The Gorge

 There's a rift somewhere in the northern hemisphere, a huge gorge where monsters dwell. Two opposing towers overlook it, manned by two people who overlook an automated defense system (mines and turrets) to prevent the imprisoned things from leaking out.

 Two snipers from both sides of the old iron curtain - Levi (Miles Teller) from the west and Drasa (Anya Taylor Joy) from the East - are hired to guard The Gorge for a year. It's all hush-hush; They have no idea where they are, they are only briefed by their predecessors (who don't know much more than they do), and the gorge itself is guarded by magical cloakers that somehow prevent spy satellites and google maps from seeing it. And if that sort of hand-waving bothers you, I'd recommend avoiding this movie like the plague because it is the sort of film that categorically does not sweat the details.

 As the loneliness and boredom of their respective posts sets in, Drasa and Levi start making eyes at each other across the rift. Levi is a stick in the mud, especially compared to Drasa, who on her birthday starts blasting The Ramones' Blitzkrieg Pop; As they start communicating through the medium of binoculars and writing pads, the residents downstairs come to complain about the music - so the couple flirts both by writing messages to each other and by covering each other's backs with their sniping skills as human/plant zombie hybrids come swarming out of The Gorge.

 This first part of the movie is all about Levi and Drasa's growing attraction and, despite some clunky dialog, it's probably the best part of the movie. As the months go by the long-distance starts to wear on the two; When Drasa is at a low point, Levi jury-rigs a rocket to function as a long-distance grappling hook and the couple have their first proper date and night together.

 But this is nominally an action/horror film, so the script (by Zach Dean) soon finds a way to strand the lovers within the gorge. There it becomes an action/survival yarn as Levi and Drasa search for a way out and bring all its deeply stupid mysteries to light - all while being pursued by a bunch of CGI monsters.
 It's a little bit Annihilation and a whole lot of the Resident Evil videogames, right down to the requisite ancient 8mm tape with a scientist explaining exactly what's going on and equipment that remains strangely functional after more than half a century of complete neglect. Hey, at least it functions as a pretty funny callback to the director's use of low-fi analog footage in his other films.

 The action is decent but not very exciting; Director Scott Derrickson is more of a horror guy, and he and cinematographer Dan Laustsen (Guillermo Del Toro and Chad Stahelski's go-to DP) make the different environments of The Gorge look creepily alien, mostly thanks to some interesting, Fury-Road-like exaggerated colour grading and mutated plants and animal remains.
 As for the shootouts, brawls and chases, there are a couple of interesting set pieces but the choreographies aren't all that great. Most of the monsters are essentially fast zombies (I was really annoyed by that, because they find the skeletons of much more interesting beasts) and the extensive use of CGI never achieves a good sense of physicality.

 For better of for worse, The Gorge has a very modern Blockbuster mindset - think the latter Fast and Furiouses, or the Jurassic Worlds: The action is middling and it's proudly, very loudly dumb; I mean, this one's nowhere near as meat-headed as either of those, but the script does devolve into a similar morass of poorly though-out world-building and unlikely developments. It goes beyond the plot and setting - there are a ton of obvious mistakes that should have really been caught during production, like the fact that both Drasa and Levi are using assault rifles with regular sights to snipe across huge distances; Anyone who's logged at least a little time on any military shooter would call shenanigans. Maybe I'm overestimating the amount of people who'd notice that, but given the movie's videogame feel I suspect it's not insubstantial. And the film is full of this sort of thing.

Fortunately, the romance is solid, and it ultimately proves more central to the movie than the action beats. I remain sceptic about Miles Teller, who I find deeply uncharismatic and plays a bit of a sadsack here (his first message to Drasa is 'we're not allowed to fraternise' or something like that). Anya Taylor-Joy, however, more than makes up for him; She's no Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but it's the same sort of dynamic where she puts in all the personality and sense of fun.

 Their relationship makes the movie - it's nowhere close to, say, Before The Sunset, but it's easy to root for these two. It gives the film some stakes, and us a reason to overlook the rote action and all the idiocy.

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.

V/H/S/85

 Ever since the V/H/S anthology series of movies found a new home over at Shudder, they've been released at a yearly schedule, gotten a bit better at maintaining the found-footage gimmick, and they've gotten a year appended to the title that works as a theme - more a suggestion than a mandate, but it adds some color to each installment.

 The latest film in the franchise takes aim at 1985 - stylistically, if nothing else; Don't expect any insights about the Regan era, and the few references to the time period feel pretty forced.

 Mike P. Nelson kicks things of with your standard bunch of loud, horny people heading to a remote lake to get killed. They're not quite as repellent as they could have been in slasher-movie terms, so it's a little upsetting once they start getting shot to pieces.

 It takes its time to get to the fireworks factory, but things get memorably gruesome once a hidden sniper starts picking them off. There's a fun, very silly supernatural twist later on, but it kind of fizzles out without a real resolution. Or... does it?

 Then we jump to the film's weakest link, as writer/director Gigi Saul Guerrero takes us through a survival story about a film operator and his rescue team trying to escape a tall building after a nasty quake in Mexico City caves in a broadcast studio. As they make their way ever downwards, they discover a mythical threat amongst the bones of the city. It's got some gore and a couple of cool images, and the found footage angle does add a lot of immediacy to their predicament... but overall I thought this was missed opportunity.

 I did find it funny that it's got a comedy asshole Argentine dude, a trope I've noticed pop up mainly in Spanish films (Rec 2 and Sleep Tight come to mind); Other Latin peoples really don't like us, it seems.

 TKNOGD follows, directed by Natasha Kermani off a script by Zoe Cooper; It's a filmed performance art piece/one-woman-show where the speaker (Chivonne Michelle) invokes the god of technology using some silly VR gear. It's a short, not very interesting segment that builds towards an entirely predictable but satisfying and darkly humorous ending - and one of the most memorable bits of bloody mayhem in an already very gory movie. It was a struggle not to spoil its final shot as the header image for this review, but it deserves to be seen with fresh eyes. There's a joke in there somewhere, but I'm to lazy to go rooting around for it.

 Ambrosia marks the return of Mike P. Nelson with a fun little story about a family reunion that turns to be, surprise surprise, a lot darker than it seems. To-the-point, inventive, and hugely satisfying.

 For the last segment Scott Derrickson makes his debut in the series with the agreeably nasty Dreamkill. The story (co-written with Derrickson's regular writing partner C. Robert Cargill) follows a detective (Freddy Rodriguez) and his 'forensic videographer' (James Ransone) investigating a series of grisly murders; The twist is that the police has received videotapes chronicling the murders from the killer's point of view... three days before each killing.

 It's a simple story, constrained a little by the short running time, but very effective. By far the most impressive looking short of the bunch (and the only one not in a 4:3 ratio), it uses a variety of film stocks and soundscapes to give it a dreamlike feel. The filmed murders are very, very nasty Giallo-inspired fever dreams. In one a a straight razor reprises its role from Un Chien Andalou, another one overlays a brutal slashdown with Throbbing Gristle's Hamburger Lady to channel a version of Skinamarink where things actually happen.

 And it ends with a bang. Many, many bangs. There's so much to like here.

 The fifth or sixth story, depending on how you're counting, is V/H/S series vet Richard Bruckner's framing device which takes the form of a cheesy TV documentary chronicling a group of university scientists studying some sort of alien shape-shifting life-form; They keep it locked in a room watching non-stop TV shows.

 The documentary elements - especially the host - are spot-on, and it does build some tension as we get fed scraps of information in between the other stories. But it's a little too overblown for what ends up being the pay-off; the heavily foreshadowed massacre it's been heading towards is pretty tame compared to the shit that took place on most of the shorts. Thankfully it's all capped with a gloriously goofy punchline.

 As a send-off things wrap up with the standard V/H/S cheesy song, in this case a (pretty funny!) eighties-inspired pop number that riffs on the events of the movie.

 If I have to be objective, V/H/S/85 is messy, uneven, and the found-footage nature combined with the VHS conceit and low budget means that a lot of it looks like ass. But as ever with this series there's a lot to like, with a couple of honest-to-god kick-ass segments. Here's looking forward to next year's tape.

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.