A Haunting in Venice (2023)

SEPTEMBER 28, 2023

GENRE: GHOST (?), THRILLER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

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 Conjuring 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 A Haunting in Venice 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 23 Jump Street in big blocky text.

(I’d be fine with that, by the way.)

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 Dead 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!

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 Hallowe’en Party* but then finds a photo of the girl and realizes she’s the long-dead daughter of the current owner (Kelly Reilly). Spooooooky!

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.

And the real draw is seeing him figure out the mystery, and unlike some of Christie’s other novels (like And Then There Were None) 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.

It is weird that he went so far off book though considering how faithful the previous two entries (Orient Express and Death on the Nile) 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 Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar 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, Nile 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.

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, Night of the Living Dead, 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 Saw sequel or even one of the more recent Halloween films doesn’t quite have the same charm, and besides I can see that sort of thing in theaters (indeed, tomorrow I’m seeing Saw X!). 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.

What say you?

* The new title allows them to do another creepy version of Poirot if this one’s successful enough. A Haunting in Venice 2: Ghosts of Genoa, perhaps?)

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Insidious: The Red Door (2023)

JULY 9, 2023

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

I’m gonna pretend I don’t feel old AT ALL that Insidious: The Red Door* is essentially a “legacyquel” to the Insidious series, reuniting the Lambert family who we haven’t seen for ten years/two sequels (they were MIA from the simply titled Chapter 3 and 2018’s The Last Key). The baby is now a pre-teen! The kid who was haunted is now off to college! Rose Byrne… well, apart from a blonder ‘do looks pretty much exactly the same, bless her. And taking center stage is Patrick Wilson, who also directed this entry (his debut behind the camera) and even sang the end credits song, a shockingly good cover of Shakespears Sister’s “Stay”, accompanied by Ghost (if you know the original, you can probably guess exactly what part Tobias sings instead of Patrick). Alas, in the great pantheon of “Spooky movie sequels where Patrick Wilson performs a cover song”, this one doesn’t quite hit the highs of The Conjuring 2.

It’s not a bad movie, I should stress – but it’s a bit of a messy one, as the narrative essentially divides itself between Dalton (a returning Ty Simpkins) at college somewhere in the southeast and Josh (Wilson) back home in Los Angeles. Both are being haunted by traditional Insidious-y ghosts, but there’s zero interaction between the pair until the film’s finale, so it feels like you’re flipping channels between two spooky movies. Both of them engaging on their own, but every time it switches from one to the other, it deflates a lot of the tension, not to mention counts as a distraction – I wasn’t shocked at all that nearly every time it cut from A to B, I saw a cell phone light up nearby, as if it was a commercial break. And it seemed rather needless to send Dalton so far away; the ostensible reason was to give him and Josh a bonding experience as they took the three day drive together, but we see exactly one scene of their journey. No fraught motel room blowouts, silent diner meals…. the college might as well have been two hours away for all it mattered to their road trip, and then maybe they could have interacted more.

You might be wondering why the two would need a bonding experience. Well, since the events of Insidious 2, Josh and Renai have gotten divorced, with Josh only getting the kids every other weekend. Curiously, the movie doesn’t even come right out and say this much until quite later in the runtime; the film opens with the funeral of Josh’s mom/the kids’ grandmother (Barbara Hershey’s character) and Renai is there, but it’s not until everyone is ready to leave that you get the hint that they’re not together anymore. Which is fine, but it takes well over an hour for Byrne and Wilson to interact again, where they hash things out and explain why the divorce even happened in the first place. And it’s a shame, because it’s a story thread I would have liked to have seen explored: it’s basically because she remembers Josh being possessed and terrorizing the family, but Josh and Dalton don’t, and the other son has chalked it up to nightmares thanks to her assurances (the daughter, being a baby at the time, doesn’t have an opinion on the matter, and is written out of the movie after the opening anyway). I find this a pretty interesting concept, not to mention mildly amusing if you recall how much Insidious 1 and 2 mirrored the first two Poltergeist movies – we never got to see how Stephen Freeling’s tequila worm freakout affected his family down the road, so Insidious is finally having one up on them!

Spending more time on this idea would have also given Byrne more to do, as she’s really only in like three scenes of the movie and is treated rather thanklessly outside of this big clash with Josh, which again occurs too far into the story. It would have been nice to know earlier why they were divorced, because at the end of I2 Josh and Dalton are hypnotized into forgetting, and without Renai actually involved in the story for 75 minutes or whatever, it’s hard to get a real idea of where any of these characters ARE in their lives, as if we missed another entry in between. It just seems like Dalton is a typical teen who would rather sulk in his room and listen to music than hang out with his dad. Even when the family drama is finally being made clear, it’s still a bit murky: Renai tells Josh that Dalton doesn’t talk to her either, and again I wondered why we were only learning this information now instead of at some point in the first act, i.e. when such things are usually established in a sequel.

But of course, people don’t show up to these things for family blowouts, they want ghosts! And in that department, they’re pretty good, if nothing new for the series. My favorite was pretty close to tbe beginning of the movie, a scene where Josh is in his car texting Dalton, with a ghost slowly approaching his car (which we see through the back windshield, unseen by him). There’s another good one later involving Christmas lights, as a character is checking various strands and thus every time she plugs one in it lights up a face that is becoming spookier. Those more subtle ones are always more fun to me than the more overt ones, which is probably a good thing for me because… well, there aren’t a lot of overly overt ones. Perhaps the constant setting shifts reduced the opportunities? Because every time they cut back to Dalton from Josh, we kind of have to get up to speed again, delaying the potential for another spookablast moment. I mean I didn’t have a pencil or stopwatch to keep track, but I’d be willing to bet if someone were to count the number of scare moments in each film (not how successful they were, just their basic existence) that this one could come up last in sheer volume. They’re on point, but they’re not as frequent, which might be a sticking point for audience members who are primed to jump from their seats every five minutes.

It's also not as goofy/funny as the first two movies, which is more in line with the last two but felt off since the Lamberts were back. But the real reason for this is that Specs and Tucker – who usually bring the majority of that energy – are reduced to about 15 seconds of screen time via a Youtube video. With 3 and 4 being prequels to the first two films, it’s a shame we don’t get to see more of what happened to them going forward; the end of 2 set up the idea that they’d continue doing the investigations with Elise’s ghost to guide them, but for all we know they’re merely cheesy Youtube goons now. Speaking of Elise, Lin Shaye has two scenes; one as another Youtube video and another in ghost form, with the latter feeling tacked on and – vague spoiler here – kind of deflated the power of the film’s final scene with Josh and Dalton, which really worked like gangbusters and would have been a great moment to end this entry (marketed as the final chapter, but a spinoff movie has been announced), but the Elise epilogue just kind of dragged it out for me. Still, always nice to see Ms. Shaye doing her thing, and I had to chuckle that James Wan made two franchises (the other being Saw) that killed off an older character actor much to the chagrin of a far younger fanbase, who’d presumably care less about them than the younger leads, forcing them to utilize flashbacks and prequel storytelling to keep them around.

That said, there is SOME humor courtesy of Sinclair Daniel as Chris, who (due to her gender neutral first name) is assigned as Dalton’s roommate and stays with him for a few days while the housing folks sort it out. She brings an irreverent touch to the proceedings as she first tries to get the introverted Dalton to have more of a college experience and then gets drawn into his Further shenanigans, and it was very much welcome since every other character was so moody. And it’s a platonic friendship, which is always nice to see as I’m someone with plenty of female pals and roll my eyes at the cliché that such things are a unicorn instead of the norm. Some of the other attempts at humor fall way flat though; there’s a douchey fraternity character who we’re supposed to laugh at, but he’s mostly just annoying and doesn’t get any real comeuppance or even point to his scenes. Whenever they focused on him for a minute or two, I found myself wishing we were back with Josh or even checking in on poor Carl (Steve Coulter), who shows up in one quick scene and also disappears after. So if you’re keeping count, the movie brings back ten characters, but outside of Josh and Dalton, their total combined screentime is about ten minutes, and if you take Byrne out of the equation that number drops to well short of five.

(The tenth would be the Lipstick Face demon from the original, who shows up so briefly it should have been a surprise cameo instead of something in the marketing.)

So overall, it’s a mixed bag. I liked seeing the family again and the father/son stuff between Josh and Dalton is pretty well done, and while I don’t want to spoil the particulars, the backstory of this movie’s new baddie is, unlike the others who have haunted the Lambert family, actually tied into their own history, which was appreciated. And it’s got a few solid setpieces (the MRI bit you’ve seen in the trailer, an attack on Josh in broad daylight) that bring on the chills that show Wilson is up to the task for such things. But the script (or the edit) never quite manages to gel the two storylines in a satisfying way, making it feel like they had two ideas for a sequel (“What’s Josh up to now?” and “What happens when Dalton goes to college?”) and decided to do both without ever unifying them, making the film come up short overall. And I can’t in good conscience ever give a ringing endorsement to anything that sidelines Rose Byrne. The spinoff is set to star Kumail Nanjiani, so I can only assume that it will bring things back to the more humorous tone of the first two, which I think was a big part of why it was successful and also why it still stands out in a sea of modern ghost movies (some also starring Patrick Wilson!). But I can also appreciate that this series has been dormant for a while and yet still opened quite well despite the recent success of Boogeyman, which mined similar territory, so I’m glad it opened well to help prove, for the millionth time, that horror is the safest bet for studios. A horror part 5 knocked Indiana Jones off the top spot after only a week, at about a tenth of the cost. The studios want to make more money? Then they should stop with the megabudget tentpoles no one is really asking for, and greenlight every cheap horror script they have.

What say you?

*In some territories it's known as Insidious: L Street.

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

APRIL 26, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What say you?

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

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Blu-Ray Review: Dead Silence (2007)

MARCH 23, 2023

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

For those who came late or just forgot, in the early days of this site, the reviews were more like "reactions", aimed at people who saw the movie already and wanted to chime in after I posted a few scattered thoughts I had about it. One such example is Dead Silence, which says almost nothing about the movie and instead focuses on the poor marketing campaign, and why I think it's a more proper "scary movie" than Saw (not to say a BETTER movie, mind, just more genuinely scary). And ironically, I also note that I'm excited that it's a Universal movie, because that'd mean it'd come to HD-DVD*, which at the time was a. fighting with Blu-ray to be the champion for next format, and b. what I had instead of Blu-ray (I ended up caving about a year later, when it was clear HD-DVD was going to lose that war). Because now it's on the even better 4K UHD format, and in turn I'll finally, you know, talk about the movie.

Even its own filmmakers have dismissed it at one time or another (screenwriter Leigh Whannell flat out called it a "bad movie" on his blog, which is now defunct but archived if you hunt for it), due to studio interference and rewrites by another writer that turned the movie into something different than what they had in mind. The most amusing thing is that they wanted a PG-13 movie, only for the studio - eager to cash in on their Saw notoriety - to insist on adding gory violence to ensure an R rating. Wan and Whannell had the last laugh though; after this, the team went back to their independent roots and made the PG-13 Insidious, which was just as big of a hit as Saw was and spawned a franchise of its own. For younger horror fans who grew up on Insidious and Conjuring, it's probably hard to believe that once upon a time a studio would second guess James Wan about a horror movie, but as a fan of this film from the start who felt kind of sad that it was so poorly received, it's great to have the ultimate seal of vindication all these years later with a Scream Factory release.

Don't get me wrong: it's not a perfect film by any means. The pacing is a little wonky and Ryan Kwanten isn't the most compelling lead in the world (he's gotten better over the years though!), but as someone who always appreciates a studio horror film that goes off the beaten path a bit, I find lots to enjoy here. I mean, it's an original story about an evil ventriloquist, at a time when every other horror movie out was either a Saw wannabe or a remake. It probably threw Wan's fans for a loop (looking back, the twist reveal being accompanied by flashback cuts was clearly someone's call to make it more in line with his previous film), but I feel in a post-Malignant world, people are more attuned to the filmmaker's off-kilter sensibilities, and will be able to reevaluate it if they dismissed it back then.

There's also something that's still kind of unique about it, in that it's a supernatural film starring two guys. Most horror films, especially those with ghosts/possession type plots, focus on women (i.e., well... Insidious, Conjuring, and Malignant, not to mention Whannell's Invisible Man), but Kwanten is front and center for nearly every scene, with Donnie Wahlberg's suspicious but patient cop as co-lead. Their "we don't get along but want the same thing" kind of dynamic reminds me of Witchboard (complete with one of them dying near a boat!), and while Whannell specifically noted Wahlberg's shaving habit as something the other writer added, I apologize but I still find it very amusing for some reason. The women, however? One dies in the opening, another only has a very brief part (but is the only person to survive the film, fwiw), and the other two are the villains. It's not misogynistic or anything to my eyes, just a different, relatively rare shift in focus for this kind of fare.

And the dolls are super creepy! By now we know that Wan prefers that his dolls stay pretty still instead of running around like Chucky, so along with the Malignant-esque kookiness (I absolutely adore the hidden hallway bit) I think it's amusing that for "the Saw guy", THIS film is more of a precursor to the rest of his career, with Death Sentence being the only post-Saw movie that feels like it's from that same filmmaker. The scene where the dolls all slowly turn one by one to look at our heroes is a terrific sequence, and he gets a lot of mileage out of light/shadow making it seem like Billy (why the same name?) is moving more than it is. Speaking of, since this is supposed to be a review of the 4K transfer as well - it's much easier to spot the OTHER Billy in Mary Shaw's lair, and Charlie Clouser's terrific score sounds better than ever.

The disc's packaging only advertises a fresh interview with Whannell for its new features, but it also has a new one from Wan and another from the guy who did the puppets. Each runs 12 minutes or so and are sadly not as candid as some other Scream Factory chats have been in the past, but Wan and Whannell both seem (rightfully!) happy that the film has found its audience over the years and seem less harsh on it than they were back then, though they both spend more time talking about how much they love each other and their time at film school together than they do the movie, making me wish they just had the two of them sit down for a commentary so we could benefit from that dynamic and maybe actually talk more about the film itself, but alas. All of the old features are also brought over, including the original bookends for the film that I feel shouldn't have been cut, but I assume it's far too late for anyone to bother making a new cut. The unrated cut of the film is also included, but (as with the features) is only available on the standard Blu-ray - the 4K UHD disc has only the theatrical cut. But that's fine; the unrated one has a few scene extensions that are take or leave, but is mostly devoted to a very dumb idea of giving Mary a longer CGI tongue during the kill scenes, and it looks stupid. Stick with the R rated one and just swap the disc out for the bonus features if you're so inclined!

The team's attempt to make a modern Hammer movie was an admirable one, and for the most part it worked in my opinion. There's also a bit of House of Usher to the proceedings, with a family curse and a decaying building (the theater), so if you're into those kind of movies (which, like this one, tend to be a bit sluggish with their pacing, with the atmosphere and vibe making up for it) and haven't seen this yet, I think you'll enjoy it especially as it is now itself a bit of a relic (sixteen years old this month!). And if you saw it at the time and walked out disappointed that it wasn't Saw, give it another look! That may be the very thing you appreciate most about it now.

What say you?

*The look and sound of perfect.

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From The Pile: Boo! (2018)

SEPTEMBER 21, 2022

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

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

Alas, it was not.

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

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

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

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

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

What say you?

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John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars (2001)

FEBRUARY 7, 2022

GENRE: GHOST, POSSESSION
SOURCE: STREAMING (HULU)

Two things certainly didn't occur to me when I made up approximately 12% of an opening weekend Saturday night showing of Ghosts of Mars (which dwindled to 33.3% by the time it reached its finale). One: that it would be the last time I got to roll up to any random multiplex to see a new John Carpenter movie*, and two: that it'd be over 20 years before I finally got around to giving it my long promised second chance. What seemed like a can't miss proposition of Carpenter applying his Assault on Precinct 13 "cops and crooks band together" plot but setting it on Mars and diving even deeper into his western stylings left me feeling cold or indifferent throughout most of its runtime, but after two decades I honestly couldn't remember what I disliked about it.

Or much about the movie at all, really. As it turns out, even my lone memory wasn't accurate (spoiler: all I "remembered" was Clea Duvall and Jason Statham both dying on the train on the way out, but it was actually running TO the train that they got offed), and very little came back as I watched, so it might as well have been for the first time. But it didn't take long to at least zero in on why the movie didn't work for me: the confusing, needless flashback structure that constantly undercuts the tension. It'd be fine if it was just bookend scenes of Natasha Henstridge telling her story to her skeptical superiors, one at the beginning and another at the end, but Carpenter repeatedly cuts back to them over and over, as if we may have forgotten that this was a flashback.

But I mean, would that have been so bad? The fact that she is presented as a "lone survivor" type has already weakened much of the film's potential for suspense, but maybe we could temporarily forget that most of her co-stars clearly weren't going to survive if not for the reminder every ten minutes or so. Worse, Henstridge's character herself arrives on Mars after a lot has happened, so even part of her flashback story is devoted to listening to the flashbacks of the handful of people who have survived thus far. I'm not saying a linear version of this movie would solve all of its problems, but I'd bet good money that it'd be much improved.

The plot also curiously involves the idea that Ice Cube's Desolation Williams (amazing name) may have been responsible for the dead bodies Henstridge and pals find, but by that point we already know it's something much more powerful, so it's a go nowhere plot point. Perhaps this stuff got re-edited some, because it also seems like Cube's introduction is pretty flat, as if there was a bigger entrance at one point that got chopped out and resulted in something less grandiose for the first time we see him. Either way, long story short the first half hour or so of the movie is a real mess, making too much work for the final hour to win us back.

And as you probably know, it doesn't quite succeed. Because the other issue with the movie is that it exacerbates something that hurt Vampires and Escape From LA as well: Carpenter's seeming disinterest in crafting tight action scenes. Rather than stage specific (scripted) action, he keeps doing this thing where he seemingly has each actor just run (or hangglide, in LA's case) around the set tossing grenades and stuff, then films a bunch of shots of stuntmen going flying through the air, and then puts it all together later to give the idea of a big chaotic sequence. Unfortunately, what ends up happening (at least for me) is that I can't really care about what's going on, because there's no real plot point driving anything forward, it's just a bunch of stuff happening for five minutes until they've run out of juice for the stuntmen's air rams. Say what you will about the surfing scene in LA - as dumb as it is, at least there's a cause and effect built into it and, thanks to Snake needing to catch up to Eddie, it does something to move the plot forward as well. Here, there's a sequence where the entire group runs for a train that isn't there, only to run right back to where they were! At least if they went to a different building it'd feel like some kind of plot momentum had occurred, but if not for a handful of minor character deaths during their pointless journey, you could cut it out entirely and it wouldn't even make a difference.

That leads to another big issue - nobody ever cares or even notices when their comrades die. Cube has a little bit of temporary sadness over his brother's death, but it passes quickly, and Henstridge and the others don't even blink when their partners are killed. Not that anyone has a great death; Duvall's is kind of funny because she ducks under a blade only to get decapitated by another as she rises back up, but without anyone else seeing it or having any kind of reaction, it doesn't mean much. It's almost like since we know Henstridge (and maybe Cube) were the only ones to live right from the start that Carpenter felt that there's no sense dwelling on their deaths, but it'd be nice if their friends could at least shout a "Noooo!" or something to give it a tiny bit of meaning. It also undercuts the "enemies teaming up" premise when he kills off all of Cube's guys within about 30 seconds of each other, long before the conclusion, so it's basically Henstridge's team with a rando who happens to be a criminal.

He also frequently employs dissolves to move things along, more than once just chucking out part of a shot. It's a trick that works on occasion (think Desperado with Antonio making his way up a loooong stretch of road) but he does it for someone walking down a short hallway, removing what could only be a second of footage in between. We've all heard him bemoan how slow he finds some of his earlier films when he comes back to do a commentary, and this seems to be the nadir of that kind of thinking - anything to make things move faster, no matter how silly it looks or how much it draws attention to the movie-ness of it all (see also: bad model shots, which he calls out on the commentary track that he recorded before the movie was even released!). Maybe it's part of the point, but if so it doesn't work for me.

Luckily there is SOME fun to be had, mostly in the last half hour. There's a great sequence (thankfully free of the dissolves and other goofiness) where Henstridge and Cube take turns with Statham and Duvall, two taking point and fending off ghosts while the others reload as they back their way down a corridor, offering the sort of Precinct 13 energy that the film often lacks. And while they don't really do much with it, the idea that killing their attackers only leaves them more likely to be possessed themselves (as the "ghost" seeks a new host) is pretty fun, and you almost get the idea that maybe this might have been better if he was reinventing The Thing instead of P13. And, perhaps this is why the film has had some renewed defense recently, I do quite like that it's a matriarchal future and no one is questioning Henstridge's authority (indeed, she replaced another woman who dies early).

In other words, it's not a total disaster, and there's enough Carpenterisms (Peter Jason pops up, the score's pretty good, the western motifs) to make it feel like a genuine entry in his filmography as opposed to the more anonymous nature of The Ward. But it's also only because his name is there that anyone - including myself - is willing to give it that much benefit of the doubt. If this was some music video or TV director who got plugged into the director spot, few would even remember its existence after even five years, let alone twenty. For what it's worth, I put in my dusty DVD (yep, I never even bothered to upgrade to Blu - his lone major film I don't own on the format) after watching the movie on Hulu and he seems pretty happy on the behind the scenes stuff, and his commentary with Henstridge is one of his more engaging ones (if the movie had been a hit, I suspect they would have worked together again, as they seem very chummy), so this doesn't seem to be a Memoirs kind of case where he was just collecting a check. Sometimes things just don't work out like you hope, whether you're sitting in the director's chair or the theater.

What say you?

P.S. I wasn't actually going to write this up, but today is the 15th birthday of Horror Movie a Day! So you get this little treat.

*I did see The Ward in theaters, but it was only playing once a day at a tiny theater here in Los Angeles, where you'd assume it'd be easier to catch any flick let alone the new one from someone like Carpenter.

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The Night House (2020)

AUGUST 20, 2021

GENRE: GHOST
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

There is a moment in The Night House that shook me to my core, but it wasn't a particularly scary moment. No, it's a bit where Beth (Rebecca Hall) is having a dream that her dead husband is texting her, and when she looks at the message, we can see that there are other, older ones (from when he was presumably alive), unlike most movies where a new text is the only time this person apparently ever texted their loved one. Then, they double down on the surprises - when she wakes up and checks to see if the text was real, her phone is plugged in! Movie characters are always just leaving their phone right there next to them, unplugged, because these people never have to worry about a dead battery I guess. But Beth does!

Granted this is just me clapping for a weird pet peeve, but it does tie into one of the things that makes the movie work as well as it does: it feels very natural and our protagonist is relatable, allowing the ghost-y stuff to really get under your skin. Having just lost her husband to suicide, Beth's grief is manifesting in many ways: she drinks, she watches their home videos, she packs up his toiletries to toss them, and she ultimately starts going through his personal things trying to find answers for why he suddenly took his own life. And (thanks in part to Hall's terrific performance) we understand perfectly that, even though we never met her prior to this tragedy, this is all unusual behavior for her, and also that he was her "rock" despite never having seen them together. It's a balancing act that the script and director David Bruckner (and again, Hall) walk expertly.

It's also surprisingly funny at times. There's another great scene where Beth (a teacher) is confronted by a parent of a student who got a C in class, and while she's trying to be delicate at first and chalk her recent absence (in the mom's eyes, the reason for the lower grade) to "a personal matter", the mom keeps harping on it, so Beth just trys the blunt approach and tells her, mid-sentence, that he blew his brains out. Dark as it is, the woman's stunned reaction is a hilarious bit of comedy, and there are other moments like it throughout the film, even as Beth's grief enters the anger portion and she confronts one of the women she finds photos of in her husband's phone.

I can't get too much into that because spoilers, but I will say that part of the mystery involves these women, all of whom somewhat resemble Beth and may be connected to a mirrored version of their house that he has built across the lake from theirs. His suicide note was a cryptic message about Beth being safe now, and we learn that she once died for a few minutes after an accident before being revived, and if you think all of these things might be connected, you'd be correct, though exactly what is something Bruckner and co. thankfully do not feel the need to spell out with dialogue, trusting the audience to piece it together on their own. It's not a puzzler by any means; it was just refreshingly free of hand holding. With Hall being in just about every frame of the film (I think the final scene is the only time we ever see anything from anyone else's perspective) and often alone except for the possible ghost, it would mean a lot of talking to herself to convey exposition in a more traditional (read: dumbed down) manner, and I was pleasantly surprised to see they trusted their audience enough to not do that.

It's also light on traditional scares, something that will likely annoy any younger audiences who were hooked in by the trailer (which shows almost all of them), as they probably won't be able to connect to the drama either (though maybe they will in Covid times? Possible they've lost someone close recently). At times you feel the creative team would rather just focus on Hall working through it than deal with the haunting element, which is fine by me since I don't really get scared anyway, but I feel I should say it as a bit of a warning for anyone who might be heading out for some good ol fashioned "let's go scream together with a big crowd" horror movie viewing. Not only will the crowd be small and muted, but blah blah blah Delta, etc (you've heard it all by now), so if you want to wait for home, I would only sigh with how it relates to the theatrical success of a solid, ORIGINAL horror movie. As a human, and movie fan in general, I'll admit this one might actually work better at home anyway, even without the health risks being a factor.

I know this is a relatively short review for me, but that's part of what makes the movie work: its simplicity. Yes, Beth finds out things about her husband that ultimately has her looking at weird old books and even taking a mini road trip for info, but it never gets bogged down in this stuff; her working through it is the driving force, and unless you want multiple paragraphs about praising Hall's performance, there isn't much to write about without diluting the experience (I can also vouch for the score by Lovett, quite good!). If you were a fan of (HMAD book recommendations*!) Absentia, The Eclipse and/or The Presence, I think you'll enjoy this, and if you found them "boring" or whatever, then there isn't going to be much here to change your mind, though I still encourage you to see for yourself when you feel comfortable doing so. At the very least, it might give jealous spouses a reason to not be so quick to fear the worst when they see their partner looking at other men/women!

What say you?

*I was gonna just write a note here but made it a whole ass post instead of burying it in a review for a movie apparently few have seen. Click here for something cool re: my book!

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Separation (2021)

MAY 2, 2021

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

Don't get me wrong, the pandemic has been awful; the sort of thing future writers will use for hacky time travel stories ("What if we went back and gave that guy a hamburger so he wouldn't be tempted by a goddamn bat?"). But there have been a few perks to the whole thing: people have used the (forced) free time productively, taken up new hobbies, gotten in better shape, whatever. And for me personally? I have reached a point where a major new horror movie can come out that I know absolutely nothing about. In fact, I only heard of Separation a week before it opened, when I was looking at the theater's advanced showtimes to try to get a ticket for their revivals of the Fast & Furious movies (which I failed to do).

See, normally I'd be sick of the trailer, probably have gotten my mind made up based on early reviews from people whose tastes I know well enough to know whether or not it'll be something I'd end up liking... but I got to go in totally blind. I honestly can't even recall the last time I was able to buy a ticket for a movie I knew next to nothing about, as that's something I can barely even achieve at a festival anymore. And there are other movies coming along within the next couple weeks I'm just as in the dark about; even the big Statham action movie Wrath of Man is something I feel I only learned about a month ago. With the publicity machine for these things having to take a backseat (probably in part because there's still a chance another outbreak causes theaters to shut down again), us moviegoers get to actually be surprised for once. It's kind of nice.

That said, the only thing I did know about the movie is that it was directed by William Brent Bell, which meant reviews would likely mean nothing to me anyway. Except for last year's misguided (being generous) Brahms: The Boy II, I have enjoyed all of Bell's work, but that sentiment is not shared by my peers. To this day people are still angry about The Devil Inside's "missing ending that you had to go watch on the website," which is not what was actually happening there but after nearly a decade I've given up trying to explain to people that it was merely a poorly placed advertisement for their wannabe-viral site, and the film's abrupt ending was in line with most found footage entries (including, uh, Blair Witch Project - perhaps you're familiar?). So basically, if the reviews were rock solid, THEN I'd be worried!

Luckily (for me, not him, or the studio) the reviews are bad, and once again I'm here to defend Mr Bell's apparently very alienating brand of horror. I wouldn't say it's his best film by any means (should I be the first to rank him?*) and it's clearly been tinkered with (more on that soon), but it takes some wacky swings that I admired, so coupled along with my complete ignorance of its plot or even sub-genre, I found myself having a pretty good time with it. The title refers to a married couple in the standard movie partner dilemma: one is a workaholic and thus doesn't spend any time with their daughter, the other doesn't work at all and thus can't really provide for her. An opening "last straw" kind of argument leads to divorce, and during a heated phone conversation about custody (spoiler ahead if you're equally dim on details!) the mom jaywalks and gets run over, instantly killed.

So now the dad has to take care of the little girl alone, and before long freaky things start happening. The nature of them is of course part of the reveal, so I won't spoil them here, only to say that it harkens a bit back to the original (good) The Boy in that there's a twist to the proceedings that keeps the action to a minimum in order to work. This means that impatient viewers should steer clear, as not a whole lot happens in it (the R rating is basically just for language; the mom in particular loves the F-word) and most of the scares until the climax are of the nightmare variety. I had to wonder if I myself would be bored by it if I wasn't finding connections to the material; the dad (Rupert Friend) is kind of a "kid at heart" type who longs to resurrect a project he created in his younger days, which is something I went through myself and only relatively recently kind of gave up on it for good. So seeing a guy I could identify with go through the horror movie motions AND try to be a good dad suckered me in pretty easily, though that obviously won't be the case for everyone.

However, if you like puppets you should be into it! The aforementioned project was a (stop motion, I assume?) animated project featuring a cast of monstrous puppets, and the designs are quite good - think humanoid versions of the supporting cast of Nightmare Before Christmas and you'd be on the right path. He's got normal puppets of the characters that the daughter (Violet McGraw, because by law every major modern horror movie must have one of the kids from Hill House) uses as dolls, but they are menaced by full-sized versions that creep around, loom over their beds, etc. One is played by Troy James, the contortionist who has been making a name for himself using his impressive abilities to play other monsters that don't need to rely on CGI (he was the Jangly Man in Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark), and his big scene is truly unnerving...

...but partly undone because of Friend's near indifference to his appearance. For whatever reason, the actor barely ever reacts to the creepy things he sees; there's even an example in the trailer (which I saw for the first time today, as I wrote the review) where he just watches a portrait burn after a candle tips over on its own. Some are dreams and can be chalked up to dream logic I suppose, but it's an odd choice and kind of hampers a number of the scare scenes, of which there aren't many anyway. But as I mentioned, the movie was clearly retooled some, so it might just be an odd side effect of moving scenes around. There's a scene between him and their nanny (Madeline Brewer) that was either moved from its original position in the film, or simply had its setup deleted, because it starts with her saying that the daughter hates her now and yet there was absolutely nothing like that in the scene before it. Also, a couple scenes before it, she misread her signals and tried to kiss the guy, which you'd think would cause some awkwardness, but in this scene she's asking him to watch movies and get high (and surprised that he says no), which to me sounds like something that would have come before she made her move, not almost immediately after. Near the end of the film there's a montage of all the dad and the daughter's big bonding moments over the movie, and at first they're all ones we've seen but as the sequences goes on we see more snippets of scenes that were otherwise removed.

Don't get me wrong, the movie still more or less works anyway, but I can't help but wonder if panicked producers hacked away at it and switched scenes around in order to get a scare in every ten minutes no matter what. As is the film runs 108 minutes, so we're talking about 10-15 minutes longer than most movies of this sort, and it's easy to imagine a cut running at around two hours, for a horror movie where the "villain" is pretty passive and the scary movie plot takes a while to even get going. This might also explain why some scenes - like a bizarre hallucination scene in the park - go absolutely nowhere. Perhaps there was a followup scene that justified its existence, but got removed for being too talky?

Still, these things didn't bother me too much in the grand scheme of things. I knew after about a half hour or so that this would be the kind of movie I quietly enjoy rather than loudly keep trying to change people's minds on (like, well, The Boy and Stay Alive), and that's fine. With creepy ass puppets, DAD STUFF, and wacky plot points (the dad's comic book writer partner has him take drugs to communicate with the dead!) it was kind of just hitting my particular sweet spots and not even seemingly all that concerned with impressing a large audience, so for that I have to admire it (also, any time I get to use my "Puppet" tag you've already earned a few points). The pacing and plot reminded me of those 1970's "Paperbacks from Hell" I've been consuming ever since that book came out, where they're always kind of slow paced and weird but somehow entertain me all the same. If you're a fellow defender of Dead Silence (and, again, The Boy) you might find yourself equally charmed by its earnest hokeyness, but otherwise you can wait for Conjuring 3 or whatever.

What say you?

*The Boy, Stay Alive, Separation, Devil Inside, Boy 2. Still haven't seen Wer.

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The Resort (2021)

MAY 3, 2021

GENRE: GHOST
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (DRIVE-IN SCREENING)

I wasn't a big fan of In The Earth, the new Ben Wheatley film that is notable for being one of the first theatrical wide release films shot during (and even inspired by) Covid lockdown times, but I was impressed by how they used it to their advantage when the plot could rely on it, as well as how Wheatley used it to establish the tone and characters in its earlier (and best) scenes. And I saw it back to back with The Resort, which I assumed was also a Covid-era production because it was set mostly in/around a closed down hotel in Hawaii. The building is mammoth and clearly abandoned for real, and given the prime tourist location I figured there's no way a place like that would be closed down for any other reason but a pandemic.

But as it turns out, the film was shot in early 2018, long before the world fell apart (at least, in that regard). Turns out the hotel was closed in 2016 and set to be remodeled into luxury condos, though they apparently had some delays (the news article I read about the closure said the work would be completed in 2017) so their loss was the Resort crew's gain. Every day the place sat abandoned (and un-demolished) was another day's worth of overgrown brush, dirtied windows, etc that they didn't have to spend time doing themselves to make it look like something that hadn't been used in years.

Ironically, it's the only thing in the movie that rings true, as the rest is horseshit on a level I haven't seen in quite some time. It's barely even feature length (75 minutes with incredibly slow end credits), but still manages to take forever for anything to happen as our quartet of obnoxious twenty somethings (one's an Instagram star!) decide to ghost hunt in the abandoned hotel and, naturally, get menaced by the very spirit they already knew was there. The main girl, Lex, is writing a piece about the ghost and wants to do research, with the other three just tagging along for support I guess - it's hard to say why exactly because the four actors have such non-existent chemistry and vague backstories that I couldn't begin to guess why they hung out. They don't really fight (just a couple bits of "we have to go NOW!" type bickering), I'll give them credit for that much at least, but at least in other modern horror movies - where there's a cheating subplot or a nerd character they invite just to mock the entire time - I can get the impression that they've had history. These people might have met for the first time when action was called on their first scene together.

And that'd be fine if the horror elements were solid, but nope. Again, it takes a long time for the "Half Faced Girl" (cool name, must have taken them all day to come up with it) to show up and start offing them, and there's precious little suspense and literally zero scares before that point. They take their time getting to the island (a scene with the four of them sitting in one of their apartments, discussing their trip and the ghost's story, eats up a full tenth of the runtime, possibly more), and when they get there they dillydally even more by taking the long route to the hotel so they can stop by a waterfall and let the DP ogle their bodies with his camera. Nothing out of the ordinary for this kind of horror, to be fair, but when the actors aren't great and the characters they are playing are so dull, it's a real drag.

All could be forgiven if the long-awaited terror was aces, but nope, it's not much of an improvement on the walking around. We barely see the villain and her half face, one death is entirely off-screen, and - sigh - the movie has a framing device with the survivor telling the story to a detective, killing even more of the suspense for no reason (other than to attempt a twist that is so confusing I almost admired it. Someone on the writing team is a fan of The Beyond, I guess!). There's a terrific gore effect involving a face bring ripped off, and I liked the low-key way they offered a POV of someone being dragged off into the darkness, but even at a mere 75 minutes, a movie has to come to life for more than a 3-4 minute stretch to even enter "worth watching in the background" territory. Hell I might even resurrect the long dormant "crap" label if not for that face rip bit, and also for how much I laughed when they kept cutting back to the present day as she was telling her story, as if to prove she was telling this guy every part of her boring adventure. "And then we walked down the road a bit, talking about how many Instagram followers Bree has..."

I will give them one tiny benefit of the doubt: maybe the film was better at one point, before being so clearly retooled. The credits list a number of characters who do not appear (including a ghost!), and two additional directors listed under "additional photography" (not "1st assistant director" or something - just "director"), so as easy it might seem to place the blame on writer/director/producer Taylor Chien, it's very possible the movie was taken away from him. So who knows what happened to this thing along its three year journey from when it was shot to now, when it's being dumped out for people like me who are still a bit weary of going to the theaters* and thus being very choosy over what they see, but will take a chance on a drive-in excursion. Alas, I'm not here to review their possible intentions, and at the end of the day this terrible movie is what they chose to put out in the world at 10 bucks a ticket or whatever. Don't make the same mistake I did; there are better and cheaper ways to waste your time. It never gets better than its "Dead Minion" poster, I assure you.

What say you?

* I am fully vaccinated, woo! But it seems people have gotten worse re: theater etiquette after a year of watching everything at home. I've been to three normal screenings since I was all clear and two of them had nonstop chatter among the few other patrons. Since the "crowd experience" I miss is generally a good one (i.e. big applause/laughter when appropriate, shutting up otherwise) I think I'd rather just watch certain things at home until the Drafthouse and New Beverly reopen, where noisy patrons are dealt with by the theater instead of fellow paying attendees who don't want to have their experience ruined even further by someone getting aggro after being asked to be quiet.

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Murder Mansion (1972)

MARCH 20, 2021

GENRE: GHOST, GIALLO
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

One valid criticism of the giallo sub-genre is that they tend to get a bit samey; the casual sex, the black gloves, the money schemes... if you take any half dozen at random you're likely to see the same plot points turn up in at least half of your picks. This is partly because they rarely cross with other genres, which can do wonders for what might actually be a fairly generic story; if I were to say "an unseen menace picks off a group of people one by one until there's only one female left" you might think I'm describing Friday the 13th but I'm actually thinking of Alien. So imagine my surprise when I picked a movie called Murder Mansion (Spanish: La mansión de la niebla) from Vinegar Syndrome's latest Forgotten Gialli collection and discovered it was less giallo and more... Old Dark House movie?

Things start off pretty typical for such a "yellow" film; there's a guy on a motorcycle, another guy in a car, and a lovely hitchhiker that the latter picks up and instantly starts rubbing her thigh (with black gloves, of course). Then we meet a guy who tells his wife he's waiting for a notary but he's actually in bed with another woman (a prostitute, maybe? She mentions him spending "all his money on women like her"), so within ten minutes or so we have all the proper ingredients: sex, money, gloves, and motorcycles. But then the hitchhiker, tired of the driver's advances, hooks up with the motorcycle guy as they head toward a town nearby, and things get a little more supernaturally charged.

Turns out everyone is heading the same way (and some are even involved with the same people!), but a thick fog and confusing directions leaves everyone lost. After some atmospheric wandering around in the countryside, everyone ends up at the titular locale (well, it's not ACTUALLY named Murder Mansion, as they probably wouldn't have stopped, but you know what I mean) and it starts to resemble James Whale more than Sergio Martino. I figured someone would just start killing everyone in the joint and it'd be up to our heroes (motorcycle guy and hitchhiker, aka Fred and Laura) to figure it out, but nope! Before long they're full on walking around dusty/spider-webbed basement corridors, and a pair of ancient ghouls seemingly rise from the adjacent cemetery to scare some of them into sounding crazy.

Hell it's even quite possibly the most chaste 1970s eurohorror film I've ever seen, with very little sex and even less violence. It's not until the climax that the body count really rises, and (spoiler for 50 year old movie ahead) it's just mostly bloodless gunshots as opposed to the usual knives and razors. The killer's motive still circles back to familiar giallo themes (money and daddy issues, in this case), but it's kind of remarkable how un-giallo it all is, to the extent that the reveal was the first time in close to an hour I even remembered that this was presented as that kind of film in the first place. If this was somehow the first "giallo" you ever saw, you'd have the weirdest impression of what these movies were like.

That said, I found it delightful all the same. Again, since so many of them are kind of similar, it was great to just get caught up in the spooky shenanigans instead of thinking "They stole that bit from What Have You Done To Solange!" or something like that. There's a great sequence where the two heroes are being shot at in the graveyard, and they think it's the guy from the car (who shrugs off Fred "stealing" Laura from him and hits on someone else at the house, but surprisingly takes no for an answer pretty quickly), but then they discover that his body was just being propped up and he's been dead for a bit - it's the sort of thing that adds to the mystery but without the usual abundance of exposition that usually just ends up complicating these movies. That Fred and Laura are actually pretty likable people is another perk; it's rare to find much sympathy in these movies, as even the heroes tend to be misogynist jerks (you usually end up feeling more compassion for the killer who is often a victim of childhood trauma or something).

The lone extra on the disc (no historian commentary, alas) is an interview with Evelyn Stewart ne Ida Galli, who plays the lady of the house. Fitting for such a PG-ish kind of movie, it's one of the more upbeat actor interviews I've seen from something from this place and time; usually these interviews are hilariously candid about brutish directors, co-stars who couldn't ask, scripts being rubbish, etc, but Stewart is pretty complimentary about the whole affair. She even says something to the effect of "I don't have any bad memories of this one!", and the closest she gets to any kind of dirt is something about the soon-to-be ex-husband of one of her female costars, who she bonded with. It's kind of sweet, though fairly dull if you're used to the more unabashed "I'm retired now so IDGAF" nature of these pieces.

Despite its rather flimsy connection to the sub-genre, I'm super glad Vinegar included it on their set. You can't argue with its "forgotten" status (the IMDb page is pretty bare, and when you click on the title on Stewart's page, it brings you to the page for the '80s adventure game Maniac Mansion, which is another of its titles), and at the end of the day the main goal is preserving these movies and finding them the audience they deserve. Hopefully these volumes will continue; not only are they helping me expand my giallo horizons, but they're also given wonderful packaging that looks great on the shelf. Having survived the shoddy era of cheap cardboard boxes (remember that Omen set? Ugh!), I find myself in awe of how sturdy Vinegar's collections are. I'm all about that deluxe aesthetic!

What say you?

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Anything For Jackson (2020)

JANUARY 1, 2021

GENRE: GHOST, SURVIVAL
SOURCE: STREAMING (SHUDDER)

For the past nearly fifty (!) years, every possession movie made has been compared (not always fairly) to The Exorcist, so it's kind of insane to think that it took this long* for someone to get around that very tall hurdle and simply invert the premise. Anything For Jackson has the girl tied to a bed, the freaky visuals, the rituals... but the plot is completely different, which means that if Friedkin/Blatty's masterpiece crosses your mind, it'll likely be of the "Huh, I guess you CAN make something that doesn't feel like it owes a debt to it."

The title refers to a little boy who died in a car accident, whose grieving grandparents (Julian Richings and Sheila McCarthy) want him back so badly that they dabble in the dark arts and find a spell that can bring him back by injecting his soul/ghost into a child that is about to be born. Of course for that they need a pregnant woman, which they find through Richings' job as a general practitioner, and arrange to have the woman come to their house for an appointment so they can kidnap her and carry out the ritual in the days leading up to the baby's birth. Naturally, she isn't exactly on board with this idea (despite being unsure if she wanted the child in the first place), so it unfolds a bit like your standard survival thriller, with the "villains" having to ward off snooping neighbors and the like, but with the fun wrinkle that the grandparents are a. a bit clueless about what they're doing and b. have no intentions of harming her.

On point A, I want to stress it's not a dark comedy. There are some bits of humor here and there, but it's usually subtle and dry - most of what there is stems from the couple's petty grievances with each other, the kind that can only be born out of a longtime relationship. Richings and McCarthy have terrific chemistry, and while it's not much new for McCarthy (Sam Coleman from WNTW News!) to play normal people, it's a true delight to see Richings not only taking on a rare lead role, but playing a relatively normal person instead of the usual creepy weirdos he has played in genre films for the past few decades. Sure, he's a guy that kidnaps a woman and perform a satanic ritual, but he's also a kindly doctor who will point out an askew hem on his wife's dress. And, while they're going about it in a very weird way, he's not only just a grandfather who wants to play with his grandson again, but he's also doing it all for his wife's sake, knowing her grief is even more unbearable than his own. It's not every day you can describe a Julian Richings character in a horror movie as "sweet", is what I'm saying.

As for the mom, Shannon (Konstantina Mantelos), she thankfully doesn't spend too much time on escape attempts we know won't work, and ultimately more or less realizes they mean well and aren't "bad people" in the traditional sense. In fact beyond knocking her over the head so they can get her inside and up into the room that she is confined to, they don't commit any violence at all in the film. But there's still a body count, because when they perform the first part of the ritual they accidentally let in other spirits, ones that aren't as benevolent as their grandson. These ghosts take to messing with the couple's heads, giving them horrifying visions (including one that might reduce the sales of dental floss among viewers) and possessing others. I was just starting to roll my eyes at the dedication of their usual snowplowing guy who kept coming back to clean up their driveway (despite Richings telling him not to, in fear he'd see something he shouldn't) when the plotline wrapped itself up in fantastically gruesome fashion.

There's also a bit of humor to be found in the performance of Josh Cruddas as Ian, an occult expert (and resident of his mother's basement) who assists the couple on occasion. It's an interesting character, as he doesn't really care much about why they're doing what they're doing, but is curious if it'll work, so he walks this line between being annoyed at their naivety but also mild amusement about what they manage to do right. His character proves to be more interesting than you'd initially suspect, and is another thing to help illustrate the movie's overall point that you can do a possession film without invoking Regan McNeill.

And it arrives at a perfect time, as my Shudder subscription will be due for renewal soon and with disrupted income due to covid, I am forever looking for ways to tighten the belt. Since the app on Xbox One is so buggy and it's somehow STILL not available on Playstation I don't use Shudder as often as you'd expect given my "I will watch any legitimate horror movie ever made at least once" approach to life. In addition to my son's aversion to such fare, my wife works from home doing therapy via Zoom and the like, so I can't have people screaming and such in the background even during the day when he's at daycare, so I can't watch anything until he's asleep (10pm, the little shit!). By then I myself am about to pass out, so I often watch movies broken up - it took three sittings to get through this, in fact. So when you factor that along with the other, more family-necessary services that ARE easy to watch (i.e. Netflix and Hulu), it feels like a bit of a waste to keep a Shudder sub going when I only use it maybe once a month*. BUT, things like this are exclusive, and I'm super glad I watched it, so the price seems right as of this time. If you haven't subscribed yet, AND you - unlike me - have the ability to use it more than 30 half asleep minutes a day, I highly recommend jumping on board. Their library continues to expand with both the older stuff you'd be excited to have at your disposal, and new films like this that would be instantly buried and forgotten on all-purpose services.

What say you?

*Luckily for them I watched this *after* the Castle Freak remake, another exclusive (at least for now) that... well, it wasn't terrible, but it was unnecessary and poorly cast (the girl playing blind was laughably bad at it), so it certainly wouldn't inspire a renewal to keep content like it coming my way.

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