it's usually the original - it's rare and, admittedly, kind of charming, to see one that resembles the original in no way whatsoever but feels specifically aping one of its followups.

And hey if you're gonna copy an F13, you might as well go with one of the best. But fear not, it's not a carbon copy at all, and mostly forms its own identity through its rare but fun mix of middle ages/Inquisition stuff (it actually feels a bit like a Tombs of the Blind Dead movie in spots) and body count slasher. There are a lot of characters in it fighting for top billing, which helps stave off some of the comparisons; we have a quartet of camping girls (one of whom is the aforementioned sheriff's daughter), the sheriff and his crew, a priest who knows what's going on, and, naturally, the title characters, a group of six (though two bail out almost instantly and return later) who are planning to steal the gold and jewels from coffins but find a treasure when they accidentally fall into a long forgotten crypt that houses the corpse of a satan worshipper who was executed in the prologue as he attempted to sacrifice a virgin, vowing to return just before receiving the sharp end of an axe. When one of the robbers removes the axe, the killer is resurrected, killing everyone he encounters as he seeks a virgin to complete his sacrifice.

Luckily, the religious/sacrifice stuff doesn't really matter much for the majority of the film - once he's up and about it's about as relevant as Jason's "revenge" mission. The body count is quite respectable, as he makes his way into double digits before all is said and done, though one pair of victims is completely unknown - the deputies just call the sheriff and tell him they found some more bodies (this is the part that proves our noble grave robbers aren't murderers), but I have no idea who they are. It's a bit of a confusing edit actually, because right before this scene is when the two grave-robbing defectors return to the story, so I just assumed it was them, but then they come back again later, so whoever those other randos were is just none of our business I guess.

It's sadly not the only confusing editing choice in the film, but it's otherwise technically sound. As opposed to Italian horror around this time, Mexican productions were thriving, and honestly the production value is better than any indie slasher from America that was being produced by this point. The crypt/graveyard area is fantastic, in fact - it's almost a bit of a shame that they don't stay there long (I actually thought for a bit it would be entirely set there with the guy just going after these folks who are trapped inside). But instead we get a nice variety of locations, including the woods (via the daughter and pals) to give it that proper Friday feel. Also, speaking of the locations - it's so nice to see Mexico looking normal, not with the urine filter American productions insist on applying whenever the country is depicted in their films/shows.

As for the kills, they're surprisingly gory af at times, including a truly gnarly bit where the killer (seemingly under the bed? He has some supernatural gifts so it's possible he's just inside the guy somehow) shoves his fist outward from the guy's stomach/chest in order to grab one of his artifacts that the guy is wearing as a necklace. The amount of guts and grue we see is on par with Rhodes' death in Day of the Dead ("Choke on em!"), and it's downright jaw-dropping to see in a film that's inspired by the later, nearly blood-free F13s that were so mangled by the MPAA. The killer himself is sadly not seen too much (usually just his arm), only getting a few big hero shots near the end, but one of his demises (of course there are multiples!) is one for the record books, where a truck crashes into him and he - being a walking corpse, after all - explodes into dusty chunks. It's actually far more satisfying than his real (?) death later!

Vinegar Syndrome's blu-ray has an informative interview with writer/director Rubén Galindo Jr. (in English), who talks about the film's performance in other markets, how video was the preferred venue for audiences, etc. I was surprised/happy to learn that the film actually played theatrically in the US, though I was unable to find any actual numbers (not surprising, he says it was limited to about 40 screens in Spanish speaking markets, and this was long before extensive box office tracking was a thing) - I would kill to see that car smash with a crowd! There's also a commentary with the Hysteria Continues guys, but having listened to a few others I assume I can skip it without missing much (not really a knock on them; they just don't really ever seem to inform me of anything I'm not aware of myself, which is the only reason to listen to a commentary).

The VS folks send me a lot of their releases, and it's a mixed bag - their tastes and mine aren't exactly on the same wavelength. As a result I sometimes don't get around to watching them, and the backlog builds up, but when one clicks with me like this one did, I get very excited, because it means another gem might be in that growing pile. I know the "from the pile" reviews have been lacking this year, but now that we are near the end of the spooky season revival for the site, I will be doing my best to bring those back more often. It's just crazy that even though I almost never leave my house and work has been reduced due to the pandemic, I STILL find myself with an overwhelming number of things I mean to watch. What will it take to finally empty that box of review copies!?!?

What say you?

*I recently learned that despite not having a 3D TV, I could use my dusty PS VR to watch it in its proper 3D! So even though it's a "middle of the pack" entry it was the first disc I popped in, because after a 3D screening I realized that's really the only way I ever want to watch the film again, and of course I couldn't at home until now. However, it's not the most comfortable way to watch a movie, with the awkward helmet and cords forcing you to stay almost motionless, so I just watched a few key scenes.

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