Bunnyman: Grindhouse Edition (2019)

Well, I had to revive the blog for this one. Thing was, I’ve been looking into some urban legends and found this Bunny Man story kind of interesting. If you don’t know, there were a few incidents back in the 70s of people running across a deranged man in a bunny outfit with an ax, who told them they were trespassing on private property and threatened them. Not much else was ever found out. It’s an interesting story to me because it’s actually some real dude – not a weird mythological creature or some shit like that.

Anyway this movie doesn’t have anything to do with any of that shit.

Director: Carl Lindbergh

IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10188162/

Co-written with Michelle.

Apparently this came out in 2011, but was later redone as ‘Bunnyman Grindhouse Edition,’ and it’s absolutely batshit. I mean this makes about 90 percent of what we’ve reviewed on here seem like a milquetoast quaint church program.

The thing starts with a black and white intro explaining how the Bunnyman was burned alive and that’s how he’s the way he is. It’s as dramatic as the intro to a serious dramatic movie, only it’s about a Bunnyman character. Get it? It’s about the juxtaposition. It goes on for several minutes to the point where I was wondering if this wasn’t some kind of Silent Night Deadly Night 2 situation just recounting some movie we haven’t seen.

But nah. It’s basically just this group of weird dead-eyed white 30-somethings driving in the woods with no clear destination – it’s never said. They have no personalities and even the dialogue feels improvised, to the point where it’s like the script probably didn’t have any dialogue at all. I bet the script was just a mysterious rune wrapped in paper that, whenever the actors stared at it, just filled them with the mythical arcane knowledge that time is a flat circle and all of space is a swirling endless stairway to the gods and the Earth and our reality is just a flimsy illusion and our minds would shatter like Christmas ornaments dropped on the ground if we perceived it as it really is, and they just spat out this dialogue as if truly inspired. That’s what I’m going with.

They run across this crazy big truck which tries to run them off the road when they cut him off. They try and confront the driver but the windows are mirrored and the truck just sits there sinisterly. Then they end up crashing their car against nothing on the side of the road. One of the idiots goes under there and fix the car, but the killer comes in the big truck again and gently bumps the back of the car, which somehow rips the one dude’s face off and kills him instantly! What a strong car they have. True triumph for the American auto industry here. It’s 100% more murder-friendly.

From here on out you get some of the insane changes they made apparently – as they wander through the woods hardly even mentioning the horrific murder of their friend, they step into a portal into 70s New York City with a goofy voiceover and vintage B-roll filler overtop? And they appear to be traveling across the globe, with arrows pointing them across oceans to Africa and then Australia?

It’s just really absurd editing. Props to the director. Just taking a fucking hatchet to his own movie and going wild like he’s on acid. It’s actually kind of admirable how utterly insane everything is. Slasher movies weren’t fucking high art. But this thing goes so far off the deep end, it comes around into being brilliant in a weird infinity circle. Just don’t think about it. Just go with the flow. They have an intermission with some weird ads about kidneys or food or some shit like that. It’s just a marvel of absolute weird shit. It's every cliche you ever heard about weirdos just flinging paint at canvasses and creating art. Just a masterclass in utter creation.

Then they’re wandering through the woods aimlessly. They see a bunch of bags of bones in the trees (always a great sign for the country and a thing that feels inviting to me!) and then they come across this random redneck with a gun and a beer. They have a long conversation trying to get this guy to let them use a phone. The guy says he wants to fuck one of the girls in exchange, and one of the guys just keeps ignoring him and repeating the question, asking this redneck if he can use the phone, with the look on his face like he’s a complete newborn who has never had a human interaction before. It goes around and around in circles. The emptiness in the main guy’s eyes is total and terrifying, like a void in outer space. The redneck guy threatens them with the gun and they leave with the other dude saying “fuck you” which seems like a smart thing to do when the other dude has a gun. But who am I to judge?

After wandering for what has to be hours, one girl goes “where are we going?!” Which, to me, that would’ve been a thing I asked before they even started walking, but I guess in the movie’s logic that would be why I’d have died before this by a lot. Who woulda known? She and the one idiot dude from the last paragraph get into a fight and she almost beats his brain out with a rock. Which is funnier to me than a lot of actual comedies. This shit is gold to me. Get it on TV somehow.

There’s another weird intermission cutscene. In this one, a naked chick is killed in the shower by a guy in a bunny costume. I hope she got paid for this, but in reality we all know she didn’t. Then you get a scene where they intentionally, poorly voiced over a bunch of goofy European sounding accents on all the main characters. More surrealism.

After this, it basically turns into a low-rent Texas Chainsaw Massacre ripoff. There’s really not much else to say. It really becomes a lot less entertaining after this, but I guess there are a few actual moments where it approaches serious scary stuff, with a few nice chase scenes going on and shit like that. But the finale is a pretty annoying attempt to re-do the TCM dinner scene and it just doesn’t work.

But that first half with all the weird edits – man, what art! Flawless. Slasher films becoming everything they were destined to be!

Black Christmas (2019)

If there was anything I was thinking this year, “gee, I wish Blumhouse would do a new Black Christmas remake” was NOT it. But apparently what I want doesn’t matter.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Director: Sophia Takal

Starring: Imogen Poots, Cary Elwes, Aleyse Shannon

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

Essentially, what this is is a bad Twitter argument about rape culture that they spent thousands turning into a movie. It’s really got no interesting insights, and the story is a bunch of crap where all the characters are barely characters so much as mouthpieces spewing all the worst arguments you’ve tuned out online this year. So why is it called Black Christmas? Well, it’s got a sorority house and a killer! That’s enough, right?

They start off with this plot about the main girl Riley, who is still traumatized after a sexual assault by some piece of shit frat guy. I am sure this very serious subject will be handled with exquisite care by this teen slasher movie they’ve created, but then, I am very stupid.

The dialogue is entirely comprised of lines where other characters talk about how much they want to remove the statue of the old racist, sexist slave-owner guy who the school is named after. Oh, and Cary Elwes is a literature professor delivering a big screed about how women are bad and need to submit to men. Then later they talk about how they hate his class because he doesn’t teach any works by women or gay people.

See what I mean? It’s like they just ripped some of the headlines off Twitter. Every fucking line in the movie is like this. If they had anything interesting to say, it’d be one thing. But it comes off like they were just like “we don’t have any ideas… QUICK! TO TWITTER! COPY AND PASTE ALL THE NEWS HEADLINES FROM BREITBART FOR THE VILLAINS’ DIALOGUE!”

Riley does see the frat dudes undergoing what looks like a satanic ritual with red cloaks and a bleeding black-blood statue and all kinds of shit. It’s even in a creepy stone chamber. I’m amazed that nobody sees her, but I guess the frat-bro magic prevents them from even seeing women. Their dick energy is just so powerful that anything else is invisible to them!

You never learned the identity of the killer in the first one and it was one of the better things about it, how fucking eerie it was. In this one, Nathan and I were just like “oh, the frat boys are the killers.” 10 minutes in, and we were right. It’s honestly barely even a spoiler. Scooby Doo would be disappointed in how easy it was to figure this out.

They do this routine on stage basically calling out the frat guys for being rapey pieces of shit. It goes better than anticipated as they get out of there just fine with no altercations. Even the text messages they get are only from the killers threatening them, which, you know, is a given in a slasher movie. These text messages, by the way, are the movie’s replacement for the deranged phone calls from the 1974 original, where the killer constantly made vile threats in voices that would make Regan from The Exorcist blush. In this one, you only get one instance of the creepy voices, and it turns out to be a glitch on an otherwise normal phone call. So lame!

The text messages are just goofy shit. It’s hardly even threatening at all – they read like an incel Batman villain or some shit, just trying way too hard to seem creepy. Boy, so glad it’s not like real life where people get harassed with much more violent, awful language and even real life threats, until they literally leave social media and have to hire bodyguards! It’s all peachy in this movie’s universe.

There’s a scene with Cary Elwes where he threatens Riley to quit speaking out about rape. She manages to accidentally see a piece of paper he’s carrying with the names of a bunch of girls on it. It’s literally right there! These guys are so fucking bad at keeping secrets that I bet when one of them cheats on their girlfriend, they just forward the texts to their girlfriend automatically. Personally I expected way more from a cult of frat bros who worship a statue that bleeds black blood. 

One of the film’s worst parts is the big argument between the girls and the one boyfriend dude. Here are some of the lines spoken: “Not all men are rapists!” “DID YOU JUST ‘NOT ALL MEN’ ME???” It’s really like the dumbest, most infantile argument you’ve seen in the Facebook comments of a Jezebel article about Brett Kavanagh.

Speaking of Kavanagh, the script even fits in the line “I like beer” from the boyfriend character. If this was any less subtle, it would just be a scroll of HuffPo headlines across the screen.

The killers start coming after them with bows and arrows, wearing black cloaks and weird metal masks. At this point I was wondering if anyone involved knew what Black Christmas was – this is more like You’re Next, except it actually makes that movie look like Citizen Kane in comparison. But hey, they have Christmas lights in there!

The final battle takes place in the creepy stone-wall dungeon cult place, as Cary Elwes’ character delivers a big soliloquy about how white men are being oppressed and they need to take back the country from women. He goes on about how white men who agree with them will take seats in “Congress and boardrooms” and says women need to “stay in line.” It’s such a blatant, ridiculous speech that was obviously written as a huge dumb strawman. Even if you’re like me and agree that all these things Elwes’ character is saying are awful and noxious, this writing is just so garishly stupid. It’s like when you dislike someone and try to make them sound as dumb and ridiculous as possible when telling a story about them to your friends, using funny voices and exaggerating the things they said to make them seem much worse.

I don’t even get what their plan is. So they worship this guy from the 1800s who founded their school, who was worried that men would lose their place in society to women? Maybe that guy was just able to see the future. Either way they’re a bunch of misogynists so silly that it’s hard to take seriously. They seem to think they can “restore order” and, what, make women subservient to them? They’re all still in positions of power at this college. 'Women will be subservient to men' is probably gonna be a hard sell for the administrators when things get back to normal in January, buds.

Frankly, we were just waiting for these idiots to come out wearing MAGA hats. But never fear, because the entire gang of sorority girls bust in and kick their asses! It makes that one scene in Avengers Endgame look like a subtle, restrained, literary feminist statement, but on the plus side, the movie is over.

The problem is that the writing is just so fucking bad in this. It’s so one-dimensional that it’s an insult to other very flat things. The characters aren’t characters, so much as they are mouthpieces for either side of an ideology. In the movie’s world, the frat bros are nothing but evil, scratches off Satan’s pube hair, and the girls can do no wrong and basically have zero flaws. It’s just dull, black-and-white shit. I don’t need them to put in sympathetic side to the frat bros, but they sure don’t act like anything but cartoon characters, as it is. And if it’s a cartoon, well, I rarely take cartoons that seriously.

I’d love it if this were an actual good feminist movie – I’m not writing this review to bash feminism or “defend the rights of men” or whatever the Reddit trolls would say. I think that’s actually the worst part of this. The writing is so bad that it involuntarily puts me in the same camp as those alt-right internet douchenozzles who will just hate this because a woman has more than two lines spoken. So, thanks a lot for that one, movie!

PS - The original 1974 film included a plot where the lead woman character was considering an abortion, and it was more interesting and daring than anything this movie tries. Pretty sad!

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Joker (2019)

Well, this one has been getting a lot of press, mostly because the media loves to write about incels for some reason these days and have been talking about this movie because they think incels will love it. It’s kind of becoming a thing. If women were as interested in those sad psycho incel fucks as writers from shitty content-farm news sites, maybe incels would never have even been a thing. But anyway – Joker is the new movie by Todd Phillips, director of the Hangover, featuring Joaquin Phoenix’s mad dash to get an Oscar nomination as the titlular iconic DC villain.

SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT!!!

Director: Todd Phillips

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Robert DeNiro, Zazie Beetz

IMDb

Honestly it’s a pretty well made movie – and, also, kinda bullshit at the same time.

It looks very good. It’s gritty and dark in the way that a lot of old art-house films were, with a lot of grungy lights, winding labyrinthine city-scapes and shots of Phoenix being crazy and laughing a lot. Boy, does he like to laugh in this. It’s definitely a thing that he probably had to get super into character and shout at a lot of people on set for disturbing him about.

The movie starts out with some scenes setting up his shitty life – he works as a clown mascot character spinning signs for people and gets mugged and the shit kicked out of him by some kids. I mean they really go in on him – how bored are they even? Kinda overkill. He talks to a therapist occasionally, but that ends up getting nixed because of city budget costs or some shit, which leaves him with no real outlet for his feelings and no meds, either. That’s actually pretty real and I wish they would’ve just left it at that.

But nope! On the subway, he shoots three douchebag Wall Street bros who are harassing a woman – not a great loss to society. However, this has an unintended consequence when billionaire and mayor candidate Thomas Wayne (something tells me he’s important to this universe) goes on TV the next day and says the poor and mentally ill are clowns! That starts a mass riot in the city with everyone wearing clown masks to protest the rich being assholes! It all makes sense if you don’t think about it too much. I appreciate the movie trying to do this kind of class warfare plot, but honestly it’s kinda shallow and dumb if you think about it even a little. Like, the scenes of the mass riots later on in the film are inaccurate because in real life, the cops would be out there pepper spraying and shooting them before it gets as far as it does.

Meanwhile, Arthur Fleck is spiraling into madness, doing things like bringing guns into hospitals where he’s trying to entertain children – though, really, his dancing and singing alone is disturbing enough without the gun. This was by far the funniest thing in the movie for me, when the gun falls out of his pocket. He gets fired from his weird clown job for it, though, which probably, maybe, won’t be good for his mental health either!

One part I did like was the inclusion of a subplot about him “dating” this girl in his building, only it turns out he was just fantasizing about it the whole time; revealed quite well in a scene where he breaks into her apartment and she finds him, very surprised and confused. And his interactions with his mother and weird scenes of him alone in his apartment are done well.

All of it is pretty kosher so far – it’s kind of a believable portrait of a mentally ill man, and maybe could have actually been artistically valuable, had they stuck to this line of things.

BUT… they didn’t. Instead, we get some ~shocking~ plot twists where he finds out he was adopted and maybe related to the Wayne family or something. It’s pretty stock, low-brow, hack type shit. Phoenix sells it well, but this was where the movie lost me. I think much of the rest of the film, in which it begins to quickly escalate into violence and killing, doesn’t have near the nuance it wanted to – it seems forced, a square peg into a round hole. Why does he even put on the clown getup? Because he wore it for a job he got fired from? Once he starts murdering people randomly, it is expected but also happened so easily that you wonder if therapy ever would’ve worked on this dude anyway. He doesn’t seem different after he stops taking his meds as opposed to before, really.

As a comic book-y origin story, a Batman tie in, it’s kind of a fun, depraved trip – Phoenix sells everything super well, as I’ve already mentioned, and the tying of the fictional Gotham to real-world class strife and turmoil is interesting if not that well fleshed out. There are a few little things that tie into long-time Batman lore and those are fun, even though not the main focus.

But as a social commentary it’s weak and shallow. Oh, mental health care is bad and the rich are assholes. So what? What exactly did that do to Arthur to turn him into the Joker? These themes were basically dropped after the first 30 or 40 minutes. We don’t know much about him as a person at the end of it all. As the movie shows us, the real nail in the coffin was when he finds out his mother was lying to him and then hears he was actually adopted. All that other stuff was ancillary – the real root cause of madness and incel terrorism is finding out your birth mother was your adopted mother!

Todd Phillips made headlines last week when he bitched in an interview about how he only made Joker because he felt like he couldn’t make comedies anymore because of “woke culture” or whatever. His stated intention with the film was only to make a fucked up “real movie” and disguise it, Trojan Horse style, as a comic book movie. The finale of this movie sees Joker giving a big speech on live TV about how society wants him to conform and won’t let him be himself – whoa, real edgy stuff there, movie! Then he kills Robert DeNiro’s TV comedy host character live on camera. I don’t even get what the Joker’s whole spiel about society oppressing him has to do with anything else – the problem in the film was never that he was censored or told he couldn’t be himself, it was that he was spiraling out of control inevitably anyway due to a shitload of factors.

All of the edgy violence and the weirdly pornographic, sympathetic way it portrays Phoenix’s Joker in the climax, along with Phillips’ dumb ‘hey, I’m a 14 year old’ style statements, gives the whole thing a sour douche-bro vibe that taints my impression of the film. It doesn’t seem like it was made for a good reason. Despite their talk about how they didn't make it to endorse violence, the movie sure is all over the Joker at the end like a horny teenager. I don't believe it'll cause violence but come on, to act like this isn't totally on his side is dumb as shit.

But I guess the Joker was created by society, man. Isn’t society the worst? Let’s all go post on a 4chan board somewhere.

There are some interesting and cool scenes in this, but as a social commentary it’s flat and over-simplified. It just skims the surface on the problems and decides to wimp out with cliché shit about family mysteries instead of really digging in. Phoenix’s incredible performance goes a long way toward making this seem deeper than it is – if a lesser actor were in this role it’d seem like the pseudo-edgy try hard stuff that a lot of it actually is.

It’s a shame because there were plenty of individual scenes that worked. But as a ‘man is broken by the world’ story, it’s just not very compelling unless all you wanted was a Batman story. Taxi Driver, one of the film’s inspirations, was much more convincing and eerie in its realism, and Better Call Saul, as a TV show, has more time to flesh out the character and portray complex motivations that lead to a downfall.

But hey, at least it’s better than the Jared Leto Joker from a few years ago! There is that.

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Crawl (2019)

Crawl is a horror movie about a Florida hurricane that I think was just intended to serve as propaganda for other people not to come to this already overpopulated state. It’s basically like what every other state thinks Florida’s hurricane seasons are always like. Right down to the gators happily devouring anybody that comes into their path. Hurricane seasons are like buffets for gators.

WARNING: A HURRICANE OF SPOILERS in this review!!

Director: Alexander Aja

Starring: Kaya Scodelario, Barry Pepper

IMDb

Co-written with Tony and Michelle.

The movie follows a woman, Haley, who has been competitive swimming her whole life who just can’t seem to quite win when it counts. She talks to her sister as this category 5 hurricane is barreling toward the state, and they can’t get in touch with their father. The movie throws in some exposition about how the family has been split up for years, because we won’t have time to delve into the rich complex drama of this family once the gator stuff starts up. And they add in a few jabs so we know they all still hate each other. Ah, family.

So Haley, possessing that classic Floridian insanity, decides to drive down I-75 to find her father, despite the sky looking like it actively wants to murder everyone – which, in Florida, is understandable. She sneaks into town against the cops’ warnings, and finds her dad in a weird crawlspace beneath his house, presumably built because this is the kind of hick nutjob character who is paranoid we’re going to have a nuclear war any day because of the liberal darkness in the country – but the movie doesn’t expound on this. Just me theorizing here.

Unfortunately for this poor sap, a bunch of gators have snuck in – the scamps! One of them bites Haley on the leg but she seems fine after, still able to run and swim perfectly fine. Must have been one of those gators with cotton balls for teeth. The dad has also already been maimed. I kept expecting him to die, but I guess he’s just too tough to do that when he has all that online dating and selling his house to move into a shitty condo like the movie shows us. He has so much to live for!

The movie unfolds into a pretty thrilling, fun ride as they try to avoid both the gators and the flooding from this monster storm. It’s a well constructed thriller. A lot of tense moments. Even if I’m skeptical of how many times they survive being bitten by gators. Shit, man. I guess gator bites aren’t so bad after all.

Several plot points in this thing revolve around Haley having to use her swimming talents, which her dad helped train into her from a young age. Every time this happens, her dad whispers something under his breath like “you go, honey!” Did he train her to swim specifically so he could feel good about himself? I hope he enjoyed the bragging rights from mercilessly beating a competitive sport into his own child. I’m also glad they chose a discipline that could help for the EXACT CIRCUMSTANCES of this movie’s plot. What kind of luck is that?

Also, they get in a few lines about their family drama in. The dad even takes time to talk about how life was so hard with his ex wife/Haley’s mom. It’s like yeah, but we’re still trapped in a flooding crawlspace with gators. I don’t think your ex wife can compare with this, buddy. It is nice that the gators are respectful and polite, letting them converse without interrupting. Gators truly are some of nature’s most considerate creatures.

There’s a lot of stuff that happens – mostly more gator attacks, including a thrilling scene where they try and brave a flooded area full of gators to get to a boat. Then the boat ships them back to the house they’d just come from. Whoops! It’s like you can never truly escape from where you came. Powerful stuff. Metaphoric, even.

Oh and there’s a scene where she shoots a gun like five times in a gator’s mouth. I thought that was cool.

Eventually they make it to the roof just in time for a helicopter, surveying the ruins with a sense of awe no doubt, to pick them up, flying them to safety so they can no doubt continue their familial arguing like earlier! Hooray for dysfunction!

But no, seriously. I wanted this to go even further. I wish they hadn’t been saved right away. I wanted to see where this post-apocalyptic wasteland could go. Maybe have the gators form some kind of union and gain human intelligence over time. Then, as the rule of law fades to distant memory and the post-hurricane humans have to co-exist with the gators, the humans could try and negotiate with the gators in order to survive and possibly escape back to civilization. That would be cool. I long for the day when a film will go this far!

Until then, this is a pretty fucking solid monster movie. It’s better than some others I’ve seen in the genre – I mean if you have a choice between this and, say, a Jaws sequel, then the choice should be clear enough. It’s well made and entertaining.

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Child's Play (2019)

For years horror remakes were just such pieces of shit. They were just so utterly terrible and without benefit. They were dreaded by fans of the old films and loved by teenagers mostly. It’s been a few years since we were getting a bunch of them, but I guess the people behind this Child’s Play remake really took their time on purpose. This is actually pretty awesome.

SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIE AHEAD.

Director: Lars Klevberg

Starring: Aubrey Plaza, Mark Hamill, Gabriel Bateman

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

I mean, Child’s Play was never, like, one of the all-time best horror films. The character was iconic, sure, and Brad Dourif was fun. But the movie was never on my shortlist with Texas Chainsaw or The Haunting or whatever. It was goofy schlock and it was good at what it did, and that was fine.

And I think it’s time to just go ahead and admit that the classics aren’t always infallible or always gonna be the best ever. There’s so much new stuff coming out all the time. Maybe not everything back then needs to be the best ever. How about we start being open to some of the newer films being as good as, or better than, the classics? It’ll happen eventually. The world keeps moving, art keeps coming out, it’s going to happen. So fuck it, Child’s Play 2019 is better than the original one. I’ll just start with that and hope others follow my lead.

And this one works because they were having fun with the silly concept. Aubrey Plaza as the mom is already fun, as her seething eye-rolls and sarcastic smiles add a lot to the whole thing. She plays it more straight as the film goes on but the weirdness of her acting makes it work. Just put her in everything. I guarantee that would make so many fucking movies better. Mark Hamill as Chucky is fun, especially if you remind yourself that this is also Luke Skywalker talking. Diversity is the key in life!

The big change is that, unlike the old one where Chucky was a devil-possessed voodoo doll, now he’s a Smart Toy that is built to act like a robot and can hook up to WiFi and stuff. I can’t be sure that the company in the movie didn’t intend to make a serial killer doll, but hey, there are weirder corporate decisions made all the time – look at the numerous cases where clothing companies decide to embrace blackface, for example. Making a murder doll isn’t that strange in comparison.

I will say Chucky’s new look in this movie is actively horrifying. Look at that thing – it looks like fucking devil spawn shit. It looks like a badly made wax doll that got left in a hot car for a week. It looks like what a blind serial killer would make if you gave him a lump of rotting clay and told him to try and mold a human face approximately.

The most unbelievable part of the film is that anybody would want to play with this even if it wasn't a serial killer.

So I guess whenever Andy expresses dislike for something – the cat, say, or his mom’s asshole new boyfriend – Chucky gets that ole murderin’ gleam in his eye and makes it happen. It’s totally predictable, but the fun factor is there. It’s gorier than I thought it would be – I didn’t think I’d see a skinned bloody skull in a Child’s Play remake, but there you go.

The movie pretty much goes as you expect, though the subplot where they have to get rid of the human face skin mask of Andy’s mom’s boyfriend that Chucky brought back to the house is a fucking trip. They end up having to wrap it up in gift-wrap paper and then Andy’s mom sees them. So they have to pretend to gift it to this old lady down the hall. Andy, then, has to get it back, doing so by befriending them and going to their place for dinner and then stealing the head back and bolting. Oh, you know, just normal kid problems.

Oh and there’s another guy who is some weirdo stalker who has cameras set up all over the building, using them to watch Aubrey Plaza take a shower. He finds Chucky in the garbage after Andy throws him away and does mad science experiments to bring him back. What is wrong with this movie? Everything in it is so gloriously insane. This guy, by the way, dies when Chucky dangles him over a table saw and cuts him in half. If a tiny talking doll can do this to you, you deserved it, sorry.

The climax is a wacky insane romp in the department store, where Chucky takes over the system and locks everyone inside as tiny toy drone planes begin to murder everyone! Woohoo! This is probably some kind of allegory for the current US geo political situation. The part where some of the other dolls turn evil, including one version of the doll that’s an anthropomorphic bear, only adds to the horror. Kids shouldn’t be playing with dolls – that’s my takeaway. Give ‘em an iPad and fuck it, just let their brain download into the fucking cloud. Who was asking for the anthropomorphic bear doll, by the way? Probably ought to get them on a watchlist. Fucking creepy shit.

Overall, the movie makes a strong case for Chucky being a good guy in this. For the bulk of the film he’s just protecting Andy – he kills that stupid fucking cat, and the mom’s boyfriend was an asshole anyway. He’s a valiant hero. Sure, the lines are blurred by his attempted genocide inside the department store. But who said any hero was perfect? Maybe the film is really pushing our expectations of heroism and making a real statement…

Or, maybe not. Who’s to say?

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Ma (2019)

This has to be the most absurd shit I’ve seen in a while, even counting the John Waters film I saw last week (Desperate Living). Not that this is as full of genitalia and body mutilation and gross out stuff as that movie was – though there is some – but just the choices this movie makes are so goddamned weird.

Director: Tate Taylor

Starring: Octavia Spencer, Diana Silvers

IMDb

SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIE COMING UP.

This is an Octavia Spencer vehicle where she plays a small-town veterinarian who apparently loves hanging out with children so much that it drove her insane. I thought at some points, this could be genuinely profound, a revealing character study, maybe about small town living or what trauma does to you. But instead it just turned into a bunch of nonsense.

I guess it starts with a new girl in town character, Maggie, as she and her mom move back to some lame podunk Midwestern town. Her mom wears a skimpy outfit at a casino while Maggie makes friends with a bunch of hoodlums who do insane and groundbreaking things like hang out at gas stations and try to get adults to buy them booze. Watch out! These kids are ON THE EDGE!

They make friends with Spencer’s character Sue Anne, or ‘Ma,’ who invites them over to hang out and drink and smoke pot in her basement in the woods. Being dumb kids, I can see it. Though the part where Spencer’s character makes this one jock kid strip totally naked at gunpoint should’ve probably been more of a giveaway. But kids are so damn desensitized to everything now.

I guess there are a few decent scenes setting up the characters, and at first, Spencer’s character is legit kind of creepy as she goes through her sort of revenge game against these kids, who are the children of some assholes who wronged her in high school. Apparently once a long time ago, those kids tricked her into giving a blowjob in a janitor’s closet to some nerdy kid when she thought she was with the popular guy. 

That’s the only thing they show us as to why she turned out so fucked up. I hate to sound insensitive here. But the movie just makes such a bad case about her psyche and how she turned out crazy that it’s making me look like some kind of alt right incel douche here. Like goddammit. It’s not played for sympathy so much as just this cheap thing. There’s not a point where the movie reflects on why what happened to her was bad or what effects that would actually have. It’s just “blowjob closet rape scene = you turn into a crazy horror movie stalker 30 years later.” Somehow, I don’t think the American Psychological Journal is calling you back.

Ma also has a daughter of her own, Genie, who she makes believe is sick and keeps home from school a lot. Like that closet rape scene, this is another actually serious thing that the movie barely treats as such. It's child abuse. But it’s kind of glazed over and never given much any point in the story. But who needs that boring real life shit when we have a bunch of scenes of Octavia Spencer partying with hick teenagers???

The main character, Maggie, dates this one guy for a while, and a few kinda nice scenes happen, maybe almost approaching character development even. Though even that goes nowhere and amounts to nothing, much like the lives of the people living in the small town in the movie. Meanwhile, Spencer’s Ma character texts people a lot, too much even. OooOOOOOoooh! Scary? I dunno. I’ve had this happen in real life from weirdos I’d known online for a few months. Didn’t make me want to see a horror movie about it.

The problem with the movie going forward is that I doubt the writers remember what it was like to be a teenager. Maggie and her mom have this overblown fight about her going to Ma’s house to hang out, and it barely makes sense. Even though Maggie herself has been worried about going there for most of the movie, now she’s super mad about it and hurling insults at her mother! It’s a pretty brutal argument for this movie’s standards, and I’m pretty sure Maggie hasn’t even been this mad at the actual villains in the movie.

Maggie goes back over to Ma’s house to save her boyfriend, and they all get trapped down there as Ma predictably goes insane. Only, even the torture methods are off. Like she paints this black kid’s face white, sews a girl’s lips together and burns another kid just one time with an iron. That’s all she does to them. Then she wants a “picture” with them to replicate her own high school years, and at that point I was just like “oh, I get it now, this is really fucking stupid.”

Then, to make things even more bizarre, when Maggie has to go stab Ma in the back to save Genie, she shouts “I’m not my mother!” I guess because her mom had to move back to her hometown and take a shitty waitressing job? Was that the message this whole Godforsaken time?

This whole thing was just a mess, and the more I thought about it the worse it seemed. I liked Spencer’s acting and even the kids were good. But the story and script just made no real sense. Every “serious” plot thread was seemingly cast aside in favor of scenes of the characters drinking and partying. In fact, pretty sure that was the whole motive here, to have an excuse to drink and party and somehow get paid for it. In which case this movie is actually ingenious and I was wrong about all of this.

Image copyright of its original owners; I don't own it.

Pokemon Detective Pikachu (2019)

Like a lot of people my age, my childhood was full of the colorful abominations called Pokemon. I played those games fucking constantly growing up, dabbled in the card games, watched a lot of the real old TV show. Hell, I’ve got old VHS tapes of the shit in my parents’ house. This movie’s trailer made it look like a kind of love letter to the kids like me who liked this stuff in the late 90s. But in reality it’s a pile of dog shit with a Pokemon card on top.

SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIE WITHIN.

Director: Rob Letterman

Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Justice Smith, Kathryn Newton

IMDb

Co-written with Tony.

I guess the story begins with this insurance salesman, Tim, is out with a buddy trying to hunt a Cubone when he learns his father dies – but really, the movie just wants us to forget that a grown man has to run for his life from a two-foot rat in a bone mask. How hard could it possibly be to capture that thing?

But yeah, his dad dies and he has to go to this city where Pokemon and humans live in harmony and don’t do any of the battling you’d expect out of this franchise. So it’s Pokemon with nothing cool about it, essentially. Riveting! We find this out through some truly wretched exposition – it’s just shown on a train TV screen ad, conveniently for the beginning of the movie. I dunno about you, but whenever shit like this shows up on Hulu or Spotify, I tune out. It wouldn't be an effective method to convey backstory.

In the city, we get some painfully stock scenes flashing back to Tim’s childhood where he lost his mom. I know it’s supposed to be sad, but this and every other emotional moment in the film seems like it was taken from a giant corporate warehouse with CLICHE SCENES & PLOTS written on the side.

Fortunately the titular talking Pikachu, voiced by Ryan Reynolds, shows up soon after that. Sure, ‘Ryan Reynolds plays a talking Pikachu’ sounds like something you and your friends came up with in 15 minutes while you were high off your asses. But it does provide for some funny moments. There’s some half-decent absurdist comedy to watching him run around and seeing the other Pokemon doing goofy shit. Unfortunately, that isn't enough for a full hour and forty-minute movie.

The problem is that everything aside from the weirdness and humor of the Pokemon is utterly phoned in. There’s a budding romance between Tim and Kathryn Newton’s junior reporter character Lucy. It’s every bit as lame and awkward as you’d expect; retro in the sense that we quit doing these types of hack storylines in the 90s because they were bad. Oh, he makes some awkward Freudian slips and Pikachu ribs him about it? Stop the presses! The fantastic Bill Nighy is wasted as the rich guy businessman who turns out to be a villain later. Awesome twist if you’ve never seen a movie in your life.

Everything is by the book and the story is a practically just a bunch of cliches patched together with rubber bands and cheap glue. There are some emotional scenes that don’t pack any punch because every line and every story beat is predictable and hollow. Like, really, are they going to let Pikachu die in this Detective Pikachu movie by being hit with a rock? Are they going to keep Pikachu and Tim apart when, right after being saved from dying, Pikachu arbitrarily decides to go on his own to stop anyone else from being hurt? I mean, wow, I was really surprised when everything turned out OK after those incredibly stale cliché tropes you guys trotted out like fat out of shape race-horses.

One of the worst parts is how they do exposition and revelations of story elements like how Pikachu lost his memory or what happened to Tim’s dad. Basically Nighy’s character invented this virtual reality camera thing that can show what happened in the past “from all angles,” effectively giving the characters an extremely hacky way to see what happened – conveniently it’s able to show everything perfectly in a neat way that explains stuff! I’d say this is spoon-feeding you exposition, but really it’s like tying you down Guantanamo-style and shoving a feeding tube forcefully into your nostrils and flushing the exposition in that way.

The climax is truly horrible, with Bill Nighy putting his brain into Mewtwo’s body. I guess his character, who is in a wheelchair, wants to merge with Pokemon to “heal” everyone in the world or some stupid shit like that. I’ve seen this ‘disabled villain wants to cure the world in an evil way’ trope before and usually done better. But as a disabled person, it’s not realistic – we’d probably just kill people like any other type of villain. We’re not that noble.

Nighy as Mewtwo spends the finale spouting out lines that somehow top even the previous cliches in the movie, which I find an amazing feat. All the good humor from earlier is long gone, and the movie bafflingly delivers this totally straight-faced, no irony at all. If actors could be punished for crimes by being forced to do horrible scenes in movies, this one would be the punishment for a triple homicide.

Maybe I’m being too harsh – there are a few OK jokes and it’s nice to see some Pokemon on screen, I guess, though it’s been ages since I was super into this stuff. Maybe some will like it better. It’d probably be a blast if I was drunk or high, watching the first act or two anyway. But overall there are way better kids’ movies you could see. Just make sure you cover your kids’ eyes at the part where Pikachu commits genocide against a bunch of Digimon. That shit was horrific to watch.

Image copyright of its original owners, I don't own any of it.

Us (2019)

SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIE CONTAINED HEAVILY WITHIN THIS REVIEW.

Jordan Peele is now a first-rate horror director, it seems. Get Out was a great start, but I was curious where he could go from there. Fortunately, the answer seems to be into even more wild, pointed social commentary with his sophomore feature Us.

Director: Jordan Peele

Starring: Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke

IMDb

This is a movie so dense you’ll probably walk out of it wanting to see it again. There is a real breadth of ideas to be unpacked here, and the movie – aside from a few exposition scenes – doesn’t waste its time waiting for you to catch up, weaving its commentary into cat-and-mouse horror tribute and some slasher gore. Basically the premise is that this family is on vacation and runs into exact doppelgangers of themselves in the night - and from there everything just spirals.

It’s a wandering, free-form exploration of the political and social divides in America. There’s something to be said for a few wry winks about Trump/MAGA types – the doubles of everyone that pop up from the subterranean are wearing red, and the fact that they target rich liberal-types in Santa Fe is something I noticed for sure, for maximum dichotomy between them.

But the larger message is about poverty and classism. Lupita Nyong’o’s character Adelaide’s double, Red, talks with some real spite in her about how everything good Adelaide has has been duplicated in a worse way: “And the girl ate, her food was given to her warm and tasty. But when the shadow was hungry, she had to eat rabbit raw and bloody. On Christmas, the girl received wonderful toys; soft and cushy. But the shadow's toys were so sharp and cold they sliced through her fingers when she tried to play with them.”

And then, when asked who they are, an even more direct line: “We’re Americans.” Later she also has a line about how “we’re humans, too.” Individually these lines are pretty evident in meaning, but the thing about social commentary is that it’s more about consistency of messaging and how the message is woven into each scene, and the story overall. It’s all about the haves and the have-nots. The rage of the under-class, burbling up to the surface like a volcano. All that’s wrapped up in a fiery and exciting romp through a beach town. Gorgeous images of the shore and of a classic American amusement park serve both to make this look great as well as to amplify the message – this is an American problem.

We’re at a fairly precarious, difficult time in our history right now, as anybody who lives here probably knows. Peele feeds off that like a vampire and creates a film that’s chaotic and off-kilter as the political climate here. Nobody understands each other in America right now. Suitably, the red-suited doppelgangers can only scream and howl – they’re unintelligible to those from the above-ground world. Violence becomes the only language common to them.

And I think what’s striking to me is that there’s really no resolution to it. Peele doesn’t pose a solution for the divide or the chaos. He just shows it as it is, this glorious miasma of violence and resentment. The red-suited doubles win in the end, unifying themselves in a literal hand-linked chain across the land, which is a pretty glaring commentary of its own. They were able to unify and come up to the surface.

At the end it’s also revealed that Adelaide is actually the real ‘Red,’ having switched places with the above-ground version as children when they met in a hall of mirrors. Both of them lived the others’ lives and now the fake Adelaide does whatever she has to to keep her status – every woman for herself. It becomes less of a monster movie, upon knowing this, and more of a struggle between two human beings. “We’re people too,” the real Adelaide, who’s spent her life underground as Red, says with biting venom and bile through every word. And maybe knowing that, then it’s a bit of an oversight for someone like me to have ever thought the other red-clad doubles were true monsters at all in the first place. Even the slasher-style murders start to make more sense. They’re fucking angry as hell.

A good twist is one that you can watch the whole movie again after knowing and the rest of the movie retroactively makes sense in a different way. This twist adds to the layers of the film and makes it more than just another monster flick. The fake Adelaide’s fear is for her own self-preservation. That’s as human as you can get.

It’s a weird-ass movie to be sure. Vague and metaphorical and not all of the in-universe world-building is explicitly explained. Why were there these shadow-doubles living in caves underground at all? We only get a few lines explaining that stuff and it’s not really a thorough explanation. I kinda like the vagueness, not gonna lie. I wouldn’t have wanted a bunch of long drawn out backstory scenes for the mechanical functions of this world – that would’ve just dragged it down and the exposition we got from Red, in character, made sense for how she sees things, adds context to the movie, and that was enough for me.

Horror, like any fantasy, is about feeling rather than mechanics. What we’re seeing on screen in Us has more resonance and meaning than a lot of movies in this genre try for. I think this is an evocative, mesmeric and hard-hitting piece of film. I haven’t been this fascinated by a movie in a while now. I’m sure there will be even more things to notice about this on future viewings. If you like classic horror and/or social commentary, Us is fucking profound and insanely engaging in its labyrinthine mirror-hall of layers.

PS: Here are some good pieces I’ve read about Us so far, which offer some views I didn’t know about or didn’t catch – I’m sure there are shitloads more, too.

https://twitter.com/kyalbr/status/1109984274114064385?s=19&fbclid=IwAR0trpsf-_PIpsflZZZLnIhOAuj_HXCYrtZXHYG4VooGwX9i1hGY6PVJjLI

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/us-was-movies-biggest-twist-hiding-plain-sight-1196584

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/03/us-meaning-costumes-kym-barrett-interview-red-jumpsuit/585793/?fbclid=IwAR0wCXNaXkRBJPQK9YBjwQEjXwN1EdWc7pl94T0K5epng003Cbjbs-aA7WI&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=5c9fe6f43ed3f00001723f9d_ta&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

Dragged Across Concrete (2019)

S. Craig Zahler, a metal musician and now film director, has been making a name for himself with a series of gruesome movies even for horror fans’ standards: first, Bone Tomahawk was full of a lot of disemboweling and cannibal madness, and his last one Brawl in Cell Block 99 was full of enough brutal face-stompings and bone-breakings to fill up even the most devout gore-hound. Now we have Dragged Across Concrete, which based on the title I figured would be the most violent schlock-fest yet.

And it is pretty violent, yeah. But it also veers into something even more uncomfortable: mild conservative “anti-PC” racism.

Director: S. Craig Zahler

Starring: Mel Gibson, Vince Vaughn, Jennifer Carpenter

IMDb

I mean, it isn’t like they go full on MAGA hat or anything, but having Mel Gibson in a starring role was almost like a wink to the audience as to what this was gonna be like. Him and co-star Vince Vaughn, after their characters get suspended from the force for stepping on a Hispanic drug dealer’s head and neck on video, have a few lines early on about how PC everything is and it made me wonder what the hell this movie was playing at. Oh and another subplot has Gibson’s daughter getting orange juice thrown on her by a black kid while coming home from school, which prompts his wife to opine about how “she never thought she was racist before moving to this neighborhood.”

It’s all pretty perplexing at first – like, are we being asked to sympathize with that world view? Keep in mind that the actual plot has nothing to do with this. It’s like he just added it in for no reason really. It barely comes up again, but the stink of this stuff is striking as you go through the film. I think he was trying to show that yeah, these people exist and there’s not much you can do about it. They have pretty shitty, regressive-ish attitudes and yet they’re still out there working jobs and trying to figure their problems out like the rest of us.

It turns out, surprisingly, that the kind of people who espouse these pretty racist views aren’t dining on baby flesh every night. And not all of ‘em are wearing Klan uniforms or want some white ethnostate – some of ‘em are just mildly shitty. Most, in fact, are more like this than some extremity.

Zahler didn’t have to put any of these things in the movie – they’re ancillary and barely take up 10 minutes of screentime in this 2.5 hour movie. But at the same time, I’d much rather not have only movies that show people I like. That’s not a good path for anybody, that kind of sameness of intent.

If anything I think Zahler is just caught up in a whirlwind not of his own making. He’s just making movies he likes, but the culture around him has changed so rapidly and there are all kinds of voices right now that are genuinely inquiring as to why things are the way they are. And maybe there’s a sort of willful blindness in making a movie like this and just shrugging and going ‘well, it’s what I want to do, it doesn’t need to be political’ like he’s basically done several times. Unfortunately everything’s become political and the world is a goddamn dumpster fire because of it. I enjoy the guy’s movies. But I can see where detractors are coming from there.

But Zahler is nothing if not a storyteller, and we also have other plot threads coming together – another guy, Henry John, played by Tory Kittles, who’s getting back into crime to help his family. Jennifer Carpenter of Dexter fame is back in another Zahler movie, playing a new mother who gets caught up in the mayhem. Gibson and Vaughn’s cop characters get into this plot to steal a bunch of gold from even worse criminals, who Kittles’ Henry John is affiliated with. And Carpenter is kidnapped by the bad guys – people have also harped on this aspect of Zahler’s films, as it’s pretty antiquated damsel in distress type shit, but what can I say? He’s a metal musician and a fan of vintage gore and action movies. Not exactly the guy we should be looking to to lead us into the future.

What ensues is a lot of shootouts, some blood and guts. But also a typically well-paced narrative as Zahler has become known for. He takes his time with these scenes, relishing in showing you their conversations and their stakeouts in the car and their family lives – it’s all just build-up and table-setting but it’s compelling due to its rawness and the extent to which he takes it. It would be less so if he skimmed through it like other movies do.

He takes the audience seriously and delivers a full experience by not just jumping into action or sex or anything. By taking the leisurely and detailed route in setting up his story, the violence and action that comes later has more impact. Most Hollywood movies would just take five minutes to show a spouse character saying “please don’t die” and then jump into the action. Not this one.

The whole thing, like Zahler’s previous movies, comes off as a satisfying full meal. At 2.5 hours you won’t feel like you’ve been skimped on. It’s a three course movie and feels complete. I can’t always say the same thing about, say, a Marvel movie, which feels more like a big cheesy pretzel that will give you gas later.

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The Prodigy (2019)

The Prodigy seems to posit that sometimes, parents are right to be afraid of their own children. But this is a pretty typical ‘bad seed’ type of movie like The Omen or Orphan or however many other ones. It’s so well-branded at this point it might as well be a corporate logo – Scary Kid, complete with creepy things said in a low voice, odd deadpan faces and spooky lighting! Get one at your local WalMart today!

Director: Nicholas McCarthy

Starring: Taylor Schilling, Jackson Robert Scott

IMDb

We start off with a serial killer dying when the police find one of his victims, a woman whose hand he cut off for some reason. Then at the exact same moment, Taylor Schilling’s character Sarah’s baby is born! Gee, I can’t imagine they’re showing us this for any hacky reason related to reincarnation or possession of any kind. Must just be a weird coincidence! I’m sure they filmed lots of other things that didn’t make it in, like just filming totally mundane random things for the hell of it! That’s how movies work.

The kid, Miles, grows up, and to my surprise the movie actually took its time here, establishing a family dynamic and only slowly introducing the creepier elements. I guess the story is that while the boy is gifted almost from birth, he also begins exhibiting some weird tendencies like when he begins speaking Hungarian in his sleep and it turns out to be some stuff like “you whore, I’ll cut out your eyes,” and you know, as far as an eight-year-old’s conversational skills, this isn’t that bad. Most eight-year-olds are way less interesting to talk to.

I think the craziest time to me is when he beats up a little kid with a wrench at school, and somehow is not kicked out after that – you never see the other kid again, but Miles is still there. But then again, what’s a little aggravated battery when you’re a kid? It’s just part of growing up.

So Sarah just goes to this weird doctor who tells her that reincarnation is real and her son is probably fighting off an evil spirit in his brain that could take him over completely! Imagine going to what you thought was a legit doctor and hearing that. He goes into insane detail about this. It’s like if you went to a totally normal doctor’s office with a bad cough and the guy turned to you and said unironically “you’re turning into a werewolf.”

But because this is some real brainless idiotic shit, the guy is totally right! He was on the money! He should probably try gambling because he’d be good at it most likely.

I think one of my favorite parts is when it’s revealed that the kid has rigged a baby monitor to spy on what his parents are saying, attaching it secretly to a picture downstairs. Are we sure this is a serious movie? Seems more like some kind of wacky sitcom. What will this boy genius do next? Maybe rig a school PA to play some hip trendy music so all the cool kids will like him?

Sarah's husband Edward flies off the handle randomly, losing his temper as if this were a fundamental aspect of his character and he were a fully three-dimensional character. But really it just seems random, and like a way to get him out of the movie for a while. He also gets into a car crash as well later – man, the script really tossed this guy aside like an old girlfriend it got tired of. The movie knew what to do with him about as much as a kid staying at his weird bachelor uncle’s house for a weekend.

Oh, and when she takes him to see that doctor dude, Miles blackmails the doctor into telling Sarah there’s no possession after all – he set up this whole plan to frame the doctor by taking his drugs, taking pubic hair off the toilet to put in his mouth (!!) to simulate the doctor putting his dick in his mouth, it’s fucking crazy. The doctor, though, he should probably quit – would you want anyone that easily outsmarted to be in charge of your mind? He’d probably get distracted and turn you into a vegetable.

I guess they figure out that to get the killer out of Miles, they have to complete the task he was there to do, which is murdering the killer’s final victim who escaped years ago. Sarah actually buys a gun and it looks like she’s gonna do it herself, which is completely batshit, like really just an out-there plot.

But if you’re afraid the movie might actually try something different and daring, nope! She wimps out and instead Miles, possessed by the killer, brutally murders the woman. Hooray for exactly the most predictable thing you could possibly do! But at least we got to see something completely, pointlessly cruel on top of that! That makes it all OK. Or maybe it makes it a total piece of shit. I can never tell.

Then Sarah chases Miles out into a field and tries to shoot him. Miles says he’s totally evil now and is only the killer, with Sarah’s actual son now completely gone. But of course, some random farmer guy shows up exactly at the right time, conveniently not hearing anything the kid said, and shoots Sarah before she can kill Miles. Of course! It’s not a lazy plot twist at all! Sometimes people just materialize out of nowhere right when the villain needs them to!

Then of course you get the lame-ass ending where Miles is at some new foster family’s place and he sees the killer in the mirror, signifying that HE IS ACTUALLY THE KILLER. Oh, wait, we already knew that. What a great ending, just reiterating what we already knew from the first act of the movie like it's a surprise!

Fuck The Prodigy, man. This is some seriously lame, dated, half-assed nonsense. Every decision made is cliché and the movie is afraid to take risks. The characters exist only as arbitrary hollow chess pieces to move around. The plot shies away from anything exciting and there’s no point to any of it. What was the message here? Serial killers are bad? Yeah, real Einstein-level shit, guys. At least Taylor Schilling is great – hope she gets a better movie next time.

Image copyright of its original owner, I don't own it.