The Babysitter (2017)

SEPTEMBER 15, 2020

GENRE: COMEDIC, CULT
SOURCE: STREAMING (NETFLIX)

There have been a few comedic horror movies about satanic cults over the past few years, and The Babysitter is... one of them. I mean, it's fine, and technically came before the others (Satanic Panic and We Summon The Darkness are the ones coming to mind, there might be others), but I don't know if there's enough material there to keep mining. Guess I'll know if/when I watch the sequel to this one, which just hit Netflix and served as a reminder that I never saw this one. And to be fair, I never planned to, but two things got me to change my mind (well, three if you count the fact that HMAD is back for a bit and thus I can't be as choosy as I've been over the past 6-7 years).

The first thing was a recommendation from one of my longtime readers (hi Cat!), which is always an easy way to get me to watch something since I aim to please. The second is that (thanks to the sequel's existence and its accompanying press) I realized I had the cast mixed up - I thought Bella Thorne was playing the title character, and this added to my indifference since I find her pretty annoying. But no! Samara Weaving plays the sitter, and she is great! (Thorne, as anyone who saw it already knows, plays one of her pals, and to be fair she's actually pretty funny as a vapid cheerleader who worries no one will want to motorboat her after she is shot in the boob) So I dove in, still not expecting much (I correctly remembered it was directed by McG) but at least more hopeful than I was at any point in time before.

And it's fine! It's unfortunately one of those movies where going in totally blind is a help, as there is nothing to indicate that it's a horror movie until something horror-y happens 30 minutes (more?) into the runtime, so watching it with knowledge of who is still around for the sequel is even less helpful, so if you haven't seen it yet and have remained even more in the dark than I was, I'd say go watch it now before reading any further. Then you can come back and tell me it's better than I had you thinking, and I can ask "but do you feel that way because you got to go in blind and I didn't?" and your mind will be BLOWN, man.

For everyone else - the element of surprise is kind of the draw here, and it's easy to see why the script ended up on the black list for a bit. For the first half hour it's just a standard coming of age kind of deal, with a bullied nerdy kid named Cole crushing on his cool babysitter, who is spending the night when his parents go out of town on a romantic getaway. The babysitter invites some friends over and he plans to stay up and spy on them to see if they're having sex and/or can maybe inadvertently teach him something he can do with the girl next door. Instead, he witnesses them sacrificing a nerd (not unlike himself) as part of their Satanic ritual, only to discover he's their next target. Can he outsmart them all and escape with his life? And maybe kiss his crush and/or stand up to the neighborhood bully in the process?

That's actually the best thing about the movie - it doesn't stop being a coming of age film once the horror element is introduced. If anything, the horror stuff charmingly intersects with it; at one point Cole is being chased by the douchey guy cult member (they're all kind of stock *victim* stereotypes: the it girl, the douche, the cheerleader, the weirdo, and the (I didn't write the movie so don't yell at me) the Black guy) and realizes that his bully is nearby. Rather than kill them both or whatever, the cult douche actually gives Cole a little pep talk and some advice on how to fight back, then lets him go on ahead while he watches. It's sweet in a weird way, and I wish the movie had more of it, with *all* of the members realizing Cole had enough shit to deal with and didn't need to add their nonsense on top of it, or something. But as the occasional surprise button to an otherwise routine chase, it's refreshing.

And by chase I mean "Cole runs in or out of his house", because for some reason he acts like a shopping cart that will lock up if he gets 50 feet beyond his front door. More than once I couldn't see any discernible reason that he couldn't keep running to safety, making the film feel a bit cramped as he repeatedly runs back to where the bad guys are instead of the opposite direction (perhaps they could have had a pet he wanted to rescue or something?). Also, Weaving's Bee is weirdly sidelined for a while, limited to just rolling her eyes at her cohorts or hanging out in the background as one of them chases Cole somewhere, only to return full throttle for the final ten minutes or so. By now it's clear she's the real deal and a huge asset to a film, so I hope the sequel utilizes her throughout instead of reducing her to glorified extra for a sizable chunk in the middle (don't tell me either way!).

The other issue I had was with some of the half-assed Edgar Wright/Joseph Kahn style flourishes, which I can barely tolerate when they do it let alone a... let's just be nice and say "not as inventive" type like McG. Text on screen and the occasional slow/sped up shots pepper the film, thankfully not to the point of overloading it, but it has the opposite effect of simply being intrusive because they're so intermittent. Best to just not use such things at all, if you ask me. McG also inexplicably stages a car crash that both driver and the person he is hitting manage to survive like it was one of the epic ones he presented in Charlie's Angels*, instead of what the script probably called for (i.e. something less visually spectacular). Sometimes less is more, my good man.

But it's cute, surprisingly gory, has two great leads, and has the always welcome Ken Marino in a bit part as Cole's dad (and his mom is Leslie Bibb, another charming presence - I'm glad they are among the ones returning for the sequel). There's a breeziness to it I appreciated for sure, though I couldn't help but be somewhat disappointed that it occasionally flirts with being something even better only to scale back again. I'll get to the sequel in a couple weeks, promise! Also, since it's not available on disc I put the classic Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead in there instead. Dishes are done, man!

What say you?

*Remember when Joey rented it for Dawson thinking something fun/goofy would cheer him up after his dad died in a car crash and then there's like all these insane car crashes in it so Dawson's like "uh..." and Joey's mortified? Man, I miss the Creek. Wonder how my man Pacey is doing.

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Shivers (1975)

SEPTEMBER 14, 2020

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

Vestron lives! After releasing a series of collector edition blu-rays fairly steadily, the line stopped in late 2018 and hasn't been heard from since. Given how many libraries Lionsgate acquired over the years, they certainly didn't run out of movies to do, so I just assumed they had quietly canceled the series. Thankfully, that doesn't seem to be the case - after a two year hiatus, they've come roaring back with a special edition of David Cronenberg's "professional" debut Shivers (aka They Came From Within), featuring a new commentary and interview with the master along with other goodies. In other words, it'd be exciting even if it was their 20th release of the year - it'd a hell of a way to come back from the dead!

Most exciting was that it would give me a chance to reevaluate the movie, which I had only seen once about six years ago. I didn't review it for whatever reason, and my lone tweet about it was about a discrepancy about how long it was, since IMDb said it was 87 minutes and the disc I was watching had it running just under 1:50 (turns out the DVD had included the accompanying interview with Cronenberg as part of the runtime), so I could only assume I wasn't too impressed with it. But after watching The Fly again last week (at the drive-in!) got me nostalgic for the guy's horror output, which as we know is intermittent at best for the past thirty years. Also, for some reason I thought maybe I'd have a different take on a movie about an out of control virus, not sure why.

Anyway, I did indeed enjoy the movie more than I seemingly did before, but that isn't too surprising - it tends to be the case quite a bit when I'm mixed on a film. With a second viewing I know what I'm in for, and can suss out what works instead of being (freshly) disappointed at this or that narrative decision. I think what kept me at bay before was that the film is kind of scattershot - there's a main plot about the two doctors trying to figure out why a colleague murdered someone and then killed himself, discovering that he created a parasite that turned its human host into a sex crazed zombies, and all that stuff is fine. However, there are also the scenes of the parasite infecting people in the high rise building where nearly every character resides, and that's where it falters a bit.

Don't get me wrong, the scenes themselves are fine and the mutated penis-looking parasite is appropriately icky to see in action. The problem is we know nothing about any of the residents being attacked (and in turn attacking others), so these scenes are never as tense or exciting as they should be. Sometimes they cut to people fighting and it's not even clear which one is the infected party, and it's constantly introducing new characters as if it didn't already have enough. Early on we meet two daft old ladies who are almost victims of the parasite when a guy pukes one out from his balcony above, and hell I could watch a whole movie about the two of them navigating this outbreak! Instead, we never see them again. Barbara Steele also feels a bit underutilized; the fact that the character is being played by Barbara Steele is deeper than any of her in-film characterization.

And the movie is almost over by the time the two things really converge; our hero doctor is kept out of any sex zombie shenanigans until the final 25 minutes or so, and by then things are so out of control it's obvious that saving the day is out of the question. There are comparisons to Night of the Living Dead to be made for sure, but what the movie really needed was a central group that could meet once or twice, instead of an ensemble that rarely interacts. Until the final scene where (spoiler for 45 year old movie ahead) just about everyone we've seen is now infected and swarming a swimming pool, most of the characters never share a scene with more than one or two other people. When Steele grabs the doctor near the end, I am pretty sure he doesn't even know who she is.

To be fair, Cronenberg will be the first to admit that the film is far from his best work. On the bonus features he calls it his first professional film (after the "underground" Crimes of the Future and Stereo) and that he had no idea what he was doing, crediting the producers for believing in him and hiring top guys for the various departments who would know how to do their jobs and help the young director see his vision through instead of waiting for him to tell them what to do. With that in mind, it's a wonder the film works at all, let alone mostly works well; there are some wooden actors and a few technical snafus (some of the ADR is downright comical) but its also ambitious and original, distinguishing it as a "David Cronenberg movie" more often than not.

On a personal level, it was also much more exciting than last time I saw it because I spotted not one, not two, but THREE Cathy's Curse cast members among the building's residents! I wouldn't have noticed them last time because at the time I only had the blurry VHS rip of my beloved, so I wouldn't have been able to recognize even the main actors in a lineup let alone supporting players. But now, with that beautiful Severin blu-ray at my disposal, I could easily recognize Paul the drunken groundskeeper as an infected resident, Mary the housekeeper as one of those old ladies, and that random inspector who makes the dog bark for reasons unknown as the building's handyman. It's rare I see anyone from Cathy in anything (some, including Cathy herself, never made another movie) so to get three at once was a true treat.

The disc has a healthy supply of bonus features, including the aforementioned commentary by the filmmaker. He says he hasn't seen the movie in decades (it's recently recorded) so the moderator occasionally has to prompt him along, but he also adds something to the discussion himself, which is what I like to hear from the moderators on these things. Sometimes it's like they're afraid to speak up when the director goes silent, and it's obnoxious - they might as well just write down a few questions and let the filmmaker sit there solo. More like this please! The new interview with Cronenberg covers some of the same anecdotes, and in turn many of them were featured on an older interview (I think the one that was attached to that old DVD), so if you go through everything you're gonna hear him tell some stories three times, but that's OK - hearing about how Dan O'Bannon ripped him off in Alien never gets old. Lynn Lowry and Joe Blasco also provide interviews, and there's another commentary with the producer that I haven't gotten to yet. HMAD might be back but I still have a kid - I can't go through the entire thing like I used to!

No one will argue that this is essentially a warmup for Rabid, which covers some of the same ground but with more finesse and experience bringing it together, not unlike Argento's animal trilogy getting him in shape for Deep Red. I'm actually curious why this wasn't the one to get remade instead of Rabid, as there's more room for improvement here and plenty to work with in order to modernize it (also, a modern production could explore male on male scenarios, which are barely even hinted at here, as if the sex crazed zombies had some boundaries). Flawed to be sure, but a fine start to an ongoing career, and a solid choice to relaunch the Vestron line. Let's hope it's here to stay this time!

What say you?

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The Gallows: Act II (2019)

SEPTEMBER 11, 2020

GENRE: GHOST, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: STREAMING (HULU)

Everything about the mere existence of The Gallows: Act II just confounds me. The first one was not loved by anyone I ever met and didn't exactly make a ton of money (profitable, yes, but you'd have to be pulling some Producers-level shenanigans to lose money on a found footage film), and this is an era where horror sequels tend to flop far more often than not. Even when the film is quite liked and more successful, like Happy Death Day, or simply more memorable (The Boy comes to mind), the sequels are met with indifference. So there's almost no incentive to make a sequel, and yet they made one anyway. And sure enough, no one cared - test audience reactions were so poor that it sat on the shelf for a bit before being quietly dumped to VOD from Lionsgate (not sure if/when original distributor Warner Bros was ever involved with this one).

But that's not the only thing that makes me sit and wonder what exactly these people are thinking. The first one, if nothing else, actually utilized the found footage gimmick far more successfully than most of its brethren; there was a natural quality to the presentation (including scenes where they forget they're filming and lower the camera) that allowed me to give it credit for that much. And yet, the returning filmmakers (and one cast member, treated as a surprise but I guarantee unless you watch the films back to back you won't be able to remember who it was) opt to drop the POV aspect this time around, using it only for an opening sequence and a few video logs that the protagonist films for her Youtube channel. At first I thought perhaps they were attempting Book of Shadows style meta "the original was just a movie in this real world" approach, but nah, it's a direct sequel otherwise. Just lacks the only thing that the original did correctly.

Hilariously, the main drawback of found footage is that the films tend to be a bit slow paced in order to keep the "why are they filming" type stuff to a minimum, so you'd think by dropping it the new film would be more exciting, right? Wrong! If anything it's even more lethargic, not to mention repetitive. The plot concerns Auna (Ema Horvath), a high school student with dreams of being an actress and also expanding her Youtube channel, which currently has about 200 followers (so, about 1/10000th that the average guy silently playing video games might have). In one of her slice of life videos we can see that she can't get through a single sentence without another edit, but that and the low follower count hasn't deterred her from her dream!

Anyway she transfers to some famous acting high school and prepares a monologue from some shitty Never Ending Story wannabe movie, but it goes poorly. So she seeks another one to do, and finds The Gallows - the play that was being performed by Charlie (the series' villain) when he died. She does the monologue, knocks it out of the park (somehow her fellow acting students instantly love her now - no rivalries here!), and even gets a boyfriend... but she's also haunted by Charlie, as is her sister for reasons I could never discern. Charlie doesn't seem to ever bother anyone unless she's around, but somehow her sister (who looks nothing like her; I don't know why casting people insist on finding folks who couldn't look less alike) is menaced by him just as often. Will they escape the curse, or become his latest victims?

Well, I guarantee you won't care by the time the movie is finally over, 96 minutes later. Once Auna is first targeted, the following hour of the movie is just a cycle of the same scenes: Charlie spooks her, she tries to change her monologue, her teacher talks her out of it, the sister is spooked, the two of them bicker about something, then the whole thing repeats again. Happy Death Day had more variety to its scenes and that was in an actual time loop. The attempt to turn Charlie into some kind of Slender Man/viral video challenge boogeyman isn't terrible, but nothing is done with it - everything focuses entirely on Auna and her sister. At one point two girls come up to Auna and ask to get a pic with her because of her newfound internet fame from her "Charlie Challenge" video, and that's pretty much the extent of this thing's impact.

Worse, it's one of those movies where half of the scares come from hallucinations, which are worse than fake scares (loud phone rings and the like) because it seems like they only exist to spruce up the trailer. She'll be talking to her boyfriend or an acting scout or whoever, and the person will suddenly have their neck snapped or something (because hangman), prompting her to scream and then snap out of it. I guess I can give them credit for not making the entire movie a dream/hallucination, but instead it has a twist ending that would probably anger me if I had any reason to care about anything to lead up to it. It did result in me having more questions, but unless I go downstairs later today and find the directors sitting in my kitchen, I can't conceive of a scenario where I'd ever bother to ask them.

Funnily enough I actually own this movie on Amazon Prime from when it was (accidentally?) available to own for $1.99, but never bothered to watch it until now, where I watched it on Hulu instead. If you're reading this and thinking "that is a remarkably uninteresting anecdote", guess what? I agree. But also: it's more interesting than this movie, I assure you. Indeed, I see pretty much all of the Blumhouse movies (except the "Into the Dark" ones, which is what I planned to look for on Hulu when I stumbled on this and shrugged) and I am hardpressed to think of one that was worse.

What say you?

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The Fan (1996)

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

GENRE: BLANK FROM HELL, THRILLER
SOURCE: STREAMING (AMAZON PRIME)

Tony Scott (RIP) made his debut with The Hunger, a pretty great vampire film that is devastating to watch now that David Bowie is also no longer with us, but he never really returned to the genre, focusing on action movies instead. The closest he came was The Fan, which was one of the last of the '90s run of "______ From Hell" movies like Hand That Rocks The Cradle andPacific Heights (the latter of which Prime suggested to watch next when this one ended), and as it turns out, he didn't even really want to do the movie. He turned the script down twice, apparently, and only returned when De Niro signed on because he was excited about working with him. The film was a flop though, and not well received by those who did see it (or the critics), so he quickly retreated back to his safer world of action flicks with Enemy of the State two years later.

(Side note I find funny: when Scott ended up taking this gig, he was unavailable for The Rock, which Bruckheimer/Simpson wanted him for. One of the leads in The Rock was Michael Biehn, star of the OTHER movie called The Fan, and the two are constantly being confused for one another.) I saw the film when it first hit video, but cropped of course (and being a Sony film, it would be that nauseating version of pan & scan) and with that murky image, so it's like not really seeing it at all anyway. All I really remembered at this point was that the final baseball game was playing in an epic rainstorm on par with the one that opened Scott's Last Boy Scout, except for football that's not out of the question - baseball games stop with anything over a mild drizzle, so it was pretty ridiculous seeing wide shots of the field completely covered in mud, players soaked to the bone and water pouring off their caps. But everything else was a blank, 23 years later, and since I had watched a few others like it for the site I figured it could qualify alongside those other thrillers.

And, to be fair, it is kind of scary at times, because... well, it's friggin Robert De Niro as the psycho! Nowadays he phones everything in, but this is back when he was still giving 100%, and gets to tap into his Travis Bickle/Max Cady energy almost from the start. His character, Gil Renard, doesn't "snap" at a certain point and then turn crazy, in his first few scenes he's clearly already a dirty look away from stabbing someone with the knives he always carries around for his salesman job. Weirdly, the movie is more tense in the first half, before he kills anyone. When he takes his kid to opening day to see his favorite player Bobby Rayburn (Wesley Snipes, also still electrifying before he hit a rough patch in the '00s) make his debut for their local San Francisco Giants, you can easily see him wiping out the rest of his section as he gets into fights with several of the other fans, and even manages to injure his own son trying to catch a fly ball (which he then tries to snatch away from the kid who caught it!). When he makes his first kill in the movie, you almost get a sense it is, perhaps, not his first kill *ever*, a feeling that isn't helped when he visits an old friend in the second half in the film and you can tell the guy is terrified of him as soon as he sees his face.

It's kind of weird is that his son is basically dropped out of the movie at the halfway point, though. These scenes put me in a low key panic, because the kid is pretty young (i.e. my own son's age) so he's still in that "Dad is a superhero" kind of mode that Gil keeps betraying; he leaves him at the game to go to an important work meeting, he reduces him to tears at his Little League practice by screaming at the coach, etc. It's legit heartbreaking to see the kid's expressions as his dad terrifies him with his behavior, even though he is pretty much the only person in the movie Gil doesn't physically harm or threaten. After that, he only appears in a single shot, telling the cops where his dad might be hiding (he then asks "Is my daddy in trouble?" just to twist the knife); 15 seconds of screentime after being such a major focus for the first half. The film is based on a novel, so I can't help but wonder if the family had a bigger part to play there and it just got excised.

On that note it seems like there might have been some trimming beyond the standard paring down of the source material; more than one familiar actor (Richard Riehle and the late Don S. Davis among them) appear in single shots without a line, and while Rayburn's son plays a big part of the third act no mother is ever seen or mentioned, even when Gil kidnaps him and has him held for a full day. Ellen Barkin is also on hand as a sports talk radio jerk, but I can't see what would have attracted her to the role as presented here, as she does almost nothing and occasionally seems thrown into a scene just to justify her casting (why is she running around the stadium at the end as if she was a close friend to the kid?). And we just have to assume Gil killed an actual umpire to manage to get himself on the field for the climax, because he's just suddenly there without much of a setup. Also: he was apparently friends with Mick Jagger? What was all that stuff about?

Curious about the book I looked up some old reviews and they all point out something that's presented as a twist of sorts in the film, that Gilo's obsession with his own baseball past as well as his catcher, "Coop" (Charles Hallahan - Norris!) is spoken about as if it was college/triple A type stuff (i.e. almost in the majors) but revealed to be Little League. It's a pretty good reveal, realizing this poor bastard's one shining moment was over 40 years ago, when he was a little kid with his whole life ahead of him, but if I'm correct in assuming that this information is laid out up front in the novel, it would help get into his head a little more throughout. Until then we think he's just a run of the mill loser with an anger problem, but instead he's been stuck in a fantasy world for decades.

Basically it's one of those movies where everything sounds great on paper, but the execution feels half-baked. Scott doesn't get to exercise much of his flourishes, Snipes' character isn't very compelling despite the movie's occasional attempts to present them as a sort of yin and yang, and while De Niro is scary when called for it, we've seen him do it in better movies. Most of the appeal simply comes from looking at the cast, which includes Benecio Del Toro as a rival player, Jack Black (!) as Barkin's switchboard operator, and Snipes' stunt double, who they don't even bother to try to hide in an actual closeup. And if they didn't change it I could say the same about the location; the book is set in Boston with Bobby playing for the Red Sox, which would have made more sense for Gil's obsession with the team winning a pennant due to the (now broken) "curse" that produced its fair share of overzealous fan behavior. Maybe I'll just track the book down, it's probably better.

What say you?

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#Alive (2020)

SEPTEMBER 9, 2020

GENRE: ASIAN, ZOMBIE
SOURCE: STREAMING (NETFLIX)

Hopefully someday all social media will be wiped off the planet, because there is simply no argument against the fact that the world was better before the likes of Twitter and Facebook came along. Yes, they have their merits, and I am a frequent user of both, but mostly out of a necessity - everyone is simply expected to be on them now, and staying away from them means being left out of birthday parties, not knowing what's going on with close friends or family since no one picks up a phone anymore, etc. And should that day come, we can look at film titles like #Alive (translated from #Saraitda, if IMDb is correct) as a relic of the past: "Back in the 2010s we used the pound symbol to denote a trend or make a Twitter joke! And Twitter was something we could use to make fun of the President!"

Until then, at least the annoying "timely" title makes sense in the context of the film, which is largely pro-social media for the record (the final shot makes it clear, it's almost uplifting until you remember those same accounts have probably been on one end or both of some kind of reprehensible message). Our hero, Oh Joon-woo, is a Youtube streamer/gamer who pretty much lives his existence online, and uses other hashtags throughout the film, which takes place mostly in his apartment as a zombie virus rages outside. For a while it's a sort of one-man show, as the zombie breakout occurs within seconds of the film's opening and he is home alone in a highrise apartment, so he barricades the door and uses his various tech to communicate with unseen others or post updates to his channel. He doesn't have much food or supplies, and one by one services are cut out, leaving him more isolated and desperate. It's only when he decides to off himself that another survivor makes her presence known - a girl who lives across the street in another apartment, who uses a laser pointer to get his attention and convince him not to give up yet.

And so for a while it's a two person piece, as he uses a drone to attach a rope stretching across their balconies so that she can send food over (she's more fully stocked) and he can send a walkie talkie over for them to talk and warn each other of dangers, since he can see zombies above or below her and vice versa. It's not particularly exciting or unique, but the two leads are charming enough to make up for it, and thanks to zombie movie law, you know that if there's only two people in the movie, one of them is either going to get bit, or sacrifice themselves to save the other, so there's some tension in knowing that an inevitable tragedy is coming just as they're getting to know each other and find a reason to live.

But then, alas, the movie dips into the worst zombie trope: EVIL HUMANS. They decide that their apartments are no longer sustainable and try to get to a safer one together, only to get overrun and then rescued by a third survivor, who takes all of 11 seconds to poison them and try to feed them to his now zombie wife. As these sort of things go it's not the worst example, to be fair, but it doesn't matter - the thing that was making the movie stand out a bit in its overcrowded genre was now lost. Chevy Chase could have shown up to save them while dressed as Snake Plissken and playing the Shocker soundtrack from a boombox and it wouldn't have been able to get me back in its corner after that.

Worse, they actually have some fun ideas for the zombies, making them an above average threat for this sort of thing. Taking a cue from Romero, they retain some of their memories, which comes to a head when a climber type manages to scale the outside of the building up to the girl's balcony. This could have been utilized throughout to present new dangers for them to overcome - the building's super could have the keys, a zombie could (clumsily) drive, whatever the case may be - instead they once again decide that in a world of undead monsters, the REAL THREAT IS YOUR FELLOW MAN. You know, like in 75% of every zombie movie ever made. Is it realistic? Well, yeah - we're seeing it now with the pandemic. But realism isn't a requirement, especially with something as fantastical as zombies, so why so many zombie filmmakers feel the need to resort to this tired trope so often is beyond me. No other sub-genre is constantly undermining its own marquee threat, it'd be like if Quint suddenly put on a mask and tried to murder Brody and Hooper on the Orca, or Jason Voorhees having to compete with that oil slick from Creepshow 2.

At least it's serviceable enough until that point, though I have to insist if you're watching on Netflix that you switch the default English dub over to its original Korean and turn on the subtitles, as the dubbing is not great. The subtitles aren't lazy either; they are pretty good with translating the various notes and on-screen messages so that we can follow along (the title itself is one such example, when he puts it in his video). Ironically though, the best scene in the movie doesn't really require sound at all - it's a scene where his family all walks in, happy to see that he's OK, his mom gently scolding him for not keeping more food in the house as he gives her a giant hug. Then they fade away and we realize it's just a daydream/hallucination of sorts, prompting him to break down and cry as he/we realize that they are in fact, probably all dead. Since he's relatively safe inside his apartment, there isn't as much traditional action in the film, which allows for these kind of moments that are rarer in other zombie films where constant threat/run and gunning is the order of the day.

Years ago there was a similar German movie named Rammbock that, for my money, was better than this one. It was not only a half hour shorter, but it added some levity and even a dash of absurdity to the situation to make up for the rather generic zombie mayhem that we've all seen a million times. If you're starved for new zombie fare, this should more or less do the trick, but given how we're all trapped in our homes and increasingly isolated these days, I'd say track down the funnier version of the same scenario (linked below since this one isn't physically available in the US). Might help your mental health. And if not, well, again, it's 30 minutes shorter. You can get back to Twitter quicker and find out what fresh hells have been unleashed since the movie began.

What say you?

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Phantom Of The Opera (1943)

SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

GENRE: MUSICAL, REVENGE
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

When I got the Universal Monsters Blu-ray collection a couple years ago during an Amazon sale, it was mostly out of a space-saving desire: my DVD versions (those green "book" types released in 2004) took up almost twice as much space as the boxed version, so I could get some shelf space back and improved transfers to boot. But when I took a look at its contents, I realized it also had a sort of bonus disc in the form of Phantom of the Opera, the 1943 version starring Claude "Invisible Man" Rains (or Claude "Wolf Man's Dad" Rains, if you wish). I don't think of him as one of the traditional Monsters, and I'm not a big fan of the Phantom story anyway, so I had never got around to seeing it before. But hey, it's in my collection permanently, might as well give it a look, right?

Instantly after hitting play I again bemoaned the film's inclusion in the set: it was in color! The only movie here that is, I think, making it stick out even more. I assume the fact that Rains was in two of their other films (the best two, IMO) gave it some connective tissue, but apart from the Robert Englund one none of these movies are full blown horror, and I kind of wish they used up that other disc (if one had to exist at all) to offer something like James Whale's Old Dark House or the 1932 Murders in the Rue Morgue. But oh well. The disc had a lovely bonus feature about the Universal Lot, which is the most fitting to put on a Phantom disc since the stage they used for the opera house was still there as of the supplement's production (ironically, after standing for almost 90 years, it ended up being demolished a year later).

As for the movie itself: eh. Again, not a big Phantom guy, though I must say that this one started off more intriguing than the others, as we meet the villain before he's the Phantom, which is unusual - the concept of his presence in the opera house is usually established at the beginning, filling in his history as we go. No, here we meet Erique Claudin (Rains), a violinist in the orchestra who is extremely gifted, but "not a good fit" or whatever. He is fired after working there for twenty years (part of his severance is a season pass, hahaha) and begins looking for new work, including trying to get his own composition published. And he comes close to realizing that dream, but a misunderstanding sends him into a fit of rage and he starts choking a guy who he thinks was trying to steal it. The man's wife picks up a handy tray of acid and throws it in his face, the choked guy dies, Claudin takes off into the sewers, and thirty minutes in, we have our Phantom!

From then on it's the usual stuff: Christine is too good to be in the chorus, gets a promotion when the headliner star falls ill, and becomes a sensation while the Phantom continues pulling the strings (some literal!) to keep her successful because of his obsession with her. A chandelier falls, a sewer rescue is mounted, a mask is torn away to reveal a hideous face... it's all the same, never that interesting to me story. And it's not even the lack of horror elements, because I've known about those for as long as I've been attempting to enjoy this particular story (my mom, when renting the Englund one when I was 10, told me they "turned it into a horror"); it's just a kind of thin story with a heroine that rarely does much, so there's no "in" really. And here, it weirdly gives us a reason to sympathize with him right off the bat and then doesn't use it to their advantage - he's just a murder-y jerk for the rest, and doesn't even go after the people he believes stole his music.

Rains is pretty engaging when he's on screen though; after he turns into the Phantom he's mostly seen in shadows (via cutaways that are never clearly defined with regards to their location in relation to the other people in the scene) for a while, and we only see the burn makeup for about nine seconds before (spoiler for 77 year old movie ahead) he is killed by dueling heroes Raoul and Anatole. Speaking of them, that's probably my favorite part of the movie besides Rains' performance - they're both smitten with Christine, for a usual love triangle kind of thing (the Phantom is not in love with her in this version - he was actually supposed to be her father but they dropped it), but the actors look alike as well, and as the movie goes on they play up the fact that they seem to be interchangeable. They both bring her the same flowers, they say the same responses to her simultaneously, etc. The final scene is downright wonderful as she turns them both down for a date, choosing option C (meeting up with adoring fans in the opera house), prompting the two men - bickering the entire movie - to become friends and enjoy the dinner together without her. Bros!

Back to the "Darth Phantom" thing though - even though they excised the reveal that Claudin was Christine's father who she never knew, there's a remnant left about how they both knew the same melody that was specific to their obscure small town, so it's a sort of sloppy removal and also makes the movie even less compelling than usual, since there's no reason for Phantom to be obsessed with her. And it's not the only "we changed something but not entirely" bit of confusion, as the opera staff begin talking about the Phantom as if he's already this urban legend in the place, in the VERY NEXT SCENE after Rains takes the acid bath! Someone even says something like "Oh, not those ghost stories again!", even though it's not only the first we've heard of it, but going by this adaptation's version of the story, the thing they're talking about (a missing mask) would clearly be the first thing he ever did there. My man wasn't going to start selecting his seat or prepping the chandelier to drop before getting the damn mask to hide his two-face.

Long story short, I appreciate the wrinkles they added to the basic narrative - honestly, this might be my favorite straight adaptation, for what it's worth - but this tale is just not for me, and I think at this point that will never change. I can maybe see myself giving the Schumacher one another look someday, if only for the now strange sight of seeing Gerard Butler in a "Handsome leading romantic role" to contrast with the glorified (and oft-AWESOME!) action junk he makes today, where he probably was second in line for Unhinged if Russell Crowe was unavailable. But otherwise, I think from now on I will insist on sticking to the ones that take the basic concept and move it into a mall or a rock venue (p.s. the Phantom's mask here was clearly an influence on De Palma's take) or something. The more they get away from Gaston Leroux's story, the more I seem to enjoy it. No offense, Gaston.

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Ruin Me (2017)

SEPTEMBER 7, 2020

GENRE: SLASHER
SOURCE: STREAMING (SHUDDER)

Having seen a few now, the "horror fans take part in a staged horror thing that turns out to be real" sub-sub genre has never produced any true knockouts that I can recall; the likes of Mimesis, Blood Fest, Haunt, etc are enjoyable enough but lack that extra bit of oomph that keeps them from being anything I would highly recommend. And now we can add Ruin Me to that group; the film isn't bad at all, but I kept waiting for it to kick into a higher gear than what it was offering. And to be fair, it did, but only in its final scene, which is, obviously, too late to change its status from "Yeah it was OK."

It starts off promisingly, and the plot was fine - a group of six strangers (two couples, two lone dudes) take part in a "Slasher Sleepout", where they're taken into the woods and menaced by a typical backwoods slasher type, having to solve puzzles in order to stay ahead of him and... win, I guess? Part of the problem is that the game is hazily described with unclear rules, so I was never sure if people were supposed to be offed or if it was more like an escape room setup where the group had to work together and win as a unit. Seems like having a bunch of strangers get together to solve puzzles as the "body count" rises would be a fine way to set up a whodunit slasher (with one person knowing they're the killer) and leave clues around to help them figure out who it was, but instead they have this confusing mix of slasher and adventure game puzzle solving that never really complement each other.

The thing they miss is that part of the fun should be trying to solve the puzzles along with them, and that seems impossible since they are so abstract (and honestly, probably wouldn't be solved by a group of newcomers as quickly as they are). For example, the very first one they come across has them find a random word on a board, then they figure out that they need to look at three trees from a precise angle to form words out of the various letters imprinted on them and adding the sound "tree" into the middle (so like there would be a S on one tree and a T on the other, so add "tree" to get "STREET" - not a real example, the movie's versions are all five dollar vocabulary words). Each word had a number on it, and the one they needed was of course a synonym for the word they found earlier - that word's number would open a combination lock elsewhere. Later, a puzzle is only solved by chance because one character happened to pee next to the tree that held the clue, as there was no other marker for them. Later they just go full blown Saw and force someone to risk drowning by attaching a length of chain to a block at the bottom of the ocean, so that one person has to be fully submerged in order to give the other enough slack on their tether to reach the key, which is further inland.

Expert I am not, but I've done enough escape rooms to be baffled at the idea of being asked to do these kind of things. See, for such a plot to really work, one has to easily imagine how things happen when the game (established as running for a bit, it's not a "grand opening" or whatever) is operating smoothly, so we can see how things are going off the rails. Here, I was never even sure how the game worked at all, so when something goes awry I was held at arm's length, wondering if that was supposed to happen. And that'd be fine if the characters weren't either, but they have veteran players in the mix! The two obligatory gothy horror fans who are obsessed with gore and laugh at the idea of people watching normal movies (you know, the type that only exist in movies featuring horror fans; pretty much all of the ones I know have well rounded tastes in cinema) are playing again because they didn't win last time, and get angry at the main girl when she solves a puzzle because... it ruins their chances, I guess? Is it like a Weakest Link kind of scenario where the gamemasters will come and kill off the players who aren't contributing to deciphering their complicated nonsense puzzles?

Now as far as the slasher element goes, well, unfortunately everything has to be plausibly waved away as part of the game, which means it's not particularly satisfying. One thing I really loved about Hell Fest, which has some of that "they wanted horror experience and now they have it" flair (but set against a normally functioning amusement park where only our handful of leads are in danger) is that they make it abundantly clear with the first kill that this is not staged, allowing us to settle into the reality and enjoy the slasher mayhem for precisely what it is. Here we are always kept wondering, distracting away from the scares and suspense - as do the characters themselves. At one point a character is killed (or "killed") in plain sight of the others, and they stand there wondering if it's real. If they're not scared, why should I be?

So it's not scary, but... well, it's not a particularly funny movie, either. There's a virginal Randy type guy who contributes the occasional chuckle but otherwise it's free of levity of any sort. Our lead is a recovering (or... still?) addict with some secrets to hide from her boyfriend, the two goth people are always angry, and the other lone guy is practically mute - not exactly a wacky group of folks who can be counted on to get us through this situation with some humor (which kept Blood Fest afloat despite suffering from some of these same issues). To be fair, the film's climax, where the lead's secrets come out, are pretty dark and upsetting, so the tonal shift would be jarring if we were laughing up until then, but a more gradual decline into that territory instead of basically starting there wouldn't have been the worst thing.

Nevertheless, if you're not too concerned with that sort of thing and just want a timekiller, it's, as I said, "OK." I didn't recognize any of the actors, which is always a plus, and given the obsession with modern trappings in recent genre films, it was kind of refreshing to watch a bunch of people run around in the woods again. Apart from some expected bickering the group gets along fairly well for a bunch of strangers, so while the two goth people annoyed me personally I didn't hate spending time with the cast in general the way I do with some other motley crews of this type. And, again (and without spoiling things) the ending kind of makes it all worthwhile, not only because of its bravado, but also because it could have easily veered into bad twist territory that we've seen before (specific examples would spoil things, but in this movie's honor I hid a hard to find clue somewhere in the review!) and refrained, keeping it grounded. I appreciate that.

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Mikey (1992)

SEPTEMBER 4, 2020

GENRE: KILLER KID
SOURCE: STREAMING (AMAZON PRIME)

I remember reading about Mikey in Fangoria (Dr Cyclops, if memory serves) when it came out in the early '90s, but despite my affinity for the evil child sub-genre I never got around to seeing it until now. But I'm kind of glad; after seeing so many underwhelming ones over the nearly thirty years in between, I could fully appreciate how trashy and demented it was. Given the respectable cast I figured it would be something more like The Good Son (i.e. violence-free) or, at best, maybe a Bad Seed kinda deal where only one or two minor characters are offed, but nope! Our boy (Brian Bonsall) racks up an impressive body count of seven, including those among the top billed performers!

And one of his weapons of choice is a bow and arrow, so it would pair nicely with the equally sublime Bloody Birthday, another one where the makers were too crass to allow for those aforementioned films' lack of carnage. In the first five minutes, Mikey has wiped out his entire family (including a younger sister), already topping those other kids' entire body counts just in the damn prologue! That said, as the movie proceeded I couldn't help but wonder if the opening was a late addition, because he gets a new family and acts like a normal kid for a while after, having fun with his new bestie (Whit Hertford from Elm Street 5) and being a good son, while Ashley Laurence's character spends a chunk of the movie trying to find out what happened to his previous family as if it was something we were supposed to be discovering as well?

If so I'm glad they did, because it told me right off the bat that he wasn't messing around, buying the movie some goodwill as it went through the routine: meeting the new family, trying to adjust, showing the occasional cracks, finally snapping. The plot is said to be about Mikey falling in love with the neighbor girl (Josie Bissett), but she doesn't even enter the movie for over a half hour and then they have to bond for a bit, so a little patience is required. That said, the final 20-25 minutes are just kind of insane as he wipes out a chunk of the cast, including a character I didn't think would get as much as a scratch, so if the middle sags a bit, the bookends more than make up for it.

It's got a pretty interesting cast, starting with the unusual distinction of John Diehl playing the most normal and wholesome character. He's one of those character actors that excels at playing hardasses and/or weirdos, but he's basically Ward Cleaver here, constantly being optimistic and smiling and trying to quell his wife's growing concerns that "something isn't right with Mikey" (one parent always has to be more aware than the other, it's evil kid movie law). And the wife is Mimi Craven, another Elm Street vet (the nurse in the original), as is Lyman Ward (Elm Street 2), which made me laugh when Mikey explains (to Ward, in fact) that Freddy is his favorite horror character. Well shit, if that's the case aren't you weirded out by how many people in your life resemble the characters from those movies?

(As a bonus, screenwriter Jonathan Glassner wrote a few episodes of the Freddy's Nightmares TV show.)

Another good thing about waiting so long to watch it was that it functioned as a fine time capsule. A character owns one of those clear phones that were so popular in the late 80s/early 90s, Mikey is able to kill someone with a boom box tossed into a pool (nowadays it'd be a portable bluetooth speaker that wouldn't harm anyone), and when a character gives another one a gun, they both take great pains to hide it from the other people around, because once upon a time having a gun in America wasn't so normal (indeed, the film's Arizona setting makes it even more ironic - as of 2010 you don't even need a permit there). It also displays some of the stranger home design choices of the era; at one point Mikey approaches his adoptive mother as she bathes in what seems to be a tub that is placed in the middle of the living room, with carpeting all around it for good measure. She scolds him for not knocking, but I can't for the life of me figure out what he was supposed to knock on since there was no door or sectioning of any kind. The '80s!

No matter when I saw it I'm sure I would have laughed at one of the death scenes due to what appears to be a miscommunication between the filmmakers and the actors. Mikey fires a ball bearing from a slingshot, and the ball flies toward the camera like a shot of one of the Phantasm spheres. I'm thinking it'll hit the victim and he/she will be momentarily stunned enough for Mikey to rush over and finish the job with a deadlier weapon, but nope! They cut to the actor slamming full force into a wall and then dropping to the ground, leaving a huge blood smear on the wall.If you were to just watch this shot on its own, you'd assume at the very least they were pummeled by a 50 lb weight or something, but when it's the result of a damn slingshot pellet it becomes high comedy.

Let's face it: the sub-genre is one where a bit of schlock is a requirement. Some are made with more class than others, of course (Joshua comes to mind as an example), but at the end of the day you have to have a twisted sense of humor to enjoy them. And with that in mind, there's nothing wrong with just going for broke in that department and making them as gonzo as you wish. When the 11ish Mikey drags an adult body across a room, you're either gonna be the kind of person who says "Oh come on, no kid could do that, this is stupid", or the the kind of person who is possibly still laughing from how ridiculous the murder was in the first place. I am, obviously, the latter, and if you are too then there's no reason to think you won't enjoy this B-grade junk.

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Little Monsters (2019)

SEPTEMBER 3, 2020

GENRE: COMEDIC, ZOMBIE
SOURCE: STREAMING (HULU)

I just finished making fun of the existence of yet another horror movie called Spiral that is coming (not the Saw sequel, nor is it a remake of Adam Green's or the two (2) Asian horror movies that go by that moniker in the US), and now I'm back here to write up Little Monsters, which is NOT the Fred Savage comedy but a very R rated zom-com, co-starring Josh Gad from Frozen, the Disney one, not (again!) Adam Green's Frozen. You know, there are over 160,000 words in the English language, so it seems this shouldn't happen so often, especially when you consider all the movies using made up words like Shakma or feardotcom or eXistenZ. Spread the wealth! It's so obnoxious to have to include a disclaimer every time you mention a movie title, especially nowadays since many people are so goddamn ignorant that even the year won't help much (and in this new Spiral's case, it's one of two this year anyway).

Anyway, THIS Little Monsters is a pretty fun zom-com that benefited from a somewhat misleading trailer that focused entirely on Lupita Nyong'O's character, a kindergarten teacher named Miss Caroline who had to protect her class from a horde of zombies during a field trip to a petting zoo. And it makes sense - not only does she rule, but she was also one of the main stars of Black Panther, i.e. one of the most successful films of all time, and the star of Us, which would lure in the horror crowds that made that film such a hit. But she's actually the co-lead and doesn't even really enter the story for a bit - she has a co-protagonist in the form of Dave (Alexander England), a typical go-nowhere slacker who is now living on his sister's couch after breaking up with his girlfriend. Will this crisis have him learn to be a man and care about others?

It's not the most original role in the world, of course, but it was continually surprising to see how big of a presence he was in the movie considering that he is barely glimpsed in the trailer, coming off as some random dude who was just adding to the problems of sole lead Miss Caroline. Even though the movie starts from his perspective (had I not seen Lupita's credit, I might have thought I was watching the wrong movie) I kept thinking he was going to be offed early on so that she could take over as the lone hero, but no! I won't spoil his fate here, but he is certainly around for far more of the movie than the trailer made it appear, making the movie more suspenseful to me had the trailer been a little more balanced, or if I had simply never seen it at all since, as mentioned, he's the one we start the story with anyway.

But the real appeal is how damn funny it is, but with heart and a lot of great payoffs that make it a journey worth taking as a whole as opposed to something that generates a few empty laughs and little else. The film's R rating is mostly earned through profanity, and you can call me childish or stupid or whatever, but I don't care: adults using the F-word around or even at children will never not be funny to me. When Gad shows up as a lame children's performer named Teddy McGiggle, you know it's only a matter of time before he's revealed to be a child-hating asshole, but even though it's a bit of a cliche at this point, there's something about friggin Olaf suggesting eating a child or letting a disabled one be used as bait that made me chuckle or even downright guffaw every time. And England's character is too laid back to care about things like tact, so he will call another child a douchebag and then explain what a douchebag actually is to his five year old nephew.

(Side note: I honestly think this is the first movie I've seen that bothers to explain the term.)

The joke would wear thin after a while though, and thus I'm happy to report that the script isn't just a springboard for a bunch of unnecessary gags strung together to reach a runtime. The payoffs aren't exactly on the level of Shaun of the Dead, but they're in that kind of ballpark where nearly everything that gets set up early on has a payoff later. There's one kid who just keeps asking when they can play mini golf, even as zombies swarm around them - and he finally gets his wish near the end, using a little putter to whack zombies as they make their escape. The nephew dresses as Darth Vader and keeps trying to use the force, making it a wonderful little moment when he finally does (you'll see). Even the music selections have payoffs; knowing the lyrics to (of all things) "Shake It Off" helps sell a sight gag, and in turn, the introduction of an affinity for Taylor Swift yields another joke later about a different Taylor. It's just really well constructed, which more than makes up for the slightly stock character beats (does Gad's character selfishly lock another character out of a vehicle and leave him to die, even though the zombies are far enough away for there to be no threat? You bet!).

As for the zombie action, it's fine. They're slow zombies, thankfully (though fast ones seem to exist in this world as well; the characters refreshingly seem to be aware of the concept of zombies, which speeds things along), and given the remote locale there's a manageable number of them, so we're spared ugly CGI hordes. They cheat a big moment where Lupita takes on a bunch (cutting past it to her being covered in blood), but otherwise there's about as much as I expected - it's a comedy with kids at the center, so only a total moron would expect Romero levels of carnage. Basically, if you watch this for an "R rated zombie movie", you'll be disappointed - if you watch it for the "R rated comedy" that it actually is, you'll find there's a respectable amount of undead violence as a sort of bonus. Furthermore, except for Gad's selfish actions, there are no evil humans or anything like that - the threat is always coming from the zombies, nothing else. That always wins points with me.

I do wish they had shown the parents a little earlier though. These are five year olds who get trapped during a school trip, but it's not until it's already their bedtime (which is around six hours past the end of a school day), nearly an hour into the movie, that they cut to the worried adults, held outside by the military who has contained the area. First off, they're pretty chill considering the age of their kids (also, only the kindergarten parents are shown; other kids are there and aren't so lucky - where are THEIR parents?), but it was a distracting question for me for longer than necessary. A quick scene of them arriving at school to pick them up for the day and finding that they hadn't returned would have helped matters.

But that's just me getting into dad mode - seven years ago I wouldn't have thought twice about it, I suspect. The real draw of the movie are the jokes (I'm still laughing at a few choice bits of profanity, as well as the opening montage showing how toxic Dave and his girlfriend's relationship was) and the sweetness of how Lupita keeps the kids safe and calm. It's kind of like those bits in Life is Beautiful where Benigni hides the true nature of the situation from his son, except for a whole movie (telling them it's a game, telling them the blood is jam, etc). AND it makes the annoying "Shake it Off" (I love folklore for the record; I'm no hater) endearing, so it's got that going for it.

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One Dark Night (1982)

SEPTEMBER 2, 2020

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: STREAMING (SHUDDER)

I couldn't have picked a better movie to celebrate the return of HMAD proper than One Dark Night, because not only was it good (more on that soon, obviously), but it was a blind spot that lasted for the entirety of the site's run. As a huge fan of Jason Lives, I obviously wanted to see the movie that got Tom McLoughlin the gig, but it was never available at any of my video stores growing up, and was also going out of print a lot thanks to the bungling of ownership that accompanies far too many indie horror films of yore. But when I started HMAD back in 2007 and replaced my Blockbuster DVD queue (!) with just about every horror title I could find, One Dark Night was currently "long wait", so I put it at the very top... and it remained there until the company went out of business. Somewhere in the world, some horror fan has a copy in that little blue mailing sleeve, and he has no idea how much I loathe him.

At least it was worth the wait! It's an entry in an unheralded but mostly enjoyable sub-sub-genre of horror: the "have to spend all night in a _____" movie. Like Hell Night (shot around the same time), our heroine has to prove her bravery by staying all night in a spooky place, and the people who put her up to it plan to make it harder by scaring her with masks and pranks, only for all of them to discover that there's a genuine threat. In this case, it's the corpse of a recently deceased psychic vampire (not Colin Robinson), who isn't fully dead and still has enough juice to make crypts explode and corpses walk around, using them to terrorize the three girls and, presumably, suck in enough of their energy to fully revive himself.

Interestingly, lead Meg Tilly and the other girls don't know anything about that guy. All of the exposition about him occurs in a series of otherwise unrelated scenes where the daughter of the vampire is told about her father's powers by an old friend of his, and she starts to suspect maybe she has some of his abilities as well, despite total skepticism from her husband (Adam West! In a totally straight, non-campy performance! It's like when you see Leslie Nielsen in a pre-Airplane movie). Once the woman understands the full breadth of her father's powers, and what he was up to, she realizes that he isn't fully stopped yet and heads to the mausoleum to finish him off. Normally, she'd show up earlier and explain this to the girls/the audience, but that's not how it happens here. From the girls' POV, they go into a mausoleum, creepy shit happens for no reason whatsoever, and then some lady shows up out of nowhere to save them.

It's an unusual way to dish out the exposition, but it works. Since Tilly or the others never stop to read an old book or stand a few feet away from where they were just attacked to listen to someone yammer about what's going on, the tension for their scenes rarely lets up once it starts. Also, McLoughlin sidesteps a common problem in horror movies, which is that the characters have no reason to be afraid but WE know there's a legit danger. By the time the two other girls show up to start pranking her, we're already clued into that something is afoot, so we get to worry about them a bit. The leader of the group is a typical mean girl, so whatever for her, but the other is just tentatively going along with the ride in order to remain on the mean one's good side, so we can root for her and also not consider their actions to be stupid, as they're both sure that the only "haunting" stuff is coming from them. And it's all because the low budget probably meant McLoughlin had to film all the exposition stuff - largely delivered via cassette tape played by the woman, alone in a nondescript room - in one day.

The budget clearly wasn't skimpy for the FX heavy finale though, where the corpses shamble around, faces falling off, as crypts explode all around them. It's a PG movie thanks to the lack of direct violence, but man, the girls being smothered by the corpses is some terrifying stuff, and probably totally f-ed up any kid who may have seen it on cable during the daytime due to its unrestricted rating. It kind of reminded me of the scene in Tourist Trap where the one girl was covered with (also telekinetic-controlled!) mannequins; as if McLoughlin saw that scene and wanted to top it with real bodies (if so: success!). There's also a pretty great/gross payoff; one of the mean girls' pranks on Tilly is to throw some joke store goop on her, only for them to get legit corpse goop all over their own faces later - heh. The main villain himself doesn't do much, just stays pretty much still while his eyes emit little electricity sparks, but the sudden onslaught of what seems like half of the mausoleum's populace more than makes up for it.

That said, you do have to be a bit patient to get to it. It's 30 minutes in before Tilly even arrives at the mausoleum, and another 20 before the girls return i.e. when things ramp up. The time isn't wasted; it's spent on developing everyone (even the mean girl, whose boyfriend left her for Tilly, explaining her reasons for disliking her) and filling in the backstory so that the final 25 minutes or so can be almost nonstop, but modern audiences might be thrown off by the "wait" (hopefully the PG rating will tell them right off the bat that this isn't a body count kind of film). Things start kind of awkwardly too; some ambulances pull up to what seems like a massacre site, with the bodies of the villain and his last batch of victims, but we learn about all of this through a radio conversation over footage of no one speaking - it's very odd. It recovers from that sort of thing quickly enough, I should stress, but as I said, it's not a roller coaster paced movie.

I'm glad it's on Shudder now (along with The Evil, which it reminded me of at times in that "late night horror movie" kind of way), as it's kind of a perfect movie for the season, a mix of harmless spooky pranks and genuine terror, but without the violence and disturbing nature of a lot of horror films that, while I obviously love, don't seem particularly suited to the holiday. I associate Halloween with fun and "light" terror as opposed to things like The Shining (not this year obviously, but usually Kubrick's film plays every October at the Arclight, and I do not understand how they zeroed in on THAT as a Halloween tradition), and One Dark Night - even that title! - checks all those seasonal boxes. And it looks good too; I understand at least one of those previous releases looked like crap due to using poor elements, but I thought it looked quite good on Shudder's stream. Enjoy!

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Sweetheart (2019)

SEPTEMBER 1, 2020

GENRE: MONSTER, SURVIVAL
SOURCE: STREAMING (NETFLIX)

One of my favorite little bits of movie trivia is that Paramount re-edited Another 48 Hrs so severely that they managed to excise the part explaining the title, which is that Jack only had 48 hours to clear his name (a snippet is left in the trailer). I thought of that during Sweetheart when the movie's title finally makes sense, as it's a (clearly patronizing) nickname for the protagonist delivered from her boyfriend, a character whose arrival dilutes the film's best asset and is played by a pretty bad actor to boot. I'd rather be writing "Why is this movie called Sweetheart?" right now and finding out later that they wisely cut the guy out of it to strengthen the film.

Of course then it'd be even shorter, since it's only like 82 minutes as is. The plot is simple: our hero (Kiersey Clemons) washes up on an island shore after her boat sinks, with everyone else seemingly dead (one friend washes up with her and dies almost instantly), and goes about doing the Cast Away thing of taking stock of her supplies, finding shelter/food, and trying to figure out how to get back to the mainland. But unlike Tom Hanks, she also has to contend with a monster who comes out at night and, after devouring her friend's corpse, has its sights set on her. Repetitive and slightly hamstrung in the suspense department (though it'd be funny if they pulled a Psycho and killed her off halfway through, focusing on the monster for the rest), sure, but it works just fine for a while.

But then her boyfriend and another friend show up, having survived on a life raft for the past couple days. Their presence does explain a few things (with Clemons arriving on the island in the first shot of the film and having no one to talk to, exposition isn't exactly plentiful), but it also kickstarts an unresolved mystery involving their other friend. Clemons borrows her boyfriend's swiss army knife and discovers some blood on it, and later she sees blood in the raft as well, suggesting that they killed the guy, not the monster, but it's never clarified. Worse, it's never necessary - even if we assume the pair murdered him in order to improve their supply ration, or even give them some privacy to pass the time on the raft by screwing each others' brains out, there's no payoff or retribution for it. I was thinking perhaps Clemons would realize her jerk boyfriend was planning to off her as well and maybe use him as bait for the creature as payback, but nope. The monster just gets him normally, and the movie goes back to being more or less silent.

Which is fine, because that's when the movie's at its best anyway. Clemons is always a scene stealer so it's great, and fun, to have her in every frame by herself, as if her reward for being the best thing about other movies where she was in a supporting role (obligatory time to mention that Neighbors 2 is way underrated). I kind of wish that her character wasn't such a survival expert though; apparently she also saw Cast Away because she's only on the island for about 90 seconds before she retrieves a coconut and also a sharp rock to split it open, with zero other attempts to open it first. Later she seemingly spears a fish on her first time out trying, which again seems like something that would take some trial and error for the city girl we're told she is. The best parts of these kind of survival movies, at least to me, is seeing them figure out those basics, but it's like she already had some training earlier.

And the monster is pretty awesome too. The first time we see it, silhouetted against a setting sun, is a pretty great reveal, and it looks good in closeups as well. WETA did it, so you can be assured it's of high quality in terms of looking real (and not all CGI), but it's also got a better design than I'd expect for a modern movie monster. I might even recognize it out of context someday, which isn't something I could say for most (looking at you, JJ Abrams). I also liked that even though it's set on an island and the open water around it, the two best attack scenes were of the claustrophobic variety: one inside a log she'd hidden in (he rolls it around) and the other on her enclosed lifeboat, where he's attacking from below. Things open up for their big showdown though, which feels swiped from a Predator movie, but I guess there's not much else they can do with the established limited means.

On that note, some of her supplies come from an old/deserted campsite, owned by people who were most assuredly eaten by the monster. We don't know too much about them, but I like how they use an old Game Boy (the green/white screen kind!) to establish how long ago they were there (at least 25 years, ballpark). That's the kind of visual storytelling I enjoy most, so it's kind of amusing to see it deployed in a movie that keeps going out of its way to suggest human on human murder has occurred and then do nothing with it. Oh well. Like You Should Have Left, it's a movie that lucked out by going VOD (though in this case it was always the plan, I believe, not something COVID caused) as its faults are easier to shrug off and enjoy the movie for what it is. Plus since she's by herself 75% of the time I never felt that momentary "Hey, be careful!" feeling I get when I see other recent movies where people are just going to the store without a mask or sitting down at a restaurant. So that's nice.

What say you?

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