Slash/Back

 Slash/Back is a winning little Canadian alien invasion yarn. Not Canadian aliens, or little Canadian aliens, though that would be something to behold- You know what I mean, stop misinterpreting me on purpose.

 Fighting the (non-Canadian) aliens this time are a bunch of very young Innuit teen girls who happen to live in Pangnirtung, a tiny town fifty miles south or so of the artic circle where the 'meatship', as it's later labeled, has the misfortune to land.

Too young to know to pine for the fjords.

 The aliens this time around are of the puppetmaster/bodysnatcher variety, taking over animal and later human hosts. This leads some of the more traditional-minded girls to compare them with shapeshifting monsters of Innuit lore... but more tellingly, one of them recounts The Thing's classic electroshock scene in detail.
 The girls first run into the aliens while out in the fjords shooting cans. They manage to shoot down one possessed polar bear when it attacks them (they just think it's sick) and quickly flee the scene... unwittingly leading the aliens back home. And as (bad) luck would have it, there's a big square dancing event that night out of town, leaving no adults available to fend off the invasion.

 There's a respectable attempt to make sense of the aliens and their actions, and despite some severe and very noticeable budget limitations, the aliens are surprisingly creepy - uncomfortably wearing ill-fitting skins and moving like broken robots; a late-film revelation of what's under the hood is a highlight.

 Beyond the low production values you also get a script that sometimes struggles with pacing, some pretty rough acting (even some of the principal characters seem to be reciting lines rather than acting at times) and a dearth of real menace.

 But despite all that the balance is pretty positive, even before taking into account this is a first time effort for a lot of the talent (including the director and the actors).

 It's a sweet, almost insubstantial slice of PG-13 adventure that gets by on warmth, charm, the unusual setting and some unexpected script choices. The mismatched foursome at the center aren't really your standard 'kids with bikes' subgenre protagonists, although the label fits the movie to a tee; for one, they don't really get along that well, and the film deals with the 'overcome your fears/rise to the occasion' trope in a more sensitive and realistic way than, say, your standard Netflix series might.

Raven's Hollow

 Using historical figures as fictional characters has a long and illustrious history - my favorite example, in both quality and quantity, would have to be Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series. There's also a sub-category of this that inserts writers, however fictionalized, into stories that vaguely resemble something they might have written, a la Cast a Deadly Spell.
 Raven's Hollow does this but for Edgar Allan Poe, and in a somewhat unusual choice, mostly restricts its references and quotes to the man's poetic work* especially, of course, the Raven.

 After a cold open where a girl is chased and killed by that most terrifying of monsters -a cloud of CGI fallen leaves- we cut the titles, and then to a scene where Poe (William Moseley) runs across a crucified, disembowelled man while riding out on some sort of military drill with four other cadets. We know he's Edgar Allan Poe, because his mates use both Edgar and Poe when they address him.

 While cutting him down, the dying man whispers 'Raven' and promptly dies. The group, egged on by Poe, decide to take the corpse to a nearby settlement - the titular Raven's Hollow.

 Once there they get the obligatory folk horror passive aggressive reception from the townsfolk, and start suspecting not all is what it seems. Poe, being the inquisitive type, opts to stay in town to see if he can solve the mystery... and the movie starts falling apart soon afterwards.

 As more characters are introduced and we start learning the facts, it becomes clear that the raven is some sort of evil spirt monster, and that the town is somehow complicit in its murders. As events escalate they... well, they basically stop making sense, and the plot starts just stumbling forward in ways that don't quite mesh together. Dialog turns from cogent conversations to people spouting unrelated lines and exposition at one another. Poe -who, remember, wrote detective stories well before Conan Doyle came up with Sherlock Holmes- is presented as an analytical thinker, but the sort of conclusions he jumps to here are highly suspect (he turns out to be correct every time, of course.)

 At least this leads to him deducing that taking opium will protect him from the monster's mind tricks (!), which results in a scene of him tripping balls and seeing locomotive-like jets of steam come out of his horse. Finally: an origin story for Poe's opium habit.

 All this is a shame, because the movie looks very good - All autumnal landscapes and creepy, semi-abandoned townships; who'd have thought Latvia'd make a good stand-in for upstate New York? The wardrobe looks great, too, and the color coordination seems to be on-point. The direction is assured and there are some great touches here and there - I particularly like a scene where Poe's face becomes increasingly bathed in red light as he approaches a bloody tableaux in a church. None of this disguises that it's a low-budget production, but it at least puts in the effort and mostly succeeds. Unfortunately the monster itself is a major letdown, a crappily designed thing rendered in sub-par CGI.
 The acting is good, too! Besides Moseley, who manages to say a lot of nonsense and seemingly mean it, all the actors (including the awesomely named Oberon K.A. Adjepong, the always welcome Kate Dickey, and Melanie Zanetti) do a lot to help keep the tone consistent.

 Beyond it just not being a satisfying story in and of itself, it's also not particularly faithful to Poe's style; it doesn't come off like something he would ever write. There are a few references, of course: character names, minor incidents, and Poe quotes his own poetry during the movie, but it all feels pretty hollow (pun not intended), and honestly... how someone could get to The Raven from the events of this movie is anyone's guess.

The House at the End of Time (La Casa del Fin de los Tiempos)

 Wrongfully convicted of murdering her husband (Gonzalo Cubero) and son (Rosmel Bustamante), a woman (Ruddy Rodriguez) is sentenced to life. Thirty years later, she's allowed to serve the rest of her sentence in home arrest, and sent to live out the rest of her days in the house where it all happened.

 And of course, there's something spooky going on with the house. The movie jumps back and forth between two time periods: the events leading up to and including the night where Dulce lost her husband and son, and a short span thirty years later when she is returned to the house and starts working out what actually happened on that night.

 Played by the same actress under a layer of unconvincing makeup, modern-day Dulce gets an ally in a catholic priest that helps her unravel the history of the house. From there the elements start falling into place - spooky night happenings with mysterious strangers roaming the house, family secrets, a second son who died shortly before that fateful night...

 More accurately translated as The House of the End Times, La Casa del Fin de los Tiempos is a Venezuelan horror movie that set box-office records in its native homeland and got enough international attention to secure writer/director Alejandro Hidalgo a place making an English-language remake at New Line; That hasn't surfaced yet, but a 2017 Korean remake based on Hidalgo's script did.

 Unfortunately, I don't think it's a very good movie. The crew does well within the obvious budget limitations, but the script leans too heavily on melodrama, contrivance, and corny sentimentality for my taste (an extended cutesy scene with children early on sets the tone and soured me considerably to the film).
 Genre-savvy viewers will quickly catch on to what's going on, and the way things fit together is reasonably clever. But for things to fall into place plot dictates that people behave in really stupid ways; this is a movie that would go very differently if people just used their damn words and behaved as if they had half a brain.

 Meanwhile the genre trappings are pretty commonplace. The house is suitably dilapidated, and the family's poverty means that there are power cuts to justify lamp and candle-lit night jaunts, but the geography is never really clear. There's a witching-hour of sorts, a scary mysterious old man, that sort of thing. It's by no means elevated horror but it is 'tasteful', so expect a stately pace, an uplifting message and (sadly) an absence of outré elements.

 The acting is all over the place. I thought Ruddy Rodriguez was pretty good as Dulce, but her priestly deuteragonist was pretty bad - and it's not helped by corny lines about the smiles of children and shit like that. Luckily he's not in a whole lot. The kids do get a bit more screentime, and they're... child actors; let's just say they don't distinguish themselves.
 The camerawork and direction is pretty decent, but its efforts are mostly expended in making it seem like a Hollywood movie with very traditional shots - well made, but not especially memorable; Much like the movie around it.

 For all its melodrama and cheap sentimentality, I do think its heart is in its right place and it does find an effective emotional center - but all the contrivances and out-of-nowhere plot developments effectively kill off any goodwill. It's a shame, but luckily it was successful enough that we'll hopefully get to see better genre stuff from this particular director, and Venezuela in general.

1408

 Weird how memory works. I remembered 1408 as a CGI disaster, a mess of crappy, cheap looking computer effects. Rewatching it now, I realize maybe I was thinking of a short, and yes, very crappy scene of flames licking the outside of a hotel close to the end; Other than that there are a few other visual effect here and there, but the vast majority are practical- and pretty good! So I owe it an apology.
 Unfortunately, revisiting it didn't lead me to revise my opinion on the movie by much; I think I disliked it a lot less this time around, but it's still a dumb, loud, cheesy mess. A fun one, at least.

 Based on a short and much simpler Stephen King story, 1408 follows Mike Enslin (John Cusack), an occult writer who goes around staying in supposedly haunted places and writes up reviews for them. At least ten years before the glut of  movies about paranormal investigators getting more than they bargained for that are all over the place these days; Mike's a writer, though, so that means it's not found footage.
 Mike catches wind of a haunted hotel room in New York, and his interest is piqued when the hotel manager refuses to allow him to book the room. Oh, it's on: next thing you know he's at the lobby of the hotel, and Gerald Olin, the hotel manager (Sam Jackson, making a big impression with a very small role) is giving Mike the rundown on room 1408 straight from a thick file full of scene-of-the-crime pictures. Turns out, 1408's got an impressive bodycount: people go there to kill themselves, or just die of 'natural causes' which include drowning in a bowl of chicken soup. It is, as Olin explains, an evil fucking room. Mike is unimpressed, convinced it's all a hoax, so Gerald ends up relenting and lets Mike in, reckoning he won't last an hour.

 The room itself seems unremarkable at first - there's a bunch of good lines lifted straight from the story about the nature of hotel rooms, and Cusack makes Mike's gruff scepticism and dickishness very entertaining to watch. There's a very effectively creepy scene early on - probably the best part of the movie - as Mike investigates the scenes of old deaths in the room and gruesome pictures of the corpses from Olin's file are superimposed over old bloodstains. Very cool.
 It doesn't take long before strange hotel-themed supernatural stuff starts happening; mints appear on pillows, toilet rolls are magically replaced - you know, classic horror! And then The Carpenters (gasp!) start blasting on the radio, which is cliché Hollywood horror code for shit's gonna get spooky.

Watch out, goofy hammer maniac's gonna gitcha!

 The haunting keeps getting more and more punishing; Injured, seeing ghosts jumping out windows and hallucinating both traumatic scenes from his past and attacks from a silly-looking hammer maniac, Mike's ready to check out after only a few minutes. But he's trapped in the room, and his attempts at escape keep getting foiled in increasingly surrealistic ways; I liked the bit where a floorplan of the hotel floor just shows room 1408, surrounded by darkness.

 Once things start moving they go over the top pretty quickly. There's a bit of psychological horror as the room forces Mike to confront a pretty horrible family tragedy (completely absent in the original story) but mostly it's a series of reality-bending attacks on Mike's sanity. The movie invests a lot of energy on some of these with quick, roving camera moves and making poor Cusack jump around like a mad man, but for me at least the gamble doesn't fully pay off - instead of the spookablast impact I they were going for, these overactive scenes feel manic and forced, and end up making everything feel faintly ridiculous instead. More Jan de Bont than Reimi. Some of the practical effects are pretty good, though, especially when the room starts destroying itself.
 Cusack gives a game performance, overacting and randomly doing mundane actions with additional athletic flourishes as if he was trying to overthrow Nic Cage - it's not a good performance, exactly, but it's very entertaining to watch, and it adds to the films weirdly endearing cheesiness.

 Despite all the gruesome happenings in the room over the years, there is next to no blood and guts on display, which is a surprisingly restrained choice for a movie that otherwise goes for Poltergeist-levels of supernatural mayhem (and would be completely justified in indulging in a bit of gore, given how many people met grisly ends in the room; Poltergeist certainly didn't have that excuse, but Hooper's gonna Hooper).
 The plot is nonsense and full of dumb developments and clichés - from bleeding walls to evil doppelgangers to a hallucinated fake-out of a successful escape, but it does have fun ideas and ends up with a satisfying conclusion*, and there's enough weirdness on display here and there that I can't really hate on it too much. This is one of King's favorite adaptations of his work, which, given how poorly so much of his stuff was treated in the '90s and '00s, makes sense. He was even happy with how well the added backstory to the main character turned out. I wouldn't go that far, but it's understandable why they felt the need to add it.
 ...Yeah, I definitely don't hate it. Glad I gave it another chance. Good job everyone involved, I guess, and sorry I didn't appreciate the effects more the first time around.

 *: there's a Director's Cut with an alternate ending that's a bit darker and a whole lot better. It's available on youtube.

Barbarian

 A young woman (Georgina Campbell) arrives at a rental house in a horrible neighborhood only to find that it's been overbooked. The guy who's already in it (Bill Skarsgård) seems nice, and invites her in out of the rain while they work out a solution to the problem, but all of the interactions are understandably fraught.
 It's a great setup for a thriller, very believably played by the two leads; Skarsgård in particular treads the line between likeable and possible psychotic threat very well. As the night goes on the tensions diffuse somewhat and they start bonding.
 But we know it's not a thriller or a romantic comedy: it's a horror movie. The film knows that we know it's a horror movie. Things will end in bloodshed, because of course they will.

 Barbarian playfully mines tension out of that knowledge, and eventually delivers on it with memorable brutality. Left alone, that first half hour would make for a killer short film. There's more, though, and the story carries on in unexpected ways.

 This is a movie that you don't really want to hold to very high expectations and is absolutely best experienced with as little prior knowledge as possible. So talking about it is hard without spoiling a little of what makes it fun, but pointedly not talking about it maybe makes it out to be a lot more than what it's trying to be.

 So what is it trying to be?
 It's a take on a traditional horror story that's been around for ages. It doesn't reinvent the wheel or anything, but it has a huge amount of fun playing with form and structure.
 There's got a huge vein of black humor running throughout, not as jokes (though there are a few great ones); rather, it uses subversion and twists that are not overtly humorous, but are pulled off with impeccable comedic timing. Despite touching on some very current issues, it deals with them with a relatively light touch and never gets dark enough with its themes, events, or gore that they drag the movie down into serious grimdark horror territory.

 The main thing is not to expect any major Malignant-style what-the-fuckery. As energetic as Barbarian is, and as willing as it is to use our genre literacy to play with us, it's not really out to try and map out new territory, and it never really gets that crazy. And that's fine! This is a really good movie, I'm just trying to temper expectations here.

 The script is great, with a ton of clever touches. There are a lot of small 'why didn't she...' or 'shouldn't this have happened?' moments - all easily forgivable and well within genre standards, but they stand out because of how well-written the movie is in general. Most importantly, it's proper creepy and has a few memorable scary bits.
 All the actors are really good, too. Campbell and Skarsgård really sell their situation, and Justin Long joins the cast in the second act as a great, memorable douchebag.
 Director Zach Creggers is a comedy guy, part of the Whitest Kids U know troupe, and he's done an admirable job here of making a horror movie that's very funny without ever crossing over into horror comedy territory. In what's turning out to be an exceptionally good year for the genre, Barbarian stands out for all the right reasons.

Baskin

 A bunch of cops gathered at a greasy spoon talk about gambling, football and whoring well into the night - a well written scene, with a good ear for dialog; I've had to endure very similar conversations at work while I lived in Argentina, and this didn't exactly bring great memories. You get a good sense for the characters, including the boss (Ergun Kuyucu), the rookie (Gorkem Kasal), and the asshole (Muharrem Bayrak). Well... the biggest asshole, anyhow - when he goes all Joe Pesci ('What do you mean I'm funny?') and turns on an innocent bystander, the others actively encourage him or look on. 'This guy, you know, he's such a joker,' even as he beats the shit out of a kid who made the mistake of getting too friendly.

 Baskin is a 2015 Turkish horror film that does not expect you to root for its characters.

 Soon the gang is responding to a backup request from an abandoned building in a 'cursed' part of the boondocks. Their designated driver, who's already had some sort of panic attack, crashes the van, and after some more misadventures they make their way to the derelict building where the call originated and find that it's been taken over by some sort of satanic cult; they get captured, and much torture ensues.

 But Arda, the Rookie, keeps going back to a nightmare where he's chased by the ghost of a childhood friend, there's frogs everywhere, and wasn't the creepy monk-like guy who's torturing them at the building also providing meat at the diner where the movie begins? And, and, and...

 There's a lot going on in this movie, and its elements do not come together in a satisfying way. Even as surreal horror, it's not concerned with tying its themes together coherently (other than everyone's in hell maybe?) or providing any mysteries to work out. The story's just there to provide a string of horrific setpieces.

 It's great in the early going, when the deliberate pace is buoyed by a sense of dread you could cut (and slit, and stab, and gouge, and disembowel) with a knife; directo Can Evrenol and cinematographer Alp Korfali do a brilliant job with lighting, creating beautiful looking scenes with bright, lurid colors.

 It's a bit unfortunate that the movie goes a bit downhill once the monsters make themselves known. There are some cool bits of dream-imagery, a few servings of decent gore, and a very laudable mean streak and willingness to push things pretty far; but by the end it doesn't feel like it's enough even with Kasal indulging in a bit of Bruce Campbell-style overacting. Without anyone to root for, and the tone too grim to enjoy our heroes' comeuppance, all I had left to look forward to some sort of cool explanation or twist that never really comes. I'm glad I watched it, but after a very strong start I felt it lost its way.

This is Gwar

 Gwar, Gwar never changes.

 Oops, sorry, my bad- Gwar's always changing; Gwar is fucking chaos.

In the grim dark future there is only Gwar. And Joan Rivers.

Gwar, for those not in the know, is a metal band that is (in)famous for going out on stage wearing cool, oversized prosthetics and costumes and rocking out with their (prosthetic) cocks out. I've never really listened to them, but as anyone with an interest in metal music I was aware they're famous for putting on theatrics during their shows that make Alice Cooper seem utterly tame in comparison. Heads get chopped off, on-stage fights erupt, giant butts get impaled with crosses; Simulated body fluids of all (yes, all) sorts are sprayed on an enthusiastic audience.

 This is Gwar is a behind the music-style documentary that covers their whole history starting with their founding back in 1984 from the mixture of an art collective trying to put out a home-made science fiction movie and a punk band frontman who got them to make props for his shows. With full access to all the living members of the band, a bunch of people who slave away (no, literally - they work for peanuts and are referred lovingly as slaves) to make the props and effects that power Gwar's incredible live shows, and tons of archival footage, it's a fascinating oral history of the ups and downs of a band that's alternatively moving, riotously funny, and shocking.

 Seriously- these folks have been through a lot over the years. It would be interesting to see this just for the logistics behind their incredible stage props; The movie opens, very appropriately, with a roadie explaining the hydraulic setup that allows them to shoot jets of blood and jizz. But the story behind their creation, the conflicts between their very... highly idiosyncratic band members, the censorship issues you'd expect and a couple of deaths (and one near-fatal shooting!) - there's so much going on here.

 It'd just be worth it for all the concert footage, which is hilarious and shows a ridiculous amount of talent and effort expended just on the stagecraft, but despite the rigidity of the music doc format their history is so full of incident and wild twists that it makes for a ridiculous compelling viewing.
 I might still not be a fan of their music, but after watching this I can honestly say that Gwar fucking rules.

Terrifier 2

 At the end of Terrifier, Art the clown (spoilers!) comes back to life after shooting himself and goes after the mortician examining him. It's a surprising scene, as the movie had up to that point resolutely avoided any supernatural trappings (unless you count Art's tendency to pop up out of nowhere like Droopy Dog.)

 Terrifier 2 picks up from there, literally and figuratively. We get a continuation of that scene where our favorite clown goes to town on the poor mortician's face with a tiny medical hammer - teeth and blood flying everywhere. It's an impressive and disgusting bit of practical effects that easily tops anything from the first movie, and maybe unconsciously carries on the theme of undersized tools causing outsized damage (remember that time when Art cut a girl in half using a one-handed hacksaw?)

 In any case, the sequel rolls with that resurrection, turning Art into more of an otherworldly threat complete with a ghostly sidekick and his own clown-themed pseudo dimension over the course of the story. If the first movie was (in part by necessity) a grungy video-nasty-style slasher flick, Terrifier 2 is a bona fide horror extravaganza that doubles down on the nastiness from the first movie but adds likeable characters with an actual arc, fantasy elements, and some very funny pitch-black humor. It's a welcome return to All Hallow's Eve more eclectic horror offerings, and makes it (for me) a markedly more fun movie than its predecessor, even as it ramps up the gore and suffering.

 The bigger budget is very noticeable - not just in the effects, as the movie expands to more locations, manages much more dynamic shots and a wrangles a much larger cast to accommodate the more ambitious script.

 After a (very funny) bit of business where Art, who is still every bit the hateful asshole, goes to a laundromat to wash his blood-stained clown duds after a messy resurrection, the retrowave-drenched credits roll and we're introduced to our new protagonist.

 A full year has past since the Miles County Massacre. Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera) is a young girl who's putting the finishing touches on a warrior angel costume which, we'll later learn, is based on a character her late father created for her. She lives with her mom (Sarah Voigt) and little brother (Elliott Fullam) and is preparing the costume for a Halloween party she plans to attend with her friends. 

 There's some real sweetness to their relationships, which immediately makes the stakes feel that much higher than with the thinly sketched bunch from the first movie. That night, as Sienna goes to sleep, Art appears in her dreams in what's easily the weakest element in the movie, a purposefully stilted dream sequence that is unimaginatively portrayed as some sort of kid's show. Oh well, at least it has some impressively chunky squibs going off once Art inevitably turns murderous...
 The flames from her dream spread to her real-life bedroom when she wakes, establishing that we're playing by Nightmare on Elm Street rules here, and that there's some sort of connection between Art and Sienna. Oops!

 Comparing notes, Sienna and her brother notice that her father had known about Art the clown even before he went on his rampage. There are some shards of a mythology strewn throughout the movie, enough to allow you to draw some conclusions, but it's all left incomplete and mysterious; I can get behind that. There's room for sequels to explain things to death, but I like this more indirect approach.

 The body count starts mounting on the following day. Sienna and her brother have run-ins with Art in town, who's having a busy day of butchering random people while he's not harassing the Shaw family: This includes one of Sienna's friends (Casey Hartnett) in a scene that's almost as sexualized, and way more disturbing that the scene that had everyone in a tizzy from the first Terrifier. There's a terrific joke in there that got a huge laugh out of me, and immediately made me feel a bit guilty about it. Top marks! And if the misogyny worries you, don't worry. The movie's response to being charged with sexualized violence is to basically double down on it, and then add a scene with a dude (Charlie McElveen) getting his own sexualized and very nasty dose of ultraviolence.

 Events escalate, as they are wont to do, and it all builds up to a satisfying (and satisfyingly over-the-top) climax at an abandoned carnival. There's also a hilariously bizarre mid-credits setup for the now-inevitable sequel.

  So... yeah, if you couldn't tell by now, I liked this one a lot. It's a batshit insane movie in all the best ways, showing commendable ambition and craftmanship, and reclaiming extreme gore from the more dour horror movies that have been the norm since the early 00's.

 The only thing keeping me from loving it, besides the dream sequence, is that it's a bit too self-indulgent, there's a bit too much flab. Not as much as on recent too-long movies, but by the end I was getting a tiny bit impatient.

 Still, I'm very happy it's been so successful; Here's hoping we get to cheerfully discuss in a decade whether the Terrifier series jumped the shark at Seed of Terrifier or on Terri Firmer.

Terrifier

 Terrifier's a nasty, no-nonsense slasher with gruesome, drawn-out kills. Running a lean eighty-four minutes, there's just enough scene setting for the cat and mouse games that will ensue as two friends and a handful of bystanders are stranded in an abandoned building with a killer clown, to be picked off one by one.

 Besides the uncompromising tone and excellent gore effects, the movie has a not-so-hidden ace in its villain Art the (killer) clown (David Howard Thonton). Writer/director Damien Leone reused him from his earlier anthology movie All Hallows Eve (an equally nasty and fun compilation of stories assembled from earlier shorts tied off with a wrapper story, released back in 2013), and he's a great psycho: distinctive, assholish, and channeling that mime energy in a way that's eminently punchable; Very memorable.

 First introduced here applying clownface and working on his implements of torture (in a very 2000s-style horror scene, complete with alternative-rock soundtrack), Art never utters a word, choosing to communicate by mugging, pantomime, and stabbing. He toys with people, annoying and pushing buttons with lame humor before the knives come out... just an all-round hateful piece of shit. 

 Art the Clown is of a piece with a dark, comedic energy that runs throughout Terrifier, and helps keep it separate from the more joyless extreme horror movies of the last couple of decades. The kills are very gruesome and at least one of them, a bit of heavily sexualized violence, gets pretty uncomfortable, but they're also ridiculously over the top and Art's constant mugging helps keep a distance. Things are unpleasant enough to give this unapologetic horror movie a healthy dose of queasiness, but they also don't really feel like a wallow though misery - more like an accomplished team of craftsmen showing some justified pride in the work they've accomplished with latex and red food coloring; If they can gross you out, all the better.

 Terrifier feels doomed to be praised with qualifiers (it's good for what it is!) mainly because despite some agreeable weirdness, the story doesn't really surprise at any point - it saves all of its energy for its inventive death scenes. The script does a better job than expected of balancing the carnage with some tension building, reversals and narrow escapes, but the two-dimensional characters coupled with game but sometimes amateurish performances don't really get you to invest in anyone's fate.
 The low-budget friendly derelict building in which the bulk of the movie is set isn't that interesting to look at either, and there's no clear sense of geography to it; characters just run into each other (or the remains thereof) seemingly at random. The cinematography is serviceable, and I did like how the stark blacks of digital video bleed into the black in Art's monochromatic clown suit.

  It's a fun, unpretentious movie done in a way that seems unfashionable these days, where there's an unspoken rule that nastiness needs to be about something to justify itself  Sometimes nasty is all there is, innit? And anyhow, it's way better and more entertaining than a no-budget killer clown movie had any right to be.

You Won't be Alone

 In a small nineteenth-century Macedonian village (not that you would know from watching the movie) a mother looks towards her child's crib and finds a withered, burnt hag leering over her baby.

 She haggles and deals with the apparition - a wolf-eateress, a witch she recognizes as Old Maid Maria (played by Anamaria Marinca), and manages to convince the intruder to leave her child be for sixteen years.
 Maria agrees, but as a parting gift she takes the baby's tongue.

 As soon as the hag leaves the house, the mother takes the child to a cave and raises her there. For sixteen years Nevena (played by Leontina Bainović as a teen) only sees the outside world through two tiny flues on the top of her cavern, and her only contact with humanity are her mother's sporadic visits.
 It's all for nothing, though: Old Maid Maria, who is also a shape shifter, finds and comes for her anyway.

 After a bloody ritual Maria turns Nevena into a witch, giving her black talons and the ability to change forms. Her intention is to take her under her wing, but the teen proves to be too stubborn, and Maria too ill-suited to teaching. Annoyed, she sets Nevena free near a town, to teach her what she trusts will be painful lessons.

 Nevena stumbles around and discovers the hard way she can only take someone's shape by devouring them, stuffing their innards into the same wound Maria inflicted on her to turn her into a witch. She will take on several lives this way, living them out herself as she tries to sate her fascination with mankind. And all the time Old Maid Maria's watching balefully from afar, full of scorn at this upstart that aspires to a normal life that was denied to her.

 You Won't be Alone is a folk tale, sometimes grim and often beautiful, about an outsider trying to figure out humankind. Nevena is almost feral at the outset, and never does speak even after she grows back a tongue- but her lust for life and experience is very endearing.
 Because she takes the places of adults, she's thrown into the deep end of life and can never really fully enmesh herself into the lives of the villagers that surround her. So she continues trying; taking lives in more senses than one.

 Rural life looks unchanged from the middle ages -brutish and short- and Nevena never really got to learn the finer points of morality, so there's no shortage of ugly and violent incidents; She is a witch, after all, and the movie does not shy away from getting raw and bloody. But it's really not a horror film, even despite having a honest-to-goodness Freddy-Krueger-look-a-like villain in Old Maid Maria. Don't expect any scares here, but the gore is used in memorable ways. I especially liked how old meatball-face Maria off-handedly discards the remains of her former skin as a disgusting trail of shambles as she walks down a hill.

 The various actors that play Nevena in her different incarnations (including Noomi Rapace) collectively manage to portray a compelling character, and do a good job in getting you invested in her journey to rejoin humanity. Old Maid Maria gets a back story too, and is a good foil for the protagonist - kind of relatable but still an absolute dick.
 Director Goran Stolevski chose to go with a squared aspect ratio; The cinematography is excellent, he and his DP compose very dynamic shots that maximize the amount of countryside and natural lighting captured whenever possible.

 It's a very contemplative, sometimes slow movie. We're privy to Nevena's thoughts, which she expresses in a poetic muddle, often while meditatively walking through staggeringly pretty Serbian natural and rural landscapes.
 Yes, the Terence Malik vibes are very strong in this one.

 The constant narration is fine; I found it a bit annoying at first, but it grew on me, and as she gets more experience, her musings become more articulate and better composed. "Fires... Fires... What soft fires." she says of children playing. I like it.

 She'll often matter-of-factly describe horrible things about the people around her, chronicling the ways they hurt each other or the suffering they endure. But she always ends them with the same refrain: "And still... and still..."
 Which could serve as the heartfelt thesis for this beautiful movie.

Halloween

 The original 1978 Halloween has launched exactly a dozen sequels and remakes since it was released more than forty years ago. Its success arguably spawned the whole slasher genre, even if it didn't invent it.
 It remains the best.

 Because it was made before the slasher genre it helped popularize solidified its rules, Halloween seems like a more normal, more respectable movie than your Friday the 13ths and whatnot (and yes, I know the first F13 movie is much more of a respectable thriller than its reputation would lead you to think, but it's a bit of an outlier).

 Halloween begins in Haddonfield, Illinois, 1963, with a wonderful scene where a voyeuristic camera is nosing around the Myers family home, Black Christmas-style. The unseen assailant picks up a knife and kills a big-breasted 'teen'. When the parents arrive and the camera pulls back, we find out that the murderer is a cute six-year-old boy in a clown costume.

 It's a genuinely upsetting scene with carefully built tension that highlights just how much thought and craft director John Carpenter, already in the middle of an unimpeachable run of genre movies, put into the horror elements; Next year's underrated The Fog would illustrate this beautifully as well.

 Fifteen years and an iconic title scene later, we cut to a couple of medical professionals making their way to a remote sanitarium. One of them is Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) who will sort of act like Michael Myers's hype man throughout the movie, talking about just how Michael is 100% pure concentrated evil to anyone within earshot.

I should just start using this for all Halloween posts.

 When they get to the facilities, they find all the inmates wandering around free. Michael Myers steals their car and drives off into the night.
 The good doctor has Myers's number (666-6666, presumably) and knows his hard-on for evil will lead him back home where he can kill more people. Dr. Loomis will be in the periphery of the movie, doing some slight Giallo-style investigation into EVIL's movements and trying to whip Haddonfield's law enforcement into some sort of response.

 But here the movie starts focusing on its true protagonists - high-schooler Laurie Strode (played by Jamie Lee Curtis when she was nineteen) and her friends. She does look a bit old for the role, but consider her (also supposedly high-schooler) friends Annie (Nancy Kyes) and Linda (P.J. Soles) were both pushing thirty at the time. Anyhow; Laurie is the virginal, straight-laced final girl, Annie is the assertive mean girl, and Linda is the party girl, but they're all more rounded, funny characters than you'd get later on with the bigger ensembles future slasher movies would require to ensure a higher body count.
 Their dialog is a bit stilted but relatable, and there's a lot of focus on their adventures and misadventures before Michael finally comes home.

 As Halloween night (and EVIL) arrives Laurie and Annie are babysitting kids in houses across the street from each other, and Linda has plans with her boyfriend to come in for a visit later. When the carnage finally starts it's good, with lots of fakeouts and some good scares. Very good use of the background, always leaving space for Michael to pop up at any moment.
 It's extremely tame compared to what will come later; the bodycount is pretty low, and the movie isn't really built around the murders as much as the other films that will follow in its footsteps. The concept of 'kills' as a cool gore-drenched setpieces is nowhere to be seen here, but there's plenty of gruesome kicks (Mike can get pretty playful with his victims) and a whole lot of stalking.

 It's got its problems, sure. My main issue is that as menacing as Myers is (played by Nick Castle - future director of The Last Starfighter!), he's got a bit of a glass jaw and goes down very quickly when attacked. He does get back up eventually, though. Guess this had a lot more impact before we knew The Shape as an unkillable, relentless hulk.
 There's also the common issue with older movies where the genre has evolved beyond them; as mentioned before, this movie can seem downright quaint and a little slow in comparison to most modern horror. And a little stilted in general to modern eyes.

 Still, there's so much to like here!
Jamie Lee Curtis's very believable dread and terror. The little touches that serve to humanize the characters peppered throughout the script (my favorite being the hilarious bit where stuffy Dr. Loomis loosens up and decides to give a few kids a scare). Dean Cundey's crisp cinematography, which looks great to this day. Carpenter's immortal score and patient screw-turning.
 It's an exceedingly well crafted movie that has every right to be considered a classic

 

PG: Psycho Goreman

  "OK, here's the deal man. Winner is champion of the universe, loser gets buried alive," says precocious moppet Mimi (Nita Josée Hanna) while putting her hands on the ball. "Got it?"

 "That's fair." says his brother Luke (Owen Mire).

 As butt-rock guitars wail into the soundtrack the kids launch into a match of crazy ball, a made up game full of arcane rules. We get close ups of the kids running, throwing balls at each other, doing a jumping jack flash face-off...
 Then the guitars suddenly stop and the cameras pull away, and the game is shown as it is, not as the kids see it.

 It's a hilarious, extremely well made scene that captures so many things so well I'm kind of in awe of it. It doesn't just get you caught up in the kid's ridiculous game, it's also a pitch-perfect recreation of a certain type of 'Extreme!' 90's commercials aimed at kids, a great representation of children's state of mind, it's setting up plot points for later; Crazy ball will return. And it's full of funny bits of trash talk and John Woo-style ball throwing.

 Best of all is the punch line: once Mimi finally wins (with a bullshit move called a switcheroo, which will also factor in later) it cuts to Luke digging a full-sized grave under Mimi's smug supervision.

 Yes, Psycho Goreman really is something special.

 While digging his grave, Luke stumbles on an ancient tomb with some sort of artifact affixed to its lid. Fooling around with it, Mimi manages to take the artifact and then they get called to bed.
 The tomb belonged, of course, to an ancient galactic menace (Matthew Ninaber wears the suit, voice by Steven Vlahos). Upon reviving he tries to resume his reign of terror; Unfortunately for him, the gem Mimi retrieved allows its bearer absolute control over him. And she obviously uses it to basically make the ancient evil her pet. She and her brother dub him Psycho Goreman... PG for short.

 To say much more would spoil the fun in this ridiculous, twisted spoof of such early nineties' luminaries as The Guyver and Urban Commando. There's a ton of cool monsters as intergalactic forces come to hunt down PG, and a lot of entertaining confrontations between PG and avowed little maniac Mimi. Director Steve Konstanski is an effects guy, so we get lots and lots of gorgeous, extremely expressive practical effects both for creatures and gore.

A Power Rangers-like fight ensues. <3

 The acting might be a sticking point for some (Mimi can be a bit much), but I loved it. The kids obviously are having a blast, with Luke given the thankless role of the straight man, and Mimi running around chewing scenery with abandon and spouting some truly inspired lines. 

 It is an extremely low budget movie, and sometimes it has that slightly-stretched feel these things often get when trying to fill out ninety minutes. You do get the obligatory (very funny) retro music video, for example. But all of the scenes and developments are worth at least a couple of good jokes or a cool effect, and none overstay their welcome.
 Psycho Goreman is unpredictable, well made, agreeably disturbed, and it gets the period its spoofing down to a tee (stick around for not one but two tailor-made end credit songs)

 I adore this movie.

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.

Accident Man: Hitman's Holiday

 Mike Fallon, Accident man (the redoubtable Scott Adkins) hasn't had that bad a time after having to go against all his assassin co-workers in his first on-screen adventure. Sure, he's had to leave his native UK behind, but he ends up in Malta, where we learn job openings for an accomplished assassin-for-hire are plentiful.

 Besides some lingering guilt issues, he's fine. He's got himself a nice pad, and has money enough to hire Siu-Ling (Sarah Chang), a kung-fu master, to unexpectedly show up every now and then and beat the shit out of him Cato style.
 Yes, a Pink Panther reference. Accident Man: Hitman's Holiday is a much goofier movie than the first one. But that's OK; enough of the jokes land. It's funny! And the fights are still outstanding.

 Mike's thinking he's got his life sorted, when suddenly Fred (Perry Benson), one of the fellow assassins he betrayed back in the UK, pops out of the blue. Fred's a loveable old geezer who made a living inventing ways to murder people, and Mike had a soft spot for the man that was apparent even in the first movie. It turns out Fred is there on personal business, and after some back and forth they decide to join forces and share the contracts.

 The first act is a bit episodic; There's a montage of the boys testing out random assassination methods, of them hanging out (along with Siu-Ling), and a couple of random hits. The movie's plot only gets started almost half an hour in when someone tries to kill a powerful mobster's son using Mike's disguised-as-an-accident MO.
 Mike successfully avoids being framed, but due to his reputation the mafia boss enlists him to protect her son; She takes Fred hostage, and threatens to kill him should Mike fail and her son die.

 The son turns out to be a jackass called Dante (George Fouracres) - an entitled, whiny man-child whose whole sadly unfunny schtick is to be painfully obnoxious. This is not even a Lethal Weapon 2 situation where he's got a good heart - the kid is a piece of shit through and through.
 But thankfully while Dante himself is not a funny character, it is pretty funny to see him get manhandled and put through the wringer in various ways throughout, and the movie understands this well.

 The meat of the movie is kind of the action movie equivalent of a videogame boss rush; Mike, trying to keep Dante from harm, has to go against a colorful roster of assassins gunning for the nine-million-euros bounty - at one point that's translated into a smaller amount of British pounds, which is a kind of unintended joke given recent events here in the UK. A painful, unfunny joke.
 The fights are plentiful, a lot of fun, and excellently choreographed and blocked. Some are noticeably better than others, but the bad ones don't drag on enough for it to be a problem. The camera is very dynamic, zooming in and out of the action to emphasize blows, and constantly moving around the combatants to show off their moves. I found it a little bit distracting at first, but while I'd prefer a more traditional setup it did grow on me; If nothing else, it's impressive just how much planning must have gone into integrating the camera moves into already busy fights.

 All in all I don't think it's as good as the first one; Directors George and Harry Kirby do a good job, but they're no Jesse V. Johnson. The limited budget is a lot more visible here, some of the humor doesn't quite work, and even when it does I prefer the first movie's smart-ass action movie tone rather than the goofier, more overtly comedic take this sequel chose to go with.
 But damn if it isn't still a great, fun, martial-arts-packed movie, packed with great jokes. Not as essential doesn't mean that it isn't essential as well.

Black Adam

 Kanhdaq's had it rough. Four thousand years ago an evil king looking for an evil MacGuffin brutally enslaved its people until a superhero rose up to throw him down. This superhero (the first incarnation of Shazam, apparently?) was never seen again, and the country fell into turmoil, taken over by outsiders for much of its history. 

 These days the country is occupied by the Intergang, which seems to be some mixture of a mafia and a PMC (complete with South African accents). And they're after the evil MacGuffin, too. A plucky adventuring archeologist (Sarah Shani) manages to recover it to try to keep it out of Intercorp's hands, but when they move to forcefully retrieve it she unwittingly unleashes the ancient superhero protector of Khandaq, Teth Adam.

 Teth-Adam (Dwayne Johnson), looking cool with a ratty cape and The Rock's distinctive glowering gaze, proceeds to lay waste to a small battalion of mixed units. But it's different from the carnage in any other superhero movie because, you see, Adam's an Antihero. It's like a hero, but cooler, because he can kill people in any brutal style a PG13 rating will allow.

 Yes, we're back in Superheroland, where critical thinking is stuck at a twelve-year-old level.

Cool guys don't look at explosions. They also murder willy-nilly.

 Anyhow, I can enjoy that sort of thing, as long as the movie is upfront about it, which... this one is. The action is pretty fun - many, many explosions and deaths, some basic gallows humor, and lots of slow motion justified because, similar to Superman, Adam operates at a much quicker speed than humans can. It's marred by that weightless CGI feel when vehicles are thrown around, but at this point in time I guess we got to roll with it until the tech gets better.

 What is not acceptable is that they try to make it iconic by completely mangling the Stone's Paint it Black. Come on, dudes, that song will always be better than anything you ever do; if you're going to ride on its coattails, at least don't butcher it.

 After murderizing dozens of people Adam is wounded by a kryptonite-like missile and falls unconscious. He's rescued by the same archeologist that awoke him, and she decides to take the unconscious Adam and the evil MacGuffin back to her department.
 When he wakes up Adam gets a bit of a history lesson, bonds with the archeologist's obnoxious, superhero-obsessed (of course) teen son, and refuses the hero's call for the first of many, many, many times during the movie.

 And here we get a slight complication. The world at large - well, Suicide Squad's Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), is concerned about this new metahuman running amok, so she sends in the Justice Society to neutralize and contain him: Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), Dr. Fate (Pierce Brosnan, by far the best thing in the movie), plus a couple other minor superheroes that don't make much of an impression.

 Because Hawkman, the expedition leader, is portrayed as an arrogant, pig-headed idiot (I honestly thought this side of things was kinda well done; much better than the idiocy they had to cook up to get Batman and Superman to fight each other, at least), you could say things start off with the wrong foot. And so begin an endless series of fights and confrontations in different configurations between the three groups involved: Adam vs JSA, JSA and Adam Vs Intertec, etc, with the evil MacGuffin lurking off in the wings to provide a final battle.

 At the same time Adam's past will be fed to us piecemeal in an unsuccessful attempt to give his character some depth. Will he finally pick up The Hero's calls? Well, yes, dummy. Of course he will. What did you think you were watching?

 Like so many of these movies, the script's main motivation is to string action sequences together. We get almost zero background for any of the superheroes except Adam, which to be perfectly honest was a bit of a relief, and the movie's themes are treated as an afterthought.

 Everything's very adolescent and extremely shallow. The big act of rebellion that gets the king in ancient Kahndaq all hot and bothered? It's getting a bunch of guards run around and making a hand gesture from a high place. Posturing, it's all posturing, which kinda looks bad when later on it becomes obvious it's referencing the Arab Spring.

 The movie also flirts with taking a stand against imperialism; we know this because the obnoxious kid explicitly mentions the I word when sassing back to an Intersoft thug. But... after timidly raising some points it then sweeps everything under the rug so it can focus on the brawls. Same goes for the whole questioning of superheroes vs. antiheroes; at no point is there any question that Kahndaq will need a hero - hell, whenever the residents of Kahndaq, including intrepid archeologist lady, look at Adam they look as if they were seconds away from an orgasm.

 And fuuuuuuck does this movie overestimate how fascinating we'll find Black Adam and his antiheroing ways. Someone needs to remind WB that we've already seen antiheroes before, even within DC - the concept had been pounded to paste by Zach Snyder's ponderous, shitty, brainless take for hour upon endless hour, and then (for contrast) it was handled with grace and humor by James Gunn in his terrific Suicide Squad and Peacemaker. This one adds precisely nothing of interest to the conversation, despite putting the subject front and center.

 So... very much a spectacle movie, then. Luckily on that front it does pretty well.
 Catalan-born director Jaume Collet-Serra ably apes Zach Snyder's style down to the desaturated palette, soundtrack and variable-speed action. There's nothing here that will stick in the memory for long, but it's all entertaining if a bit stretched out; As in Snyder's films, there's a bit of abuse of slow-mo, especially when it's used to allow those involved to strike cool poses rather than clarify what's going on.

 It's breezier than any of Snyder's superhero crap, less self-serious (there are a couple of jokes here and there, some of them good, and a fun Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood/Ennio Morricone homage) and it doesn't insist on insulting our intelligence at every which turn. Only on a few turns, and the abuse is pretty mild compared to BvS.

 The actors do what they can with slim pickings. Dwayne Johnson has shown that he has enormous reserves of  charm and good comic timing, but they go untapped here; his one-note performance as Black Adam is all about intensity, which gets kind of boring pretty quickly. Pierce Brosnan gets to have a lot more fun as a wise avuncular uncle type, and he single-handedly elevates a lot of the character drama through sheer charisma. Finally, I did like Aldis Hodge as Hawkman, he makes for a good asshole.

 

 So, with the lowered expectations I approach any superhero movie these days, this was a modest success. It does what it sets out to do, its many many problems worth at most an eye-roll, not a facepalm. It's loud, crass, dumb, and it overstays its welcome by at least twenty minutes, but its action makes for an enjoyable way to waste a Saturday afternoon.

Halloween Ends

 The new Halloweeen trilogy has definitely been a ride. It began by doing away with all the previous installments except for the first one and delivering a very satisfying, mostly traditional slasher sequel. Then for its own sequel it took a hard left, featuring some strange choices (which I thought were exciting) and some of the goriest, most upsetting kills in slasher-dom.

 Halloween Ends again takes an unexpected turn. It's a much more traditional slasher than Kills ever tried to be, but it also keeps willfully subverting expectations, sometimes at its own expense.

 Director David Gordon Green accrued some serious cred with his early movies, mostly with the brilliant George Washington, which earned him frequent comparisons with Terence Malik (back when everyone spoke of Malik in hushed reverential tones.) He's done plenty of good movies since, but before he became the Halloween guy, he also made a couple of stoner comedies (one of them quite good, one of them very, very bad.)

 It's this stoner period that I keep coming back to when thinking of Halloween Ends. It's completely unfair, but I can't help it but to imagine David Gordon Green and his buddy Danny McBride (who shares writing duties) getting well and truly baked before mapping out these movies. The wild swings and reversals and inconsistencies and dropped themes and threads make a lot more sense to me that way, as do the ponderous, overwrought meditations on Evil.

  

Yeah, I get that it's based on Loomis's rants on the original Halloween. Still, though.

 After a nasty short prelude that introduces a new main character, this latest installment picks up four years after the events of Halloween Kills. Michael Myers, while still at large, has seemingly vanished, and Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) has turned over a new leaf and decided to move out of Murdertrap Deathhouse and rejoin polite society with her granddaughter (Andi Matichak).

 New character Cody is also trying to rebuild his life after accidentally killing a kid in the pre-title scene. He's been acquitted of murder, but the residents of Haddonfield at large remain as shallow, short-sighted and judgemental as ever; Cody and Laurie meet as he's being mercilessly bullied by a group of marching band nerds, of all things. Laurie rescues him and decides to play the matchmaker and introduce Cody to her granddaughter Allison.

 Allison and Cody hit it off, to say the least. For some reason Allison latches onto Cody with a psychotic intensity; Unfortunately, while both of the actors are OK there's no chemistry there and their courtship is very poorly written. Except for a scene with Sebadoh and Dead Kennedys songs... man, I wish the parties I've gone to played Sebadoh and Dead Kennedys. Anyhow, and it's SPOILERS from now on, the circumstances pile on poor Cody so that he eventually snaps and starts stabbing people to death - at first involuntarily, but slowly getting a taste for it. And Michael Myers might be playing tutor.

 It's not that weird a setup for a slasher movie - yes, Friday the 13th did something similar - but having to shoehorn Myers in, and trying to play it like there's no supernatural elements... it doesn't ruin it exactly, but he's a big spanner in the works.

 The carnage is great, as always. Who would have thought the director of All the Real Girls would move on to be a respectable purveyor of gore? The kills aren't quite as gruesome or upsetting as in, um, Kills, but there are some show-stoppers here (there's a particularly nasty one with a blowtorch, and a record-skipping scene that is a definite keeper). There's a bit too much emphasis on knives, so it gets a little repetitive, but hey.

 While the movie is a bit on the slow side, it does carry momentum and, fueled by its unpredictability, quite a bit of energy. Things escalate until (of course) it's Laurie vs. Myers again; like so many other things in this new trilogy, the logistics and underpinnings are clumsy and half-baked, but it brings everything to a satisfying conclusion that, yes, seems very final. Halloween ENDS, as the end credits helpfully point out.

 I didn't find it as appealingly weird as its predecessor (for my money, the best of this new bunch) but I enjoyed it, warts and all. It's as part of this new trilogy, and especially as a sequel to Kills, that this last installment fails the hardest, since while it keeps the characters and some plot threads (sometimes very minor) and gives them a satisfying resolution, it ignores everything the other movies seemed to be setting up.
 It's not a huge problem if you consider it as a stand-alone film, though. I'll go to bat for it.

Vesper

 Vesper is an English-language French movie written and directed by Kristina Buožytė and Bruno Samper, shot in Lithuania. It's a bleak, brutal coming of age story set in a near-future biopunk hellscape.

Biopunk is a sci-fi subgenre that focuses on biotechnology - it's well-represented in literature (my favorite exponent is probably Pablo Bacigalupi's The Wind Up Girl) but not really that common in cinema; Besides the films of both Cronembergs, I guess you could argue the Blade Runners are a bit biopunk.

 Vesper embraces the genre with gusto. A crashed ornithopter-like vehicle sheds a trail of organic parts as it goes down, generators run on cultures of bacteria, drone repair looks like a deleted scene from Videodrome, and so on. It's a bit too fantastic to register as proper hard scifi, unfortunately (too many things seem either too far-fetched or too nonsensical) but the world is lovingly rendered with a lot of imagination, detail and texture.

 It's set at some point in a future where biotechnology run amok has wrecked the ecosystem. Animals as we know them are gone, trees sport meaty, cancerous growths, there's weeds that shoot weird insectile missiles (remember what I said about the 'science' being a bit too silly?) and so on; the film does a great job at portraying a world that's been completely remade. Enclosed Citadels house the high castes of the world, who live in relative luxury while people outside survive how they can - and one of the ways they maintain their power is by selling seeds that have been genetically locked so that they only last a generation (utopia, as designed by Monsanto/Cargill.)

 13-year-old Vesper (Raffiella Chapman) wasn't born on a Citadel. She lives alone in a small house with her invalid father (the great character actor Richard Brake) who is bed-bound but often accompanies her via a remote-control floating drone; her life consists of foraging in the mud for edibles and weird plants to run her biotech experiments on, and occasionally trading with neighboring creep Jonas (Eddie Marsan), who runs a cultish compound close to her house.
 After a leisurely first act introducing Vesper and her world, the movie coalesces around two events and their consequences: First, Vesper is forced to steal some valuable supplies from Jonas. Then she sees a crashing flying vehicle and rescues one of its passengers (Rosy McEwen.)
 The Passenger, Camelia, is a Citadel resident, and she promises Vesper access to it if she helps her out with a few tasks. The rest of the story has to do with their tentative friendship, and the escalating sets of complications Vesper's actions and Camelia's just being there brings for everyone involved.

 The movie feels a bit like a young adult yarn at times, and that's not helped at all by using the tired old 'girl genius' trope (Vesper, you see, happens to be an absolute wiz at biotech hacking!) It's a french young adult yarn, though, so it leans extra cruel with a discomfiting side of sexual menace.
 It gets pretty dark; not overwhelmingly so, but this is the sort of movie that unceremoniously kills of important characters and is happy to deny the more traditional payoffs you'd expect out of this sort of thing.

 The pacing is sedate at first, but soon it ratchets up the tension as you wait for the other shoe(s) to drop. It also does surprise with some tense action, not incredibly ambitious but well staged.

 All the actors are good. Chapman is fierce and committed, and Marsan gives a great, sleazy performance that makes for a very hiss-worthy villain, especially once things get serious and he lets his freak flag fly. It's a low-budget movie but it's got an interesting aesthetic going on with a lot of light/shadow contrast (people who hate washed-out looks and dark cinematography may want to sit this one out). The effects are pretty good and imaginative, and I especially liked the wardrobe design; there are some really good-looking, original costumes on display:

Full-face facemask

Full-body hood (over an actual hood!)

 It's a good one.

Get Duked

  Get Duked is a very slight, likeable comedy about a bunch of lads who get dragged into being the most dangerous game while tripping balls in the Scottish highlands.

 The lads in question are a trio of misfits played by Lewis Gribben (the dumb... well, the dumbest one), Rian Gordon (the down to earth one) and Viraj Juneja (a vain would-be hip hop star who calls himself DJ Beatroot) who are forced to take part in the Duke of Edinburgh award to atone for burning down a bloc of toilets while trying to find out if shit is flammable.

 The Duke of Edinburgh award is a UK scheme to get teens to do sports, outdoor activities, that sort of thing; in this case it's a two-day hike across the highlands, overseen by their teacher (Jonathan Aris). The lads are joined by a slightly nerdy, middle-class kid (Samuel Bottomley) who wants to do the challenge because 'it'll look good on my CV'.

 The foursome set into the wilderness and soon get into some mild misadventures involving teen idiocy, electrified fences, and magic mushrooms. It's all low key, affable humour; the movie's sympathies rest squarely with the kids, without any of the bullying or hostility you'd expect out of a bunch of people like this when forced to go with an outsider.
 They're not hoodlums or anything, just a sweet bunch of knuckleheads with just enough depth to give the movie a little bit of a thematic kick, portrayed affectionately. They're the film's biggest asset.

 Things kick into gear when they start being chased around the hills and heaths by a masked posh gentleman (Eddie Izzard) with a hunting rifle and his wife (Georgie Glen), who keep spouting classist drivel about how they need to cull the herd of insouciant (read: low-class) teens; Subtle, this ain't.
 But it is pretty funny that the lads think he's the actual Duke of Edinburgh.

 Ostensibly a horror-comedy, the horror side of things is all but neglected, even though it drives the plot, focusing instead on character-based humor and a welcome absurdist streak.
 The comedy does fare a lot better, but it's low-key and pretty hit and miss; Besides the character stuff, it scores some big laughs with its most gruesome (it's not very gruesome) black-humor joke involving some vehicular manslaughter, the way they resolve the final confrontation with a deus ex machina - wait, is that a reference to Terry Jones's Erik the Viking?) It also includes a full meat-headed hip hop song courtesy of DJ Beatroot. But there are a lot of duds too: everything to do with the provincial police officers sniffing around the edge of the goings-on is eye-rollingly bad (even Kate Dickey can't save that drivel), there are some low-rent psychedelic scenes that aren't really integrated into the story... the sort of filler you'd expect in a low-budget stoner-adjacent comedy like this.

 It's a likeable but twee thing that struggles to fill out its running time and to fulfill plot obligations. Good thing the asshats it revolves around are fun to hang around with.

Mad Max: Fury Road

 First Avatar, now Fury Road. Damn my decision to write down a few words for everything I watch (which I've failed to do a few times, but shhhhh.) So: what could I possibly say about Fury Road?

 It's the coolest thing ever, and every time I see it it feels exactly like watching Road Warrior as a not quite jaded pre-teen. (Road Warrior was of course the coolest thing ever before Fury Road usurped its place). If you like action cinema at all and somehow haven't seen it, go see it. It's mandatory.

 If you want to read a cogent dissection of what makes it so great I'd point you to OutlawVern's epic, factually and objectively 100% correct review. I feel anything I could say has already been said better there and in a hundred other places.

 Instead, I'll mention that this last time I saw it with someone who hasn't seen a lot of movies, especially not action movies.

 A guy my age, who liked the look of the trailer and was curious about it.

 He liked it (or at least was polite enough to say some nice things about it), but the movie is so relentless, so manic that he had trouble following the plot and missed a ton of stuff.

 For example, he was surprised when they show Immortan Joe's corpse at the end; He'd completely missed his death earlier on, which, to be fair, is awesome but pretty anticlimactic. He did not get why they were using Max as a blood bag and other worldbuilding details. The movie overwhelmed him, it was literally too much too fast for him to absorb.

 He's a really intelligent dude in his forties, and doesn't normally have issues following twisty movies (although talking to him I did notice he has trouble when things get a bit meta. For example, he liked Knives Out a lot, but had trouble with the meta elements of See How They Run, which is a much simpler movie.)

 Got me thinking that it goes to show watching a movie is also a skill that needs to be trained, and that different genres come with their on very particular set of skills. I think of Fury Road as the apex of crystal clear action cinematography, but it's an evolution that incorporates lots of disparate elements over hundreds of movies, and that most of us have internalized because we grew up with the genre. It's a very specialized machine that we've come to understand over time. I used to think Fury Road was... if not universally appealing, at least a movie any person who liked action cinema would at least enjoy. But this guy likes Die Hard, Ronin, Bond movies and, ahem, Stranger Things, and he couldn't really get into this one, beyond the imagery.

 Maybe spare a thought for those that watch Fury Road and only see a clanking, bewildering monstrosity.

 Now excuse me, I'm going to see if I can convince him to watch Road Warrior.