Funny Games (1997)

Let’s talk about stuff that hasn’t held up. Every decade has a few things that just end up seeming dated after it’s over and we’ve all had a chance to analyze the settling dust of said decade. Like the 60s had the whole Woodstock hippy thing, the 70s had prog rock and acid, and the 80s had Reaganomics and weird PRMC hearings trying to say anything fun was witchcraft. Well, I’ve recently found an interesting one from the 90s – movies that really, really wanted to be smart about how VIOLENT and DANGEROUS movies were making America. Like Funny Games.

Director: Michael Haneke

Starring: Arno Frisch, Frank Giering, Susanne Lothar

IMDb

This is kind of a weird social commentary type of movie where the villains break the fourth wall and talk to the audience occasionally. It’s not done much and not in very interesting ways – usually just a wink or a nod, or maybe a paltry bit of dialogue about how they want to make it to feature-length movie time or something. I guess it’s interesting but it’s hardly even all that obtrusive. I guess there’s some dialogue about reality perception and stuff, but that’s so on the nose it comes off as hokey. Without real character traits for these guys, it feels empty and gimmicky to me.

I have to give the movie props – it’s well made, and director Michael Haneke has a great command of putting together expert scenes and making this tense, sparse atmosphere, focusing on the pain of the victims of these two sociopathic killers. It’s more uncomfortable than a lot of thrillers at some points because they take their time to show the victims’ anguish in this very quiet, stark way, and don’t have any deus ex machina type shit to save them. So it does get its point across at least in the beginning.

However, the whole messaging and blunt “point” of the film is what ended up bothering me – oh, we’re complicit in violence because the killers can talk to us, and should we even be watching movies that have this kind of violence in them? It’s kind of condescending actually. It’s like the movie is the scolding parent wagging their finger, telling us not to watch violent films because they’re bad for us. Like, pretty sure we can make our own decisions there, bud. Natural Born Killers, another edgy 90s flick, is very similar in its messaging, and even goes further by totally un-subtly throwing the news media in there – that one is so obvious in its messaging you can see it from space. But I’m sure a lot of people thought this stuff was, like, so deep, man.

I mean it’s really just kind of a weird puritanical kind of thing. I know Haneke likely didn’t mean it that way – he wants to reflect on the violence and all that and it’s not like he’s literally running a Sunday school class. But come on. Violence in movies isn’t some insidious plot. It’s fucking fun. It’s entertainment and catharsis to escape whatever bullshit is going on in the real world – which, these days, is a fucking lot, if you’ve seen the news lately. Not everything is gonna be about knitting circles or a guy who finds a lost puppy or something. Occasionally we want to see a guy get stabbed with a bayonet on fire or something.

‘Movies are violent, we’re complicit in violence’ - yeah, it’s called escapism. It’s enjoyable. That’s been going on since, Jesus, like the dawn of civilization? It’s not like Hollywood was the first thing ever to invent violent made-up stories. The ancient Greeks had stories about guys fucking their moms and killing their dads. Shakespeare had violent disembowelments and all sorts of murders going on, some of them even via bears. Did they also contribute to the downfall of society? Maybe we never had a fucking chance.

And yeah there are movies that are in poor taste and are exploitative – no doubt about that. Some things are bad. But other times it’s just for fun. I think things have just changed in the last 20 years. Especially in these last few, with the ascension of Trump to the presidency and the surrounding chaos that seems to have enveloped everything in our public view. These days everything just seems so much more dire and serious than when we had the luxury of going ‘oh, isn’t our violent media consumption such an issue? Pass the caviar, Angelina.’ The stakes have all changed. So maybe that’s a part of why Funny Games didn’t strike me. That’s always funny about art; how it changes depending on an indefinite number of factors.

Maybe it’ll strike you different. For me this missed the mark. I might’ve found it really deep when I was 13 or so.

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The Pyramid (2014)

There have been a lot of good horror movies coming out. So many, in fact, that I occasionally go back and watch something fucking stupid to remind myself where I came from. You can’t forget your roots.

Director: Gregory Levasseur

Starring: Ashley Hinshaw, Denis O'Hare

IMDb

The Pyramid is a found footage movie – remember that stupid-ass form of horror? I mean sure, there were a few good ones. This isn’t one of them. I guess it’s about a bunch of archaeologists filming a documentary in Egypt as they’ve found this underground pyramid. The entire country is rioting because of this, by the way, because the discovery disturbed their old spiritual beliefs. You know what I always say; starting off a horror movie with mild racism and xenophobia is always a surefire good idea.

The main characters are all vapid as fuck and barely worth commenting on. There’s a documentary team who are, uh, doing a documentary I guess. Then there’s an archaeologist girl and her father, who argue a lot. Arguing is a good way to show character, right? That’s always a good sign when the bulk of your dialogue is just idiots screaming at one another, makes it real endearing. Oh but they do show a lot of close-ups of the blond archaeologist woman in her underwear – why watch pornography when you can watch movies like The Pyramid? Very minimal titillation followed by underwhelming horror; that’s the way to go.

Like all these movies, there are a bunch of shots of people screaming at them not to film, which adds tension because uh oh, they’re filming anyway! Those incorrigible rebels! They send a robot into the pyramid and it gets attacked by something and goes offline… like true geniuses, they go inside after it despite every indication that just leaving would be better. But hey, anything for science and/or documentary filmmaking – in shitty movies, a person’s job is always 100% of their identity and motivation and they have nothing else going on!

Inside it’s poorly lit and this is the rest of the movie; just these jackasses wandering around in the underground pyramid. There’s at least an hour of movie, if not more, set here, and it becomes apparent that it only has two things to offer: dialogue with the characters screaming at each other that they NEED TO GET OUT OF THIS PYRAMID (‘cause, you know, it wasn’t obvious before) and the two archaeologist characters randomly stopping to recite facts about Egyptian gods and mythology they got off Wikipedia. Seriously, I fucking took a Middle School history class and it was more in depth than this movie made by supposed adults.

So most of this is really just these idiots running around through dimly lit catacombs bickering. Why did they think this would be entertaining? Whose idea of a good time is ‘oh yeah, I’d love to watch a bunch of characters walk around in a dark tomb where I can’t see what’s happening’? Even when you get a brief glimpse of creatures running around in there, or when a character gets sucked into a dark hole by the monster, it’s not scary or interesting. It’s like the whole direction was ‘make sure none of this is compelling.’

It’s like the moments that should be scary aren’t given any more weight than the ones of them just arguing in the hallways. This is a problem common to these found footage things – they have to be real and gritty and so they can’t do any of that cool stuff like, ya know, actually having interesting, well-lit scenes that show you stuff. That isn’t real at all! All those classic horror movies with cool lighting and special effects and scary scenes were for drama club dorks. THIS is the real shit, man! I’m being sarcastic but it really seems like all of this was the mindset here.

Most of the characters die off in awful ways, but that doesn’t stop the archaeologist father and daughter from gawking dumbly at cave paintings and talking about Egyptian history. Wow, the writers can copy-paste from a textbook! Amazing! A few times characters died who I’d thought were already dead. Usually a good sign, when you can’t tell fucking anybody apart. The archaeologists certainly don’t give a fuck – these damn sociopaths wouldn’t notice their own mothers dying if they had a rock with some carvings on it in front of them. What awesome characters! Totally invested! I think The Shining or The Exorcist would’ve been better if they took notes from this movie’s character development, man, just have everyone be bland, soulless and barely act like a real human.

Finally, after what feels like an eternity, we get the climax, with Anubis himself making an appearance! Wow, didn’t think they had a real celebrity in the movie. It’s amazing how dumb he looks though. I can actually see why they kept everything so dark for the movie before now. Anubis looks like some kind of third-rate Resident Evil video game villain rip off. It’s like what a very uninspired artist would draw and then be like ‘nah, this is not my best work,’ but then whoops, here come the producers of The Pyramid to steal from your trash can and put it on screen anyway!

Holy fuck this was lame. I don’t think there was anything I’d need to see again. But in fairness, I’ll do the movie a solid and bury it underground so nobody discovers it for the next thousand or so years.

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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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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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