The Riddle Of Fire

 When I was a kid one of the TV channels put on some ancient shorts where Shirley Temple and some other kids would act out some simple melodrama, all in costume. A quick search shows them to be the 'baby burlesks' from the early 1930s.

 The one I remember best is one where two kids (I'm talking five year-olds or less) dressed as sailors fight over Temple, who's basically dressed as a cutesy lil' slut. The short ended with the winner of the fight taking Temple to his room, and even as a kid I could work out it was all about sex; (I'd watched Heavy Metal by then, so I was an expert in the subject - something to do with oddly-shaped women very slowly taking off their clothes and putting them on again, right?)

 In any case - what the fuck, 30's Hollywood? That Hays fellow might have been onto something.

 I hadn't thought about those shorts for literally decades until watching The Riddle of Fire. What is The Riddle of Fire, you ask? It's a bizarre comedy that basically lets a bunch of kids -very young kids, ranging from eight-ish to twelve - fool around in front of the cameras for almost two hours. Some of it feels unscripted, some of it lets the kids act as if they were the heroes of a story that's pitched somewhere between a fairy tale and a backcountry Tarantino crime epic. Every now and then, it'll give one of the kids a ridiculously precocious line, making them sound like Bugsy Siegel or something, which is why it reminded me of the Baby Burlesks. That's the only point in common, by the way - no creepy shit here. Some mild flirting, but it's played for laughs.

 The film tracks the three immortal lizards - Hazel (Charlie Stover), his little brother Jodie (Skyler Peters), and their friend Alice (Phoebe Ferro). They're basically a feral, amoral gang roving around town in dirt bikes and stealing shit all over the place, and shooting at anything that moves with paintball guns - much to the surrounding adult's mild consternation, eye-rolling and tut-tutting. As the film starts, they break into a warehouse and pull off a wordless heist. Their loot: a gaming console around which they've planned their entire weekend.

 But first they have to get the TV's parental control password from Hazel and Jodie's bed-ridden mother, who's sleeping off a nasty flu. To get on her good side, they set off on a quest to get the perfect blueberry pie.

 And to prepare the perfect blueberry pie, you need speckled eggs. But a ne'er do well gets the last carton at the store, and refuses to share. That's how the Three Immortal Lizards get involved in a war for the eggs against the Hollyhock clan, a family criminal enterprise led by the effectively intense Anna-Freya (Lio Tipton), who might be a witch, and the boorish, gun-toting John Redrye (Charles Halford). On their side: The youngest of the Hollyhocks, Petal (Lorelei Olivia Mote), who's an apprentice witch herself.

 There's shades of The Goonies in the confrontation between the Lizards and the Hollyhocks, but this is a much more loose, goofier film. I guess it comes from a lineage of kids' adventure stories where the protagonists would have to outsmart some smugglers or something, anyways. There are some segments which focus on the adult villains, the point of view remains steadfastly the kids'. The film is (by design) slight to a fault, and some of its escapades are more compelling than others. Intellectually, I recognize this film really shouldn't be two hours long... but then again, it's consistently hilarious and unpredictable, and I never felt it drag.

 It's all shot in glorious, sun-drenched  Utah (passing for Wyoming) on 35mm, giving the film the feel of a slightly-aged polaroid without losing any of the vibrant colours. The acting is... well, there's a couple of untrained child actors, one of them who needs to be subtitled because he tends to mumble his lines. These natural performances, alongside the more polished ones from child actresses Ferro and Mote, are an integral part of the film' considerable charm.

 On the adult side of things writer/director Weston Razooli puts in an appearance as one of the Hollyhocks, as do real-life sisters Andrea and Rachel Browne. None of them are great, but they're all endearingly enthusiastic and are obviously having fun. Tipton and Halford both have the presence to provide the backbone for the movie, and both strike the perfect balance between mysterious, menacing, and incredulous that they might have gotten away with it if it wasn't for these meddling kids.

 There are so many cool, goofy touches - from the faux-serious fantasy tropes and music to the little carillon sweep that plays whenever a speckled egg, that most fabled of McGuffins, is displayed. I don't like kids, I tend to not like cutesy shit. But this, this isn't cutesy, it's just cute, winsome and fun. 

Hellboy: The Crooked Man

 OK, just in case, let's get you caught up in what Hellboy's all about - because this movie all but assumes you're already familiar with him. He's the protagonist of a bunch of comics going back to the 90's about a supernatural investigator who also happens to be a devil. You know: red skin, goat legs, a barbed tail and two horns (which he's cut off). He's an agent for the BPRD (the Bureau of Paranormal Resarch and Defence), a government-sponsored FBI-style organization full of literal spooks. There's been two really good film adaptations made from the comics, a mediocre one that few liked, and now this one, set in the '50s - long before any of the previous movies.

 Hellboy creator Mike Mignola has been pretty open about not being a fan of Guillermo Del Toro's adaptations of his comics. It's a fair cop; Good as they are, their tone strays far from Mignola's more gothic, Hammer-Horror-like roots.

 So here he's fully involved - as executive producer and co-writer (along with frequent collaborator and novelist Christopher Golden and director Brian Taylor) in a new reboot of the series, one where everyone is theoretically aligned in making an adaptation of a self-contained short story arc as faithful as possible to Mignola's vision.

 Shame they went and got one of the directors of the Crank movies to do it.

 I've read a lot of the Hellboy/BPRD comics, but I managed to miss 2008's The Crooked Man side-story. From what I can tell, this is a fairly accurate translation. Hellboy (Jack Kesy) and BPRD operative Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph) are transporting some sort of demonic spider on a train passing through the middle of Appalachia. The Spider goes nuts and escapes, leaving its captors stranded in the middle of a witch-plagued part of the country.

 While trying to get back to civilization, Hellboy and Bobbie Jo run into war veteran Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White), a haunted local man who's just returned from his tour abroad (I guess Korea?) Together they start looking into a rash of supernatural goings-on spiralling around a shadowy figure called the crooked man.

 First things first: it is nice to see a Hellboy adaptation that feels closer to a horror movie than a superhero one. And, bless him, director Brian Taylor really does try to put on a folk horror tale. When the film settles down a little - and there are long stretches during the film's first half that do - the dank American Gothic atmosphere, chilly palette, folk-drenched, witch-plagued lore and impenetrable accents really do cast a spell. The best scene in the film is just a normal conversation in a cabin, with a few locals dipping in and out of the chat while a witch-touched fella just lies in the floor. Gave me a very slight When Evil Lurks vibe.

 But... that's it. Taylor, along with partner in crime Mark Neveldine, was among the perpetrators of some the worst cinematic war crimes of the dark ages of American action (from the mid 2000's to, oh, say the first John Wick). You know, the "I think something cool happened, maybe, but I didn't get to see it properly" era of Hollywood action.

 Their movies (the Cranks, Ghost Riders, and Gamer) didn't just fuck up action with some of the worst editing, blocking, and general incompetence of the era, but also were filled with blips, glitches, stylistic bullshittery, and just all sorts of hyperactive crap even on supposedly quieter scenes. Movies for the ritalin set.

 Here, Taylor is a bit more subdued, and at least keeps his bag of tricks mostly constrained within a subset that should, in paper, work under horror. But he doesn't have the discipline not to keep the camera from roving all over the place, putting in speed ramps, glitches, randomly changing focal length, and all sorts of shit that if you want to be charitable at least shows a willingness to experiment to try and find an unsettling aesthetic. I'm not saying he succeeds - he's just nowhere near good enough to make it work - but he does try.
 And that goes double for the action scenes, which are a complete disaster. The Hellboy stories, even the quieter ones, feature a lot of fights; There are quite a few here, and even when the concept's good - like a ghoul calling out sins to force the dead to fight for him - they are all utter shit. Some of it is due to a piddly budget, but most is due to poor blocking, choreography, and a style that seems to confuse incomprehensibility for intensity.
 As for horror... well, it does try to be scary, but aside of some good ambiance, it botches its scares in the most inane way possible. Lots of cheesy jump scares and artless dramatic zooms. The crooked man, for example, is prone to crack his neck suddenly. To remind you that he was hanged, I guess; It looks silly and very, very dated.

 It's not all technical issues, as the script doesn't really work either. It may be faithful to the comics, but that doesn't mean it transfers over to the screen successfully; Hellboy is edged out of the movie by both Bobbie Jo and Tom Ferrell, feeling like a secondary character in his own tale. The others don't fare well either, their arcs shallow and unsatisfying. Supposedly emotional beats, like a painful memory or some silly business with Hellmom (which is a real head-scratcher in a movie as detached from Hellboy's context as this) completely fail to connect.
 There's an arbitrary, episodic feel to the events, including an interlude in which a witch explains how to build witchballs straight at the camera (indulging in some of the worst stylistic excesses of the film, including some extremely cheesy sound effects) - I can see that working beautifully within a comic book, but it would have been wholly excised out of a better film.

 The acting is... well, it's acceptable for a movie of this low a budget. I liked Rudolph and White, but Kesy fails to imbue big red with any sort of presence or charm. There's some of the character's signature bone-dry humour, but none of the lines (which I imagine are lifted straight from the source) are memorable.

 A wasted opportunity, then. Not the catastrophe I'd have expected from one of the Crank directors doing low-budget horror (relatively low-budget; It was much higher than many, many movies that still manage to look much better than this). But the result remains pretty fucking far from even being merely OK.
 Let's hope it doesn't kill the franchise, though. I still really want to see the a good adaptation of The Corpse. Just... get someone else to make it, please.

The Substance

 It's possible to use satire subtly. It's not all that common, especially in movies- after all, even when they go over the top, people still take them at face value. I have some sympathy for this: we should never forget media literacy is a skill, and that many people don't consume enough fiction to develop it.

 Still - I do wonder if there's someone, somewhere, who could mistake writer/director (and editor, and producer) Coralie Fargeat's The Substance for... I don't know, a feminist cautionary tale about science run amuck or a particularly unpleasant body horror film.

 It is pretty much at the opposite end of the galaxy from subtle, is what I'm saying. And damn if it isn't entertaining.

 Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore)'s star is falling. That's made hilariously clear in a brilliant (and brilliantly unsubtle) montage where her star for the Hollywood Walk of Fame is first built (in a gorgeously extended, very procedural scene), then admired, then forgotten, ending in a scene where a guy drops a very sloppy burger on top of it.

 She's now fifty, and as we catch up with her she's being callously fired from her long-running aerobics TV show by an exec played with sick, sick relish by Dennis Quaid. This leaves her in a tailspin which I think any of us can relate to, even if we don't have her financial stability, and will never be as gorgeous as she is at 50. (Or as Moore is at 60, while we're at it).

 And then someone passes her a USB stick with an ad for an enigmatic product called "The Substance" - the marketing campaign sits somewhere between a body spray ad and the latest promo for some overrated techbro's latest scam. It's accompanied by a note saying "It changed my life".

 At first Elizabeth rightly scoffs, but after a series of insults and degradations she caves in to curiosity and manages to get a hold of the product itself. It's a series of vials, injectors and other medical-looking paraphernalia boxed carefully with enigmatic instructions to follow. All printed in a large, bold letters. It goes well with the techbro vibe from the commercial - it looks like a high-end consumer electronics product; Wonder if that's how beauty products are marketed these days.

 In any case, Elizabeth not only easily works out what to do from the instructions, she also shoots herself full of needles with the ease of an inveterate junkie. And lo and behold, after some unpleasantness, out of a long crevice that opens on her back pops out a younger woman who will later call herself Sue (Margaret Qualley). She's everything Elizabeth feels the world wants out of her / everything she would like to have again; Young, curvy, unattainably beautiful. At first I thought there was some sort of conscience transfer involved, but no, it soon becomes clear they're two separate people.

 The science is ridiculous on its face (conservation of mass can bite it!) but it's a neat and well thought out concept with its own internal logic. Even if they have two different bodies, Sue and Elizabeth have to time share their lives for a week at a time; As the instructions keep telling them, they are the same person. So when Sue goes out and starts conquering Hollywood - by... um, taking over Elizabeth's old show, Elizabeth spends that time unconscious in the bathroom floor, and viceversa.

At first Elizabeth lives Sue's life vicariously through TV tapings and billboards. But the rot soon sets in, and they both start resenting the time the other woman takes up in their life. And thanks to some slight misuses of The Substance, that rot is pretty quickly made manifest. Thigs go downhill quickly. And spectacularly.

 Coralie Fargeat made an impression with her excellent Revenge - an, um, rape/revenge genre exercise that was actually fun and included loads of uncommonly cool visuals and poetic, almost avant-garde flourishes. This, her follow-up, confirms her as a ferociously talented, inventive writer and director. There are so many incredible scenes, clever transitions, and great visual gags and callbacks.

 It's not just immaculately crafted, but very carefully put together; The sort of movie where, if, say, a finger gets hideously mutated due to The Substance abuse, you can bet your ass it's going to crassly feature the deformed appendage in as many extreme close-ups as the film can squeeze in. And I don't think a chapter title card has made me laugh so hard since Aniara. It's all portrayed with gooey, convincing, disgusting effects - most of them practical, and an outstanding sound design that prioritizes all the gross sounds our bodies make. I imagine the Foley artist had a lot of fun recording some of these.

 And Moore and Qualley are incredible, both in pretty ballsy roles. Might be a bit cliché to call their performances fearless, but that's pretty much what they are. Moore in particular really goes for it in a role that runs the gamut from brittle self-loathing to all-out evil hag. 

 I don't want to oversell it. In many ways, it's a bit of a misfire; For one, it's extremely bloated. Even if you count its excess as part of the joke (it absolutely is) that doesn't make the experience of watching its slow parts any better. And if you don't like blunt symbolism... well, you might hate it. I got onboard pretty quickly, but even then a couple of over-the-top conceits made me cringe, and not in a good, body-horror "oh my god don't put that needle there" way.

 But it's not like its messaging is all that simple either. I mean, some of it is - Take Quaid's sleazeball, one-note executive - the guy is so over the top he could basically be a villain in one of the Schumacher Batmans, one whose power is being overbearingly entitled/chauvinistic/etc.

 And then the film delights in both Sue and Elizabeth behaving horribly, and the obligatory 'Can't you just smile?' joke here is hilariously anti-intuitive.

 Don't get me wrong; It's feminist and angry as fuck. Both women are shaped by the people and the industry around them, and their antics are ultimately tragic. But if that's the message, that's not what the film focuses on, instead providing a cavalcade of Cronenbergian horrors, bleak jokes and enough bloodshed to unseat Project: Wolf Hunting in the "most gallons of fake blood spilt" sweepstakes.

 The script also doesn't give a flying fuck about plausibility, but that's honestly a tiny concern, since things are clearly heightened to ridiculous levels from the get-go. Crowds form mobs with the ease of a Simpsons or Spongebob Squarepants cartoon, morning gym shows throw shapely asses at our face like the tackiest of hiphop videos and catapult their star into being America's sweetheart in a couple short months, and most men behave like Tex Avery cartoon wolves.

 Finally, it's a pretty disgusting movie. But if you read this blog then you're probably on-board with that. My problem, ironically, is that the ending's outrageousness had been a bit over-sold to me by a friend - so I found it underwhelming when compared to... I dunno, Society or Men. But it's still a good one. It made me laugh.

 I think I prefer Revenge's simpler pleasures to this movie's all-maximalist-all-the-time approach. But it's quickly growing on me, not the least because of the near-inexhaustible levels of enthusiasm and inventiveness Fargeat shows behind the cameras; I can't wait to see where she heads next.

Scanners

 Scanners is the first movie in a prequel trilogy to the Scanner Cop movies. For this one, the producer behind all the movies in the series, Pierre David, tapped relatively well-known fellow Canadian David Cronenberg to write and direct.

 Of course, Cronenberg had little idea that his producer would run a decent streak of B-movies (most of them terrible) out of the back of his tight, mostly serious-minded little thriller. It's based on a couple different scripts Cronenberg had been thinking about pitching to Roger Corman for a while... influenced more than a little by Stephen King's Firestarter and Carrie, going by the finished product.

 To claim government subsidies (those Canadian commies) the film was hurried into production way before it was ready - Cronenberg has commented that he was writing the script the morning for scenes that he would shoot later in the day. Not that you can tell that much - the film is a bit strangely paced and structured, but not more than you'd expect from the director of Rabid and The Brood.

Headsplosion!

 The plot follows one Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack), a weirdo who walks into a mall driven to distraction by the voices in his head - which are quickly revealed to be the thoughts of people around him. 

  He's chased down by a couple of shady characters, who shoot him with tranquilizer darts and put him under the care of Dr. Paul Ruth (Patrick McGoohan, having a lot of fun chewing the scenery). The good doctor informs Cameron that he's a scanner - a person born with telepathic and psychokinetic powers. After a little training, he conscripts Vale as a sort of superpowered spy to infiltrate a sort of underground terrorist cell led by rogue scanner Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside).

 Revok is -by far- the best thing in the movie, an amoral badass played with unhinged ferocity by Ironside. He's introduced assassinating a rival scanner in one of the most iconic gore moments of the '80s, a messy headsplosion (achieved by someone shooting a prop with a shotgun!) that's still a beauty to behold. That's immediately followed by a great escape scene as he gets a bunch of guards to kill each other off using his scanner powers. Cronenberg is always great when he indulges his more basic genre leanings; And here we even get from him that most eighties of action conventions, the car that is immediately engulfed by a fireball upon crashing. It's glorious.

 Unfortunately -and this is always the bit I forget when rewatching this- we're stuck with Cameron for most of the running time, and he's a complete bore of a character, a bland leading man with absolutely nothing going for him except good looks and a killer action hero name. Lack is pretty wooden in the role, but there's not that much anyone could have done in his place; It's about as generic a thriller protagonist as you could come up with.

 All this is brought into sharp relief later when, while searching for Revok he runs into Kim Obrist (Jennifer O'Neill) -  the leader of a new-agey cell of scanners who reject the people trying to manipulate them and use their powers for self-enlightenment. Even though she -in true '80s genre movie fashion- barely gets anything to do besides watching from the sidelines, she's immediately a much more human, interesting character than the protagonist's robotic plot pawn.

 The story beats are fairly standard - Vale and Obrist unravel a shady, barely-developed conspiracy as he tracks down Revok, all the while dodging or killing assassins sent to hinder them. Many of the plot's particulars remain elusive, and the pacing -while brisk- feels a bit off. Given the circumstances behind the film, though, it's amazing it works half as well as it does. 

 There are multiple action scenes, all pretty well done and fairly exciting even when the shotgun-toting bad guys' hilariously awful marksmanship would make a Star Wars Stormtrooper tut-tut disapprovingly. The suspense is really well handled, too - I love a sequence where a bunch of gunpeople approach a barn where our hero is investigating - and there are a few neat visual ideas peppered throughout. The barn above, for example, belongs to an avant-garde artist, and he has a conversation with Vale inside a giant hollow head. 

 Not so successful: the mind battles between scanners, which look like two of the world's most constipated people trying to take a dump in front of the camera.

 Everything else is pretty top-notch. The cinematography (by Mark Irwin*) is chilly, and Howard Shore's atonal synth-based score complements the action well. And the effects, of course, are spectacular. Watching this on a big screen from a new transfer, the fidelity is high enough that you can easily spot the latex fake skin patches used for some of the F/X. This, not that the planet is soon heading for an environmental disaster, is the hideous cost of modern technology.

Shanghai

 Shanghai has a fascinating history. A focal point for the opium wars, control over it was strong-armed from the Chinese by foreign powers during the second half of the eighteenth century - the British, mostly, at the beginning, but other countries with imperialist designs (USA, France, Japan) soon joined in and basically set up wholly international suburbs around the city. While the city was nominally controlled by the Chinese, it was a sort of international plaything until it was invaded by the Japanese during the second world war.

 A political spy thriller set there just before the US joined WW2 is an incredible pitch, seeing as how both the Germans and the Japanese both had a presence in the city. But Shanghai, the movie, had a seriously troubled production; Permits to shoot on-location were revoked by the Chinese after pre-production had started. This forced the shoot to move to Thailand and the UK, further investors had to be brought in to cover ballooning costs, and let's not forget that this is a mainline Weinstein company production; The full extent of Harvey's sins was yet to be known, but they were still a legendarily meddlesome company. The finished film, when it was finally widely released seven years after completion, is a bit of a mess.

 Paul Soames (John Cusack) is a jaded, worldly spy in the Ian Fleming mould, sent to Shanghai to bring in a rogue spy acquaintance (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) at the behest of their handler (David Morse). When the spy turns up dead, Soames dives into the city's underworld to try to avenge his friend, and discovers that he was following up on some troubling information unearthed by an opium-addicted informant with ties to the head of local Japanese intelligence (Ken Watanabe).

 While all that's going on, he also tangles himself in the business of a local Triad boss (Chow Yun-fat) and his beautiful wife (Gong Li).

 

 The way things tie up is less than satisfactory, with the characters crossing paths in extremely contrived ways (Soames seems to luck into many of his major findings), desultory 'action' moments that drop Soames into a shootout solely to give the film some excitement, logic be damned, and a deeply suspect final act that feels completely at odds with the rest of the film's tone and even its genre. I've liked other scripts by writer Hossein Amini but this one, whether by design or compromise, is not one of his best.

 Pulpy noir and wartime movie references are thick; There's a lot of The Third Man and more than a little Casablanca in this movie's DNA. But director Mikael Håfström loads the movie with stylistic signifiers (An assassin shooting someone only shown by his shadow, Dutch angles, overwrought voiceover) that seem come off less as a homage than tacky.

 It's a lush, often handsome, clearly expensive production that nonetheless is made to feel weirdly low-rent by things like an over-reliance on TV-movie-style captions for the locations, bad editing, some desultory film-making, and an overuse of its claustrophobic exterior sets. This last one is forgivable, given the film's production troubles and how good the sets are; Production designer Jim Clay  pulled off an admirable job, as did cinematographer Benoit Delhomme, who manages to achieve some beautifully atmospheric shots (a shipspotting diversion is a highlight).

 The main problem, though, is the characters. The protagonist in particular is a gaping void at the story's heart, a cypher who uses Bondian nonchalance to mask a lack of characterization. Cusack is a good actor who's really good at putting on a blank expression, and that talent gets a huge workout in this movie. He manages to imbue Soames with a little of his fidgety, nervy energy and some intelligence, but as written the character just doesn't seem to have much of an inner life, however  much the glib voiceover narration may protest.
 And the extremely stacked international cast barely gets to make an impression despite involving some of the biggest stars outside of Hollywood. It's all surface-level; Watanabe gets to show off his wounded dignity, Chow Yun-fat his charisma and poise (even if his one action scene is deeply shitty), and Gong Li's femme fatale is mostly there to... well, look beautiful in glamorous dresses, her character oddly inert despite being deeply enmeshed (in oblique ways) in the plot.

 It's not terrible film, per se, just stilted, staid and disappointingly compromised. A huge waste of an incredible setting and premise, a great cast, and some incredible sets. Ces't le vie.

All You Need is Death

 Plenty of folk horror movies use folk music, but I think All You Need Is Death is the first one to be about a killer folk song. Points for originality - there was an old Twilight Zone episode that sort of did something similar, but that's a deep cut.

 That's not even the most memorable element of the movie. That'd be the underground industry writer/director Paul Duane invented for his protagonists to try and break into.

 Anna (Simone Collins) and her boyfriend Alex (Charlie Maher) track down folk songs to sell them to moneyed collectors. It's all simultaneously very grounded and hilariously heightened; Anna gets into trouble when she's discovered recording a dude singing in a bar, for example, and a later meeting to try and sell one of their recordings is treated like a backlot arms deal. The young couple even attends an illicit-seeming seminar from Agnes (Catherine Siggins), an older pro in the field giving advice to prospective folk song hunters. Late-stages capitalism ethnomusicology - if you don't love the concept, I'm sorry but we can't be friends anymore.

 The plot - and the horror elements - kick in when the kids catch wind of the golden grail of their profession: a song that's been lost to time, one that no one has heard in centuries. Of course it's obscure for a reason - it's a bizarre cursed song from ancient Celtic times described "love is a knife with a blade for a handle". Our plucky folk exploiters manage to retrieve the song, but after they leave a mysterious force kills the singer dead.

 From there the movie takes some unexpected turns as Agnes wedges herself into the proceeds and the dead singer's son (the improbably named Breezeblock, played by Nigel O'Neill) starts hunting down everyone involved.

 I can't say I'm a fan of the mid-movie twist. It leaves the story feeling pretty disjointed, and I just didn't really enjoy the second half as much as the first. But it remains interesting, and while not entirely successful, it does have some memorably batshit moments.

 It's a strange brand of horror that doesn't really seem to know what it's going for. The supernatural threat is not very cohesive: One of the deaths feels taken from a giallo movie, and then we get swirling shadow ghosts. A slow degenerative mutation into something or another brings in a little body horror, and there's even some light cannibalism. None of it's particularly scary, but it get fairly creepy, and the variety does lend it a particular kind of energy. It kept me on my toes.

 Stylistically it's all over the place. It starts out with some diegetic found footage, only to then settle on a more traditional indie horror look (I do wonder if the film was originally intended to consist entirely of Anna and Aleks's recordings). The ensuing low-key filming style suits the film well (cinematographer: Conor Rotherham), but a couple of stylistic flourishes don't do the film any favours. There's a handful of flashbacks to the events that the song describes, and I'm sorry to say they look fucking terrible - ren-faire level bullshit. There's also a sort of montage that's meant to be scary but it only made me roll my eyes. 

 Despite all of this the film works, in a sort of shambolic way, because many of the distinct elements are engaging and the film as a whole is very well written on a moment-to-moment basis. Some lovely music and great performances from Collins, Siggins and O'Neill don't hurt. And it has all the enthusiasm of someone who's saved up a hundred disparate ideas for a passion project; I liked it, and hope it's successful enough that we get to see what these people cook up next.

I Saw The TV Glow

 I think it's safe to say I didn't really like Jane Schoenbrun's We're All Going to the World's Fair that much. Still, mostly thanks to a remarkably sweet ending, it's stuck with me. So when the trailer for their follow-up movie looked cool, I decided to give it a go. But it took me a while to get around to it.
 This, dear reader, was a mistake. The delay, I mean, not deciding to watch it; I Saw The TV Glow is... well, it's fucking delightful. Yes, I hate that word so much that I feel I need to cut it with some swearwords. And the promise that the word 'vibes' will not be used hereafter.

 It's set in some generic American suburb in the mid-nineties - and hey, they're giving the 80's a rest, for once! We know it's the mid-nineties because the 'saxophone guy' is up for re-election and the gym at the school both protagonists attend has been converted into a polling station. The film, incidentally, uses the gym recurringly being transformed into non-gym-like shapes as a not-too-subtle but cute nod at its themes.

 In any case - that's where Owen (Ian Foreman while he's a kid, he grows into Justice Smith later on) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Payne) meet. Owen is a bit of a drip, Maddy is impossibly, unattainably cool - think Wynona Ryder in Heathers. Also, Owen is in 7th grade, and Maddy is in 9th; that's an almost unsurmountable distance at that age. But bond they do, thanks to an episode guide that Maddy is reading about a TV show called The Pink Opaque.

 The Pink Opaque sits somewhere between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Power Rangers, and it's about two girls (Helena Howard and singer Lindsey Jordan) who live thousands of miles away but use their psychic link to fight monsters led by Georges Méliès's man in the moon. Owen's not allowed to watch it, so Maddie smuggles him to her house so they can watch it along with Maddie's girlfriend, and later sends taped episodes to Owen so he remains up to date. They both obsess over the show, which Maddie holds as more real than her own life. 
 And for a while, things seem... good? Except that Maddie, who has a really shitty home life, wants to run away. She tries to enlist Owen, but he chickens out. Maddie shortly disappears, and soon afterwards The Pink Opaque gets cancelled.

 Ten years pass. Owen continues drifting through a... well, it seems like a pretty shitty life, honestly. In one telling moment, he holds a flat screen tv close and tells us that he's formed a family. He did self-identify as liking TV shows when Maddie told him she was a lesbian, after all.

 As Owen sinks into a grey soup of conformity, Maddie comes back, introducing a gnostic twist in the tale.

 Don't go into I Saw The TV Glow expecting a horror movie; There are some creepily effective scenes, but it's best approached as a surrealist fable. A deeply personal, weird, sad fable with overt queer themes.

 There is a plot, of sorts, but it's about as passive and languid as our point of view character. It does go places, eventually, and finds its way to a devastating conclusion... but it takes its sweet time getting there. Schoenbrun's direction is terrific, and captures both being a teen and the seeming pointlessness of adult life remarkably well, using impressionistic tricks like doodling directly on the screen with the scrawled messages Maddie leaves on their VHS tapes, or letting Owen break the fourth wall and narrating what he's going through at us. It sounds unbearable, but the film is carefully crafted so that it eases us into these flourishes; For me, at least, it worked beautifully.

 The budget is modest but it's used well - One of the affordances was that the film is shot in 35mm, which cinematographer Eric K. Yue uses to capture some really stunning shots. The recreations of The Pink Opaque, meanwhile, were either shot on VHS, transferred to it or have been run on some really good filters. It's a great-looking movie, and it sounds great too, thanks to a synth-heavy soundtrack from Alex G. a bunch of indie bands trying to approximate 90's music, plus two excellent covers (Jordan's band Snail Mail does Smashing Pumpkins, and there's an appropriately anthemic version of Broken Social Scene's Anthems for a seventeen year old girl.)

 This is one of those movies that's just too willfully weird to recommend easily - All I can do is to try and communicate how it hit me. Because yes, in case it's not clear, I absolutely think it's worth anyone's time. I love it to pieces.

Acidman

 Maggie (Dianna Agron) hasn't seen her deadbeat dad since he abandoned his family when she was little. As the film begins, she's finally managed to track him down to a remote house in the middle of a gorgeous stretch of wilderness. The word 'ACIDMAN' is crudely graffitied across the facade... sort of functioning as the title card. Cute.

 The scrawl refers, of course, to her father Lloyd - a very gruff, ornery Thomas Haden Church, who after some desultory pleasantries asks how long she's planning on staying. Clearly hoping it won't be long. 

 But she persists, and after a while, he opens up, a little: he's basically not been up to much. Composes beats for a hobby, has frequent fugue states he doesn't consider serious enough to merit medical attention, and... oh, yeah, he's made it his life's work to communicate with some mysterious lights in the sky he's been observing for the past few years.

 The lights are real - Maggie confirms as much, but they're left unexplained. Acidman is your basic quiet indie drama, and the chances that they'll ever turn out to be much more than a metaphor for Maggie's attempt to reconnect with him are about as likely as him becoming an overnight celebrity for his beats with Maggie as his producer.

 No, not much happens beyond two people slowly opening up to each other. And maybe that's for the best - the film's most dramatic incident, while affecting and serving a plot function, is a very, very cheap shot that almost soured me on the whole enterprise. Not the least because it's very easy to see coming.

 Aside from that, it's well made. It's not like we're lacking for these sort of stories, but scriptwriters Chris Dowling and Alex Lehmann have created two worthwhile, complex characters that are fun to watch bouncing off each other, and handle their interactions with grace and realism. Just as importantly, both Agron and Church deliver two great performances - Church is particularly great at making his character's kookiness feel natural.

 Alex Lehman's unfussy direction means that there's not much style on display, just your standard indie handheld shots, but it's cut with loads of beautiful wilderness footage (cinematographer: John Matysiak). The soundtrack by Christopher French is the requisite pleasant synths with the occasional piano plink, but the film is just as happy to let the busy quietness of the great outdoors - wind, flapping clothes, the whispering of the trees - take up long stretches of the film, giving it a little more personality that it would otherwise have.

 The conflict at the root of the story is mundane, trivial even - but I found it engaging: a variation on the old 'am I broken?' type of insecurity we see so often in this sort of thing, but done well enough to justify its existence.

The Others

 The Stewart family reside in a perennially fog-shrouded manor house in the middle of the Jersey island countryside. The matriarch, Grace (Nicole Kidman) looks after her two young children (Alakina Mann and James Bentley) alone ever since her husband failed to return from the just-ended second world war. The kids suffer from a rare condition where the sunlight is actually harmful to them; Their life is a succession of shuttered windows and candlelight.

 It's a rich setup for a traditional ghost story, in other words, even before three strangers (Fionnula Flanagan, Eric Sykes and Elaine Cassidy) turn up at her door looking for employment as domestic help - and to turn the screws, as it were.
 What follows is a pretty well crafted gothic mystery as an initially sceptic Grace slowly comes to realize the ghosts her daughter keeps complaining about might not be just in her imagination.

 Director Alejandro Amenábar and cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe nail the gothic atmosphere - lamp-lit jaunts through darkened, well-appointed hallways, mist clawing at the grounds, the works. Amenábar also provides a pleasingly old-school soundtrack (depressing reeds abound!) and a script that's more successful on its psychological aspects than on its attempts to be a metaphysical puzzlebox.

 It's not particularly scary, either. It drips with menace early on, but the nature of its central mystery robs it of the sort of visceral punch these stories excel at (consider El Orfanato, another Spanish gothic offer from the same decade). It didn't help at all that I managed to guess what was going on fairly early on, either. Here's an interesting tidbit: Apparently dialog lines were erased from the theatrical version on later releases, to make what's going on harder to figure out; I wonder if I would have liked it better had I watched it first in this later incarnation.

  The acting is excellent across the board. Kidman was born to play this sort of character - visually, she has the aristocratic airs and porcelain pallor requisite for a gothic heroine, and more importantly the talent to portray her character's complex, fraying arc. The kids are excellent, too, especially Mann, and Flanagan is splendid as the housekeeper, adding a dollop of sorely needed humour.

 In the end I'm left with a movie I like but can't love - a strangely inert film that's all class but feels slightly lacking in substance. Even if I appreciate what it's trying to do, it doesn't do much for me.
 But it's good enough I don't begrudge it the high esteem in which it's generally regarded, and would recommend it in a heartbeat if you're in the market for this sort of thing.

The Demon Disorder

 Graham (Christian Willis) hasn't seen his brothers Phillip (Charles Cottier) and Jake (Dirk Hunter) since the patriarch of the family (John Noble) passed away. The old man apparently spent the last years of his life stricken by some sort of dementia which led him to harm his children. A dementia that's portrayed in flashbacks as a kind of demonic possession, which... hmmm*. It's probably not the most responsible of narrative devices, but it can work.

 Anyhow; Jake suddenly pops up at Graham's workplace, sporting a madman's beard and demeanor, and tells him the youngest, Phillip, has caught the same sort of insanity dear old da had. There's tension between the two - that old "you left us to deal with an ancient family curse on our own" chestnut. But they put their differences aside to help their little brother, and Graham returns to the creepily derelict family farm to confront something something father's sins etc.

 There's a glimmer of an interesting idea in the lousily named aussie creature feature The Demon Disorder: that of a curse as a fleshy, fleshy entity that desperately seeks to escape and take ever evolving forms like a refugee from an 80's horror movie. It's the debut film from Steven Boyle, a veteran effects designer and technician, and it's cleverly planned around both a limited budget and Boyle's areas of expertise. Expect a bunch of cool practical effects, with a decent variety of creatures and a smattering of effective body horror.

 Unfortunately they're sprinkled too sparingly in an otherwise unremarkable film. The script, by Boyle and Toby Osborne, never really takes its story of literal family demons anywhere interesting. The actors are game - watching Graham and the semi-deranged Jake interact is always entertaining - but their dialog, and the way conversations are framed, often strain to add an intensity that's not really warranted by the material. Worse still, by the time the third act rolls around the script kind of falls apart, with a series of idiotic decisions spiralling out of control in a not particularly entertaining manner.

 This'd be a stronger recommendation if the film could harness its premise better, or at least muster a better finale. For a mostly unpretentious creature feature, though, it's not that bad. I think the mayhem and the monsters make this one worth it. Just about.

*: That's the tasteful version - there's always The Taking of Deborah Logan, too. This film never really dares to actually make any parallels, which is both part of its problem and probably for the best.

Midnight Special

 Two men (Michael Shannon and Joel Edgerton) try to smuggle a child (Jaeden Martell) across state lines while hunted down by every law enforcement agency in the land. It seems everyone is after the kid: besides the ongoing manhunt for him and his kidnappers, a shady cult views him as their saviour, the FBI and NSA seem to think he's somehow in possession of state secrets... and it quickly becomes apparent that they all might be onto something. The kid in question is a little more than human: he can shoot light and information out of his eyes and is able to pluck satellites clean out of the night sky.

 The boy needs to move eastwards and be at a specific place at a specific time for... something to happen. Helping him are his "kidnappers" - one of whom (Shannon) is his biological father. 

 Writer/director Jeff Nichols slowly, patiently reveals how everything hangs together over the next two hours while maintaining a deep sense of mystery; not everything will be explained, but it's enough. Midnight Special is a conscious attempt to recapture the allure of 80's science fiction movies the director loved as a kid - think early Spielberg, but Nichols keeps the focus close to his characters and carefully grounds even the most fantastic elements deeply in the mundane. It's an idiosyncratic, grounded take on its inspirations.

 And damn if it doesn't work beautifully; The mystery is engaging, the pacing both sedate and relentless, and all that hard work establishing a sense of normalcy heightens the modest action and makes it feel actually dangerous. It's a ripping, low-key yarn interwoven with a meditation on parenthood that hit me like a hammer the first time I saw this at the theater; it's lost very little of its power since.

 I unabashedly love this movie, but it's a hard one to recommend - whenever I've done so, it's with some heavy caveats that it skews more drama than sci-fi. It promises a little more than it can deliver, and as a result the third act revelations are... well, a little bit underwhelming. The script can get a little clunky every now and then. All minor complaints to me, compared to its strengths, but I can see how someone would bounce off it.

 Those strengths, though! Nichols directs the ever-living fuck out of this, as usual, and gets to indulge in (tiny amounts of) pyrotechnics, car crashes, even a little gunplay. It's less than you'd see on a given episode of any action TV show, but it goes a long way when shot in Nichols's naturalistic style and when it involves characters we actually care about.

 Regular collaborators Adam Stone and David Wingo are present and accounted for. Wingo in particular provides a soundtrack that's about as memorable as any from the last decade, especially the beautiful piano-driven title track. Stone's photography, meanwhile, makes the world lived-in and worn down while still delivering some outstanding shots (it's got to be hard to portray a convoy of buses as beautiful, but somehow he manages.)

 Ultimately, as on most of Nichols's movies, it's all about the actors and their characters. And here he's assembled an insanely talented cast who proceed to hit it out of the park: Shannon, Edgerton and Martell are later joined by Kirsten Dunst, Adam Driver, and Sam Shepard, as well as Bill Camp as an electrician who's called on to act as a cult enforcer, and proceeds to comply with poignant melancholy. "Sometimes we are asked to do things that are beyond us..." It happens, buddy. I hope you survive.

Tiny Cinema

 An odd-looking fella in a wheelchair (Paul Ford) introduces six short stories about (mostly) ordinary people who find themselves in weird, awkward situations. Things will get uncomfortable, he warns us. And well, that, they do.

 The individual components of this hexad of horror barely merit a synopsis - they're basically punchlines agonizingly stretched out to ten minutes, hoping against hope to achieve a sort of Simpsons rake joke effect (basically, what's unfunny can become funny through repetition). For example: A man fails to get an offhand "that's what she said!" joke, and it sends him off spiraling into madness, trying to find out who "She" is. Or a woman tricks a date into sniffing her dad's ashes, making him start to lose his hair and spout dad jokes.

 Most of them aren't terrible premises, on paper, but there are precious diversions to be found - just one overlong (usually dirty) joke dying in slow motion right before your eyes. It aims for discomfort humour and... well, I guess it does get pretty cringeworthy, in the same way the Tim and Eric show does, but more uninspired and, well, fucking boring. Lovers of the more out there Adult Swim catalog may enjoy this more than I did. Chemical assistance might help, or watching it with people who are easily shocked. Though don't be surprised if they don't return your calls after you've subjected them to this.

 At least it looks great; Director Tyler Cornack (who co-wrote along with Ryan Koch and William Morean) stretches a measly indie budget to... well, TV levels, but good-looking TV levels. Very slick, with attempts made to switch up the look of the shorts to portray different tones. Cinematographers Joel Lavold and William Morean do a great job. Other than some effective corpse makeup, don't expect much in the way of special effects, but the music (by Conack and Koch) is pretty great. 

 Getting through six stories in under ninety minutes means that the pacing and variety somewhat compensate for the mediocre writing. How mediocre? The guy who goes crazy in the opening segment does it by the medium of  putting together a (very tidy) conspiracy board and writing all over himself with a sharpie, 90's crazy movie dude style. He then tries (and fails) to put his wife's hand down the trash compactor... but two minutes later they're both acting as if nothing happened in front of company. Describing the script as quarter-baked would be too kind. Though to be fair, that's probably the worst short of the lot.

 

 The best is the second one - a girl meats corpse kind of story with a rote punchline. It's elevated by actors Olivia Herman and Matt Rubano, though, both giving committed, funny performances, and - fair is fair - some pretty inspired douchebag dialog for one of the characters. If you didn't like the first story, you can safely bail out once this one's done.

 That's about as positive as I can manage to get about this movie. I guess some of the premises are pretty creative, too, but none of them ever go far enough - just mildly amusing ideas stretched out beyond capacity. There's a sort of frat boy energy to the whole thing that I found deeply annoying, too; "You won't believe what I'm about to throw at your eyeballs bro!"
 As far as technical calling cards go, it's an excellent one; Making movies is hard, making indie movies is harder, and making one that looks and sounds as good as this is a goddamn miracle. Maybe it'll help everyone involved move on to better things. In the case of the writers, hopefully it won't feel as lazy as this.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

 A sequel that's been stuck in development hell for thirty-six years, from a director who hasn't made anything good in the last two decades and a half.

 There's nothing left of the original scripts for the sequel commissioned as soon as the first movie was deemed a success - the one that came closest to being made would have sent the Deetz family and Beetlejuice over to Hawaii. Instead, we get one written by geek goofball Seth Grahame-Smith, and heavily rewritten by Miles Millar and Alfred Gough. The final screenplay is... well, it's fucking dire, story-wise; A shambling, muddled mess of trite plot points, dropped threads and unnecessary characters.

 But. And this is a big but, I cannot lie: none of that matters, because it's funny.

 Lydia Deetz (Wynona Ryder) has grown into a bit of a mess, a minor celebrity cashing in on her minor medium powers to host a chintzy paranormal show on TV. She's fallen under the spell of Rory (Justin Theroux), a sleazy TV producer who's always looking for an angle, and has an estranged daughter - Astrid (Jenna Ortega) who detests both of them.

 The plot (we need to call it something) kicks in when Lydia's mom (Catherine O'Hara) informs everyone that the patriarch of the family has passed away (in a hilarious claymation plane crash/shark attack). So the whole family converges on the old family house, where that old wascally demon Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) awaits, chased by a ghost of his own - an old soul-sucking flame played by Monica Bellucci who, for all she gets to do, ends up being more of a live-action visual reference to Sally from Nightmare Before Christmas than anything else.

 It's a very busy plot which... seems to hold most of its threads in contempt, judging by the way it resolves them in the laziest manner possible. I wish I could say that's because it's just there as a joke-delivering mechanism (AKA the ZAZ defence), but it often slows down and tries to deliver more conventional narrative goods as well; Try being the operative word here. There's a whole thing with Lydia's old husband (Santiago Cabrera), for one, and Astrid falling for a local boy (Arthur Conti). Both elements are extremely clichéd and resolved in deeply unsatisfying ways.
 In any case - even if it was all about the jokes, that's still no excuse; there's been plenty of comedies goofier than this that have managed to deliver a satisfying story. Hell, this film is a direct sequel to one of them.

 So that's the bad. Luckily, aside from that, everyone - from director Tim Burton down to the actors, the set designers, and the people behind the wonderfully tactile special effects - is, well, completely there. Everyone just seems to be having a huge amount of fun, and it's infectious as hell.

 All the actors are great and obviously having a blast. Ryder is likeable as ever, O'Hara is hilarious, and new additions Ortega and Conti do wonders with fairly shitty characters and cookie-cutter puppy love subplot.  And Keaton... well, he's a fucking national treasure, so it's no surprise how good he is.
 New characters like Father Damien* (Burn Gorman, hilarious) and especially Willem Dafoe's action-star-turned-ghost-detective probably shouldn't have as much screen time - and they wouldn't, if the movie was better written... but Dafoe in particular is having such a great time (and his character is so funny) that I can all but see Tim Burton telling his crew "eh, screw it, leave everything in." I'm glad they did.

 The special effects favour practical over digital and are full of charm. A lot of it doesn't make sense - why does Beetlejuice preside a room-full of office drones with shrunken heads? Well, it's a callback, sure, but more importantly: they look hilarious. The underworld still has more than a hint of the surreal, and things are kept playfully gory, with comedy blood squirts deployed strategically throughout the movie. Danny Elfman returns to score; The soundtrack didn't bowl me over, but it sure is Beetlejuicy. The needle drops fare a little better - Sigur Ross for some vintage indie cred, and a gloriously campy pop standard that everyone is forced to lip sync to at the end. Turns out old Beets has just as terrible a taste in music as you'd expect.
 Don't expect much in the way of new cool concepts - the movie's biggest metaphysical expansion, The Soul Train, is a ridiculously obvious joke, but goofy enough to cause an amiable groan. The film is more about small, bite-sized gags and ideas.

 It is so good to have Burton back, fully engaged. This is probably closer to Mars Attacks than anything else in his filmography - the 'fuck it let's just have fun' vibe is strong in this one. And that is beyond fine.

*: I chose to believe he's a descendant of In a Valley of Violence's priest, which enhanced his (already very funny) character for me by several magnitudes.

Rebel Ridge

 Iron Maiden kicks off writer/director/editor Jeremy Saulnier's long-delayed Rebel Ridge, the rising harmony carefully timed so that the title card coincides with Bruce Dickinson's iconic scream.

 The music is revealed to come from a man's headphones as he rides down a country road on his bike. He can't hear the police chasing him, and they elect to end the pursuit by running him off the road. It's an immediately tense situation, one that's complicated by the fact that it's two armed, white cops standing over a downed black man (Aaron Pierre).

  The police shake the man - Terry - down at gunpoint, and seize a sizeable amount of cash he was carrying in a carrier bag to make bail for his cousin over at town hall; A 'lawful' seizure, as they make up a spurious claim to have reasonable suspicion that it's drug money.

 By the time the police head out leaving a quietly enraged - and conspicuously not shaken - Terry behind to pick up the pieces, the Iron Maiden song has long ended. It's been replaced by the much harsher riff of March of the S.O.D., promising things are going to get a lot darker.

 Once Terry makes it to town hall Summer, a sympathetic clerk (Anna Sophia Robb), takes pity on him and explains that he's likely never going to see his money again; The seizure, while unethical, seems to be fully legal. Terry starts making alternate arrangements - he fears his cousin will not last long in jail - but those plans also fall through. The situation escalates once Terry has a series of confrontations with the township's crooked chief of police (Don Johnson)... until things tip over to violence despite Terry's best efforts to keep them from boiling over.

 From there it's Summer and Terry reluctantly going up against a complex but credible conspiracy involving all levels of law enforcement in town, an unholy but completely coherent mixture between action, paranoid '70s political thrillers, real-life systematic injustice and social drama. One that never neglects a single one of its threads, backed by the best, most badass script I've seen in years: detail-oriented but lean as all hell, one that carefully grounds each and every one of its elements, and that gives us to everything we need to put things together without ever devolving into exposition dumps.

 It's got a palpable, entirely justified sense of moral rage fuelling it - one small detail, a $9k margarita machine bought with seized police money - was popularized by a real-life case featured in a John Oliver show about police corruption; You can tell a lot of research went into the making of this, and I wouldn't be surprised if many other plot points are also ripped from the headlines.

 But while circumstances give Terry every excuse to paint the town red all over, he's no Rambo; he's a true pacifist, ever looking for ways to de-escalate situations even when he's willingly stirring shit up. He's backed up by the film, which doesn't excuse anyone involved in its central conspiracy, but complicates things by humanizing almost every character and hinting at how things got to be that way. Seriously - the script in this thing... it's a fucking marvel.

 Some people might balk at the protagonist's superhuman morality and his preternatural ability to keep cool under fire - and I can sympathize a little with that; He's an action hero dropped in a much grittier mix of genres. But as an action lover and a fan of all things awesome that criticism won't ever hold any water with me. As for those annoyed by the politics of the film... well, fuck them.

 In any fair world, this would be a star-making turn for Pierre; he sells his veteran protagonist with ease, exuding charisma, moral fortitude and both physical and mental menace. Robb is also great, and so is Johnson and a host of dependable character actors, all well served with meaty, complex roles. 

 Saulnier's filming is, as ever, top-notch. His style is unshowy but crisply shot and carefully staged; At several points I found myself thinking "wait, that whole thing was an unbroken take!". The action is brilliantly choreographed; Mostly gritty and naturalistic, but full of cool moves (mostly jujitsu) and vehicular mayhem, all clearly captured. There's surprisingly little of it and, pointedly, very little of the ultraviolence of Saulnier's past films. 

 This is, by far, the best new movie I've seen in a very, very long time - and I don't say this lightly in face of a year that's had two outstanding Mad Max and Dune movies. My only complaint is that its Netflix origins robbed us of the chance to see it on a big screen, and more people the chance of even finding out it even exists (it's been dumped alongside all their other usual shit with minimal fanfare).

Poltergeist

 If we're talking horror, 1982 is the year of The Thing - no contest. Poltergeist comes in a remarkably close second, though; One hell of an achievement, considering that a) The Thing is one of the best movies ever made, and also that b) Poltergeist is a (mostly) kid-friendly horror/comedy hybrid.

 It's the best type of comedy horror, though; Not just in that it's really funny, but all of the humour comes organically from the characters and the situations.

 A lot of that comes from an excellent script by Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais and Mark Victor (Spielberg wanted to get Stephen King to work on it with him, but that proved impossible). The Freelings are, unusually for Spielberg, a happy family: Dad (Craig T. Nelson), Mom (JoBeth Williams) and three cute kids... most notably 5-year old Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke). Their idyllic suburban life is beautifully established in a series of 'day in the life' vignettes, which effortlessly weave in gags and setup for future scares in equal measure.

 The horror itself arrives in an eerie scene where the ghosts establish a connection with little Carol Anne through the static of their TV set. Her pitch-perfect delivery of "they're here" as she's bathed by the TV's unearthly glow gets me every single time I watch this movie.

 From there the supernatural manifestations get more and more overt. You know how in movies about haunted houses the script has to contort itself to find reasons to stop its protagonists from just leaving? Poltergeist has one of my favorites instances of this: The hauntees (mom, at least - dad's a bit more wary), are basically fascinated. Beetlejuice would evolve that concept to hilarious ends, but... Poltergeist was there first, and the scene where mom presents her husband with her amateur supernatural investigation findings is just as funny as it is relatable. She's having fun!

 Poltergeist doesn't really skimp on the horror - even if it, as so many 80s horror movies, were  closer to a thrill ride than something gruelling. So this honeymoon phase doesn't last; The spirits soon abduct Carol Ann, and the movie starts focusing on the parents' attempt to recover her from wherever the spirits have sequestered the girl in the spiritual plane, along with the help of a team of parapsychologists (led by Beatrice Straight) and later a medium played by Zelda Rubinstein.

 Director Tobe Hooper provides a mix of silliness, his own take on Spielbergian awe-inspiring shots (this time with a supernatural bent) and more traditional -if over-the-top- horror shenanigans, all deftly managed. It doesn't always hang together seamlessly, but it's definitely effective... especially among its younger audience. The times I've talked to other people about the overtly gory face-tearing scene*...

 Always in that same conversation: a toy who gets used by the evil presence (its reality-bending powers allow it to use your fears against you) to terrify one of the kids. It doesn't really do much for me these days, but I still think of the toy as that fucking clown, and get a little of an echo of the fear it provoked in me as a kid whenever I rewatch the movie. 

 The other elephant in the room when discussing this movie, at least with more cinephile fans, is the nasty rumour that Spielberg stealth-directed it while giving Hooper credit (because he was making ET at the time, and couldn't have his name associated as a director.)
 That's always felt like bullshit to me, and an insult to the guy who made the Texas fucking Chainsaw Massacre. I mean, I'm sure Spielberg had some influence - Hooper would have to be crazy to not pay attention to advise from the creator of the modern blockbuster, at the very least. But this is of a piece with Hooper's later films (Invaders From Mars and the wonderfully batshit Lifeforce), so... I don't buy it. At all.

 Effects are handled by ILM, and up to their usual high standard - a wonderful mix of practical effects, illumination tricks, and analog-era visual effects. The performances are great, even from the child actors; Everyone really gets into the (restless) spirit of the thing. The only bum note (for me) is Jerry Goldsmith's score which, while objectively pretty good and memorable, leans a little too far into whimsical territory - enough to take the edge off some of the horror.

 And the script is really, really good, even by early Spielberg standards. Here's a detail I don't think I'd ever noticed before: Carol Ann insists on the closet lights early on, foreshadowing the lightshow that will take her away. And at the end, that famous (and widely parodied) scene where the house slowly collapses into a supernatural singularity? Its being sucked into the portal within the same closet, suspended on the second floor. How cool is that?

 Warning: the preceding paragraph contains spoilers.

*: Two fun facts: This scene is widely credited with the creation of the PG-13 rating, because holy shit is it going to be uncomfortable watching that with your eight-year-old. Also: the hands tearing the flesh from the face are Spielberg's.

Something That Happened In A New Year (Algo Que Pasó En Año Nuevo)

 Unhappily wedded working class couple María (Natalia Maldini) and Manuel (Casper Uncal) go spend the week around new year's eve with Manuel's sister Ana (Xiomara Martínez) and her rich husband Julio (Federico Aimetta). Class humor ensues, slowly curdling into mild horror as it becomes clear Ana and Julio are into... something weird.

 That something is fairly wrong is clear as soon as Maria and Manuel make it to the beautiful country house, when they're introduced to a handful of very young, very servile "godsons" and "goddaughters". But that quickly becomes a secondary concern as their host's overbearingly paternalistic treatment comes to the fore; The film mines a lot of laughs from Ana and Julio's oblivious entitlement. Not that it lets Maria and Manuel off the hook: Manuel is an unimaginative, ambitionless dolt, and Maria a seething mess of bottled-up resentment and frustration.

 Julio is some sort of self-help guru, and constantly berates our protagonists for not doing better, as if not being rich was a failure on their part; His way to help is to subject them to some hilariously inane aphorisms and parlor tricks to get them to think their way positively to success. It's a type of new-age-guru role that would be played too slickly in an American film, but feels more fresh and down to earth here. I'd be lying if I said I knew people like that back in Argentina, but I did knew some who were pretty close to it. His wife, Ana, is a more naturalistic character and a near perfect depiction of posh Buenos Aires gentry. Definitely met plenty of people like that.

 They're both hilarious, and watching Manuel and Ana trying not to fly off the handle (they're trying to borrow money from them, you see) never gets old.

 The film does take a turn towards the bizarre around the halfway mark, bringing the established cult-like aspects to the front and switching genres from observant social satire to something a bit more horror-adjacent. I don't like this second part as much as I did the first, but it still scored some belly laughs (Manuel's wide-eyed description of an epiphany might be the funniest thing I've seen in ages) and it does a respectable job of trotting out its chosen genre elements, which even include an arterial spray at one point. The final revelation is also a neat little darkly humorous sting.

 Writer/director Jorge Pinarello's budget doesn't allow for many flourishes, but he incorporates many of his limitations - including a simple editing scheme - into the film's down-to-earth humour (the way a conversation cuts into the jacuzzi scene pictured above is a good example). Pacing is tight, with a host of good jokes, sight gags (Manuel's impassive frustration is never not funny), characterful moments and bits of weirdness sprinkled throughout. The script is fairly cartoony, but it's got teeth - there's a particular scene where Julio illustrates a point comparing a single glass of vintage absinthe to Manuel's monthly wages that's pretty savage.

 The acting is superb. Martínez and Aimetta, as discussed, are great as the hosts; Uncal (whom I'd seen before in the excellent History of the Occult) seemed a bit amateurish to me at first, but he's undeniably funny, and there's a late twist that shows off his chops in a much more positive light; It's a good performance. The standout for me, though, was Maldini, who doesn't just get to be very funny, but also anchors the horror aspects of the movie by herself and remains a completely credible character, flawed and natural to the very end. Outstanding.