Evil Dead Burn (2026)

JULY 10, 2026

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

As this review of Evil Dead Burn is one of the increasingly rare updates here, here's a fun little bit of HMAD lore: the 2013 remake was the first movie I reviewed after "retiring" five days before its theatrical release. The 13 years and change in between is more than double the amount of time the original "daily" run of the site lasted, and any review I post now could very easily be the last one I ever write here. Do I PLAN for that to happen? Of course not, I'll never give it up for good by design - it's just that life gets in the way, and it certainly doesn't generate income anymore, so I pretty much only post when I really want to get my thoughts out about a movie that got me thinking (like Obsession, or last year's Companion) or it's a franchise entry, because I'm a completist. If someone decides to kill a lunch break seeing what I thought about a certain franchise, I won't disappoint them by skipping one!

But even if this was an original, I feel I'd probably be inclined to write something, because I thought it was a damn good time at the movies despite two bad decisions (one franchise related, the other not) that threatened to leave me cold and indifferent. The "bad for Evil Dead" one was at the very end and I'll get into that later, but the other I feel I need to get out of the way early to save you time reading the review and also seeing the movie if it's a dealbreaker. So, SPOILER FOR FIRST 30 MINUTE STUFF: a possessed person kills the family dog. And while it's nowhere near as gratuitous as all the human violence we see throughout (which no one ever minds), there are a few quick shots of the poor pooch being stabbed, along with its whimpers as he takes the hits. If it makes you feel better he gets to come back as a Deadite, but it's still a pretty tough moment. However, I was warned about it beforehand, so it didn't play as much as a (negative) shock as it might to someone going in cold, especially someone who may have lost their own furry friend recently. So I feel it's one of those necessary spoilers, because it could seriously affect your ability to enjoy the rest of the movie and maybe if you're warned about it, as I was, it'll go down easier.

Because otherwise this is a solid addition to this series, and renewed my interest after the last two. While not without their high points, I felt both the 2013 remake and 2023's Evil Dead Rise suffered from a curious lack of escalation, instead offering a series of gnarly moments that were largely interchangeable and (especially in Rise's case) weirdly ignored after they happened. The heroes in that film would see something creepy, get hurt and/or run away, and then somehow sort of calm down and approach the NEXT creepy moment as if it was the first weird thing they saw. It kept the movies from ever really taking off for me; I found myself bored because there was no buildup or increasing intensity, instead offering the "and then this happens" kind of plotting that wore me out. That doesn't happen here; director Sébastien Vanicek (who cowrote with Florent Bernard) rarely lets the pace drag at all, and is constantly building up the threat and (naturally, since this is an Evil Dead movie) the amount of bodily harm our heroes endure as they try to stay alive.

It helps that, for a change, the Deadites actually have a clearly defined goal. The protagonists are the surviving family members of a guy named Ben Price who researched the Book of the Dead and Kandarian Demons and all that other lore stuff I barely pay attention to (which is to say I don't know if this guy was mentioned before. but the name didn't ring a bell), and apparently he found a dagger that could actually kill them. The Deadites, naturally, don't want such a thing to exist in the world, so they're basically trying to drive his grandson Joseph (Hunter Doohan from Wednesday) insane by killing off his family until he gives up the location of the dagger, which they all assume to be in their big isolated house somewhere. Is it the most complicated story? Hell no, but it's *something*, and gives the movie an energy the last two lacked, as the makers of those entries were seemingly more concerned with finding as many different ways to make trailer-worthy injuries as they could, without caring much about momentum.

Not that it lacks injuries. There's a moment involving an ear that I actually had to look away from for a second, due to my own ear issues (they get clogged super easy and I had numerous ear infections as a kid; to this day I almost never go underwater), and Vanicek has a particular love of having sharp things go through jaws, cheeks, etc. No one is completely covered in blood this time, but they all get tossed around, through walls, smashed on mirrors, etc throughout the film's slightly overlong 110 minutes. I also thoroughly enjoyed when he demonstrated what passes for restraint in a film like this; there's a terrific one take sequence where our protagonist makes their way around the house looking for a hiding spot as we see (sometimes not even in complete focus) three of the family members beating the hell out of each other in the background. And when a character is making their way down a chimney only to be caught, instead of watching yet another dismemberment (as we've seen plenty), the director cuts to the fireplace, letting us use our imagination a little as blood and viscera pour down over the logs below.

He tosses in a lot of great details like that throughout, more than making up for the occasional Raimi wannabe stuff (closeup shots of a dinner being prepared in the same quick-cut style of Ash preparing himself for battle, for example). I particularly liked when a Deadite stepped a bit on a corpse who had just been boiled alive, with their foot dragging away some of the skin and exposing the bone underneath (it's basically like when you step in dog poo and it smears a bit). And there's a mirror gag that is more of an homage to Contact than anything in Evil Dead 2. In fact fan service is incredibly/thankfully brief - there's a "Dead by dawn!" shoutout of course, but the only other big one is a picture of Bruce Campbell on the wall of family photos, which you could even say is more of a possible storytelling hint (is Ash part of this family?) than something that's there for no other reason than to make us nerds happy. Hell, they even successfully fake us out at one point, showing a chainsaw and then using a different construction item instead.

On that note, Vanicek is a big fan of payoffs! There's a Chekov's gun, a Chekov's pocket knife, a Chekov's prosthetic foot... it felt like a well constructed movie as opposed to a series of highlights, as everything is set up beforehand and put to use later. But my favorite had to be a gold pen, given as a gift to Joseph in the film's early moments when we're meeting everyone. The payoff is good, but it also made me chuckle, because anytime someone gives a character a fancy pen in a movie, my mind instantly drifts to Jason Takes Manhattan, when heroine Rennie is given what is apparently Stephen King's old pen. But that usual thought took on extra weight here, because this is an Evil Dead, and many a fan in the early '80s was inspired to check out this little independent feature because of King's infamous blurb in the marketing: "The most ferociously original horror film of the year!" And if Vanicek is a Friday fan, he is also probably aware that according to Jason Goes to Hell, the big lug is actually powered by the same Necronomicon that gave us the Deadites, so it all kinda ties together. Or it's just a pen that'll be used to harm someone. One of those.

Joseph is one of the movie's two main protagonists, with the other being Souheila Yacoub as Alice, Joseph's sister-in-law. His brother/her husband Will dies early on, which is why the family is together (another nice bit of Vacinek's: blood splattering the TV showing their wedding video as she fights his possessed parents for her life in the background), and it's clear early on that Will wasn't exactly the most loving and caring husband, nor did his mother approve of her. Being that this is an Evil Dead movie, it's not a spoiler to say she lives out the dreams of every woman who ever got put down by her mother-in-law by using more than words to fight back. But unlike the previous movie's rather dull "I don't want to be a mom but now I have to be" character arc, here we have an abused woman who is somehow seen as the real problem by his family, who believe him to be perfect. A dinner scene prior to everything going to hell via Deadites is just as tense as the horror stuff, honestly, as Alice butts heads with Will's parents and Joseph tries to keep the peace - it's like the dinner scene in Hereditary, which isn't the vibe these movies tend to offer and the film is the better for it. Over time we get the extent of what he put her through, and possessed family members even taunt her for being too weak to leave him, which gives extra weight to her standing up for herself in the here and now. And I like how the French filmmaker (he made the enjoyable killer spider movie Infested) paid tribute to his origins; Alice is French and in moments of extreme stress she (realistically) speaks in her native tongue, which again is just a nice touch that proves they were putting together a real movie here, not stringing together a bunch of "moments" that make it much less interesting to revisit.

Bonus: there's also a senile grandmother in the mix, who gives the movie most of its rare but mostly on point touches of humor. Yes it can feel a little Ready or Not-y at times (there's even a runner about Alice wanting a smoke, and a comment about her footwear that almost seems like an INTENTIONAL nod to RoN), but the movie I kept thinking of was Final Destination Bloodlines, which also offered a woman who was outcast from her dysfunctional family and a curse that has followed them for generations. I used to hold the impression that watching a family all get killed was too much of a bummer (as opposed to a group of friends, which is what the first film offered), but here it worked (except for the dog) just fine. And by giving equal weight to Joseph and Alice, there's a bit of "OK but who is our "Ash"? suspense that was also lacking from previous revivals.

But as mentioned, there is one blunder that I found just as hard to forgive as the dog, and the one that I felt was conduct unbecoming an Evil Dead movie. While digital effects are hardly a stranger to the series by this point, the entire climax revolves around a guy that is clearly aided more by computers than practical makeup, which bummed me out. It also committed the sin of leaving the house for a new location in the final fifteen minutes, something that always irks me as it deflates a lot of the buildup and makes the movie seem longer (which, again, at 110 minutes, it already WAS a bit too long). Maybe if this sequence took place at the house without a little break in between as they made their way from one location to the next, or if they left to give us a practical showcase that could have been cool even if they suddenly went to the moon, I could have been more forgiving. But having both seemed like a bad call to my eyes, and there's just no way I can accept such a CGI-heavy "final boss" in an Evil Dead. Indeed, I am convinced most of Rise's inflated good rep is because of its glorious chainsaw vs latex monster finale, so I can't help but think if they confined this junk to the first half I might have forgotten it entirely by the end if they putting their best foot forward right before the credits rolled.

Speaking of the credits, there are two extra scenes; one a little gag for this story, the other tying it into Rise (which is also how the movie starts, with that blonde girl at the lake). Since the 2013 one never got a followup, even though I didn't care much for Rise I'm glad they're finally trying to give this series some kind of continuity as opposed to just slapping the brand name on random stand-alone stories. Since this is literally the first time in the franchise's history I've liked one more than the installment before (honestly, since I never took much of a shine to Army of Darkness, it's my favorite since ED2), I'm kind of interested to see where it goes from here, as opposed to seeing it just because of the same obligation that has me still seeing Jurassic Park or Crow sequels. Well done, new team! Just leave animals out of it next time, please.

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The Mummy (2026)

APRIL 26, 2026

GENRE: POSSESSION
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

While a lot of folks flipped their lids for Evil Dead Rise, I found it to be disappointing. There was no real progression to the madness, the setting was wasted, and the central “woman who doesn’t want to be a mom but is forced into the role” motif has been done to death over the years. But the thing that really killed it for me was that the characters seemed incapable of reacting normally to their obviously possessed mother/sister - scene after scene had them see her do something creepy and they would react as if it was the first time she had displayed such behavior. Sadly, Lee Cronin does the same damn thing in The Mummy (full title, and stop encouraging him), albeit in a movie that runs much longer, which means it generated even MORE instances of me saying “Does this character have amnesia?”

You can tell it’s gonna be one of those movies that runs too long right from the start, as we are treated to a lengthy epilogue with characters who are not speaking English. Being that this is a major studio horror movie, we know damn well that they will not be important characters, and therefore we should not be spending more than 3-4 minutes tops with them to set up whatever they’re there to set up and be on their way. But it just keeps going and going, and yet still leaves us with questions that won’t be answered until much later. After what seems like 15 minutes we finally meet our actual main characters, and before long the plot kicks in: their daughter disappears and eight years later, as they’ve more or less finally moved on, she is found. But she’s not right…

Now, if she APPEARED to be right and gradually got all creepy and possessed, it’d be one thing. Exorcist works because Regan seems perfectly normal at first, even after displaying a few odd behaviors. Here, she is clearly, you know, the possessed little monster girl from a horror movie. She contorts in strange positions, has weird liquids oozing from around her body, makes clicking noises… it’d be like if the “Let Jesus f— you!” version of Regan was the one that Ellen Burstyn started being a little hesitant around. And yet, the parents (Jack Reynor and Laia Costa) act as if she’s merely a little quiet or something. They take her home and she starts doing horror movie things almost instantly, yet they never call a doctor or bring her to one, and even when Reynor starts to express concern that something might be wrong, it’s treated like a “You’re an uncaring dad!” kind of moment as opposed to, you know, a guy being perfectly rational.

And this sort of thing continues over and over throughout the movie! Both parents just sort of shrug off extreme behavior; even when her antics clearly cause the death of someone, they basically forget about it a scene later. Since Exorcist is just as much of an influence here as any Mummy movie I’ve ever seen (there is SOME Mummy esque stuff here, technically - though it’s basically Exorcist mixed with the same bag of tricks he used in Evil Dead), I started getting the impression that the first version of Friedkin’s masterpiece that Cronin watched was the 2000 recut/expanded one, and the stupid and pointless spider-walk scene unlocked something within him. “Yes!” a young Cronin presumably thought. “Real horror is a technically scary and creepy scene with zero followup whatsoever, never mentioned again!” Crazy things happen in this movie - many of them fun on their own! - but then there is no followup to them, making them feel weightless, not to mention continuing to increase my belief that the parents were brain damaged. Any time Cronin comes up with an idea that would force the plot to change gears, he simply cuts to black and picks up a day later, as if it never happened.

It certainly doesn’t help that the movie runs an unforgivable 135 minutes (longer than the actual Exorcist!), and not because of its complicated plot or wealth of well-developed characters. No, it’s just that every scene goes on much longer than it should, and it’s riddled with pointless subplots like Reynor visiting a professor to have some markings translated. Not only do we get a bit of the guy’s class, suggesting maybe he will be an important character (he isn’t), but there’s a whole other character (a cop who investigated the girl’s disappearance in the first place) whose point in the movie is to find answers, so this information could have been discovered by her. Instead we just have the father leaving his family behind with a clearly dangerous person to go talk to some guy he’s never met, all to get information he then does nothing with.

All of that is a shame, because at 85 minutes or so, this could have at least been a fun little Halloween time “spook a blast” type movie. Cronin uses diopters to an almost comical degree, but on the other hand he has a penchant for gnarly gore and bodily harm that serves him well here (the death via falling out a window has a very cruel/funny button to it), and the makeup for the possessed Katie is quite good. And she starts mind-controlling her siblings, resulting in some fun profanity from a little girl, always an easy way to win me over. But when the movie runs damn near an hour longer than necessary, by the halfway point it’s hard to remain engaged when the parents are so bafflingly inept. Like I understand the idea that they finally got their daughter back and don’t want to give her up again, but when she’s clearly posing a threat to their OTHER children, it just comes off as insane behavior. At least in Cathy’s Curse (a movie I would never defend for its strong character work) they establish that the mom has mental problems before she nonchalantly ignores her daughter teleporting around the house. I legit started cackling when the mom responded to the dad’s (EXTREMELY JUSTIFIABLE) concerns with the same face my own wife gives me when I tell her I don’t feel like taking our kid to his swim class or something.

Oh well. Despite the title, it’s technically an original R rated horror movie and it’s doing fairly well at the box office, so that’s always a good thing. But between this and Rise, I feel that - much like Fede Alvarez, weirdly enough since he made Evil Dead (2013) - despite their popularity with a lot of fans, I just don’t connect with this filmmaker’s particular brand of horror, so I can’t say I’ll be too excited for whatever he makes next. And that’s OK! There are probably people out there who couldn’t ever see what the big deal is with Carpenter or Romero. Just sucks when you can’t have the same fun others are having, though at least here even the people who overall liked it agree it was too long, so that’s not just me being an old grouch.

What say you?

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The Exorcism (2024)

JULY 1, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Five Nights At Freddy's (2023)

OCTOBER 27, 2023

GENRE: POSSESSION, VIDEO GAME
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (NORMAL/MIND-BLOWINGLY AWFUL SCREENING)

If anyone ever doubted my commitment to the theatrical experience over streaming, I only have to recount the 4:30 showing of Five Nights at Freddy's 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.

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!

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.

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.

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...

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 Willy's Wonderland, 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.

And I haven't even mentioned Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail from Countdown), 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.

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).

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.

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.

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 Saw-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 Hocus Pocus but too young for Serbian Film? Five Nights at Freddy's got you covered!

What say you?

*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.

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When Evil Lurks (2023)

OCTOBER 27, 2023

GENRE: POSSESSION
SOURCE: STREAMING (SHUDDER)

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 The Abyss 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 When Evil Lurks (Spanish: Cuando acecha la maldad) 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.

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).

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 Halloween movies recently, and a few young'ns have met grisly fates in those (Buddy in Halloween 3, Bumpy in the 2018 one, plus Billy is nearly killed in H5 - hmm, maybe don't have a B___Y name if you want to survive Haddonfield?). And Quiet Place 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.

Outside of those two brief highlights, what you have is a darker take on Mike Mendez' Don't Kill It, 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.

(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.)

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.

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.

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.

What say you?

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The Exorcist: Believer (2023)

OCTOBER 6, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What say you?

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

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The Nun II (2023)

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What say you?

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Evil Dead Rise (2023)

APRIL 24, 2023

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

I think I was about an hour into Evil Dead Rise when I realized why the film wasn’t working for me: like the 2013 remake (which I was also mixed on at best) it was aimed at the people who find Sam Raimi's first two films “cheesy” or “cheap looking” or whatever. On a technical level these two films – which admirably largely eschew digital effects in favor of practical ones – are flawless, no argument there. There's more money to play with, and it's all on screen, with professional actors to boot. But there’s simply no soul to these modern entries, and their relatively large budgets betray the whole appeal of the first film and its 1987 sequel: seeing what a creative and determined guy can accomplish with nothing (on the first one) and then seeing him truly cut loose when he had more money to play with the second time around. That is why the films make for such a great double feature (weird retconning aside due to ED2 not having access to ED1 footage): you’re seeing the progression of a filmmaker (and an actor in Bruce Campbell) on a technical level, while marveling that Raimi had lost none of his gonzo sense of humor in the intervening years.

But let’s face it: the story of the series is not particularly interesting. People read from a creepy book and supernatural forces come forward, killing all but one person, who usually grabs a chainsaw and takes out the immediate threat, but doesn’t stop it entirely. It's just an excuse to cut loose with whatever Raimi (or now, his successors) can dream up, and it's seeing that kitchen sink approach in action that makes them fun - when they're at their best, you truly have no idea what will happen next. Raimi seemed to understand the limitations of this concept, setting the third film in medieval times and turning it into more of a fantasy/adventure film than a traditional horror one, using our affinity with Campbell’s hero Ash Williams to smooth the wildly different tone and approach. For some it worked great – it’s their favorite one! I myself just find it OK, but there are others who wanted things to go back to the scarier roots of the first film. And to their credit, that’s what this film and the 2013 remake did – but they also seem content to recycle Raimi's ideas at the expense of coming up with too many of their own.

The biggest issue with this film (and the remake suffered from this too, now that I think of it) is that there’s no real sense of escalation or pacing. The first film certainly has its slower moments, but there’s a real buildup overall; every time another friend gets possessed things get more and more hectic until the final reel becomes just a nonstop frightfest, with Raimi’s camera constantly swishing around and Campbell being tortured with every turn. Here, writer/director Lee Cronin stages things more like a slasher movie for whatever reason; every time someone dies, there’s ten minutes of not all that much happening until the next possession occurs. And that might be fine if the other characters weren’t aware of the threat, but that’s not the case – the first possessed person makes their grand entrance to all four of the other characters right off the bat, which results in the film being repetitive on top of being poorly paced. A possessed person does something creepy (usually some sort of self harm and/or puking liquid everywhere) as the others watch in terror, then they run into another room of the apartment, regroup, make some kind of escape attempt that puts them in contact with the possessed person, who then does something creepy as the others watch in terror, then they run... you get the idea.

I mentioned the apartment, and that’s the other thing that kept the movie from ever really working for me: they totally waste the potential of the location. For the first time, one of these movies takes place in a big city (LA to be specific, though the New Zealand production obviously limits how much they can really sell us on that idea), with our heroes residing in a big apartment complex that is said to be falling apart and set to be torn down the following month. So one might be hoping for a real expansive romp around the building, like a modern update on Demons 2, right? Nope – we barely ever leave the protagonists’ apartment (and yet the layout for it remains hazy even by the end of the film, despite spending so much time there) and the only other people we see live directly next door. Don’t the other residents hear all of the commotion? Wouldn’t the Deadites roam around the joint looking for fresh victims to help when our heroes have themselves barricaded? I guess we can assume that the impending demolition has already scared off most of the residents, but since our heroes have two neighbors and we see several cars (not the Classic, however!) in the building’s shared garage before anything even happens, there should be at least a few others that could have gotten roped into the proceedings.

The lone exception is a millennial on the 4th floor (our heroes are on the 14th) who we meet as a possessed person in a flash forward prologue set in the woods, but she doesn’t show up again until the very end, showing how she got that way. This little bookend almost makes the movie seem like a prequel to the usual idea, showing how the Deadite force got from Los Angeles to the woods, and it’s rather pointless in the grand scheme of things, but I’ll allow it since a. otherwise we wouldn’t see anything exciting happen for a half hour and b. it has the only good joke in the entire movie, where a Raimi-esque “shaki cam” shot is revealed to be the POV of a drone one of the girl’s friends is using. But on the other hand, this opening suggests the movie will have a sense of humor, which it most certainly does not outside of a few darkly mean-spirited lines. The only other time I laughed was at an out of nowhere slam on the Freddy sequels.

Cronin also makes a miscalculation with his group of victims: a woman named Ellie and her three children, plus her sister Beth. Beth is a typical slacker type who fails to keep up with her sister’s phone calls, managing to miss that Ellie’s husband (and the childrens’ father) has left them, and she has just discovered she got pregnant during one of her (suggested frequent) casual hookups, so we have our character arc: she’s not exactly planning to be a mother, but thanks to the film's events she's going to get a rather intense crash course on being one! That’s fine, but not since Hereditary have I seen a casting director seemingly go out of their way to find people who couldn’t look less alike to play a family. There’s enough of a resemblance to pass the son and the younger of the two sisters as siblings since they at least have the same color hair, but otherwise it was honestly distracting – I kept waiting for some sort of explanation that they were all adopted or something. And Ellie and Beth don’t look anything alike either, so when the inevitable “I have to kill my sister” kind of stuff comes into play, it doesn’t land as well as it should – they might as well be strangers, since they barely interact prior to Ellie's possession. We also know that this big screen Warner Bros movie won’t be killing the little girl (or her protector), so that also betrays the “anything goes” spirit of the first film, where Ash wasn’t any more prominent than the other characters and thus had just as much chance of survival as they did. All of the neighbors are wiped out too early too, another thing that could have helped add some suspense to the proceedings. Sure, we know they're all goners, but the WHEN of it all can generate some tension. Alas, they all die within seconds of their first encounter with Ellie.

Weirder still, there’s not really anything all that inventive with the gore and violence. There’s a big scene set to someone chewing glass, but it’s not even as unsettling as the one in Oculus, a movie that wasn’t being sold on its gnarliness. Most of the effects involve the possessed person puking blood or bile or some kind of goo on another character, which is effective enough the first time but by the 3rd or 4th one might wonder why it is no one tapes the possessed folks’ mouths shut whenever they’re temporarily subdued. The only time it ever starts to feel like there’s a genuine IDEA behind a sequence is when Beth watches some slaughter occurring through the front door’s peephole, which leaves some of the carnage off screen and allowing a quick scare when a body is tossed back into the fishbowl style POV. I also liked the final form of the Deadite menace (I won’t spoil the particulars), the appearance of which is boosted by Beth and the little girl finally leaving their apartment for a change of scenery, but couldn’t help but wish it had appeared sooner. Plus, said scene is in the garage, which just reminded me that there were a bunch of residents who weren’t being utilized, an hour or so after the idea of “the Deadites infect an entire apartment building!” was suggested and never delivered upon. But for each of those scattered good ideas, we're given eye-rolling references to the others (including a "Dead by dawn!" chant), which I'm sure made someone with a Bruce Campbell tattoo cheer on opening night, but left me just wondering why in 35 years the best idea they could come up with is "what if someone else ALSO did this?"

So I dunno. It’s got good reviews and audience scores, and several friends have loved it, but it just didn’t work for me. I kept waiting for things to kick up a notch, but the final scenes (save for the aforementioned "final form" and accompanying obligatory chainsaw bit) aren’t any more intense or imaginative than the ones we saw a few minutes into the runtime during the prologue, and far too much of the movie is devoted to people simply giving “oh my GOD what IS HAPPENING?” kind of looks at the possessed characters (after a while I started wondering if Beth had some kind of Memento like amnesia, since she repeatedly seems shocked to see things she’d already witnessed in the previous scenes). And when it ended, I was aghast to realize that both Renfield and Pope’s Exorcist have more inventive examples of both splatter and dismemberment than this Evil Dead movie, which to me would be like if Ed Sheeran or someone like that was opening for Metallica and somehow managed to put on a more exciting show. Due to the lack of rules for Deadites (which is otherwise fine), it's hard to say what exactly makes this an "Evil Dead movie" as the evil force lacks a repeated presence (meaning a calling card "boogeyman" figure one could slap on mugs and T-shirts), and our new hero doesn't stand out. Even the remake knew enough to play with the idea of who the new hero might be, but here it's clearly Beth from the start and she is never given all that much to do until the final moments. So there’s no Ash (or "Ash"), there’s no cabin, there’s no Classic... the only thing left to live up to the title that they were coasting on would be the “splattery Three Stooges” type of physical action, but they kept dropping the ball and settling for restaging Raimi's moments far too often, content to coast on his ideas while bringing precious few of their own to the table. Just a huge letdown.

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Last Gasp (1995)

APRIL 12, 2023

GENRE: POSSESSION
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

For whatever reason, whenever I would request a film for review from the good folks at Vinegar Syndrome, they would send everything they were putting out that month (I assume this is their standard practice, but don't want to speak for everyone!). And that is a nice way to pad out the collection and occasionally find a gem that wasn’t on my radar (like Cemetery of Terror, or pretty much anything from director Ruben Galindo Jr), but also means I end up with a lot of their filler like Last Gasp. This thing has been sitting in the “pile” (now an actual shelf) for two years because it didn’t sound particularly interesting, but I like star Robert Patrick, so I kept it around for a proverbial rainy day. Which finally came today.

The thing about Patrick is that he is a terrific character actor, rightfully respected and a “get” for movies and shows that need someone who offers his particular “you’re not sure if you can trust this guy” presence (X-Files in particular benefited from this, as he was replacing Mulder on the team but taking over skeptic duties from the now believer Scully). But that skill isn’t utilized here – in fact it’s downright wasted for a story in which his character is proven to be a jerk in his first scene. He’s a real estate developer in Mexico where the locals keep killing his builders for invading their land, so after promising a proper burial for the latest victim (which he instead has the body tossed in a river) he hires a guy to just kill all the locals to solve the problem. The mercenary eggs him on to finish one guy off himself, and then he is possessed by the man’s spirit.

This prompts him to kill people (while painted up and wearing next to nothing like the jungle-dwelling locals, which is slightly problematic but gives Patrick a chance to show off his physique), but… he already had no problem with that, nor was he an innocent victim like Larry Talbot or whoever. The actual hero of the film is Joanna Pacula’s character, who is introduced much later as the wife of a man who disappeared while working on Patrick’s project. Perhaps if we met her first and then gradually learned what was up with Patrick’s character, there’d be some engagement to her plight, but since we have all the answers long before she does (hell, mostly before we even MEET her), there’s little reason to invest yourself in the narrative. They don’t even tease out the mystery of her husband’s disappearance – a randomly inserted flashback tells us he’s dead not long after we even knew he existed, having been killed during one of Patrick’s possession sprees. Weirder, the movie spends like 20 straight minutes with a PI she’s hired to find the man, and we stick with him as if he’s the actual hero of the movie. To be fair, it’s (spoiler for 30 year old movie ahead) slightly surprising when he is killed at the end of the first act, but again this would only work if we hadn’t already known everything. When he dies it isn’t a “oh wow, he’s dead!” moment, it’s a “So why were we focusing on this guy for long?” one. It’d be like if Psycho started out with Norman tending to his mother’s corpse in lieu of the hotel scene with Marion and Sam, but still wanted us to be shocked when she died in the shower.

I assume that the original script was indeed told more from the Pacula character’s perspective, only to be carelessly reworked to get Patrick – still high on his T2 fame – front and center in the proceedings, but unfortunately no one thought to simply make him a decent guy in the process, which would at least give us the sort of American Werewolf in London type tragedy at its center. Who cares if he’s possessed by a vengeful spirit when he was already scummy to begin with? Why are we watching a PI look for a missing car for a man we already know is dead (and also who killed him)? It’s just a baffling approach that renders the movie inert nearly from the start. The only reason to keep watching is – because this was a mid-90s pay cable movie – to enjoy the occasional sex scene, since such things are so rare nowadays. Not that I need nudity to enjoy a movie, but it’s such a taboo thing now that it sadly rates as a novelty whenever I watch an older movie and see it presented so casually, not unlike how odd it looks to see Bruce Willis smoking in an airport in Die Hard 2.

In other words, if our country hadn’t gotten even more prudish than it already was over the past 30 years, this movie would have literally nothing going for it. VS didn’t even bother to produce any new extras of note, which is pretty telling too since they always have at LEAST a commentary or lengthy interview with one of the movie’s principles. Here all we get are some outtakes and the trailer, which does indeed make it look more like a man struggling with a curse than it ever comes off in the finished film. What a dull, pointless movie.

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