Sinister

 When Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) uproots his family to move to another town for work, it doesn't go down all that well. Especially since his work is writing about true crime; His wife Tracy (Juliet Rylance) is particularly cautious, but Ellison reassures her with a promise that "we haven't moved a few doors down from a crime scene again". Notice the very specific wording there.

 Yep, the very house they're the proud new owners of is very much a crime scene; the previous residents, the Stevensons (a family of five) were all hanged from a tree out back - all except one of the children, who remains missing. Ellison stakes out an office and sets up one of those conspiracy boards to map out his book. He's barely started preparing when he runs into an unexpected breakthrough: In a box conspicuously placed in the middle of an empty attic, he finds a box with old Super-8 recordings and a projector.

It's horrific because he's watching the video in Apple Quicktime

 Luckily, Ellison's a dab hand with obsolete electronics (I'd have no idea how to even spool the reels), and soon he's watching a collection of five home movies - which begin with some footage of families going about their normal lives, only to then cut to them being restrained and murdered in cold blood in various ways. Starting with the hanging of the Stevensons, an event that took place not ten meters away from the spot Ellison is watching the movie. He's understandably shaken, but nevertheless successfully resists his scruples and decides not to share the films with the police and do his own investigation instead. You can imagine how well that works out for him.

 As he delves into the tapes with the help of a friendly local police officer (Derrickson regular James Ransone, bringing some very welcome humour), a series of events of increasing freakishness start convincing him that there's something... occult going on - that whoever is behind the murders might not be wholly human.

 Sinister's gathered a bit of a reputation since it came out in 2012; It regularly comes up in a pretty high in any list of the scariest movies ever made, and people still talk about a couple of 'legendary' jump scares that, to be honest, I've always found a bit silly. Rewatching it now, all these years later... yeah, I'm still not entirely convinced. Which is a shame, because so much of this movie works beautifully.

 Especially those fucking home movies. They remain supremely... well,  sinister, and are still viscerally effective on a rewatch - so much so the director's used the exact same trick on later projects. Derrickson and his team have always been adept at finding freakish soundtracks to pair these vignettes to, and here they use experimental and drone/noise bands to double down on the intensity of already disturbing imagery. The only one I recognized was Ulver, but holy shit there's some amazing stuff in here. The result - sound, image, subject matter - is creepy as all fuck.

 The acting is also excellent. Hawke is one of those actors I'm always happy to see pop up; He always gives whatever it is he's on, genre or arthouse, his all. Rylance is very good, Ransone is likeable and so is Vincent D'Onofrio in a bit part. The script, which Derrickson co-wrote with regular collaborator C. Robert Cargill, gives them all good characters to inhabit and a cool, twisted supernatural mystery to fall victims to. It stumbles a few times but the information is parceled out nicely, the pacing is fine, and the ending's got a nasty bite to it. As for the direction, Derrickson already had a good grasp on both the mundane and on building a solid horror atmosphere.

 So why don't I like it more than I do? Without going into spoilers... it's the supernatural menace, particularly the entity that's at the root of the goings-on. It's... well, there's no other word for it - it's fucking tacky, and the couple of jump scares it's a part of feel like they come from a much trashier movie (like, say, 75% of distributor Blumhouse's output). There is, to my mind, a tonal clash that the film doesn't resolve between its more grounded, nihilistic horror and the schlockier take on its ghosts and ghouls. I'm all for both of those approaches, but have a clear preference for the former - so this mix doesn't do it for me. Not the way it's executed at least.

 I don't begrudge this movie its success, though, nor its reputation. It's just a good film that rubbed me the wrong way.

24 Hours to Live

 24 Hours to live doesn't make a great first impression. Warning bells were set off by a Chinese production logo at the start - I love Chinese cinema (and I've got the write-ups to prove it!*) but their western co-productions seem, in my experience, to play it safe and skew to the sort of extremely dumb and crass would-be-blockbuster crap I tend to get very annoyed at. Think The Meg, with Meg 2 as the exception that proves the rule.
 The other early warning sign is a prologue where an Interpol convoy transporting an American whistleblower (Tyrone Keogh) who's about to present a declaration against a powerful PMC. They get attacked at a checkpoint between South Africa and Namibia, and the agent in charge, Lin, (Qing Xu) and the prisoner barely make it out alive.
 It's a fine action sequence, with lots of shooting and a couple of really good stunts. But... it's choppy - very choppy, to the point where you can barely see one of its best stunts (a guy climbs onto a car and then gets thrown off when it crashes). Not a good precedent on a movie that bills itself as Ethan Hawke's John Wick.

 Then the movie proper begins, and most of my reservations melted away. We're introduced to Hawke's character (going by the excellent action movie moniker Travis Conrad) as he's bantering drunkenly with his father in law (holy shit, it's Rutger Hauer!) on a beach. After some (pretty funny) back and forth, they work up the will to do what they're there for: to spread the ashes of Travis's wife and son, who've died a year prior. Unfortunately Hauer barely appears after that; I'd watch the hell out of these two talking shit for ninety minutes.

 But the plot must go on, and the movie goes about this business efficiently. Travis senses trouble when two thugs enter the strip club he's buying coke at, and preemptively ambushes them in a pretty funny scene where he locks them in a bathroom and incapacitates them with cleaning products out of a janitor's closet (I'm guessing he mixes bleach with ammonia - I did that once by mistake, and yeah, I totally buy that it could be weaponized).
 He runs into his handler (Paul Anderson) at the bar when he returns from the incident with the thugs; turns out they were just there to set up the meeting, I guess? As established by the way he dealt with those two, Travis is an assassin - the best in the business, of course - and his new job (pay: 1M/day, courtesy of the ever-present PMC) is to hunt down the whistleblower from the prologue and end him.

 The way he does this is by seducing agent Lin - a very clever scene where he uses the information he's got on her to subtly win her over. Also, this is fucking Ethan Hawke with charm turned to 11 we're talking about, so all the footwork and hacking was probably superfluous. But it's still appreciated.
 I'd just like to say that the script for the movie (by Ron Mita, Jim McClain and Zach Dean) is pretty damn on point, especially for a VoD action movie like this; It's got its problems, but when it's good, it's really good. And while we're doing an aside: Qing Xu is great- very charismatic, and we get to see a few sides to her character. Unfortunately she doesn't get that much to do, she's just an accessory to Travis's story. A redemption hook.
 Ahem! In any case, Travis is about to kill Lin as she's in the shower next morning - even has one of those gotcha scenes where he goes through and then we see he was just planning how'd it go - but decides against it and sneaks out instead. Bad idea: Lin (I guess) notices he hacked her phone, tracks him down, and after a short (and very cool) shootout, puts two bullets in his chest.

 So here's the twist in the movie, and this will be a spoiler if you haven't seen its trailers or read its premise (just skip until after the picture): he gets brought back by techs from the PMC that hired him - they've been developing a way to bring soldiers temporarily back from the dead; This is actually what the whistleblower was going to testify about, as they unethically (in my opinion) tested the procedure on dozens upon dozens of poor African civilians first ("some real Mengele shit").
 It's only a temporary reprieve from death - Travis has 24 hours before his brain shuts down, and he's given a handy implant in his wrist with a countdown (the script can be pretty dumb). Side effects include hallucinations, which is useful for storytelling purposes, too.
 In any case, the PMC just brought him back to get the location of the whistleblower; They try to get rid of him immediately afterwards, which, if you've seen any amount of action movies, you'll know is a Big Mistake. Faster than you can say "remorseless killer develops a conscience and seeks redemption", Travis kills all the PMC soldiers on the site and sets out to foil their plans to kill Lin and the whistleblower. 

A good boy almost got flattened during the making of this picture.

 What follows is pretty standard action fare, but well made, grounded by some great character work, and with some superb conceptual flourishes. I loved a bit where Travis enlists the help of some civilians to stop the PMC. It's a really dumb setup: Yeah, let's stop a heavily armed military convoy by waving axes and knives at them - but the kicker is that he gets a resurrection-related seizure just before shit hits the fan, and is forced to watch the carnage in slow motion without being able to do anything. There's a bit where a dog almost gets run over when a Humvee drives through house - I hope he got hazard chow. Anyhow, it's a really great scene.

 The movie does run out of steam towards the end, with a very standard and pretty forced final act, but it's still exciting enough, and it comes by it honestly after all the setup the movie went through. Also, there's a callback to that first conversation between Travis and his father in law at the beginning of the movie that's both affecting and hilarious. Yeah, the script is a mixed bag, but there's some really superb writing in there.

 I was really impressed by director Brian Smrz (not a typo). The guy's only ever directed this and another one from 2008 - Hero Wanted, which I should check out sometime - but he's racked up an impressive resumé as a second unit director and stunt coordinator. Like, seriously impressive, in quantity and popularity if not quality. And he handles himself really well here.
 The action here is not quite up to the standards of the 87North production the movie's marketing invokes, but it's still really good modern action. Shootouts improve a lot after the one in the prologue, with a little more clarity, and the bullets causing an impressive amount of destruction - at one point a sniper uses a gun to shoot multiple people clear across a room. There's also some impressive vehicular action. I'm less enamored of the digital blood and a hilariously bad explosion close to the end, but that's all easily excusable given the budget.

 Other than that it's a well-shot, expansive movie with great cinematography (by Ben Nott) and a little world-hopping flair. It's not quite Ethan Hawke's John Wick - probably something more like Ethan Hawke's The Accountant - but it's still a great action movie with some excellent drama, way better than my glib comparison makes it sound like. And at the heart of it lies an outstanding performance from Hawke, a great actor who's always willing to give it his all for interesting genre stuff. One of the good guys.

* Chist, I sound racist... "Some of my best friends are Chinese movies!"

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.