Glorious

  Where you wondering what to watch the next time your in-laws are in town? How about Glorious, the heartwarming tale of a man whose whole life is upended when he is trapped in a bathroom with an eldritch being who communicates with him through a gloryhole? He lives, he learns, and maybe, if he plays his cards right, he'll get a blowjob from an elder god. That's one way to lose your mind and end up in an asylum, I guess.

 Wes (Ryan Kwanten) has just gone through a messy split with his girlfriend Brenda (Sylvia Grace Crim) and is living off his car, like a less hairy version of Macon Blair in Blue Ruin. After a bender outside a rest stop, he stumbles into the toilets to kneel before the porcelain throne; There he strikes an awkward conversation with the congenial gentleman (he assumes) locked in the next stall over. The cubicles are connected by the aforementioned gloryhole, adorned with a pretty off-putting picture of a lady with some extra bits. Not to kink-shame all you tentacle enthusiasts out there; You know who you are.

 Ahem. The gentleman is played by none other than the great J. K. Simmons, and while unfailingly polite and friendly, he does have some hangups about Wes getting a look into his stall... or leaving the bathroom, for the matter; And as it turns out, he can enforce both preferences with magical powers. He quickly reveals that he's some sort of trans-dimensional all-powerful being named Gathanatoa, and he needs to avert some sort of cataclysm with Wes's help.

 It's a Weird (as in Weird Fiction) as well as a weird (as in willfully fucking weird) chamber piece, and gets a lot of mileage out of its batshit premise as well as from a few extremely funny jokes. Despite an extremely low budget and a script tailored for a shot during COVID isolation, there's some effective gore, some appropriately weird imagery, and a fair amount of imagination on display.

 The problem is that, for such a character-driven piece, the protagonist is pretty damn weak. Most of the specifics of the character's situation, at least for the first stretch, are pretty generic, and while director Rebekah McKendry tries to add some style to the proceeds, her attempts also come off as slightly generic. What's worse, the script doesn't give Wes many convincing lines - much of his muttering seems both writerly and generic at the same time - and I am absolutely not a fan of Kwanten's acting here.

 I really wanted to like the movie more than I did. There's not a lot of cosmic horror out there that's... well, as out there as this, and the jokes that land are pretty damn funny. As with most of these things it leans more towards comedy, but Wes's situation does get fairly horrific once what's really required of him is finally revealed. Simmons is, of course, a treat, and there's a good spread of weird visuals that are effective even as they drive home how little money the production had to work with.

 But even as the Lovecraftian madness is fully unleashed, there are as many misses as there are hits. I would recommend it overall, but it's a very flawed movie.

 Rebekah McKendry also wrote and directed All The Creatures Were Stirring, a movie I'm happy to report I remember now better for its bright spots than its sour notes. The screenplay here is by Joshua Hull and David Ian McKendry (who also co-wrote and co-directed All The Creatures...) based on a short story by Todd Rigney.

 Gathonatoa comes from a tale by Hazel Heald, revised by H.P. Lovecraft. The film alludes extremely obliquely to the short story, and is perfectly happy to wander off in a direction which the original authors never intended - par for the course with Mythos adaptations, really. I vaguely remembered the monster, but only as a bit player in the Call of C'thulu roleplaying game; Had to look him up to remember what he was all about.
 No offense, Gat - you're all right.

All The Creatures Were Stirring

 A five-short (plus wraparound) Christmas horror anthology - what could possibly go wrong?
 That's a rhetorical question, by the way. You don't have to answer that, All the Creatures Were Stirring has got you covered.

 The wraparound story is about a couple who go see the titular play in some sort of community theater, a terrible-looking performance-art-like piece where three bored-looking actors put on ridiculous looking pantomime of some common activity - each one transitions into one of the film's five segments. There's some fun in just how shitty the shows get, and how poorly the couple are treated by the theater staff, but other than that there's very little going on here.

 The first segment - "The Stockings were Hung" is one of those stories where some sort of evil mastermind traps a bunch of people in a room and tries to get them to kill each other. In this case it's a group of office drones at a company Christmas do. It's fun, for a little bit, until the character writing gets so ludicrous it completely breaks any possible immersion - one of those cases where you wonder if the writers ever saw how human beings actually interact, a copy of a copy of a copy of lazy horror tropes with no verisimilitude or grasp of psychology. It's bad, really bad.

 "Dash All Away" has a man (Matt Long) lock himself out of his car in a deserted parking lot - deserted except for a van with two slightly cultish-looking girls (Catherine Parker and Mekeda Deklet) whom he needs to engage to call his family and roadside assistance. It's the only short in the movie that manages to build some suspense, as the situation is very relatable and effectively creepy. It also has, when it arrives, a cool monster and a nicely bizarre explanation as to what's going on. High marks.

 After that high, we're due a couple of turds in the stocking. Specifically, a particularly shitty take on A Christmas Carol where the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future decide scrooge over an unfunny, angry loner (Jonathan Kite) in deeply underwhelming ways. It's a witless, poorly paced and absolutely uninteresting slog that takes way too long to do its thing and shuffle off the screen.
 It's followed by what's almost a throwaway joke, a story where a man runs down a reindeer in a country road to then be followed home by a mysterious assailant that lights everything around it red. It's a hilarious premise, but the next-to-zero production budget means that nothing is shown, completely buggering any chance it had to be a cool (and very funny) creature feature.
 What's interesting with this one is that directors Rebekah and David Ian McKendry go full on with the giallo and '70s Italian horror imagery, from the leather gloves that the man dons to manhandle the downed reindeer to some trippy, very cheap-looking photography-based visuals, to some of the editing and even a goblin-esque (on a budget) score. The short ends up being fucking dire, but it's got some interesting visual callbacks in a movie that otherwise looks pretty drab.

 Well, mostly drab. The last segment, In a Twinkle, is another highlight: Steve (Morgan Peter Brown) tells his girlfriend Gabby (Constance Wu) to not visit him for Christmas, as he prepares to chain himself to bed as a full moon shines outside his window. And then, just as he's about to lock himself in, Gabby, as well as three other friends, arrive for a surprise party.
 What seems like a straightforward lycanthropic (were-reindeer? elapusthropic?) premise fortunately takes a left turn into Twilight Zone territory, complete with an aspect ratio change, (very flat) black and white photography,  some overtly familiar musical stings, and sci-fi elements. Despite one major dangling thread, it ends up being a very cute, heartfelt Christmas story and it'd be a really great note to leave things on.

 But... no dice. We've still got the wraparound story to wrap up - or deflate, to put it more accurately, with a barely-there resolution. Only then are we finally done; It's some sort of achievement to make an eighty minute movie split into six stories that drag this much.

 So what we have here is an extremely uneven and almost aggressively unfunny horror comedy, one that offers at best some chuckles at the concepts on offer, but none at any of the actual jokes. The best segments take their ridiculous premises seriously, and are inventive and cool enough to work on their own terms and merit a recommendation- just maybe skip to Dash All Away and In A Twinkle unless you're a completist.