Attack The Block

 The fifth of November is Bonfire night here in the UK. It's sort of like the fourth of July in the States in that it's basically an excuse to launch fireworks all over the place, but instead of commemorating something momentous it's a sort of monument to the saddest, most ineffective mainstream terrorist this side of the four lions and his failure to kill some king.

 Against this backdrop that a few flares come down from the sky at high speeds. They're not fireworks, but meteorites carrying a highly lethal species. Unfortunately for these invaders, they happen to land in one of the rougher areas of Lambeth in southern London.

 How rough? Well, that's quickly illustrated when Sam (Jodie Whittaker), a young nurse on her way home is mugged at knife point by five young thugs. It's a legitimately scary scene - one that's instantly relatable in the way it conveys both the rush of fear and the impotent rage that follows these sort of events evoke.

 The mugging is interrupted by one of the meteorites falling nearby; Sam escapes, and the gang goes to investigate... and at around that point (if you haven't seen any of the trailers) you realize that holy shit, those five kids are the protagonists.

 Moses (John Boyega, in his film debut) leads, a laconic, no-nonsense would-be career gang member. Pest (Alex Esmail)  is the most vocal of the lot in the funny asshat role, and the group is rounded out by Franz Drameh , Leon Jones and Simon Howard. Most of them were closer to twenty than the fifteen or so they portray here, but they pull it off well. When not terrorizing innocent, underpaid nurses, they happen to be a charming bunch of hooligans. Just Kids. And the script sensitively drums up empathy for them without making any excuses for their behaviour. There's so much value in that.

 Anyhow! The gang manages to kill the alien the meteorite disgorged, but it turns out to be just the spearhead of the invasion - and a smaller version than the soldier types to follow. Once more meteorites land, unleashing their deadly passengers, the kids go on the hunt to see if they can bag more prey... only to find themselves running for their life, eventually falling back on their council estate. A thin, brutalist building, the Block in the title. There they join forces with Sam, who understandably isn't impressed, a chill drug dealer (Nick Frost), and a posh university student (Luke Treadaway) who provides a lot of cluelessness-based comic mileage.

 Oh, and they also piss off the block's resident gangsta, who's out for their blood as doggedly as the big alien gorilla wolf motherfuckers (as one of the kids christens the aliens).

 This is one of those movies that's an absolute joy from beginning to end - no missteps, no notes, nothing bad to say about it whatsoever. Writer/director Joe Cornish's direction and script are incredibly assured. He manages to pack in so much cleverness into a tightly-paced siege story and works so well with his actors that it's hard to believe most of his experience came from sketch comedy (he's the titular Joe in Adam & Joe).

 It's a movie I've watched several times over the years, and there's always a new detail to find. For example: This time I noticed that Pest fakes a leg injury to sneak an aluminium bat out of his house hidden in his trouser leg. Guess who (and this is a slight spoiler) gets a chunk of the same leg bitten off later, and spends the rest of the movie barely mobile? That's some next-level scriptwriting, especially when it reinforces the themes of consequence woven throughout the story. Man, to think we could have had an Ant-Man written by this guy.

 The action is good, the jokes are great, and the social commentary is, going by all the people who got put off by its choice of protagonists, sharp and still very topical. I've met fairly film-literate people who hated it because of that over the years. One of them turned it off, disgusted, half-way; His favorite movie? Scarface. I still find that funny.
 Beyond that, the writing's strong enough - and it trusts us enough - that it can play a scene where Moses is promoted to drug runner as a straight-faced triumph, with the rest of the gang sincerely, innocently happy for him. Oof.

 Effects are excellent for its budget, with the monsters (which started as gorilla suits!) feeling menacing and original; They look uncannily like something out of a '90s Image comics title. They're a believable threat and animate well, which is important as the more elaborate sequences consist of different types of chases. Things get a little brutal, especially for one (thoroughly deserved) gory death that lets the FX crew get all Romero and shit. The soundtrack is a glitchy wonder that has Basement Jaxx plus Steven Price playing with '50s scifi touches, Carpenter-style synths and more standard grand adventure film music.
 Yeah, this film's got everything.

 Sadly, Attack the Block failed to catch the public's attention in the same way that his mate Edgar Wright (who's an executive producer here) did with Sean of The Dead. Cornish's only done one kid's movie since, apart from some scripts and TV.
 Hopefully that will change soon; There's a sequel in the works, under the Netflix aegis, but let's not hold that against it. What is worrying is that it's gone a bit quiet lately, which is never a good sign, but we'll see. As the box office for Terrifier 3 showed us this week, sometimes the world works as it should.

Salem's Lot

 Stephen King's Salem's Lot is, like The Stand, a novel with a sprawling cast of characters entangled in a complex web of relationships. There's a reason why both have only ever been made as miniseries - and all of them still had to make many, many changes to the source material. Any movie version of either would have to cuts so much of the book that most of what made it special in the first place would be inevitably lost.

 And so it is with the new HBO adaptation of Salem's Lot. It's still the story of a small town that's invaded by a pernicious presence that brings out the worst in everyone until chaos reigns*. Except that even though the movie does spend some time establishing the fault lines and characters that will later become semi-feral bloodsuckers, it quickly becomes more of a cheesy, 80's laced horror adventure.

 Inevitably, it's set in the '70s, like its source material - this story would be unrecognizable in the age of mobile phones and social media. It mainly follows two characters: Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman, just as bland as his dad) as he returns to his hometown of Salem's Lot (Maine, of course- it's a Steven King Staple) to research a novel, and Mark Petrie (Jordan Preston Carter), an eleven-year-old who's basically obscenely competen in absolutely everything. Seriously - he's introduced immobilizing a bully Segal-style, and later takes to vampire hunting with an even-handedness that would make Peter Vincent feel completely inadequate.

Get that clown. Vampire. I mean vampire.

 Following the arrival of a mysterious stranger (Pilou Asbæk, gloriously ridiculous) at the local haunted mansion, a string of child disappearances (there's been a lot of that lately on this blog, hasn't there?) rocks the town. And then people start getting turned into vampires. Our heroes and a few disposable sidekicks quickly realize what's going on and decide something to do something about it. It's actually kind of refreshing how quickly they figure and accept what's going on, though it does require a hefty suspension of disbelief.
 The book is notorious for spending a very long time setting up things and ratcheting up tension - the real mayhem only really starts in the last few chapters; Here, it's more half and half, and a lot of the supernatural stuff is pulled forward to provide a brisker pace.

 Those changes mean that the film is nothing like the novel, despite being recognizably based on it. And yet... it's a surprisingly fun take, a film that feels like it was discovered in a time capsule. Writer/director Gary Dauberman's adaptation is firmly tongue in cheek without fully crossing over into horror comedy; When you find out that an eleven-year-old is an ace driver, for example, it's a moment that invites more of a good-natured cheer than eye-rolling. Or at least good-natured eye-rolling. 

 It is pretty stupid, is what I'm saying, willfully so, in both obvious and subtle ways. This is the type of film where crosses glow like the sun as soon as vampires come near, even emitting a sort of high-wattage lamp sub-sonic flicker as they light up. It's also the type of film where the characterization is completely left to the side characters; Mark, Ben and his girlfriend Sue get the barest minimum of personality. They're just the protagonists.

 Alfre Woodward and Bill Camp get much meatier roles as concerned citizens and would-be vampire hunters. Woodward, in particular, gets a very clever, that shows, rather than tells that she's figured something out - a rare moment of subtlety in this movie. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I have to pay respects to Asbæk's Renfield character - he's basically chewing scenery as if he came in from a Hammer movie. Someone should probably tell him auditions for Nosferatu are closed.

 So. It's a throwback 80's style action horror film, knowingly cheesy. There are a few laughs, but they mostly come out of situations organically. It feels like a huge improvement over Dauberman's previous two-part script for King's It.

What elevates it is a rare (in horror) sense of style. The production is a little on-the-nose with its period detail, but very well realized. And the ambiance is to die for; Layered thick - dusty, sepia-tinged sunlight and a gorgeous autumnal palette during the day, misty, inky-black nights with vampires perching on rooftops like bright-eyed gargoyles.
 There's a scene where two kids get attacked while trekking through a forest, backlit against the gloaming, that is frankly beautiful; Another one, set at a bar, makes uncanny use of light and, more importantly, shadow. The haunted house the vampires nest at looms over the town at one point, like Dracula's castle. There are also a host of fun, showy matching cuts, starting early on with an amazing transition from a business card to a staircase, but my favorite is probably a priest going through a bible to a guy opening a sandwich to check its contents.

Dauberman, cinematographer Michael Burgess, and the rest of the crew have evidently lavished attention on the visual side of things, and I love it. James Wan is a producer; I'm sure he got a kick out of that.

.

 There are, of course, a ton of problems baked into the film's approach. If you aren't on-board with what it's doing, you'll fucking hate it. This dumbness does get to be a bit too much even if you get into the spirit of things; once our heroes know vampires are in play, for example, their refusal to wear even a measly crucifix or slather themselves in garlic like human kebabs is very, very perplexing.

 But the thing that was most detrimental to my enjoyment was an extremely underwhelming final confrontation - hell: the final boss and head vampire himself, the Nosferatu motherfucker** who caused all the trouble in the first place barely makes an impression.

 As for the adaptation liberties... eh. I have a lot of affection for the book, but to be honest I'd rather have this than a more faithful adaptation. It's got some surprises. The literary approach of the novel is best left to the novel or a series... and honestly I'm not at all that interested in the latter.

 It's fine! A bit corny and old-fashioned, but again, that's kind of the appeal here. I suspect it'll make a great kid's horror gateway movie despite the tween deaths, or, frankly, probably because of them. There's a little blood, but not much - some splatters, but most of it is implied or more fun than upsetting. This is a much better result than we had any right to expect from the maker of some Annabelle sequels and the unholy clusterfuck HBO has become.

*: Sit down, Needful Things. You'll probably get another chance sometime soon.

**: A nod to Tobe Hooper's version, I'm sure. Definitely not from the book.

Terrifier 3

 Terrifier 2 expanded on the first movie in every conceivable way. A bigger budget can do wonders, as shown by that film's presentation, but no amount of money is worth anything if the people behind it don't have any ambition. That's not the case with Writer/director Damien Leone, who stepped up on his previous effort with a script that included likeable characters, a cool '80s-movie-adjacent fantasy plot (seriously, this movie's more fantastical elements feel like they belong airbrushed to the side of a van) and... more violence, more cruelty, and, well, I'd say more gore, but that doesn't even begin to cover the amounts of innards, shambles, offal, guts, viscera and other synonyms that Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) cheerfully throws around during the course of that movie. It's a fucking maximalist, peerless gorefest.

 So here we are, a couple of years later, with a sequel set during Christmas that somehow ups the ante on the grand guignol and on Art's antics, letting the rest recede a little bit into the background.

 The opening shows you just how terrific (and how vicious) these movies can be with a horrific, stand-alone yuletide home invasion shown from the point of view of a poor, doomed, innocent family who gets a visit from a suspiciously skinny and pasty white Santa Claus. With an axe. The segment is worth the price of admission alone and is a good showcase for Leone's considerable chops (ha!) for pacing and building a sense of dread. And, of course, for bloodshed.

 From there, the script gets a lot sloppier, bouncing back in time a little to explain what happened after the end of the previous film. First, a (very funny) interlude to show how Art put himself back together after being beheaded at the end of Terrifier 2. Then, an introduction to her sidekick Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi), back from the first Terrifier film. Her suffering at Art's hands left her a broken wreck, physically and mentally; After (literally) playing a role in the demonic clown's rebirth, she decides that she wants to be on the other end of a knife for once, helping him out on some of his grisly outings, providing running commentary all the time. There's a story reason for her inclusion which ties into the series' convoluted metaphysics, but honestly... it's kind of a mess.

 Once Art is fully back and on the warpath (a process that takes him five years), he decides to go after the other one that got away - and also decapitated him with a magical sword.
 Sienna (Lauren LaVera) has spent those five years in a mental institution. She's released to spend Christmas with her aunt (Margaret Anne Florence), uncle (Bryce Johnson) and adoring young cousin (Antonella Rose). Her trauma gets a lot of screentime, but while LaVera remains likeable and does a good job selling her internal turmoil, the dialog is a little too clunky. Serviceable, but not really effective.

 As Art circles around her and her newfound family, Sienna realizes something is up and tries to put up a resistance. It all leads to a sickeningly brutal final confrontation, and... sigh, an extremely unsatisfying cliffhanger. The script barely moves forward, plot-wise, and only develops the mythology a tiny bit - and not in a satisfying way*. The story here, like on many a modern Marvel or other franchise-minded movie, barely merits that name; Besides signalling that the series might get weirder, it's mostly padding. It works better as a series of murderous episodes, and the focus is firmly set on the bloodshed.
 

 It is some pretty damn good bloodshed, if I might say so. Faces are torn off, necks are slit, bowels are dissem'd. And that's just for starters. There's a grotesque creativity at work, and a sense of gleeful, over-the-top cruelty even before Art starts miming his stupid little jokes like the little shit he is; His lethality is only rivalled by his punchability.
 There's nothing as bad as poor Allie's torture from the last time around, but there are a lot more extended deaths, elaborate as all hell and realized with disturbing panache; It's no wonder that Tom Savini, patron saint of gorehounds, puts in an appearance. As in the previous movies, things are heightened enough (the sound design, particularly) that you can kind of have fun in between all the wincing... just about. There's some heavily sexualized violence (to both genders) but next to no nudity, which must have been a conscious decision - a strange one, given that we get to see loads of people with their skin off, never mind their clothes. In any case, that scene caused three walkouts at my screening (that I noticed).

 This is a nasty, nasty movie, ugly by design and calculated to get a deeply visceral reaction. Some of the targets of its violence are fair game as per the slasher genre's admittedly exaggerated rules, but most of them aren't. There's also a lot of black, black humour, most of it coming from Art. After killing a whole family at their home, for example, he takes the time to eat the cookies and milk they left for Santa. Or, in my favorite scene, the asshole finds a way to curdle the hospitality of a kindly soul in the foulest way possible. He really is the incarnation of the most hateful internet troll.

 Terrifier 3 is not exactly scary - it's a little too ghoulishly interested in its red, wet fireworks - but there's a lot of very effective suspense as the next gruesome death looms. And as a gnarly kill delivery engine, well... that's basically the film's raison d'etre, and it fully delivers. I prefer the second part's balance and tonal variety, but I have a lot of respect for a film that only cares about the bits that everyone fast forwards to in slashers upon a rewatch. Shame you may also need to do that here.

*:  We do at least find out that Art washes his hand after taking a piss. If he puts his shopping cart back with the other after doing his groceries, I think that effectively makes him a good person. At least according to some internet theories.

V/H/S/Beyond

  The V/H/S series seems to have found a second lease of life, with the last four installments of the anthology series (out of seven) coming in at a yearly release schedule. This latest one comes with a science fiction theme. As usual, it's fun, but uneven. I personally found it a bit weak, but worthwhile; There's some good stuff there.

 The framing device is directed by Jay Cheel (he of the excellent Shudder documentaries Cursed Movies), and it's a mockumentary about a couple of VHS tapes with supposed proof of extraterrestrial life. The fragments, interspersed among other shorts, give a (necessarily) very abridged overview of UFO mania over the ages while telling the tale of a family that was convinced that they were visited by some sort of presence over the years. They do a token effort of foreshadowing the short they precede, but the tie-ins are extremely loose, I suspect because of the nature of the project. The fake documentary itself is engaging enough, and features a few guest youtubers (the wizards at Corridor Digital put in an appearance), but it builds up to a conclusion that's mildly funny and wholly underwhelming.

 "Stork" kicks off things with the tale of a rogue police squadron raiding a derelict house that they suspect is home to a cult of baby-snatching cultists. Once inside it devolves into a series of shootouts against zombified enemies clearly modelled after action/horror computer games, down to the entrance of a chainsaw-wielding maniac and copious spurts of very fake-looking CGI blood.

 I wasn't too impressed by it, though it goes by easily enough. Overall it feels a little like a calling card to show what everyone involved can do. It's built around the reveal of a very bizarre boss creature, which did make me laugh out loud, so... mission accomplished, I guess.

 Virat Pal is next with a Bollywood-set story that includes the series' first musical number. Its first half is great, chronicling the attempts of two paparazzi (Rohan Joshi and Sayandeep Sengupta) to grab some 'candids' of 'Superstar Tara' (Namrata Sheth), an up-and-coming starlet. Unfortunately, thanks to a pretty underdeveloped plot development, it devolves into some mayhem that's rife with the worst tendencies of found footage movies: someone running around with a camera through extremely dark places.

 Then comes "Live and Let Dive", to me the clear highlight of this V/H/S installment, courtesy of F/X specialist Justin Martinez (he was involved in the very first V/H/S and in semi-spinoff Southbound). It's about a bunch of dudes (of both sexes) who, while on a skydiving expedition get caught in the middle of an alien invasion. The character introduction is weak (I have very little tolerance for forced bluster), but once things get rolling it's a fucking blast: the action moves seamlessly from a disintegrating plane to a forced skydive to the orange grove below, while all the time some truly disturbing aliens (of the feral, murderous kind) hunt them down. Add some inventive gore and you've got a top-shelf entry into the series canon.

 Justin Long directs the next segment, in which a group of activists go to investigate a woman (Libby Letlow) who runs a dog shelter. This one's by far the worst of the lot: Letlow is great, and the introduction mines a lot of anti-humour out of her cheesy promotional video, but other than that it's a slog- overlong, deeply mediocre... and for fuck's sake, out of all the things Long could revisit from his career, did he really have to choose Tusk?

 The great Kate Siegel helms the last segment, Stowaway, making her directing debut off a script written by her spouse Mike Flannagan. It follows Halley (Alanah Pearce), an independent documentarist, as she investigates mysterious lights in the sky sighted at the Mojave desert.
 She does find what she's looking for, but in her pursuit of a story ends up in a horrible situation, made all the more horrifying by an absolute absence of malice. 
 Conceptually, this is excellent. It's the only story here that attempts to engage with a proper science-fiction mindset, and the concepts it plays with are sound (even if they fall in the softest possible range of the sci-fi spectrum). Pearce is also great as Halley, and along with a solid script, she's the only person in this movie who could qualify as a decent, rounded character.
 Unfortunately the filmmaking - by choice or circumstances - is too murky, making the latter half of the story unintuitively uninteresting to look at. It also suffers from a bloated runtime, which is a trait several stories in this V/H/S installment share. Siegel's talked about considering doing a musical, and then something about muppets (with Bryan Henson's involvement, no less). Overall I like Stowaway, but it's hard to wonder how those would have turned out. As good as that last shot is, the movie really needed a bit more craziness.

The Coffee Table (La Mesita del Comedor)

 This... this is a really hard movie to write about without ruining it a little.

 Without spoiling anything: The Coffee Table is an extremely fucked up Spanish provocation - think Álex de la Iglesia, but more hostile to the viewer than he's ever been. Nominally horror, it features some of the blackest of black comedy I've seen in a long time... and unlike nearly all horror comedies, it's plenty horrific, although probably not in the way you'd expect.

 Jesús (David Pareja) and Maria (Estefanía de los Santos) are a middle-aged couple in the process of remodelling their apartment to make space for their newborn son. They're introduced at a furniture store where Jesús hopes to buy an extremely tacky glass-top coffee table, against his wife's justifiably horrified protestations. It's a quietly hilarious scene that, as they argue while an obsequious salesman gives them the hard sell, and it quickly establishes one of the film's major tones: whip-smart, well-acted character work, very funny in a sort of humour that's poised somewhere between observational and cringe.

 That tone is maintained as they make their way back to their apartment. And then a horrific tragedy strikes, which the film treats seriously, only to then cruelly start bringing back in the same sort of quotidian comedy from before. And things slowly start spiralling out of control.

 Yes, you can probably guess what it is that happens. And yes, it's brutal, though mercifully not as graphic as it could have been. But that happens very early in the film so that's not really where I feel the need to tread lightly. What I don't want to spoil is where the movie goes from there, because unpredictability is key to the film's bizarre allure.

 Writer/director Caye Casas gleefully keeps the chaos simmering, later expertly managing some very tense Hitchcock-style suspense to pretty unusual ends. His gift for unintentionally ironic remarks, in particular, remains a delight until the very end. The script (co-written with Chris Borobia) also has room for some inspired bits of lunacy -religious imagery, a 13-year-old femme fatale, Jesús's unexplainable sex appeal with all the major characters- and of course keeps up the wonderful dialog, which the talented cast have a field day with (Josep Maria Riera and Claudia Riera share the back half as Jesús and Maria's houseguests).

 On the technical front, it's a very accomplished movie, with good photography (cinematographer: Alberto Morago Muñoz) and a style that purposefully alternates between well-composed shots and jittery, handheld cameras. The production design is excellent, if on a modest scale, and I particularly loved the title sequence.

 It's a great movie, though the subject matter and trollish tone does make it hard to recommend. I almost feel like a bad person for liking it; And that, surely, is the intention.

Let Me In

 Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is a friendless, bullied latchkey kid whose life is changed when a new girl, Abby (Chloe Grace Moretz), moves in next door. Abby is twelve, the same age as Owen, but she's been twelve (to paraphrase the novel) for a very long time. Because she's a vampire. Which might be why when they meet, she coldly tells Owen that she can't be her friend.

 That falls by the wayside quickly because, in this take on the undead staple, child vampires retain at least something of their childhood no matter how many nights they've seen. Despite her misgivings, she ends up developing a connection with Owen, much to the displeasure of her familiar Thomas (Richard Jenkins).

 What follows is a weirdly sweet story about two outcasts falling in together amidst the chaos and mayhem that vampiric subsistence demands: they teach themselves Morse Code to communicate through their bedroom walls. He teaches her about the modern world and Mrs. Pacman, she teaches him to solve Rubik's cubes and to stand up for himself. They murder someone together. Puppy love.

 If any of this sounds familiar, it's because this is a remake of Tomas Alfredson's Swedish arthouse horror hit Let The Right One In, itself an adaptation of a 2004 novel by John Ajvide Lidqvist. This film came out only a couple years after the original, and at the time director Matt Reeves claimed it'd be a parallel adaptation of the book rather than a remake of Afredson's take on it.

 Well... I call bullshit. This is as close to a one-to-one adaptation of the original movie as these American remakes get, with many of the scenes staged and even framed almost identically. It's kind of hard to defend as anything other than as an exercise in making the movie more palatable to Americans... and that's a shame, because it's a pretty terrific movie on its own right.

 Let's go with the good first: The acting is phenomenal, with both Smit-McPhee and Moretz giving natural, convincing performances that both differ and compliment their Swedish counterparts. Both of them feel believable as kids, and what's rarer and more exciting, as weird, kind of unlikeable -but still relatable- kids. Full credit to them and the script (by Reeves, tracing the original script from Ajvide Lidqvist).
 Jenkins, as the familiar, is also terrific, and his character is much more sympathetic than his predecessor on Alfredson's take - not to mention the one on the book, who was a sociopathic paedophile strung along by the vampire with promises of cold, cold, underage eunuch corpse sex*. Elias Koteas also puts in an appearance; Great as usual, but barely there enough to register.

 The filmmaking and cinematography (by Greig Fraser) are also good. Matt Reeves is no Alfredson, but he acquits himself nicely. And because he's closely following someone else's script, this is by far his best movie - which is ironic, because his additions here, including a hilarious-slash-tense murder attempt followed by a harrowing car crash, are top-notch and the only time this version creeps out from the original's shadow.

 I'll also lump in some of what they chose not to go with on the remake in with the good. The book's biggest menace (spoilers for something that doesn't happen), an acid-scarred vampire going around murdering people in a paedo-boner-induced frenzy fails to make his debut for a second time in favour of a much more intimate, and honestly better, third act. I remember thinking at the time that would be this one's selling point, what with the claims on it being closer to the book, so that was a close one. It also doesn't re-attempt a scene with some hilariously dodgy CGI cats.

 Finally, Reeves' version -by virtue of his direction not being as clinical as Alfredson's- seems to add a little warmth, lean a little more into the story's fucked-up romanticism. That's nicely cut down by a little detail, unique to this version (in fact, it directly contradicts the book), that implies a much more cynical interpretation to the film's ending.

 But in the end... despite some differences, it ends up feeling to me like a lesser imitation. Part of that is that it's such a unique story that it's robbed of some of its power the second time around. I do wonder how I'd rate them if I had seen the remake first, but I think I'd still prefer Alfredson's chillier interpretation. CGI cats notwithstanding. I also wonder whether I'd like the new one better without Michael Giacchino's score. It's perfectly fine, but it sounds too intrusive and... well, too Hollywood for the material.
 The effects are a mixed bag. They're mostly ok, but I really disliked the way Abby moves as a vampire; Took me out of the movie in a similar way those shit CGI cats took me out of the original. Speaking of; As good as Moretz is, I liked Lina Leandersson's take much better - she just looked, and sounded (thanks to her voice being dubbed by Elif Ceylan) much more... other, something that's sorely missing in the remake.

 All in all I'm probably being too harsh on this one. It bears repeating that taken on its own, it's an excellent, unique, sophisticated little movie that packs a hell of an emotional punch, whichever way you choose to interpret its nicely ambiguous ending**.

 But... well, it's not on its own, is it?

*Ajvide Lidqvist adores taking deep dives into the psyches of deeply repellent people, and the book's chapters narrated from Thomas's (Hákan in the original) point-of-view are a pretty harsh reading endurance test, even to this jaded horror fan. That's nothing compared to Little Star, though, which is basically an attempt to cram in as much awful, awful human behaviour as possible into a single novel.

**I leaned cynical. The book's author disagrees. He also loved both adaptations.

Oddity

 In roman times, a husband would gift their wife a silver wreath on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and a golden one at their fiftieth. This custom was kept over time, and in the twentieth century a host of other anniversary milestones were added (yay, capitalism!). The fifth anniversary is called a wooden anniversary, and this is the excuse Danni Timmins (Carolyn Braken, who's excellent in her dual roles) uses to gift her brother-in-law Ted (Gwilym Lee) a horrifying wooden mannequin.

 This is wrong on several levels. One, because the mannequin is a fucked-up wonder, a creepy rendering of a shrivelled mummy with hollow eyes and a mouth frozen in a horrifying scream. Two, because the gift comes one year after Ted's wife and Danni's sister Darcy (Braken, again) was brutally murdered. Not cool, Danni.

 The story in Oddity hinges around the character of Danni, who happens to be both blind and possessed of psychometric powers (she can read objects, like Johnny Smith in The Dead Zone), and how she rudely invades her ex-brother-in-law's life -and that of his new paramour (Caroline Menton)- at their rural cottage in an attempt to find out what really happened to her sister. What part the mannequin plays is not clear until much later.

 It's a high-gothic tale that's happy to throw in ghosts, a dash of paranormal phenomena, and some deliciously heinous sociopathy on top of the initial murder, all laced with a bone-dry sense of black humour. It takes its time carefully laying the infrastructure to support a handful of extremely effective jump-scares and a very satisfying finale. The whodunnit aspects are relatively simple (they have to be, with a cast this size) but the pieces of the puzzle are assembled with such care and imagination that it's still a pleasure to watch them fall into place with grim sense of inevitability.

 Writer/director Damian McCarthy has crafted a nasty, elegant, classically-built box of horrors that's still playful enough to remain unpredictable in its particulars. Meticulously composed at all times, its heavy emphasis on atmosphere (cinematographer: Colm Hogan) beautifully supports the script's rising pitch. And that fucking wooden man, sculpted by Paul McDonnell and a team of six, easily tops the creepy rabbit from McCarthy's previous movie Caveat (which makes a welcome cameo here) both in form and function.
 There's a smattering of gore, ugly enough to jolt, but it's not a particularly bloody film. It is weird, funny, engaging and properly scary, though; It's a shame it didn't receive much of a marketing push, because it should rightly become a classic.