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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Midsommar (2019)

Just a year after his breakout hit Hereditary, director Ari Aster is back with this movie, which is somewhat like a Wes Anderson-style comedy if Anderson descended into a serial-killer-style mania. There are gonna be spoilers in this one, so tread lightly.

Director: Ari Aster

Starring: Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor

IMDb

Midsommar is about a bunch of kids going to Sweden for one of the guys, Josh, to do a thesis on European traditional ceremonies. Josh is played by William Jackson Harper of the Good Place, which is a fitting casting if I ever saw one. Also, the guy from Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, the eccentric game developer, is in this too, as a womanizing idiot, so that was fun.

The central act is the relationship between Dani (Florence Pugh) and Christian (Jack Reynor), who are not really vibing with one another and he wants to break up with her. Unfortunately, an all too common occurrence happens when Dani’s mentally unstable sister kills herself and their parents with poisonous gas, thus making it inconvenient for Christian to break up with her. Bummer! It’s weird that the movie made the sister bipolar. That’s not a good message to send at all. But it did top the ‘child severed head’ scene from Hereditary that shocked the fuck out of me last year – god, it’s awful to watch.

So Dani, who the movie implies has always been somewhat anxious and needy, is now understandably traumatized and depressed. Pugh does an amazing job at conveying this character. Easily in the same class as Toni Collette from Hereditary – he’s got a knack for working with killer actresses and they all do amazing shit.

The movie unfolds at a pleasantly lackadaisical, molasses-slow pace that I think works for it. Most horror movies are like 85 minutes and barely waste any time getting to the point. That’s great when they’re good. This works because it takes its time and lets you immerse yourself in these strange, rolling green fields, these chipper white-clad Swedes in the countryside, the sort of glimmer of unease that grows as the movie goes on. Everything is shot open and wide, and it gives the movie a different feel than the pervasive shadows and quick cuts of other horror movies. The characters are goofy and not all of them given much development, but they’re acted well and seem believable as these chumps who wandered into a bizarre situation.

I think it’s strange that this is a 2019 movie using the old “look at how creepy these foreigners are!” trope. I really thought that had died off. But then again, nostalgia is big these days. There’s a scene where the villagers take two old people and have them jump off a cliff to their deaths and then when one of them survives, they take turns bludgeoning his face in with a giant mallet. They didn’t know this would be jarring to people from America or other countries? Pretty hard to believe. I mean if they’d had a demonstration where a cop shoots an unarmed black person, I could understand, but this is a bit much. It is a creepy scene though.

Also I take issue with the one Swedish guy, Pelle, who was their friend back in grad school in the US and hooked them up with the gig. He apparently was in on the whole thing and was a big part of the others getting killed or sucked into the cult lifestyle of this countryside coven. What was the plan there – he went across the ocean, enrolled in grad school, took classes and met friends with the sole, long-shot hope that he’d be able to find some guys who wanted to do a thesis on European Midsommar traditions so he could sacrifice them to his weird gods? Seems like that was a hard bargain. Glad he was able to do it. You can accomplish anything with determination and somewhat implausible writing! All of them end up dying – so I hope that grad school money this guy wasted was worth it, since he can’t go back now without facing questions about it!

But even with those misgivings, I was sucked in. I loved the surrealistic, rolling wave of this film, which just sucked me in like some 1950s Blob type abomination. The complete absence of any outside world was entrancing. The little details, like when Dani hallucinates her dead family in momentary glimpses, are like icing on the cake. God I love that type of shit in horror movies – the little details that creep up on you. The movie’s slow, weird pace makes it so that the scares come random and unpredictable. It’s a bizarre, circus-like experience, the daylight making things off-kilter, the benevolence of the Swedes being genuine at times but quick to turn against the characters, creating this really paranoid atmosphere.

The metaphor of the whole thing is the dissolution and death of the relationship. Every conversation Dani and Christian have is fraught with weight and trouble. They’re never quite at ease and always a bit out of sync. They never seem to have a moment where it isn’t a chore for them both to interact, it seems, and anybody looking at them would probably think they were about to break up. He stayed with her through the awful tragedy, but at his core he just isn’t into this anymore, not by the time they make it to Sweden for sure. He doesn’t consciously cheat on her but doesn’t stop himself either, when the villagers nominate him to fuck a teenage girl to impregnate her and carry on their lineage. Could’ve probably protested a little more, there, bud.

But Dani sees them through the door and that’s that. She’s distraught and can’t forgive him – the relationship is unceremoniously done, in an ugly manner, but one that’s all too common. No more bones about that.

The ending comes with no more ambiguity as they vote to sacrifice a bunch of people, mostly the foreign main characters, to their weird old gods (don’t let them hear me saying that though). They nominate Christian to be the one who they paralyze and put inside a hollowed-out bear carcass as they burn him alive. What a day! There’s a good shot at the end of everyone screaming and it’s about as good as this ever could’ve ended, I suppose. I like that they don’t even try to put on an appearance that this is anything but horrific anymore. So much for trying to appeal to the outsiders, I guess.

Midsommar is a weird movie. Not without its problems, but Aster is a killer talent of a director and there's enough good here to make it well worth seeing if you're a fan of this new wave of horror movies and aren't resigned to only the classics. At the least, it’s a hell of a tourist pamphlet for those wanting to visit Sweden!

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Boar (2017)

Movie titles can be confusing sometimes, as to what they’re about. Sometimes, you just don’t know for sure. For instance, this one is about a giant boar that murders people in the outback.

Director: Chris Sun

Starring: Nathan Jones, Bill Moseley, the fucking boar

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

Boar is an Australian horror film starring Australian power lifter and wrestler Nathan Jones, who wins the contest for the man I’d be most afraid of if he ever turned evil and decided to start murdering people. Seriously; dude’s the size of the fucking Incredible Hulk. Bill Moseley, of Texas Chainsaw and Devil’s Reject’s fame, also has a role, although this is perhaps the only movie he’s done where he isn’t a raging psychotic, so you’d be forgiven for not immediately recognizing the man.

But the real star is the boar, of course! He wastes no time at all doing what boars do best: stealthily rampaging through the night like a vampire and massacring unsuspecting tourists. Did you know that boars can basically just appear and disappear at will, like ninjas? They’re really hard to hear and see, even when they’re gigantic like the one in this movie.

The movie is essentially a slasher film where the killer is a boar. It’s like if Jason Voorhees was a boar, which was always my main issue with those movies. The story moves through a series of characters with rich and complex backstories. Like, there’s a guy and a girl in a tent fucking! And another guy and a girl telling scary stories in the woods and he tells her to shut the fuck up a few times! It’s rich stuff. Compelling narratives, you see.

There are some other things that happen, such as two crazy old guys who wander around talking about stuff and who smartly split up to go look for the boar. Splitting up is a tried and true tradition in horror movies, and anybody who’s anybody does it immediately. It’s the mark of the high-born in a horror movie. One of them even finds one of the girls who previously got gored by the boar. Instead of helping her, he kind of dawdles around as he looks for the boar, which kills him!

Man, this boar is way smarter than most of the people around here. I think that’s why it’s so angry. It’s so easy to kill these people that he’s just crying out for a real challenge. But alas, none come. The boar stands alone as the apex predator of the world. The most dangerous of all God’s unholy creations...

The movie isn’t just about boar killing though. It has depth. It’s got other stuff happening, like the day to day life of a regular Australian bar and its patrons. This tough chick working behind the bar gets to beat up a guy being a creep. Then later on there’s a long sequence of this old man going on and on about how he saw the boar at the bar, with nobody believing him. It takes up a lot of time. My theory is, this guy was terminally ill and just wanted for once in his life to act in a movie. So kudos to Boar for letting him really go for it!

Meanwhile Bill Moseley’s character and his daughter’s boyfriend wander around as Moseley tries to convince the boyfriend guy that marrying his daughter is gonna be tough and he really has to think about it. Moseley, who’s been married three times, says he’s the poster child for what not to do. Man, who knew a movie called Boar would be raising some serious and deep questions about the nature of relationships. Like, are we ever really ready to get married? Are we prone as a species to rushing things, sadomasochistically running headlong into pain, knowing we’re only likely to end up disappointed? All questions the movie wants us to consider here. Very deep stuff.

That all comes to an end, though, when they come across the boar! They’re probably the only characters in this whole fucking movie to actually see this thing. That still doesn’t stop it from ripping off Moseley’s head like he’s a rag doll. Oh well, at least the boyfriend doesn’t have to worry about Moseley being up his ass about the marriage thing anymore!

Well, actually he too only survives a few more minutes. He comes back to the family and tries to tell them what happened, only then the boar lunges out from nowhere and gores him too. IT WAS BROAD DAYLIGHT. Even pre-schoolers would be able to see a giant murderous boar hurtling toward them. Blind people would at least hear it and be like, oh damn, I better move out of the way. Don’t give me any excuses like ‘oh, the characters here were on vacation, their guard was down’ - they should’ve seen the fucking thing!

I guess what happens next is a lot of running around in the dark. Nathan Jones’ character Bernie is able to fight the boar until it gores him and leaves him for dead, though because his body is apparently immortal Superman-like stuff, he survives and comes back later. The boar is actually killed by the chick from the bar from earlier. I guess bartenders really are the most badass people in society. She can kick the asses of random weirdos trying to grope her in the bar, and also murderous boars. Do not fuck with the bartenders!

Well that was Boar. It had a little bit of everything, from horrific violence to charming family tales and even some moral dilemmas. All in all, a well-rounded movie for the discerning film goer. Check it out!

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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.

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Dark Spirits (2008)

Dark Spirits is a movie about a chick whose sister dies from some mysterious supernatural force and she has to figure out why it’s haunting her, too. The problem is that by the end, the audience still has no real clue. This was part of a box set of DVD movies from Walmart my friend found in his apartment, so you know it’ll be amazing!

Director: Huck Keppler

Starring: Milena Minichova

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

The movie starts essentially like the 2003 classic The Room – which is to say, exactly like a porno, with bad lighting and camerawork, and two people having sex, except unfortunately here mostly with their clothes on. There’s really no difference other than that, though. The main girl Eva calls her sister later, who is a totally random woman who the movie wants us to believe is super close with her. The reason is to tell her sister that she had a dream of her walking into some desolate country house, like a bargain bin Texas Chainsaw, and getting grabbed by a ghost! You know – normal sister stuff!

Her sister is understandably skeptical – like, she probably heard this stuff every week while the main chick was in college and friends with that weird gypsy girl who had all the tea leaves and tarot cards and she's kinda done with it after all these years.

Then, the next morning, her boyfriend walks up extremely slowly to let her know her sister is dead – boy, was that fast. She takes it about like anyone would, with some crying and sitting at a table and whatnot – your usual bland depictions of sorrow. The Store Brand Box depictions of sorrow, really. There’s nothing at all in terms of who she is as a character. All she does the entire movie, really, is sit around an impressively bland apartment and write in a notebook. Thrilling stuff! Her apartment is so un-adorned and bland that I suspect she might be a serial murderer using it as a patsy for unsuspecting victims. Unfortunately the movie does not seize on this potential plot goldmine.

But don’t worry – there are plenty of weird scenes of her interacting with her boyfriend talking about different dimensions. And talking with some girl and a random homeless man about the concept of death or something. It’s seriously like they just took pages from a Philosophy 101 textbook and threw it hodge-podge into a screenplay. It has nothing really to do with the story.

So what IS the story? Well, I guess she keeps seeing ghosts and some mildly weird stuff happens to her. A few scares in the dark. But it’s not too bad, considering all the stuff that happens to people in better horror movies. This is kind of like the white privilege of horror movies. I think maybe the worst part is when she gets chased through the park by the homeless guy. But the next day, no kidding, he apologizes to her. What a good turnout! I wish more movie conflicts ended that way!

That stuff is positively rosy compared to how she is with her boyfriend, though – watch as these two barely actually touch each other and act mostly like two awkward people who were asked to act like they’re in a relationship. Amazing! It’s like I’m inside of a high school prom. Real interactive content.

Also, some detective shows up a few times, with the actor clearly stoned on camera. Why can’t he solve this crime? What are they paying him? I have some legitimate questions. His story essentially goes nowhere and, near the end of the movie, he gets killed by a ghost. Or maybe it’s not a ghost – it’s not really all that clear.

The main girl comes home and she sees her own dead body on the floor of the apartment. Wow! She should’ve cleaned that up! Then, I guess, she dies too, and is able to meet her dead sister in the ghost world. Given that these two characters acted stiff and cold toward each other already as if they barely knew each other, my guess is it’ll be exactly like they’re used to. I wonder what wacky ghost adventures they’ll go on. Hopefully it’ll be more interesting than this movie.

This was mostly harmless. I actually do like seeing low budget stuff like this and watching how people try to construct something scary – at least, it’s not some calculated corporate garbage. There is that. But it’s just not very good. It’s too slow and lacks any kind of compelling characters. It was kind of fun to see where it went, but the payoff was lacking. See it if you’ve got a bottomless appetite for this kind of fun schlock.

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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.

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