FTP: 11.22.63 (2016)

JULY 24, 2023

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

I can’t say with 100% certainty, but in my head, “The Pile” began with the blu-ray of 11.22.63, seven years ago. As I’ve explained, most of the discs in the pile were either won at trivia, blind buys, or – most common – unsolicited review copies. And by unsolicited I mean I didn’t ask for them; some studios just send stuff out to everyone on their list, while others only do it when you ask. Well, 11.22.63 was one I requested, but it unfortunately arrived at the worst possible time: when I was suddenly forced to move in the summer of 2016. Like most Los Angelenos, we were renting the place we were living in, and the owner decided she wanted to sell it, and while it would have been nice to just buy it ourselves and spare ourselves a move, we couldn't afford it. So I had to scramble to find a new place with as much free time as work would allow (my wife, who works in the mental health sector, couldn’t really join the “fun” as her day job is much harder to suddenly take time from), and thus I didn’t have much time to watch an eight hour series in a timely manner.

I tried though! I distinctly remember getting the PS4 connected to my TV and watching the first episode one night after a long day of unpacking at the new place (even more specific: my couch was at an awkward angle as unpacked boxes were in the way), hoping that maybe I could do one episode a night and get a review up within a reasonable adjacency of the time of its street date. Except I passed out before I even got through that whole episode (in my slight defense, the premiere was a double length affair), and then something came up the next night, and the next, and before I knew it the street date had long passed and I hadn’t even finished the premiere. And by that point, other things I had requested had come along for review, and rather than let THOSE slide too I just sort of backgrounded 11.22.63 for a rainy day, promising to get to it eventually. Well, that day has finally come!

The funny thing is that I never intended to review it here at HMAD; having read the book I knew it wasn’t horror, despite being from Stephen King. No, I was going to use it as one of my infrequent but welcome “mainstream” pieces on Birth Movies Death, where I wrote about non horror things outside of my usual Collins’ Crypt piece for the week. Obviously that isn’t a possibility anymore (insane that it’s been over three years now since the site died twice), and I probably could have just finally watched it to satisfy my weird feeling of guilt of requesting it only to let it sit there, but since it’s such a legacy player in “the pile” I figured (along with the King connection) it’d be fine to say a few things here and, at long last, fulfill my promise to the publicist who for all I know doesn’t even work there anymore.

Anyway, it’s a pretty faithful adaptation of the book, at least in general. Both tell the story of Jake Epping, an English teacher who is shocked to discover that the reason his buddy Al is able to sell hamburgers so cheap at his diner is because he time travels to the past to buy them. Thanks to a wormhole of sorts in the diner’s backroom closet, Al (and then Jake) is able to transport back to a specific point in time in 1958; whether he stays there for five minutes or five years, he’ll come back to a minute or so later in his own time, and if he steps through the wormhole again, it’ll just be that same moment in the past, every time. Al has decided to use the ability to prevent the assassination of JFK, but he develops cancer and dies before being able to complete the job, passing on the idea (and his notes and such) to Jake. So Jake steps through the hole prepared for a very long journey, but finds a new love named Sadie that distracts him from the mission, and also makes him not want to return to his own time. He also discovers that the past does not want to be changed, so his attempts at following Lee Harvey Oswald and getting proof he was the shooter are always derailed in some way, forcing him to stay until the actual day in question rather than just shoot Oswald immediately and go home (the story wouldn’t work with RFK, or Lincoln, or any other notably assassinated leader where the killer was clearly identified).

I must admit it wasn’t my favorite of King’s books; the weirdly long time frame (five years in between his arrival and the assassination; the show changes it to three) kept the book from feeling very urgent the way the best time travel stories do, and so it just got kind of draggy (it’s also over 900 pages). The show does attempt to speed things up a bit by reducing the number of years in between, but even with that it still feels drawn out, as if King (or the writers of the show) couldn’t decide if they were making a legit procedural about what preventing the assassination would entail (following George de Mohrenschildt! Tracking Oswald’s attempt on General Walker!) or a love story about a man who travels back 50 years and finds himself more at home than he ever was in his own time. Having it played both ways just muddles things up, something the show actually makes worse by inexplicably having scenes from Oswald’s perspective, when Jake isn’t even around. King decides to go with “Oswald acted alone”, which is for the best, but it makes these scenes weirder than they already are with the POV shift, as if they want us to have sympathy for the guy.

They also made the curious decision to upgrade the character of Bill to a full lead. In the book, Bill is barely even a supporting character; he’s a guy who helps Jake kill Frank Dunning (an abusive father to one of Jake’s students) and then has a heart attack and exits the story. Here, his backstory is the same, but after Frank is killed Jake takes Bill along for his quest, telling him he’s a time traveler and having him pose as his brother as he helps keep tabs on Oswald while Jake goes to work and/or romances Sadie. Then Bill starts falling for Oswald’s wife, which causes friction between the two. I assume this was all an effort to give Jake someone to voice what was inner monologue in the book and give it a little more visual variety since it’s a TV show and not a book, but it doesn’t fully work, and at a certain point it’s clear the writers never really figured out what to do with him. There are some other minor changes here and there (for one example, Jake and Sadie kill her psycho ex, whereas the man killed himself in the novel), but this is the biggest and also least successful.

Of course, the biggest issue with the show was the casting of James Franco as Jake. Even disregarding his icky personal life, he’s just the completely wrong choice for this character. The ideal would be Tom Hanks or Bill Paxton/Pullman circa 1995 – an everyman who you can imagine being the sort of kid who would have gone to a Presidential parade, watched the astronauts coming home on TV, etc. You know, that quintessential all American good boy who grew to be a good man. This isn’t a skillset Franco possesses; to be fair he’s actually putting in a decent performance, but it’d be like Weird Al giving 110% to play Abraham Lincoln or something. There’s just no getting around the fact that Franco is best used as a weird/stoner kinda guy, and the role is written for a completely straight arrow. Even some of his Apatow-verse cronies would have been a better option; Jason Segel or Paul Rudd can/have shed their comic persona to solid effect, but Franco never has, and it’s baffling he’d make his biggest attempt to do so here, with a preconceived character that drives nearly every second of the story.

That said, it still more or less works. The suspense scenes (Sadie’s ex attacking, everything with Frank Dunning, the assassination sequence) are all well executed, and the rest of the cast is pretty on point; Josh Duhamel was shockingly scary as Dunning (Duhamel being another actor who’d make more sense to cast as Jake), and I believe Sarah Gadon may have been put on this earth to portray the ideal 1960’s blue eyed blonde. And it was great to see Kevin J. O’Connor as the “Yellow Card Man”, the mysterious person who seems to be aware that Jake is traveling through time. Chris Cooper also shines as Al, though obviously due to the story’s nature he isn’t in it that much (the use of flashbacks to keep him around isn’t particularly successful). And the 60’s setting is pretty well depicted; there are quite a lot of exteriors but I was never taken out of it by poor VFX or obvious anachronisms (cue someone pointing out a 1962 car in a 1961 scene or something dorky like that – those people need lives. Just keep cell phones and Starbucks out of the hands of a 1960s character and I’m fine). I think a six episode structure (as opposed to nine, as the premiere is double length) would have been better as it would streamline the Bill/Oswald stuff that seems extraneous, but after so many examples of the books being robbed of their souls due to being cut down for movies it seems weird to complain that a King adaptation left too much in.

But most importantly: I can finally get rid of it. And now the oldest movie in the pile is, I believe, only like 3-4 years old. That’s some real progress.

What say you?

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FTP: Darlin' (2019)

JULY 17, 2023

GENRE: CANNIBAL, RELIGIOUS
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

OK just to note quick before I ramble: I mostly enjoyed Darlin’, finding it the best of the loose trilogy featuring Polly McIntosh (who also wrote and directed this entry) as “The Woman”. But I find nothing about it as fascinating as the existence of this franchise, as the first film (2009’s Offspring) was based on a book that was a sequel to another book (Off Season) which has yet to be adapted, and then 2011’s The Woman was more of a spinoff from Offspring as opposed to a traditional sequel, as it only featured (you guessed it) The Woman and an otherwise completely different plot and mostly new creative team. And then Darlin' was a spinoff from that, once again retaining McIntosh’s character but going into different territory yet again. So it's a spinoff of a spinoff of a sequel to an un-adapted book! I kind of hope it keeps going, with McIntosh eventually inside the plot of a Bond movie or something.

Darlin’ also retains another character from The Woman, as Darlin’ was one of the daughters of the family that had her tied up in their shed. The Woman killed the son and the two parents in that film, taking off with their three girls (Darlin and Socket, with Peggy sort of just going along by choice), but since eight years have passed they recast Darlin’ and left Socket out entirely (Peggy is once again played by Lauren Ashley Carter, though only makes a couple of quick appearances in flashbacks, where – spoiler ahead – we learn that she died giving birth to the baby she was carrying). So this one is a two-hander, as Darlin’ and The Woman are split at the beginning of the movie and follow different journeys, with the now feral Darlin’ being taken in by a church orphanage and rehabilitated while The Woman makes (reads: kills and eats) her way around trying to reconnect with her. It’s MOSTLY standalone, but while you certainly don’t need to see Offspring it might help to at least read a Wiki on The Woman to really follow the story, as despite the long gap between films and the “spinoff” nature (not to mention this one doesn’t come from a Ketchum novel) McIntosh’s script doesn’t fully explain their relationship, and Darlin’s explanation of where Socket and Peggy went (which occurs far into the movie) is a bit hard to follow due to her broken English, so having the context of who they were will help fill in those gaps.

But what’s most important is that this movie is far less grim and unpleasant as the first two, with only scattered moments of on-screen violence and even less of the sexual assault that permeated those films. No one in the world will be shocked to learn that the Bishop who runs the orphanage is preying on his young charges, but thankfully we are spared any overt depictions of it, and the lone scene of a man trying to force himself on a woman is quickly interrupted by The Woman, who takes care of the jerk in rightfully short fashion. This allows the characters themselves to shine through without constantly alienating a chunk of the audience as the first two did, though if you’re squeamish at the sight of cannibalism then you should be warned that there are a few quick shots of such practices. I’d say the entire movie has about the same level of violence/face eating as Lecter’s escape sequence in (ahem, Best Picture Winner) Silence of the Lambs, so if you can handle that you should be fine.

That all said, the real issue here is that the two narratives don’t really complement each other all that well (two in a row!), and it’s never fully clear what one wants from the other. Early on it seems Darlin’ wants nothing to do with The Woman, but we don’t get enough of what happened between the end of The Woman and the beginning of this one for that to really land, and likewise with Woman’s communication skills rather lacking it’s difficult to parse out exactly what she plans to do once she finds Darlin’ again. It seems she wants to “rescue” her, which is understandable enough, but given that the movie seemingly takes place over several months it’s unclear why she’s taking her time with it. It finally becomes more clear near in the third act, when she tries to kidnap a baby, but that renders a lot of the earlier scenes feeling somewhat aimless. The script also pads itself out in a rather silly manner, as a caring nurse is taking Woman to Darlin’, only to get in a car wreck. The man survives, but The Woman just runs away and hooks up with a group of homeless women for a while rather than finish what she was doing. It’s like when you’re playing Zelda and are proceeding toward a tower to unlock or something, only to get distracted by a shrine and a sidequest to find someone’s horse.

Still, it’s always engaging enough; even though they’re both quick to tear off someone’s face or bite off their finger, both are still sympathetic in their own way, and it’s not hard to root for them against pedo church leaders and such. Both McIntosh and Lauryn Canny give excellent performances with a minimum of dialogue (McIntosh just has her grunts, Canny eventually speaks but in very short bursts), and I was also happy to see Nora-Jane Noone from The Descent (she played Holly, the young punk-y one) as the lone kind nun at the orphanage, as she’s basically playing the same role as Sister Margaret in Silent Night, Deadly Night, in that she wants to help this troubled sort but slowly realizes it may be a lost cause. Plus, again, it’s so much less unpleasant than its predecessors, I was mostly just happy to watch a movie in this world without feeling the need to shower after. I’d be very curious how someone who hadn’t seen the others would respond to it; I can imagine someone seeing this one first and then discovering this fact after. “Wait, so the movie where someone’s lip is eaten off is the LEAST disgusting of the series?”

The blu-ray has a few bonus features; one is called “Deleted SCENES” (plural) but there’s only one, and I had to chuckle when I saw it because I specifically noted “wow, that’s an awkward edit” at the point of the movie where it was removed, and it also makes more sense out of a later scene, so it really should have stayed in. Then there’s a 20ish minute making of piece, which is nothing special but it’s nice to hear McIntosh and Canny speak normally. McIntosh also provides a commentary, which is quite good but weirdly runs out of synch, seemingly getting worse as the film goes on – by the climax, she’s reacting to things that we saw 30 seconds earlier, which makes the comments somewhat confusing at times (“Her family rallies around her” she says over a shot of Darlin’ seeing The Woman’s homeless women pals for the first time, but actually referring to the nurse and nun characters who had run up to help her several seconds earlier). I also winced in sadness at a comment about a particular scene that had to be revised on the day because a storm hit their location and it would have been a safety issue for her camera crew… which was led by none other than Halyna Hutchins, the cinematographer who was unfortunately killed on (someone else’s) set in 2021 due to lax safety protocols. Truly a terrible reminder of the tragedy, but at least we were assured that McIntosh (a first time director) had enough brains to ensure her crew’s safety came first, unlike the dummies on the other project that I’ll never ever watch.

Basically it’s a decent movie, but I can’t help but wonder if part of my warm feelings are due to my dislike of the previous two entries, giving this one a little bump that it might not have received had I gone in completely ignorant of its predecessors. The script lacked focus and never quite found its footing when dividing lead character duties between the two women, and the geography/time was never clear enough to understand why they weren’t able to reunite sooner. These are things that should derail a movie for me, but I wasn’t watching anyone get tortured, and none of the film’s well-meaning characters are killed in meanspirited ways, so I walked away with “this is pretty good!” kind of feelings despite having several concerns. I guess it’d be like how you’d probably never drink Faygo if you had other options, but it would taste absolutely delicious after a week in the desert.

What say you?

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Insidious: The Red Door (2023)

JULY 9, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What say you?

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

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FTP: All-American Murder (1991)

JULY 8, 2023

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

Sometimes I get a plot synopsis of a movie in my head that is so far from what it actually is, I have to wonder where exactly I got the idea and if I’m having a stroke of some sort. All-American Murder has been sitting in the pile for nearly two years now, and despite the presence of Christopher Walken (and ‘90s crush Josie Bissett), I kept shrugging it off, because of its plot of a professor who teaches a class about serial killers and how he encourages one student to commit his own. But that isn’t even remotely the plot! Where the hell did I come up with that? It’s so damn weird, and it’s not the first time it’s happened.

No, this is actually a giallo-esque college slasher about a “bad boy” type (Charlie Schlatter) who falls for the most popular girl on campus (Bissett) and then becomes the chief suspect when she is murdered. But head cop Walken takes a strange liking to him and gives him 24 hours to clear his name, so it skirts into buddy comedy territory at times except with Walken and the one-time Ferris Bueller, which is an amusing concept even without the Argento-tinged death scenes, where folks are killed by drills, snakes, and – yes! – even a black-gloved killer stabbing someone in the back. Add in Walken’s usual off-kilter performance and you have a recipe for a movie that is basically begging for my love and affection. Hell it even has a power ballad on the end credits that could have subbed in for “Sword and the Stone” from the Shocker soundtrack.

I also had to laugh that I had never heard of the film and then spent an additional two years ignoring it after it arrived from Vinegar Syndrome (who no longer sends me things unprompted, so finding such minor gems won’t be happening anymore, alas), because my only real criticism of the film, besides some uneven pacing (after Bissett’s murder there isn’t another for a while, and then they happen in quick succession) is that it was pretty easy to guess the killer, something that would not have been the case if I watched it 30 years ago like I should have (at the time I also crushed on Bissett’s fellow Melrose Place-r Amy Locane and thus tracked down a DTV horror movie she made*, why didn’t I do the same for the lovely Jane Mancini?). It’s something that would have worked great on the page, and assuredly shocked the hell out of anyone reading the script, but on-screen there’s something a little too obvious to me about how Bissett’s death scene plays out that tipped me off almost instantly who the culprit was. I don’t want to spoil it, so I can’t go into further detail, but suffice to say it’s one of those things that I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t seen 11,000 movies over the years, a couple of which tried something similar.

But otherwise it’s pretty fun! Sometimes the script is a bit too slick for its own good, where every character is fighting to be the one with the memorable lines in a scene, but there are enough good ones to forgive it. I mean, one of Walken’s earliest lines is “I never forget a face, especially if I’ve sat on it,” which is so hilarious it buys the movie leeway for a dozen eye-rollers. And the supporting case is great too; Richard Kind as a far more suspicious cop, Joanna Cassidy as the dean’s wife who is also Schlatter’s lover, and JC Quinn from Maximum Overdrive and The Abyss as that most obligatory of school slasher characters: the creepy pervy janitor red herring! And Schlatter is an engaging enough lead; it’s obvious why he got the gig on the Ferris Bueller show and I’ve enjoyed his performances in other things (I used to watch Diagnosis Murder reruns over the summer when I was in Maine without cable/video games; it was an enjoyable procedural), so it was fun to see him going through the motions that any number of Argento protagonists have played out. It’s at its best when he’s interacting with Walken of course, but seeing him race around with the ticking clock, talking to people who mostly think he did it, is pretty involving.

VS’s blu-ray has a pair of interviews, one with Schlatter and the other with the film’s cinematographer, both of whom spend a lot of their time talking about Walken (Schlatter’s impression is a cut above most!) and Ken Russell, who was originally set to direct. It’s funny, I just watched Tommy for the first time a couple days before, and Russell has said that’s his most commercial movie, but this would have cleared it I think – it’s got odd touches of course, but it’s at its core a pretty conventional murder mystery, and at no point does anyone get covered in beans or get molested by Keith Moon. The only other bonus feature is a commentary with the Hysteria Continues guys, and it did little to change my mind that these folks – while well meaning and obvious fans of the genre – are really not insightful or interesting enough to warrant being on so many tracks. More than once I found myself rolling my eyes at their frankly kind of stupid comments, like when one mocks a character for having her name on her door in her dorm, as if this wasn’t a common thing (“Maybe she forgot her own name?” he ponders – it’s so people can find her easily in a sea of identical doors in a giant hallway). They also repeatedly bring up how the film was compared to Twin Peaks upon release, confused at how anyone could make that connection, prompting one guy – who hasn’t even seen the show! – to explain to the others that it’s probably because Bissett’s character is, like Laura Palmer, supposedly the perfect girl next door but after she dies people discover she was into some far from wholesome lifestyle behaviors. Which I thought was pretty obvious, but it somehow went over all their heads. And that’d be fine if they were just some goons with letterboxd accounts, but when they’re repeatedly tasked with being the top listed bonus feature on an expensive blu-ray, I can’t help but wish VS (and Arrow, and whoever else hires them) to spread that wealth and get other podcast/historian types to contribute on the regular, maybe give these guys a little more time to prepare. Not everyone can be Troy Howarth or Jarret Gahan, but they can certainly at least be a little more perceptive than, well, me.

Anyway, not a movie you need to own as its rewatch value is fairly low, but definitely worth a look. I don’t need to tell you that the post-Jason Lives/pre-Scream period for slashers was not particularly glutted with solid options, so to find one that had completely passed me by was a wonderful little treat. It’s also worth noting that this was a year before Walken’s big-screen comeback with Batman Returns, which is what set him a track of pretty much all villain roles (or at least, ones that really played up the eccentricities), so seeing him elevate this pretty normal cop role while actually remaining a sympathetic ally to the hero is such a novel sight to behold nowadays. AND he sings “Feelings” in a scene that was apparently cut from the video (probably for clearance issues), so there’s another good reason to track it down.

What say you?

*It’s called No Secrets and I assure you it isn’t worth any effort.

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The Blackening (2022)

JUNE 30, 2023

GENRE: COMEDIC, SLASHER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

It’s interesting that the “horror comedy” genre is always referred to in that order, because more often than not, these films work better as comedies first. Much like last year’s Bodies Bodies Bodies, The Blackening is a fine comedy – I laughed heartily several times and liked spending time with (most of) the characters. But it’s pretty much a failure as a horror movie, and it weirdly forgets about the comedy aspect for most of its third act, so I couldn’t help but walk out feeling slightly disappointed, as by that point it had been a while since it had been all that engaging on either level.

In the film’s opening scene, the film offers (I think?) its lone meta joke, where Jay Pharoah and Yvonne Orji discuss how Scream 2 killed off Jada Pinkett and Omar Epps in the first scene because they were the biggest stars and the production couldn’t afford to pay them to be leads, before taking a beat and all but look at the camera to acknowledge that they themselves are now in the same position. Whether the film could have used more of that sort of thing is another story, but I had to chuckle that they name-checked one of the actual few slashers that really did kill the Black characters off first. In reality, Black characters noting their low survival rates in such situations is actually far more common than examples in which they are indeed the first to die. Just using the Friday the 13th series as an example: the original film doesn’t have any, part 2 has one minor (unnamed, actually) counselor who survives, part 3 actually kills its primary Black character *last* while the other one dies 3rd, part 4’s survives, part 5 has four, one survives and the other three are far from first, part 6 and 7 off theirs somewhere in the middle, part 8’s Julius is one of only five people to actually make it to New York (he’s the first of their group to die THERE, but that’s 80 minutes into the movie), Hell and X’s Black characters function as the most formidable foe for Jason and die last, as does Kelly Rowland in FvJ, and the remake’s Black character is 9th to die out of Jason’s (heh) 13 victims. So this trope, based entirely on slasher movies, isn’t even true ONCE in the most famous slasher series. And ditto for Halloween; while Black characters are more infrequent there, they tend to survive (HIII, H20, Resurrection) or die late (Halloween II ‘81). The closest it gets to being true there is in Rob Zombie’s Halloween II, which kills off Octavia Spencer third but only a few minutes after the first two (white) victims.

Now, I’m not saying it hasn’t happened outside of Scream 2, I’m just merely pointing out that we’re more likely to hear a joke about their survival chances than actually see them dispatched right from the start – which may be why the film, marketed entirely around this trope (“They Can’t All Die First” is the tagline) sort of abandons that joke around the halfway point. The film started life as a short, and perhaps that’s all it should have been, because there isn’t enough humor to mine from this one idea. Indeed, most of the best laughs have nothing to do with horror movie concepts – the hardest I laughed was a gag about how the rare Black characters on Friends were seemingly always either love interests for Ross or one of Chandler’s new bosses. There’s also a great bit where the killer forces them to do math to figure out how many things Nas needs across the lyrics of his song “One Mic” (“All I need is one blunt, one page, one pen…”), which had me chuckling heartily even though I’ve never even heard of the song. It seems to me that the (far more common, as you can see just from my F13 and Halloween examples) idea of how under-utilized/represented Black characters tend to be in mainstream entertainment (be it horror movies or hit NBC sitcoms) would have been a far better target. Especially when you consider some of the gags have nothing to do with their race, like when Grace Byers’ character practically throws up in her mouth when she suggests that they split up. I mean, we just had a new Scream movie a few months ago – it’s not like horror (specifically slasher horror) is lacking for metatextual commentary on its cliches at this time.

All of which could be forgiven if it worked as a slasher, but that’s where they drop the ball the hardest. Again, there’s plenty of funny stuff here, but never once did the villain come off as a genuine threat, which is fine if it’s an all-out spoof like Scary Movie, but when it comes time to reveal the killer and their motivations, there’s no comedy to the proceedings at all, so one has to assume we’re meant to be taking them seriously. But it’s nearly impossible to do so, because the actor’s *performance* practically IS like something out of a Scary Movie sequel even though he has no actual jokes in his dialogue. On top of that (spoiler here), the movie has by that point clearly established that they’re not willing to kill off any of the characters, having two of them survive major wounds without even pretending they were dead for a bit, so we get the slasher killer revealing themselves (and honestly, if anyone in the world is surprised at the identity, I’d seriously question their mental facilities, as it’s obvious before they even arrive at the cabin let alone start trying to kill anyone) to nearly the entire cast, having failed to actually kill any of them (save Pharoah and Orji in the opening sequence) along the way. That their plot hinged on predicting how the others would answer a particular question adds a layer of silliness to the whole thing, undercutting the fact that at the heart of their motivation is something that is actually quite interesting (the idea of someone “not being Black enough”) and deserved a better plot to be tied to.

Of course, I try to remember two key details. One is that I’m white, so maybe there's some stuff I simply don't have the proper experience to appreciate and in turn I should shut up about these things (fair!). The other is that I’m a horror fan more than a comedy fan, so it’s not surprising I’d expect more from that half of the equation and in turn feel more disappointed that it didn’t deliver. If you’re just in the mood for a comedy, with likable characters and a unique premise (for the comedy genre), it should do the trick just fine. Again, I laughed a lot (though mostly in the first half) and enjoyed spending time with these folks, particularly Byers and Melvin Gregg as King, a former tough guy who has “gone all Gandhi”. In this sendup of the “Black guy dies first” trope from slashers, it’s ironic that one nearly universal downside of such films – that the characters are all wafer thin at best – is actually not an issue here, as we get plenty about their history with each other, where they are in their lives now, etc. It almost made me wish we could have gotten a prologue showing them in their younger days, which could have helped some of the awkward exposition but also maybe could have established the killer’s backstory earlier, since it’s all clumsily dropped out of nowhere in the final 15 minutes (seriously, I’m somewhat stunned that Scream VI no longer has the weakest slasher reveal of the year, when it was already one of the weakest in decades).

Tim Story and writers Tracy Oliver and Dewayne Perkins (who is also in the movie) did a solid job in making a hangout comedy with some on point and delightfully random jabs at White vs Black culture (I don’t even know if it’s really a thing, but I was endlessly amused that the “whitest” Black guy is partially denoted as such because he uses an Android instead of an iPhone). But I was sold on a Scream-like slasher, and best I can tell, the only ones they’ve seen are Scream 2 and, of all things, Just Before Dawn. Had they been as successful in that department, this could have been an all-timer, instead of, you know, just OK/pretty good. But then again, a pretty good comedy in theaters* is rare enough these days, so overall I will still give it a pass.

What say you?

*Though it's actually already on VOD, because this is the modern world where if a movie doesn't make $100m on opening weekend it's considered a failure and shipped to the studio's streamer of choice in less than a month.

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Children of the Corn (2020)

JUNE 20, 2023

GENRE: CULT, KILLER KID
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

Stephen King’s short story “Children of the Corn” is only 30 pages long, and yet it has somehow inspired a lengthy short film (retitled Disciples of the Crow, and worth seeing!) and three (3) feature films, not to mention all of the sequels. The 2009 version was more faithful to King’s story than the 1984 one, but both suffered from being clearly drawn out from a 30 page story (Disciples had no such issue, as it ran the same length in minutes). The two best films in the series were both sequels; 1994’s Urban Harvest and 2018’s Runaway, which was curiously a sequel to the remake despite being part of the Dimension brand (the 2009 film was a Syfy one), as if being free from King’s not particularly expansive story allowed the filmmakers to come up with something that worked as a genuine feature film. But in Children of the Corn (2020)’s case, writer/director Kurt Wimmer tossed out King’s story entirely in favor of something that… doesn’t work as a feature film. Weird tack.

To be fair, the one line synopsis is close enough: the kids in a Nebraska town kill all of the adults and worship a corn-dwelling monster called He Who Walks (the “Behind the Rows” part is dropped). But this all happens within the present day timeline of the film, as opposed to something that happened years ago like in the story/previous movies. The unsettling idea of stumbling into a town that’s been adult-free for the better part of a decade is a big part of what gives the story its power, so to toss it in favor of having it happen within the story (and without any outsiders) is an odd choice. And maybe it’d work as a prequel of sorts, fleshing out the briefly seen events from the other movies as a film of its own, but with the different town name (Rylstone) no Malachi or Isaac, etc. it doesn’t fit into anything, so it stands alone as a total reimagining.

Which would be fine if it was, you know, any good. But even though it’s reworked from the ground up it feels more padded than ever. The film opens with an older teen walking into an orphanage and killing all of the adults who work there, which prompts the sheriff and some local “good ol boys” to pump some lethal gas into the place to take him out, shrugging off that it’ll also kill the children who were staying there (and not being targeted by the older boy). The lone survivor, a 12ish girl named Eden, then rallies the other kids in town to wipe out their parents, but they attribute their anger to the parents ruining the corn with some experimental growth hormone, killing the town’s economy and now planning to take a buyout from the government, which (per the kids) “steals their future.” An interesting idea, sure, but… why the orphanage massacre, then? It’s basically forgotten after the first few minutes, and robs the film of a dozen potential cult members. Then again the whole “angry at the parents for selling the town out” angle barely factors into anything either after a while, so it’s just part of the random plotting that Wimmer keeps relying on throughout the film’s seemingly endless 93 minutes.

My favorite example happens around a half hour in or so, when our hero Bo (Elena Kampouris) and her brother decide to have a mock trial at the town hall to plead their parents not to agree to the government buyout. To do this they tie their father’s hands together while he sleeps, then wake him up and tell him he needs to come to the town hall (added hilarity: they keep saying the trial is at 10pm, but don’t even wake him up until 10:30, so they will be an hour late for their own idea. Stupid lazy kids), adding not to wake up their mother, who they’ve already bound as well, But then they cut outside and the mom is with them anyway, with both of them just sort of wearily going along with this kidnapping the way a parent might humor their kid by laughing along with them at Paw Patrol or something. Then they see signs of violence, and do they cut their parents loose? Nope, they just act like Eden’s being a little weird, despite crashed cars and the like. It’s like ten straight minutes of the film where no one acts like a human being, all so the plot can work. That it’s never clear what Bo was going to do if Eden hadn’t already started killing everyone in town just adds to the “Why are we watching this?” feeling.

It doesn’t help that Kampouris is noticeably older than the character she’s playing. We’re all used to seeing much older actors portraying teens (Kampouris was 22, 23 at the time of the production, playing 17), but it has a much different effect in this particular story, where the kids are the evildoers. Bo and her two friends (same age, if not older) aren’t on board with Eden’s wrath of terror, but it should come off as same-aged kids (KIDS) realizing right from wrong. Instead it’s like a trio of camp counselors catching their charges in the act of wrongdoing – of course they’re not going to go along with a bunch of 10 year olds! They look like grad students! Not that I hold Carpenter’s Village of the Damned up in high regard (though it isn’t nearly as bad as its rep), but David’s hesitance to join the others always played out perfectly, because you could feel his struggle between knowing what was right and wanting to fit in with his peers. There’s no such suspense here; Bo and her pals just kind of fret for nearly an hour until they finally do something. At least if they were the same age as Eden and the others, it could read as “well she’s a little kid too, she doesn’t know what to do!” but it’s impossible to believe such a thing when the character seems old enough to go ahead and have a kid of her own.

And as an Isaac substitute, Eden isn’t particularly scary – the most intense she gets in the entire thing is early on, right after the orphanage sequence, when she freaks out over being unable to fit a piece into a jigsaw puzzle. She also dons a “Red Queen” persona for a bit, which amused me because it reminded me of the Resident Evil movies, and it was all the interference on Ultraviolet (also starring Milla Jovovich) that led Wimmer to retire from directing for a while. Why he came back for this is beyond me, but I couldn’t help but wonder if the Red Queen thing crossed his mind as well. Either way, it’s dropped after about thirty minutes for some reason; I was kind of into the idea of Eden having two personalities (a more innocent one and the more sinister “Red Queen”) but it, like most of the movie’s odd plot points, ultimately doesn’t mean much.

I also thought of Deadly Friend, though not because of any particular wacky death scene (it’s actually a pretty tame movie; most of the carnage occurs off screen and when we do see something it’s usually pretty phony looking anyway). At the end, a character seemingly wins the day and escapes, only for a burnt/decaying Eden to reappear for one final scare, and it’s just as absolutely WTF as the ending of Craven’s misfire, where the robot tears itself out of Kristy Swanson’s body. Eden looks like some kind of messed up Good Guy doll in the scene, and it makes zero sense whatsoever, but honestly it’s probably the best part of the movie, since it’s at least kind of memorable. It’ll take years before I forget that shot, whereas I’m already hazy on the film’s interminable middle section. And as for the villainous corn god, he basically looks like an Asylum Mockbuster version of Groot, which is kind of amusing at least but they (as is often the case in this series) only show him in brief glimpses, so he fails to become much of a genuine threat. Wimmer ought to have gone full Sharknado and embraced how silly it looked so we could at least generate some “get drunk and laugh” entertainment out of his scenes, but they’re so brief they only remind us of how plodding the rest of the movie was (and also wonder how it is the adults managed to ruin all these crops with this genetically engineered stuff without encountering a 15 foot tall beast that is angry about it).

It's a shame too, because there are glimpses of an interesting movie here and there. The shots of the dying town, the idea that the heroine actually agrees with the villains but just doesn’t want to go about fixing the issue the same way (her ideas are much less murdery), the occasional moment where the kids are just being kids among all the atrocities – this all works! And I applauded the use of a particular Twilight Zone clip, even if it was kind of on the nose it was still funny. But Wimmer’s screenplay continually settles for introducing interesting ideas only to drop them just as quickly and revert back to the protagonist being kind of dumb, or at least not proactive enough (though the former takes precedence; at one point she tasks Eden – who is currently painting the crops with fresh blood from *something* – to meet the reporter coming to town that has promised to help, instead of asking one of her friends who were part of the plan to get her there in the first place). I kept thinking that it felt like the first 20 pages of the script were tossed out, which would explain/help some of the film’s issues, but not the fact that its hero stands around doing nothing for most of the runtime and the villain rarely delivers any real menace. There are certainly worse entries in this series, but they tend to suck from the ground up – it’s far more frustrating to see one that seemingly has some ideas (and Wimmer has done some good work in the past!) but never do anything with them. I suppose it’s possible he got micromanaged or even replaced by producers (reshoots would certainly explain all of the dropped ideas; did anyone who saw it in 2020 notice anything different when it was finally released for the rest of us this year?), but I can’t imagine there was much second guessing on Children of the Corn 12, during a pandemic no less.

There are two deleted scenes of zero interest and a trailer reel for RLJE releases, including Mandy which I found amusing – it’s been like four years since that came to disc and they’re still pushing it! But who can blame them, it’s a great movie and they probably want to remind folks that they put out good stuff, too. I bought the disc at Target because I was just tickled that they had it at all in their increasingly tiny movie section (which is otherwise just pretty much blockbusters and TV show boxed sets) and I liked seeing in my cart next to bananas and cat food, but if you’re somehow still curious enough to watch the damn thing, it’ll be on Shudder next week. I doubt it’ll help increase subscriptions. Speaking of buying it, even though it was already on clearance, it still cost more than this site has generated in revenue all year, so it's very possible that this is the last time I ever write a Children of the Corn review, which makes me kind of sad in a weird way. Whenever I make self-deprecating jokes about what I do, I frequently make the Corn franchise the target (i.e. "I haven't seen Raging Bull, but I HAVE seen all twelve Children of the Corn movies, so it evens out."), so it's like the end of an era, possibly!

What say you?

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Terrifier 2 (2022)

JUNE 13, 2023

GENRE: SLASHER, SPLATTER
SOURCE: STREAMING (PEACOCK)

As a slasher champion, and someone who prides themselves on seeing most genre movies in theaters, it may come as a surprise to you to learn that I didn’t even get to take part in Terrifier 2’s out of nowhere box office success last year. Once intended for a few weekend shows only, the strong showing encouraged the distributor to bring it back the following weekend, where it made even more money, prompting something closer to a traditional release. When all was said and done it grossed over $10 million, more than buzzy/studio backed genre films like Pearl and Men, and even some more mainstream fare – who would have guessed the return of Art the Clown would sell more tickets than a new film from George “Fury Road” Miller? It’s a remarkable success story, and everyone involved should be proud of that.

So why didn’t I join folks in buying a ticket? Well, a couple of reasons, the first and foremost being that I didn’t really like the original all that much. And while I’ve certainly gone to see sequels to movies I didn’t like (I just saw Transformers 7 in theaters, for example - but my kid wanted to see it, so at least I had a decent excuse for once), the other big hurdle for this particular film was its length: 140 minutes. Even the first one, at 80something minutes, felt padded and overlong, so that runtime just seemed like torture to me considering I wasn’t exactly counting the days for more of its world in the first place. Still, I was mildly curious to see what all the fuss was about, and wanted to support the cause and all, so I kept an eye on the local showtimes just in case one ever matched up with a period of time where I had over three hours (travel + trailers included) to devote to ANY film, let alone one I was on the fence about seeing anyway. The October release didn’t do it any favors; Terrifier 2 isn’t the first nor will it be the last horror movie I miss in theaters simply because the month keeps me too busy to find the time to venture out for it. It took me a month to get around to seeing Smile (which opened the week before) too, and that had the benefit of more theaters and genuine interest on my part.

But now it’s on Peacock, so that made it easier! It’s right there and all I had to do was remember that I have Peacock along with the 47 other streaming services that fight for my attention. So I finally watched it today and… well, I agree with most that it improves on the original in terms of character development. Lauren LaVera’s Sienna is a great “Final Girl” and it’s a blast to watch her go toe to toe with Art during the film’s climax – at one point he’s attacking her with a cat o' nine tails kind of thing only for her to grab it and start using it on him – that’s great! One of my (many) issues with the original was that it felt too episodic, as the would-be main character is killed halfway through and then it just keeps going with other people we didn’t get to spend much time with, making it feel unfocused and, kind of ironically, like it was over two hours long, as this film actually is. So to have an actual lead character this time around, and seeing her transform into a literal goddess badass, was a relief.

However, the sequel has the same main problem, which is that it’s simply far too dragged out. Every single scene feels twice as long as it needs to be, with extra bits that don’t add anything to the proceedings. When Sienna’s brother’s pals find a dead animal in the schoolyard, why do we need the extra time devoted to one of them scaring another classmate with it? When Sienna dreams she’s on a Bozo type show with Art as the host, why does it last longer than some actual short films when we know it’s a dream anyway? Even the action bits feel like writer/director Damien Leone wanted to double up on everything; Sienna tears part of Art’s face off at one point of their final act battle, which should be a sort of climactic move, but there’s still another twenty minutes to go. This extends all the way into the damn post credit sequence, which only needs to show the one thing that matters (that Art will be back for Terrifier 3) but has an extended conversation between two hospital employees about what kind of Halloween snacks they have. I don’t know if it’s an attempt at Tarantino-esque “let’s skip past the generic story stuff and just have these people talk about cool things” filmmaking, but in a movie where the kills are the calling card, it baffles me that Leone continually and needlessly leaves them spread apart by far too much downtime.

Not that wall to wall kills would be the way to go either – there needs to be a break so that such spectacle doesn’t wear thin. It just doesn’t need THIS MUCH of it. There’s probably a decent 85-90 minute movie in there, but it’s lost with the extra 45 minutes of needless blather. I actually laughed when Sienna’s mom freaks out about the aforementioned dead animal (which she believes is her son’s doing, thanks to Art), because she is stunned that he could do such a thing, despite Sienna specifically telling her earlier that the kid (who keeps looking at serial killer websites and such) will end up doing such a thing someday – I had to wonder if the thirty minutes in between the conversations had the characters/editor simply forget that it was already discussed.

That said, even if the character/story scenes were perfectly paced, I feel the movie would still be an entry in the “root for the slasher” sub-genre, to which I’ve never taken much of a liking. Not that the characters are horrible and people you want to die (indeed, the worst of the lot is Sienna’s mom, who is constantly aggro – the teens are all fine!), but there’s rarely any real attempt at suspense or scares. There are a few decent creepy bits, like when Art trick or treats at one girl’s house, but for the most part the MO is “how graphically can we kill this person?”, where you can practically hear the rowdy audience cheering Art on as he dismembers, slices, and occasionally even eats his victims. I’ve seen a million slashers with a crowd, and while there are certainly crowd-pleasing kills in some, the ones I prefer don’t have people hooting and hollering for *every* kill, as is clearly the intent here. Yes, Sienna is a good character, but she’s the only one that you wince for when they’re attacked by Art. And when that approach is spread across over two hours it’s just exhausting, at least to me.

So I dunno. Again, I’m happy for the film’s success, both for the team and for what it meant for other movies – there’s little chance I was later able to see Skinamarink or Malum in theaters if not for this film’s box office performance, as it proved audiences will show up without stars or big budgets (or even MPAA ratings, in this case). And it’s hardly a disaster or anything; there’s actually quite a bit to like as the kills are A+ on a technical level, the music is good, and the guy playing Art is an engaging presence. But after two entries, I think it’s safe to see that Leone and I are not on the same wavelength when it comes to pacing and (relatively speaking here) narrative for a slasher movie, and Terrifier 3 will have to be well south of two hours for me to even consider checking it out, theaters or not.

What say you?

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The Boogeyman (2023)

JUNE 6, 2023

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

Knock on wood, but after three years, I still haven't gotten covid (at least, not to my knowledge; it's hard to tell when I battle allergies 365 days a year and have no sense of smell anyway), and I chalk at least part of it up to the fact that I have always tried to sit in isolated sections of the movie theater (i.e. the front section, so all the idiots with their cell phones will be behind me). I still wear my mask pretty much anywhere I'm going to be indoors with strangers, but that's not possible when you're a popcorn addict like me, so while I'm not worried about Target or whatever, the movies are the closest I get to living recklessly. To keep things safer, I no longer go to most movies on opening night, figuring a few days later will be less busy and I'll decrease my chances of sitting next to someone spreading their germs. But my usual move didn't work for The Boogeyman; the front section was empty when I bought my ticket earlier in the day, but those three rows were all nearly full by the time the movie began (and, with people being the morons they are, filled in even more throughout the first 15 minutes of the film).

And naturally, as you can probably guess, they weren’t the most considerate moviegoers in the world: talking, laughing when nothing was funny (including at a character’s grief), coughing... it all served as a stark reminder of why so many people have opted to skip theaters altogether. Which is kind of ironic, because Boogeyman was supposed to be a streaming movie anyway, only for strong test screening scores – and a rave from Stephen King, who wrote the short story it’s sort of based on – to have Disney/Fox change their mind and release it theatrically. So I got to watch it on the big screen, like I prefer, among a bunch of dumbasses who should have stayed home and watched literally anything else since they obviously weren’t engaged by the film. If I get covid on top of it, I’d almost have to laugh.

Luckily the movie was pretty good! As I’ve said a million times, I don’t particularly find this sort of movie scary in the slightest, but there are some well executed jumps scares (one, involving a smashed door, even got a jolt out of me) and the sections of the crowd that weren’t mutants were eating it up, gasping and muttering “oh no” whenever the telltale signs of a looming fright moment were offered. So even if I myself wasn’t exactly going to have trouble sleeping that night, I’ve been to enough of these things in theaters to develop a pretty good gauge for the ones that work and the ones that don’t. It’s part of why I keep going even when I know I’ll be rolling my eyes at certain crowd members (I mean seriously; it’s been a long time since a crowd was that annoying, and I see a lot of kids’ movies, too), to use the crowd’s reactions to sort of make up for my own inability to really tell the difference between a good scare and a weak one.

That said, I can’t help but feel some of its power was diluted by Lights Out, which covered the same ground, of a supernatural entity that thrives in the dark/can’t get you in the light (not to mention Darkness Falls, but that was 20 years ago now and hopefully forgotten by most anyway). King’s short story (which is in Night Shift, for the curious) is basically just one scene, of a troubled man named Lester who tells a psychiatrist about how he came to lose all three of his children, chalking it up to the titular boogeyman. King’s story ends on a little twist (the shrink is the boogeyman), but the filmmakers (Rob Savage of Host fame, with a script by Quiet Place/65 creators Beck and Woods) omit that and use the scene as a launching point, focusing on the doctor (Chris Messina with a fantastic beard) and his two children, a teen played by Sophie Thatcher from Yellowjackets and a younger girl played by Vivien Lyra Blair (young Leia from Obi-Wan). After Lester (David Dastmalchian, killing it in his one scene) tells his story and makes his exit from the film, the boogeyman attaches itself to Messina and his family, providing the film with all the child endangerment terror that sells tickets.

The boogeyman chooses them because, as Lester’s wife (Marin Ireland) tells us later, it’s attracted to the broken and wounded, and they’re all dealing with the recent death of the mom of the family unit, who died in a car accident. Messina’s character buries himself in his work, helping his clients deal with their problems while talking around it with his own children. It’s this stuff that I found most interesting about the movie; there’s a number of heartbreaking little moments about how Thatcher’s character is dealing with the loss of her mom that made this a cut above the usual “let’s make sure there’s a jump scare every five minutes” PG-13 horror. At one point she repeatedly refreshes her text chain with her mom as if a new message might appear, and when she finally returns to school after a month’s absence to deal with the loss, she opens her locker and finds the (now very spoiled) last lunch her mom packed, complete with a “have a good day!” kind of message; an everyday, forgettable kind of thing that nearly reduces her to tears as she realizes it’s the last sort of communication she ever had with her, while also reminding us how quickly someone can be taken from us - she went to school like every other day and got that awful call before lunch. Messina’s dilemma is also well handled; he sends the girls to another therapist because he is unable to talk to them about it, which comes to a head when Thatcher starts opening up about how she’s feeling and he cuts her off with “You should tell Dr (whoever) about this at your session this week,” prompting a teary-eyed Thatcher to reply “I’m trying to talk to YOU.” Teen girls in horror dealing with loss are usually presented as rebellious and withdrawn; it’s kind of refreshing to see one who is trying very hard to communicate with her remaining parent.

As for the other, younger daughter, she is mostly tasked with giving the movie its trailer moments, which is fine but – again, as someone who doesn’t find this stuff all that scary – left me feeling less invested whenever it focused on a young child being menaced by the monster in this PG-13 studio horror movie. Dastmalchian’s kid is offed in the opening scene and Thatcher has an F-bomb, so we can be assured that anything more intense would have netted it an R rating, and thus it’s hard to get too caught up in her plight during these scenes. But again, they’re at least well done, and with a minimum of *fake* scares to boot, so it’s all good. I know it’s this stuff that gets butts in seats, not someone freaking out that her dad is trying to get rid of her dead mom’s painting supplies - having those character elements in between the scenes instead of something more generic is what made the movie engaging to me, is the point.

And the boogeyman itself? It’s a pretty good creature! The concept means we rarely get a good look at it, but I liked that it was an actual creature (sort of like a humanoid spider?) as opposed to a human kind of thing, as the concept of “The Boogeyman” is a bit synonymous with Michael Myers so moving away from that idea helped me from thinking about my favorite movie during this one. On that note, the few references to other things are pretty subtle; their house number is 19, which should make any astute King fan smile, and Savage drops a little bit of Host footage into a key moment, which won’t register unless you’ve seen the film anyway. I mean, we’re at the point where horror movies are the only things that are successful in theaters outside of the predetermined blockbusters from Disney and Universal, so even if the crowd isn’t well behaved there’s something almost soothing about seeing a packed crowd for a movie that isn’t just an advertisement for the next movie in its franchise. The last two movies I saw in theaters before this (Fast X and Spider-Verse) both ended on cliffhangers, so I have to fork over more money next year to see how those events pan out – that’s kind of annoying! But The Boogeyman told a complete story (even the obligatory “it isn’t over yet!” tease at the end actually ultimately plays as more of a definite THE END) and almost never reminded me of other movies - that’d be worth my 15 bucks even if it was just 90 minutes of cats jumping out of cupboards.

What say you?

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Tale of Tales (2015)

JUNE 4, 2023

GENRE: HORROR?
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

I had a suspicion that “horror” being listed as a genre for Tale of Tales was a bit of a stretch, and I was correct. If the brief presence of a sea monster and the occasional act of violence is enough to consider it a horror film for you, then so be it – I’m not the genre police! (I was. But was killed three days before retirement.) No, like many of the fairy tales of old, this is just a pretty standard fantasy/morality tale, which means it gets dark at times but doesn’t quite qualify as a horror story. Indeed, when Vincent Cassel showed up I thought about Brotherhood of the Wolf, which also fits into several genres, and I feel even that would be closer to a horror film than this. Not a slight on it, just a bit of warning for anyone who might sit down with it!

But again, I figured as much going in anyway, which is important to note because my reasons for being mixed on the film have nothing to do with its genre. Even if it was an all out gore/scarefest, I think I’d still have the same opinion if director Matteo Garrone (who also co-wrote the script, all based on stories by Giambattista Bastile) took the same approach with his narrative. The film is basically an anthology with three stories, but for some reason he opted to intercut between them throughout the 2:20 runtime, which would be fine if there was some kind of connection between their events, but there isn’t. It’s not until the final scene that it’s even clear all three stories exist within the same universe, as we see characters from all three attending the same event, though they still don’t interact.

Weirder still, all three stories are about Kings, so they must all have very tiny kingdoms if they’re all invited to a coronation at the end. It actually adds to the lack of cohesion between the three stories; if two of the kings were changed into other royal/important figures of some sort, there would be opportunities for them to interact and maybe drift into one another’s stories like in Pulp Fiction or Trick ‘r Treat. But really, the whole thing could have worked so much better if Garrone just presented each tale from start to finish instead of cutting between them at random, with no clear strategy as to when he opted to go from one to the other. Sometimes we stay with one story for 20 minutes, other times it seems we only get a scene or two before going elsewhere. As a result it becomes harder and harder to get invested into any of their proceedings, because just when you get settled into one, he’ll go off to another and softly reset your attention.

At least the three tales are interesting/weird enough to be memorable. In one, Toby Jones is a king whose daughter is about to be of the age where she is old enough to be married off, but because he doesn’t actually want that to happen, he arranges a seemingly unwinnable contest for her hand: guessing what animal a skin came from. The “animal” is actually a pet flea that grew to be the size of a cow before it died, so there’s no reason to think anyone could guess it, right? Alas, an ogre figures it out and Jones honors his own rules, so off she goes and then naturally tries to escape the brute. It’s a very random story; even if it was presented fully intact without the other two cutting between it it would feel like two stories jammed together (the flea one and the ogre one), but it’s just so odd and Jones is always so fun to watch, it doesn’t really matter much. The oddness alone keeps it compelling.

Then there’s the most kind of typical one, in which another king (Cassel), who is perpetually horny, hears the sing-song voice of a townswoman on the streets below and becomes infatuated with finding her. But as it turns out, she’s kind of a crone looking older lady that would never catch his attention if he were to see her on the street, so she stays behind her locked door and won’t let him see her. He persists with his wooing, so she finally agrees to come to his bed but only at night with all the lights (candles) out so he can’t see her. He agrees, but sneaks a look and then becomes, as expected, repulsed by her appearance. So he has her tossed out the window, but she survives and is taken in by a witch, who makes her incredibly beautiful (she’s played by the knockout Stacy Martin from The Night House), at which point Cassel sees her and naturally doesn’t recognize her. It feels like it’s going to be a revenge sort of thing, but it goes in a different direction that results in one of the film’s most gruesome images (again, it’s got some violent moments). Unfortunately it feels like it lacks a true resolution, only kind of wrapping up in the film’s epilogue where everyone comes together (well, they’re all in the same spot – again, the characters never interact).

The other one is, I guess, the “main” story, since it seemingly takes up the most time and boasts two of the four names on the cover: Salma Hayek and John C. Reilly (Jones and Cassel are the others). It’s also the shaggiest and thus has the most damage done to it by the cross cutting, telling a story of yet another king (Reilly) whose queen (Hayek) is having trouble conceiving. He is told by a witch that if he kills a sea monster and then the queen eats its heart (if cooked by a virgin), they’ll have a child – and it works! Unfortunately, he also dies of his injuries from the fight (making Reilly’s appearance so short he might as well have gone unbilled), so Hayek has to raise the child on her own. But she barely seems to care about his death – she’s more troubled by the fact that the virginal cook also gives birth to an identical child, and the two grow up to be best buds/brothers, despite Hayek’s insistence that her son not play with the other boy. Eventually she drives the other one away, and her son resents her for it, and then... it just goes on and on, without any real drive to the proceedings, made worse by the intercutting that means it takes 15-20 minutes to get the next piece of its already drawn out story. The twist ending is more of a “Wait what?” than the knockout it’s supposed to be, and Hayek’s hatred of the other kid never really makes a lot of sense, so this one might not have worked even if it was kept intact. But hey, you get to see Salma Hayek devouring a bloody monster heart, and John C. Reilly dressed in an old diving suit that makes him look like the Bioshock guy, so it’s not all bad.

The lone feature on the disc (besides some trailers) is a making of that runs nearly an hour, and while it has some talking head stuff with the cast a lot of the time it’s just behind the scenes footage of key moments being shot sans any commentary, and the chatter before “action!” is often in French without subtitles, so it’s not clear what they’re discussing. I've certainly seen more involving documentaries, in other words, but maybe if you’re bilingual it’ll be of more interest. Kind of funny to see the little bucket next to Salma during the filming of the heart-eating scene, waiting for her to spit into just off camera as soon as they call “cut!”. There aren’t a lot of people on the planet who can look good performing either of these actions, so good on you, Ms. Hayek (sorry, Ms. Hayek Pinault). Ironically, the doc is more structured than the film – it covers the Hayek story, then the Cassel one, and then finally the Jones one, without going back to the others.

Few would deny that the film is lovely to look at it; between the cast and the costumes and the production design, it’s all top notch and looks like it cost a lot more than its reported $14 million budget. But the strange presentation that leaves all three stories feeling like they aren’t properly resolved, not to mention having their narrative thrust constantly weakened, makes it a hard film to recommend with regards to how invested you can get into its proceedings, which is a lot to ask when it’s nearly 2.5 hours long. I’d be curious to see someone recut it to be three standalone tales, because then you could just watch one “episode” at a time if you wanted, instead of investing a not insignificant chunk of your waking day to it. And then you might also spend less time wondering if that’s actually the way it was meant to be, only for Garrone (or perhaps one of his producers) to watch Game of Thrones one night during an editing break and feel the film could work the way that show did, jumping across multiple stories with people who didn’t even know each other. But it didn’t even always work great there, and they had eight seasons to work out the kinks! But again: very nice looking film.

What say you?

P.S. This was a "pile" movie, having been there for over six years (!), but those reviews are supposed to be shorter and this one turned out a little long. Plus I always feel bad seeing so many "FTPs" on the main page.

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FTP: Children of the Night (2014)

MAY 29, 2023

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

I don’t know what the oldest movie in “the pile” is, but Children of the Night (aka Limbo) has to be in the running, as it came out in October of 2015 (and, since it was sent for review consideration, means I probably got it a month earlier). My life is very different now! Since this film has been sitting there waiting for me to watch it, I’ve moved, gotten a new (used) car, published two books, lost two side jobs (typical layoff and covid shutdown, respectively), and helped turn a baby who only just started walking into a 9 year old who has his own TV and can figure out Zelda bosses easier than I can. Kind of crazy, at least in a low key way that's probably not interesting to anyone reading.

But I bring it up because I wonder if I would have enjoyed the film as much then as I did now. My thoughts on “evil” children movies have gone through the wringer since I had my own child, but here’s one where the kids – who are all vampires – are actually the good guys. Sure, they need human blood and can be pretty creepy, but they also just want to do kid things and eat curry (a drug to their vampiric kind – a delightfully odd idea I must say), as none of them asked to be vampires. And they’re all being hunted by a group of black-clad men who believe them to be the devil spawn or whatever, so it’s not hard to, at the very least, hope they take down the hunter jerks with them.

Caught in the middle is Alicia (Sabrina Ramos), a writer who got a tip about the retreat where all of the children live, believing them to all be suffering from some kind of illness with no cure. At first she’s confused, then scared once she realizes what they are, but then comes around to being an ally, thanks in part to the fact that one of the children is actually her girlhood bestie. As vampires tend to do, he hasn’t aged since she last saw him when they were adolescents, so she finds herself weirdly drawn to this now-man trapped in a child’s body, and of course wanting to protect him so she doesn’t lose him again. It’s a potentially icky plot point, and has a few eyebrow raising moments (they don’t *do* anything, I should stress – she just acts charmed by his seemingly inappropriate comments instead of overly concerned), but it’s ultimately a rather sweet unconventional (and, again, physically platonic!) love story.

But it’s also a vampire movie, and while there isn’t a lot of action, what we get is pretty entertaining, since it’s… well, a bunch of kids taking on grown men. At one point a kid literally kicks the head off one attacker, and the other kids momentarily kick it back and forth like a soccer ball – it’s delightful. The music accompanying these scenes is also top notch, as it weirdly reminds me (of all things) of the music in Tetris Effect: Connected, where it’s exciting but also kind of relaxing? Hard to explain unless you’ve also played that game (and you should! It’s the best version!). I also like how they handle the usual tie-in to pop culture vampires, as it proposes the idea that Bram Stoker was a self-loathing vampire who wrote his book to expose the (real) Dracula, who as it turns out is the grandfather of one of the children there. Silly? Sure, but I’ll take it over the usual corny line about Bela Lugosi “getting it wrong” or whatever

. Honestly the only real flaw, besides running a little too long, is that the low budget is occasionally far too apparent on screen. The video/soap opera look I eventually adjusted to, but there are a number of scenes where it seems like they tried to hide a mistake with a superimposed black oval? For example, in one scene, it seems one of the child actors missed their cue and just stood there while the others ran around, and they tried to hide it with one of these ovals, but another actor crosses in front of them, so the oval disappears and we see the kid just standing there – it’s seriously far more distracting than it would have been to just not draw our attention to it in the first place, though I’m sure it could have worked if the oval in any way matched the color of the rest of the image. There are a few other lo-fi “fixes” like that in the movie that kind of keep calling attention to how under budgeted it was, distracting away from the surprisingly involving story. For some reason there’s a remake of One Cut of the Dead coming, but I feel something like this would be a far better option to remake, as the low budget (which was part of One Cut’s charm, not a handicap) actually harms it here and it deserves a polished presentation.

Director/writer Ivan Noel provides a commentary where he notes some of their budgetary issues and thanks the many people who did favors (CGI shots of a moon eclipse, for example), making it a fine track for those who might feel they can’t pull off their own ambitious projects due to a lack of resources. He also notes that the movie was an hour longer at one point (I’m sure he meant his first assembly as opposed to a “director’s cut”; people who don’t understand the difference make reporting on such things an incredible nuisance), though the only other bonus feature is a 20ish minute behind the scenes where we can see everyone was just enjoying the experience and having a sort of summer camp vibe during the proceedings. Since the movie was still too long, I can’t say I need MORE scenes from the film, but if this stuff was in any way elaborate I can’t help but wonder if he tightened his script in the first place perhaps some of those limited resources wouldn’t have been spread so thin.

That said, what’s left is still much better than I would have guessed after the first few minutes (my heart sunk when I saw that video look), so he pulled it off! It has a lot of tones (sweet and nostalgic! Dryly ironic! Kind of scary!) but Noel balances it out fairly well, and Ramos is an engaging presence (as is Ana María Giunta as Erda, the childrens’ caretaker, wearily dealing with things like one of the children sleep-flying). And then I had to laugh that since the movie’s ten years old now, all of the kids in it are now adults. Such is life in the pile!

What say you?

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