tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-51101477521227724262024-03-19T01:47:01.141-07:00Horror Movie A DayI watch a horror movie every day. One I haven't seen. Then I write random comments about it. Ideally, dear reader, you'll do the same. For 90% of all horror movies, talking about them afterwards is more entertaining than watching it.BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.comBlogger3381125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5110147752122772426.post-27694696872465865332024-03-13T09:17:00.001-07:002024-03-13T09:17:37.034-07:00Welcome!<div align="justify" style="font-family:verdana;"><span style="font-size:85%;">If you're just coming here for the first time, uh... you're late. The site is no longer updated daily (see <b><a href="http://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/2013/04/hmad-is-dead-long-live-hmad.html">HERE</a></b> for the story). But it's still kicking a few times a month, and it's better late than never! Most reviews nowadays are labeled "FTP:" and you should read <a href="https://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/2019/01/introducing-from-pile-ftp.html" target="_blank">THIS PRIMER</a> to understand why. Also, while they're marked nowadays, many of the site's older reviews (i.e. 2010 or older) do contain unannounced spoilers, so tread carefully! Thanks for coming by and be sure to leave comments, play nice, and as always, watch <a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/2007/04/cathys-curse.html">Cathy's Curse</a>.<br /> </span></div>BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.com206tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5110147752122772426.post-27020937008524979982024-03-13T09:17:00.000-07:002024-03-13T09:17:31.321-07:00Immaculate (2024)<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-weight: bold;">FEBRUARY 27, 2024</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">GENRE: <a href="https://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Religious" target="_blank">RELIGIOUS</a><br>SOURCE: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Immaculate-Collection-Madonna/dp/B000002LND?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=60604299c500a0cfbe3f8a45862adaa7&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">THEATRICAL (ADVANCED SCREENING)</a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Before this advanced screening of <i><b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Immaculate-Collection-Madonna/dp/B000002LND?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=60604299c500a0cfbe3f8a45862adaa7&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">Immaculate</a></b></i> began, director Michael Mohan came out and listed some of the movies that influenced this one, such as <i>The Devils</i> and<i> The Red Queen Kills Seven Times</i>, but the title that really piqued my curiosity was <i>Barbarian</i>. Faithful readers of the site might wonder why there is no <i>Barbarian</i> 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 <i>Immaculate</i> are about based on its first half.</p><span id="fullpost"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
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.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
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.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
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 (<i>The Witch, Midsommar, X</i>...), 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 <i>Out of Darkness</i> and <i>Stopmotion</i>, both of which I'd describe with words like "grim" and "cold." </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
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. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
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. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
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.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
(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.)</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
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 <i>Consecration</i> 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.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
What say you?</p><p><iframe width="400" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ewxS9Z-XXYo?si=XBLb4m4CaLPTrS5K" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe><script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12436276-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-hashtags="horror">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script></p><script data-ad-client="ca-pub-3302834381937327" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script></span>BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5110147752122772426.post-53674763604483793422024-02-29T11:45:00.000-08:002024-02-29T11:45:58.174-08:00Hellraiser: Inferno (2000)<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-weight: bold;">FEBRUARY 28, 2024</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">GENRE: <a href="https://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Psychological" target="_blank">PSYCHOLOGICAL</a>, <a href="https://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Supernatural" target="_blank">SUPERNATURAL</a><br>SOURCE: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hellraiser-Bloodline-Inferno-Miramax-Feature/dp/B004TP55QQ?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=a5aeb1a8482e772bb947bcfbd03a42e5&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)</a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
There are currently 11 <i>Hellraiser</i> movies, and as many reviews tagged "Hellraiser" here on HMAD (well, 12 now if you feel like seeing for yourself), so I actually forgot that I never reviewed <i><b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hellraiser-Bloodline-Inferno-Miramax-Feature/dp/B004TP55QQ?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=a5aeb1a8482e772bb947bcfbd03a42e5&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">Hellraiser: Inferno</a></b></i> back in the day, as it seemed "complete." I knew I saw it pre-HMAD, but same went for 1-4 and I got those taken care of along the way, so I'm not sure how/why <i>Inferno</i> (the 5th entry, if you've forgotten) got skipped over in those rewatches, especially considering in my memory I actually thought it was pretty good. So for anyone who has been waiting over a decade for me to finish up the Doug Bradley era of the franchise: today's your day!</p><span id="fullpost"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
The biggest complaint about the DTV ones (well, maybe not <i>Hellworld</i>) is that Pinhead doesn't appear in them very much. It's an odd complaint considering he's barely in the original, either, but I was amused that it's similar to the hate for the 5th <i>Friday the 13th</i> movie because Jason isn't in it. He's not in the first one either! How often do you hear fans complaining that a sequel is trying to bring things back to the original, which is usually the favorite? Wackiness. But yeah, he's barely in it, and his first appearance seems shoehorned in to try to rectify that, but it's a bad call.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Because really, the worst thing about the movie is that it's "Hellraiser 5" instead of a movie called <i>Inferno</i>. I get the "Where's Pinhead?" complaints in a way, but the film is structured in a way that doesn't rely on him the way the previous sequels did. The Lament Configuration gets more screentime, I think, as it appears almost instantly at a crime scene. Our protagonist is Joseph (Craig Sheffer), a corrupt cop who pockets the cash from victims' wallets, lies to his wife to go sleep with prostitutes, and does up close magic for other grown adults - in other words, he's kind of awful. Anyway he finds the LC at a crime scene and, as a bit of a puzzle nerd, keeps it for himself and maybe, just maybe, opens it.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Now, in any other <i>Hellraiser</i> movie, that would mean Pinhead would show up and start causing problems. But here his brief experience after Joseph fiddles with the box is treated as a nightmare, and as the movie continues following Joseph's investigation that started with the crime scene, feeling more like something like 8MM than a supernatural horror film. Not that the case isn't gruesome; a child's finger was found and the killer, known as "The Engineer", seems to be keeping the kid alive, so Joseph becomes hellbent on finding him. As the investigation gets more dangerous and disturbing (he has visions of cenobite type figures, the hooker he slept with is murdered, as is one of his informants, etc.) he starts to wonder if the box has somethng to do with it. And guess what? It does!</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
So unfortunately it's one of those sequels in which the audience is too far ahead of the characters, unless they for some reason are watching this as their first <i>Hellraiser</i> movie and have zero knowledge of the series when sitting down for it. If that's you, great, but you're also like 1% of the crowd at most. Curiously, writer/director Scott Derrickson (this was his debut as director) did the same thing with <i>Sinister 2</i> (which he wrote but did not direct), giving the hero a mystery to solve that we already know the answer to. It's hard to recover from that sort of disconnect when it's treated as a "what's going on?" kind of mystery film, as opposed to <i>Friday the 13th</i> part whatever when a new group of idiots arrive at Crystal Lake without knowing anything about Jason. They're not exactly poring over newspaper clippings and police reports to figure out who the hockey masked guy is, you know? They're unaware and then they're dead, and it's fine. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
But if you ignore the <i>Hellraiser</i>-ness and just go for the ride of this dirtbag getting what's coming to him, it's a solid time. The<i> Jacob's Ladder</i>/David Lynch-esque touches keep it visually engaging throughout, and Derrickson gets every bit of his meager budget on screen. Plus it's just enjoyably weird at times, in particular when Sheffer goes to a saloon in the middle of nowhere (already weird!) and proceeds to get his ass kicked by two long haired Asian cowboys. He also spends an extended (dream/hallucination/whatever) scene shotgunning his parents who have become cenobite/zombie things, and his own family ends up on a rotating pillar like the one from the first movie. And if you're a <i>Nightbreed</i> fan, please enjoy the fact that Craig Sheffer has now played two (2) Clive Barker characters who are set up by their psychiatrist, though here it's (spoiler for 24 year old movie ahead) actually Pinhead in disguise.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
And keeping with the spoilers, while I'm sure it's not the first movie to do so, and also kind of changes the canon version of what Hell is in this world, I like the idea that he's stuck in an endless loop of being made miserable as his eternal punishment for the misery he inflicted on others when he was alive. He has to keep seeing his family die, chased around by demons, etc. and when he tries to kill himself to get out of it, he just ends up back at the beginning of the loop again. I try not to think about the afterlife too much, but the idea of hell just being in a cycle of reliving your worst memories for eternity sounds far worse than some kind of "you just burn forever" kind of scenario. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Plus I have to admire that it took efforts to return the series to its roots. I like Hellbound as much as the original, but I have little use for 3 or 4 (though in the latter's case it COULD have been good if the Weinsteins hadn't Weinstein'd it), and none of them really seemed to get that the Cenobites weren't supposed to be the main attraction. Like the original, this is a movie about someone whose endless thirst for hedonistic pleasure results in them delving into things they shouldn't, resulting in their very gruesome and supernaturally-charged death. It doesn't mention any of the other films' events; even when the history of the Lament Configuration is explained to Sheffer's character, it's more of a vague idea of what it's been through as opposed to "And then one time this douche who ran a nightclub got a hold of it...". So I appreciated that they were at least trying to get things back on track, even if it was kind of a silly thing to do now that the series was going DTV and thus only the most die-hard fans would likely be bothering to watch.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
The blu-ray I have is paired with <i>Bloodline</i>, from an Echo Bridge release. Since I recently got Arrow's 4K UHD set of 1-4, I looked to see if <i>Inferno</i> had ever been available on its own so I wouldn't have TWO <i>Bloodlines</i> in the house (I mean, I only have one <i>Godfather</i>. It just doesn't seem right to have twice as many "Pinhead in Space!"s), but all I found was another EB multipack that added <i>Hellseeker</i> and <i>Hellworld</i> to the mix. I nearly bought that one before I realized <i>Deader</i> got left out, so it's a set of 4-6 and 8? Why? More annoying, <i>Deader</i> DID get its own release, also from Echo Bridge, but it's long out of print and goes for over 300 bucks on eBay, which... no. I'm not even sure what studio owns these movies anymore, but maybe since they did it for <i>Amityville</i>, Vinegar Syndrome (or someone like them) can make a nice set of Bradley's DTV era (so, <i>Inferno</i> through <i>Hellworld</i>) and I can get rid of this janky-ass disc that doesn't even have subtitles, let alone the bonus features from the DVD. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
What say you?</p><p><iframe width="400" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TnjAYOZ1rIA?si=CbmaPmlBsYbdLkE7" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe><script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12436276-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-hashtags="horror">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script></p><script data-ad-client="ca-pub-3302834381937327" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script></span>BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5110147752122772426.post-53963206923909674112024-02-16T10:55:00.000-08:002024-02-16T10:55:17.879-08:00Out Of Darkness (2022)<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-weight: bold;">FEBRUARY 12, 2024</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">GENRE: <a href="https://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Survival" target="_blank">SURVIVAL</a><br>SOURCE: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Out-Darkness-Iola-Evans/dp/B0CP4DP2H7?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=25f35334ec98560dbd64537a522eb94a&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)</a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Having never seen the trailer*, I only knew two things about <i><b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Out-Darkness-Iola-Evans/dp/B0CP4DP2H7?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=25f35334ec98560dbd64537a522eb94a&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">Out of Darkness</a></b></i> when I sat down for it: 1. That it was, alas, not based on the book by Sidney Prescott, and 2. That friends who saw it described it as "boring." But that's not a particularly enlightening description, and it's subjective af to boot. I also know people who think <i>Session 9</i> is boring, whereas I'm the guy sitting there wishing it was longer. And yet I have found the last couple Michael Bay movies interminable, even though they're certainly not lacking for action sequences. A slow paced movie can reel you in or turn you off depending on so many factors (your mood, the vibe of the crowd, even the presentation) that "boring" is about as useful as identifying the font in the end credits in determining if a movie will be for you.</p><span id="fullpost"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
At any rate, I didn't find it boring. Indeed I was really into it for the first hour, despite the fact that-yes-there weren't a lot of traditional action or scares in that chunk of the film. The plot concerns a group of six nomads in the year 45,000 BC, searching for a new land because the one they left was cursed. They arrive on the shores of this new world looking for strong shelter and game to hunt, only to find it suspiciously barren and the nearest caves a few days' walk away from the beach, a daunting task when they have no food (and one of the two women is pregnant to boot). Will they survive long enough to get there? Should we put too much thought into the fact that the main couple of the group is named Adem and Ave?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
That alone could be a compelling tale, but before long it's clear that there's something out there watching them, and eventually it grabs the youngest member and vanishes into the darkness. Since he is the boy's father, Adem (who is also the group's leader, a position a couple others in the group are starting to doubt he deserves) wants to follow, but is convinced to wait until the daylight so that he isn't lost (or worse) as well. As the film proceeds, his role as "heroic leader" begins to diminish, becoming a borderline villain at one point, so again even without the (monster?) out there the movie could have a compelling thrust. The idea of an alpha male being broken down by the pressure of being the leader, his own ego, and his inability to protect that what matters most is certainly something that I could watch for 87 minutes.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
(Side note: yes, that is the actual runtime. A glorious gift from the cinema gods. Even with trailers I was home two hours after the start time!)</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
But no, there is obviously something out there reducing their number, and the movie unfortunately lost me when it was revealed (spoilers ahead, though it's kind of obvious after the second attack scene). It is not an animal or a monster (or a demon, as one member of the group seems to think) but merely Neandrethal people who were there first, and they don't even mean harm. They took the boy, yes (and it's unexplained why they did it in the manner they did; why not wait until daytime and present yourself in a less terrifying fashion?), but not to kill him--they actually brought him back to their shelter and fed him. Our main group's paranoia and mistrust is what gives the movie its body count, so ultimately it's a MESSAGE MOVIE with the rather well-tread idea that maybe we shouldn't just assume "the other" means us harm, and that ultimately we're our own worst enemy. Not that that is an inherently bad idea, but even with the acknowledged/appreciated short length it retroactively makes the movie feel long when it all boils down to the same moral of any dozen <i>Twilight Zone</i> episodes that were an hour shorter.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Plus (still spoilers! Skip to the next paragraph if you want) it denies us prehistoric monsters (or even a badass sabretooth tiger or something along those lines)! I feel we've been really shortchanged over the past decade when it comes to normal sized monsters; we get plenty of Godzilla types but almost nothing when it comes to 10-12 foot long beasties, other than sharks which are way overused. The hints we got about the "creature"--the kidnapping of the kid, the discovery of some giant skeleton and what seems to be enough blood to cover a cliffside, a character's jaw torn straight off--don't really gel with what we learn about it later, so it feels like a cheat on top of a copout. And when it's in favor of a lesson we can get out of a few memes on Twitter (well, maybe not these days), I couldn't help but leave disappointed after such a promising first hour.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
On the plus side it looks great even after the script takes a nose dive, and the cast does a fine job of quickly creating six distinct characters (when it's almost all dark and they're all wearing animal skins/furs, it could have been easy to get them mixed up, but I never did) while also speaking a made-up language called Tola, which is based on Arabic and Basque. Since it was on the same screen I saw Silent Night two months ago, I couldn't help but wonder if the movie would have worked just as well without any dialogue at all, leaving grunts and facial expressions as the sole mode of communication. Other than the story of how they got there and why, I can't think of a single moment that required dialogue to really grasp, especially when the dialogue is weirdly anachronistic (there's an F bomb!) or just clunkily spelling out its obvious message. Great score by Adam Janota Bzowski, who also composed <i>Saint Maud </i>(if memory serves the score was one of the few things I liked in that one).</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
So I get why people were bored, but I wasn't one of them. Instead I was just annoyed by the "twist", as it undid what was working about the movie while also giving me flashbacks to a certain sorta-horror movie from 20 years ago (you can probably guess the one, if not just go look at the box office for 2004 and you'll see it pretty quick), though the context was different (and that movie offered an even more annoying twist later). Still, it's always nice to have an original horror movie in theaters (a foreign one at that!), especially one that mostly delivers: it's nice to look at, has a couple of good jolts, etc. I just wish they hadn't tried to go all "elevated" in the home stretch, as if making a straightforward survival horror movie wasn't good enough and they were hoping to get picked up by A24 instead of a lowly major (Sony, in this instance). Felt weirdly insulting, honestly.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
What say you?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
*I had to laugh that I uncharacteristically went to the movies on a Monday, because for the past 3-4 months I have had to see the <i>One Love</i> and <i>Madame Web</i> trailers before every single movie I have gone to see, and therefore had to suffer through them again this one last time as both finally opened the following day. I was so close to never having to see them again! </p><p><iframe width="400" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sU_SQo1wbos?si=eNvfnQa_PTHvny36" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe><script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12436276-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-hashtags="horror">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script></p><script data-ad-client="ca-pub-3302834381937327" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script></span>BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5110147752122772426.post-37579933445437703732024-02-13T09:42:00.000-08:002024-02-13T09:42:09.107-08:00Lisa Frankenstein (2024)<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-weight: bold;">FEBRUARY 8, 2023</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">GENRE: <a href="https://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Comedic" target="_blank">COMEDIC</a>, <a href="https://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Hero%20Killer" target="_blank">HERO KILLER</a><br>SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Hello! I am a 43 year old straight male who didn't think <i><b>Lisa Frankenstein</b></i> was particularly good.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Normally I don't bother describing myself in a review, but I feel here it might be useful, because I want it to be clear that I am first to admit I'm not the target demographic for this particular movie, and maybe you simply won't care that an old white dude thinks about it. But that said, considering it's Diablo Cody's first return to the horror/comedy genre since <i>Jennifer's Body</i>*, which I enjoyed quite a bit (with some reservations), it's not totally out of the realm of possibility that I could have enjoyed this more than I did. And I did like it at times, so it's not a disaster, it's just... *off*. And as a result, disappointing.</p><span id="fullpost"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
The plot is perfectly fine and has loads of potential. Kathryn Newton, still playing high schoolers 12 years after <i>Paranormal Activity 4,</i> stars as Lisa, a goth-y outcast who works at a tailor shop (sewing skill foreshadowing is a rare but admirable note in a Frankenstein movie) and longs to be dead like the 18th century guy whose grave she visits. One night a convenient lightning bolt wakes the guy up, at which point he beelines for her house. After a few "WTF?" moments she has him shower and puts him in some fresh clothes, and he becomes her protector/ servant/ confidante. And every now and then the two of them kill people who annoyed her in order to secure a body part to replace something that's MIA on him (his hand, an ear, his... well, spoiler).</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
As with her previous horror-com, Cody has a weird tendency to introduce completely random plot points that seem to suggest a more fleshed out narrative, only to just shrug them off. In <i>Jennifer's Body</i> it was the thing with the orange balls/waterfall "portal" and the school's gym becoming a swamp. Here it's the backstory for Lisa, as we learn her mother was killed by a Ghostface type masked slasher a year before, leaving her nearly mute. The way it's presented suggests it will play a part in the present day (i.e. the killer will come back, and/or be revealed to be someone she knew), but nope. Her mom was murdered by a masked slasher and I guess he didn't do anything else after that. Why have something so specific if there's nothing further to it? Why not just kill her in a car accident or something? Similarly, what happened to this guy for him to lose a few body parts? It's bizarre Lisa never once thinks to hit up the library and see what she can learn about her new boyfriend, even if to confirm he wasn't, you know, the same kind of murderer who killed her mom.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
The weirdest part is how casual she is about the rising body count. She was supposedly traumatized by an earlier act of violence, but now seems pretty blase about doing it herself? It's just a really odd disconnect, and (also like <i>JB</i>) the film's third act is rushed through without any genuine resolutions to these plot threads. Lisa never shows any real remorse for their murders, including that of someone who did absolutely nothing wrong (earlier she goes after a guy who tried coercing her into sex, so we can "go girl!" that one, but this other guy... nope. And he gets it worse!), so it's not even easy to root for her after a while. Like you can have all the weird plot points you want, but if the character development is equally haphazard, there's a problem.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
One thing that's not botched, and actually quite endearing, is that the only (living) person who genuinely cares for Lisa is her stepsister Taffy (Liza Soberano). Even her own dad is kind of zoned out when she tries to talk to him, but Taffy supports her, tries to get her out of her shell, etc. Normally a stepsister is just another thorn in the side of an introverted character like Lisa, so to see them get along and care about each other was refreshing. That said, Carla Gugino as the stepmother is so cartoonishly mean that it more than makes up for Taffy's refusal to be a stereotype, but far be it from me to decry the sight of Ms. Gugino chewing some scenery. She can do whatever she wants.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Much has been made of the film's 1989 setting, but I never really saw a purpose for it other than, I suppose, having an easy excuse to make pop culture references. Gugino fretting about her Precious Moments figurines, the family going to see <i>Look Who's Talking</i>, a gag about the Sports Illustrated football phone (30 years after <i>Wayne's World 2 </i>already did a better one, but whatever)... there aren't as many as some other period pieces focused on the era, but there are enough to establish it even if you ignore the clothing and hairstyles, which are all on point (take it from me, an Old who was actually around then). Weirdly, the movie takes a while to firmly establish that it's the '80s, and given the Tim Burton influence, one could just assume that it was just being retro with its production design as a choice (sort of like how <i>Edward Scissorhands</i> LOOKS like the 1950s/60s, but clearly isn't since they have VCRs and such) instead of using it to specify a timeframe.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
As for the Monster, he's delightful. Cole Sprouse is pretty much mute, using his facial expressions and body language to do the bulk of his communicating, and he does a fantastic job. I also liked the makeup; since Lisa starts to fall in love with him it's obviously not too grotesque, but it's also clearly monstrous - a tricky balancing act that they pulled off well. The PG-13 dictates we don't see much of his carnage, but one moment is played via shadow and it's kind of amazing, the closest we will get to seeing *that* in a teen-friendly movie. And I definitely appreciated the REO Speedwagon usage; I may in fact be the only person in the audience who actually listened to "Can't Fight This Feeling" earlier in the day just for my own aural pleasure (though that's another weird thing about the movie - Lisa's a goth and has a Bauhaus poster in her room, but the soundtrack itself doesn't have much of such things. There are more Yacht Rock staples than anything you'd hear as house music while waiting for The Cure to take the stage).</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
And to be fair the humor tends to hit more than miss (which was also the case in <i>Body</i>, it's just not as consistently funny), focusing on the unlikely romance more than jokes (or horror, but I expected that much). Had the characterization and plot been a little more fleshed out and less uneven, it could have been an easy film to recommend to all, not just (for the most part) to teen girls having sleepovers. But even on that level, it sends some weird messages to the impressionable, and even that would be OK if the movie just went full throttle into darker territory. Instead it basically just edges for 95 minutes, always pulling back whenever it feels like it's going to finally kick into high gear and get really memorable, or at least commit to a tone. I don't know if Cody's script had to be sanitized or budget cuts resulted in chopping some grander ideas, but it ultimately just never really came to life for me. It's cute, and intermittently charming, but seems to settle for being "fine", making it feel disappointing considering the talent involved. Great animated opening title sequence though. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
What say you?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
*Diablo Cody has said that the films exist in the same universe, though there are no ties that I noticed. Also since this film takes place twenty years before that one (and in a different town to boot) I'm not even sure why she bothered saying so, other than to perhaps drum up interest.</p><p><iframe width="400" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/POOeA3zCuUY?si=seAR6_ABIfUuG1l1" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe><script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12436276-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-hashtags="horror">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script></p><script data-ad-client="ca-pub-3302834381937327" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script></span>BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5110147752122772426.post-38015613293361662732024-02-08T13:48:00.000-08:002024-02-08T13:48:37.455-08:00Blu-Ray Review: Funeral Home (1980)<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-weight: bold;">FEBRUARY 7, 2024</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">GENRE: <a href="https://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Thriller" target="_blank">THRILLER</a><br>SOURCE: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Funeral-Special-Blu-ray-Lesleh-Donaldson/dp/B07GQ5SJZJ?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=b413af384623f4fe3d2ec1a266d59a95&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)</a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Today marked the 17th birthday of Horror Movie A Day, and fittingly I spent part of it watching a Blu-ray of a movie that I saw back in the early days of the site. <i><b>Funeral Home</b></i> (aka <i>Cries In The Night,</i> which is the title that appears on the film itself but not the packaging) was part of the legendary 50 Chilling Classics set that provided me with such faves as<i> Devil Times Five, Scream Bloody Murder</i>, and of course, my beloved <i>Cathy's Curse</i>. It unfortunately is not as good as those; in fact <a href="https://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/2007/04/funeral-home.html" target="_blank">I actually labeled it "Crap" at the time</a>, which I reserved for movies with no redeeming values whatsoever. But even then I said it probably didn't deserve the same scorn as some of the other movies in there, and it doesn't. I've certainly seen worse. </p><span id="fullpost"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Funeral Home's main problem isn't even its own fault. It was shot in 1979 and meant to be a thriller, but by the time it was released the slasher sub-genre was kind and so it was marketed (and retitled) to make it seem like one of those. And yes, it has a few deaths committed by an unseen stalker, so in a few scenes it very much feels at home with the <i>Friday the 13ths</i> and such that were so common back then. But it's really more of a <i>Psycho</i> riff, so "proto-slasher" would be more apt, and even on that level it's not particularly exciting. In fact it actually feels a lot like a TV movie from that era; Wes Craven's <i>Summer of Fear</i> came to mind a few times.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
But the <i>Psycho</i> lifts get to be a bit grating, especially when the whole movie builds toward a nearly identical climax of the crazed old lady (an actual old lady this time, not her son in a dress) freaking out in the cellar next to a mummified corpse. There's nothing wrong with borrowing from this or that movie, certainly (<i>Halloween</i> took some stuff from the same one, in fact - and I prefer that one!), but you gotta make it your own and add a little flavor, which this movie doesn't actually do. Outside of the four kills (two of which are simultaneous - a couple in a car that the killer pushes over a conveniently adjacent cliff) the movie is just an endless series of scenes where our young heroine Heather (Lesleh Donaldson from <i>Happy Birthday to Me</i> and <i>Curtains</i>, another thing that doesn't help this movie's "not a slasher!" existence) gets suspicious about someone disappearing in the middle of the night, hears an old story that seemingly confirms her suspicions, then readily accepts her grandmother's explanation. It gets to the point where the grandmother NOT being the culprit would have been interesting, but since it sure seems she is (and, you know, she IS), it just leaves the main character - our surrogate - looking like a dope for 90 minutes.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
The most suspenseful the movie gets is a scene involving the great Alf Humphreys as the town deputy, who also seems to be the only cop that's concerned about all the people who disappear when they stay in this small town. He's kind of a goof and not taken seriously (real Dewey vibes; he even has a sibling who mocks him), and then late in the movie there's a scene where he insists on seeing the room that the car couple stayed in, with the grandmother accompanying him and by this point not even trying to hide that she's evil. So you spend the whole scene worrying about poor Alf, offering the movie some tension the rest could have really used. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
However, as I've learned over the years, every movie is someone's favorite movie, and even if I hated it I'd be the first to champion a remaster, because no movie deserves the fate it previously had. Like most of the transfers on that Chilling Classics set, Funeral Home was a cropped, murky mess, to the extent that I can't even quite place the screenshot I offered in my old review (I was going to do a "then and now" kind of thing but I literally can't tell what the image was). Indeed, I was surprised to see it's actually a fairly good looking movie courtesy of Mark Irwin, who at that point was already working with David Cronenberg and continued to do so for another 5-6 years. And it's also got a great score by Jerry Fielding, a frequent collaborator with Sam Peckinpah and Clint Eastwood, something the cruddy transfer wouldn't have allowed me to appreciate either as my ears would be exclusively focused on trying to make out the dialogue. There's a bit of a weird color shifting going on (more noticeably in the daytime scenes) that's probably due to print damage, but otherwise it's a fine transfer and I'm glad that the movie's fans won't have to suffer that Mill Creek version anymore.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Scream Factory has also assembled a pretty extensive collection of extras as well, including an audio interview with Donaldson and the film's 1st AD (offered as a commentary in the setup menu, so don't look for it in the extras), plus traditional interviews with Irwin, some of the set folks, and Brian Allen, whose father was executive producer Barry Allen. His is probably the most interesting interview, since he explains how the movie came to exist and why it ran into the distribution issues that it did (no movie ends up on a Mill Creek pack unless someone got screwed financially along the way). And he owns drive-ins now, which amused me as I can only imagine how many children were conceived in backseats during showings of this movie thanks to it failing to hold the audience's attention. Mike Felsher also stops by the house that's used as the titular home, showing how part of it has stayed pretty much the same almost 45 years later. I'm always charmed by those kind of videos so it was a nice addition.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
The best extra, however, is the historian commentary by Jason Pichonsky And Paul Corupe, as they offer the usual bits of insight about the film and its players, but mostly spend the track discussing Canadian horror of the time and also how the films were given 100% tax rebates by the government, which is how we ended up with so many wacky movies at that time (including <i>Cathy's Curse</i>, though they sadly don't mention it by name). They also spend a good deal of time discussing director William Fruet, who had an interesting career that began in stage productions and dramas before finding success in the horror genre (he also gave us <i>Spasms</i> and the incredible <i>Killer Party</i>). Since he either couldn't be located or simply wasn't interested in contributing an interview or commentary of his own, it more than makes up for his absence by covering his biography pretty extensively.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
So it's better than I remembered, but not by much (even Donaldson laughs about how boring it is, so I know it's not just me). But still, I'm glad I gave it another shot (and will go back and remove the "crap" tagging from my old review to be fair), though not as glad as I am for its fans that they finally have a decent way to watch it. And it's always nice to see a legit new title from Scream Factory, as they've pretty much burned through everything they are able to access and most of their recent releases are either 4K upgrades of movies they've already done, or "Who asked for this?" special editions of modern horror movies like the <i>Child's Play</i> remake. This felt like a golden era release!</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
What say you?</p><p><iframe width="400" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/08HBM4o7hv8?si=rRMhIudO1tA7XM_o" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe><script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12436276-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-hashtags="horror">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script></p><script data-ad-client="ca-pub-3302834381937327" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script></span>BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5110147752122772426.post-54436075316734696252024-01-24T08:47:00.000-08:002024-01-24T08:48:11.832-08:00Founders Day (2023)<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-weight: bold;">JANUARY 21, 2024</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">GENRE: <a href="https://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Slasher" target="_blank">SLASHER</a><br>SOURCE: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CSGK4YPV?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=6e137bd7e5b21b6e12911f8ec4fc2991&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)</a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
For the past 28 years, whenever there’s a new masked whodunit slasher (as opposed to the <i>Terrifier/Hatchet</i> types that are centered on a named boogeyman) one would assume its makers were inspired by <i>Scream</i>. And that’s not a knock, I should stress – why NOT ape what is easily the best of its type we’ll likely ever have, in hopes of capturing that lightning again? But here’s the surprising thing about <i><b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CSGK4YPV?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=6e137bd7e5b21b6e12911f8ec4fc2991&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">Founders Day</a></b></i>: it did indeed seemingly look to a Wes Craven slasher movie for inspiration, just not that one. Nor were they going back to <i>Nightmare on Elm Street</i>, or even <i>Shocker</i> (though I’d be all for that). No, the point of inspiration seemed to be <i>My Soul To Take</i>, which turned out to be Craven’s penultimate film and (since <i>Scream 4</i> was such a lackluster snooze) the last genuinely interesting one he made before his unfortunate passing.</p><span id="fullpost"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
To be clear, <i>Founders Day</i> is not a supernaturally or psychologically driven slasher movie. On paper it’s very much a standard whodunit, with a masked “Founding Father” (powdered wig and all!) using a mallet and its hidden blade to wipe out notable members of a small town who are celebrating their tricentennial alongside a very polarizing and heated election for town mayor. Both the incumbent mayor and her primary challenger find themselves and their families targeted by the killer, who also wipes out some teens associated with the candidates’ children, so you got your standard red herrings (the mayor’s assistant? The boyfriend of her daughter? The wannabe new mayor himself?) and such; in fact if it wasn’t shot around the same time I’d say they were actually influenced by <i>Thanksgiving</i>, as it has very similar vibes at times, with the equal mix of teen and adult victims, a remarkably similar sequence where our heroine has an encounter with the killer just after he murders two fornicating bully kids in the school, plus the “small town celebrating its history” backdrop that sets it apart from the usual influences. No one’s ever had a “Haddonfield Day” or whatever, far as I can recall.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
But after a decent if unspectacular first forty minutes or so, the movie suddenly pulls out a pretty novel idea: announcing itself as a two-killer slasher by unmasking and offing one of them when there is clearly a lot of movie left to go. This is followed by a bizarre montage of nearly all of the film’s characters reacting to this development over a Kate Bush-esque power ballad cranked up to 11, at which point the movie’s true colors begin to shine through. From that point on, the film is loaded with more random plot turns, strange acting choices (I could write this entire review about the chief of police, who is obsessed with candy and seems like she wandered in from <i>Funny Farm</i> or one of those kind of “small town folk sure are kooky, huh?” movies), and nearly every character screaming their dialogue more often than not. The film’s highlight is not a murder scene or anything else particularly horror-y, but the mayor drunkenly bursting into a town council meeting and yelling absolute nonsense for a while before pivoting to a “And that’s why you need to vote for me!” message. The actress’ total commitment to playing this outlandish moment with utter sincerity made me cackle and applaud, and cemented my appreciation of the movie.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Don’t get me wrong, much like <i>My Soul To Take</i> it’s not particularly great in the ways you showed up for. The kill scenes are hit or miss (they’re brutal at times, but also marred by digital blood) and lack much suspense, and the whole plot hinges on the audience believing something that any seasoned (or even half seasoned) fan won’t buy for a second and makes even less sense with later reveals (if you can’t track it, DM or email me – I can’t figure out a way to even hint at it without it being a spoiler). The killer’s guise looks good (Tony Gardner created the mask, a nice get for this obviously small production), but it’s not utilized enough, as there’s only one chase scene of note and even the killer's big entrance is played mostly in shadows and long shots. But the movie’s straight faced approach makes it seem almost kind of alien at times, like AI spit out something after being prompted with “Politics + slasher + small town.” It was that – plus the genuinely admirable fact that it is a straightforward original slasher without any real genuine humor to speak of – that kept me fully engaged.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Back to the politics though, I can’t tell if it’s good or bad that the movie is pretty apolitical, as it turns out. When we first meet the challenger, a boorish man with dirty blonde hair who is wearing a blue suit and a red tie and clearly cares more about his campaign than his own children, even an infant could probably guess that he’s seemingly meant to invoke You-Know-Who. But it’s the existing mayor who turns out to be an opportunistic jerk who is using the office to pad her pockets, so it’s not the result of someone from either side of the aisle Making A Statement. The candidates’ views and party affiliation are never revealed, either, a necessity since the killer’s motive (spoiler of sorts) boils down to a “They’re all the same” kind of thing, so labeling the characters or hearing their individual thoughts about hot button issues would cloud that approach for viewers who have a pretty clear take on who the bad guys and good guys are when it comes to politics. It never gets any more "Us vs. Them" than the opening sequence, where opposing supporters for the two candidates are interrupted by someone who just survived a Founder attack, at which point they begin fighting over who gets to protect her ("She's on OUR side!") and fighting again, the victim basically forgotten. But after that, the arguments and antagonism never really feel politically charged, and when characters butt heads it comes off like similar moments in movies with zero political ties (the bar fight scene in <i>My Bloody Valentine 3D</i> came to mind, as there's a nearly identical scene here). Long story short, you won’t come out of this having a good idea of who writer/director/co-star Erik Bloomquist is voting for this year, and while that is probably good for the movie’s mainstream appeal, it’s somewhat disappointing to use the political backdrop (in an election year no less) and toe the line. I’d almost rather it was right wing propaganda with slasher dressing; it might annoy me, but it’d also be more interesting in that department. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
So it’s a good thing it’s so weird! The scene where the killer explains how certain moments worked, with <i>Saw</i> style flashback footage, is an absolute howler and makes up for <i>Scream VI</i>’s utterly embarrassing reveal scene, coming closer to <i>Urban Legend</i>’s delightful unmasking scene (“Miss THANG!”) and yes, more yelling. Even when the killer has their obligatory “not dead yet!” return, they do so by screaming a line of dialogue I couldn’t even make out, prompting me to start cackling again (I assume the handful of other, quieter people in the theater thought I was deranged, but oh well). And again reminded me of <i>My Soul To Take</i>, as like that film we have killer and victim having an almost casual conversation where exposition is given to each other, as if there were audience members who needed to know where every character was at every point in the story that they weren’t on camera. Weirdly, both films also kick off with a murder on a bridge that has those bumper poles at one end to keep cars off, and I later learned that this new film was also shot in Connecticut, something I dimly recalled about <i>MSTT</i>. And both had animated end credit sequences too, now that I think of it. Future double feature!</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
I don’t know how well the movie performed over the weekend, as the box office was not reported for it. All I know is that AMC has had the posters up for months and ran trailers before <i>Thanksgiving</i> and <i>Silent Night</i>, only (around LA at least) to dump it on to one or two showings a day on the tiniest theater of the lamest of the three AMCs in Burbank, which means if its situation was like that everywhere else it COULDN’T make that much money. I ended up going to Regal (paying out of pocket! No A-List!) where it was playing at a more normal time in a large auditorium, but there were only like 10 other people there. With the strikes causing a massive reduction in theatrical output from the major studios, it’d be nice to see little movies like this continue to get big screen chances just so the theaters have something new to show, but if no one shows up then they’ll just bring back whatever the last Marvel or family hits were instead, which is a bummer. But once again, this is the kind of movie that isn’t QUITE good enough to all out recommend, especially since, as I mentioned, it kind of blunders the basics (no good chases, CGI kills, way too easy to guess main killer). However, if you enjoy slashers that seem like they’re a little bit “off”, as if they shot a first draft of a script with actors who each thought they were making a different kind of movie, then I wholeheartedly recommend it to quench that rarely satisfied thirst.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
What say you?</p><p><iframe width="400" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2eAF8bKg69Q?si=o0BTuKKtUxoIg8wt" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe><script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12436276-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-hashtags="horror">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script></p><script data-ad-client="ca-pub-3302834381937327" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script></span>BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5110147752122772426.post-60848613115689155662024-01-10T10:45:00.000-08:002024-01-10T10:45:49.599-08:00Cobweb (2023)<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-weight: bold;">JANUARY 8, 2024</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">GENRE: <a href="https://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Thriller" target="_blank">THRILLER</a><br>SOURCE: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cobweb-Blu-ray-Lizzy-Caplan/dp/B0C7YFNCMG/?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=0cb0eaa45034264388729a1e8eaf8674&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">STREAMING (HULU)</a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
It’s been a long time since Lionsgate took the time to make a horror movie with notable actors and then just randomly burned it off on a few screens with no advertising, so the makers of <i><b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cobweb-Blu-ray-Lizzy-Caplan/dp/B0C7YFNCMG/?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=0cb0eaa45034264388729a1e8eaf8674&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">Cobweb</a></b></i> can take solace in that they’re reviving a tradition! It joins the likes of<i> Blood Creek, Haunting in Connecticut 2, Repo</i>, and probably others I’ve forgotten, except the key difference is that I wasn’t able to make it out to one of those random screenings when it opened last July against "Barbenheimer" (a very busy time for whatever reason; it took me a month to see <i>Oppenheimer</i> and I still haven’t seen <i>Barbie</i>). I toyed with the idea of making it a blind buy a few times, but now that it’s popped up on Hulu I saved myself the 20 bucks but also actually used my Hulu account for something besides <i>What We Do In The Shadows</i>, so it’s a real win win.</p><span id="fullpost"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Especially since, as it turns out, it’s not a movie I need to see again, so that Blu-ray would have gone back for 9 cents in trade-in value. It’s a pretty good movie and worth watching, but it’s also one of those movies that presents a “Are they evil or not?” mystery that, once you know the answer, renders it less interesting to rewatch (on that note, I threw it under "thriller", but only because the specific sub-genre is also a spoiler). It also has a terrible final scene that knocked it down a peg (read: Letterboxd star) for me, so that didn’t help. But your mileage will vary, of course – a number of friends called it among the best horror films of the year, and (spoiler) I’d never want to turn folks off from seeing a horror movie that actually has the stones to kill a kid.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
The plot is pretty simple and straightforward: a bullied kid named Peter (weirdly, same kid from <i>Last Voyage of the Demeter</i>, which was released around the same time and where HE was surprisingly killed) hears noises in his room and his strict, clearly “off” parents (Lizzy Caplan and Antony Starr) keep chalking it up to an overactive imagination. But given their hesitance to let him go out much beyond school, or have people over, and other odd behaviors, it’s clear the parents are hiding something and that the noises – which eventually become the voice of a girl asking for help - are probably in fact very real, but the movie doesn’t come right out and say so. So, while it often works as it should in keeping you in suspense, it’s a movie where the would-be antagonist can never really go too far into villain territory because then we’d know they are indeed evil, nor can they just explain what’s going on because then there’s no movie.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
And so for an hour we watch scene after scene of the parents acting mildly threatening but never outright BAD, until the runtime reaches a point where we can learn the secret of the noises in the walls and what, if any, the parents’ involvement is with them. I was slightly disappointed that it ends up being a variation of the reveal in another genre movie from 2016 (the title of which will be too much of a spoiler, but if you want a hint: it had a sequel that I disliked!), but the villain is a memorably creepy one all the same. Plus, it makes up for the first hour's balancing act by decimating a group of bullies who came to torment Peter, including an offscreen but still somewhat startling beheading (we see the aftermath via the still walking body). There’s some unfortunate CGI in these moments that hampers their effectiveness a bit, but it’s forgivable when you consider how much the movie decides to earn its R rating after a full on PG-13 first hour.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
But man, that final scene. Without spoiling its particulars, it basically feels like there was a five minute epilogue of sorts that they decided to cut down into 60 seconds with narration by the villain. Why they’d do that I don’t know; it’s not a very long movie and the credits run at a crawl to pad it up to (almost) 90 minutes, but it really does a disservice to the film. It’s hard to tell if the images we’re seeing are imagined or an actual future for the hero (we see him in a different bedroom, so it seems he moved to a happier environment), and it also weakens the “I’ll be back someday” threat the villain is attempting to make. WILL it be back? Or is it just leaving the kid forever scared at the idea it *might*, like some kind of boogeyman? It’s unclear, but the credits run long enough to debate it with whoever you’re watching with!</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
(Fairly clear evidence that this was a re-edit is given right at the top of the film, as we see two editors listed with the second being Kevin Greutert, who when he’s not making <i>Saw</i> films is basically the horror industry’s go-to editor for reworking movies that are coming up short with test audiences.)</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Otherwise: pretty good little creeper! Caplan and Starr do a fine job of walking their fine line between “strict parents” and “possibly murderers”, and along with Castle Rock (amusingly, the reason I got Hulu in the first place) serves as a fine reminder that Caplan is a terrific actress, since she's best known for being hilarious and charming in things, but can adapt to genre roles with uncanny ease. And as a <i>Last Man on Earth</i> fan I was happy to see Cleopatra Coleman in something, playing the kid’s obligatory “teacher who notices something is wrong and oversteps her boundaries” (I got some real <i>Antlers</i> vibes at times, in fact). The score, attributed to “Drum & Lace” (Sofia Hultquist) is quite good, and perhaps best of all, it’s a Halloween-set movie but without going overboard with it or dropping in overt homages to Carpenter (a bully does smash a pumpkin, but it doesn’t play like a tribute to Tommy’s). Given the “lonely kid trying to help a possible ghost” plot, I think it’d pair nicely with <i>Lady in White</i>, in fact.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Ultimately it’s not hard to see why Lionsgate buried it; with violence toward kids and a plot that doesn’t give them much to market it around (i.e. an action figure-ready villain), it was probably never going to be a big theatrical hit anyway, though I always wonder why it is they make these movies in the first place – don’t they know from the script that it’s not going to be something the mainstream masses will latch on to? And it’d work just as well at home to boot, so: sure, let’s get it onto streaming services as quickly as possible. But with the strikes and lingering production slowdown from the pandemic, you’d think any finished movie would be worth giving a shot to just in case it connects, plus horror fans don’t exactly get spoiled by a glut of movies throughout the year and would probably show up out of curiosity if they knew it was there. I just wish I could give it a fully committed endorsement, but that final 90 seconds and maybe a few too many “if they just say ______ the movie would end so they’ll be vague and weird for no other reason” moments keep it in “Yeah it’s pretty good, go ahead and watch it if you have Hulu” territory, but not as "background viewing" the way so many streaming films are. It's worth your full attention!</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
What say you?</p><p><iframe width="400" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hGY0icwlDGY?si=jg3p0pdhIkGt2LSa" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe><script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12436276-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-hashtags="horror">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script></p><script data-ad-client="ca-pub-3302834381937327" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script></span>BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5110147752122772426.post-54181679167301399162024-01-03T08:41:00.000-08:002024-01-03T08:41:18.872-08:00Terror Train 2 (2022)<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-weight: bold;">DECEMBER 31, 2023</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">GENRE: <a href="https://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Slasher" target="_blank">SLASHER</a><br>SOURCE: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Terror-Train-Blu-ray-Jamie-Curtis/dp/B084DG7P42?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=9fa73e3e7f2a44e1e9d74623d2316794&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">STREAMING (TUBI)</a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Unlike Halloween and Christmas, there aren’t a lot of New Year’s-set horror movies, and let’s face it – neither <i>Terror Train</i> or <i>New Year’s Evil</i> (I know they’re not the only ones, but they’re the most popular) are amazing enough to revisit every year. So last year I opted to watch the *remake* of <i>Terror Train</i> that had popped up on Tubi, only to laugh when I discovered one of the only two changes of note it made from the original film is that it changed the holiday from NYE to, sigh, Halloween. Which, to be fair, actually makes the costume element make more sense, but since I wanted something seasonal and it turned out to be unrelated I was mildly annoyed. But thankfully, <i><b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Terror-Train-Blu-ray-Jamie-Curtis/dp/B084DG7P42?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=9fa73e3e7f2a44e1e9d74623d2316794&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">Terror Train 2</a></b></i> takes place a year – and two months! – later, setting itself on December 31st and restoring balance to the universe.</p><span id="fullpost"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
It’s also a better movie than its predecessor, which it was shot back to back with. Normally, combined productions like this tend to mean that the second of the pair is much lesser than the first (for examples: <i>Matrix Reloaded/Revolutions</i>, <i>Pirates 2</i> and <i>3</i>, etc), but that’s not the case here, and ironically it’s the very nature of that sort of production that allowed it to come off as the better of the two. If this was a traditional sequel, it’d probably have a mostly new cast, with some survivors forgotten, and there would probably be a new location as well (or at least a *different* train). But by jumping right into it with the same cast and crew, that means pretty much everyone that survived the original is back here, and by being on the same train it feels more like a successful do-over than traditional sequel.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Because as I mentioned (and for those who haven’t seen it), the remake only made two changes from the original, one being the rather superfluous day it was set on, and the other was the identity of the killer. Rather than go with the magician's assistant, the remake (spoiler) changed it to the conductor of the train (Carne, the Ben Johnson character in the original, played by a woman) and chalked it up to the umpteenth “vengeful parent” excuse, as Carne was revealed to be the mother of the kid they pranked at the beginning. So along with the much less interesting cast, CGI blood, etc it made the remake a very trying experience, offering almost nothing new while doing the same thing we already saw before only poorly, with its two changes of note only reminding you of other slasher movies (<i>Halloween</i> and <i>Friday the 13th</i>, namely). Here, they’re into entirely new territory with regards to its plot, so I just found myself more interested in the proceedings, as I didn’t know who would die and when (and where, and how, etc). Hell, even though the killer’s identity was different last time I was still able to figure it out long before it was revealed, but here I actually guessed wrong! The person I pegged as the new villain took an axe to the back barely over the halfway point!</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
But in my defense (big spoiler here, so skip this paragraph) I have been conditioned to accept that the killer in a slasher sequel will never be someone from the previous movie. Not that there are a lot of whodunit slasher sequels, but if you look at the handful – the <i>Scream</i> series, the <i>Last Summers</i>, <i>Urban Legend(s) </i>– you’ll see that the new killers are always new characters as well. The closest we ever got was when there was a draft of <i>Scream 2</i> that turned Cotton into the killer he was accused of being in the first place, but that got changed (rightfully so IMO), while <i>I Still Know</i> just had it be the same guy with a new character, and <i>Urban Legends: Final Cut</i> introduced an entirely new cast anyway (save Reese, of course). So naturally, as a slasher connoisseur going back over 30 years at this point, my eyes were only trained on the handful of new characters, only to see most of them get killed before the climax, allowing the reveal to work as something of a surprise (but not a cheat – important distinction). So good on you, <i>Terror Train 2</i> – you had the balls to do something <i>Scream</i> never did across five sequels.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Of course, the flipside to all of this is that you have to accept the dumbest setup in slasher history (or at least tied with <i>I Still Know</i>’s radio station trip to Bahamas nonsense) for all of this to occur. I can KIND OF buy the idea that today’s social media obsessed millennials would be jealous of survivor Alana and think what she went through was so cool, and also that they’d want to commemorate the events on the train (though the holiday switcheroo makes this a little awkward – why are they celebrating it on New Year’s when it happened on Halloween?), but Alana AND The Magician both being coerced to join the festivities, plus Sadie the assistant conductor, who is now the conductor? It’s a bit too much “Dick Thornburg was also on Holly’s plane” sequel nonsense for me, even by the already low standards set by a cheapie/quickie sequel being offered for free on Tubi. Like, at least leave Sadie or the Magician *off* the train and just trying to get there to help, or something.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
But otherwise (and the return of the CGI blood, though there are some practical spurts on occasion and a surprisingly gnarly disemboweling) it’s shockingly “pretty good” for the most part. I honestly can’t recall a slasher sequel that brought back literally everyone (even <i>Scream 2</i> left Sid’s dad out of it), and even in the first one I enjoyed the Magician and Alana’s platonic friendship, so I was happy to see more of it here. And even though I’ve seen it a million times by now, I’ll never not laugh at dumb comments from the clueless viewers who find themselves watching a live streamed murder in one of these things. Also, since every horror movie heroine has trauma now, at least they put it to good use – Alana’s PTSD includes hallucinations, so at one point she sees an actual murder taking place and assumes she’s just imagining it again, turning around and doing her breathing exercises to calm down. Heh.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
That said, it’s also one of those things where I can’t help but wonder if it’s actually worth watching or if it’s only benefiting from my extremely low expectations. I’d also be curious how it was received by people who never saw the 1980 film and thus were able to watch (and enjoy?) the remake without the déjà vu distracting them the entire time. Maybe they were annoyed at the reveal and/or seeing their favorite returning character(s) die. But for those like me who think the OG is entertaining but no classic and were equally baffled that the remake couldn’t be bothered to make any real changes until the last ten minutes, I think you’ll agree this one, if nothing else, shows a little more effort. And that’s always worth noting in this day and age. Especially right now, when we’re besieged by “Mickey Mouse horror!” trailers thanks to the <i>"Steamboat Willie"</i> copyright expiration. I’ll take <i>Terror Train 7</i> over any more of that dumb crap.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
What say you?</p><p><iframe width="400" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hROEtAzwGd0?si=3EaRmo8sdi3xvO5E" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe><script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12436276-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-hashtags="horror">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script></p><script data-ad-client="ca-pub-3302834381937327" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script></span>BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5110147752122772426.post-21890009353238622852023-12-21T10:16:00.000-08:002023-12-21T10:16:40.335-08:00FTP: The Wax Mask (1997)<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-weight: bold;">DECEMBER 16, 2023</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">GENRE: <a href="https://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Giallo" target="_blank">GIALLO</a>, <a href="https://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Mad%20Scientist" target="_blank">MAD SCIENTIST</a><br>SOURCE: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Wax-Mask-Blu-ray-Robert-Hossein/dp/B07TPYX2Z1?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=089ad0926a58bbe6a628668dfb96b44f&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)</a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
There’s kind of a heartbreaking moment on the bonus features for <i><b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Wax-Mask-Blu-ray-Robert-Hossein/dp/B07TPYX2Z1?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=089ad0926a58bbe6a628668dfb96b44f&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">The Wax Mask</a></b></i> (Italian: <i>Maschera di cera</i>), where Sergio Stivaletti notes that the movie never got a fair shake from horror fans. Not a direct quote because I don’t have the patience to go back and find where he says it (more on that soon) but the gist is “It was never seen as the exciting debut movie from a FX artist they liked – it was always the movie Lucio Fulci was going to make and I replaced him when he died.” And he’s right; you’d be hard-pressed to find a single review or article about the film from the past 25 years that doesn’t practically lead with “This was supposed to be a Fulci comeback movie,” which is unfair to Stivaletti (for those not privy to the history: Fulci died weeks before production was set to begin). The closest equivalent I can think of would be <i>A.I.</i> being directed by Spielberg instead of Kubrick, but it’s not like the ‘berg was making his debut, you know? We trusted him.</p><span id="fullpost"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
But one thing that’s not mentioned as much is, you know, it’s very likely the movie wouldn’t have been very good with Fulci calling the shots, either. At that point he hadn’t made a good flick in over a decade, and the Italian film industry’s decreased interest in horror (Stivaletti notes it may have been the only major Italian horror film being produced at that time, saying they were more interested in distributing American disaster movies of the era) meant that they weren’t afforded the same resources they had access to in the early 80s. With the story being a period piece, I feel it always would have come off as underwhelming at best, and (ironically) some of the film’s only real memorable moments were apparently things Stivaletti added that wouldn’t have been in Fulci’s version anyway.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
I mean don’t get me wrong, the movie’s not terrible – at times it’s actually fairly entertaining. It’s just one of those things where the names you see in the credits (in addition to Fulci, who wrote the majority of the script, it was also co-written and produced by Dario Argento) elevate expectations. If you snipped off the opening titles and showed it to someone without context, they’d probably walk away thinking it was a decent enough spin on House of Wax, where a reporter and the museum’s new employee work together to solve the mystery of why those wax figures look so darn realistic and if it has anything to do with a string of disappearances. There are a few gory murders, some goofy mid-90s CGI shots that I find charming now (man did they love their morphing FX back then!), frequent sex scenes with actual nudity (also charming since such things don’t exist anymore), and a fiery climax that gave off low-key Hammer vibes. Nothing too exciting or memorable, but, you know, it’s fine!</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
That said, it never really looks all that well, which kept me at arm’s length. Cinematographer Sergio Salvati was Fulci’s DP for a number of his classics, but sadly it looks more like Salvati’s later work with Full Moon (including the OG <i>Puppet Master</i>), where everything is over lit and soap opera-ish. Honestly if it wasn’t for the time discrepancy I’d swear it was shot on video, so again I can’t help but think if Fulci had survived I’d have the same issues with it that I do under Stivaletti’s watch, and if anything I give him a little more benefit of the doubt since he’s a first timer whereas Fulci would have no excuse for it to look this phony (with the fact that it’s supposed to be 1912 even harder to buy when it looks like they shot it with something they bought at Circuit City). And as I mentioned, one of the best things in the movie is an out of nowhere <i>Terminator</i>-esque scene where the villain, revealed to basically be a robot wearing human skin, is melted down to his exoskeleton and chases the heroes for a bit as the fire rages behind them all. It’s delightfully batshit, offering the movie the sort of energy that it could have used throughout in order to offset its deficiencies.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Stivaletti, Argento, producer Giuseppe Colombo, and a couple others (none of the lead actors, alas) are on hand for a retrospective documentary that is annoyingly broken into several different featurettes, despite having the same people in all of them. Like I get that they want to pad the bonus features menu (indeed, I was kind of overwhelmed when I first loaded it up), but why not just have each interview separate? They obviously put together a 80ish minute doc and then cut it all up – next time make that “we need more bonus features” call before wasting the time of the editor who saw their work split into chunks. Especially since you kind of have to watch all of them anyway to get the context of what they’re talking about; like one just discusses the cast and even a child could be able to detect that it’s lacking a proper intro and stops suddenly. Also they’re all in Italian with non-burned in subtitles, so you can’t even cheat and fast forward at 2x (while reading fast) to get through them all. There’s a solid interview with Alan Jones about some of the project’s history and reputation, and a vintage featurette of Argento on the set, where it seems there was some Spielberg/Hooper/<i>Poltergeist</i> kinda stuff going on re: who was actually directing at times. And there’s a commentary, which is fine – I was most engaged by the Italian Stivaletti speaking English and occasionally asking moderator/Severin guru David Gregory to translate (“It’s a… word joke?” Stivaletti questions, with Gregory deciphering what he meant: “Play on words”). It’s cute! Oh and somewhere in there (again, if it wasn’t all broken up I might be able to find it again easier) Argento tells a delightful story about the lead actor Robert Hossein hooking up with one of the film’s actresses, only for her husband to catch them. But Hossein, thinking fast, told them they were just rehearsing their love scene and she was naked so she could start getting used to being undressed on camera. Hahahah, what a legend.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
What say you?</p><p><iframe width="400" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wQHF-dOuzYA?si=wya3_qKkBk-y00xx" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe><script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12436276-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-hashtags="horror">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script></p><script data-ad-client="ca-pub-3302834381937327" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script></span>BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5110147752122772426.post-64006623084658949162023-12-06T08:49:00.000-08:002023-12-06T08:49:14.305-08:00Godzilla Minus One (2023)<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-weight: bold;">DECEMBER 3, 2023</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">GENRE: <a href="https://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Monster" target="_blank">MONSTER</a><br>SOURCE: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Godzilla-Original-Soundtrack-Naoki-Sato/dp/B0CKBR94TB?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=cf1813d297afdacc1f0e6a4f3c2629dd&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)</a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Once upon a time, I got invited to press screenings and also went to more festivals, which meant I got to see newer movies before hearing too much about them. Which was great, because I’m (sadly) easily swayed by the hype (or the rumblings) and then end up feeling the opposite way, because my expectations have been skewed in one direction or the other. It’s something I try to avoid as much as possible, but it’s kind of unavoidable, especially when by the time I end up seeing something it’s from buying a ticket to the Sunday night showing of its opening weekend (by which point reviews have been going around for a week or two). But every now and then there’s a movie like <i><b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Godzilla-Original-Soundtrack-Naoki-Sato/dp/B0CKBR94TB?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=cf1813d297afdacc1f0e6a4f3c2629dd&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">Godzilla Minus One</a></b></i>, where all the praise turned out to be pretty on the mark.</p><span id="fullpost"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
I should preface the rest of this review by noting that I’m hardly a <i>Godzilla</i> expert, but more of a casual fan at best. I’ve liked most of the ones I’ve seen (not too many; counting the new Monsterverse types I put the total at 12, including this*), but apart from the original and <i>King of the Monsters</i> I wouldn’t say any of them are movies I’d want to watch a second time (even though I have ended up revisiting a few for various reasons). Not that they’re bad movies (well, Emmerich’s is) but it’s just not my thing – I am entertained by them and then kind of forget about them a few days later. So me saying that <i>Minus One</i> might be my absolute favorite of the lot – or at least tied with the original – may not carry as much weight as a die hard aficionado saying as much (and I know some of those types who have indeed declared this their favorite), but hey, it should count for something, right?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Part of why it works as well the OG is because, well, it’s a period piece set around the same time – actually a few years before. Our hero is Shikishima, a WWII kamikaze pilot who is too afraid to carry out his suicide mission and flies to an island where planes are being fixed, claiming a maintenance issue with his aircraft. He’s barely just arrived when Godzilla stomps his way onto the island, killing all but one of the mechanics while Shikishima once again is too afraid to engage in battle. The only surviving mechanic, Tachibana, blames Shikishima for their deaths, and then the poor sod gets an even worse heaping of guilt when he returns to his hometown and discovers his parents have perished in an air raid that might have been prevented if he had committed to his duty as a kamikaze pilot.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
It’s an intriguing and utterly messed up take on the “hero needs to atone” story, because basically everyone is mad at this guy for not committing suicide, and he himself feels bad about it. And thus as Godzilla continues to stomp and smash his way around Japan, Shikishima is basically on a path of “I need to kill myself to feel better about all the deaths I might have prevented!”, leaving us in the audience in the odd position of either hoping he continues to be a coward so that he won’t die, or egging on his demise. I kept thinking of the end of <i>Armageddon</i>, when Billy Bob Thornton is basically screaming at Bruce Willis to “push the button!” when pushing said button means killing himself – it’s basically that kind of weird moment stretched out for two hours.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Luckily, it’s not as grim as that sounds. In fact, it’s kind of a charming movie at times, particularly in the middle chunk of the film when it’s essentially <i>Jaws</i> but with Godzilla instead of Bruce. A few years after returning home, Shikishima gets a job on a boat that goes out on the sea to find and deactivate all the mines that were planted in the waters by both Japanese and US military during WWII, only to find G out there as he makes his way back to land. There’s a riveting sequence where they’re trying to use one of the mines they’ve collected to blow him up that is akin to the barrel scene in Spielberg’s classic, and the camaraderie among the four guys on the boat has elements of the Quint/Brody/Hooper dynamic as well. Honestly I would have been just as happy, perhaps even more so, if this was how the rest of the movie played out, with these four guys (each with their own reasons for being there) trying to stop Godzilla before he got back to the mainland, but eventually their boat is proven to be too small for the gig and more military/scientist types come to the rescue for a grander final act.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
In fact if I had one minor complaint about the movie, it’s that the waterbound climax lacks the same kind of tension a land-driven one would provide. Sure, the crew of the two big battleships (plus Shikishima in a fighter plane) is at stake, but one of the things about the movie is that he keeps getting bigger, and that scale is hard to judge when he’s just surrounded by water instead of people and buildings. I also find myself puzzled in this sequence, as he appears to be just standing in the water in many shots but the plan involves using the two ships to tie a massive weight belt around him and sink him to the bottom of the ocean below, so he can’t be touching the ground where he is. I guess he’s just really good at treading water? All that said, it’s worth it for their plan B, which is that if sinking him to the bottom doesn’t kill him (from the pressure), they will remotely trigger some inflatable things on the same belt that will make him skyrocket back up and basically kill him from the bends. Again, I haven’t seen all of these movies, but of the ones I HAVE seen, the method of stopping him has never been from something Thom Yorke sang about back when he could still write coherent songs.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
The other thing that the water prevents is G moving around with as much force, which is a bummer because he is legit terrifying in this one. The opening sequence with the mechanics is actually full on scary in ways that giant monster movies rarely are – the original<i> Jurassic Park</i> might be the last time I found myself really tensed up from a giant monster scene, as it really delivers on him being a MONSTER as opposed to a force of nature of some sort. Like, yeah, one swing of his tail can knock over a building and kill hundreds, but there’s something far more unsettling about him seeing a person and eating him or deliberately using that same tail to swat him hundreds of feet through the air and let him die when he lands. And by keeping the movie’s giant monster population to just one (another thing it has in common with the original), it avoids any kind of “Well he’s more of an anti-hero because we need him to stop this other monster” angle that too many others rely on, though I understand that the series would get quite stale if it was just “Godzilla is here/back, we have to stop him!” every time. It's a double edged spiky tail.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Naturally, as is always the case despite some erroneous claims to the contrary, a hefty portion of the movie is devoted to human drama, though as with Godzilla himself the material is well above average. Shikishima is a sympathetic hero and his relationships with the other characters are just as compelling as any of the effect-driven scenes. He has a neighbor who lost her children to the air strike and blames him for their deaths, though she slowly warms to him as he does his best to care for a survivor named Noriko, who is caring for a baby (Akiko) whose parents also died. It’s endearing to watch this little makeshift family come together, and I also enjoyed the strained relationship he has with the other guy who survived the opening island attack. Shikishima feels enlisting this man to help him fix the plane he needs to take out Godzilla will help make up for his cowardice then, and so the other man is given his own dilemma: help the man he despises, or do nothing and risk more deaths from the actual threat? So many of the ones I’ve seen have had rather corny human elements (the love triangle in <i>Raids Again</i> comes to mind, or the dull business dealings in <i>Mothra vs Godzilla</i>), so I liked that not only were these more interesting, but actually tied into Godzilla as well. It’s not that they have to put aside their differences to stop him – he’s the root cause of their differences in the first place!</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Oh and the music is terrific. I damn near cheered when the main theme really kicked in at a key point during the climax. It was like the “Brothers in Arms” cue in <i>Fury Road</i> in how pumped it got me for the already exciting action on screen.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Honestly, unless you demand a certain number of buildings to be destroyed in these things, I don’t know how you can walk away disappointed with this one as long as you understand that these movies are always at their best when they have compelling humans on the ground that Godzilla stomps upon. Sure, it’s not as destructive as some others (including <i>Shin Godzilla</i>, which was also well received but I found rather average) and those accustomed to the monster brawls might be taken aback by the lack of another kaiju for him to fight, but it’s clear everyone involved wanted to truly get back to what made the original such a classic, and (quite impressively) giving it a modern spin despite the period setting. It really just works on all levels, and I suspect will be the go-to influence for any number of series entries over the next few decades. And I’m stoked it was given a proper US theatrical release, something that’s eluded the series for quite some time (<i>Shin</i> was given a limited release in art house theaters, and <i>Godzilla 2000</i> was a recut version); since it’s been successful I hope the trend continues from here on out. It should always be just as easy to see the big foreign films here in the US as it is for them to see Marvel and Minions movies there.
What say you?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
*The others being the original, <i>Raids Again, King Kong vs, Mothra vs, vs Biollante</i>, Emmerich, <i>2000, Shin</i>, and the three WB/Legendary ones.</p><p><iframe width="400" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VvSrHIX5a-0?si=powo19K3gnLxi7Mk" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe><script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12436276-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-hashtags="horror">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script></p><script data-ad-client="ca-pub-3302834381937327" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script></span>BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5110147752122772426.post-30809477049059914612023-11-15T12:23:00.000-08:002023-11-15T12:24:51.924-08:00Thanksgiving (2023)<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-weight: bold;">NOVEMBER 6, 2023</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">GENRE: <a href="https://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Holiday" target="_blank">HOLIDAY</a>, <a href="https://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Slasher" target="_blank">SLASHER</a><br>SOURCE: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Grindhouse-Two-Disc-Collectors-Blu-ray-McGowan/dp/B003VMFWYI?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=3cb0eafea743e756c97f345cfa4ca2f1&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">THEATRICAL (ADVANCED SCREENING)</a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
It's kind of funny that <i>Scream</i> was supposed to kill the idea of doing a slasher film and yet it's only the success of parts 5 and 6 that we finally, FINALLY have the feature version of <i><b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Grindhouse-Two-Disc-Collectors-Blu-ray-McGowan/dp/B003VMFWYI?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=3cb0eafea743e756c97f345cfa4ca2f1&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">Thanksgiving</a></b></i> that's been in the works for over 16 years, after winning fans over with its faux trailer during <i>Grindhouse</i> (a film that flopped and yet has inspired several films from its fake trailers - this is the fourth after two <i>Machetes</i> and <i>Hobo With A Shotgun</i>) - not to mention all the movies since that aped its dirty/scratched look). Spyglass was the production company that successfully relaunched Ghostface, and smartly not wanting to put all their eggs in one basket, they made Eli Roth an offer to fulfill this long overdue promise. Was it worth the wait?</p><span id="fullpost"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Somewhat surprisingly, yes! Luckily, Roth and his writing partner Jeff Rendell realized early on that they couldn't just flesh out the trailer (which had no actual story to it, just kills) and make a real movie out of it. Instead, per Roth at a post-screening Q&A, they decided to treat the trailer as a lost slasher of yore and write the would-be remake/reboot/rewhatever of it instead. So there are a few moments from the trailer that are recreated here (the sight of a trampoline produced an audience cheer as if an A-list star just made a surprise cameo), but not all of them, and I think it was the right move - it allowed us to get into the movie as we would any other, but with a few fan service moments like that to remind us that having fun was the order of the day.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
It's also got a terrific hook for the obligatory tragedy that sends our masked killer out for revenge a year later: a Black Friday stampede that leaves a couple people dead/injured. The Wal-Mart type store is owned by one of our hero teens' fathers, so they use their privilege to sneak in a few minutes before opening to buy a new phone, prompting the impatient mob outside to break through the metal fencing and storm the store, crushing a security guard, an employee's wife, etc and also breaking the arm of the local high school sports star, ending his promising career. So not only is it an epic way to open the movie and give us some spectacle for the incident (as opposed to the usual accidental *single* death like in <i>Prom Night</i>), but it also opens up the suspect pool more than we are used to for such things. The injured kid could be getting revenge for his destroyed career, the husband could be avenging his wife, etc., while the privileged teens, the rioters, and the store staff are all to blame in some way. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
And the killer (named John Carver after the famous pilgrim/governor of Plymouth, MA, where the film is set) is the best kind of revenge slasher, where he mostly sticks to the people who were involved and doesn't add randoms to the mix when it suits him. Since I recently rewatched <i>I Know What You Did Last Summer</i>, a movie I don't like much anyway, I couldn't help but think of how the fisherman actually kills more people who had nothing to do with him/the main group than the ones he was actually mad at. That's not the case here; the killer's identity isn't exactly difficult to parse out, but their motive is actually quite strong (almost sympathetic!) and they rarely go outside of their target group (in fact I think Carver merely tranquilizes a few "in the way" people who had nothing to do with the stampede, but I'm not 100% sure). </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Plus, the kills are all on the ridiculous side of things, and many have something to do with cooking/dinner. One gets corn cob holders to the ears, another is basted and roasted, etc - it's a nice change of pace from <i>Scream VI</i>, in which more people actually died by gunshot than knives (if they died at all; another nice thing here - no one's invincible). Roth knows better than to hold back from the gore, and it is glorious right from the start, as a man's neck is lacerated on broken glass as he storms into the store (and then proceeds to try to grab a toaster oven anyway). The MPA has gotten more lenient over the years to be sure, but even on that level, there were one or two kills that had me momentarily wondering if this was some sort of unrated cut, just because you don't see this type of stuff in major studio (Sony!) theatrical releases anymore. Not that you NEED this sort of thing for a slasher to work (<i>Halloween</i>, my favorite, has next to no blood and the kills are all rather pedestrian even by existing standards - nothing like the unicorn in <i>Black Christmas</i>!) but you also kind of want to feel that the person calling the shots loves them as much as you do, and that's a good way to prove it and let you know it's OK to cheer at this or that demise. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Because make no mistake, this is very much a fun slasher film in the vein of <i>Jason Lives</i> or <i>Hatchet</i>, where it's not that you dislike the victims (in general; there's a few you're supposed to hate) but the tone suggests you're not hoping they all get away either. And it's aided by the genuine humor, in particular a local gun/alcohol salesman who is using the events to drum up business but is also seemingly a genuinely good dude that ends up saving the day (not with a gun or alcohol). Roth - a native Masshole like me - also gets lots of mileage out of our well-known anger issues; I don't think the movie is five minutes old before we are treated to our first of many "Faaack you!"s. The accents are also on point; the angrier people have the "Hahhvahhhd Yaaahd" thing going but the people with actual normal volume dialogue keep it in check. Patrick Dempsey as the town sheriff (no Michael Biehn like the trailer, alas) is particularly good, but turns out he's from Maine and has been faking a "normal" one for his whole career, so I guess he was happy to just use his real voice for once. It sadly wasn't shot in Massachusetts, but whatever Canadian town they used is a pretty good stand-in - it's only the lack of decorum (read: Patriots jerseys and Dunkin Donuts cups) that spoils the illusion. On that note, my actual hometown got used as the butt of a joke, so that along with the gruesome death of someone named Collins has me thinking Roth might be mad at me about something (or he just has no idea I exist and it's a coincidence. One of those.).</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
I only have two minor gripes. One is that the heroine is kind of a blank page; nothing against the performer, but I couldn't tell you a single thing about her by the end of the movie, so she's one of the "final girl by default" types and I expect a little better from Roth in that department, since he played against expectations so well in his earlier films. The other was some wonky plotting regarding "who was there that night", treating it as a mystery of sorts when there isn't one? There's a subplot about the store's security camera footage being erased that results in two weird plot points: our heroine says her father has a backup, which makes no sense once we know who deleted the store's footage, because there's no reason for them to not delete that one too. And I couldn't quite track why they needed it in the first place, because one of our hero teens filmed the whole thing and put it on Youtube, so that along with eyewitness accounts (which apparently just don't exist?) should have been all the cops needed anyway. It felt reverse engineered, as if Roth/Rendell were still awkwardly trying to fit together elements from their trailer or something. And it's more of a funny issue than a serious one, but apparently one victim is identified by their legs, since Carver keeps their upper half for his dinner table tableau (very <i>Happy Birthday to Me/Madhouse</i>) and yet the news reports name the person instantly.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Other than that, I had a blast. It checked so many boxes for me (A masked slasher! <i>Halloween</i> homages! Over the top kills! People with Masshole accents shouting profanity!) that I think Roth would have had to stop the movie cold and have each actor say something derogatory about my mother for me to be not on board with what it was serving. Your mileage will vary of course; I know Roth's style just rubs people the wrong way, but as a fan of most of his films (<i>Death Wish</i> is the only one I dislike I think?) I was happy to see him dive into his first proper slasher, since he's confessed his love for such fare from the early days of his career but had never actually made one. And I know not everyone will find "Hanover sucks!" as funny as I do (it's a "well-to-do" town in Massachusetts, so yeah, they suck), so other audiences might not get QUITE as much of the humor, but I'm confident that the kills, the gore, the all-purpose humor (two things to look out for: a thermometer ding and a cat being fed), and well rounded cast will be more than enough to make your ticket price worthwhile.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
What say you?</p><p><iframe width="400" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KbU50SdL8zA?si=bpzDvgbUB8UaMbDX" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe><script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12436276-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-hashtags="horror">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script></p><script data-ad-client="ca-pub-3302834381937327" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script></span>BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5110147752122772426.post-88435258673425291172023-11-03T12:02:00.002-07:002023-11-03T12:02:25.397-07:00I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998)<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-weight: bold;">NOVEMBER 2, 2023</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">GENRE: <a href="https://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Slasher" target="_blank">SLASHER</a><br>SOURCE: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Still-Know-What-Last-Summer/dp/B0C93BG42G?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=42b58ad32ddbc7b251ea5f9109fdbe44&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">STREAMING (PEACOCK)</a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Since I wasn't a huge fan of the original, I skipped <i><b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Still-Know-What-Last-Summer/dp/B0C93BG42G?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=42b58ad32ddbc7b251ea5f9109fdbe44&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">I Still Know What You Did Last Summer</a></b></i> in theaters, only seeing it when it came to the then-brand new DVD format (in fact, it might have been the first movie I watched for the first time on the format? Everything else I was getting at the beginning were old faves). I didn't like it, either, and I've only seen it one other time since, but I happened upon it tonight when looking for something I had seen but didn't much care about to provide background noise as I drifted off to sleep, and to my surprise it held my attention! I watched the whole thing! </p><span id="fullpost"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Now, I'm not saying it's a particularly good movie, and - again - I don't think the first film is good either, so maybe I'm not the best judge here. But unlike the original it's rarely boring, has a reveal that - while laughably goofy - is at least more engaging than the first one's wet fart of a killer unmasked scene since we never met the character, and has a shockingly good cast of supporting characters, making it more to my liking despite its rampant silliness. Nothing in it may be as exciting as Helen's chase scene in the original, but I tend to prefer a movie that's consistently OK throughout over one that has high highs and low lows. Oh and it's raining this time when Jennifer Love Hewitt screams into the sky, so that's another plus.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Also it had been so long since I watched it that I was misremembering plot points about the film's location and how they ended up there. For some reason, in my memory, they won a trip to Rio by naming it as the capital of Brazil, and I thought it was some epic 4D chess on Ben Willis' part to arrange everything around a wrong answer she might have gotten right. But instead she could have said anything (including the right answer) because the trip is to the Bahamas, and our characters certainly aren't smart enough to question why they'd be asked about one geographical location in order to win a trip to another. I also forgot that Bill Cobbs' character is tipped off to the ruse when Julie tells him how they won, since he knows the answer is wrong, and also that the "radio station" calls them, not the other way around. So while there's still some dumb stuff about the whole thing, it's not nearly as stupid as I had built it up in my head to be over the years. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
That remaining dumb stuff (spoiler ahead!) mostly revolves around "Will Benson. BEN'S SON!" It's fine to have a second killer, and they thankfully don't cheat - the script goes a bit overboard to paint Will as a dorky wuss, perhaps, but he never acts scared or anything when no one else is around, and the one sort of "what's going on?" look he gives is to Cobbs' character, which makes sense - he's suspicious that Cobbs knows, but the moment plays fine as a "This guy might be after us" kind of deal. But the sheer planning on him and Ben's part, in that he has to befriend Julie for months, hope like hell that her boyfriend Ray doesn't come along so that he can use the ticket, etc - all to help his dad out, despite (as we learn here) the fact that Ben killed his wife (Will's mother) at some point too. You gotta figure he asked at least once "Do we really need to buy four plane tickets and all this other stuff? Why can't we just go kill her in her house?" Then again, the whole first film revolves around Ben inexplicably trying to murder the teens who think they committed the crime he actually committed himself, rather than enjoy get out of jail free card they were inadvertently handing him, so logic and motive aren't strong suits in the ol' Willis family. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
But if you look past all the bad plotting, it's actually pretty fun? Again, the cast is stacked - you get Cobbs, Jennifer Esposito, John Hawkes, Mark Boone Junior, Mekhi Pfifer, and the GOAT Jeffrey Combs all popping up and committing 100% to a silly teen slasher, which is awesome. And yes, a young Jack Black as a Rastafarian dude, which is misguided to be sure, but looking back, it's just another example of how Black is always bringing his A game no matter what the role, something that continues to serve him well 25 years later (we've all seen his tireless promotion as Bowser for this year's <i>Mario</i> movie). One thing I DID remember is that Combs only appeared in two scenes (three if you count finding his body - there are a couple of offscreen deaths), but I forgot how much he clearly hated these idiotic American teens flying in for a vacation during their hurricane season. Indeed, more than once I got the impression that the writers and director Danny Cannon were leaning into the idea that Julie wasn't exactly the smartest horror heroine of all time, and it kind of makes the movie work better than you might expect.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
It's also fast paced, something even die hard fans of the original can't claim with a straight face. The whole second half of the movie is basically a nonstop chase, as all four of our heroes find dead bodies and spend the rest of the time running around the island trying to get help and/or outrun the killer, who doesn't bother with silly nonsense like cutting hair and leaving crabs in people's trunks. The body count here is eight (up from five) and the movie is even a minute shorter to boot - the math don't lie! Also, in a rare "smart" decision for this script, a hefty chunk has Julie on the run with two potential victims (Esposito's bartender and best friend Brandy), giving those scenes a suspense boost since you know at least one will be a goner, maybe both (while Julie is safe), so every slash of the hook actually could produce a fatality.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
I felt bad for Freddie Prinze Jr though, as it almost seems like they added him into the movie at the 11th hour. He only has a single scene with Julie before he goes off to be in his own side adventure of trying to get down to the Bahamas in time. He pals around with John Hawkes, rides a bus, trades his engagement ring (awwww) for a gun... it's all stuff that could be removed without affecting the main story at all, and without much tension since the killer is obviously on the island. Given the backstory that Ben and his family used to live in the area where the resort is, Will could have been someone they met there, and Ray could have come along from the start - the movie would be less silly as a result, and it'd give Freddie P a chance to actually interact with his co-stars. I assume the plotting was revolved around his schedule or something, but if this was their design from the start, it's needlessly damaging.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
So I dunno man, I know it's dumber than it needs to be, but I think the film's bad rep has more to do with Kevin Williamson's absence than its actual quality in relation to the first. They're both kind of stupid movies with a killer whose motives make zero sense, but at least this one seems to be trying to have some fun with itself instead of being so dour and serious. Add in the colorful supporting cast, storm-ravaged hotel setting, and more proactive killer, and I have to confess that I think this is the better movie, if only in a "clears the low bar" kind of way. Sorry for being so hard on you over the past 25 (!) years, I Still Know. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
What say you? </p><p><iframe width="400" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Bm3-443K2V4?si=TIPnACyM-215-F4T" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe><script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12436276-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-hashtags="horror">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script></p><script data-ad-client="ca-pub-3302834381937327" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script></span>BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5110147752122772426.post-44930434800550459922023-10-31T15:22:00.004-07:002023-10-31T15:22:38.291-07:00Scary Movie (2000)<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-weight: bold;">OCTOBER 30, 2023</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">GENRE: <a href="https://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Comedic" target="_blank">COMEDIC</a>, <a href="https://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Slasher" target="_blank">SLASHER</a><br>SOURCE: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Scary-Movie-Blu-ray-Shawn-Wayans/dp/B093RV4TYX/?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=285393c9c533eff435a5a4ea08b9cd19&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">DVD (OWN COLLECTION)</a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
I believe I only saw <i><b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Scary-Movie-Blu-ray-Shawn-Wayans/dp/B093RV4TYX/?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=285393c9c533eff435a5a4ea08b9cd19&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">Scary Movie</a></b></i> once, during its opening weekend in theaters (back to back with <i>The Kid</i>, of all things), so watching it again now was basically like seeing it for the first time. But I was surprised to see a few gags I remembered vividly, like when Shorty (Marlon Wayans) says everything they’re saying was also in <i>Scream</i>, and the fact that the killer in the movie only killed like one person in the entire thing, with the rest being offed by someone else (i.e. the Drew Barrymore spoof character in the opening ends up being run over by her own parents when she runs away from the killer into the road). And those were relatively niche things – bigger moments, like the fact that the movie is also spoofing <i>I Know What You Did Last Summer</i>, were forgotten entirely.</p><span id="fullpost"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
But the bigger surprise is that it’s actually not that bad (and a Halloween movie, briefly – the opening scene takes place on October 31st)! Since we’ve had so many awful parody movies since (including some of this film’s sequels) it’s actually kind of refreshing to watch one with an actual grasp on storytelling, as opposed to just stringing together a bunch of gags based on whatever pop culture moments came to the filmmakers’ heads when they arrived on set that day. In fact it’s so close to <i>Scream</i> at times that Kevin Williamson should have gotten a co-writer credit, as entire conversations are recreated other than to dovetail into a punchline. The actors in turn also mimic the gestures and deliveries of Skeet Ulrich, Neve Campbell, etc – it’s legitimately impressive how well Shawn Wayans apes Matthew Lillard’s dialogue (complete with excess spittle) during the climax when he outs himself as one of the killers. One of the reasons <i>Airplane</i> works as well as it does is because they took an existing script (a movie called <i>Zero Hour</i>) and just added jokes to it, and that’s close to what the Wayanses did here. 80% of the movie is just <i>Scream</i>, with <i>IKWYDLS</i> taking up maybe 10% (basically just the accident scene and the pageant, plus, of course, "What are you waiting for?") and a few other quick gags from 1999 movies (<i>Sixth Sense, Blair Witch, Matrix</i>) making up the rest.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Blending it with <i>I Know What You Did Last Summer</i> is not only just another obvious target for the time, but it actually keeps them from swiping even more plot points directly from <i>Scream</i>, as Sid’s (er, Cindy’s) mom is barely mentioned and Bobby’s (read: Billy’s) motive has nothing to do with his own mother. Unfortunately, the new motive is incredibly homophobic, as are a lot of the other gags in the film. I know attitudes have changed across the board (they also do the Tatum in the doggy door scene, but as an extended fat joke when the girl can’t get through), but given that the movie actually holds up better than most of these sort of things, it’s kind of a bummer that it couldn’t have been even more “timeless” had it not so constantly relied on the same basic idea that gay is "less than". A line or two that wouldn’t fly anymore is one thing (even the actual <i>Scream</i> has a few fat jokes), but I’d estimate 25% of the movie’s gags boil down to “it’s funny because it’s gay.” Just gets a bit tiresome (hell, it probably even did in 2000, I just can’t remember).</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Luckily a lot of gags are just, you know, good gags! Having David “Squiggy” Lander as the principal (originally played by Henry “The Fonz” Winkler) is hilarious, and the scene where everyone else in the theater kills Brenda (Regina Hall) for being so obnoxious while Ghostface just sits and watches the movie is pretty great. And special props to Shannon Elizabeth for getting to show off her comic chops; at the time she was basically just known for <i>American Pie</i> and didn’t get many laughs on her own, but she’s great here as the Tatum/Helen stand-in – instantly forgetting about her dead boyfriend when she hears the won the pageant might have been the hardest I laughed in the whole thing. And I was happy to see Kelly Coffield from <i>In Living Color</i> get a quick cameo as Cindy’s teacher, angrily telling a student to STFU during their boring First Amendment presentation – if I tracked that at the time, it was one of the many things I had since forgotten (Jim Carrey, the other “token white” from that show, which I still quote on the regular, was the lead in another scatological R comedy playing in theaters at the same time, so if Tommy Davidson was in something at the time it could have been a full blown reunion at the multiplex).</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
And of course, one must appreciate this movie for giving us Anna Faris, who had only been in a few things prior to this and got her first lead here (apparently it was like a last ditch thing for her; she was about to give up acting). She’s one of the most likable comedic performers of the past few decades, and even though the series declined after this one, she always gave it her all while stealing movies away from the leading actors in other things (<i>Just Friends, Lost in Translation</i>, etc). Some of the folks who have starred in other parody films (like the execrable <i>Twilight</i> one <i>Vampires Suck</i>) were essentially never seen again, so it’s a testament to her skills that this gigantic hit (it was the 9th highest grossing film of 2000! It nearly outgrossed<i> X-Men</i>!) may not even be the first thing folks think of when they think of her.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
The DVD I watched was given away at an outdoor “Trick r Treating for Adults” event that showed <i>Scream</i> and <i>Scary Movie</i> back to back, which must have been fun for anyone who hadn’t seen the movie before (or, like me, had just forgotten how closely it mirrored it), with all of <i>Scream</i>’s deliveries and obscure lines of dialogue still fresh in the audience’s mind as they were spoofed so specifically in the latter (seriously: Jon Abraham even does Skeet Ulrich’s little finger waving thing when he talks about watching <i>The Exorcist</i>). Alas, we didn’t stay for it as we wanted to get home to relieve the babysitter (weirdly, the same friend I saw <i>SM</i> with all those years ago!), but I’m almost glad it worked out that way, because I probably wouldn’t have ever bothered opening the DVD (it’s not exactly a movie I need to watch over and over) and then I wouldn’t have noticed that despite being a re-released package for the film from Paramount (who now owns this formerly-Disney film) it’s seemingly the exact same disc released in 2000, as it has a bunch of trailers for movies of the time (<i>Gone in 60 Seconds! Hellraiser: Inferno</i>!) despite them, you know, not being Paramount movies (<i>Gone in 60</i> is still Disney, <i>Hellraiser</i> ended up at Lionsgate). Gotta love how lazy of a release it was, but the time capsule nature of it made me smile. Man, what a time to be alive, when an R rated spoof comedy could outgross the year’s big Disney cartoon (<i>Dinosaur</i>) and the subsequent DVD would, well, exist at all. Now anything like this would be straight to Netflix and be forgotten in two weeks, and perhaps lost forever if they decided not to bother keeping it on their platform due to low viewing numbers. Sigh.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
What say you?</p><p><iframe width="400" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HTLPULt0eJ4?si=7LTuutOXVo1jKS4o" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe><script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12436276-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-hashtags="horror">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script></p><script data-ad-client="ca-pub-3302834381937327" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script></span>BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5110147752122772426.post-23646028400618242202023-10-30T11:43:00.006-07:002023-10-31T08:08:38.798-07:00Five Nights At Freddy's (2023)<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-weight: bold;">OCTOBER 27, 2023</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">GENRE: <a href="https://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Possession" target="_blank">POSSESSION</a>, <a href="https://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Video%20Game" target="_blank">VIDEO GAME</a><br>SOURCE: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Five-Nights-Freddys-Josh-Hutcherson/dp/B0CJRGD2C9/?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=82ab25493f9836c59b2ae57d4f7529ed&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">THEATRICAL (NORMAL/MIND-BLOWINGLY AWFUL SCREENING)</a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
If anyone ever doubted my commitment to the theatrical experience over streaming, I only have to recount the 4:30 showing of <i><b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Five-Nights-Freddys-Josh-Hutcherson/dp/B0CJRGD2C9/?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=82ab25493f9836c59b2ae57d4f7529ed&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">Five Nights at Freddy's</a></b></i> at the AMC Fallbrook 7 in Los Angeles, October 27, 2023. I've already gotten bewilderment from friends and it just happened; 20-30 years from now anyone I tell will probably just think I'm a confused old man making up "walked uphill in the snow both ways" kind of nonsense. But trust me, while it's still fresh in my mind, I sat through the entire movie* with a crowd full of teens who had normal volume conversations, wandered around in the theater, filmed the screen for Tiktok/Instagram reels whenever the robots were on screen, etc. All for a movie I could have just watched at home, since it premiered day and date on Peacock.</p><span id="fullpost"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
And the funny thing is it could have been worse! My seat, directly in the middle of row C, was taken by a teen girl who flanked by all her pals, so I knew pulling rank and making her move would just leave me in between a bunch of 12-14 year olds I'd probably have to shush 43 times during the film, and since her actual seat was also taken by someone who wasn't where they were supposed to be, I just sat in one of the handicapped companion seats at the back, where I only had to listen to the nonsense of the people directly around me and let the movie's audio drown out the rest. I mean, the people near me were still morons (including one of the "let's film the screen" dipasses, and a kid who kept inexplicably tossing and turning on his recliner seat like a restless sleeper), but, again: it could have been worse!</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Anyway, the movie is fine. I must admit I know next to nothing about the source material, as I played the first game when it popped up on Game Pass (or PS+, I can't remember now) and after about ten minutes shut it off and uninstalled it, finding little enjoyment from its cruddy presentation and boring gameplay, which (for the even less acquainted) involved clicking through security camera angles and making sure the Chuck E Cheese-esque animatronic mascots (including the eponymous Freddy) didn't see you. Riveting stuff. Apparently, it's this game and its sequels that helped popularize the idea of watching others play video games, because the game itself isn't very fun to play but it's fun to watch others get scared, I guess? I dunno. I am "Watching others do things isn't as fun as doing them myself" (or 43) years old.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
But the kids who know it inside and out seem to agree it's done a good job of translating the games to the big screen, so I guess the movie is a success for them. And that's fine! Most video game adaptations work so hard to welcome newcomers that it ends up alienating the people who loved the games and made it an attractive IP in the first place (Resident Evil is a good example), so it's nice to see one going the other way. Not that it's impenetrable or anything (though the plot is a bit convoluted, more soon), but given the limited scope of the games themselves, the filmmakers and Blumhouse had an easy gig here: stay true to the games by including stuff from the sequels, keep the budget low, and boom: a film that can spawn its own sequels, and quickly burn through the games' stories so they can start making their own. It's kind of genius in a way.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
For those who don't know anything: the movie is about a guy named Mike (Josh Hutcherson) who has trouble holding down a job due to a quick temper and a lifelong obsession with finding out who kidnapped his little brother from a campground when he was younger. He witnessed it happening, and believes that he can find clues to the culprit's identity if he makes himself repeatedly dream about the crime (a poster for where it occurred and a tape of nature sounds ensures he dreams only of this and not, I dunno, being naked at school). Then his PO (Matthew Lillard) finds him an ideal gig: working the night security job at a defunct arcade/pizzeria called Freddy Fasbear's, which needs security because the owner wants to keep the place intact and it attracts vandals. Mike brings his tape recorder and poster along to help him sleep through the gig, but something creepy is happening...</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
If the movie burned through all of this exposition in 15 minutes, it'd be fine. But it takes around 40 minutes for him to arrive for his first night on the job, because there's even more plot to get through involving his little sister Abby, who he is now responsible for after their mom died and their dad took off. Their aunt (Mary Stuart Masterson) wants custody, so he has to prove he's fit to raise her, which is tricky when he keeps losing jobs and his newest one means he won't even be home at night, prompting the need for an overnight sitter with her OWN plot contrivances to add to the mix. Given the target audience, I was legit stunned at how sluggish the pacing was, and how the endless backstory kept the robots off-screen in the meantime. Not that they were likely worried (and given the box office numbers, they were right!) but we already basically had this movie in 2021 with <i>Willy's Wonderland</i>, which was a mercifully brief 85 minutes, so it's kind of baffling that they didn't think to speed things up and maybe streamline the plot a bit. I mean, the title tells you how far along you are, and by Night #3 I already felt the movie should have been close to wrapping things up, runtime wise.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
And I haven't even mentioned Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail from <i>Countdown</i>), a cop who keeps showing up during Mike's shift and being cryptic. In fact a lot of the movie relies on people simply not saying anything and being needlessly vague, reaching a boiling point when Mike has the evil aunt come over to babysit but tells Abby "Come here, I want to talk to you about something," which of course makes the girl think he's giving up and letting the aunt adopt her. All he had to do is say "Hey, I have to go somewhere, and I know it sucks, but your aunt is going to have to watch you today," but instead he acts suspicious and opaque for no reason. A late reveal in the movie practically turns Vanessa into an accomplice for the villain, and for the life of me I can't fully grasp why she didn't divulge this information sooner.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
The movie also curiously can't decide if the creepy animatronics are evil or good, which would be fine (and fun!) if there was a Krusty doll-style switch on their backs to make them switch, but nah. They take a liking to Abby and make forts with her and stuff, but we've already seen them kill several people by this point (a guy in a cold open, plus a gang of vandals hired by the evil aunt to trash the place so Mike will lose that job, too), so it's a little late for the good-natured "Aww, the lonely girl has friends!" approach it's going for. And when you consider the backstory (which I won't spoil) it's kind of weird to see them get smashed up by Mike in the third act (reminded me of the new Star Wars movies telling us that Stormtroopers are real people who were forced into their gig, and then having our heroes "triumphantly" kill a lot of them anyway). </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
They look great though. The Jim Henson company made them, and they not only look exactly like the characters in the source material (take that, Michael Bay!), but they move believably too - you see them move around on their own (not faked by hiding the legs or something) but they're still jerky and awkward, without the grace of a human performer to betray the idea. There's one exception, but it turns out there IS a living human inside it, so that's fine. Also, speaking of the human villain, I can't explain the particulars without it spoiling things, but the way the audience is tipped off to their identity is kind of brilliant (for those who have seen the movie, you probably know what I'm talking about, but if not: it involves a knife), and doubly fun when you consider the performer's other best-known role, as they get to be on the other side of such a reveal. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
And even though it's too damn long, I was impressed how un-kid friendly it was, with a plot involving murdered children and a few gruesome deaths. PG-13 deaths to be sure, but I mean: someone being torn in half is hardcore even if you're not seeing it fully on display (it's done with shadow). As long as they have the patience for a slower unfolding of a plot than they might be used to, it's a rare gateway horror from this generation that doesn't have the "family friendly" kiss of death on it that can be a turnoff for some (kids or parents). It may be slow, but it's a legit horror movie, not a teen comedy with some spooky trappings. In fact there are actually few moments of levity in it at all; Lillard has a few funny deliveries and the aunt's lawyer is clearly afraid of her, but otherwise it's humor-free. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
But again: I'm not the target audience. The fact that I stuck around for the whole thing even as I contemplated murdering the people around me proves it's got some genuine appeal, and with tightening (and a better crowd) I might have legitimately enjoyed the thing, maybe even enough to try the game again. The score was solid, it's always nice to have a male lead in a horror movie aimed at younger folks, and I loved the robots when they were actually on-screen (plus their bizarre <i>Saw</i>-level mechanisms that serve to kill their victims). And as my own kid gets closer and closer to being able to watch a genuine horror movie, I'm always happy to find another possible choice for him to make that jump, even if I don't particularly love it. So it might be a bit too much for say, a nine year old (due to the slow pace and occasional violent death), but for teens who have been kept from R fare thus far, it's a great way to start dipping their toes into the deep end of the genre, both for the more involved story and the potential nightmare fuel. Too old for <i>Hocus Pocus</i> but too young for <i>Serbian Film</i>? <i>Five Nights at Freddy'</i>s got you covered!</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
What say you? </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
*Except the post-credits scene. I knew it had one, but I also knew that as a non-gamer it would likely just be teasing the sequel with a character I didn't recognize, so I didn't bother waiting. I read a description online later, and sure enough: it meant absolutely nothing to me. But I discovered the cab driver was a popular Youtuber making a cameo for the fans, so... OK, sure.</p><p><iframe width="400" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0VH9WCFV6XQ?si=Aat2kHzIWrrrJ1Nj" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe><script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12436276-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-hashtags="horror">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script></p><script data-ad-client="ca-pub-3302834381937327" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script></span>BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5110147752122772426.post-27956899622233419052023-10-30T10:22:00.006-07:002023-10-30T10:24:21.984-07:00When Evil Lurks (2023)<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-weight: bold;">OCTOBER 27, 2023</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">GENRE: <a href="https://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Possession" target="_blank">POSSESSION</a><br>SOURCE: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/When-Evil-Lurks-Ezequiel-Rodr%25C3%25ADguez/dp/B0B6T7Y2XF?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=57e6e116676dbca45084ae25e8378be4&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">STREAMING (SHUDDER)</a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
For those not in Los Angeles, our annual Beyond Fest is jam-packed with great, "must-see" events, with a healthy mix of new stuff making the festival rounds, world premieres, and repertory offerings (for the latter, this year gave us the unveiling of the long-in-the-works 4K remaster of <i>The Abyss</i> director's cut, with James Cameron on hand for Q&A - just an example). Perhaps needless to say, tickets for the screenings tend to sell out fast, and you have to fight hard (read: hit refresh a lot) to get to that magical checkout screen, but in one of the many ironies that make up my life, I managed to get a ticket for <i><b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/When-Evil-Lurks-Ezequiel-Rodr%25C3%25ADguez/dp/B0B6T7Y2XF?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=57e6e116676dbca45084ae25e8378be4&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">When Evil Lurks</a></b></i> (Spanish: <i>Cuando acecha la maldad</i>) only to not be able to use it due to a scheduling conflict. And then I couldn't make any of its standard showings when it opened in theaters two weeks ago for a limited run prior to its Shudder debut, so alas I had to watch at home, defeated.</p><span id="fullpost"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Not that it's a tour de force for the senses kind of thing you need to see in theaters, but I just prefer to see films for the first time that way, something that only got worse during the pandemic when I was forced to settle for the drive-in and all its distractions (cars arriving late, various environmental issues like helicopters or nearby traffic, horribly dim screens) for over a year whenever seeing anything new. I can leave my phone in the other room and wait until I have the house to myself (save for the cats), but I still can't have a distraction-free screening at home the way I can in a theater, and while that might be fine for some goofy comedy or even an action flick, a dark supernatural horror film like this can't quite have the same hold on me at home the way it could have in a theater with a respectful crowd (which Beyond Fest ones usually are).</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
I say all of this as a sort of "grain of salt" explanation, because I can't help but wonder if I would have been as blown away by the film as folks who saw it on the big screen. It's good, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't anything extraordinary either. I suspect two moments in particular (both involving children) have elevated its rep, because of the "rule" that kids don't die in movies, but I mean... they do? We've all rewatched some/all of the <i>Halloween</i> movies recently, and a few young'ns have met grisly fates in those (Buddy in <i>Halloween 3</i>, Bumpy in the 2018 one, plus Billy is nearly killed in <i>H5</i> - hmm, maybe don't have a B___Y name if you want to survive Haddonfield?). And <i>Quiet Place</i> kicked things off with the death of their kid, and that was PG-13. Sure, it's not a regular occurrence, but while those events are good shock moments here (well one is, the other is off-screen but has an unsettling aftermath), they're not exactly breaking any new ground either. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Outside of those two brief highlights, what you have is a darker take on Mike Mendez' <i>Don't Kill It</i>, where a demon is possessing folks (or animals) but if you kill the host it will just jump into another. A "Cleaner" can exorcise the demon properly, but what kicks the whole plot off is our hero Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez, who's got a real Tom Jane vibe that I dug) finding the body of one such exorcist on his land, and they can't find another and the authorities won't help. But it's not that they don't believe him; one of the more interesting things about the movie (albeit not fully explored) is that possessed folks (referred to as "Rottens") are kind of known throughout the area and the higherups just basically shrug it off and consider it something we just have to live with and hope it doesn't affect them directly. I don't know if it was definitely the case, but I read it as a low-key jab at how certain countries (cough, America, cough) ultimately dealt with Covid, and I laud director Demián Rugna for it.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
(Also, they specifically say guns are no way to solve the problem, and everyone who uses one in the movie is met with a horrible fate, so that amused me greatly and dded to the "sigh, Americans" vibe.)</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Another thing Rugna does that I liked was that it kept switching gears. The first 20 minutes or so all take place on Pedro and the neighbor's property, making it seem like a contained, isolated thriller that will be a slow burn kind of thing. But then after something spoiler-y happens, Pedro and his brother get more proactive, going into the nearby suburbs to rescue their mom and also Pedro's estranged family (his ex wife who has since remarried, his two sons with her, plus the boys' half sister and her dad), and things kick up a notch, as an outbreak of sorts occurs and sends Pedro running/driving all around the area trying to keep everyone safe as the possession jumping gets out of control. And then the third act revolves around a new character with some answers, plus two new locations to boot. It gives the plotting a bit of a random jumpiness, but at least you're never quite sure how things are going to play out, who is safe, etc. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
One thing I didn't like isn't the movie's fault though - the subtitle work (the movie is in Spanish) is garbage. The translation is done by someone who was seemingly just going word for word and not always with the correct verb tense, so the longer a line is, the more it tends to be "off" and making you work a little harder to suss out the exact meaning, which is a needless distraction and could be avoided by simply having done the work correctly. I know AI is being used for this sort of job nowadays, and it wouldn't surprise me if it was to blame, but either way we deserve better. This also leaves a crucial bit of backstory involving Pedro's character (and specifically why his ex-wife has full custody of their children) maddeningly unclear, as it seems like it's supposed to be something the audience has to put together as opposed to being spelled out, but that's harder when the translated lines are also incomplete. I am curious if they had a better version for its theatrical showings; they're not burned into the image (and as always with Shudder, they just run on the bottom of the screen even when the credits are there, so you get to squint trying to separate a line of dialogue from the name of the casting director too!) so it's possible they're different.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
But other than that, it's an impressively dark possession tale, one that thankfully avoids most of the tropes of these kind of movies (the exorcist is dead right from the start! The police believe it's happening but just don't care!) and has a bit of a mean streak to it that you don't see all that much. I don't know if it's the gamechanger it was made out to be by fest crowds, and I am baffled by the publicity of a "perfect Halloween movie" since it's just dark and hopeless and that doesn't fit the Halloween vibe to me at all (it's a fun holiday and there's nothing fun here?), but a good movie is a good movie, and it's always nice to get one of those. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
What say you?</p><p><iframe width="400" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YrTnV6gNzno?si=z5RuarTkUorKOwsi" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe><script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12436276-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-hashtags="horror">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script></p><script data-ad-client="ca-pub-3302834381937327" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script></span>BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5110147752122772426.post-51104590897439082852023-10-13T11:09:00.004-07:002023-10-13T11:09:51.199-07:00The Seeding (2023)<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-weight: bold;">OCTOBER 8, 2023</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">GENRE: <a href="http://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Survival" target="_blank">SURVIVAL</a><br>SOURCE: <a href="https://beyondfest.com/" target="_blank">THEATRICAL (BEYOND FEST SCREENING)</a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Sometimes I have the wrong idea of what a movie is about, but <i><b>The Seeding</b> </i>was the first time I also had the wrong idea of where it took place. I THOUGHT it was a movie about a couple who run afoul of feral children in the Australian outback, but at least I was somewhat close on the plot (there are feral children, but the plot isn’t a <i>Wolf Creek</i> meets <i>Them</i> kind of thing). Turns out the movie was shot in Utah, and presumably just takes place there too since the main character is from Los Angeles, but I spent the entire thing thinking he was in <i>Wake in Fright</i> territory as opposed to somewhere that’s only like a 90 minute flight away. I think it’s safe to assume that I would do pretty miserably if I was ever on <i>Carmen Sandiego</i>.</p><span id="fullpost"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Anyway, the movie is about a guy with the very silly name of Wyndham Stone, who is NOT the evil CEO in an ‘80s action movie but a photographer who is out in the desert to get a shot of a perfect eclipse (unlike the versions I always see, where it’s just covering like 1/4 at most of the sun). On his way back to his car he sees a kid who says he can’t find his parents, and tries to help him despite the kid leading him the opposite way of his car (which is on the road that could take them to someone who’d be able to help better than a rando guy who doesn’t even live there – Wyndham’s a bit of a dummy). After a while he gets sick of the kid seemingly leading him further and further away, so he tries to go back to his car, but gets lost as it’s now too dark to see his way. He then descends a very long rope ladder down into a canyon that has a house, and thinks nothing of how peculiar that is (this seemed less weird to me when I thought it was the Outback. Now that I know it’s just Utah, I think the guy is even dumber than I already did).</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Living in the house is Alina, a quiet woman who seemingly opted for a life of isolation, but happily offers him food and a place to stay. The next morning Wyndham heads outside to presumably climb back up and find his car now that the sun is on his side again, but the ladder is gone. He tries to climb out, but falls and hurts his leg, and after Alina patches him up a bit, he sees some teens above who offer to help. Naturally, him being an idiot and a jerk, he not only secures himself to a rope they drop (without asking them to just put the ladder down) but starts screaming at them when they pull a little too hard and shake him up a bit. At this point our man finally catches up to the audience and realize he’s been trapped down there on purpose, and it only takes a moment of thinking about the title to know what that purpose might be.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Perhaps needless to say, this is a “slow burn” horror; it’s coming from Magnet but it’s very much like an A24 type of movie, so your mileage will of course vary depending on how patient you are with such fare. There isn’t much in the way of violence (two would-be helpers are dispatched off-screen) and he remains in the canyon for the rest of the movie. I thought for sure there’d be a sequence of him escaping and being chased down/returned, but nope – he tries to climb the rocks out but doesn’t make it that far, and the only other time his feet leave the ground is when he’s being tricked by the kids. And since he’s such a jerk it’s hard to really care if he gets out anyway, so you’re better off tracking Alina and wondering what her deal is. Scattered clues more or less tell us she’s been down there her entire life, without any entertainment or connection to the outside world, which is scarier than anything in the movie. At one point Wyndham shows her his camera so she can see the photos of the eclipse, and accidentally swipes to an older video that has a snippet of a hiphop song, and it’s obvious that she’s never actually heard music before, asking him to replay the brief clip over and over.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Things finally get a little more exciting in the third act, as we finally get our answer re: “Is Alina good or bad?” and events spiral out from there. The movie takes place over a surprising amount of time (passage is depicted by title screens saying what Moon is in the sky, and “Harvest Moon” comes up twice), allowing Wyndham’s mental state to deteriorate to the point of seeming feral himself, and that’s an interesting approach for what is at its core a survival horror movie, but I couldn’t help but feel a little restless at times, wishing the movie would kick into higher gear sooner (and then getting higher than it ever did). You know how in <i>Talk To Me</i> (spoiler) the last scene shows us how the protagonist eventually became one of the anonymous ghosts that people like her were conjuring up for their own amusement? It would have been interesting to go all the way and have Wyndham fully transform into one of the scary people kidnapping random tourists in the middle of the <del>Outback</del> Utah desert, but the movie doesn’t take things that far. The ending is pretty good as is, but it’s also like “Well, yeah, that’s exactly where I thought this would go.”</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
So I dunno. It’s well made and the actors are solid, and I liked how it flirted with folk horror a bit, but there’s not enough meat on the bones for a 90 minute movie – even those aforementioned “moon cards” seem to just be padding the runtime, playing out over a shot of some vegetables for a far longer time than it takes to read them. And the protagonist’s idiocy and prickly behavior keeps him from being very compelling (I don’t have to love the main character, but I should be invested in what they’re doing either way), so by the time Alina’s character came into focus I started wishing the movie was told from her perspective all along (doesn’t hurt that she gets the best line, though I can’t say it without spoiling things. It involves the C word though!). If you absolutely hate men you’ll probably be a little warmer on it, since it basically boils down to how useless we are, but there are ways to do that while remaining more engaging throughout instead of in spurts.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
What say you?</p><p><script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12436276-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-hashtags="horror">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script></p><script data-ad-client="ca-pub-3302834381937327" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script></span>BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5110147752122772426.post-63665978676133961762023-10-11T08:52:00.006-07:002023-10-11T08:56:06.578-07:00The Exorcist: Believer (2023)<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-weight: bold;">OCTOBER 6, 2023</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">GENRE: <a href="http://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Possession" target="_blank">POSSESSION</a>, <a href="http://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Religious" target="_blank">RELIGIOUS</a><br>SOURCE: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Exorcist-Believer-Leslie-Odom-Jr/dp/B0CJJGYDQ2?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=55e0f0a604376276cab392cd1a5b46e6&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)</a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
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 <i>Halloween</i> films, and if <i>The Exorcist</i> had maybe a few ripoffs but no direct sequels or fifty continued years of would-be successors, <i><b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Exorcist-Believer-Leslie-Odom-Jr/dp/B0CJJGYDQ2?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=55e0f0a604376276cab392cd1a5b46e6&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">The Exorcist: Believer</a></b></i> 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-<i>Saw</i> sequel ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. And also the sky is blue.</p><span id="fullpost"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
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”?) <i>Halloween</i> 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 <i>All The Real Girls</i> and <i>George Washington</i> making a horror debut with an <i>Exorcist</i> sequel, much like the intrigue he was offered in 2017 when they announced he would be making a new <i>Halloween</i> (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 <i>Exorcist</i> sequel, just as Friedkin himself was, post-<i>French Connection</i>, 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 <i>Believer</i> 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 <i>Halloween</i> 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 <i>Exorcist</i> sequel? Forget it.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
(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.)</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
But even Friedkin (or William Peter Blatty, who made the mostly good <i>Exorcist III</i>) 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 <i>Evil Dead, Devil</i>, and even <i>Paranormal Activity</i> 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 <i>Exorcist</i> 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 <i>Exorcist III</i>’s relatively good reputation is because Blatty was involved and thus got a pass. It’s not exactly a masterpiece either).</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
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?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
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 <i>Blade Runner 2049</i>, 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.”</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
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.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
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. <i>The Exorcist</i> 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 <i>Exorcist</i> 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.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
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 <i>E3</i>’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 <i>Exorcist 6</i>; 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.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
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 <i>Exorcist</i> sequel with one of the actors!</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
What say you?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
* 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 <i>Halloweens</i>, there’s nothing here that <i>rewrites</i> any of the other sequels’ events – they’re just not mentioned.</p><p><iframe width="400" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PIxpPMyGcpU?si=7C1S56FRv2kFWVwd" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe><script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12436276-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-hashtags="horror">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script></p><script data-ad-client="ca-pub-3302834381937327" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script></span>BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5110147752122772426.post-2006501312950629772023-10-06T10:24:00.005-07:002023-10-06T10:38:48.935-07:00Totally Killer (2023)<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-weight: bold;">OCTOBER 4, 2023</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">GENRE: <a href="http://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Comedic" target="_blank">COMEDIC</a>, <a href="http://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Slasher" target="_blank">SLASHER</a><br>SOURCE: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Totally-Killer-Kiernan-Shipka/dp/B0CG7JCWP4?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=b0f1493a27da19e1a81f41c968039090&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">THEATRICAL (BEYOND FEST SCREENING)</a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
After <i>Scream</i>, there was some chatter that there could never be a straight slasher again, because how can a filmmaker go through those motions after they’ve all been skewered so smartly (in a film that managed to have more suspense than most of those straightforward ones ever did, to boot)? Luckily folks found a way, with the likes of <i>Cold Prey</i> (2006) and at least the first of the new <i>Halloween</i> trilogy proving it could still be done and even win over fans who could recite Kevin Williamson’s script by heart. But there’s also been a number of “fun” slasher films that owe a debt to Wes Craven's classic, and in 2017 Blumhouse hit on a goldmine with <i>Happy Death Day</i>, which essentially took the plot of a high concept comedy (<i>Groundhog Day</i>) and added a slasher plot into it. And some of the same team gave us <i>Freaky</i> (pitched as “Freaky Friday the 13th”) plus the <i>Happy Death Day</i> sequel which leaned even more into ‘80s comedy shenanigans, proving there was room to explore in the sub-subgenre. So now we have <i><b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Totally-Killer-Kiernan-Shipka/dp/B0CG7JCWP4?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=b0f1493a27da19e1a81f41c968039090&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">Totally Killer</a></b></i>, which is essentially <i>Back to the Future</i>, but instead of Biff we have a masked slasher threatening our hero’s existence.</p><span id="fullpost"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Just as <i>Happy Death Day</i> acknowledged <i>Groundhog Day</i> in dialogue, Jamie (Kiernan Shipka) is able to use <i>Back to the Future</i> as a quick explanation when she time travels back to 1987 from 2023 (the movie was shot in 2022, so I assume it was supposed to be a more even 35 years, but on-screen graphics say 2023 - *shrug*), as <i>BTTF</i> had been out for two years by that point*. In fact, shorthand is kind of a crutch in the film, as even the time travel plot is introduced as casually as one might introduce someone trying out a new restaurant – Jamie’s bestie is making a time travel device for the school science fair (alongside things like a baking soda volcano no less) and no one really seems alarmed or incredulous about it. And it works! And then Jamie finds the friend’s mom (a science geek who gave her the time travel idea in the first place), who quickly accepts the idea that this young woman is her future daughter’s best friend and needs her help. It’s a bit of an issue for all these high concept slashers, because we’ve all seen the originals (and slashers) and thus are just kind of waiting for both ideas to come to the forefront of the narrative, so they can’t spend too much time prior to the big event and thus sort of have to quickly race through all the setup (something the OGs didn’t – Marty McFly could pace himself a bit, since he was the first). But at the same time, if you’re sitting down for a time travel movie in the first place, it’s probably safe to assume you’re not too much of a stickler for real world logic, so it shouldn’t be too much of an issue that they're basically racing through/past any questions you might have.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Those who sat down for the horror part of this horror comedy might be harder to win over, though. Slasher fans may be a bit dismayed to hear that the balance is shifted more toward racking up laughs than a body count despite the R rating (the PG-13 <i>Happy Death Day</i> found a more even balance), but the kills are on par with something like <i>Scream</i> when they occur, and one is downright brutal as the actress in question really sells her realization that she’s about to die (it gave me flashbacks to poor Rob's "He's killing me!" in <i>F13 4</i>). The resolution of the whodunit mystery isn’t all that surprising either, but unlike <i>Happy Death Day 2U</i> it’s at least something ingrained into the narrative as opposed to something they just sort of threw in because they felt they had to, and Jamie’s appearance in the 1987 timeline throws a wrench into the original order of deaths, so even though we’re told at the beginning who died and when, it gets mixed up a bit to allow for a little more intrigue it might have had otherwise. Long story short, the slasher element may not be as prominent as one might hope, but it’s treated with some thought when it’s in the spotlight. Not sure I love the mask though; it’s a little too far into the goofy look (again, something <i>Happy Death Day </i>triggered), to the extent that he basically just looks like Beavis with an earring.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
But I sure did laugh a lot. First off it’s got Randall Park in a bit role, and that guy never fails to make me cackle with glee. He’s the sheriff in 1987 who (naturally) disbelieves Jamie’s story that she’s time traveled and wants to stop some murders before they happen, and every time he waves her off he finds a way to make it hilarious (his response to Jamie's "DNA evidence" nearly left me on the floor laughing so hard). The script also gets a lot of mileage about how Jamie is very much a product of a more accepting/acceptable 2023 environment and is frequently disgusted/stunned by how casual and “unsafe” the 1980s were, perfectly encapsulated when realizes she has to enroll at the school to get close to the victims (and find the killer) and starts to come up with an elaborate backstory only for the secretary in the school office to not care at all and just hand her a schedule. And it’s a nice change of pace for her to discover her mom was kind of a B in high school; there’s obviously some surface similarities to <i>The Final Girls</i> in the plot, but by focusing on the humor and Jamie’s increasing exasperation that her mom could probably use a brush with death to stop being such a jerk, it kept comparisons at bay. Sure, maybe it didn’t have anything as emotional as the mom’s dance in the rain in that film, but I was laughing too often to notice.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
It also does something that I don’t think I’ve seen in any time travel movie (spoiler ahead), which is that when our hero returns to her own timeline, her friend’s mom gives her a notebook of all the things that she inadvertently changed in 1987 that present day her should know already (but doesn’t, because time travel). It of course just highlights the very reason that time travel is such an impossibility (anything you change would prevent your own existence), but it’s still a cute idea when (again) you’re just going along with the ride and accepting the silly idea in the first place. Like most people I enjoy <i>Back to the Future</i> a lot, but every time I watch I always wonder about the Marty from the day before, the one who bought the truck and such – where did that version go? Our Marty (Marty #1) goes back in time, changes things, and sets his parents on a different life path, one in which they have a son named Marty (Marty #2) who buys a truck that Biff cleans for him, right? So where does that Marty go when Marty #1 returns? Marty #1 didn’t inherit his memories and life experiences, as he was confused by all of them, so there’s a Marty with those memories/experience who just, what? Disappeared? So this idea kind of meets us halfway on the paradox, which I can respect. I mean, the only time travel movie that holds up to scrutiny with this sort of thing is <i>Primer</i>, which is damn near impossible to follow, so if you have to choose one over the other, I think going with “sloppy fun” over “requires flow charts to follow along” is the right way to go.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
So, yeah: it’s a lot of fun as long as you a. aren’t the type to get too hung up on time travel’s inherent flaws from a narrative perspective (as Park says, “they never make sense”) and b. aren’t hoping it will replace <i>Halloween</i> or <i>Friday the 13th</i> as your favorite slasher movie of all time. Both elements are there to serve a fun comedy about how the “awesome” 80s were filled with a shocking lack of concern for people’s wellbeing (the mother with the carful of smoke - *chef’s kiss*) and horrible attitudes that we’ve made great strides to change (there’s a running gag about someone named “Fat Trish”, which Jamie keeps trying/failing to course correct to simply “Trish”). Sometimes it seems like it’s been cut down from a longer story (there’s a VERY minor subplot about Jamie’s grandmother that seems leftover from older drafts, for example), but one can’t fault this sort of movie for just trying to get to the fun stuff as economically as possible, and Shipka is one of those performers who is always game for whatever she's being asked to do, so that goes a long way into making it easier to just go with it. And there’s a gag I won’t spoil here, involving an upcoming test, that was both hilarious AND a sort of “Wait, why has no one ever made that joke before in one of these things?” moment that earned my full appreciation, so: well done! I'm glad I got to see it with a theatrical crowd (thank you Beyond Fest) before it premieres on Amazon Prime; that makes two crowd pleasing slashers in a row that were inexplicably given streaming only releases (last year's Sick being the other) but a prime slot at Beyond for those of us who understand how much more fun these things are on the big screen.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
What say you?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
*They really should have just said it was 1988, because they also watch a VHS of <i>Robocop</i>, which was barely out of theaters at the time the movie takes place! To the IMDB anachronism page!</p><p><iframe width="400" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vNm3VPPKEQI?si=CDvm0gJi1BbSNgEZ" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe><script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12436276-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-hashtags="horror">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script></p><script data-ad-client="ca-pub-3302834381937327" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script></span>BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5110147752122772426.post-57628212318904229412023-10-06T09:53:00.006-07:002023-10-06T09:54:09.311-07:00FTP: The Vault of Horror (1973)<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-weight: bold;">OCTOBER 3, 2023</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">GENRE: <a href="http://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Anthology" target="_blank">ANTHOLOGY</a><br>SOURCE: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Tales-Crypt-Vault-Horror-Blu-ray/dp/B00LMBURDG?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=dba277ad82bb4f095c20aa60aa2f19a6&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)</a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
I could have sworn I actually saw <i><b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Tales-Crypt-Vault-Horror-Blu-ray/dp/B00LMBURDG?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=dba277ad82bb4f095c20aa60aa2f19a6&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">The Vault of Horror</a></b></i> before, but I apparently just got it mixed up with the half dozen other early ‘70s horror anthologies, which explains why I always get <i>Vault</i> questions wrong at horror trivia. To be fair even when I started watching it it seemed like I had already seen it, because the setup was so similar to <i>Tales From The Crypt</i>’s, with a bunch of dudes (well, <i>Crypt</i> had Joan Collins among them) finding themselves grouped together under mysterious circumstances and proceeding to tell their individual stories about how they might have gotten there. I mean it's technically a sequel as it's from the same producers and based on the same old comic series, so I can't fault it for taking a "if it ain't broke..." approach.</p><span id="fullpost"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Luckily I found it to be just as enjoyable as <i>Tales</i>, so at least it’s worthy of the name. As I’ve said in the past, I tend to like few anthology films as a whole; the hit or miss ratio inherent to such things makes them hard for me to recommend when all is said and done, making me wish you could just extract a segment (say, "The Raft" from <i>Creepshow II</i>) and not deal with the rest. This also makes me less likely to revisit any of them, though since <i>Vault</i> is packaged together with <i>Tales</i> (via Scream Factory) I took another look at that one, and since it had been nearly 16 years since I last saw it (holy crap I’ve been here for a long time) it was basically like a first time watch, and I even enjoyed the story I didn’t like as much the first time around.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
As for <i>Vault</i>, the protagonists are even bigger jerks than the ones in <i>Tales</i>, which at least had the good sense to introduce a few sympathetic characters (Peter Cushing’s, for example) to mix along with them. Here the closest we get to a decent person ends up murdering her jerk husband and cutting his corpse into pieces which she then stores in a bunch of labeled jars – hardly a role model. But I was in the right mood for all the crass behavior, so I had a good time cackling at how reprehensible these people were and then cheering for their demises; a movie with no heroes but plenty of crowd-pleasing moments. The first story exemplifies this attitude the best; it’s a pretty short/simple tale of a guy who wants to find his sister regarding the family inheritance, but not to split it – he kills her so he can have it all (he also kills the PI who tracked her down). Then he treats himself to a celebratory dinner, only to discover everyone in the restaurant is a vampire, all of whom proceed to place a valve in his neck and use him as a blood keg. And that’s it! I love it.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
The next one is the one I mentioned, where the lady kills her husband – but he had it coming, as he was an insufferable ass who marries this younger woman only to make her miserable by being so obsessively neat and tidy, screaming at her for things like not buying more tomato sauce even though he has a (complicated) checkmark system in place to ensure that things are replaced when used. I was delighted by this one too, but it also made me feel a bit bad, because I’ve definitely scowled at my wife for not telling me we were out of this or that. Guess I won’t ever do that again, so thanks for setting me straight, fifty year old horror movie. (Still, I’m glad she didn’t watch it with me and point it out, as I’d feel worse!)</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
The next one was the seemingly obligatory weak link, about a jerk magician and his jerk wife going out of their way to show the audience how a rival magician was pulling off his tricks, then killing the man’s daughter in order to steal a “magic rope” trick that appeared to be the real deal. It felt drawn out compared to the others, and the ending was both abrupt and puzzling (a dead character resurfaces with no explanation – magic, I guess?). And the next one wasn’t exactly a slam dunk either, but was at least pretty short, involving a guy being buried alive as part of a scam only for his partner to leave him there to keep all the money. There’s another twist after that, resulting in what’s probably the most comical of the five stories, but it’s too slight to really register as a highlight.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
The final one is pretty great though, focusing on an artist who has been told by the critics and dealers that he’s no good, only to discover that they were lying to him in order to sell his (apparently good!) paintings at high prices and not tell him about it. So he strikes a deal with a voodoo doctor that allows him to paint someone, then do something to the painting that will happen in reality to the person depicted in the painting (so if he paints a guy and then lights the painting on fire, the guy will be suddenly immolated). This leads to some amusing death scenes and a howler of an ending, when the guy leaves his own self-portrait out in the open (he can’t put it away or else he feels like he’s suffocating) and it’s destroyed by paint thinner, heh.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Alas, the disc has no real extras (same for Tales) except for an alternate version of the movie which, best I can tell, censors the gory ending of the vampire restaurant story, and also presents it at a different aspect ratio (it was shot open matte, so while the 1.78 image is the one preferred by the filmmakers, the open one actually has more information at the top and bottom). For reasons I can’t discern, one disc has <i>Tales</i> and <i>Vault</i>, with the other version of <i>Vault</i> on a second disc? Why not put both Vault versions together on one disc for easier comparison? Bizarre decision. But that’s it beyond trailers; no historian commentaries or anything like that, which is a shame as it was an interesting trend in the early ‘70s that basically died out, something a historian could have gone over in detail along with pointing out the original Gaines comics the stories came from and such. Oh well.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
But hey, it’s the best time of the year for these sort of movies, as they’re fun but fiendish, and also if you’re like me and find yourself too busy to watch too many movies at home, it’s certainly easier to break up your viewing into chunks with an anthology than it is for a traditional feature. So it’s a bad "Pile" movie, because I’m going to keep it, but I’m glad I finally saw <i>Vault</i> (it’s been in said pile for several years, again because I thought I had seen it already and therefore it would be a rewatch) and gave <i>Tales</i> a second look. Plus, having recently seen an anthology where the segments were all over the place with regards to tone and quality, it was nice to watch one with a little more cohesion.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
What say you?</p><p><iframe width="400" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Qddgkeh51jo?si=R-jyvK-9J2GBeyeP" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe><script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12436276-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-hashtags="horror">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script></p><script data-ad-client="ca-pub-3302834381937327" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script></span>BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5110147752122772426.post-22670217737630516352023-10-06T09:33:00.004-07:002023-10-06T09:33:31.917-07:00A Haunting in Venice (2023)<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-weight: bold;">SEPTEMBER 28, 2023</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">GENRE: <a href="http://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Ghost" target="_blank">GHOST</a> (?), <a href="http://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Thriller" target="_blank">THRILLER</a><br>SOURCE: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Haunting-Venice-Movie-Tie-Mysteries/dp/0063342979?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=145921293dfc771f271d75394c2de1ce&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)</a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
I vaguely knew that Kenneth Branagh was going to make a third in his series of Hercules Poirot movies, all adapted from Agatha Christie’s novels, but I didn’t realize he had already completed it until I saw a trailer one day for what seemed like a <i>Conjuring</i> type of movie about a séance gone wrong with Michelle Yeoh and Tina Fey, only for Branagh and his telltale mustache to show up near the end of the spot, the newest entry in this otherwise horror-free series. And even then I was thinking "Well it's just a weirdly cut trailer for a mystery" only for the title <i><b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Haunting-Venice-Movie-Tie-Mysteries/dp/0063342979?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=145921293dfc771f271d75394c2de1ce&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">A Haunting in Venice</a></b></i> to appear, making it quite clear this was a ghost story. I was so delighted at the reveal! Not too many series can get away with that; it’s not like you’re ever going to see a trailer showcasing a moody Channing Tatum being menaced by vengeful ghosts only for Jonah Hill to pop up and then show <i>23 Jump Street</i> in big blocky text.</p><span id="fullpost"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
(I’d be fine with that, by the way.)</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Anyway, this time around Poirot is retired, but his old pal Ariadne Oliver (Fey, clearly enjoying herself with her period clothing and Hawks-ian quick talk) has roped him into helping her prove that a local psychic (Yeoh) is a fraud after failing to do so on her own. Her pitch is that only the great Poirot can figure this out, and if not, then they have to admit Yeoh is the real deal and ghosts are real. Either way she would have herself a basis for a new book, as after a lengthy successful run of novels based on Poirot’s previous adventures, her last few have flopped (presumably because with Poirot retired she had to come up with her own ideas). It’s a sort of autobiographical touch on Christie’s part, as Christie herself got sick of Poirot but due to his popularity kept him around; it kind of reminded me of how George Romero found himself making so many <i>Dead</i> movies in succession at the end of his career (and life, as it turned out) because he couldn’t get money to do anything else. It must be so rewarding to be an artist!</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
So Poirot goes to the séance, and quickly figures out some of the tricks, but after (spoiler!) Yeoh is seemingly murdered, he locks everyone inside the house (not too hard with a raging storm outside making the Venice waterways constantly thrashing against the house anyway) and enlists Oliver to interview everyone and figure out who the culprit is. But he keeps being spooked; he hears a child singing a song but no one else can, and later he talks to who he thinks is a little girl who stayed behind at the Halloween party that was held at the house prior to the séance (indeed, the original novel was titled <i>Hallowe’en Party</i>* but then finds a photo of the girl and realizes she’s the long-dead daughter of the current owner (Kelly Reilly). Spooooooky!</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Basically the movie goes back and forth throughout its runtime: Poirot and Oliver talk to one of the suspects, they make it pretty clear how they couldn’t possibly be the murderer while also opening up possibilities for one of the others to be the surefire culprit, and then Poirot hears/sees a spooky thing and starts wondering if his whole “no such thing as ghosts” worldview is correct. So it’s kind of talky, and… well I don’t want to spoil things for people who have never seen a movie before, but (spoiler, I guess?) it’s kind of a foregone conclusion that Branagh isn’t going to just up and introduce legit supernatural elements into his classy mystery series, so you know there’s eventually going to be a plausible explanation for everything, but that didn’t bug me. It was kind of an Old Dark House movie in that way, as those pretty much always explained away their seeming ghosts and goblins as parlor tricks, but didn’t make them any less fun.
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
And the real draw is seeing him figure out the mystery, and unlike some of Christie’s other novels (like <i>And Then There Were None</i>) it’s not impossible to do so. That said, I looked at a synopsis for her book (I haven’t read this one myself) and it seemed Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green barely used the original story, borrowing only a couple of character names (sometimes to odd effect; Yeoh’s character of Joyce Reynolds is a 13 year old girl in the novel) and the Halloween night setting. It also didn’t have the séance or any supernatural concepts, so no wonder they changed the title too while they were at it since it’s a pretty lousy adaptation if still considered one at all. But that’s fine; the central mystery of “Who killed Joyce?” paves the way to other mysteries involving blackmail, a secret alliance between two characters, and (again, minor spoiler) the real cause of the so-called ghosts Poirot is seeing, so you’re constantly treated to reveals as opposed to a simple “That person killed her, the end” kind of third act. Even when you think all the culprits have been identified, Poirot reveals he’s figured out another mystery that we didn’t even realize was happening! It’s delightful. Maybe not as cinematically satisfying as watching a dozen A-listers stabbing the hell out of Johnny Depp, but perfectly enjoyable all the same.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
It is weird that he went so far off book though considering how faithful the previous two entries <i>(Orient Express</i> and <i>Death on the Nile</i>) were, at least with regards to the mystery (Branagh’s interpretation of Poirot himself was the biggest alteration), but maybe after two movies where he ended up casting people that got canceled in the interim (Depp in the first, Armie Hammer in the second) maybe he thought he was cursed and had to do something drastic to avoid it happening again. Luckily for him and all of us, Jamie Dornan hasn’t assaulted anyone or said anything racist, so phew! (I love Dornan for the record; if you haven’t seen<i> Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar</i> yet, please fix that.). It’s also a smaller seeming film than those; the whole “all-star cast” approach has been seriously reduced (I’ve mentioned the five big names; the other half dozen or so characters are played by folks you might only vaguely recognize at best – nothing against their acting talent of course, just their fame level) and the majority of the movie takes place in a house as opposed to a lavish train or boat. I wonder if he got a budget from the studio first and then decided which book to use? I mean to be fair, <i>Nile</i> lost money so he’s lucky he got another one at all, but it almost seems like the approach was designed to set itself apart from the others entirely.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
So it can be a little overly talky and will likely let down huge fans of the first two films since the lavishness and glamor have been so scaled down, but ‘tis the season and all, so if you just want a proper Old Dark House kind of movie with modern production value, it’s a solid choice. It’s the sort of thing I can see myself putting on some October (or September; I start early) night in a year or two with a cup of cocoa and a blanket, dozing off halfway through with a tiny smile on my face. I realize that I end up watching a lot of the same movies every spooky season: the Vincent Price stuff, <i>Night of the Living Dead</i>, the Amicus anthologies… nothing too loud since I watch them late at night, nothing too gruesome as the intent is to lull me to sleep with its cozy familiarity. That limits how many newer films I can add to that collection; putting on a <i>Saw</i> sequel or even one of the more recent <i>Halloween</i> films doesn’t quite have the same charm, and besides I can see that sort of thing in theaters (indeed, tomorrow I’m seeing <i>Saw X</i>!). For when I just want to relax at the end of the day with seasonally appropriate repeat viewings, this is the sort of movie that fits that odd little niche, and it’s always nice to have another.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
What say you?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
* The new title allows them to do another creepy version of Poirot if this one’s successful enough. <i>A Haunting in Venice 2: Ghosts of Genoa</i>, perhaps?)</p><iframe width="400" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oRCKIP5paEU?si=8ifN_jr5iKrrMwzF" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe><p><script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12436276-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-hashtags="horror">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script></p><script data-ad-client="ca-pub-3302834381937327" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script></span>BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5110147752122772426.post-83440038572491908162023-10-02T15:04:00.002-07:002023-10-02T15:04:37.446-07:00Saw X (2023)<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-weight: bold;">SEPTEMBER 29, 2023</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">GENRE: <a href="http://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Survival" target="_blank">SURVIVAL</a><br>SOURCE: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/SAW-X-Tobin-Bell/dp/B0CH9DLKQ7?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=34a05d302f2a8edd1e901b59851b129f&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)</a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Let's get the most important thing out of the way first: the red dungeon logo is back! Lionsgate had phased it out in the early '10s, and since they basically stopped making horror movies it wasn't really an issue, but many fans (including me) were bummed that they didn't resurrect it for <i>Jigsaw</i> or <i>Spiral</i>. But this time they listened, and it really did go a long way into making <i><b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/SAW-X-Tobin-Bell/dp/B0CH9DLKQ7?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=34a05d302f2a8edd1e901b59851b129f&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">Saw X</a></b></i> feel like we were back in familiar territory after those aforementioned films went so far out of their way to welcome newcomers instead of catering to the hardcores.</p><span id="fullpost"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
It's ironic, then, that this movie also does that, but in a way that is still satisfying to the <i>Saw</i> faithful in ways those two were not. Once again they have designed a film for people who may have given up on the series along the way, but instead of making it a twist (<i>Jigsaw</i>) or just going off in a completely unrelated story that takes place in the same world (<i>Spiral</i>), this one just presents itself as an entry that takes place in between <i>Saw I</i> and <i>II</i>, something that's obvious right off the bat. If memory serves, <i>Saw II</i> took place six months after the first film, and at the beginning of <i>II</i> John "Jigsaw" Kramer is on an oxygen machine and needs help getting around, so anytime we see Kramer up and about, we know it's prior to that film. The only reason we know for sure this takes place after the first movie was given away in the movie's marketing, but treated as something of a reveal about forty minutes into this one, so if you haven't seen the trailers yet, you might want to steer clear if you want to preserve the surprise.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Still here? OK, so we know it's after <i>Saw I</i> because Amanda is shown to be helping John throughout this one, with her face healed up from her appearance in that one. This allows the film something we never really got before: extended scenes of John and Amanda talking, working as a unit, etc. In <i>Saw II</i> her being his accomplice was one of the twists, and of course in <i>Saw III</i> he was at death's door throughout, so it's only been a handful of flashbacks (in <i>III</i> and <i>VI</i>) that we've seen them together with all their facilities intact. And, again, they were flashbacks, so they were overshadowed by whatever was happening in the present day story. That's not the case here; even though it's a prequel story, it's ENTIRELY a prequel, without any present day scenes, no bookending or anything like that. For all intents and purposes, with the exception of "ruining" <i>Saw II</i>'s twist re: Amanda (and a post credits scene I'll mention later), you could just watch this one directly after the original and then keep going after there - it's basically <i>Saw 1.5</i>.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
It's also director Kevin Greutert's "revenge" of sorts for the untimely box office failure of <i>Saw VI</i>, which despite being universally agreed as one of the best entries, ended up being clobbered in theaters by both the reception of <i>Saw V</i> and the surprise powerhouse of <i>Paranormal Activity</i>. So it's nice to see this one getting healthy reviews AND box office, as once again the target is the healthcare industry. If you recall in <i>VI</i> (though this isn't necessary info to have beforehand, I should stress) John mentioned a doctor in Norway that had a radical treatment he wanted to try, only for his insurance to turn him down (hence why he went after the whole lot of them). This takes place, presumably, shortly thereafter, when John learns that the doctor's daughter Cecilia is also providing those rogue treatments, albeit in Mexico, and has an opening. John heads there, undergoes the surgery, feels optimistic, and then accidentally discovers that the whole thing was a sham, and he was just knocked out with anesthesia for a bit - they didn't even really cut into his head a bit to sell the ruse!</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
So naturally, he calls up Amanda and has her round up the doctor (Synnøve Macody Lund) and her accomplices, brings them to a fairly standard <i>Saw</i>-esque basement dungeon, and puts them through death traps. But he doesn't do this one at a time, or have them make their way through a building like the groups in <i>II</i> and <i>V</i> - they're all in one room the entire time, each locked into their own unique trap. So John and Amanda will talk for a bit, and then tell one of the four that their test is about to begin, at which point we get a traditional trap scene, and then the cycle repeats. There are some complications of course, primarily another victim of their scam who comes around wanting his money back but doesn't quite agree with Jigsaw's methods of refunding, but it's a refreshing twist to the formula, as most witnesses to trap scenes either have a good reason not to help (Jeff in <i>Saw III</i>) or have to inflict some kind of pain on themselves to do so (William in<i> VI</i>), but here they're helpless, chained to their own trap and rooting for each other to succeed as one getting free would presumably be able to help free the others or at least run for help.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
And it really works well! The traps are impressive, with only the mildest <i>deja vu</i> reminding us of others (namely VI) as they're all medically-charged in some way - a self surgery, a radiation wave set to "melt", etc. The story also remains suspenseful even with the prequel element weighing it down some (i.e. we know John and Amanda will succeed/survive), as some new sympathetic characters are worked into the mix and could theoretically survive even though we've never seen them again (this series can retcon anything, so they're never painted into a corner in that way). And Lund is a wonderful antagonist, as her accomplices are a mix of losers that were posing as healthcare practicioners, but she actually has the background and know-how for what she claims to be doing, so when John is explaining the traps to them, you can almost see her smile at times, impressed with the science behind them and also not really caring if any of them die because it's one less person to split John's payment with. This series has always had trouble coming up with worthy adversaries for Kramer, so it's nice to see one who (if she survives) could be on his level but (for once) not a potential accomplice.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
I guess at this point I should note it's a slower paced entry than the others; in fact it's the longest entry in the series but has the lowest body count (four, or five if you count the post-credits scene, which I'll get to soon, promise!). They even throw in a dream scene early on to provide the movie with some kind of <i>Saw</i> type moment in its first act, as it otherwise acts as a full on drama for the first half hour or so. Apart from the dream scene and a cutesy joke about what he does for a living ("You're sort of a life coach?" they ask, and he says "Something like that") there is nothing in that first chunk of the film to suggest this is anything but a drama about a cancer patient trying a new treatment, and Bell is clearly relishing having a chance to explore the character in ways we've only seen in brief flashbacks in the past. Telling a complete story, in sequence (the only flashbacks are the usual "here's footage from before now that you know something new" montages), is something the series has literally never done before, as they've all had two timelines or hefty uses of flashbacks (even Spiral), and it pays off in his performance. Shawnee Smith unfortunately doesn't get as much to do (and she's saddled with a hideous wig to help with her de-aging), mostly going through the same inner turmoil she had in <i>III</i>, but again, seeing her and John discuss matters as mentor/mentee (and a whiff of father and daughter) for more than a few seconds in a flashback is a welcome sight.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
It could have been a little tighter, though. For example, Amanda makes her grand reveal (the trailer shot) when she helps John kidnap Lund's character, but then we get flashbacks showing how she was the muscle behind the kidnapping of the three accomplices, and we see her pull the mask off for each one of those too. I mean, not for nothing, but she gets them all when they're isolated and then walks around without her mask in front of them for the entire movie, so why she even needed the pig mask in the first place is beyond me, but we certainly didn't need to spend another 90 seconds of the movie watching her do it over and over. Even the trap scenes themselves run a bit long, which has a weird (presumably unintentional) side effect, in that they kind of seem unfair at times. One victim actually does as they're asked with regards to the self mutilation, with another minute (!) to go to put the gory stuff in the device that will unlock their shackles, but the tubing that runs them together is just slow I guess? So they die anyway? It's one thing if they're slow and are "too late" because the clock runs out just before they finish mangling themselves, but to go through all the work (i.e. choosing to live) and then die because the trap was being sluggish seems cheap. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
And the post-credits scene (obvious spoilers here, so skip this paragraph if you haven't seen it yet) is one of those things that opens up other questions, and also seems to suggest another cheap move on John's part, as he's shown trapping another accomplice (the person who told him about the treatment) along with... Hoffman! Who we haven't seen since <i>Saw 3D</i> and is, in the current timeline, presumably still sitting in that bathroom. Neither of them are masked, so I guess they plan to just shoot the guy if he survives his trap, but being reminded of his other accomplices makes me wonder why, when going up against medical jerks, John didn't enlist Gordon and/or Logan to help out, as they'd presumably be better to have on hand to help with all these medically-centric traps than Amanda the heroin addict. And Hoffman's appearance is spoiled early, when John makes a phone call asking for help, and it could have been to Amanda (or at least, we could have just assumed it was) but he starts the call with "Detective", giving it away early that Hoffman might be showing up (the trailer didn't help, using his one line of dialogue and giving it away to anyone who recognized his voice). Didn't they learn their lesson in <i>Saw 3D</i> when literally no one was surprised to see Elwes pulling off the mask when he already showed up earlier in the movie for a nothing scene?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
So there are a couple of missteps, but for the most part it's a fine return to form, offering the best entry since <i>VI</i> and succeeding where the previous two movies didn't quite measure up with regards to toeing that line between making a movie for newcomers and one that can also satisfy, well, the folks who actually keep asking for these things. Fans of Bell as an actor get his biggest showcase to date (even in <i>II</i> and <i>III</i>, when he was still alive, I don't think he's had this much screentime/dialogue), the series gets a formidable opponent in Cecilia, and, via the post-credits scene (a first for the series, save for one on the director's cut of <i>VI</i>), a suggestion that the ongoing story dropped after <i>3D</i> might actually come back into the fold someday. And we get to see a guy drill his own brains out. What else can you ask for?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
What say you?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
P.S. Minor spoiler here, but they had an opportunity to tie up a series-long loose end re: how John could afford all this stuff but also needed his insurance to cover his treatments when John finds the doctor's loot, and blew it by having him give it to someone else. Sad! </p><p><iframe width="400" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/t3PzUo4P21c?si=B8BobYCUf0CIlhoz" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe><script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12436276-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-hashtags="horror">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script></p><script data-ad-client="ca-pub-3302834381937327" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script></span>BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5110147752122772426.post-78373865092559461462023-09-29T11:42:00.004-07:002023-09-29T11:43:15.229-07:00Spooktacular! (2023)<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-weight: bold;">SEPTEMBER 28, 2023</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">GENRE: <a href="http://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Documentary" target="_blank">DOCUMENTARY</a><br>SOURCE: <a href="https://beyondfest.com/" target="_blank">THEATRICAL (FESTIVAL SCREENING)</a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Last weekend I went to Universal Horror Nights, and as is often the case, I was dismayed at how it seems to be operating under the rule that no guest should be allowed to be immersed in the scary worlds the mazes attempt to scare you with. As it's housed within a working studio lot, you have to walk pretty far to get to some of the attractions, behind soundstages or through the bright lights of Springfield. You may wait in line for <i>Stranger Things</i> while Glenn Morshower barks orders about <i>Transformers</i> the entire time, and the mazes seemingly have more employees waving flashlights (to instruct you to keep moving, don't ever slow down to appreciate the production design!) than scare actors. It's expensive and not particularly good, and always makes me long for the days of Spooky World in Massachusetts, so I'm glad <i><b>Spooktacular!</b></i> was shown here a few days later, because if I saw it first and THEN went to Horror Nights, I'd probably be even more disappointed with it. </p><span id="fullpost"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
For those unfamiliar, Spooky World was built over the grounds of an old dairy farm in central Massachusetts, about a half hour west of Boston (and about the same southwest of my hometown). Launched in 1991 with just a hayride, the park expanded throughout the '90s, adding haunted houses, a creepy circus, and other fright-themed attractions, with the hayride serving as the centerpiece. Again, it was only a half hour away from the city, but it was far enough to feel "out of the way", with the location itself giving proper vibes of countless "stumbled on seemingly abandoned property" horror flicks. But it also had the horror museum, with props from movies like a Xenomorph suit and an OG Michael Myers mask, and in this museum you could meet folks like Kane Hodder, Tom Savini, or Linda Blair. So it was sort of a convention and a horror-themed amusement park Brundlefly'd into one memorable experience; an annual must-go destination for horror kids such as myself (it was only open in October, as Halloween hadn't yet become the two month event it is now). People would come from around the country to check it out, because there was nothing else really like it then.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
It's a fact (well, a mostly true fact - Knott's was doing something similar since the '70s, though it was naturally an extension of a traditional theme park as opposed to an exclusively Halloween-tinged location) that the doc tries several times to explain, but with all these kinds of things so ingrained into our culture now, it's really hard to wrap your head around the idea that it was a wholly unique experience, and that such things didn't usually exist in Massachusetts. To us horror kids, the idea that we could meet Jason or Freddy (and I did!) without having to travel to Hollywood was a surreal notion. And we could do so after going through state of the art haunted houses? And then get a donut with hot cider? Incredible!</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Luckily, the doc doesn't just cater to the nostalgia of folks like me who had been there. It gives a complete picture of how it began, the upbringing of founder David Bertolino, how it expanded through the '90s, covers a few unfortunate incidents (traffic jams caused by bigger-than-expected turnouts, a blown transformer causing the park to lose all its power, even the fabled "Perfect Storm" (the one from the Clooney movie) derailing a publicity stunt), and finally explains why the park first moved to a newer/lesser location and then shut down for good not long after that. Even I didn't know a lot of this stuff, so it worked not just as a memory generator, but a genuinely engaging history of an interesting topic, which is the goal of any doc. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
And it's funny! The editor uses conflicting memories to great effect, with an employee touting the hayride intercut with Tom Savini laughing at how corny it was, or another employee noting that her marriage fell apart thanks to partaking in the cast members' frequent after-hours (or during-hours) rendezvous in some of the more out of the way spots in the heavily wooded area. And of course some of the old video clips feature priceless New England accents, which are always good for a chuckle (as a former resident whose accent occasionally resurfaces, I give you permission!). There's one moment where the "license to laugh" doesn't quite work though, as some on-screen text about Tiny Tim (a frequent guest) made the audience laugh, only to feel terrible a moment later when a followup note about his death appeared under it. But that said, it does mark a turning point in the park's meteoric rise, as a number of misfortunes (primarily some righteous townsfolk deciding to play hardball and reject previously approved permits to operate some of the houses) and the unsuccessful relocation to Foxboro (on the grounds of Gillette Stadium where the Patriots play) followed shortly thereafter. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Since the park operated before camera phones (or even high def video cameras), most of the footage of the park is blurry and even marred with tracking issues. But to make up for it, the rise and fall tale is illustrated with clips from Vincent Price movies, which works surprisingly well most of the time. As founder Bertolino considered Price a role model, it works to show him in clips from the likes of <i>House on Haunted Hill, House of Wax, The Tingler</i>, etc. to add a little "show, not tell" flair to the story so we're not always looking at talking heads or cruddy VHS footage. So when the townsfolk start coming after Bertolino and his team, we get a clip from <i>Last Man on Earth</i>, with Price trying to keep the monsters from breaking down his door. And some old phone messages about guest complaints are laid over footage from the same film as his character listens to reel to reel tapes. Sometimes it's a little corny, but for the most part it works really well, and as someone who firmly believes that Price's films embody the "fun but scary" vibe of Halloween more than any other, it's remarkably fortuitous that Bertolino felt that kinship with the actor, as footage of someone like Karloff or Lee wouldn't have yielded the same successful results.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Sometimes there are some narrative dead ends (they note trying to get Robert Englund to come, but instead of noting that the attempt was successful, they pivot to a story about how the "Horror House of Wax" at the park came to be), and the edit could be a little tighter as we see a few clips twice (such as John Krasinski gushing about the park on Seth Myers' show), but it was for the most part a terrific doc, smartly balancing nostalgia bait with an honest look at its history, as Bertolino is on hand to note a few of his less successful ideas. The allowance of humor and the Price clips make it far more accessible than I thought it would be to someone who had never been there or even heard of it, and despite the covid-era production meaning a lot of folks are shot via Zoom (plus the aforementioned VHS clips) it's quite professionally put together, impressive for a team with almost no documentary experience among the principals. And for two hours, I almost felt like I was there again, which is a feeling the Horror Nights of the world can't generate even when I'm doing very similar activities. Well done, and thank you.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
What say you?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
P.S. I can't find an embeddable trailer, so just go <a href="https://www.spooktacularthemovie.com/preview?wix-vod-video-id=b3c6dc2c971e4266863b38d0b9afd9e0&wix-vod-comp-id=comp-l2o1s6gl" target="_blank">here</a> to check it out. </p><p><script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12436276-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-hashtags="horror">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script></p><script data-ad-client="ca-pub-3302834381937327" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script></span>BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5110147752122772426.post-26985965409670954302023-09-29T10:40:00.003-07:002023-09-29T10:40:59.709-07:00FTP: Uncle Peckerhead (2020)<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-weight: bold;">SEPTEMBER 25, 2023</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">GENRE: <a href="http://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Comedic" target="_blank">COMEDIC</a>, <a href="http://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Hero%20Killer" target="_blank">HERO KILLER</a><br>SOURCE: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Uncle-Peckerhead-Blu-ray-version-Region/dp/B08F32KCLZ?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=4c046e3cd331ad46d501d69529e55299&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)</a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
For the most part, the worst thing I can say about <i><b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Uncle-Peckerhead-Blu-ray-version-Region/dp/B08F32KCLZ?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=4c046e3cd331ad46d501d69529e55299&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">Uncle Peckerhead</a></b></i> is that it often reminded me of two better movies. Luckily, both of them are relatively obscure compared to the movies most small budget horror films ape (i.e. <i>Conjuring</i> or whatever the newest hit slasher was), so it’s possible one could watch without having seen them, and maybe you’ll be more engaged by what it has to offer. But if you’ve seen <i>Green Room</i> and/or <i>Eddie the Sleepwalking Cannibal</i>, be prepared for a lot of déjà vu.</p><span id="fullpost"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Luckily it’s not as hard to watch as <i>Green Room</i> (even if star Anton Yelchin didn’t ultimately die of a gruesome accident in real life, I don’t think I could ever watch his arm injury scene again), it’s just got a similar backdrop: a very poor punk band trying to make a go of it when playing for next to nothing and stealing gas from other cars in the parking lots they often sleep in. The scene where that film’s The Aint Rights plays to a pizza parlor has a very close cousin here, and the plot also kicks off in the same way, when our hero goes back inside the club and sees something they weren’t supposed to. The key difference is that what they weren’t supposed to see there was your standard murder, and here it's their roadie, Peck, turning into a zombie monster and devouring the greedy promoter that just ripped them off.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
And that’s where the <i>Eddie the Sleepwalking Cannibal</i> element kicks in, as Peck seemingly means our hero band (a trio named Duh) no harm, and is actually a pretty helpful addition to their band, so they kinda let his murderous ways slide (and occasionally help cover up evidence of such digressions) as their band is getting more successful due to his influence – he’s quite good at selling merch, for example! But you know how this sort of story goes – they’ll enjoy the success for a bit, and then realize it’s not right, so their ally turns into a foe. So maybe <i>Little Shop of Horrors</i> would be a more apt comparison, but the dry humor and the fact that the monster is a person (not a plant) had me thinking more of <i>Eddie</i>, so I’m sticking with it!</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
But that said, it’s a pretty fun watch. The trio of band members (two girls, one guy) are likable and easy to root for, and honestly could have made for the basis of a straight indie comedy without “Uncle Peckerhead” worked into the mix. Since they never have money for a motel they often crash at rando’s houses, giving the film a steady stream of new faces/dynamics, and their rivalry with an emo band led by a pretentious Jared Leto type provides the film with its funniest moments (though as an old school <i>Simpsons</i> fan I would cite an out of nowhere Poochie reference as my favorite gag). It’s never really laugh out loud funny, but it provided pretty of amiable smiles, which is fine – if the comedy part of a “horror comedy” is a total failure (and many are), it drags the whole movie down, so getting decent results in that half of the equation is something of a win on its own.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
It’s just too bad that the ending is garbage! I won’t spoil it outright, but it tonally didn’t fit with the rest of the movie to my eyes, sending me out on a downer instead of another wry smile that the previous 85 minutes had been providing with regularity. I’m not sure why they went the way they did with it, but man, it’s been a while since I’ve seen so much goodwill get tossed out the window at the 11th hour. I’d almost rather it sucked the whole way through, at least it’d be consistent. I guess I see the intent, that at the end of the day the band deserves some punishment for what they allowed to happen, but it swings too far into the other direction and ends abruptly to boot, leaving a bad taste in my mouth. Your mileage may vary of course, but be prepared for some whiplash.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
The disc comes with a group commentary (arranged via Zoom or something, as it was recorded in the early days of the pandemic – at least we know they’re smart!), to which I couldn’t always tell the participants apart but they have a good chemistry and never fall silent, loading the track up with production stories, the occasional jab at each other’s expense, and praise upon the other crew members, many of whom wore multiple hats on the production. A short film about a demon that has a few of the same cast members is also included; the back of the blu-ray promises it’s in the same universe as the film but I don’t see how that’d be possible with the doubling performers. There’s also an 11 minute compilation of Duh’s music if you’d like to listen without the movie’s audio distracting from it. A fairly low-key release for a similarly enjoyable but ultimately just shy of a must-see movie.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
What say you?</p><p><script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12436276-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-hashtags="horror">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script></p><script data-ad-client="ca-pub-3302834381937327" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script></span>BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5110147752122772426.post-55598392880116763912023-09-25T11:21:00.005-07:002023-09-25T11:22:11.533-07:00Black Circle (2018)<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; font-weight: bold;">SEPTEMBER 22, 2023</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">GENRE: <a href="http://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Mad%20Scientist" target="_blank">MAD SCIENTIST</a>, <a href="http://horror-movie-a-day.blogspot.com/search/label/Supernatural" target="_blank">SUPERNATURAL</a><br>SOURCE: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Black-Circle-2-Disc-Special-Blu-ray/dp/B0C24Q7KXW?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=832e80a75c2ce44c1f10283f6aad65ec&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)</a></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
If there was one benefit to watching horror movies every day for six years – and also, due to the point of the site, thinking about and then writing about them – it’s that I was able to fine tune my ability to tell the difference between a bad movie and a movie that just wasn’t for me. There was definitely a time in my life where I could have hated <i><b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Black-Circle-2-Disc-Special-Blu-ray/dp/B0C24Q7KXW?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=homoada-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=832e80a75c2ce44c1f10283f6aad65ec&camp=1789&creative=9325" target="_blank">Black Circle</a></b></i> and told folks to stay away from it because it was terrible or something, but now I know better. Now I know that there’s a select group of genre fans who will eat this up (and not because they’re drunk and having “so bad it’s good” fun), and I am simply not in that group. Thank the <i>Beneath the Mississippis</i> of the world for helping me learn the difference.</p><span id="fullpost"><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
To be fair, this one had me hooked in at the beginning, at least. Our hero Celeste is your typical slacker in her twenties who isn’t making enough of her life, and apparently her sister Isa was once the same way. But now she’s doing quite well at her job, dressing nicely, etc – she’s got her shit together, in other words, and chalks it up to listening to a self-help record from the 70s (that’s what the title refers to, for you young “music is only available through streaming services and nothing else” types). Isa lets Celeste borrow it to see if it can yield the same results, and it does, but almost instantly Isa shows up all frazzled and insane sounding, claiming she’s being followed… is the record to blame? Well, yes, otherwise they wouldn’t have named the movie after it.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
So for a while it follows the usual haunted object kind of movie scenario – Celeste sees ghostly figures, has weird dreams, etc. One can assume that she will have to track the record maker down to save her and her sister before it’s too late, like Naomi Watts figuring out where the VHS tape comes from, and they’d be right… but fewer could assume the hard left the movie takes into lo-fi sci-fi as opposed to supernatural horror suggested by the first half hour. At a certain point, out of completely nowhere, we meet a young couple who can communicate telepathically and have been sent by “The Supreme” (don’t ask, we never get much more info) to warn Lena (Christina Lindberg from <i>Thriller</i> aka <i>They Call Her One Eye</i>*), who is indeed the one that made the record, that Celeste and Isa are about to arrive. For a while this trio basically takes center stage of the film as if it’s been about them all along, and the film never quite recovers from the switch for me.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
At least we start getting some answers as to what is going on. As it turns out, what the record does is separate all the negative parts of yourself (so that all that’s left is the ambitious and “good” parts, hence the life improvements), but those parts end up being a doppelganger that believes itself to be the original and wants to take over for good. Lena and her X-Men-like charges work to fuse the two back together, and naturally things don’t go smoothly. Not a terrible idea, but at this point the movie just tailspins into nonsense, with both of the sisters’ doubles making erratic appearances while the others carry out the experiment, drawing itself out until all the creepy stuff of the first act becomes a distant memory by the time it finally ends an hour later. The “70s self-help techniques are bad” backstory recalled <i>The Brood</i> a bit, but as the telepaths took over I started thinking more about the silly <i>Scanners</i> sequels instead.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Personally, I’d rather a movie be confusing at first and slowly start to gel together until I’m fully engrossed in its off-kilter vibes (<i>Cloud Atlas</i> comes to mind as a good example; I was almost ready to walk out after 20 minutes but I stuck with it and by the end of the first hour I was completely on board) instead of the other way around, but as I said, there’s definitely folks for whom this will check every box. It reminded me of things like <i>Beyond the Black Rainbow</i> or <i>Altered States</i>, i.e. trippy sci-fi without spaceships and laser guns, and again that sort of thing is fine, but I wish it hadn’t lured me in with the promise of a traditional curse/possession type horror movie. Maybe a second viewing would improve things, now that I knew what direction it was going, but not enough to completely change my tune, since the movie gave more than ample time to adjust to the cerebral slant of the back half. Sure, I was disappointed it forgot about being a horror movie as it went on, but I was also left cold by its confusing presentation and abrupt story turns. I actually rewound the movie for a bit assuming I merely missed something with the introduction of the two telepathic kids, but nope – they just show up out of nowhere and the reveal of their powers is given no fanfare, introduced as casually as one might inform the audience what kind of pet or job this new character has. It’s a lot to ask!</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
I should note that it’s also a curious film that probably works best late at night when your brain is operating at a different level (and you are perhaps stoned), but it also has several hypnotizing scenes (including a lengthy one that kicks the film off, before we meet Celeste) that are quite effective. And by that I mean I fell asleep the first time I tried watching, literally during one such scene. I course corrected and watched the rest around lunchtime the following day, so that I’d be safe from dozing, but it would probably take a month to get through it if I tried only at night. I’m sure this played midnight slots at festivals back when it was making its run, and for a properly wired audience it was probably quite mesmerizing. But I just had to take it as it was, and I just couldn’t ever get back on its wavelength after Lindberg was introduced, and the film practically daring me to fall asleep again at regular intervals didn’t help.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
But if you’re a fan of Lindberg, you’ll probably a. be happy to see her again (this and another film from around the same time were the first features she made since 1982!) and b. be even happier that the blu-ray has an hour long interview with her, conducted by Bogliano. I wish it was a more traditional one where we don’t see the interviewer at all, since he is constantly saying “sure” and “right” as she speaks which gets incredibly annoying, but she covers a lot of her career, why she stopped acting, how <i>Thriller</i> is perceived then vs now, etc – it’s a pretty thorough chat. Bogliano also provides a commentary where he almost never stops speaking, name checking his influences and pointing out who did drawings or what crew member played this or that bit part in between explaining some of his choices, mentioning some post production trouble (some money never came through), etc. Then there’s the short film, which is basically just two early scenes from the film, albeit slightly truncated, with a different ending, giving it a traditional short film twist ending instead of proceeding with the narrative as the feature does. A featurette and trailer are also included, so it’s a pretty well rounded package that the film’s fans will certainly get their money’s worth from. But a blind buy is not recommended unless the above mentioned titles are all in your all time faves list.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
What say you?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
*Which was randomly the “pile” movie I watched before this one, having no idea she was in both. It wasn’t horror and it was just an unpleasant r**e revenge movie, but if you like that sort of thing, I guess it qualifies as one of the more interesting ones since it spends the middle of the narrative showing how she trains in secret to be the avenging woman of the finale that her peers just suddenly turn into.</p><p><iframe width="400" height="225" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Cz5uPB1x29U?si=FQLGklLciNNI7xLN" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe><script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-12436276-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script><a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-hashtags="horror">Tweet</a>
<script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');</script></p><script data-ad-client="ca-pub-3302834381937327" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script></span>BChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06480847497966171794noreply@blogger.com0