It was about a year ago that I first tried to watch Darkness Rising, not getting too far before falling asleep. Why I didn't try to finish it then is a mystery (smart bet: other stuff I *had* to watch arrived and it just got forgotten) but it's a perfect "FTP" entry in that I have very little to say about it and am happy to finally feel comfortable with dropping it off at a Goodwill or something, knowing that it isn't anything I ever need to watch again. It took me four sittings to finally get through it all, which is kind of a problem for an 80 minute movie, wouldn't you agree? I mean it only took me one to get through Slender Man.
At least it starts promisingly enough, with a woman, her boyfriend, and her cousin breaking into her (condemned) childhood home to retrieve some things and maybe finally figure out why her mom went crazy twenty years ago. They're only there for about seven seconds before they start seeing things, and then their minds start to work against them - a suburban Shining of sorts! But then more stuff happens, and then more stuff happens, and then... yet more stuff happens, as if the writers were afraid to leave any haunted house/supernatural cliche on the table. People's eyes turn black as they turn on their friends, angry dogs appear out of nowhere, ghostly figures pop out, creepy phone calls are received... at a certain point I gave up trying to make sense out of any of it, assuming they were just purposely going for a kitchen sink thing in the spirit of Evil Dead, albeit without the humor or DIY charm.
And the comparison isn't really a stretch, because the film is bookended with scenes of Ted Raimi himself, in period garb, though like most of the rest of the plot I couldn't quite discern the point of the scenes other than to say "Hey, Ted Raimi!", as if they wanted to pay their respects to the film they were emulating. To be fair some of these random sequences kind of work - I enjoyed the bit where they were trying to leave the house only for a dog and its many copies to block them at every exit, and even if it wasn't played for laughs I was amused when one of them was plagued by visions and poured bleach in her eyes to stop them, only for it to not work (bonus: the other girl uses toilet water to rinse her eyes!). But it's hard to get particularly worked up in the plight of the characters when there were no clear rules to the threat, and while the house is serviceable for this sort of thing it gets mighty repetitive watching just these three people (apart from Raimi's scenes, the entire film takes place within the house in one night, with no other characters) wander around the same hallways and bedrooms. Sam Raimi might have been able to make this work with some inventive camerawork and editorial energy, but these folks do not. Movies this short shouldn't be such a struggle to get through, especially for someone with my level of experience of watching anything/everything.
The second lowest grossing film of all time is Storage 24, a movie about a monster killing all the randos in a storage facility, which grossed a total of 72 dollars during its theatrical "release" (one screen, but still - that's like six tickets!). The thing is, it's actually a pretty decent little movie (it's from Johannes Roberts, who has since gone on to bigger fortunes with 47 Meters Down and the Strangers sequel), and would be the one I recommend if you only could watch one horror movie about randos trapped in a storage unit. However, this one, The Hoarder, isn't all that bad either (and the title makes it a terrific place to start FTP reviews), offering up reasonable amounts of gore and a fairly decent twist in its sub-90 minutes.
Now, those things are nice but moot if you hated everyone in the movie, but that's thankfully not the case here which is what makes it worth a look as opposed to unwatchable dreck. Our characters (led by Mischa Barton) aren't the most savory lot in the world - Barton has a history of snooping on her boyfriends, there's a cop that's there to retrieve some bribe money, there's a prickly divorced couple splitting up their belongings, etc... - but they're not hateful or even all that obnoxious. They're flawed, and so even though there's no real sadness to seeing any of them get offed, I never found myself rooting for the killer either. Plus, the twist kicks it up a notch, and I give kudos to director Matt Winn for how he didn't cheat in the kills that occurred prior to the reveal. It's not a mindblowing twist, for the record - just one that gives it a little oomph at a point where the movie could have started getting too repetitive.
So it's a perfectly OK timekiller; the sort of thing you can safely watch at the end of the day and maybe pass out during (I didn't, for the record - I watched it midday!) without feeling too bad, but also not kick yourself for staying awake through and having to find something ELSE to doze off to instead. I wish there was a little more variety to the environment, but I guess it's more realistic that it'd be aisle after aisle of identical doors that lead into the various units, so I can't fault them for that (and to be fair they do utilize the basement and some offices to mix it up a bit). I wouldn't ever pay for it (this one was a trivia win, so all it "cost" me was whatever birthday I forgot in order to keep the full title of the 6th Puppet Master movie rattling around in my head), but if I was still watching/reviewing every day it wouldn't surprise me if this was one of the better movies I saw in a given week.
One of my OCD symptoms is an inability to abandon something without it nagging at me forever; I traded in a game I wasn't enjoying over a decade ago and to this day it bothers me and I feel I should buy it back so I can finish it off at least. I've had to talk myself out of buying it again several times, and whenever Gamestop has a B2G1 I always check to see if it's an option (it's the tie-in game for X3, for the record). Similarly, if I get a movie for review (unsolicited), or win it at trivia or something, I find myself unable to dump it until I give it a look, but with my limited time usually spent on watching the films I DID ask for or simply went out of my way to see, this pile of unwatched screeners and winnings just keeps getting bigger. I keep them next to my couch and the stacks often fall over, burying things that I might actually need to watch, unearthed until I feel like cleaning up.
So for this New Year's I resolved to get that pile down to something manageable (say, eight or nine movies tops - it's about ten times that right now), so I've been doing my best to watch a couple a week. As expected, none of them have been particularly great so far, but that was always the "fun" part about the site - digging through all those forgettable movies to find the ones that made it worthwhile. Now to be clear, last week's 10 To Midnight wasn't one of them - most of them I watch and just don't feel like writing a full blown review, so I settle for a Tweet and move on. But I'm trying to wean myself off of Twitter, and I want to update the site more often, so I came up with an answer to both problems: From The Pile!
From The Pile reviews will be marked FTP and will be shorter than the usual HMAD review (which I'll still do, of course), but longer than a Tweet, naturally. I'll do one for every "pile" movie I watch, regardless of its quality, which will not only give you guys more to read but also offer incentive to get through more of them! Everyone wins! Hopefully you guys enjoy the column - but even if you don't too damn bad. I have to get this crap off my floor. Anyway, the first one will be up later today!
Back in 2010, I had planned to make 10 To Midnight my movie for the day via a midnight screening at the New Bev, but the film (or projector itself? Can't remember) broke and I didn't get to see how it ended. It wasn't available to rent at the time (and I had already started trying to pare my collection down), so I had to wait until another screening happened, but when it did something came up and I couldn't make it at all. So now it's been so long that I couldn't even really remember the part I had seen or where I left off; watching via the new Scream Factory blu-ray was pretty much like seeing the film for the first time. Incidentally, I also revisited Predators this week for my BMD column; it was 2010 where I had my one viewing of that film and that too jogged almost no memories. Long story short, it seems my memory only goes back (at most) eight or nine years now, so maybe I can just start re-reviewing all the movies here since I won't remember any of them.
Anyway, this is a delightfully odd little movie. It's from Golan and Globus, and was somewhat hastily made after the success of Death Wish II prompted the Cannon gents to stay in the Charles Bronson business, but what they made wasn't exactly a "Charles Bronson movie". But if you're an astute movie viewer you can probably tell that just from watching the trailer, as they use the same shot of him firing his gun like six times because it's the only shot he fires in the entire film. See, there's only one bad guy in the plot, and he obviously can't be killed until the very end, so there's not much opportunity for Paul Kersey-esque action beats, and instead Bronson just spends most of the movie bickering with his partner and - in the second half - taunting the killer in order to get him to screw up.
Why does he need to do that, you ask? Well I'll tell you - it's because the killer is too damn good at covering his tracks, but since Bronson is blessed with Bronsonian skills, he just KNOWS the guy is the killer but lacks the hard evidence needed to put him away. So he plants some, but screws up because of all the things he could have done, he opts to douse some of the victim's blood on the killer's clothes - which couldn't possibly be legit because our guy strips to his birthday suit when he commits his crimes. Actor Gene Davis should have won a bravest actor of the year award for sure, because while they usually obscure his junk we can tell perfectly well that he's running around in the woods, around the sets, and even on city streets with the thing dangling around where it could be easily mangled if he tripped or zigged when he should have zagged. So anyway, Bronson has to admit he planted the evidence, and gets fired while the guy goes free.
So for the rest of the movie we watch these two guys antagonize each other - Bronson follows him around to make sure he doesn't do anything, and in turn the killer calls him up and leaves vague threats. Caught in the middle are Bronson's daughter (the incredibly charming Lisa Eilbacher) and his younger partner, McCann (Andrew Stevens) who is also involved with the daughter but keeps blowing her off for reasons I can't quite follow. The film's a bit long for its type, running over an hour and forty minutes when 85 would have done just fine, but it rarely bores and switches gears so many times it's hard to even notice. It's a procedural! It's a serial killer thriller! It's a courtroom drama! It's a buddy cop movie! Hell if they spent a little more time on it it could even count as a character study, since Eilbacher's character has a rocky relationship with her dad on account of his commitment to policework, yet pursues Stevens' character hard, possibly working through some daddy issues.
Alas, we don't get much time with that sort of thing, because director J. Lee Thompson is happy to cut back to Davis doing his thing. He's got a pretty great alibi for the opening kill sequence - he goes to a movie, makes his presence known to a pair of girls, talks to the box office clerk, etc. before sneaking out of the bathroom window and killing a woman. He then returns to the movie (the Aero theater in Santa Monica, to be exact) and again bugs the same girls, so when he is inevitably brought in for questioning, they are located and confirm that he was at the movies during the time of the murder. But after that we rarely see that much cunning - he does something similar with a hooker in the film's final reel, but naturally Bronson's on to him by then so he doesn't get a chance to put the alibi to use, and in between he's mostly just making creepy phone calls (with a bad Mexican accent for "good" measure) and going about his day, where he seems to be the only male employee in an office full of women who rightfully hate him.
In other words, the actual plot/narrative thrust kind of meanders and isn't particularly interesting, but all the weird little details make the movie a blast. You get Bronson angrily presenting a sex toy for men (called an "Acu-suck" - use your imagination), Bronson mocking a guy for being a virgin (actually that's the same scene), Bryan Cranston's brother as a goofy party attendee, Carmen "Reverend Sayer" Filpi as the world's least effective hotel clerk, and - if you're a Los Angeles resident or aficionado - lots and lots of vintage scenery, including the reveal that the Aero hasn't really changed much in 35 years even though the area around it is nearly unrecognizable. Ditto the LA Courthouse, which I recognized instantly despite not having been there for ten years (for jury duty, don't get too excited). Less fun but still interesting - it pretty much boils down to a guy killing women because they won't go out with him, which is still a huge (bigger?) problem today, and unfortunately in the real world we don't have Charles Bronson risking their career to keep these clowns off the street. Some old movies have a weird charm because we see things that aren't really an issue anymore; it's a bummer this can't join that crowd.
Scream's Blu-ray comes with a few interviews and a pair of commentaries. One has a guy I can't stand so I skipped that one, but the other, by Paul Talbott (author of two books on Bronson) is chock full of fun info about the film's production and stars, including the reveal - one I could have guessed myself - that the film's opening scene with Bronson was not intended to be the film's opener, but moved up because the producers were afraid that audiences wouldn't like having to wait a whole ten minutes to see Bronson. So the film opens with this dull scene of him typing out a report, then cuts to a murder, then we get a traditional introduction to the actor when he comes to investigate. It's a bit of a dry listen since Talbott is by himself and reading from notes, so it can be a bit hard to stay focused on, but he goes all out - noting car models, street locations, the wardrobe selections, the whole nine yards. He also offers script passages of scenes that didn't make it for one reason or another, so it's a highly recommended listen if you're a fan. Stevens' interview is also pretty fun; he relates a great anecdote about getting the notoriously quiet Bronson to open up and shoot the breeze with him, clearly (rightfully) proud of his accomplishment.
So it's a pretty nice release for the sort of movie that fans would be happy to just finally be able to own on high def, which is the sort of thing Scream Factory excels at. I'm still on the fence about keeping it, however; it's a fun movie but not one I'm likely to watch over and over, since most of its charm stems from the out of nowhere wacky moments as opposed to its compelling characters or crafty narrative. In fact, I suspect the film's reputation is largely due to how the audience gets sent out of the theater; I won't spoil the particulars, but I will say I'll never forgive myself for missing out on that rescheduled screening and losing out on the chance to watch it unfold with a crowd. I laughed and cheered by myself *at home*, so with the energy of the crowd I might have started crowd surfing or something, it was just that great. Even if the rest of the movie was junk it'd be worth watching for that moment alone, so enjoy!
If I was operating on a normal schedule, I would have seen/reviewedEscape Room on its opening day (perhaps the Thursday night before), as seeing genre films on opening day is one of the only HMAD traditions I still uphold. But ironically, I was out of town for a weekend bachelor party that included doing an actual escape room on Friday, so between traveling and wanting to spend time with my family on Thursday night I just couldn't make it happen, and had to wait for an opportune moment during the week. Weirder still, there's a moment in the movie where a character looks at a newspaper headline saying that five people died in a fire - it has nothing to do with the movie, but in real life, on the day the movie opened, five girls actually DID die in a fire that broke out in the escape room they were doing. So that's kinda freaky, and if I went to the movie earlier I wouldn't have thought anything about it.
Odder still, the escape room I was playing in real life was based on the Saw films, which this movie occasionally feels like. The characters arrive on their own freewill, but it's still kind of the same deal as Saw II and V (and, uh, Jigsaw) - a group of people who don't know each other are trapped in a building and need to complete twisted tasks engineered by an unseen madman, and making a mistake means you die. The PG-13 rating obviously keeps it from ever being as violent/gory as those films could get, but it's still easy to be reminded of that series from time to time, and not in a ripoff way - it's actually kind of part of its appeal, reminding me of when that series was king and still retained its clever appeal. There are no major twists in this one, but the ticking clock scenarios that usually reduce the cast by one before they move on to a new challenge makes it feel like a Saw that doesn't require a notebook to keep up with who's who and when things take place. So a more successful Jigsaw, I guess.
But the film's primary appeal is that the writers clearly ran through some escape rooms before sitting down to hammer out their screenplay, giving it a genuine feeling that a number of game-driven movies often lack. Video game movies (that is, movies *about* video games, not Tomb Raider or whatever) are the worst offender - the games the characters play often bear no resemblance to a game anyone would actually play, suggesting the writers never bothered to check if they came off as genuine. But here, even if the setup is unlike anything in the real world (people are invited to the room to play with strangers - it's almost exclusively something one does with their friends), the puzzles themselves are 100% in line with what I myself have experienced in these things*, which added immensely to the proceedings.
In fact, the movie was at its best when combining danger with their attempts to solve a standard puzzle. The trailers highlight what's probably the best overall sequence, where the group is trapped in an upside down room - as the floor gives way, they have to figure out a four digit code for a safe that contains the key that will allow them to get to the next room. Apart from the whole "the floor is disappearing and can send you plummeting to your death" element, it's a puzzle that anyone who has ever done an escape room will recognize - the group has to scour the room for clues that will produce the necessary code (in this case, it matches up to the color/number of billiard balls that are glued to the table above them), with the clock ticking down and the ever-present "we have the numbers but the wrong order" hiccup that I've run into nearly every time I've done a room.
Unfortunately, they occasionally betray this realism with some stuff that would never fly in a real room, like when their key is frozen in the center of a giant ice cube, so they have to melt it with their bare hands. The room had plenty of other dangers (the cold temperature and cracking ice), so I wish the solution involved something more traditional i.e. "brainier" rather than be something that just adds to their risk. Later in the movie they get even more unfamiliar, but it's explained away with "they did their research, they know what we can handle!" so solutions require them to know sign language and things like that. And by that point I was pretty much on board and willing to forgive, but still - I would have loved if they kept the puzzles/solutions in line with reality while simply increasing the risk of the danger around them.
Speaking of the danger (and this is kind of a spoiler, so skip to next paragraph if you want to go in blind-ish), it's the rare instance of a PG-13 rating actually kind of helping a genre movie rather than hurt it. If it was rated R, I'm sure we'd see all the horrific details when our characters got offed, but instead it's usually left pretty vague - which got me wondering for a while if it was all a game after all and no one was really being killed (a la April Fools Day). The first time it becomes 100% clear that these folks are dying is when it's actually from the hand of another player (not in a villain way, it's a fight to the death per the game's rules), so it kind of works as much of a shock to us as it is to the person who just took another life, an element we'd be denied if they were going the Saw (or Cube, respect) route and letting us see the gruesome outcomes.
Another smart thing is that we only meet three of the six players before they all arrive for the game, which makes us identify more with them and mistrust the others, because if Saw II or Cube taught us anything it's that there's usually a mole in there to make sure things are going smoothly. I won't tell you if that's the case here, but the approach keeps us on our toes with regards to that and also the order in which people exit the film. The trailers thankfully stuck primarily to the first couple rooms where everyone was alive, so it's a legit surprise when this or that person is removed from the proceedings. It's a good mix of actors too; you might recognize them from this or that thing (for horror fans, Deborah Ann Woll from True Blood and Tyler "Dale" Labine being the most obvious), but there isn't a clear "star" that overshadows everyone else - it's a true ensemble from start to finish. That said, it's a shame they had to blow part of the mystery with the ever awful flash forward opening, which shows us one character in a room by themselves, rendering their "in danger" scenes throughout the film anticlimactic. It doesn't take too long to get going (especially since we only see three of the characters prior) so I'm not sure why they thought this was necessary, but it's mostly forgivable thanks to the other stuff that managed to surprise.
My only other quibble is that the ending drags. Obviously I can't get into details, but at a certain point it seems like we're watching the sequel to the film as opposed to the natural conclusion to this one, followed by a lengthy teaser for where the next room might be held - it's a bit much, in a movie that's already longer than average as is. Think of Cube, how it ended so perfectly with the guy walking out into the unknown - this could have done something similar, but instead it relieves us of the ambiguity, and then keeps going on and on for good measure. So it loses some of its energy, unnecessarily, with the only saving grace being that the film's surprising success (it made $5-6m more than it was expected to over the weekend) means we will probably get a sequel and this stuff will at least not be in vain.
Other than that, it's a solidly entertaining movie that makes the most of its concept and doesn't get bogged down in too much "how is this all possible" nonsense that would just kill the fun. It's more of a thriller than a horror film, and I think that works in its favor - the focus is always on the game itself and occasionally even lets you solve the puzzle along with the characters (I figured out one before them!), giving the film a minor interactive feel that the likes of Saw can never accomplish ("Audience members are invited to chop off their own fingers along with the characters on screen!"). This sort of thing makes up for its occasional blunders, and I hope they get the sequel to work out the kinks. In summary: it might be released in January, but it's not a "January movie"!
What say you?
*The Saw one has seven rooms and if you fail one you get to move on. We ended up beating five of the seven, which is apparently very good as we were told the average group only beats one or two! I believe it was the seventh room I have done over the past few years, so I'm not an expert by any means but I've done enough to realize that the people who make these things really love 3 or 4 digit combinations.
I usually bristle when they remake a recent foreign language horror film for seemingly no other reason than to do it in English, but at least they waited about a decade to do it with Inside, as opposed to the insulting turnaround times for the likes of Shutter (not even four years) and Let Me In (barely two!). Plus it wasn't just a greedy big studio behind it - this Inside is an independenta Spanish co-production, with [Rec] fave Jaume Balagueró writing and producing (a guy who'd know about quickie English language remakes), giving it more "on paper" cred than the likes of, say, The Stepfather '09. And as a bonus, they cast Rachel Nichols from my beloved P2 as the pregnant mother - add all that up and you should have a redux that's at least worth a look, right?
Well... they kind of cleared that not-exactly lofty goal, I guess. It's not a bad movie, but it's so beholden to the original's beats (not its specifics, more on that later) that the only reason to see it would be if you haven't seen the original. I prefer my remakes to keep the basic scenario but change just about everything else (Dawn of the Dead being the easiest example, though the recent Suspiria is also an easy one to point to, albeit less accessible), but this only diverges slightly from the Bustillo/Maury original, so if you've seen it there's little surprise to be found here, and you'll keep asking yourself why they bothered. Suspense/home invasion movies like this tend to not lend themselves to repeat viewings anyway, and that's what this kind of feels like; even when they change things up a bit, they tend to fall right back in line with the story we already knew... and likely preferred.
But in theory, it should actually be the better film, ironically enough, as they excise the original's two biggest blunders (skip the next three paragraphs if you haven't seen the original!). For starters, we aren't subjected to horrible CGI shots of the baby being jostled around inside the womb (to be fair, the original's directors didn't want them either - they were forced to add them by the producers), so that's a blessing. The other thing they thankfully get rid of is the number of cops (and the suspect!) who come over and figure out what's going on - this time around, there's no suspect at all, nor does one of them survive their initial injuries but attack Sarah thinking she was the villain. That chunk of the original nearly derailed the movie for me, so I was happy these folks seemed to feel the same, removing it without putting anything else in its place. The stuff with the cops is simplified and, for what it's worth, superior.
Their other changes aren't as successful, unfortunately. One intriguing one is that Sarah has lost her hearing as the result of her injuries from the car crash, but very little is done with it - it's mostly just an easy way to keep her from alerting a friend that stops by (because she isn't even aware he's there until she replaces her hearing aid battery, at which point he's out the door anyway), and rarely used otherwise. Also, this time The Woman (Laura Harring) has set up shop across the street in a half-finished house, so she can take pictures and such, but the only reason this exists, best I can tell, is to give them a second location to go to for part of the film's climax, which is always a dumb move in these things anyway. It's a home invasion movie - why is it all building toward two people fighting elsewhere? Hell they don't even stay in THAT house - they go outside for the final fight. So now it's a Yard Invasion movie.
In fact the ending is drastically different, so if you ignored my earlier spoiler warning then DEFINITELY skip this paragraph because it spoils them both! In the original, in keeping with the French New Wave Horror's sensibilities of being grim af, Sarah dies and The Woman gets the baby after all - this time it's the other way around, so it kind of just ends as you'd expect it to as opposed to something more interesting or daring. Worse, they fight to the death inside a covered swimming pool, so when The Woman is subdued Sarah swims to the top and pushes through a cut in the tarp to emerge from the watery enclosure - even the baby in Sarah's belly would probably roll its eyes about the corny symbolism. Then she just delivers the baby herself, robbing us of one of the original's intriguing elements: that The Woman becomes a protector and nurse during the delivery. They never have that sort of "bond" here, and I actually missed it - because otherwise it's just another crazy person trying to kill our hero (it doesn't help that we already had a ripoff of Inside called Visions, which gave us the happy ending version already).
Now, when doing a review of a remake I try to avoid too much "this is how it differed" stuff and try to judge it on its own terms, but when it's so close to a movie I've seen (let alone really loved) it's hard to separate. Any review I write will be from the mindset of someone who has seen x number of horror movies, and their job should be to make me think this is one I haven't basically seen yet. At no point was I able to forget that I was watching a remake, as Balagueró and director Miguel Ángel Vivas (who also co-wrote) never gave it enough of its own identity to let me get sucked into it (perhaps Balagueró was inspired by the impressive box office of Quarantine, which also changed precious little). There are times when it feels like things might go a different way, such as the introduction of a gay couple who lives next door (more or less filling in the role of the coworker), but they're dispatched before having much of a chance to do anything differently. Even the specifics barely change - the cop once again leaves the house thinking everything is fine before realizing that the woman he talked to wasn't pregnant. Like, they couldn't think of a different reason to have him go back (or just not leave in the first place)? It's fine to use the same setups if you have new punchlines, so that viewers can all enjoy whether they've seen the original or not, but here it's like the opposite - the setups occasionally change but it always ends the same way.
So it's like one of those Telltale interactive games, where they say you have a choice between saving Person A or Person B and regardless of what you choose, they kill Person B because that's how the main story needs to go (Person A will just be kind of a dick to you for not trying to save them). And by design it's not like we can fall in love with these versions of the characters, as they're not around long enough to get attached to any of them except Sarah. As for her, again I'm always happy to watch Ms. Nichols, but she's not given much to do here beyond look startled, look around for something to fight with, etc. She gets in a couple of good lines near the end (both the result of trying to stall The Woman while waiting for the right moment to strike), and they have softened her a bit from Alysson Paradis' version, though as with the ending that just gives the film less of a personality overall. So she's stuck kind of just going through the same "trapped with a psycho" stuff we saw her do in P2, so it's double the deja vu.
The good news is, it's watchable and decent enough on its own, and unlike the original it's not "tough to watch", so if you're squeamish there's finally a way for you to get through this story! It's got some gore (including a borderline darkly comic moment where someone is seemingly using their own pouring blood as a weapon of sorts), but nothing that would give the MPAA much of a problem - this movie won't have you worried about scissors, anyway. Indeed, I can't help but think this was meant to be a wider theatrical release at some point and all of these changes were made to make the film more accessible to mainstream audiences, only to see it get an even more buried release than the French original (which at least got Dimension behind a big video push for their Dimension Extreme label). I wasn't even aware the damn thing had even come out until I found it while scrolling around on Hulu (which I just got) for something to watch to fall asleep to. Considering Vivas made the incredibly grim Kidnapped (which makes the original Inside look like, uh, this one) I can't help but wonder if they had gnarlier ideas that were left off the table in favor of chasing ticket sales, but I also suspect that would just mean they'd make an even closer clone. So instead we get this watchable but forgettable version that exists mainly for Nichols' devotees and people who don't like to read.
Back when I ran HMAD proper, I tried to make sure I saw at least one new Christmas-themed film every year around this time, because there are so many I haven't seen and don't usually find myself in the mood for such fare in say, April. It's a tradition I meant to keep after "retiring", but like most of my optimistic plans for the site's future, it hasn't exactly panned out; even when I manage to see one, like last year's Better Watch Out, I usually lack the time to write them up (for the record, that one is pretty good but the twist is far too easy to spot ahead of time, and the film takes a bit of time to get back on track after trying so hard to misdirect us). So after last month's Mrs. Claus I'm happy to be sitting here again with a review of Christmas Blood (Norwegian: Juleblod), making up for last year's absence.
Alas, while it's certainly better than Mrs. Claus, it's not exactly a new classic that will join the likes of Black Christmas or even Black Xmas. I'll give it this much: they score lots of points by going big with the concept. Our killer is another axe-wielding Santa Claus setting his sights on a house full of lovely people, but they're just a few of the many, MANY targets he has. As we learn in an opening crawl (after a pretty good prologue where he takes out a guy and his present-snooping daughter), Santa has compiled a "naughty list" of admitted criminals from all over Norway, and every Christmas he whittles that list down from his initial 300+ (!!!). After being taken down and institutionalized in the opening sequence, we cut ahead seven years where he has escaped and picks up where he left off. You gotta love such a widespread scenario that - if all goes well - makes sequelizing easy, as they don't need a continuing victim hero like Sidney Prescott or even much of a new story. "It's Christmas again and now he's after these people on his list" is all they really need.
And we get a cop on his tail, which fills in some of the questions one might have about this particular MO since it's known (basically, the departments work together to check in on all of the people on his list) and breaks up the house-slasher stuff. But here's the weird thing: rather than take advantage of this scenario by having Santa hit up a few victims in one area (dealing with the lone patrol checks as necessary) he sets his sights on one group, so the filmmakers never really embrace the freedom of their own concept. If you think about the biggest hurdles for a slasher, finding a reason for everyone to stay in one spot (and not notice when people go missing) is one of the harder to overcome, and they had this easy way around it but opted not to take it. And they really should have, because (like Mrs. Claus, oddly) the house isn't exactly perfect for this kind of thing - it's kind of cramped and not even isolated, forcing the action outside often enough to make you think "Isn't it supposed to be super cold, and also where are the neighbors?"
Weirder still, the person on his list is already dead, so he's not even sticking to his "thing". The person on his list is a woman who drunk drove and ran over a kid, but the grief about this led her to a recent suicide. Lucky for Santa (and non-discriminating slasher fans), she has a daughter, and that daughter has several friends to comfort her, and those girlfriends have love interests to pad things out. So even though they set up a slasher where the victims kind of deserve it for once, it ends up being another thing where he's going after people who never did anything wrong, which is fine when we know that's the score (see: Friday the 13th) but when they establish "criminals get their due" and don't deliver, it feels like more of a bummer than it should. I'd rather it was just crass from start to finish.
(Santa also goes out of his way to murder two of the people at the house who are made to leave, rendering the backstory even less relevant.)
Another problem is that it takes too long to get to the kills, in a movie that's too long overall (an hour and forty five minutes) to boot. It's just before the hour mark when Santa starts offing the people in the house, by which point some folks might have already checked out (I myself might have, but I had to wait for laundry so it was either this or find something else). That first sequence is a pretty good one, to be fair, with Santa toying with the two victims and giving a good chase before taking them out, but after that all the kills lack the same panache. Most of them don't even have much of a buildup: Santa just shows up and chops them with his axe (or smashes their head with the blunt side of it), and then we cut to the others or to the cops that are trying to pin down where he might be tonight. He occasionally seems to teleport as well, which wasn't even that acceptable when Jason did it in Manhattan - at least build up your goodwill before cheating the audience, brah.
Finally, the end isn't worth the wait; if it was great some of the other flaws could have been forgiven, but alas. (SPOILERS!) In the prologue Santa is shot several times, including once in the head, but survives - and we kind of buy it, because we don't see where the bullets hit (and maybe the hat got the blunt of the round!), and also maybe there's a MBV-like twist where this Santa isn't the same one. But no, it is, and when he gets taken down by the same cop, you'd think this time he'd make sure the bastard was dead. Instead he inexplicably wanders away, so of course Santa disappears, and you have to wonder if he's actually a damn zombie already (along with the teleporting thing, maybe this IS Part 8 of their plan and the next bunch of films will be prequels?). It's also a downer; after Santa is dispatched, the Final Girl (whose mom is the one he was ostensibly after) rushes to a friend he attacked, a familiar beat that usually ends happily - but no, in this one the girl dies, adding to the bummer nature. Nothing in the film feels like a triumph, even momentarily.
On the plus side, the girls are mostly likable and normal, so the only reason you're wanting Santa to start killing them is because, well, it's a slasher and that's what we came for. And he does so with practical glee - there's more than one instance of spilling guts (if that's your bag) and one girl is killed because so much blood from the other victim poured on her that she doesn't seem to be able to see enough to get away. Also, they don't overuse their Santa, which is a blessing - he sticks to the shadows and stays quiet, so that when he does speak near the end it's kind of a creepy moment. I wouldn't have minded if they had personalized his look a bit - in wide shots he might as well just be Billy Chapman - but in this era of "THE NEW HORROR ICON!" it's nice to see one that keeps it simple and doesn't earn top billing. Last but not least, the score is Carpenter-ish but not punishingly so, and doesn't directly ape any of his themes in its attempt at homage (looking at you, Strangers 2), so it's not distracting - it's just a pretty good idea of what he might have done if he scored this movie with his new band.
Plus, you know, 'tis the season and all. My slasher itch has been well scratched lately thanks to Hell Fest and Halloween, but otherwise I might even be kinder to it, as it's not exactly BAD, just zigs where it should have zagged more than once, leaving it kind of in that neutral "Well, if it's on and you got nothing better to do, you can do far worse" kind of territory. I'll probably keep it but only because I collect slashers (and Christmas movies); the odds of me watching it again land somewhere between Jack Frost (Keaton) and "one of the lesser Silent Night Deadly Night movies", though those would have improved if it was twenty minutes shorter at least. I've included the Amazon link for my fellow collectors - everyone else that's still intrigued can do with a rental, as the disc has only one extra: the trailer that's right below this paragraph. So uh, happy holidays!
While people keep singing the praises of A24 and Neon, I'm gonna humbly request IFC Midnight get some more love for their steadily improving library of acquired indie/foreign gems. By partnering with Scream Factory, more eyeballs are getting on titles like A Dark Song and Autopsy of Jane Doe, and now we can add Wildling to that impressive (if still spotty - please steer clear of Desolation) roster. Like their earlier release The Cured, it's a dramatic and atmospheric (read: "slow" to those who demand a jump scare every three minutes to hold their attention) take on a classic movie monster, in this case the werewolf; checking the boxes that fans of such films expect while making sure the characters and story are always given priority.
And it hooks you in early, thanks to Brad Dourif in what seems like a rare good guy role. He is "Daddy" to a young girl who he seems determined to protect from "the wildlings" outside, telling her that she's the last child alive after they got all the others. During this opening montage sequence, it gradually becomes clear that he's trying to keep her in rather than them out - she is confined to a room with an electrified doorknob and isn't allowed to interact with anyone who happens to visit him, and when he starts giving her a mysterious drug any reasonably astute horror fan can probably figure out SHE's a wildling and he's trying to prevent her from turning into one.
This scenario might have been a perfectly good movie on its own, focused only on this man and the girl he sees as a daughter but also a monster, but after an incident I won't spoil she is taken in by the town's sheriff (Liv Tyler) and given the chance to live a normal life: she goes to school, makes a few friends, even learns about internet porn courtesy of Tyler's brother, who is at least twenty years younger i.e. closer to her age/a potential love interest. At first he's dismissive of her, but as they grow closer she also starts finding it harder to subdue her monstrous side - will she end up killing these folks? Will she be hunted down by the same folks who killed the rest of her kind?
I'm not here to answer those questions, but I can tell you that the film does a good job of balancing its sad nature with some violence, including a gnarly throat rip. Again, like The Cured (which kept coming to mind because, like it, Wildling is a movie that's just been sitting there on my floor hoping to get noticed for who knows how long) this isn't a movie that will satisfy those looking for the popcorn thrills generally promised by their sub-genre, but knowing that going in I was kind of surprised at the carnage it offered. A pair of clear villains are established, and you're expecting them to go out spectacularly, but a third act plot point introduces some random hunters that allows for bonus bloodshed, sort of like a reward for being patient with the slower-paced first hour.
That said, ironically the movie kind of races through one of the dramatic plot points, making me wish that earlier part had been stretched out some. As I mentioned, when Anna is first brought to Tyler's house her brother is kind of antagonistic toward her and sees her as a weirdo (for good reason), but they become quite close over what seems like an afternoon. I wouldn't have minded seeing their bond strengthen more organically, as opposed to a "Well you know they have to get past their opposition eventually so why not get on with it?" kind of approach. It's not a crippling flaw or anything, but it was a bit distracting, as if the editor chopped out a chunk somewhere to move things along. The disc has a few deleted scenes, but it's mostly more with the younger version of Anna and also when older Anna and Ray had already bonded.
Speaking of young Anna, they did a phenomenal job casting younger versions that actually look like they might grow into the lead actress, particularly the middle one. It's the holiday season, and thus naturally Silent Night Deadly Night is on my mind, which has what may be the least likely progression of actors showing the same character across three periods, so perhaps it's just making this one look all that much better? But seriously: it's one of the best matches I've seen - I figured they were actually sisters until the IMDb told me otherwise. Casting just did a fantastic job across the board, really - we're even treated to James Le Gros as a mountain man who aids Anna from time to time. Haven't seen him in a genre movie since Bitter Feast, always good to see that guy pop up (no Phantasm jokes! He was fine and it wasn't his fault!).
Ultimately what works best about the movie is kind of a spoiler, but I'll try to be vague and say that Anna isn't treated as the villain, or even a doomed hero - there's an optimistic slant to her predicament. Most movies of this type end in one of two ways, but this one opts for a third version I can't say I've seen too often. There are sad moments in the movie, for sure, but overall it's kind of an uplifting entry in the sub-genre, one that didn't bum me out as so many indie horror films tend to. So it's a good-natured movie where someone gets impaled! Definitely worth looking for, and I look forward to what writer/director Fritz Böhm does next - he has an extensive VFX background (which he puts to good use here, but thankfully for things like backgrounds, not just the creature stuff) and such folks don't have the best track record, but he clearly has more on his mind than, say, the Strause Brothers. Here's hoping he continues that approach for his future endeavors.
For what it's worth, there's nothing particularly terrible about The Possession of Hannah Grace - it's actually kind of OK for the most part, and it's mercifully brief (85 minutes) compared to the seemingly now-standard two hours (or more) length of everything else playing right now (even Wreck it Ralph 2 is in that vicinity - as was Incredibles 2. KIDS DON'T HAVE THAT MUCH PATIENCE!). It's just that it's nothing particularly memorable either; you'll be more or less engaged by it and forget about it by the time you get home. At this time of the year, it's an odd choice for a wide release: counter programming only really works when it's something on the total end of the spectrum from the Oscar bait and family films. Most folks will just choose to save the 15 bucks and stay home.
But if you're like me and determined to see every one of these things, at least you won't be in for a miserable time like Slender Man or Rings. And if you've seen enough possession movies in your life, you'll probably be as amused/relieved as I was to see that the obligatory exorcism scene is actually the first one in the movie, and no it's not a flash-forward, either. The exorcism isn't going well, and so her father decides the only thing to do is to just kill his daughter in the hopes that the demon will be trapped inside of her corpse. Then we skip ahead a few months and meet our real main character: Megan (Shay Mitchell), a recovering junkie and ex-cop who takes a thankless gig working the night shift at the morgue. Guess whose body shows up on her second night on the job?
The poor dad also shows up, trying to destroy the body in the morgue's incinerator, which of course marks him as a crazy person. Then spooky things start happening and Megan gets the idea that maybe there's more to this corpse than there should be. So it's kind of like Autopsy of Jane Doe (but written before that film's release, I understand) meets the unseen sequel to an exorcism movie, which is kind of a fun concept, with the added bonus of some mild "is she just going crazy/having withdrawals" flavor as Megan struggles with PTSD (her partner got killed in part because of her failure to stop a suspect). And thankfully, it's not just a fake scare-fest either; there's one early on that's so telegraphed I assume the director wanted to let the audience know well in advance that he just had to get this sort of thing out of the way and we shouldn't put much stock into it, but otherwise it's virtually free of such nonsense.
It's also a relatively "quiet" horror film, especially considering that it's a Screen Gems release, as those folks have never found a loud clanging noise they couldn't amplify when the time was right (i.e. when it had been more than five minutes since the last one). There are a few scares that involve Grace's corpse (or her father) doing something in the background behind her, without her noticing, and there's no loud musical sting or anything like that to accompany such moments - you might even miss them if you're focused on Megan instead of the space behind her. Even some of the more traditional scary scenes (i.e. a fight to the death) run without music, and other times the film was so quiet I could actually hear A Star is Born booming from the adjacent theater ("Shallows", specifically). I should note that this is an R rated film, so I guess they figured if teens weren't coming they didn't have to make sure they had something to get them to look up from their phones every few minutes.
Oddly, it's only when the film switches into "exciting action" mode that it starts to fall part some. You can probably figure it out for yourself but eventually the movie tells us what's going on: since the body wasn't destroyed, the demon inside of Hannah's corpse needs to kill to get stronger and be up and about again. Fine, but it doesn't actually correlate to what we see, as the demon seems to be doing just fine while housed in the mangled cadaver (Cadaver was the film's original/better title, for the record, before they ran it through their The Scary Word Of A Girl's Name generator), nor does it seem to be any less powerful as a result of its predicament. In fact, the most elaborate of its kills is the first one she pulls off at the morgue, a ridiculous sequence where she uses some form of telekinetic power to lift a person into the air, pretzel up their body a bit, and then make them fly directly into one of the morgue's body drawers - this is her at her weakest? She also doesn't even seem confined to the morgue - one or two kills later occurs on the hospital's roof, where she does something similar and then returns to her drawer, for reasons I can't quite understand. If there was some escalation to her abilities, and/or noticeable limitation to what she could do, maybe this would work, but as presented it doesn't make a lot of sense. When doing these kind of things it's super important that the "rules" are clear and consistent to maintain suspense, but they bungle that. They also try to make Hannah dying months ago into a "Dun Dun DUNNNN!" kind of moment but we already knew that from the opening, so I'm not sure what the thinking was there.
It's saved (relatively) by the characters, all of whom are good folks who don't deserve to die. Megan's backstory is fresher than most (though I'm not sure if having her be distraught over NOT shooting someone is the most timely idea), and there are no real antagonists: her ex boyfriend, the security guards, the paramedic who drops off corpses, etc. are all personable and decent, and I liked that her rehab sponsor was another woman, Lisa (Castle's Stana Katic), who helps her get the gig and checks in on her (so hey, it even passes the Bechdel test!), as opposed to the usual "sponsor as romantic interest" concept. Some characters exist only to give exposition - there's an early scene where the guy in charge shows her the ropes and pretty much everything he says is just setting up a scare later ("These lights are automated" "The door won't open without this keycard" "Here's the incinerator") - but otherwise it's a refreshingly adult group of people going through the silly motions of what would normally be a PG-13 movie, so I was kind of charmed by that.
(Also, Megan and Lisa share some Dunkins coffee, properly establishing the Boston setting which was slightly bungled by setting it at the non-existent Boston Metro Hospital, even though it was really shot there instead of Canada or wherever.)
Ultimately, the biggest problem with the movie is that it doesn't feel like something that would normally get a wide release. It reminded me of the better entries from the 8 Films To Die For or Ghost House Underground series: smaller, imperfect films that got their job done as a Saturday night rental, but would get creamed if put in the multiplexes. The small scale of it is admirable and refreshing, but I just had too much trouble with Hannah's corpse seemingly having no limitations to what it could do, keeping it out of what almost could have been "must-see" territory. As is, it's the equivalent of one of those studio comedies that are only really worth watching on a plane - a decent distraction and nothing more. Now that Moviepass is dead it's harder to justify the ticket price for such fare (though if you have AMC's A-List it's definitely worth one of your three weekly options), so unless you're a huge fan of Shay Mitchell I'd say you can wait until it hits Redbox to check it out.
If you're not a discerning slasher fan and want to start diving into your seasonal horror collection, then I've certainly seen worse thanMrs. Claus (formerly Stirring). It's watchable, it's got plenty of kills (and they're done practically), and even if the mystery is so obvious the killer didn't even really need the mask, it's still a whodunit as opposed to some lame attempt at a new wisecracking "icon", which sinks so many of these things. Also, I have to give it props for hiding an additional twist in the audio for those who watch the end credits - there's no "post credits scene", but if you listen you'll hear a line of dialogue that suggests the killer had an additional helper. That's kind of novel!
But if the movie hadn't made a huge blunder I probably wouldn't have caught it, because the only reason I was watching the end credits all the way to the end was to see if it listed the filming location, because while the plot (and pretty much entire film) is set in a sorority house, it looked more like a two bedroom apartment to me, and it kept the movie at bay the entire time. Alas, it didn't list any of its locations, but I did learn that there were apparently more producers on this movie than actual crew members, and I can't help but wish one of them produced a better location for the bulk of its action.
See, location is crucial for a slasher of this sort - we need to know how far apart people are, the killer needs room to stalk/chase his victims, etc., but none of that stuff works here because everything seems so cramped. There are no chase scenes at all, really - someone will just enter a room or their car and then the killer pops up and kills them. We never see Mrs. Claus unless she's about four seconds away from offing someone, which further undoes the need for a mask at all - we barely ever get to see it, so they might as well have just taken a cue from the original Friday the 13th and done everything with POV and feet. And without any sense of geography for the "house", there's not a lot of tension the director or editor can manage when someone's in danger: are their friends in the next room, another floor? The way it looks in the movie, it shouldn't even be possible for Mrs. Claus to make her way around without being seen by the other characters.
It doesn't help that everything is a direct lift from To All A Goodnight, right down to the identical setup (a tragic death at the sorority), and motive for the killer. Hell it even cribs the same damn twist (spoiler: they're not acting alone), so it started to rub me the wrong way since To All A Goodnight is a pretty obscure entry in the slasher canon and thus could be stolen from without some folks noticing, unlike Halloween or Friday the 13th where the filmmakers tend to make those films' influence more apparent to avoid any such "ripoff" claims. I'm sure the "sorority house during Christmas break" setting will make more folks think of Black Christmas, a film that this one otherwise shares little in common with, but there aren't enough grains of salt in the world to make me believe that David Hess' film wasn't on the minds of this one's screenwriter.
But again, at least the kills are practical! And plentiful - I was worried they blew their fake blood budget on the first one (the obligatory "tragedy", in which a picked on sorority sister viciously stabs the meanest one before hanging herself) as it was almost unsettlingly bloody, but I don't think they hold back on any death scene - everyone gets stabbed or impaled in some manner or other, with the red stuff pouring/spraying in a manner that suggests they wanted to rub it in to MPAA-mangled predecessors like F13: The New Blood. Occasionally the deaths are Christmas-themed, like a guy who gets a giant decorative candy cane shoved down his throat, and I started to wish they embraced this sort of thing more often to help make up for the movies' lapses. If someone got beheaded by a giant nutcracker or run over by a reindeer, I would have forgiven all that other stuff.
Oh well. Even though I wasn't expecting a classic, it didn't quite do it for me even when I factor in its low budget hurdles. The bad acting and non-existent production value I can look past, but when they're swiping so heavily from another film that had its own issues (and wasn't exactly a big budget affair itself) it's hard to really get excited about it. There's zero excitement or engaging material to be found unless someone is being killed, and with no buildup to these moments, you'll find yourself just waiting for the next one. Luckily they're never too far apart (possibly the one thing it has over To All A Goodnight), but still - keep your phone or a magazine handy, as there's little reason to bother with anything in between. Hell they even bungle a defense of Christmas Vacation over other holiday staples by leaving it to the film's resident douchey asshole guy to say it! I find that offensive! Let the male hero be the one to rightfully acknowledge its merit!
In a bit of irony, Paramount has played up Overlord's horror aspects in its marketing, despite the fact that it actually spends more time on its war plot than anything that'd feature in Fangoria, offering a rare case of the money people saying "It IS a horror movie!" Not that it's NOT horror at all - it's just that those elements are not featured as heavily as one might expect from the trailers, which showcases all of them and sets them to ACDC's "Hell's Bells" to give the impression that this is some balls out crazy action/horror blend in the vein of the Resident Evil films (or, to stick with AC/DC, Maximum Overdrive!). In reality, the genre elements are barely even hinted at for the first half of the film, and even once they are the war plot is still very much the focus - the Nazi zombie monsters are just another thing they have to deal with as they attempt to complete their mission.
The mission is basically straight out of a Call of Duty game level - after their plane is partially blown up in flight, the four survivors of a WWII squad are hellbent on completing their objective: destroying a signal-blocking tower that will prevent US naval ships from communicating as they head toward the beaches on D-Day. As with the COD games (at least the ones I've played), there's no ridiculous "go kill Hitler" kind of narrative - their mission is part of a bigger whole, and if this is somehow your first World War II movie you won't get a hell of a lot of background info on what's going (even D-Day is presented as something they figure you already know, and, not for nothing, but you should). There are some skirmishes with Nazi soldiers along the way and when they get closer to town they meet Chloe, a French woman who lost her parents and is trying to protect her little brother from the ongoing war atrocities. Not everyone makes it out, our protagonist Boyce butts head with his superior Ford re: saving lives or finishing the mission, Nazis do slimy things to innocent people... it's very much a war movie, albeit one with a smaller scope than the likes of Saving Private Ryan or Inglourious Basterds.
The horror stuff comes in later, when they get closer to the tower that they need to take out, which is perched on top of a church. Inside that church's basement is your standard evil Nazi doctor with brightly colored syringes and scary-looking operating tables, and he is working on perfecting soldiers that can last for a thousand years. Naturally, the imperfect formula means his test subjects turn into nearly invincible mutants, and a few of them cause more headaches for our group of guys. Honestly, there are no surprises left for this portion of the plot if you've seen the trailer - you'd know the formula gets used on one of our heroes, that one of them chases Chloe around, etc. There are a few one-off visuals of other experiments, like a disembodied head that can still speak (yes, there's a very good chance someone involved has seen Re-Animator), but for the most part the zombies might as well be standard Nazis on steroids for all it matters to the plot. I almost got the impression that the pitch was something akin to From Dusk Till Dawn, where there would be zero indication that this was a horror movie until it turned into one, full-stop, only for that approach to get tweaked with through development until it was a little less crazy.
I know that all sounds like I was disappointed with the film, but I wasn't - I actually had a lot of fun with it; if anything I'm more disappointed with the marketing team for spoiling so many of its surprises instead of focusing on the war plot that the movie was actually about (I suspect a low Cinemascore will be forthcoming). All of the characters were quite likable and played well by actors mostly known from television, with the exception of Wyatt Russell as Ford, who once again proves he inherited a sizable amount of his father's considerable charisma. He plays the hardass "we have to get the job done, to hell with collateral damage" type of soldier who softens a bit over the course of the movie (they're all kind of cliches, but it's a war movie, so that's to be expected), but it's impossible to ever dislike the guy, and he gets to kill most of the Nazis which makes it easy to admire him. And near the end of the film, when he's a bit banged up from the events of the movie and grunting more, he starts to look and sound like RJ MacReady a bit, so that was kind of fun.
Also I kind of liked that the horror element remained a B-story and that the A-plot was always in focus. There are a lot of horror movies set during World War II, and I noticed that unless it was a "we got a distress call from this bunker and have to check it out" story I tend to forget what exactly our heroes were there to do in the first place, as they usually have to devote all their attention to whatever supernatural threat has sprung up along the way. Given Normandy's massive importance to our eventual victory in the war, it's a good call that the Nazi monster/zombie things never overshadow their objective, or even feel like a more weighted threat. It's just part of the escalation of things that try to prevent them from taking out that tower - from crashing the plane to Nazi patrol squads to bloodthirsty creatures, nothing will stop Kurt Jr and his pals from getting the job done!
I do wish the mad science plot was slightly more inventive, however. When I realized it was just another botched super-soldier serum thing I kind of rolled my eyes a bit; granted, these kind of movies rarely see theatrical releases (in IMAX no less) so the mainstream audiences have probably not seen too many, if any at all, but I expected producer JJ Abrams to bring something a little more peculiar to the table. There's a brief scene where Royce is chased by a dog that seems a bit demonic - perhaps more of that sort of thing would have elevated this into more of a must-see. Also, early on one of our guys steps on a landmine and is presumably killed, only to be found later hooked up to one of the scientist's operating table/machine hybrids. He is freed, and you wait the whole movie for this to have a payoff, and... it doesn't. The Nazis apparently just cured him with no drawbacks? It's very odd, and adds to the feeling that someone just threw in some horror stuff at the 11th hour (or, if you want to go with conspiracy theories, had to remove Cloverfield-y plot points) instead of really fleshing it out.
But it's a good time all the same, which is all that really matters. If you're gonna sit there with a list of quotas ("I demand 10 Nazi zombies, five zombie dogs...") instead of just engaging with the movie then you're probably going to walk away disappointed. If you haven't seen the trailer at all (or somehow just saw the part that focused on the war element) you're likely to enjoy it more than those expecting a carnage-fest. It's got some terrific action beats (Royce's forced parachute deployment is astonishing) and a small but memorable group of actors who bounce well off one another (even the kid is charming instead of annoying), serving a plot that's refreshingly straightforward without being disposable. And (unfortunately) proof once again that marketing teams can fuck over their own movies by focusing on the wrong things and prepping audiences to expect a different kind of experience.
Hey all, here to share a bit of some sad news: my beloved cat Butters had to be put down last week. We noticed he was eating less and not as active (even by cat standards) last Monday, but he otherwise seemed to be normal - helping his brother with his bath (and then swatting him away when he got tired of it), making his way upstairs to use the litter box, etc. So we didn't think much of it, but then on Tuesday when he again didn't come right away for food, I picked him up and brought him to the dish - where he promptly flopped over as if he didn't have the energy to stand. I took him to the vet right away, and then they instructed me to take him to the emergency hospital where they quickly determined he needed a blood transfusion right away or he'd go into cardiac arrest, as he basically didn't have any blood count. So they did that, and ran tests, and were even able to get him kinda back to normal for a little bit, but then he declined again. The tests showed he had problems with his bone marrow and his heart in addition to the unexplained blood loss, plus he wasn't eating. Every option - which even the doctors seemed to practically be talking me out of - involved heavy and risky surgery (as trying to help one thing could race up problems with the other), so on Halloween night I had to say goodbye and let him go painlessly.
Of course any pet loss is difficult, especially with a 4 year old kid who doesn't quite understand the concept of death, but this one stings even more as he was originally my father's cat, who we inherited when Dad had to move away from MA to FL and couldn't take him with him. We never saw Dad again as he passed away down there a few months later, so having Butters around was a comforting reminder of my old man, and now I don't have that either. Long story short, I'm pretty sad - and about to get worse. See, animal hospitals don't provide refunds when they can't actually save your furry pal's life, and in a couple weeks I'm going to get a very, VERY big bill for all the procedures and intensive care they provided trying to save him, which would have been tough to manage even if I had the comfort of thinking "At least it was worth it". I didn't want to set up a GoFundMe or whatever, and I truly hate to ask, but if anyone would like to offer a bit of relief via Ko-Fi, it would be greatly appreciated. I've (hopefully!) been entertaining you guys for these past 11 years on my own dime, with no paywall or obtrusive ads, and I'd like to keep doing that, but alas if these bills prove to be insurmountable I'll need to focus my time on paid endeavors, which means HMAD would likely be abandoned, and I'd hate to do that. So if you can spare a few bucks to keep that from happening, consider it an investment!
Thank you in advance, and hug your furry ones for me. And please, never ever assume that you'll have more time with them, because the last thing I thought when I brought him to the vet would be that he would never be coming home. They're tiny and they can't talk - the doctors can only do so much when they don't know where to start, and illnesses don't take as long to ravage them as they do for us. Take nothing for granted, especially your time with them.
If you go back through my tweets about the idea of remaking Suspiria, you'd see that I did a 180 on the idea. At first, like many, I was aghast at the idea of remaking this particular title - it was just such a singularly odd film and so deeply entrenched in Dario Argento's sensibilities that I felt trying to mimic it in any way would just come off as phony at best. It didn't help that the filmmaker attached was David Gordon Green, whose comedies (at least, the ones I had seen) didn't leave me with much confidence that he'd be the guy to do this. But after the trailer I came around a bit, as it certainly didn't look like a carbon copy, and after the first volley of reviews I completed my transition: I was legit excited to see what new director Luca Guadagnino was doing with the material.
However, in an ironic twist no one could have seen coming, I walked out almost wishing David Gordon Green had directed it instead, because he proved to be such a good fit for Halloween and perhaps could have made something more in line with my own (admittedly kooky) tastes. I didn't dislike this new Suspiria, but I had trouble connecting to it more often than not, and felt a few of Guadagnino's choices kept me at bay when it wasn't particularly necessary. I suspect it's the sort of film I'll like more on a second viewing, but as it runs two and a half hours I'm not entirely sure when or even if I'd ever be willing to give it that much of my time again. I could watch the original again (which required no "warming up") and still have time for half of another film I perhaps haven't seen at all. Or I could go for a taco.
Before I get into my issues with it I'll say this much: this is definitely NOT a soulless, "let's cash in on the name" kind of remake that largely gives the "sub-genre" such a bad name. Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich kept the basic concept of Argento's original - a girl named Suzy Bannion enters a European dance studio that turns out to be run by witches - but precious little else, making it very much its own thing and keeping cutesy nods to the barest of minimums. The closest it gets to winking at the audience is casting Jessica Harper (the original Suzy) in a bit role, but even that feels more like a genuine creative choice (given the part she plays and its use in the overall story) than a producer's idea of giving the fans something to cheer for. I went long stretches without even thinking about the original - basically every time someone was in danger I wondered if they'd walk into a barbed wire pit, that's about it.
And for whatever problems I may have had with it, I was never thinking "this sucks" - if anything I was trying my hardest to engage and walk away the fan of it I hoped I would be, rather than checking out as I normally would for a film that was seemingly on a different wavelength than I am. The actors were terrific across the board, for one thing - Dakota Johnson as Susie (they changed the spelling, yes) is wonderful and continues to prove that she's a million times better than the 50 Shades material she's sadly still best known for. She's got a tough role; she's a bit naive at first, almost ditzy, so we can see how transfixed she is by the school and Madame Blanc, played by Tilda Swinton, but she pulls it off deftly. She also has to dance - a LOT, as this film actually has some concern about the dancing that they're ostensibly there to learn. Johnson apparently trained for over a year to get the dancing down, and Guadagnino cast mostly actual dancers to play her fellow students as opposed to actresses. It'd make a good companion piece with Climax, now that I think about it.
As for Swinton, well, she can't look out a window or take a sip of water without finding a way to make it fascinating, so it should be no surprise that she's great, but what IS surprising is that her character is kind of the most normal person in the movie. Unlike the more sinister original incarnation of the character, Blanc here is torn between wanting to stand by her coven (despite wanting to take control of it due to a lack of faith in its current leader, Markos) and wanting to protect Susie, whose dancing prowess and innocence have Blanc having understandable misgivings about sacrificing her. Unfortunately (widely publicized spoiler of sorts incoming) she also plays the role of Josef Klemperer, the film's only male character of note, and it's a distracting choice that did the movie a disservice in my opinion. Someone made a good point, that it smartly tied into the film's feminist approach (that a woman had to act like a man to make her voice heard), but I dunno, it just felt like a great actor trying an experiment that rendered a hefty chunk of the movie feeling phony and almost goofy.
See, Klemperer is a psychiatrist who didn't believe his patient (Chloe Moretz) when she said that the school was run by witches, and now that she's disappeared he feels guilty and responsible - and he's also carrying a lot of baggage from losing track of his wife during the Holocaust, still holding out hope that she is alive and living somewhere under an assumed identity. It's a tragic, meaty character... but the entire time I was just distracted by the (very obvious) fact that it was just Swinton in old man makeup. I kept hoping it'd have some in-film point to it, but it doesn't; it serves only to add more "food for thought" in a movie that's already overstuffed with it, and as a result the character never truly came alive to me, which hurt because Klemperer is kind of our detective here, since Susie is less curious than the original incarnation, giving us less of an "in" to the proceedings. We're also continually updated on the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181, though as my knowledge of that even is limited, I couldn't begin to tell you what connection it had to the story of a witch monster running a dance studio. There's a strong (and timely) message of what women can do when they work together (hammered home when we learn the true fate of Klemperer's wife), but it gets muddled with all this other stuff that I'm apparently too dim to connect to the rest of it.
As for the traditional horror elements, they're often jaw-dropping, particularly an early sequence where Susie inadvertently acts as a human voodoo doll for another dancer, who - if I'm following it right - is mimicking Susie's movements with her arms and legs, but with her torso not being controlled the same way, resulting in some human pretzel visuals that are as horrifying as they are impressive. The replacement for the barbed wire is suitably ghastly, and - well, I don't want to spoil anything, but if you ever thought the original ended rather abruptly, you'll be happy to know you get a long and detailed look at the final coven sequence, which ends... messily. Guadagnino also likes to make quick edits during a simple motion (someone turning in their chair, or opening a door), which can make the less "horror" scenes still feel uneasy, and he also throws in the occasional very fucked up dream sequence for good measure.
In fact, for better or worse it often reminded me of David Lynch's work, especially the most recent (and best) season of Twin Peaks. It's a little messy, and there are tonal shifts and weird choices, but it's kind of fascinating in its own way, and demands you give it your full attention to let it work its magic over you even if you're not always sure what was happening. But that was a TV show, so when there was an episode that didn't work as well, he'd usually get me back with the next one - a movie is a different experience. I truly wish I could say I flat out loved it instead of being mixed, especially when so many of its cast and crew brought their A-game (even Thom Yorke's score is quite good, and I haven't exactly been a fan of what he's been doing since OK Computer), but it's certainly a memorable and distinct piece of art. Since that's a critique some have made about the original, in that respect it's one of the most successful remakes ever. I walked out of the theater kind of bewildered, but after a couple days found myself closer to "I liked it" than "I didn't" (which, again, suggests I'd enjoy it more a second time around), so if nothing else you know it's not a disposable cash-in. Long story short: it's worth watching, despite itself, and proves once again that horror remakes can be valid if their creative teams are gung-ho about making them and not just taking a job from a studio hoping to make easy money on a dormant IP.
HMAD-ing is actually somewhat expensive! If you can, help BC pay for his various movie-getting services (Netflix, Amazon, buying used DVDs, etc.)! Thank you!!!
