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 horror 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 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 (real-life) 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 Scottish highlands, overseen by their teacher (Jonathan Aris). The lads are joined by a 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 from a story focusing on  a bunch of kids being forced to work together.
 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 is 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: some business involving a little vehicular manslaughter, and the way they resolve the final confrontation with a deus ex machina - oh, shit, 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 the great Kate Dickey can't save that drivel.) There are also 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 decent 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.

My Best Friend's Exorcism

 Abby (Elsie Fisher) and Gretchen (Amiah Miller) are BFFs in the eighties. Gretchen gets possessed while visiting a haunted house, some melodrama and mildly comic scares ensue, and then there's an exorcism.

 And some other stuff happens. It's hard to muster enthusiasm to write about a movie like My Best Friend's Exorcism; It's not just that it's not for me, but mostly it's, well, basic. Very very basic.

 I'd heard good things about the book, and was planning to read it with my son but we never did get to it, and now we never will (that sounds ominous! I just meant he's now older than its target audience). To be fair to a novel I have not read, there are some clever conceits here and there, a few funny lines I'm guessing are lifted straight from the source material. And the drama might work better with a novel's internal perspective on the characters; But the movie adaptation reeks of... not exactly low effort, but there's definitely an utter lack of ambition.

 Visually it's got no energy whatsoever. The whole thing is built out of exactly the types of shots you'd expect for each scene - no imagination, no surprises, no sense of style. The script is similarly dull: blunt in its messaging, tame in its horror and way too broad in its comedy. And it relies exclusively and unnecessarily on CGI for effects that could just as easily be achieved practically, which rarely means good things for a horror movie.

 Yes, even the prerequisite projectile vomiting is completely unconvincing.

CGI pea soup. Pazuzu does not approve.

 I didn't really much care for the acting, either, but to be honest the characters are so underdeveloped and the direction so flat that I wouldn't hold it against any of the actors. It's ostensibly a period piece, but it just looks like a modern movie with 80's signifiers thrown in every now and then - including some that feel a little forced.

 That the horror didn't work for me is OK, that's a me problem: Heightened teen drama is not something I'd rank highly in the list of things I can be bothered to give a fuck about. The main scares are built around not the story's supernatural elements, but things like social insecurities, fear of betrayal and alienation, and stacking the cards against the protagonist to a ridiculous degree (an extremely common narrative device in YA fiction I personally can't stand.)

 At least some of the humor works. 'Puke and rebuke' might be the best euphemism for an exorcism I've  ever encountered, and there are a couple of  solid visual gags and funny lines lurking in the script. It's not a lot, but it's something, I guess.

 I didn't hate this movie, exactly... But I was very impatient for it to be over and done with once it was clear it wouldn't have anything interesting on offer... which, unfortunately, was only a couple of scenes in.

Hellraiser (2022)

 Hellraiser will always have a special place in horror history. Clive Barker's creation was so unique, so personal back in 1987 that it almost seemed like a nasty little open sore on the skin of the world, showing another, sleazier, more interesting reality beyond*. Even today, with all the purported creative freedom afforded by the streaming market and cheaper effects, it's rare to see something that approaches its (or its sequel Hellbound's) dark, exuberant imagination, perversity and grisly imagery. It made a lifelong Barker fan out of me.

 A reboot with Barker's involvement for the first time since the second movie has long been rumored, even in the midst of increasingly forgettable sequels (I missed the last one, I think.) And now it's finally out.

 It doesn't even begin to have the same impact as the original did - how could it? And it feels curiously... restrained, for a series that at its best embraced batshit insane excess. It's slick, well produced, and a bit too normal. But it's still good, and it does get to do some great shit by the end.

 The protagonist this time around is Riley (Odessa A'Zion, doing a great job), who's a bit of a mess; she's on a twelve-step program (it doesn't last) and living in a shared flat with her overprotective brother, her brother's partner, and another roommate (this living arrangement doesn't last, either.)

 Egged on by her shady boyfriend Trevor (Drew Starkey) she falls off the wagon and helps in the robbery of a familiar-looking art-deco-ish puzzle cube from an otherwise empty container. Later, after a fight with her brother that gets her kicked out of the house, she gets even more wasted at a playground and starts fooling around with the cube, unlocking it and causing a blade to snap out. A gruesome figure appears and tells her to cut someone using that blade, so they can claim a victim... but she's too far gone to pay attention.

 Riley is so out of it she barely notices her brother arrive. Feeling guilty for kicking her out, he's there to take her back; but while gathering her stuff he stabs himself with the cube's blade.

 Cue a very effective scene where walls start moving and the Cenobites take her brother away (It does look a mite more impressive than the original's flimsy moving walls, but nowhere near as iconic.) When Riley comes back to, there's nothing left of her brother except some blood splatters on a bathroom sink.

 Trying to work out what happened, Riley and the remaining flatmates follow a trail of clues that leads them to the original owner of the cube - a millionaire asshole (Goran Visnjic) previously seen in a prologue where he sacrifices a sex worker. They head to his mansion, where some third-act twists raise the stakes, explain what the hell (literally) is going on, and the new Pinhead finally makes their appearance. It all gets appropriately messed up and weird, up to and including an old monolithic friend popping in to a triumphant reprise of Christopher Young's original score.

 But... mostly it's neither too weird, nor too extreme. The 2022 model has more than enough carnage to cater to any gorehound's needs, but until the very very end there's nothing nearly as memorable as Frank's resurrection, or his glistening, flayed form strutting around and groping at Julia in the original film. This is my biggest issue with this version of Hellraiser: Almost all of the perversity is gone, the wild psychodrama and overriding horniness have been excised. This is not your (perverted) father's Hellraiser.

 The visual effects for the weirdness that happens when the cube are pretty cool; There are a lot of surreal scenes where perspective fails, walls open up and distances don't behave as you'd expect them to (most memorably within the back of a moving van.)

 I'm not a fan of the design of the new Cenobites; they're very detailed, but seem oddly... sterile. I get what they were going for, but I much prefer the tortured, mangled meat puppets of their previous incarnations. Pinhead gets some pearl-headed pins, which I thought was an abomination, but rereading The Hellbound Heart, he originally had multi-coloured, jewel-handled pins. Glam Cenobite would be a fun image, but pearl handles are probably a good compromise. Still, at least the Hellpriest's and the Chatterer's designs are pretty cool, and while no one will ever replace Doug Bradley, Jamie Clayton gives it a very creepy, otherworldly spin.

 As the plot synopsis up there indicated, the core mythology of the setting has seen some changes. Now it's more of an occult ritual, with every configuration of the box a step towards a goal (some of these permutations had been seen in previous movies, but just as stages in resolving the puzzle.) It's a good premise on which to hang this movie, but I again prefer the original version where jaded perverts and hedonists sought out the box to find pleasure at the other side of (or inside of) pain; The new interpretation, as I see it -that there's only pain, the cenobites just don't understand or care about pleasure- is in keeping with this more boring, safer version of Hellraiser.

 But it's as good a version as could be done without a singular vision like Barker's given full control, and much better than I expected after finding out one David Goyer was involved in its long, long march toward completion. It's a very well-made movie oozing with obvious love and respect for the original; Well acted, and with a lot of cool scenes courtesy of director David Bruckner and cinematographer Eli Born. Seriously, it's a really good looking film!

 And they do tie things up with a killer ending (vague spoilers) - an emotional gut-punch that recontextualises the lament configuration (the box's canonical name) beautifully, followed by the films craziest scene, an epilogue where a cenobite gets his wings. It's a shame it will be overshadowed by the ending of Men in the 'most batshit horror scene of 2022' department, because it's a cool, beautifully grotesque scene that could only happen in a Hellraiser movie. Much respect for that.

*Nightbreed and Lord of Illusions were similarly, startlingly original, but failed to catch on. I'm clearly in the wrong timeline.

Deadstream

 Have you heard of "Influencer houses"? They're these houses or flats that investor groups rent and dump a bunch of influencers into to generate 24/7 #content, in the hopes that they will go viral and generate revenue. Upon first hearing of them a couple years back my first thought was that they the perfect setting for a slasher film. Think about it: An enclosed, possibly remote location with a ready-made supply of loathsome, attractive young people to put through the meat grinder. Cameras everywhere, so you can make it found footage if you want. And if you frame it as a Halloween special or a horror channel, you have an excellent excuse for no one to take the carnage seriously: the whole world is watching, yes, but thinks everything is staged.
 The main problem would be finding someone sympathetic enough in that world. Oh, and you'd actually need to watch something that's similar enough to a bunch of influencers trying to make it big in TikTok for at least a while- that shit is beyond parody at this point.

 Deadstream, a movie about an influencer encountering real horror, is much more clever than that. There's been a few "internet paranormal experts discover that ghosts are real and get more than they bargained for" since... at least Grave Encounters, and a lot of them are good. This one differentiates itself by centering itself on a single live streamer - Shawn Ruddy (Alex Winter, also pulling duties as one-half of the writing/directing team), a Logan-Paul-style dipshit who streams stunts like getting locked in the trunk of a car to be smuggled across the border to Mexico, picking fights with cops, and paying a bum to fight with him on his live casts.
 After one of those stunts went horribly wrong, Shawn was effectively booted off the internet for a year, deemed too toxic to sponsor.

 Now he's back with some corporate backing(and an apology video), and his stream ("Wrath of Shawn") is back. It being Halloween Shawn's next stunt is to go into "Death House" (some haunted cabin in the woods), spend the night there, and see if he can pick a fight with the supernatural...

Spoilers: he does. And a fight is not the only thing that's picked.

 The whole movie is presented as a part of Shawn's stream. Everything's shot either through the main camera he carries on a harness pointing at his face, the GoPro strapped on his forehead, or the multiple remote cams he sets up across the house; The stream chat pops into view whenever Shawn looks at it, offering some jokes (a lot of them of the blink-and-you'll miss it variety.) Later viewers submit their own videos and offer advice.

 Shawn himself is a brilliant creation, effectively poking fun at the mass of screaming man-babies of the internet who attempt to make money by putting themselves through some degree of discomfort or humiliation for their viewer's enjoyment. Willing to scream at the drop of a hat, displaying "authenticity" and being cannily self-effacing while trying to peddle all sorts of merch.
 It's all effective satire, even if it gets grating simply by virtue of... well, passing for the real thing. If this sounds like it will annoy you, well, yeah - it will, and by design.

 Once at the house things are effectively spooky. It's not a slow burn movie, but there's a good sense of dread as Shawn locks himself in the house and starts sweeping through it, room by room, while commenting on the place's macabre history and reputation for paranormal events. Creeping through a dark, abandoned place with only a flashlight will always be creepy if the direction is halfway decent (which it is!), and both the stories Shawn tells and the things he finds at the house effectively build tension and set up things for future scares. Not to mention that the house's simple geography is very effectively mapped out for the ensuing action.
 He soon runs into fan (Melanie Stone) who's managed to figure out where the stream was taking place. He begrudgingly lets her tag along, but her behaviour becomes more and more erratic as the night goes along; things soon come to a head, and the movie gleefully switches gears into Evil Dead territory.

 To use Sam Raimi's terminology, the film's back half is the platonic ideal of a spookablast. Unlike the newer Evil Dead movies, Deadstream focuses more on the fun side of horrific shit than on its intensity (more Evil Dead 2/3 or Drag me to Hell, in other words, than the first Evil Dead). The house's resident evil has a puckish sense of humour in its way of fucking with Shawn, its undead are definitely deadite-influenced, and even the protagonist's mix of resourcefulness and cluelessness echoes Ash in some ways. And yes, there are more overt homages as well.

The acting is great. Winter might be a little too good at playing this douchebag, and Stone's radiant natural charm scores some huge laughs playing off Shawn's pettiness.

But the script perfectly understands that Shawn being put through a gauntlet of clever and horrifying tortures makes for a hugely satisfying third act; Deadstream doesn't quite reach the energy or inventiveness of Raimi at his prime (not that anyone expects it to), but it makes a respectable attempt out of it and it's a huge amount of fun to watch it try. Writer/directors Joseph and Vanessa Winter and their crew milk a lot of clever scenes out of the rigid stream-mimicking format, especially when switching between Shawn's point of view and static cameras, and manage to get a lot of cool monsters and gore effects out of a minuscule budget (validating their promise from their short To Hell and Back on V/H/S 99)
 There are some attempts at establishing a mythology and setting up some themes - even some character growth - but they're mostly shoved aside to set up the next gruesome joke/shock. It's not a huge loss when what we do get to see is so much fun.

 Highly recommended.

Leave No Trace

 Will (Bill Foster) and her daughter Tom (Thomasina McKenzie) live off the grid in the wilds of a national park just off Portland. Living off the land and evading detection from forest rangers, their routine includes homeschooling, survivalism, training drills in covering their tracks in case they need to escape quietly from the authorities, and forays into town to stock up on essentials and the few luxuries they can get by trading Will's meds for money (Tom, waving a chocolate bar: Need or want? Will: Both.)
 It's an appealing, very (but not uniquely) American Thoreau-style fantasy, brought vividly to life by director Debra Granik with a naturalistic, unshowy style and the same lack of melodrama she brought to the superb Winter's Bone.

 Will and Tom, despite their best precautions, are soon discovered by the authorities and sent to be processed by an inhumane bureaucratic system that doesn't quite know what to do with them, and is all set to fail them horribly. But, in my favorite touch (and something that will be a running theme throughout the movie) the people around them - in this case, the social workers assigned to them - quickly empathise with them and go out of their way to help them navigate the battery of questionnaires and personality tests set up to act as a barrier any sort of social help these days.

 This might be about the only movie I've seen that paints a rosy picture of the American welfare system; it might not square with reality, but it works well within the reality of this movie.

Got to love the ironic use of wallpaper here...

 Will and Tom are reunited, and luck out when a Christmas tree farmer hears about the case and offers Will a job, and a small worker's cabin for him and his daughter. But while Tom immediately makes the best of the situation, Will does not do well; every form he needs to fill, every other rule he needs to follow, he gets more and more restless, until he has enough and leaves again, taking his daughter up north.

 From there on the movie unspools until the simmering conflict between the two main characters boils over. It's a quiet, contemplative character study that's happy to forego story to instead observe day to day routines with an attention to procedural detail - be it bagging pines for use as Christmas trees, carving wood into kindling, or how rabbits are prepared for pageants.

 The acting is superb (this deservedly launched a career for Thomasina McKenzie the same way Winter's Bone launched Jennifer Lawrence's), the tone is unremittingly warm and humanistic, and it's compelling throughout even as it remains stubbornly low-key, with nothing happening for long stretches.

 It was one of the best movies I saw back in 2018, and it holds up just fine. Can't wait for Granik's next movie, hopefully sometime before 2026.

Avatar

 So... what could I possibly say about Avatar that hasn't been said elsewhere before a hundred times, and better?

 Well, nothing, that's what. But that's never stopped me before.

 Upon rewatching it I'm kind of surprised at how few... well, surprises it held for me; I had forgotten a lot of the specifics, but my reaction to the whole remains completely unchanged. Maybe a bit more positive, since I knew what to expect, but there are no new real insights, nothing to add to my opinion of it; The only surprise was how well the CGI has held up over the last (oh god!) thirteen years. For good or ill, everything's there... right at the surface.

 Overall, I like it. It's a good spectacle/action movie with a carefully crafted but extremely shallow and very manipulative story. Despite that its science fiction is bad (let's not hold that against it, though, almost all Hollywood movies fail at the Sci part of Sci-Fi), it spends a lot of time focusing on the planet of Pandora and its species with an almost documentary-like focus, letting  you inhabit the setting more than just about any other movie (the only exceptions I can think of right now is Dune and the Blade Runners.)
 It almost feels more like a videogame than a movie, and this is one of the rare cases where I mean that as a compliment; so much focus on the backdrop is rare in non-interactive media. I say it's bad sci fi because, well, it is, in the same way Star Wars is bad sci fi, but like Star Wars it's got a very detailed and well thought-out fantasy setting. A little derivative in the sense that most things are recognizable as an analog of something from earth, but the amount of detail layered on top of it -the amount of spectacle poured on even the most unimportant elements of a scene- honestly makes it all right to me even if it underwhelms as a a plausible alien world/ecosystem. Suspension of disbelief is easy as hell when the production has been so tightly designed.

 Cameron's populism on the story department is, unfortunately, much harder to swallow. Beyond it being a white saviour movie that very cynically exploits white man's guilt (re: American natives, not black men)... it's just a bit shit, right? I mean, our protagonist almost immediately falls in with a fucking goddamn princess! Through dumb luck and cheap contrivances he's able to accomplish more in days than the scientists that trained years for the same mission ever did. And.. of course he ends up being the Pandoran Kwisatz Haderatch. Fuck that noise. One thing that people miss when ripping on Dune is that Herbert was a very smart cookie and most of the cheesy tropes in the first book end up being subverted or they're explained by other, more powerful players' ulterior motives. Paul Atreides is a pawn, not a chosen one. Herbert had something to say. Cameron... well, he's got things to say too, but to put it kindly they're not nearly as sophisticated or nuanced. 

 It's Titanic all over again; You can call it elemental storytelling, playing with archetypes, whatever... I'd just call it manipulative and really, really fucking basic. However, this time the tropes and melodrama are action- and sci fi-related, so of course I'll find it easier to give it a pass.

 Another reason that it works is that Jake Scully makes for a very likeable protagonist. The only scene I respond to emotionally at all in this movie is when he first gets his Avatar - after an undetermined time as a paraplegic, he can't contain himself and just bursts out running... it's a lovely scene, and the only honest one in the movie. He's got a child-like purity that makes him a very engaging character throughout.
 (This is directly at odds with how long it takes for him to betray the military in favour of the Na'vi, which is the rare slip in an otherwise very slick script; it could be explained by military conditioning and naivety, but it comes off as another cynical script device.)

 And... that spectacle! It's a movie that never lets up and never cuts any corners, and it's hard to overstate just how good it looks, how goddamn cool everything is even after more than a decade of technical advancement in CGI. The action is clear, exciting and full of awesome moves and pyrotechnics, the designs are intricate and consistent, the cinematography clear, crisply edited and punchy. It's easy to roll your eyes at the story, but the spectacle more than fills out its two hours and a half nicely. The script may be shallow and cynical, for sure, but there's so much of everything else to make up for it.