Truth Or Dare (2018)

APRIL 13, 2018

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

As I've mentioned before (and yet some of you insist I am lying!), I am not a teenaged girl, so my opinion on films like Truth or Dare* should be of little concern to its target audience or its makers. That said, I found it fairly enjoyable and - relative to its sub-genre, not to horror as a whole - rather impressive in some ways, putting it above the films it will probably play alongside at slumber parties for the next few years. In an ideal world, we'd have a new Friday the 13th movie hitting theaters today (the logic of which I never got - why not release them a week BEFORE their namesake day and get a second weekend boost?), but this is a perfectly decent consolation prize for adults, and thus teens will probably like it even more.

The plot is hokey, but so is "a guy kills you in your dreams" and "a videotape will kill you if you watch it", so I'm baffled by the people rolling their eyes at the damn premise. As the trailers promise, our protagonists are playing Truth or Dare, and if they lie or refuse the dare, then they're killed. It's kind of Final Destination-lite, in fact - once our heroes realize the stakes are real and that there's an "order", they find ways to stay alive while the curse moves on to the next person, then cycles back when necessary. We learn some other rules along the way, including one that states that they can't just keep picking "truth" (once they realize the dares they're given are often quite dangerous); if two people in a row pick truth, the next has to do a dare. This does more than just mix up the film's pattern - it actually ties into the heroine's arc.

See, our traditional hero Olivia, played by Lucy Hale, is the totally selfless type who plans to use her spring break going to Habitat for Humanity, and when asked if she'd spare her friends if it meant wiping out an entire country of strangers, she tells her friends they're goners. So even when she can pick "truth" and merely tell a friend something they probably don't want to hear, she chooses dare in order to make things safer for her next two friends in line. Once the demon (of course it's a demon behind everything) figures that out, it uses it against her - daring her to tell the truth, heh. I mean it's not the point and it's going to go over the heads of its target audience, but the underlying theme of the movie is to stick by the people who care about you instead of trying to please strangers (her passion for her Youtube channel is another underplayed element of this), and she ultimately learns her lesson, albeit only after a number of her friends are killed.

As for the others, they're the usual gaggle of stock characters in these things: Markie the blonde best friend, Ronnie the horny asshole no one likes, Veronica the lush, Brad the minority (OK to be fair there are two this time, but they double down by making the Asian guy gay as well), etc. But they're fairly likable versions of these people; even the asshole guy is kind of charming in his own way, and (spoiler? it's in the trailer) he's the first to go, so it's not like we have to put up with him for that long anyway. At first I was ready to write the whole lot of them off when signs of yet another goddamn love triangle reared their cliched heads, with Olivia clearly gazing at Markie's boyfriend, but instead of just a generic way to introduce strife, it's actually kind of a thru-line for the entire movie, and part of the game as well. For starters, nothing's happened between Olivia and the guy - she just has feelings for him that she can't act upon, because she cares about her best friend more (this makes her, I believe, the first modern horror movie character who seemingly cares more about their best friend than getting laid). Second, Markie is constantly cheating on the guy with randoms, trusting Olivia to cover for her - making Olivia's feelings even harder to deal with, as she could easily get what she wanted and not even feel that guilty since Markie's the one in the wrong anyway.

Anyway, this stuff keeps coming back into the game, so again it's just not a lazy excuse for people to be mad at each other and thus go off on their own to get killed. The demon uses it against both of them and the boyfriend at every opportunity, to the point where I was genuinely unsure who, if any of them, would survive, and if they would end up together or not. Plus in between their scare moments we get the more straight forward deaths of their pals, with the demon using their own issues (such as Brad's fear of telling his father that he's gay, or Veronica's drinking habit) to conjure up some psychologically driven dares. Eventually it bogs down to the usual "Oh look online here's an article about this old church and blah blah we have to blah blah ritual" stuff we've seen in a zillion others, but the fact that the characters aren't all jerks and that their death scenes are intrinsically linked to their personal demons (as opposed to the random nonsense of things like Wish Upon) make it more compelling than I originally assumed, keeping my interest. I mean, due to the way the theater was designed and the fact that no one was in my row I could have looked at Twitter or something during the movie without anyone seeing/being bothered, and I DIDN'T. The word "hero" gets thrown around a lot, but...

To be fair, you do have to overlook a couple of dumb things, like the fact that the old lady they go to for exposition has a granddaughter, even though the backstory is that she was a nun at age 19 who cut her tongue out and went crazy, so I dunno when she found time/interest to get knocked up after that. The actors playing the two parents we see are both remarkably terrible; thankfully their screentime is kept to a minimum but considering their importance to their children's storylines it's a bit of an issue that they both seem to be meeting them for the first time in their scenes. And I get the concept of using a Snapchat-y looking filter effect on the faces of the people who are possessed by the game, but it's not creepy at all and overused anyway. I suppose if they used it sparingly it might just produce laughter when sprung on the audience, so at least we get numb to it by the halfway point if not sooner, but it's an odd gamble to take. I mean everyone looks like they are victims of Joker's gas in the Burton Batman, but even they were creepier since it was an appliance instead of a CGI effect (not to mention an unexplained one - why are they all smiling? They just love Truth or Dare that much?)

But they're not fatal flaws - the biggest obstacle it has is that there have been a lot of these "supernatural curse targets a group of friends" type movies in the past couple years (Friend Request, Wish Upon, Bye Bye Man, Rings, Ouija, and Unfriended all came to mind more than once, plus Polaroid, which would have been released if not for Dimension's legal woes), and I'm not sure if "the characters are better written than usual" or "the death scenes aren't throwaway things that look cool" is enough to convince folks to show up. Quiet Place is also only a week old (and, to be fair, better) so it can't coast on starved audiences the way Ouija was able to when it had Halloween time all to itself for reasons I can't recall, and "Jeff Wadlow's best film!" isn't exactly a huge hurdle to clear, either. Basically, it's not great, but it's better than I figured it would be when I sat down (and saw the goddamned Sicario 2 trailer for the dozenth time - yet I still haven't seen one for Bad Samaritan which supposedly opens in three weeks), and I wish it was opening at a time when it had no competition so it would shine a little brighter - or that it was merely just a touch better so I could give it a stronger endorsement without sounding crazy. But the ending is admirably gonzo, if that helps?

What say you?

*It's actually called "Blumhouse's Truth or Dare" on-screen, which is ridiculous. Don't start doing this, guys. Hopefully it's just a one-time thing because of the other movies with that title, but if not... just don't.

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A Quiet Place (2018)

APRIL 3, 2018

GENRE: MONSTER, SURVIVAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (ADVANCED SCREENING)

The scariest horror movies are usually the simplest - people (including me) may love the Saw sequels, but they're never scary in the slightest, because they're too bogged down in their labyrinthine plots to lull you into being frightened. I'm not sure why so many horror movie writers seem to be ignorant of this, but thankfully, John Krasinski of all people isn't one of them, as his newest film A Quiet Place (his first foray into the genre) is so stripped down to its bare essentials that it practically makes the likes of Halloween and The Strangers seem complicated in comparison. The earth's population has been decimated by monsters that will kill you if you make a sound, and Krasinski is the father of a family trying to survive under those circumstances - that's it. There's no human villain, no team of scientists babbling on, it's just a few days in the lives of these people living out their very quiet life, and how they react when things go astray.

And Krasinski (along with original writers Bryan Woods amd Scott Beck) conveys this without much of an ability to say so, since there are only about a dozen spoken lines in the film. A few newspaper headlines clue us into the monsters' origins (a crashed meteor, not that it matters but I'm sure some joyless twerp would complain otherwise), but the "rules" are laid out in an opening sequence - along with the consequences for breaking them. I liken it to an old arcade game like Pac-Man or Space Invaders - you didn't need tutorials or manuals for those games, as they were simple and quick to grasp just from looking at their basic layout. It's the same thing here; even if you went in blind, it'd only take a few minutes to understand the plot, which is that our heroes need to be very quiet or else they'll die. Communication is carried out through sign language, every action is done gingerly (I never thought I could tense up watching someone try to put a battery down on a counter, but I have now), and you damn well better watch your step to avoid creaky floorboards and the like.

As for the creatures, their design is a mixed bag. They move so fast it's often hard to get a good look at them, but they're kind of like Xenomorph shaped, with heads that unfold like flower petals to reveal their well tuned eardrums (in fact, since they're blind and seemingly can't smell their prey, their heads are basically just giant ears), i.e. kind of generic all purpose modern movie monsters, nothing iconic that you'd instantly recognize ten years later. I couldn't tell if they ever had any practical ones, but I don't think they do, which is a bummer but at least it's high quality CGI and they're used sparingly, plus there's no real "interaction" to speak of - if they're close enough to touch you you're already dead anyway. But it's not free of analog's pleasures - Krasinski and DP Charlotte Bruus Christensen shot on film, and it looks spectacular, in addition to giving it that old-school look the plot itself invoked. If not for an iPod the film could have been set in the 1970s (and to even it out, the song they listen to on it is an oldie: Neil Young's "Harvest Moon"), and I swear it was to give the film that bit of humanity (Krasinski and wife Emily Blunt dance to it, sharing the earbuds) that he didn't just go ahead and make it a period piece.

But look there could be hovercrafts and VR displays on every corner and it wouldn't take away from the main appeal: the movie is scary as all hell. And if you've been reading my nonsense for these past eleven years (Christ...), you should know that's not something I say often. Think of all those great "don't make a sound" kind of scenes in movies (not horror, but the "suspended over the computer" scene from Mission: Impossible would be a good example) as well as every super nerve-wracking monster scene (like when the aliens finally come through the roof in Signs, or the basement scene in War of the Worlds), and string them together/stretch them out for a feature, and that's what you get here. It's also the rare use of LOUD SOUNDS to make a scare that actually makes contextual sense - when someone accidentally knocks something over or steps on a crunchy thing, the sound team cranks up the sound, and for good reason, because every noise might as well be the loudest thing possible, being that the monsters can detect it instantly and move at lightning fast speed to catch you.

Even better, it might be the first horror movie that's cell-phone or talk proof, too. It's not like the film is mute; there's a score and things like wind rustling or water dripping - i.e. rhythmic, natural sounds - don't set them off, but it only takes a few minutes for the film to start affecting your own behavior. I took a sip of my drink and it slurped a bit, so I instantly froze up, and I noticed the lady next to me being oh so cautious as she removed her sweater to put it on the seat next to her. I'm sure there will be assholes ruining it somewhere in the world, but as this was a free radio station screening and I didn't see a single cell light the entire time (and only minimal whispering, though it was a big auditorium so perhaps I just got lucky), there's hope that your crowd will be just as into it and playing along with the whole "shut up or die" approach. The movie only offers spoken dialogue twice; Krasinski and his son talk for a bit behind the masking sound of a waterfall, and the former shares a conversation with his wife in their tiny somewhat soundproof room that they've set up. The rest of the time, any noise you make is liable to get a dirty look from one of your fellow moviegoers, so it's best to follow the rules.

I recently joined Letterboxd, more for my own memory to keep track of what I saw over the year, and thus had to start rating films. I gave this four (out of five), and it woulda been four and a half (fives are reserved for my all time faves) if not for two things. One is, ironically, the score - it's got a lot of that BWAARMMMMMMMM stuff I dislike and it's just kind of generic, so it was intrusive given the whole "quiet" nature of the thing. There's one pretty good cue near the end during a key moment involving the family truck, but otherwise I woulda been happier if Krasinski opted to have no score at all. The other one requires a spoiler about the opening scene, so if you want total blindness skip the rest of this paragraph. For those still here, the opener is a gut-wrenching moment, when a careless action from their youngest son ends his life, and it largely works - but only because the parents inexplicably walk ahead of their two children, one of whom is deaf. I get why Krasinski would want to lead the way, but why Blunt is right behind him instead of her children, who cannot call for help (and in the deaf one's case, hear any danger behind her) is a complete goddamn mystery. I get that they had to hammer home the consequences early on so that we knew just how careful they had to be, but I wish they had figured out a more logical way of presenting it. Still, at least the movie's biggest narrative blunder is at the top instead of the end; I had mostly forgotten about it by the time it was over.

Otherwise, I was totally on board with the film. Sure, if you start thinking about what we don't see you might have questions, like how they were able to establish their routine without making noise to implement it, i.e. stringing up warning lights and setting up radio equipment, and if you've seen the trailer you know that Blunt's character is pregnant, so that raises some possible logic flaws (I satisfied myself by assuming it was an accidental pregnancy and they had neither the knowledge or resolve to terminate it). But 99% of all movies have those kind of issues, and you're kind of missing the point if you try to go beyond what they're showing. It's a scary movie first and foremost, designed to keep you grabbing your armrest or partner's hand for 90 minutes while reminding people like me that you're never above being frightened by what's on screen. I wouldn't be surprised if it grossed over $100m, and I hope it's the start of a new, more Blumhouse-y direction for Platinum Dunes (yep, this deliberately paced, quiet movie was produced by none other than Michael Bay). Plus it's nice to see Paramount getting a win after all their troubles - it's a shame they already blew their chance at doing another Friday the 13th, but that just gives them more incentive to create new ideas like this.

What say you?

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The Passion of the Christ (2004)

APRIL 1, 2018

GENRE: RELIGIOUS, SURVIVAL
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

When I was younger and attending Catholic school (for grades 1-8), during Lent we would go to Mass on I think Friday every week and get an abbreviated mass just for the students. Due to the younger crowd, the priest would cater the sermon to us a bit, and one time he delighted me by starting off with "Who has seen Friday the 13th 1, 2, 3, 4...", followed by other franchises (I remember being miffed he went up to 4 for Child's Play, which at the time, 1992 or 1993, didn't exist yet). His point was to explain how the acts of gory violence in those movies were nothing compared to what Jesus went through during his Crucifixion, so I always wondered what he thought of The Passion of the Christ, which is indeed gorier than all those films combined, and all directed at one poor guy (that'd be Jesus).

And I can assume he saw it, because pretty much everyone did in 2004 when it was released. I still remember the entire lobby being jam-packed when the film got out as another crowd waited for the next show, far more people than I had ever seen in the theater (the AMC Boston Common, for the record) even for the likes of Star Wars. The film's North American gross remains the highest for an R rated movie (non-inflated), and it was the worldwide champ until another movie about a guy who rises from the dead took its place (that would be Deadpool). It was a true phenomenon, something no one could have predicted and presumably got a few studio execs fired since every one of them turned Mel Gibson down even though it was a low budget ($30m) production, forcing him to bankroll the movie himself and release it independently. And this was before he was persona non grata, mind you.

Despite that huge success, he went back a year later and recut the film in order to soften the violence and hopefully get a PG-13, for the people who couldn't deal with it in its R-Rated form. This version, however, was a huge bust - just as the original form has box office records, the recut version is still floating high on the charts of worst opening weekends ever. No one wanted to see that version, and for good reason - watching every smack, every lash of the whip, every hammer blow to the nails in his hands and feet, was crucial to the movie's power. And it reinforces what my priest was trying to get across all those years ago - you truly feel the agony this guy went through every step of the way, and every time you feel it can't get much worse or that he couldn't possibly go on any longer, it does, and he does, and you realize you can't really complain about stubbing your toe or whatever ever again.

In a weird way it's also the only real reason to see the movie. The performances are great and it looks very nice (the cinematography got an Oscar nomination, in fact, despite being passed over for any of the more major awards), but as a narrative it's a bit of a misfire, as it requires you to know the story already in order to follow it. The first thing Jesus says in the movie, I think, is scolding Peter for not being able to stay awake for an hour, without informing us what he was referring to, who Peter is, etc. Judas' betrayal comes up shortly thereafter, and again it has almost no on-screen explanation for what is happening - you're just expected to know that Judas was a. one of Jesus' disciples (something we haven't seen or been told) and b. that these assholes weren't sure what he looked like or where he was (let alone why they were looking for him in the first place). And even though I DO know the story I still have no idea what's up with that freaky little baby that looks like the Man from Another Place cosplaying as Stewie Griffin, only that it certainly adds to my justification for making it an HMAD entry today.

Granted, it's a famous story, but a little more context would have gone a long way, especially for those who had trouble with the violence. What little we do get comes in the form of flashbacks, but even those tend to require a passing knowledge of the Bible to understand their significance. Almost no one in the movie is introduced properly (I'm not even sure if Monica Bellucci as Mary Magdalene has more than a line or two); I just checked against a transcription of the film's subtitles and names like Judas, Mary, and John are only spoken once in the entire two hour runtime, and even less time is spent explaining why they are important. The best flashback has nothing to do with a Bible story (at least, not a major one); it's a scene where Mary comes up to Jesus and tries to comfort him, and we are shown a quick scene of a young Jesus, maybe five years old, having taken a tumble or something and Mary cradling him to soothe him - it's heartbreaking to see the contrast. Whatever you choose to believe about the immaculate conception, his ability to turn water into wine, etc - there's no denying that this man went through several hours of grueling torture, and that his mother had to sit on the sidelines and watch, unable to help her child. As anyone with kids can tell you, your child is never too old to avoid being thought of as your baby that you must protect, so Mary's mental anguish is equal to the physical torture Jesus was enduring.

Luckily, I did know the story quite well thanks to the aforementioned Catholic school upbringing. In fact during Lent the mass would include "The Stations of the Cross", which was a reenactment of this story played out around the church, where the fourteen stations were marked with pictures of each event - the sentencing, the carrying of the cross, the nailing, etc. Of course, this is a little "play" put on by Church volunteers, so when you're a kid it's hard to really comprehend the brutality of what really happened when you see a guy being kinda brushed with a small length of rope, carrying a cross that weighed approximately 10 pounds. "This doesn't look so bad," seven or eight year old me would think, assuming that the Church was presenting it exactly as it happened (though I knew they weren't really killing the guy at the end, because I saw him do it a dozen times).

I'm not sure if it ever really clicked until I saw Mel Gibson's take, in fact; somehow I thought whipping just meant he'd get a lot of red abrasions and bruises on his (clothed) back, and that he was more or less undamaged until the nails went in as he was hung on the cross. But if anything it's a wonder he even had any blood left in his body by the time they got to that point, as they whip his BARE back with "cat o nine tails" over and over, and when you think the commanding asshole is about to put a stop to it, he instead asks his men to turn Jesus over so that they can continue ravaging his front as well. Just as my priest suggested, it was indeed more brutal than anything I've ever seen Jason or Michael do - the most horrifying moment being when one of the "tails" wraps around to his face and swipes his eyelid. The power of the weapon is demonstrated on a wooden table, showing chunks of splintered wood being torn away before they turn their attention to this man's skin, and even in the cut form it's agonizing to watch.

On that note, Jim Caviezel was truly robbed of a nomination. Not only was he speaking a foreign (and dead!) language, he also went through plenty of physical trauma (including a dislocated soldier) and sold every second of his agony, something that's even more powerful in the cut version* as it holds on his face rather than cut to the lashings. In the few flashbacks you get the impression he would make a terrific Jesus in a movie about his usual day to day, and even though I was familiar with him already thanks to Frequency and Thin Red Line and such, he completely disappears in the role. Ironically, one of the actors who stole his rightful nomination was Leonardo DiCaprio (for The Aviator), who would ultimately win the award a decade or so later for The Revenant, primarily because he put himself through a lot of physical agony for it. Even the actual Jesus probably would have been like "This is some bullshit".

Long story short, it's a powerful film if you're well versed in the history, otherwise it's just the longest torture scene in film history that only relents to give some flashbacks that may not make total sense to you. Granted, I'm not sure who would be seeing the movie unless they had at least some idea about it (rabid Mel Gibson fans? People who saw "Rated R for sequences of graphic violence" on the trailer or poster and thought it was part of the mid-00s torture horror wave?), but I think Gibson could have at least offered up a few Cliff's notes to bring those who had let their Sunday school lessons retreat to the back of their memories along with algebra and frog dissection. And it's certainly not the kind of film you'd want to watch over and over (I bought the DVD nearly a decade ago and just opened it for this viewing; I hadn't seen the film since opening night, fourteen years ago), but I highly recommend watching or rewatching it now, with so-called Christians delivering messages of intolerance and hate (indeed, our so-called Christian president tweeted "HAPPY EASTER!", then went into a three part rant about how much he hates minorities). Even if you literally know nothing about Jesus, the film shows a guy going through unimaginable torture and yet still showing mercy and forgiveness to those who wronged him, and how it's not helpful to only love those who love you. Maybe some of these people, most of whom have never experienced more than a paper cut, can learn a thing or two about the guy they supposedly follow.

What say you?

*For the record I watched the theatrical one, then went back and watched a couple of key scenes in their "PG-13" form.

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