The Black Phone

 It's a risky endeavor to expand a short story to fill out a film. There are many ways to do this - you add characters, you draw things out, you expand on some aspects or add b-plots... my favorite example of how to do this is Stuart Gordon's From Beyond, which uses up the story it's supposedly adapting before the starting credits roll; the rest is a (characteristically) bonkers story wholly cooked up in Gordon's evil, twisted brain.
 The Black Phone, adapting an extremely lean thirty-page Joe Hill story, is a great example on how to do it the right way; most of the additions are solid, and they build towards a theme that wasn't there in the source material (I think! It's been a long time since I read it.)

 Taking place somewhere in suburban America during the '70s, the movie tracks the story of pre-teen Finney as he navigates a gauntlet of peer and domestic abuse, and later, an abduction by a serial killer who kidnaps and kills children. That's where he runs into the titular phone, which lets him communicate with the ghosts of victims past. Between them, they try to figure out a way to escape, while his sister never gives up hope and uses some unreliable psychic powers to try and track him down.

 The late 70s slightly-run-down americana setting is evoked beautifully with subdued colors, great production design, iconic (but not too well-known) period song choices, and some outstandingly greasy-looking teens. It's not exactly naturalistic - this is a world where a kid beats down a bully using martial arts moves, or a teen pulls a knife at a corner shop brawl (who wrote this, a Daily Sun columnist?) - but it captures the feel and anxieties of teen-hood very well. Everything is heightened, fraught, exaggerated.

 Some stylistic choices I didn't much care for, but the tone is much more controlled and well maintained than the (terrible) trailers would lead you to think. There's a lot to like here; Director Scott Derrickson and Robert Cargill continue to make for a great team.

 Ethan Hawke gives it his all, as he always does. He plays the main antagonist, but he's not even in the movie all that much; just a human-shaped blob of pure evil who's there to move things along, never really taking the spotlight. Most of the time hidden behind a mask. This is not his movie.

 The film rests entirely on child actors to carry it - and luckily, they're all great. The actor playing the protagonist gives a brilliant, very internal performance. The younger sister is also excellent - I wasn't a fan of how precocious her character was, but that's on the script, not on her; she gets one of the most upsetting scenes in the movie, and it's very much thanks to her acting chops. Hopefully this will put them both on the radar. The other kids are great, too.

 The Black Phone takes its sweet time before the actual black phone enters the picture, but it's time well spent introducing several characters and their world, raising the emotional stakes for when things inevitably get worse. This is, along with raising the number of ghosts imprisoned with Finney, one of the biggest additions to Joe Hill's short story. It's a smart call; it shows how Finney and his sister rely on each other to tough things out, something that will resonate when he's later helped by the Grabber's previous victims. It's a sweet message, and powerful.

Monstrous

 Monstrous is a Christina Ricci-led horror movie that... well, it's really hard to talk about without entering into spoiler territory. I'll try to keep them mild, but consider yourself warned.

 Ricci plays a woman moving in to a new town in California with her son, back at some point in the '50s.  They have trouble fitting in at the new place, and it's increasingly apparent they're fleeing a bad domestic situation. Then a monster starts coming out of the lagoon out back to stalk first the boy, then the mother.

 There are a lot of problems with this film. The whole thing looks like a TV movie - which, for its obviously modest budget, it might as well be. This includes a betentacled, protean creature that I didn't find either scary or interesting to look at; Part of it is that the CGI used for it looks cheap as hell, but it also doesn't really have a visual identity. The script also meanders a bit - the details do end up fitting together, but I didn't find the journey interesting at all, especially when most of the elements are borrowed from other, better movies. And yes, it does have a couple of gotcha! twists, one of which I guessed about a third of the way in, and the other so unnecessary and out-there that it barely counts as a twist.

The ghost of Alien sequels past

 I feel kind of bad for bashing on Monstrous - it's got a honest attempt at mindfuckery going on, and a proper monster/ghost/spirit creature thing lurking around its edges. Effort was clearly expended in writing and making the film, what with all the foreshadowing and internal references; Its heart is in the right place, and it's got a good emotional core. This would all be meaningless if the protagonist wasn't up to snuff, but Christina Ricci gives a good performance as well - even when half of her acting notes could as just well be "put on a brave face" and her dialog, as written is... often not great.

 So give it a chance, I'm sure a lot of people will love it. Personally, though, I found it pretty boring. It seemed to me that director Chris Sivertson and writer Carol Chrest expended all their effort wrangling its puzzle into the shape of a movie, leaving little room to tell a good story. A lot of the choices that render the movie problematic for most of its running time are deliberate and make sense in retrospect - but it takes so long to make that clear, and the journey there is so filled with tropes, that by the time the revelations come I personally found it hard to give a shit.

Hellbenders

 Hellbenders is a gleefully blasphemous horror comedy about a bunch of warrior exorcist priests -the Augustine order of hellbound saints- who commit to a regime of sins to make their souls attractive to demons; they're basically waking spiritual honeypot operations to draw out spooks from their possessed victims. And, as a last resort, they're trained to kill themselves so they'll take the demon back to hell with them.

 For a little bit during the introduction it looks like the movie is going to be a bit too much - too in. your. FACE! - but luckily that aggressive tone is quickly scaled back somewhat. Some creative cursing, fun character work, a few good jokes and motherfucking Clancy Brown pick up the slack and help make up for the very low budget and sometimes meandering plot.

 The Hellbound Saints live together in a New York apartment and are a fairly varied bunch of (mostly) likeable assholes. The movie gets a lot of comic mileage out of how sinning is basically in these folk's job description- one of them carries a ledger of misdeeds around, and keeps nagging them on how they're falling behind on their unholy quota. The nature of the sins themselves is sometimes suspect -an arbitrary slap counts as Wrath, for example- but I guess you need to hold back a little if you want anyone to root for your characters... and it also pokes fun at bible literalism (at one point someone says something along the lines of 'don't come to me with those bullshit Leviticus sins' - that got a big laugh.) Also, this is the sort of movie that falls apart under any close scrutiny, so it's better to just go along.

 Which brings us to the plot. It's ok, serviceable: an ancient god is trying to open a gate to hell just as the Hellbenders are being audited by an (understandably) unsympathetic church servant. There are some documentary-type asides, which do serve a purpose, but consistency is an issue as, for example, one of the characters is introduced talking to the camera for a scene and never does it again. Other than that the dialog is sharp (if  juvenile), and there are a lot of cool concepts and weirdness thrown into the mix. In the end there's too little heft and detail to the fight against demon/god Surtr to really carry the movie, but it allows for a lot of fun character moments and bloody exorcisms.

 The whole endeavor has a sort of puerile energy that I found very easy to like, and unlike the vast majority of similar films it doesn't push its lore upon you. There's no pace-killing glut of exposition (hello Nekrotronic!) and it doesn't feel like it's trying to set up a franchise or a string of sequels. It's slight to a fault, it's never scary, and it doesn't really pull off a satisfying finale, but that's fine. It's a goofy, blasphemous lark.

 The humor doesn't all come from inventive swears and casual blasphemy. A weird aside to why there aren't any classic superheroes called Clint gets a killer, flamboyantly delivered punchline for example, and a few of the jokes and jargon are relatively deep theology or occult cuts: Besides the previously mentioned Leviticus dig, for example, I got a chuckle out of the auditor being revealed as a member of the Opus Dei and the crew's reaction to that. It's... a weird movie, and a game cast led by the redoubtable and stentorious Clancy Brown really elevate it.

 Writer / Director J. T. Petty does a pretty great job on both counts with a tiny budget; Between this, Mimic 3 (way better than it had any right to be), Soft for Digging and The Burrowers (highly recommended) he's more than proven to be worth following. He seems to have a career in videogames now, and I hope it's lucrative, but it'd be great to see him make more films.

Mad God

 You may not know Phil Tippet's name, but you know his work. He's one of the main driving forces behind the dinosaur effects in the Jurassic Parks, the AT-ATs and Tauntauns in Empire Strikes Back, and more importantly (to me!) the ED-209 in Robocop. The way it gingerly tests the stairs before tumbling down... oh you sweet, leopard-voiced brute.
 Anyhow: the guy's an absolute indisputable legend. And for the last thirty years or so he's been working on and off on his own weird dream project, a mostly stop-motion trek through hell, which he started in 1990, did a kickstart fund injection in 2012, and finally released on Shudder a few days ago.

 Mad God is a surrealist, gruelling walk through many, many hellish locations, using varied types of animation and visual FX (puppetry, stop motion, the type of mixed chemical footage that made the visuals in The Fountain so memorable) plus a little live action here and there to basically pour cool-looking creepy shit down your eyeballs for every single scene of its duration.

 After a particularly unhinged bible quote (Leviticus, of course*) and some awesome tower-of-babel-like scene setting, a gas-masked dude is lowered into an apocalyptic wasteland via a rickety diving bell. Once he gets off he starts legging it through a huge number of insanely detailed and varied scenes. He wanders among monsters and bystanders (who have a pretty funny tendency to bite it in elaborate and horrifying ways), usually trying to sneak by or run away from some menace.

 The film has a nasty, hypnotising momentum while it accompanies the man, and then others like him, in scenic walks through horrible places. And that's what most of the movie is, really; Very episodic, as you'd guess from its patchwork production. There are a couple of interludes but most of the running time is taken up by this extremely bleak, ridiculously well crafted travelogue.

 There's precious little dialogue, and as with most surrealist movies, not a huge amount of plot; It's more a succession of thematically coherent vignettes than a 'proper' narrative. Not to say there isn't a story there. You might be able to mine some sense from it, since the film is full of mythic resonances and it pulls out far enough to show enough pieces you could use to put together a reasonable semblance of an explanation. Even then, your interpretation will probably look very different from someone else's (mine, for the record, involves Gnosticism.)

 And to be honest, the lack of a more conventional plot didn't bother me much. It'd make me happy just to know that this movie exists, never mind that it's a great on its own terms.

* I like that passage; It's a good bit of old testament don't-fuck-with-me swagger. Somewhat shockingly, it's not the only bible curse that mentions eating your children; The ancient world was pretty brutal.
 Leviticus is usually known as the bible book most Christian homophobes use to justify their bullshit, and the one a lot of atheists turn to when looking for stuff to make fun of. I'm as atheist as they come but I still cringe when I read things I wrote two decades ago... so I can understand that some people wrote some silly stuff two millennia ago. Doesn't excuse the hateful stuff though.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

 In the catalogue of movies starring actors playing a lightly fictionalized of themselves, Nick Cage's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent would come in slightly below JCVD and miles and miles above Pauly Shore is Dead.
 (I'd love to have more movies to include in that list, but I couldn't think of any others... There's tons of movies where actors play a slightly fictionalized version of themselves as minor characters - There's Being John Malkovich, Last Action Hero, The Player - but none of them are built around the actors-as-characters.)

 After failing to get a role he had his heart set on, beset with money and family problems, Nicholas Cage (Nicholas Cage) decides to take on a paid gig to spend a couple of days at a rich fan's birthday party in Majorca. It's exactly as cringeworthy as it sounds, except that the millionaire (Pedro Pascal) turns out to be a pretty cool guy, and they rapidly become friends.
 And if you've seen the (terrible) trailer, then you know what's next: the millionaire is apparently the head of a Spanish drug cartel (this is actually a thing that exists, and the film accurately ties it down to Galicia, the area where most of them are based!) so a CIA agent (Tiffany Haddish, who gets a couple of good jokes in) gets Nick to spy on his new found buddy. What follows is a pretty mellow, charming comedy with two very charismatic actors having some misadventures: a very funny acid freakout, some low-budget shoot outs and chases (a respectable effort for a low budget action comedy.) Maybe, just maybe, by the end Nick Cage will learn how to be a better human being, parent, and ex-husband.

 The Nicholas Cage persona is used reasonably well, scoring some big laughs with ridiculously pompous statements that... yeah, I can totally buy him saying. There's some post-modern riffing, but don't expect a deconstruction of Nick Cage's career, or any degree of reflection on his real-world off-screen antics. His movie daughter isn't called Kara. This is light, Cage-friendly entertainment, and what little mind-fuckery there is never intends to even begin approaching Charlie Kaufman levels.

 What does drag the movie down a little, besides some pacing problems in the early going, is how patently fake a lot of the showbiz talk seems to be. The dialog in the fake movie Nick is trying to get into (to be directed by David Gordon Green!) is so purple I can't see it flying in a 30s pulp novel, much less anything produced this century. When talking about respectable character actor roles, someone puts forth "the gay uncle in a Duplass movie" as an example, someone else says that a script is a mix between three lesser-known or niche directors that don't make any sense in context, that sort of thing. Dunno, it all sounded extremely inauthentic to me. That also was a problem in JCVD, mind.

 That, and they cast Neil Patrick Harris but they just had him play an agent instead of letting him reprise his role as Neil Patrick Harris from the Harold and Kumar trilogy. Talk about missed opportunities.
 

Lightyear

 On the leadup to its release Lightyear was touted as a more serious Pixar outing, a proper sci fi film that within the Toy Story universe would be the launching point for the Buzz Lightyear toy line.

 Within its first few minutes, it's pretty clear that this is just a bog-standard Pixar movie - a kid's animated adventure that leans a little on sci fi trappings in the same way The Incredibles leaned on superhero tropes (to be clear, this is nowhere near as good as The Incredibles). Any attempts to mimic a proper movie are barely skin deep; characters are still hyperactive and mug constantly to the camera, the emotional beats are exaggerated and simplistic, and everything is pitched to an elementary school level.

 

 It's a bit unfair to judge a movie on expectations, especially when I may have misjudged its marketing. Even a middling Pixar movie is better than most of kid's anything, and it remains a fun, funny, and cool-looking adventure by any metric. But it's also very recognizable as a Pixar(tm) product that plays it completely safe while much braver stuff went directly to streaming before it. Maybe that's a statement.

 So yeah, there's a lot to like here: the designs are incredible, there's a lovely montage of an alien planet being terraformed organically integrated as the background to a story beat, the pacing is expertly judged (except for a weird aside with future sandwiches) and the action is fun. The plot holes and dumb errors and contrivances that are unforgivable for sci fi, but ok in a kid's movie; the formulaic character arcs are a bit harder to swallow, but they're handled with enough grace. The biggest shame here is the missed opportunity to aim a little higher, to make a movie not for Andy as a six-year old, but for when he was a little bit older and discovering Heinlein, Asimov, CJ  Cherryh or whatever. You know, a proper science fiction film, not yet another kid's adventure.

Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers

 It's pretty fun.

 What, more? OK: So... Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers is the latest result of Disney deciding to dust off an old but well remembered IP. That's had various results over the years -for every Pete's Dragon, we got a bunch of those awful live action remakes- but this is firmly on the 'It looks like everyone involved actually wanted to make this one' category. And the people involved in making it are the fine folks at Lonely Island, so it was always going to be worth a watch.

 In an inspired touch, it's not a direct continuation of the short lived very late '80s Chip and Dale Series. It takes place in an extremely Who Framed Roger Rabbit?-influenced setting where cartoon and real people mix - and cartoons are made by, well, cartoons acting in front of painted backgrounds. In fact, Roger Rabbit has a big cameo here, so this movie can and should be understood to take place within the Roger Rabbit cinematic universe.

 After a short summary of Chip and Dale meeting and rising to fame the film jumps forward to the modern day, a bunch of years after their series was cancelled. Chip has survived on the margins of showbiz and Dale gave up on it and became an insurance salesman. Salesmunk? Anyhow, a mystery involving an old friend reunites them and off they go on an investigation of animation's seedy underworld.

There's a jaunt into Uncanny Valley

 It's very, very similar to Roger Rabbit, right down to smuggling in adult situations and jokes a la Jessica Rabbit's pattycakes subplot. There's a killer roster of voice talent on hand, all very game, and while this doesn't have Rabbit's seemingly bottomless pockets for securing the rights to other studio's properties (The Looney Tunes crowd remain conspicuously absent), it does have some pretty funny inclusions like MC Skat Kat or Ugly Sonic, and some of the cameos make for pretty good jokes just in and of themselves. The limited budget also unfortunately makes it so that the animation here isn't even close to Rob Zemeckis's masterpiece, but it does well enough, and it's got the energy and enthusiasm to make up for it.

 It's hard to say how much tinkering director Akiva Schaffer and the other guys at Lonely Island did with the script, but it feels very much of a piece with their sensibilities- even the character arcs for Chip and Dale feel very similar to the ones in Popstar. The story isn't going to blow any minds, but it's fun, self-aware, and it goes to some inspiredly (google informs me that isn't a word; fuck google) weird places.

 It does feel at times like a bunch of great ideas or jokes strung together with lesser connective tissue, but hey, it got quite a few solid laughs out of me. It's cute even when it's spinning its wheels, and I suspect anyone with a fondness for the original series will get a lot more out of it than I did.

 

Bloodbath at the House of Death

 Bloodbath at the House of Death is a fairly witless 1984 British comedy that reads like an attempt to do an Abrahams\Zucker style parody by way of Hammer Horror, but comes out feeling like a particularly unfunny Carry On movie, or a Benny Hill skit.

 There's a couple of decent jokes here and there, but for the most part it trades on mild subversions of expectations without a decent punchline. Or even worse, just thinking some mundane thing is intrinsically funny and letting it play out: Hey, this guy is blind! Look, he crashes into things all the time! Or look at these two men, they're gay! Here they are, liking other men! It's... pretty fucking terrible.

This, I'm sorry to say, is representative of the humour within.

 It starts out all right - likeable, if not actually very funny, and with a high body count as well. In a short pre-titles prologue a terrible massacre is carried out by a bunch of monks on a secluded manor house. A few years later a group of scientists go in to investigate, and spooky hijinks ensue. You get your requisite references to then-recent(ish) Hollywood hits (ET! Carrie! The Entity!) but unfortunately the movie never has the grace to more closely emulate its obvious influences (the great Top Secret! was released on the same year.)

 Besides the humor, the film is not exactly Z-grade. It boasts a decent budget for what it is - there's a few big scenes with a lot of extras and a decent amount of locations, but it still looks cheap and tacky throughout. The gore and makeup effects are uninspired, but perfectly fit for purpose. The acting ranges from "they did what they could with the material given" (this includes Vincent Price, classing up the joint a little) to painful to watch (Kenny Everett, who I'm happy to say I'd avoided up to now and will continue to do so; Reading up on the movie, it came as no surprise that he was a radio jockey.)
 Director Ray and co-writer Ray Cameron is a British TV guy through and through, most known for the long-running panel show Joker's Wild and a some stuff with Kenny Everett.

 Just... seriously, unless you have some fondness for even the worst of the Carry On films, don't even bother. There's a dearth of real laughs to be had here, and the few decent jokes (like someone getting decapitated with an electric can opener, or... um, a cute bit with a bookcase, I guess?) are few, far between, and better on paper than in execution.

Morbius

 At this point, I don't think there's any big studio out there with a worse track record for terrible, terrible scripts than Sony Pictures; With some honourable exceptions, they just don't seem to give a single fuck about storytelling.
 This has been clear for ages (Ghostbusters 2016, a movie I actually kind of like, feels like it was shot from an unfinished script; that's pretty characteristic of Sony Pictures), but it's never been clearer than with their latest slate of Spiderman Villain films: Venom is a movie that seems to be rejoicing at just how bad it is, and Morbius is somehow even worse than that.

 Jared Leto plays the titular vampire doctor with admirable conviction, but all his intensity and weirdo charisma are wasted in a cliched and pretty staid character. He's got some sort of consumptive disease, he tries to cure himself by something something vampire bats, and of course he becomes a vampire. That's the level we're operating at here. Which... fine, it worked for the Spiderman movies, but they had a ton of other stuff going for them; here we get cut-rate CGI, poor acting, some of the worst scriptwriting I've seen in a long time, plus a bunch of weirdness that's kind of respectable in how wrong-headed it is. I mean, there's a bit where Matt Smith struts around in his pimped-out room, preening and making evil vampire faces at the camera not once, but twice. And it's filmed like a commercial or a fashion shoot! Besides the titles, it's the best part of the movie.

Vamp's gonna vamp. Wish more of the film had as much fun as this bit.

 Smith plays Milo, Morbius's childhood friend turned antagonist. Since Morbius is one of those saintly characters that is always on the right, they had to introduce some conflict somehow, right? Matt Smith ratches up the camp admirably, but the film doesn't have the wit or verve needed to actually make his character fun. They fight a bit, Morbius kills him, then it's time to start setting up the sequel and a Sony Villains Assembled film that nobody in their right mind should want.

Every single scene in this film is weirdly truncated, its storytelling so blunt it can't be arsed to thread scenes together with any sense; It's just going through the motions, trying to get through its shit story as quickly as possible with seemingly nothing but contempt for its characters or the audience.
  Much as I hate the scripts for some modern superhero movies*, they at least have the decency to be slick and maintain a pretense of professionalism. This one... does not.

 Beyond the incompetent plotting, you get all the expected dumbness and then some. This is a movie that handles exposition by having characters tell each other things they both already know, that transitions from the line "that's so illegal that we should do it in international waters" to a shot of an ocean liner with a title card saying "International Waters"... OK, no, that's actually pretty good, if too dumb/easy a joke.
 It has a father figure (poor, poor Jared Harris) who's only there to dramatically die in someone's arms, and a "touching" scene where a villain who's been an irredeemable piece of shit the whole movie goes for a grace note that's so unearned it plays as comedy.

 There's at least an attempt to give the movie some interesting visuals, which mostly come down to giving the characters a kind of trail that looks like ropy coloured smoke when they jump and shit, and an echolocation effect that applies a similar mist effect to any surrounding structures. It didn't work for me at all - I found it to be a butt-ugly movie that looks remarkably videogame-y.
 And don't get me started on its (quickly abandoned) attempts to cultivate a horror movie atmosphere. Matter of fact, while we're discussing horror credentials, Blade proved that you could have a successful Marvel movie and keep it gory more than twenty years ago. This bloodless PG-13 crap was never going to cut it.

 They do have Morbius do some bat shit I haven't seen Batman do, including hanging upside down for a bit, and getting swept around in currents of wind; I don't think the writers understand echolocation (or, more likely, they don't give a flying fuck.) The first time Morbius uses it, he doesn't screech to get the echoes back, which is a huge wasted opportunity - that would have been hilarious! Now I think of it maybe he's meant to be getting the echoes from his fishtank bats? Still stupid, and much less fun.
 If I may make a humble suggestion for the sequel, maybe Morbius could fly into someone's house, and they would have to shoo him around with brooms until he found a window he could fly out of? I'd watch that.

 Anyhow them's the breaks with Sony. I had extremely low expectations for Morbius, and the film duly lived down to them and then some. I wouldn't say it's so bad it's good, but it did made me laugh out loud a few times. If I have to be honest, I prefer proper bad like this to mercenary, pandering mediocrity like Ghostbusters Afterlife or plain old shitshows like Uncharted.

Because I'm feeling magnanimous, let me list a couple of other things I actually liked about Morbius besides Matt Smith's glam scene:

- The title sequence and end credits kick ass, a neon laser-show-like display that have nothing to do with the rest of the movie but looked really neat.
- The movie is only one hour forty-four minutes long, which is about half an hour shorter than superhero movies inexplicably feel is the minimum runtime these days.
- Obligatory love interest Adria Arjona is very pretty, and Jared Leto is a good-looking weirdo. The acting is bad across the board, but with this material I wouldn't pin the blame on the actors; No amount of acting is going to elevate this shit, so why bother?

 And that's it; Morbius out.

*(And if you thought I'd miss a chance to fling some feces at the Russo bros or Snyder, you don't know me well enough!)