The Perfection (2018)

I… uh… you know, I don’t have an intro for this. Just read on and I’ll explain what this is.

Director: Richard Shepard

Starring: Allison Williams, Logan Browning

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

This one starts off with a girl named Charlotte, whose mother has died and so she can finally go back to playing the cello like she always wanted. She meets her teacher’s new protege, Lizzie, who has been in the New York Times, so that’s cool. Then through a rapid-fire series of scenes of them playing the cello, they drink together and then have sex and are in a relationship enough to go to China together!

Well, you can say a lot of things about musicians. Apparently they move fucking fast. Charlotte says this is the first time she’s ever had sex, since she spent so much time with her dying mother for years. Well, so far so good. I’m sure this will just be a movie about a romance. How sweet.

In China, the two almost immediately have problems when Lizzie starts getting sick. It quickly begins to escalate when they’re on a bus in the middle of nowhere and Lizzie begins to vomit up worms. She wonders if she has that virus that had been reported in China (… you know, I’m not going there for this), and, no, my friend, what you have is apparently much fucking worse. Vomiting up worms – this is some Exorcist shit.

So, OK. It’s a body-horror flick. Cool.

Then the bus driver kicks them off and they just have to wander around in the middle of the mountains with Lizzie dying. She sees bugs exploding out of her arm and Charlotte then immediately produces a giant meat cleaver out of nowhere and goes “you know what you have to do!” Uh, anyone who carries around a fucking meat cleaver and just pulls it out at the ready is nobody I want to be around.

But then the movie ‘rewinds’ itself in a very weird and stupid manner to SHOW US WHAT REALLY HAPPENED! Apparently, Charlotte actually got some hallucinogenics and slipped them to Lizzie, suggesting subtly that bugs were in her skin. Then she also stole a meat cleaver from a restaurant just for the right time to use. This is some psycho shit, man. The character from Single White Female is going “wow, that’s fucked.” Why’d she have to go all the way to China to do this? How did she know the bus driver would just abandon them? I have so many questions. If they had taken her to a hospital, none of it would’ve worked and the whole plan would’ve been shot. I guess it’s just dumb.

So, OK… now I guess it’s a weird revenge/sociopath type of story! Cool! Are you done trying on different genres of films like it’s a department clothing store? I mean, Jesus Christ, this has more personalities than the homeless guy down the street from me.

Then we flash forward a few weeks to back in America, as Lizzie shows up at the music school like a lost orphan with one hand. The teacher, Anton, immediately shows no regard for her well-being at all and basically kicks her out for losing her hand. What a class act! “You suffered a traumatic injury, now GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY SIGHT!” This is the kind of guy who grades child cancer patients’ drawings as ‘mediocre at best.’ What a douche!

So instead, she goes and fights Charlotte at her house in the suburbs – wait, so Charlotte’s whole big plan went like:

1. Go trick girl into sleeping with you.
2. Go to China and drug her and make her cut off her own hand!
3. Go home and live in a suburban home and do nothing.

What a plan! She sure is keeping busy these days. I guess it’s good to have a full calendar. That’s the spice of life.

Then Lizzie kidnaps Charlotte and takes her back to the music mansion where Anton the weirdo music teacher just invites them both back in. It’s revealed through some weird flashbacks that, actually, this music school is a weird rape cult where the teacher makes you have sex with him if you mess up the music! What a twist! We also learn that Charlotte was apparently institutionalized before, likely because of the rape cult stuff, and had electroshock therapy.

What a tasteful plot. I’m glad this movie is really shining a light on the plight of sexual assault victims by showing us a bunch of sensational gaudy bullshit twists. Actually it's trash and uses heavy subjects as fodder to be shocking and garish, making it really very immature.

Like this shit is crazy – Anton and his goons, with Lizzie on their side, have Charlotte shackled to a chair and threaten to rape a little girl if she doesn’t do well. What the fuck am I even watching? Who wrote this down and said ‘yeah, makes sense’?

Eventually, we get the OTHER big twist – that Charlotte and Lizzie had actually teamed up to beat Anton, tricking him into thinking HE had the upper hand!

Christ, this movie is full of twists. It’s like three different movies; a romance, a body horror film and then a rape revenge film. I’m not opposed to the genre switching, but the way the movie keeps on throwing twists in and then retconning everything before it makes this a very frustrating viewing. It's not clever if all you're doing is going "oh, yeah, that thing you thought happened? That didn't happen. I'm smart because my mom said so!" Just tell the fucking story!

But yeah – Charlotte and Lizzie team up and kill Anton, eventually severing all his limbs and making him watch them play the cello together. Just imagine clicking on this part as a random point in the movie after seeing the beginning with the two girls kissing and sleeping together. I know that’s not a hard hitting critique, but man is it funny to imagine.

Also, Charlotte apparently did all the stuff about cutting off Lizzie’s hand to save her from the brainwashing of the rape cult thing. I wonder if she EVER just tried talking to Lizzie calmly about it before pulling off that whole scheme. That would be my big problem if I was in Lizzie’s shoes. “Uh, you couldn’t have just talked to me about the brainwashing and the rape cult over our morning coffee? There was no point where you could’ve brought it up civilly? You had to jump straight to CUTTING OFF MY FUCKING HAND???”

But then, that’s our Charlotte – always such a cheeky rascal!

I just wonder why Charlotte had to do everything the way she did. Couldn't she just have killed Anton immediately at the beginning? That would have probably been easier. Or better yet, find some way to expose him or something. So much could've been avoided, including loss of limbs and PTSD-related trauma. But I guess it was more fun to do the whole hand-cutting-off, rape-revenge elaborate plot!

This movie is terribly bad, but I just find it more fascinating than anything. What brain mash thought this crazy shit up? I want to study it under a microscope and find out what secrets lie within. Maybe it could cure cancer.

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

The Hunt (2020)

Good satire is very hard to do, as this movie proves so well that it ought to be in the dictionary definition for how not to do it.

Director: Craig Zobel

Starring: Betty Gilpin, Hillary Swank

IMDb

You might know this from last fall when Trump and a bunch of other conservative weirdos saw the trailer for this movie and then got mad about that without even waiting to see it! Which, after I’ve now seen it, is hilarious, because it’s basically conservative satire playing right to their base and they didn’t understand it. That makes this at least a little funny.

This thing starts out with the subtlety of a nuclear warhead hitting your house, with a text conversation between a bunch of stereotypical liberal types talking about how they’d love to be at “the Manor” hunting “deplorables” right now. One guy says the president is a “ratfuck” and a lady says what he did “ruined her day.” Oh man, pause it, I need time to digest this mind-bending social commentary. It’s too smart!

Then a bunch of regular-seeming white people with southern and midwestern accents wake up in a field with gags in their mouths. They find a bunch of swords and guns and stuff in a giant box and take them, but this does not seem to help them even a little bit, as their opponents just throw grenades at them. That seems unfair as fuck. It’s like if you agreed to play badminton against someone and, instead, they just fucking threw grenades at you.

I do admit that the way the movie just kills off characters wantonly while implying they’ll be important is pretty funny… that at least adds a charming sort of grindhouse splatter to the whole thing. Too bad that can’t last all movie, since that would be weird and make no sense.

Instead, the REAL plot starts when a bunch of the idiots find a gas station where a mom and pop old people team is at the counter. One dude says he’s from Orlando, FL – the one guy with a basketball jersey and white-dude dreadlocks, of course he’s from my hometown. Fuck you, movie.

The old couple starts spewing a bunch of dialogue about gun rights, and then, after they kill the others – they’re part of the whole thing, oh man! – they get into an argument about whether it’s OK to say “black people” now while cleaning up the bodies. Get it, 'cause they're annoying liberals? The subtlety! It’s burning my eyes! I can’t see anymore and am now having to figure out how to apply for a service animal online!

The main girl turns out to be Betty Gilpin’s character Crystal, who is obviously the lead because she’s the only one not spewing generic conservative stuff about secret societies and libtard cucks and everything. She looks like she is about to cry for the entire film, which made sense after I saw where all this was going. She teams up with Ethan Suplee’s character Gary, who is some kind of Alex Jones style blogger.

There’s one scene where they come across a bunch of illegal immigrants who Gary suspects of being “crisis actors.” Just keep funneling those buzzwords into the script! It’s the cheapest way possible to show how political division is – this shit is like a Facebook comment thread between a bunch of 65 year olds just thrown haphazardly into a blender. Like yeah, just throw in every possible bottom of the barrel cliche. We don't get enough of that in real life. I want to hear about crisis actors and liberal cucks in a movie now, not just in the sewers of the internet. That's good dialogue!

There’s no real characters here for the most part; just strange Frankenstein’s monsters made up of cliches from the most obvious, groan-worthy parts of today's agonizing political discourse. I'm amazed Damon Lindelof wrote this after his quite good take on Watchmen last year. Is it some kind of yin-yang deal? Something about for every good thing you put into the world, there's something negative, too? Dude - you didn't have to do this.

There is some fun violence I guess. Crystal and this old farmer-looking guy get to the compound where all the bad guys are sitting around going “please don’t joke about that” - yes, really. Crystal makes incredibly short work of them all in an entertainingly bloody fashion that I am sure CPAC will make great use of as a ‘let’s get pumped up’ video.

Then we get the big twist that Hillary Swank is in the movie! Happy day! Oh, and also that apparently, the whole plot never existed before conservatives on the internet all started making conspiracy theories about how liberals take conservatives to a big manor and hunt them for sport. So then Swank’s character and the other villains, all high up businesspeople or something, make jokes about it through text and are fired. Then they all decide to make the conspiracy happen for real. They set up an elaborate murder hunt for no reason except that they were accused of it.

The final fight with Swank has her telling Crystal that “you all made it happen.” Which is about as lame of a justification as you can get. “We may have murdered a bunch of people, but you guys posted stuff we didn’t like on the internet.” Well when I think about it for a second, I guess that’s a good justification after all. The internet is life or death and if you can't have a fancy office job, you might as well become a mass murderer. I think that's what Rachel Maddow told me in my dreams.

Oh and also Crystal was apparently not the person they meant to pick for this – there was another lady with her name that they meant to kidnap, and THIS one is a trained badass martial artist. Seems like they should’ve noticed that when she was picking everyone on their side off like they were defenseless babies. But who am I to judge?

I guess the final fight is pretty OK, but how much of it is worth sitting through the rest of this awful steaming shit pile of a movie? I really don’t think it was worth it.

The problem with the twist in this movie is that it doesn’t change all of the stuff from before, which is essentially red meat conservative propaganda – the LIBRULZ are KILLING real AMERICANS! That’s shitty writing. You can argue that it’s all meant to be nonsense and satirical comedy, but the conservative characters, despite some outrageous lines, are shown to be polite, helpful and generally on the same team to help one another when the shit goes down. The liberal elites are just evil cartoons.

It’d actually be fun to lampoon the milquetoast liberals who are all superficial – but this isn’t the way to do it. Even aside from that, the writing is just dumb and dull and everything that happens is just perfunctory to move the plot along. It’s a hollow thing. But have fun paying 20 bucks to rent it on Amazon – what a great investment this has all been for me.

Images copyright of their original owners; I don't own any of them.

Wendigo (2001)

When I was maybe 13, I’d go to Blockbuster any chance I got. I’d browse the shelves for the evil-est looking horror flicks available. I didn’t give a single fuck. One of them was this movie. This was maybe the third or fourth horror flick I ever saw - back then I didn't get to see most of this whole genre until I was 12 or 13 and neither of my parents watched it, so I just discovered everything piecemeal and random, just whatever Blockbuster had. It was an interesting evolution. I'll show you why now.

Director: Larry Fessenden

Starring: Patricia Clarkson, Jake Weber

IMDb

This thing starts with a family of three hitting a deer on a snowy country road! Some bearded asshole tries to get in their face because HE was gonna fuck that deer ahead of them!! Oops, did I say that last thing out loud? I ought to be more sensitive about that stuff.

They get to an old country house where the dad just exercises his own weird stereotypes, talking endlessly to his wife about how that dude on the road was such a rude piece of shit. Dude, get over it! You’re not handling it well. There’s a whole trippy psychedelic dream sequence with the son, too, mostly just looks like the camera guy took mushrooms and then left the camera on!

Some weird old man at a gas station hands the kid a totemic stone figure of the Wendigo, which is a kind of mythical figure that has apparently infused itself into strange toys at gas stations! What a world! In 100 years some idiot kid is gonna find a statue of Ronald McDonald and that will awaken an even worse murderous idol spirit to come and wreak vengeance. And I’ll be here for it, because by then I am guessing none of us will have a choice in this fucking capitalist hellscape we’ve created.

By the way, the old man apparently may not have actually existed as the manager says nobody else works there! Weird! The gas station clerk reacts to this news of a mysterious man pretending to work there with all the surprise of a catatonic zombie. Who can blame the girl? She probably makes $6 an hour and gets spit on by weirdos all day. Woohoo, America!

At some point, despite the father’s objections, the movie continues on. The movie jumps over several hurdles of wasting time. This shit could get an Olympic medal with all the scenes of this family doing fucking nothing. I have to say the production value is something – I’m not gonna grab the low-hanging fruit and bash this movie for it, but some of these low-budget productions just fascinate me. I mean, the camera shakes like a tornado victim is holding it, the actors act like they have guns to their head and the picture quality is so bad that you wonder if they didn’t just hold a piece of greasy plastic film over the lens on a dare. But it’s all part of the charm. This feels like it was made by people with no money who just left the camera on while people just did whatever on set. I dig the authenticity.

The bad guy is conveyed via sticks from the forest waving in your face, like it’s a game you played when you were a nine-year-old. Most of the action shots are so dark you’ll swear the light guy was off fucking the secretary from the studio. But hey! That’s what horror was back then! Real horror has no production values and feels like maybe, it might’ve been made out of some weird fetish! That’s what it is!

Somehow, during an expedition in the woods, amid all the movie’s weird trippy dark psychedelia, the dad gets shot. I don’t even know if they had the budget for that effect, given everything else. Was he really shot? Were the makers of this film that sadistic? Even if so, I respect them. We all have to make sacrifices for our art, and some of us have to do it for straight to DVD blockbuster picks that only bored stoners end up seeing, which end up on specialty horror streaming sites 20 years later.

God, how long does it take to get him to the hospital? Don’t you know we can piece it together and fill in the blanks in our heads? We don’t exactly need to see every bathroom break these idiots take. It’s not some kind of fucking Richard Linklater biopic with a progressive theme and a whole concept to spend 20 years behind the filming. Nobody is gonna be lost if you skip a few steps and just show us the dude in a damn hospital bed!

They have a whole sequence where they don’t know if the dad was shot – then you can see a bullet hole right there in his gut. These damn doctors graduated from Mr. Magoo’s University for the Somewhat Well-Sighted. Oh my god, has medical knowledge failed us here in Bum Fuck Nowhere? My god.

The redneck dude from earlier in the movie turns out to be the one who shot the dad. His karma comes because the little boy’s Wendigo statue wants revenge. In a bizarrely shot shaky camera sequence of the forest, the trees like they’re seizure patients, the dude ends up dying. He fires his gun a few times. We get a brief, hazy glimpse of the monster – a naked person with a deer head. I’m sure this was a dejected extra from Eyes Wide Shut that just wandered onto the wrong set; don’t get fucking overreacting about it...

Honestly, I didn't mind this that much. My film education is a thousandfold what it was when I saw this last. But there's a charm to the total DIY factor here, with everything the movie did so bizarrely but while trying to craft a certain atmosphere. They had an idea here. It wouldn't be as creepy without the low-fi production. It's not great and spends too much time waffling around, but I can't say it's the worst I've ever seen.

All in all the Wendigo is my favorite Marvel Universe character and I can’t wait for the long-anticipated sequel that will surely be inspired by this whole coronavirus thing going on. They do have a lot of time to spend indoors. Better get on it.

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

The Platform (2020)

The Platform is a Spanish horror comedy about a strange prison concept where food is distributed via a system where a giant platform (name drop!) lowers through hundreds of levels and people are supposed to be fair. Unfortunately, people are selfish! There. That’s the entire fucking movie. But they milked it for like an hour and a half, so I guess I have to review it.

Director: Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia

Starring: Ivan Massagué, Antonia San Juan

IMDb

Co-written with Tony and Michelle.

This guy Goreng, the main character, apparently agreed to be part of this, as apparently it’s one way to get a degree. How does that work? Is there a university that’s like ‘well, you can take classes and educate yourself and prove you’re worthy, OR you can go be in jail in a filthy hole for a while!’ How does that make any fucking sense?

The main dude wakes up with some crazy old man. There are some scenes of them doing naked yoga together (???) and reading and bickering and whatnot – it’s all a big waste of time to eat up screentime.

The main meat of the film for the first act, the idea that this platform brings food down every day and they’re supposed to ration it out – but of course, human greed gets in the way and nobody does it that way. Every man for himself, etc. I’m not sure who’s benefiting from this. Is it a science experiment? If so, it’s gone on long enough, I am almost positive. Is it just the cruelty of an uncaring barbaric system? Nice social commentary I guess. But we got over an hour of movie left and I already get the idea! Uh oh!

The old dude ties Goreng up and tries to eat him. Wow – they went straight from honeymoon marriage right into the homicidal phase. They don’t waste time. The old dude reassures Goreng he won’t eat his genitals – well, that’s nice of him.

Where is security during this? And was it worth the degree yet??? I HAVE TO KNOW! But then a crazy lady, I suppose the physical manifestation of Deus ex Machina, comes and murders the old dude just in time. What a convenience.

Then Goreng gets stuck with this other lady who has a dog, who I guess was the administrator for this place who let him in in the first place? Why is she there? I have no idea and the movie doesn’t seem to care. Character development is never really a concern here. They don’t really explain anybody’s motives. This lady is mostly there for exposition we couldn’t get elsewhere, basically spoonfeeding the audience the whole plot about how the prisoners are supposed to ration out food and there should be enough for everyone if they do. We get it! The blinking garish neon sign of your “smart social commentary” is starting to hurt my eyes!

In between all of this, the ghost of the old man returns to haunt Goreng and, mostly, waste more screen time. 98% of the reason for this is wasting time!

I guess some type of a plot finally starts up as the lady and Goreng hatch a plot to try and regulate everything to help everyone eat. The lady just tries to ask nicely, but unfortunately, the kinds of people who exist in a prison like this don’t respond to asking nicely. Goreng then threatens to shit in their food if they don’t listen. Finally, character development! He doesn’t ever shit in the food that we see, though. That’s a shame as it would have made this movie better to me at least a little.

They spend an exorbitant amount of time trying to make this happen and it doesn’t work, so the lady ends up hanging herself, with the intention of letting Goreng eat her. This leads to more hallucinations of the old dude telling him to eat her. The old dude’s ghost also says he was more polite because he didn’t just stab anyone to death – instead he was nice about his homicide attempts. Man, I don’t know, I guess this word vomit is supposed to be a ‘moral gray area’ type of character thing for Goreng. It doesn’t work at all and is stupid as shit! Good job!

I guess then he ends up with this other guy who is sort of manic and crazy, trying to climb up each level to get to the hole. Goreng and this guy team up to make a ‘statement’ to the administration of this prison by stopping anyone from eating the food. This is actually a little bit of an interesting plot, which I assume is why they made us wait an hour before getting to it – because the writer/director/etc are sadistic fucks and want us to experience the movie the same way the characters do, starved for anything of substance.

So then we get a few somewhat OK moments as Goreng and the guy try and stop anyone from eating in order to save food for the lowest levels and ‘make a statement’ - I’m not sure if both of those are the same goal, or if one contradicts the other; it’s not that clear. There are a few bloody ass fight scenes that are kinda entertaining, if exploitative and goofy. And at least Goreng finally has a fucking goal here. Imagine that – a character who wants something! It’s like finding an oasis after dying of thirst in a desert in this fucking movie.

They find a small child on one of the levels and end up saving her rather than finishing their mission. I guess children weren’t allowed in here which is why this is shocking. But as we’ve seen, this prison doesn’t care if inmates cannibalize each other or hang themselves! So it’s just whatever. They decide they’re fucked anyway and just stay down there, instead letting the little girl ride up on the platform, deciding SHE is now the ‘statement’ to the administration! Ooohhh!

...Nah, they’ll probably just give her to an orphanage and keep doing things the way they always did. Or was that cynicism and pointlessness the ‘message’ all along? If so, fuck this shit anyway.

No world-building to help us contextualize anything, and I hated all these characters actively throughout the movie. I sure hope ole Goreng felt good about his choices to do this to get a degree. Don’t watch this shit, man. This movie sucks and I'd prefer getting the coronavirus to watching this, which I'll regret writing if I do end up getting the virus.

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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!

Image copyright of their original owner; I don't own it.

Demons 2 (1986)

The first Demons was a gloriously insane little ride that was mostly about people spewing green stuff out of their mouths while heavy metal songs played over scenes of them all dying. This one is kind of like that, only without any of the things that made the first one good or even interesting. All the cool lighting and directing touches are gone, the music is less prominent and the kills are less interesting. Sound fun yet?

Director: Lamberto Bava

Starring: Bobby Rhodes, Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni, lots more

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

I guess this is a sort of weird ‘movie within a movie’ where you think you’re watching a story about a bunch of kids trespassing in the ruins of the movie theater from the first Demons and waking up a demon – it's weird that all five of them can't take one demon that was just asleep a second ago. I guess not everyone can be Ash from Evil Dead! It's just that these guys are like baby kittens completely helpless in the world. Pathetic, really.

This all turns out, confusingly, to be a movie within a movie, watched by a bunch of boring simpletons in this kind of weird hellscape of an apartment building. The entire movie pretty much takes place here, inside this giant Kafka-esque block of an apartment. It’s kind of a strange, claustrophobic setting that could’ve been effective if they’d known what they were doing. But it doesn’t seem like much more than an excuse not to spend money filming in actually interesting locations.

Instead, you mostly just get scenes that play like something out of a bad comedy. Like, this one girl is having a huge birthday party and locks herself in her room in the middle of it and watches the Demons movie. A demon starts coming out of the TV and, when it goes to static, she just tries to change the channel – shows how deep TV gets you. People get addicted to the shit enough to prefer it over preventing their own imminent death. The funny thing is, this movie is so bland that this isn’t even social commentary – it’s just another in the line of stupid, meaningless shit that happens.

The movie basically then becomes a lot of people turning into demons and killing people and stuff. It’s all a lot of noise – a lot of people who stand in place screaming as the demons kill them. It’s not really much of a challenge for the demons here, guys. You’re like easy pickings now. At least put up a little bit of a fight! It’s barely even a fucking horror movie if the characters just sit and wait to die. At that point it’s, what, just a dinner for the monsters? A potluck maybe?

They try and compensate for it by having the actors over-do all their scenes like they’re having epileptic seizures. That can be kind of funny at first, but after like an hour of just screaming, it’s like being in the middle of a bunch of cranky infants. Not really what I look for in a horror movie, guys!

There are various characters, but none who are really interesting. Oh man, tell me more about the gym guy who shouts at everybody to lift more weights! He’s such a compelling character I think my brain is gonna explode. William Faulkner and Alfred Hitchcock only could have DREAMED about a character this good.

Oh, the pregnant woman faces off against a small child turned into a demon – you have to be pretty weak to not be able to beat up a child. I know normally you wouldn’t want to, but this thing has mottled green skin and eyes like an inferno. Not sure the normal rules apply. It should be easy enough to defeat the kid but, by horror movie rules, the pregnant chick has a really hard time of it. Then a monster does an Alien-style chest burst out of the kid and out comes a tiny little goblin-like thing that looks like a shitty rubber McDonalds toy. Truly, what am I even fucking looking at with this?

I’ve been grasping at straws trying to talk about this, but it’s tough because there’s so much shit happening and all of it is so boring and inconsequential. There’s never a sense that anything in the story is moving forward. It’s all just random scenes, arranged arbitrarily, as if drawn from a hat and then slapped together. It’s as exciting as waiting in line at the DMV, but at least in that situation you have the ability to escape the screaming children there after less time than this movie’s runtime takes up.

I guess there’s some scenes of people in an elevator trying to hide from a demon, which are somehow more dull than if you were actually stuck in an elevator with someone in real life. And the climax is set in this underground parking lot, you know, the PRIME fucking location for ANY horror movie to be set in! My God! What a revelation, a climax so exciting that I will never enjoy any other movie again. Fuck any other cinema, this is the true zenith of all film creation!

I dunno, I really have nothing else to fucking add here. This is just a vapid, dull, awful movie and I would rather go watch the first one again.

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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.

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