V/H/S

 Well, here it is - the little indie horror found-footage anthology film that could, with six sequels and counting. And... the thing is that as much as I like the series, I didn't really care much for this when it came out; A little too hit and miss. It was with the second one that I sat up and started paying attention.

 The brainchild of the folks over at Bloody Disgusting, the series came out the door with a truly impressive roster of horror luminaries: Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett, between You're Next and The Guest. David Brukner in between two other excellent anthology entries (one for The Signal, the other for Southbound). Ti West between Innkeepers and Sacrament. Glenn McQuaid, whose other work I haven't seen. Joe Swanberg in what I think is his only horror directorial detour (the guy was insanely prolific during that period). And last but not least, the Radio Silence team (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett, Justin Martinez and Chad Villella) - this was their first properly distributed gig, and it's one of the good ones.

 The framing story, from Wingard and Barrett, stars a "delightful" bunch of delinquent assholes (two of which are Wingard and Barrett) who engage in such exuberant youthful shenanigans as vandalism and sexual assault, film everything and then sell the footage. Tired of just producing #content, they accept a gig to steal a special V/H/S tape from an old man in his run-down home. When they get there the homeowner is dead, and there are plenty of tapes with creepy stories on them strewn around the house; While watching them to figure out which one it is they were meant to take, they're hunted by something. So they get (presumably) killed, and we get shown the shorts; It's a win-win, at least for us.

 David Bruckner starts things off properly with Amateur Night, the tale of three asshole kids (Mike Donlan. Joe Sykes and Drew Sawyer) who go out to pick up some chicks, try to get into their pants, and film everything with a pair of spy glasses. Unfortunately for them, one of the girls they pick up (Hannah Fierman) turns out to be weirdo and, more importantly, some sort of succubus. It's a basic structure the V/H/S series would reuse several times over, but this is by far its best execution thanks to Fierman's fierce performance, unrestrained sleaziness, great gore and some great, intense filmmaking from Bruckner. It's really good, but you might feel like you need a bath afterwards.

 Ti West classes up things with his segment, second honeymoon, where a couple (Joe Swanberg and Sophia Takal) go out on a road trip down route 66. They do inconsequential, touristy stuff during the day, and at night someone enters their room and films them with their camera. The night segments are really creepy, and the couple have a really well-developed, lived-in relationship, but it takes too long to get to a fairly underwhelming payoff.

 Glenn McQuaid takes us back to a bunch of idiot young adults (Norma C. Quinones,Drew Moerlein, Jeannine Yoder, and Jason Yachanin) who go to visit a remote lake in the middle of the woods with a girl they just met. They have a picnic, some nice extramarital sex, and leave happy and contented to lead long, fruitful lives.
 Oh, wait, no- they all get killed. It's standard slasher stuff with the usual cast of dillweed characters, but the short uses video glitches and weirdness in a really interesting way. The plot doesn't really go anywhere, but the visual gimmick keeps it fresh.

 We're next left in the hands of Joe Swanberg, who provides the strangest segment of the film. It's presented as a series of video chats between two childhood sweethearts (Helen Rogers and Daniel Kaufman) as they keep their long-distance relationship alive while at different universities*. Sweet as it is, we still get some gratuitous boobage, because of course we do. The young exhibitionist confesses that she thinks her department is haunted, and soon manages to capture some proof on video... which leads to a nasty bout of self-harm, a couple of good things-that-go-bump-in-the-night scares, and a truly batshit series of revelations. It's pretty evil, and a whole lot of fun.

 The last segment is by Radio Silence, and it's another good one. Here we follow another bunch of kids (the Radio Silence crew), but, amazingly, they're just good-natured dopes, not assholes. It also gets the best, most original justification of why everything gets filmed out of any found footage film I've ever seen: the main character's whole costume is one of those stuffed-toy nannycams!
 The kids are out looking for a Halloween party but get lost and end up in a real, honest-to-god haunted house. The early bits use that old Scooby-Doo trope of the kids thinking it's all make-believe and making fun of the paranormal stuff, but it's well executed, and when shit hits the fan it's appropriately hectic. There's some really dodgy, low budget CGI and the whole thing looks about as tacky as the Blumhouse producer credit animation, but the concepts are good fun and the goofy tone sells it well. Make sure you look up the alternate ending, personally I think it fits the short better.

 And there you have it. The only thing left is the standard song at the end which remixes some of the footage from the movie, including, ugh, the sexual assault. There's a line through which provocation curdles into bad taste, and this really crossed that for me.

 Overall I think I liked the movie better this time around, but I'd still rank it relatively low overall - at two hours, it feels a little too drawn out, and some of the shorts really overstay their welcome. That's especially true when you have to endure some pretty loathsome kids. I was surprised at just how sleazy it is, too: Several full frontals, including a bunch of floppy bananas as well as the expected amount of melons (that would be: many pairs of melons) and unsurprisingly high levels of horniness.
 A lot of it is unpleasant by design; Male toxicity is a bit of a running theme (even within the "happily" married couple, the guy tries to pressure his wife into something she doesn't want to do), but I can't really say it's taken anywhere more interesting than the standard Tales from the Crypt morality play. Except maybe for the Swanberg short, which is just nuts in the best way possible.

 It's definitely worthwhile, though, with at ton of caveats - as usual the high points are pretty high. Wonder if I'll like V/H/S:Viral more this time around, too.

*: I originally mistyped this as universitities at first; Proof that this sick filth truly has a degrading effect on impressionable, innocent minds like mine.

Maxxxine

 It begins, of course, with barn doors opening. Only this time they don't belong to a barn, but to a giant studio soundstage. In struts Maxine Minx, porn starlet, determined to cross over and become the biggest goddamn star in Hollywood. And the film... it just struts right along with her and doesn't ease up until the credits are well past done.

 She's there to audition for the sequel to a controversial horror movie. And, in the course of a beautifully filmed one-shot, she proceeds to (as she brashly puts it to the rest of the hopefuls lining outside the casting call) fucking nail it. Her transformation is astounding, calculated to floor us as much as the directors and producers casting her. It's a bravura sequence that's quickly, pointedly deflated by one of the producers asking to see Maxine's breasts; To which she quickly complies, of course. She's a pro.

 Maxxine is the capper to a slasher-adjacent trilogy writer/director Ti West started with X and Pearl - all shot mostly with the same crew and all starring the ridiculously talented Mia Goth. All you need to know from them, really, is that Maxine was the only survivor - the final girl - from the massacre of a whole porn crew on the remote Texas farm they had chosen as a set.

 You should watch them anyways. Not just because they'll let you appreciate shared themes and motifs (the opening barn doors, for example, how Maxine's casting references the monologue in Pearl, or the differing mottoes that inform their characters' worldviews), but because they are both incredible.

 Both prior movies were slasher movies cross-pollinated with clever, extremely dry humour. While X is knowingly a fairly formulaic horror film, Pearl is a much more complicated beast: a character study wearing the skin of a technicolour melodrama with some gruesome killings sprinkled in and a wicked sense of black humour.

 Maxxxine takes its queues, narrative and stylistic, from trashy '80s culture - Satanic panic, Brian DePalma and Angel. And also Giallo - a whole lot of it, from the lurid colours and the way stabbings are shot to the fetishistical focus on the killer's very expressive thick leather gloves, complete with squeaky leather sounds.

 After the events of X, Maxine's moved to LA and worked diligently to move on up in the world. Aware that her porn star career has a sell by date and that she's rapidly approaching it, she's been doggedly pursuing crossover success. Just when it looks like she's made it, a sleazy creep of a private investigator (Kevin Bacon, beautifully milking the role for all it's worth) turns up and tries to coerce her into meeting his employer for some nefarious end.

 The film is set during the couple of years that the Night Stalker was killing women in the area, too, giving the film a nasty sense of background menace - one that's quickly realized once Maxine's friends and coworkers start popping up dead.

 Calling it horror might be a bit of a stretch, but it's a highly entertaining, grisly thriller with a Fangoria gorehound sensibility: Heads will explode, balls will be (graphically) busted, and body parts will tumble down a stairwell with artistic abandon.
 The mystery itself is ridiculous in not entirely satisfying ways. It works well driving the rising suspense, but when all is revealed, while funny, it's a little too over the top and on-the-nose, like an off-hand joke that somehow became a plot point. And the film as a whole is let down by a weak ending that sets up a righteous third act bloodbath and then messes up the action, both conceptually and stylistically.

 It somewhat threatens to overshadow the rest of the film, which is a shame, because other than that relatively minor stumble, it's a stunningly realized creation. It looks incredible - cinematographer Eliot Rockett and colorist Tom Poole faithfully recreate the grimy, grainy look of celluloid on digital, and West's muscular yet detailed directing style mirrors how driven Maxine herself is. The prologue and title sequences alone are worth the price of admission.

 The acting is excellent; Not just from Goth and Bacon, but from a whole ensemble of memorable characters: Elizabeth Debicki as a hardass director, Giancarlo Esposito as an agent who's absolutely not above getting his hands dirty, and Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale liven things up considerably as a pair of homicide detectives.

 Beyond that there's a whole lot of filmic references that, honestly, don't seem to come to much; Is there any point in making a rapist look like Buster Keaton, other than to lump him in with the other celebrity impersonators on the Hollywood Walk of Fame? The same goes for a chase down the Universal backlot that ends in the Bates Motel, which looms big in the film as a whole but never seems to really stand in for anything but Maxine's aspirations (it's pretty funny when the director makes sure to mention Psycho II was shot there a couple years earlier, though).

 Still: Maxxine may hit a few minor bum notes, come off as a little hollow, but it's still a gorgeous-looking film that's a huge amount of fun. It doesn't stand at the same level as the other two movies in the trilogy, but even if it ultimately misses the mark it's still an ambitious, well-crafted movie bursting with memorable scenes and the subversive sense of humour that lines all of these films.

The Sacrament

 A thinly fictionalized found-footage account of the most horrifying cult massacre in modern times. Sure, sounds fun!

 The Sacrament is a grim, grim movie, as befits the material. It posits a world where the 1978 Jonestown massacre never happened, so it can re-stage it, simplified and in a much smaller scale.

 The movie presents itself as a Vice documentary following up on a letter received by one of its employees- Patrick (Kentucker Audley), a fashion photographer. In the letter his sister asks him to join her at Eden Parrish, some sort of religious utopic commune. When Patrick follows up and tries to get more information, he's informed that the Parrish has moved to a remote country, and they refuse to tell him where it is - they tell him that to see his sister he has to fly out to the unnamed country and go to an airstrip, where a helicopter will be waiting. Gulp.

 So Vice (which, honestly, should be paying advertising fees to this movie, but it's a fun conceit) fly Patrick out to find his sister, with investigative reporter Sam (A.J. Bowden) and cameraman Jake (indie director Joe Swanberg) embedded to report on whatever the hell is going on.

 When they arrive they find that the Parrish, which is set in the middle of the jungle (or as close to a jungle as Georgia, where the film was shot, can provide) have cleared out a few hectares and set up a compound with several cabins and a central meeting area for a hundred and something people; It's a pretty impressive setup. On a creepier note, a group of AK-toting gunmen are sent out to meet them.

 But once inside everyone they talk to seems to be happy and thinks the world of the Parrish and Father (Gene Jones), the cult their spiritual leader, and Patrick's sister Caroline (Amy Seimetz) looks radiant and more together than she's been for a while. So the Vice crew, while sceptical, allow themselves to be somewhat won over by the commune.
 Until the second act, where they discover things are not as paradisiacal as they seem (the Vice crew sub in for the real-life Ryan delegation, and the way they find out about the cult's nastier side is the same). So begins a tense search for more information and a series of face-offs with Father and his cronies, resulting in... well, a fact-inspired massacre that includes dozens of children, depicted in an unsensationalistic manner. You have been warned.

 The events have been changed - by necessity, as so much went on in Jonestown before shit went down that it'd take at least a miniseries (with a much bigger budget) to do a faithful dramatic depiction. For starters, the original massacre claimed more than nine hundred lives, not a hundred and sixty-odd. And there's all sorts of wrinkles- from attempted collusion with the soviet bloc to Father pulling off full-scale suicide dry runs before the main event that the movie never covers (the real Jones was much more openly unhinged than his cinematic counterpart, at least until his final scenes.) But for a fictionalized take, it's pretty close, taking all sorts of small details and weaving it into a thriller framework.

 Writer/Director/Editor Ti West does a stellar job delivering an unflinching, genuinely upsetting slow-burn of a horror thriller. It's a good-looking movie, too, with a bright, polaroid-like color scheme (cinematographer: Eric Robbins) and a lot of the footage actually shot by Swanberg as he was acting the character.

 West hasn't missed yet, and this is another strong entry in an extremely impressive run of very diverse films.

Pearl

 It's a fucking miracle, I tell you. We would be lucky any year that gives us a slasher film as good as X (which came out before I kicked this blog to life again, but here's my review: It's great and go watch it already!) But it turns out that Ti West had gotten the green light for his next film from A24 before that one was in the can, so he shot a prequel back-to-back, reusing the location and Mia Goth.
 Now we're in the enviable position of having two kick-ass Ti West movies released within less than ten months.

 Pearl begins with a parallel opening to X; In X, it was a very clever shot moving towards the entrance of a barn from inside, the darkened threshold dropping away and slowly expanding the aspect ratio to widescreen as the police arrived to a crime scene. In Pearl, the barn door is shut - and when the doors open, instead of the semi-desaturated, sun-drenched carnage of the earlier movie, we get an eye-popping, glorious technicolor view of the farm as it was back in 1918.

 It's set at the tail end of the first world war and during the influenza plague (both of which have a tangible presence throughout the film), yet the tone and style of the movie are closer to the fifties, and yes, more specifically to the films of Douglas Sirk, from the title lettering to the heightened melodrama.
 (I should note I've only seen one of Sirk's movies; I didn't particularly like it, I barely even remember it... but I feel I have a decent handle on him thanks to his influence over others like Haynes and Ozon. Philistine! Boo! Hiss! And all that, I know, I know.)

Ahem.

 Pearl is a melodramatic character study about Pearl (Mia Goth), a small town girl who worries that she will waste her life at a farm in the ass-end of nowhere. She's exuberant, funny, completely relatable, and a hot mess of a sociopath.
 We get our first taste of all this - and a good illustration of how the movie will go down - with her first scene, where she feeds the animals at the barn while charmingly bantering with them, cute as a button. She shows them her dance moves. Then a goose interrupts, so she kills it with a pitchfork and feeds it to Theda, the alligator in the pond out back.

 An origin story, then, for the monster she'll become (in oldface) in the sequel... or maybe by the end of this one. But this is not a slasher movie; The colorful cinematography, period-appropriate music and heightened, slightly histrionic acting are not (just) an aesthetic choice, the movie follows suit and puts the melodrama front and center.
 It's easy to see what would drive Pearl - who isn't very stable to begin with - to murder people before we get a single drop of (non-goose) blood. Her mother (Tandi Wright) loathes and resents her, partly with good reason, though you have to wonder if it's a chicken-and-egg situation; her father (Matthew Sunderland) is an invalid who can barely move his facial muscles (one of the funniest gags in this very bleakly hilarious movie is how much better he gets at emoting as the movie goes on). Pearl's husband is off in the war, fate unknown.
 She's trapped in a life she abhors.

 Pearl dreams of running away, of being a dancer in the movies. But of course we know she's never going to leave the farm, since she'll be there fifty-odd years later killing porn people and a many implied others, feeding their remains to a descendant of the same crocodile that ate that goose. It's a cruel trick - I really wanted that loveable psycho to pull her shit together!
 I wonder how this would have played if I hadn't seen X before, without this air of inevitability.

 The drama is very compelling, but it's also a remarkably funny movie. A nasty streak of gallows humor runs through most of Ti West's films, but this might be his most overtly comedic while never actually spilling over into comedy; all of the jokes are situation and character-based.
 In fact, one of the most dramatic and tense scenes - a prolonged monologue where Pearl opens up to her husband, camera tight on her face (in a fair world this scene would get Goth Oscar attention) is undercut with the pitch-black humor of knowing someone is sitting across the table while she confesses to increasingly awful things.

 When the killing finally starts it's good fun, too. It's not quite as gruesome as in X, but there is some pretty graphic dismemberment that West and his crew somehow manage to make beautiful. There aren't any gags with people saying lines that act as ironic foreshadowing to their deaths as in X, but all the implements of murder are lovingly presented before they're eventually used. The pitchfork even gets a ominous 'shhhhing' sound when it's first wielded; great stuff.
 The music is varied and excellent, full of reedy winds and the occasional carillon. And the acting is all-round excellent, with Mia Goth giving a terrific performance, both unhinged and grounded.

 As for themes, there are some interesting references to cinema itself. A projectionist friend of Pearl shows her an early pornographic film, which of course ties to X, but Pearl is obsessed with escapist musical reels instead; we see her as she imagines herself a few times throughout the movie, both in an extended war-themed musical number and in short, sad (to our eyes) black and white vignettes. Cinema as a release valve from an unpleasant situation in an unpleasant era. And X of course was about the porn boom of the seventies, but also about indie filmmakers not too far from Ti West's heart (just in a different, slightly less respectable genre.)

 All of West's movies have been good to great so far, and this year we got two of his very best yet. Pearl might be my favorite out of the whole lot. He's already working on the capper to this trilogy, so hopefully we'll be able to see what Maxine got up to after ending Pearl's history. Can't wait.