Black Roses (1988)

It must have been an interesting time in the 80s when the biggest thing to worry about was the dangers of subversive rock and heavy metal music. Black Roses is a slasher that sort of doubles as a PSA for the PMRC, seeming to posit that maybe heavy metal really IS bad and will make kids kill people! Finally, someone is tackling the real issues!

Director: John Fasano

Starring: John Martin, Sal Viviano

IMDb

This starts off with shots of this band of weird demons, making GWAR look like they could play your corporate holiday party even if only through believability, playing a song… or, rather, miming along as Lizzy Borden’s “Me Against the World” plays. It’s a good song and got my hopes up unjustifiably for the movie. So now I have a bit of a grudge against it. Though, frankly, what I heard of the newer Lizzy Borden material maybe should've clued me in.

Then we’re introduced to your stereotypical small town with a lot of Christian stuff going on like banning rock and roll concerts because they’re Satanic and will destroy the moral fabric of society, etc. One lady, who I believe was a Frankenstein’s monster combined of all the uptight Christian moms of the 70s and 80s and who has probably never known what fun is, just straight up reads some of this band Black Roses’ lyrics out loud. C’mon. You know the delivery is half of it.

But apparently Black Roses are cleared to play the small town anyway – it’s apparently the band’s first live show ever, and they’ve only ever played in the studio and have mysteriously chosen this random backwater town as the location to play for four nights straight or some shit. Well, all of that sounds completely insane, better just greenlight it and let it happen! No red flags!

There’s a bunch of other stuff that happens. Like there’s the high school teacher who spends the whole movie trying and failing to get his students to care about Wordsworth’s poetry. It doesn’t go anywhere. As a bonus, he’s apparently involved in some weird romance with one of his students! This guy becomes the hero of the movie, by the way. This is our moral compass for this grand epic of a film.

I do think the first rock show is funny where the band pretends to be this nice sentimental pop ballad type of band for the first song, only while the adults are in the room – then as soon as the adults go ‘huh I guess this music isn’t that bad’ and leave, the band immediately strips off their clothes revealing skintight black leather, and begin singing about how they’re going to take over the town! But nah, I’m sure the lyrics are just metaphoric. You know - rock and roll at its best is just open to all sorts of interpretations.

The rock shows keep getting weirder and weirder after that – by the end, it’s literally just chanting with red lights like it’s the cult from “Mandy.” Except the guy in that movie played better music than this. Frankly, I know there have been periods where there has been music that got popular that was super avant garde or atmospheric, very removed from what was traditionally popular. But I’m pretty sure this shit isn’t charting. Maybe you should go back to the drawing board.

I guess all of this hypnotizes the kids, and they start all wearing black, acting ruder to their teachers and parents and whatnot. As we know, children have never acted out before. This is totally new behavior as of the late '80s. I'm glad the movie is this socially aware. Then things get even worse and they start killing everyone. The kills aren’t even very good. Like one is a car hitting someone, another is a gunshot to the head. Yeah – real slasher hall of fame shit. I personally want my on-screen deaths to be better.

The main source of morality in all this is the teacher, you know, the guy who has a forbidden romance with a high school girl. Fantastic source of good and bad, I say!

The climax, where the teacher goes and tries to burn down the concert while all the kids are in the building, involves some of the worst CGI you’ve ever seen. It’s seriously like somebody was handed an assignment to make the goofiest looking CGI monsters possible. Like I guess the point of the movie was to show off how the evils of rock and roll were. To me it was just like I’d rather convert back to Christianity than ever see this shit again. Mission accomplished, movie. You won.

Overall the whole thing is complete garbage. Go listen to rock and roll and ignore this whole movie!

Images copyright of their original owners, I own none of them.

Pig (2021)

SPOILERS for the movie in here.

Director: Michael Sarnoski

Starring: Nicolas Cage, Alex Wolff

IMDb

Food is such a fraught, weighty thing; it can be political and it can recall all these memories and mean so much to people. In Nicolas Cage’s new vehicle “Pig” these kinds of themes are explored. Cage’s character Robin Feld, an ex-chef who now lives a solitary life in the woods, has a line maybe two-thirds of the way through that really encompasses everything the movie is: “You only get so many things to care about.”

Most of the rest of it is just this tour through the strange and seedy world of the restaurant underground. It’s a curious backdrop for a film and endears me to it – this wholly singular kind of plot and setting. There’s some pretty wild and ugly things that go on like an underground fight club for cooks? I want to know how much this is based on real life. Something tells me there has to have been some real-world connection there. Then you get the more artificial side of the actual front-facing restaurants, so fussy and over-prepared that there’s nothing real in it. All of it really ends up showing you why someone might end up leaving that life.

But he’s got to go back in though. Someone’s taken his truffle pig. He and Alex Wolff’s character Amir, who is trying to start his own business in this crazy culinary underworld, end up on a tour of said underworld, as Robin tries to figure out what the hell happened.

It’s all very moody and somber and the movie doesn’t spell anything out for you. Cage is remarkably restrained and his killer stare does a lot of the work as he chooses his words very carefully. When he does speak it’s like a thunderbolt. You fucking pay attention. Wolff’s character talks tough but he also talks too much and betrays that maybe he’s not as worldly as he wants to be.

Robin goes through this whole thing with a cloud of impending violence over him. But the violence never really comes. There’s one scene with the fight club I mentioned where you get some pretty grisly stuff comparative to the rest of the film, but everything else tends toward the quiet. One of the best scenes is when he visits his old restaurant – now a bakery – and has this really short, tender exchange with the lady who’s taken it over. He gets some baguettes. It doesn’t sound exciting but like I said – food has layers and layers of meaning for people.

Eventually he finds out who took the pig – Amir’s father, played by Adam Arkin, who is now some kind of big kingpin in the Oregon culinary world. Arkin apparently ordered the pig stolen to do what his son was doing selling the truffles but even better. It’s pure capitalistic bloodthirst. No real regard for the humanity. Robin and this guy commiserate just slightly on the fact that they’ve both lost their wives. In an earlier scene Amir had said Robin once cooked a meal for his (Amir’s) parents that they talked about for years after. Unlike your usual “who took my (x)” Taken/John Wick sort of film, there’s no big beat-em-up action scene. Instead Robin cooks the same meal as he’d done years before – he says he remembers “every meal he’s ever cooked, every person he’s ever served.”

Killing the other guy with compassion. Reminding him of what was lost and what matters in life. It’s genius. I wish I had thought of it. The underlying theme speaks to me of the human connection that really matters more than anything else. It sounds like something obvious, but stripped to its core with how the movie presents it, and especially with the raw, quiet ending - it comes off profound. At the end of the day, by the time the last line tells you Robin's deceased wife had given him the pig as a gift and that's why he's so hellbent on getting it back - you kinda guessed that by then, but the emotional effect is as resonant and heavy as an obelisk anyway.

The whole thing really comes out to a grand piece of film. It’s quiet but the themes and ways these characters are unveiled comes out to something that the greatest movies are all about. Mightily human and vulnerable stuff. The reason you go to the movies. Don't miss it.

Bunnyman Vengeance (2017)

This kind of movie is honestly tough to review because you know it wasn’t really serious. It’s a fucking guy in a bunny costume. That could be the whole thing right there, but it wouldn’t be fun to read.

Director: Carl Lindbergh

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

The first one, at least, was funny – particularly the Grindhouse edition we reviewed a while ago, which was so batshit and absurd that it rose to some weird arthouse level of insane humor. I didn't see the second one and in fact only found out about that just as I was finishing this review. So if there's something I missed from that movie that could've put context to the nonsense that is this one, I apologize and I'll revoke everything I said.

I guess it starts out with this black dude getting stopped by a cop. You might think this is a parallel to real life, that we’re about to really get some serious social commentary from this movie about a man in a bunny costume. But no, the cop just grills him on whether he’s left or right handed, I guess as the script’s attempt to make tension with the fact that the black dude is hiding a gun out of the cop’s sight. But it’s as boring as the most boring thing you can think of. No tension and nothing happens. Great scene!

Then we see the Bunnyman on the same road and he’s beating up some random child in a bag. There’s no real context and it comes off mostly tasteless… he sets the now lifeless, possibly dead kid up at this bus stop and I’m mostly wondering who’s going to school way out there, they’re in the middle of the desert and there’s literally nothing around. But I’m thinking too hard. The Bunnyman puts the unconscious/dead (?) child on the bench, then gets mad and kicks the bench over? I don’t know. Maybe someone else can make this make any fucking sense.

The cop shows up and tries to apprehend the Bunnyman, and then the black guy from before runs him down with his car and addresses the Bunnyman – “Michael, get in!” Apparently they’re all part of some kind of criminal gang or whatever? I guess they have some big fortress in the desert and they shoot people who randomly accidentally get too close. There are some scenes where they try and make drama with all these guys in the compound, but it eludes me like a faint gust of wind. I couldn’t tell you anything that happened in this if you had a gun to my head.

There are just a shitload of boring scenes in this thing – boring scenes of the Bunnyman interacting with a deaf mute, looking at old photos that I guess are supposed to mean something about his past, eating dinner with these guys who run the compound. There’s just nothing that happens. It’s like the director was just given a $20 bill as a budget plus a scrap of napkin from a cocktail bar with the word “guy in bunny outfit” as the only script, and he just had to improvise because he needs the money to feed his family who are currently living under a bridge somewhere.

Or sometimes there IS stuff that happens, like when the gang kidnaps these random people in the woods and tortures them by making these women choose between drinking poison or having spiders crawl on them! That’s weird, right? Later on he chainsaws some more random people in this weird carnival attraction the gang is running. There’s really not much more context to it. The whole fucking movie is just random scenes of slow, badly acted, random murder scenes. I wish I could say it was even funny like the first one. The best we get is a non sequitur musical trip-out scene of the Bunnyman flying through space or some shit, seemingly just thrown in at random in the middle of the murder scenes. But this is only funny in comparison to the dour tone of everything else, which has the atmosphere of sitting in the DMV for too long while you have to pee.

I mean I guess there are a few funny parts though – the main guy is trying to have this whole circus or carnival event or whatever it is, and one of the Bunnyman kidnapping victims comes running out screaming that they’re being killed. The carnival guy’s response is to take out a gun and shoot her right there in front of everyone! Who says being a businessman is hard?

I can’t even really keep talking about this because it’s all just nonsense. There’s no plot here. It’s just a dude in a bunny costume doing random stuff. That sounds like it should be more fun than this is. I hate to even rag on this shit since it’s not even really a movie made with any serious budget behind it. I should have spent this time bashing something lame and corporate. Or watching good movies. I thought this one would at least be entertaining schlock but we’re all wrong occasionally, even me, I’ll admit to it right here.

Oh well. Happy trails, everybody.

Image copyright of its original owners.

Bunnyman: Grindhouse Edition (2019)

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

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

Director: Carl Lindbergh

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

Co-written with Michelle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Legion (TV show) and how to resolve stories without fighting

I want to talk about the TV show Legion, which I finally finished all of a while ago, but also more in general about the concepts of superhero stories and action and all the other ways you can tell a story than what we get.

NOTE - MILD SPOILERS FOR LEGION AHEAD

Legion, the Noah Hawley vehicle, ran for a few years in the late 2010s and came to an end in 2019. The first season, I bought in 2018, and I found it interesting and visually colorful, but I’d be lying if I said I really connected with the characters. I put it in mind to check the rest but it wasn’t a priority.

But now, of course, I had more time. So I delved into the rest of the show. I found season 2 to be an arresting display, arthouse cinema meets superhero fantasy. I’d never seen anything like it from a superhero medium. It was like they'd taken influence from the old avant garde filmmakers of the '60s and '70s and applied it to this modern thing. I found the ways Hawley and the writers portrayed the various characters and showed development to be kooky and off-beat but also artful, communicating truths and ideas in vivid ways. And the action scenes were interesting because they were pretty much the inverse of what you would expect. In one scene, two characters do an impromptu old-school wrestling match in a dream realm. In another, you get singing, a dance battle and cartoon animations laid over what’s really happening.

It’s all very conceptual. Me describing it here won’t do it justice. But it’s like taking the essence of conflict itself and just doing these creative things with it. Instead of typing out a lot more word salad, I’ll just paste what Hawley himself said, which has in turn inspired my own creative juices for writing recently…

"A fight is a very black and white, two-dimensional thing. We're fighting and I'm trying to beat you and you're trying to beat me. But what if the scene is... part of it is peacocking and part of it is a courtship dance and part of it is fighting because 'I hate that I have to work with you' etc. You can't express that in a fight sequence, but in a dance fight you can.”

I’m just drawn to the idea of conflict being resolved in other ways beyond fighting. Fight scenes have long been a weird thing for me. I like action, sure – but for a long time since I was younger, some types of action just came off perfunctory, even boring. I found myself longing more for good dialogue and themes. You can show a big fight and it’ll look good on the big screen for everyone with their popcorn, but that doesn’t always stick with you forever. Or it doesn’t for me. A lot of the recent MCU movies have this problem – I just find myself sucking in breath and waiting for the fight to be over. Like it’s just obligatory, a fill-in-the-blanks thing that has to be there. They’re also so bloodless and predictable that it isn’t like it adds much anyway.

Don’t get me wrong here. I like violent media as much as anybody. I like stuff brutal and quick and realistic. I love Sicario’s pitch-black bile, and Mad Max Fury Road is a high octane burst of insanity. Blue Ruin is more my speed for a revenge film because it shows you how ugly violence and revenge really are. There's an underlying reason for every horrific thing that happens. That’s worth a lot more to me than your John Wicks, polished and pristine to the point where I just can’t really get invested.

The essence of stories is always one where things are resolved at the end. And not everything needs to be resolved with a big fight scene, as the shows and stories from our childhood told us. I grew up watching a lot of anime – all these big flashy colorful fight scenes to determine everything. In the end, though, it becomes a formula, rigid and ramrod-stiff. Maybe this sounds like me trying to tell you your taste is shit. But really it's more that I am trying to break my own biases from when I was younger. Freeing from a thought-cage, if you will.

As I got older, other stuff just became more compelling to me. Twin Peaks: The Return has a few scenes of utterly warped, psychedelic action in its last few episodes, but that isn’t what the whole series hinges on either. That’s another example that’s inspired me lately. The conflict is fluid and metaphorical, and gives me ideas of transformation and righting the wrongs of the past. The violence is never the focal point. 

Legion ends with its third season, which is the most action-packed of all of them, with the most traditional fight scenes (though I guess ‘traditional’ for this show is still utterly weird for any other one). They’re well done and don’t take away from anything. But the actual end isn’t based on violence – the characters end up subverting things pretty blatantly, and love and forgiveness wins out. That sounds like hippie shit, I know. But it allows the story to come full circle, and makes a stronger point about damage done through the years, about the ways we can grow and change and maybe everything bad isn’t permanent after all.

More interesting ending to me than ‘good guy beats the bad guy,’ you know? This is the kind of thing I’d like to explore more. Stories are damn fascinating to me. There are infinite ways to do them.

Possessor (2020)

This one got a lot of good reviews, but man do I ever not like it! Apparently, this was a movie made by David Cronenberg’s son Brandon Cronenberg, who probably grew up surrounded by surreal body horror props and scenes and it bled into him, and this is what came in lieu of seeing a therapist.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Director: Brandon Cronenberg

Starring: Andrea Riseborough, Christopher Abbott, Jennifer Jason Leigh

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

Possessor is the kind of movie I haven’t seen in a while, got to say. It’s the kind of thing that made my friends and I keep doing these blogs all those years ago, so inept and infuriating that there was nothing to do but crank up the snark. It was fun, and came with an easy outlet for creativity. In recent years we’ve fallen off a bit, sure, and the general premise seems dated now. But every once in a while – hoo, boy, sometimes something just comes along that reignites the fire.

This is about a weird alternate 2008 – according to Wikipedia; it’s never said in the movie. Why 2008? I can't think of that much interesting about that time period. But then, maybe that reflects the movie as well. Might as well be consistent with the uninteresting-ness of everything.

The main character is a dead-eyed weirdo of a woman who works as a professional assassin. The twist is, her company has this convoluted technology where she can jump into the body of someone else to carry out the kill! I seem to remember decades of time in which hits were carried out by the person themselves, who was unknown to the target. Those were better days.

There’s really no reason to do the body jumping, and also, nobody ever seems to acknowledge that they’re wrecking random peoples’ lives when they do it since those people get blamed for the crimes. The main character Tasya, never shows any conflict with this aspect, nor do any of the people she works with. This could be interesting with deft writing, it could show moral conflict or corporate soullessness and such. But guess what’s missing from this movie?!

I guess they try to sell you that Tasya misses her family who she separated from to do the job, and her boss wants her to cut off any human attachments. Tasya goes back and has sex with her husband and sees her kid again, too, before taking a new job. All of the “character development” is just stated blankly in the dialogue, while the movie and actors do nothing to actually convince you. It’s like the script is the shitty public defender for the most irredeemable defendant alive, the worst, guiltiest and least likable person imaginable.

The main plot is that they want Tasya to jump into the body of this guy Tate who is dating the daughter of some high-up business guy. The job is to kill the daughter and the business guy so the assassin company can buy the business guy’s company? Is that even possible? Sure does seem like a lot of nonsense to go through for this fucking goal, and there's no stated reason what the real endgame is or who's behind it all - just Jennifer Jason Leigh's mid-level management character who barely gets any real dimension to her. It’s like the 80s comedies where dorky scientists would invent these whole complex contraptions that just ended up like, making toast or some shit.

The whole movie is like that – I’m sure she could just get into this business asshole’s office somehow and shoot him and be done with it, but then we wouldn’t have a whole movie of art-school bullshit hallucinating scenes for no reason. Yeah – there are a lot of weird trippy scenes just shoved in seemingly whenever the movie was at risk of getting (more) boring, just eyes being pierced and odd hazy blue people screaming and colors flashing like an epileptic nightmare. They do this like half a dozen times in a less than two-hour movie. I guess it’s supposed to represent something. Really it just comes off as the movie equivalent of filling out your term paper with more white space and periods to inflate the character count.

But yeah – despite this being a fairly clear-cut assassination goal, they can’t just go and do that. There has to be this endless soul-sucking drag of random other shit. Tasya as Tate goes to some weird job where he has to look at curtains in peoples’ houses? It’s never really explained but is an excuse to throw some random sex in there. Then he goes to a party where they all have the worst inane conversations rejected from a Tarantino film. Then some more sex, this time with Tate and his girlfriend. If you really need to see this much sex and nudity in a thriller movie, why not just go watch porn? It's not cool, fun sex. It feels weird and gross in the context of this movie.

The party comes, and the idea is for Tasya as Tate to get thrown out of the party and then come back in and kill everyone. Why not just kill everyone right away? If you already went through the process of doing the whole body swap thing, do you need even more pointless rules? Oh, right, I forgot, padding is needed to give this thing a decent runtime. My bad, so silly of me.

If you like gore, I guess the scene of Tasya stabbing this dude in the mouth and wrenching teeth out is something. But I like gore when it's fun - this movie is about as fun as reading tax documents. It's dour and unpleasant. Everything from the sex to the gore is just lifeless, weird and lame.

I guess the story from here is that Tate fights back against Tasya possessing him and stabs himself to stop it – why was that a possibility? Seems like your tech sucks ass. Just go kill people regular next time. It's DIY. Small business, artisanal stuff. It's more all-American, classic style and we need some of that sometimes.

Anyway, it leads to a fragmented mind where he’s seeing a bunch of stuff from Tasya’s life and feeling like he’s going insane. He kills a few more random people as he tries to figure out what the fuck is happening. These scenes of him with his face twisted in agony, not knowing what’s going on and realizing he’s fucked up his life by being associated with what’s happening now are the only relatable scenes in the movie.

There’s at least thirty minutes of meandering nonsense left. It’s amazing how awful the pacing is in this thing. Everything is so slow and yet there’s not even the minimum attempt to endear you to any character or situation. If you wanted to simulate the feeling of being stuck in rush hour traffic, with the sun beating down as you move an inch every five minutes, and you’ve had to piss for the last twenty minutes, fantastic job.

With the whole mind-swapping thing, there’s a super long sequence of Tate taking some mold of Tasya’s face that looks like it was burned in a car accident. It’s not scary but it is weird and gross and makes me hate living a little more. I love that it's superimposed over scenes we already saw in the movie. This thing is less than two hours and we're reusing scenes. it's like being at a party and trying to avoid the annoying guy who won't quit talking to you. When does it end?

Somehow it ends with Tate finding his way to Tasya’s house and killing her husband brutally with a knife. No real reason for all this, but hey, gore! That’s something, right??? It also turns out the boss lady from Tasya’s job takes control of her son and gets him shot too. There’s a lot of screaming, guns firing and a little kid dies – is this an edgy adult dark movie yet? Please, this is all that’s left in life. It doesn’t matter if the motivations are unclear, there’s no discernible character development and the plot is fuzzier than an out-of-focus 1995 disposable camera. All that matters is that the movie is dark and edgy.

Finally it’s over, leaving me with the vague feeling that I’ve seen some weirdo’s school shooter manifesto translated somehow to the screen. It’s not that I’m against dark films, or avant garde shit. I spent quarantine last year watching every David Lynch and Gaspar Noe movie I could find. I’ve seen David Cronenberg’s old material several times. But Possessor is just so awful in every aspect, from the stiff, vague plot to the deadened, nonexistent characters and right down to the stale, too-cold settings and expressions on the character’s faces. It’s just unpleasant in every single way. I truly didn’t enjoy anything about this at all. No exaggeration.

And sure, in old reviews, as was the case in the late 2000s and early 2010s, it was en vogue to bash the creators and make all these hyperbolic statements, this is the worst thing ever, et cetera. And I’m not as about that anymore. Brandon Cronenberg is probably an OK guy and I like his dad’s movies. Nothing personal here. I just think Possessor is the void where any kind of hope goes to die, the thing that fills me with nothing but hate and misery towards everything. But nothing personal. You know how it is.

Frankenstein (2015)

Am I still doing these? Let’s see what happens. I'm posting this with very little editing. I don't know if anyone reads blogs anymore. But this is still here, still heaving onwards like a strange misshapen behemoth forgotten by time. Here we go.

Director: Bernard Rose

Starring: Xavier Samuel, Carrie-Ann Moss

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

Frankenstein is a new adaptation of the Mary Shelley novel from so long ago, because I guess somebody really wanted more stories like this after all this time? This version starts off with very little backstory, just a couple of scientists making a 20-something white dude in a lab. There’s no real info on why they did this, no real details on who they are. Just a fun science experiment. The creature can barely walk and shows no discernible skills, but they take a lot of shots and inject him with sedatives a lot! Then he gets some boils on his face randomly so they decide to kill him.

Sorry, so what was the point then? Doesn’t seem like a very good experiment to me. Luckily the creature, who calls himself ‘Monster’ in this, just breaks free and kills everyone. He gets out and sees sunlight for the first time, and the cops just appear from nowhere like vampires and start firing guns without even asking questions. I give the movie points for a realistic portrayal of cops.

He goes out into the world and makes friends with a dog like it’s a fucking Disney movie from the late 90s. Then he finds some little girl to race sticks in the water with – truly this will be one of cinema’s all-time greatest scenes. He throws the little girl in the water for no reason, which is actually kinda hilarious. She gets out, but there are more cops there almost immediately ready to shoot him without asking questions – these guys are real desperados, man! Living on the edge!

He traipses through some fairly nice looking scenes of the city, until he finds Tony Todd, the Candyman himself, hanging out as a bedraggled blind homeless man playing a guitar under a bridge. This is actually a portrayal of how he's been doing since Candyman!

Anyway, he’s also cool, accepting and can do a lot of shit despite being blind, but doesn’t really have a character aside from that. It’s about as cliché as a movie can get. This stuff is like they were playing Mad Libs in the studio. It’s like they were trying to angle for an Oscar but didn’t know how to make the whole movie, instead of just individual scenes. It’s actually charming in a doofy kind of way.

Tony Todd introduces him to your usual cool, down to Earth hooker who wants to have sex with him. They go to a hotel and the hooker continues to treat ‘Monster’ like he’s a regular dude who just doesn’t talk much, even though he’s actually a catatonic freak show. It’s one of those dumb movie things where it doesn’t make sense why anyone doesn’t just see he’s an abnormality and treat him as such – the movie’s writing isn’t clever enough to sustain it. The bridge is giving out. You can feel the free-falling air meeting you like an old friend…

Anyway, he comes out of the shower naked, completely fucking scarred and with no dick. She freaks out and says she doesn’t want to do anything anymore, and he accidentally kills her. Then Tony Todd’s character comes up and ‘Monster’ kills him, too. The issue with the movie is just that he’s so strong he can do fucking anything. How is this an interesting plot if nothing hurts him and he can just swat anyone around like a fucking King Kong impression? Not very, I think.

He ends the movie by going back to the scientists as they’re about to have sex. They interrupt their good times to go down to the basement and care for him yet again. The dude tries to kill him yet again, also showing him a newer model of the same thing – still no reason why they’re doing this by the way; it might as well be gibberish. The woman scientist then tries to stop the dude from killing ‘Monster,’ but the dude ends up slashing her gut and killing her. They were having sex before this – that’s just funny to me now. What a tumultuous volcanic relationship. What a weird dynamic.

Anyway, that’s the movie I guess. It’s at least not a straight re-telling. I liked a few of the scenes’ camerawork. But overall it was kind of a joke. Why would you make this and title it Frankenstein and then just do it so unpretentious? Why was there no backstory to anything? I don’t need a huge amount – but this literally had nothing explaining any aspect of why these things were happening. That would be fine if the movie was gripping, but really, because he can just beat the shit out of or kill anyone he wants, there’s no drama. It’s like half of a premise became a movie with no vetting.

But maybe the pointlessness is just reflective of how life is now. Of how looking for meaning is really just naive and not constructive at all, and we might as well just go along with whatever weird tides life throws at us. Yeah. Maybe that’s it.

Cinema Freaks 2020 New Horror Recommendations

Enough talk about bad movies. Let’s relish in the good. Halloween is almost here in this year of 2020 when everything is a mess. Why not have some fun with some of the more creative horror you can find recently? Here are a few of my recent favorites.

Scare Me

This is really like nothing I’ve seen – not because of anything it does, but because of what it omits. It’s a horror anthology film like others you’ve seen (Trick ‘R’ Treat, Tales of Halloween, etc), and it references old horror films gratuitously. But unlike a lot of these things, it focuses only on two characters just acting out their stories in a snowy, stormy, candle-lit cabin at night. No cutaways, no other actors. No adornments. It’s just pure storytelling. The movie functions as a love-letter to horror storytelling and to the old classics stretching back decades, digging deep into what worked and what’s been done and why it’s all so captivating. And the way the two leads play off one another is great, with wonderful dialogue. But it also goes the other way too, and works in some modern gender politics and themes. If you’re dead-set against thinking about any of those things, or if anything related to those themes just sounds like woke-scold feminist virtue signaling or whatever the fuck, go ahead and skip this movie. Your loss. More for the rest of us. This made me think and I love watching it do its own absurd thing.

Host

This was made during the pandemic, and is a story pretty simple, one you’ve heard before – some people do a séance, it goes wrong. Only this time it’s done over Zoom and with all the usual things that come with that mess. It’s mostly all women and they’re all good at what is needed for this movie. There’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but refreshingly, the movie cuts out the bullshit and the fat. No cliches or dumb unnecessary parts. Just a solid ghost story. What I appreciated about this is the slapdash, spontaneous creativity. It was made during this awful pandemic. Human creativity shone through the worst of it and made something enjoyable of it. I dig it.

Spiral

Two gay guys in the 1990s move to a mysterious small town where nothing is as it seems. This is a very traditional sort of psychological horror, but we haven’t seen much like it in a few years now. There’s a real sense of darkness and paranoia to this that just works. It’s fun to watch and eerie because you get in the main dude’s head. I’m glad to see more inclusivity in horror movies. Plus the climax is cool as hell. This is just all-around solid.

The Color Out Of Space

Outrageous, vivacious and bombastic, this Richard Stanley comeback and Lovecraft adaptation is entertaining all the way through. Eschewing the idea that all horror films have to look dark and grungy, this is bright and alien - almost obtrusively so. With some climate change references, it's timely enough. But the main draw is the insane roller-coaster ride of the plot and pacing, and the nightmareish way it escalates. This is a funhouse of gleefully occult, indescribable horrors. Check it out.

La Llorona

A very different sort of horror film, about the family of this aging, disgraced Guatemalan dictator dealing with the fallout of his criminal trial. This is about politics and the larger implications of generational violence. It's artful, quiet and subtle. For long stretches it doesn't even seem to be a horror movie, so much as a drama. I think this is inscrutable, poignant and layered stuff.

Find all of the previous movies listed on: Shudder

SiREN

Back in 2011 or so the first V/H/S movie seemed really kick ass, compared to some other shit coming out then. It had a certain fun, schlocky, dark factor to it. This is a whole movie version of the first story from that first movie, about a bunch of guys at a bachelor party who run afoul of this demon chick. It’s fun because it’s just a back to basics horror story. It’s not artsy like some things now, and the writing is still solid no matter what you like. There are a few weird elements – I was surprised to see a psychic element to some of the characters. But that’s cool because overall the whole thing doesn’t rely on tropes too much. Just macabre, creative horror. Go see it.

Find it on: Netflix

Antebellum (2020)

Yup, I'm still doing these things. It's been a while, but we're back.

This is a new horror movie about a modern writer who seemingly finds herself back in the times of slavery somehow. This was billed as something like other recent black-centric horror films like Get Out. But that isn't really accurate in the least.

Directors: Gerard Bush, Christopher Renz

Starring: Janelle Monae, Eric Lange, Jena Malone

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

We start right off in the thick of it – slavery times, complete with some Confederate generals killing a few slaves trying to run away. The main character is Eden, who we see subject to a horrific branding at the hands of this one guy. It’s all hard as fuck to watch. You’re really just sitting there at these parts going boy, this must be building up to some really grand point to make us watch all this horrible torture and killings; I wonder what cerebral, intelligent things this movie is going to give us to make up for showing this!

One girl is pregnant and asked to go and fuck this one soldier, who is made fun of for not being able to talk to her. At first it seems like she’s going to be OK and maybe make a connection with this guy, maybe he could get her out or something. Nope! He goes apeshit and hits her a few times, including kicking her in the stomach. What a completely heinous scene to watch. All these scenes with the Confederates are only gratifying if you picture these guys having bad things happen to them. Get creative! Maybe this guy always feels like he left his oven on and is thus never at peace with the world.

Eventually, after like 30 minutes of this horrific shit, we switch gears and the main girl wakes up in bed, a successful writer named Veronica, living in the modern times with a husband and a kid and everything. Wow! What kind of unpredictable twists are we gonna see to make sense of this? We get a few fairly nice scenes of the family doing regular stuff, which are really just relieving because I didn’t need to see any more fucking slavery scenes. You could have showed paint drying and it would’ve suddenly seemed like a relief.

There are a few weird things happening, though – what’s up with the strange Southern white lady who Skypes her and says a bunch of cryptic stuff? I dunno, and neither does Veronica. And what’s up with the strange little girl in period clothing who says cryptic stuff to Veronica in the hotel elevator later like “you shouldn’t be talking”? Boy, white people sure are cryptic, huh?

Then there’s a scene where the mysterious Southern lady from the Skype call enters Veronica’s hotel room while she’s away and uses the toilet without flushing apparently. And these fucks think they’re the superior race… please…

There’s a fairly elongated scene of Veronica and some friends at a restaurant, in which one friend schools this guy trying to buy them drinks because he sent over something other than champagne. Personally if this happened to me I’d cut my losses and go find someone else to talk to. I dunno. These scenes are well-acted and all, I guess, but the pacing is so slow. It’s like the pacing of waiting for your mom to finish talking to a friend at the grocery store. Get to the fucking point!

Leaving the restaurant, Veronica gets in a weird Uber where the driver cranks up the music super loud and, on the phone, she finds out that there wasn’t an Uber called for her after all. That sends the panic flaring. This is one of the only really effective scares and it’s barely even a scare. The one Confederate jackass pops out from the back like a fucking Freddy Krueger scene and slams her head against the window.

Aaaaaand here’s the big reveal – the whole thing never took place in the 1800s. Actually it was all just in modern times and a bunch of jackass rich people kidnapped black people to simulate slavery, like the world’s most repugnant Civil War reenactment. Why would you want to pretend to live in the 1800s with no electricity, modern toilets, etc? Seems miserable as fuck even if you’re the one in power. I guess the racism is such a powerful drug that they’re willing to wipe their asses with tree bark and sweat all day for it. Anything to own the libs, right?!

Long story short, Veronica kills all the racist conservatives – one of whom is actually a politician, surprise surprise. It’s gratifying to watch her burn them alive and then punch that one white lady in the face a bunch of times. But really, this was what it was building up to? All the torture, rape and whatnot, all for a few passable scenes of violence against the bad guys? That’s kind of like setting your house on fire and then throwing water on it, expecting to get accolades and praise. It wasn’t worth it.

Also, the characters were pretty much undefined. What did we even know about any of them? No real distinct traits aside from racism (for the white characters) and not wanting to be a slave (for the black characters). What a masterpiece of literature.

What was the message here, anyway? Slavery was bad and there are racists in the U.S. who want to keep black people down? Not exactly deep, and the film doesn’t say anything unique or layered about what to do or what the root of the problem is. The twist is that everything was taking place in a section of a preserved plantation owned by this politician guy. How did they kidnap that many people and force them to comply? Were they drugged or threatened somehow? How did nobody with a conscience know about this and stop it almost immediately? The politician guy would’ve had to take a fuckload of time off work to come role play. But hell, a lot of conservatives don’t care about shit as long as their guy is suitably racist, so touche, movie.

Mostly it just seems like an excuse for aimless racist violence. I get it, sometimes art has to show uncomfortable truths. But the second you revealed that plot twist and nothing was actually taking place in the past, what the fuck was the point of any of this then? Mostly torture porn and pointless violence against black people, it seems.

Friend Request (2016)

Friend Request is a horror movie about what happens when you turn down a friend request from a crazy witch on social media.

Director: Simon Verhoeven

Starring: Alycia Debnam-Carey, Connor Paolo

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

If you’ve seen Unfriended, you basically know what you’re gonna get here. It’s one of these ‘college’ movies written by someone who’s whole idea of college was shaped on like, 1990s cheesy sitcoms or whatever. The main characters are all the cool popular kids who have expensive parties, and they post dumb pictures on Facebook of them at the beach, kissing, eating and drinking and smiling!

It’s funny because, while I guess it’s accurate that they’d do this kind of stuff, the writing is bereft of any kind of character or personality. So the whole movie has the effect of being like a bunch of shallow Facebook profiles came to life. That’s pretty funny if it was intentional; but you know it fucking wasn’t.

I'd also like to point out how random the main group is... you've got the one blandly popular white chick, an overweight mixed-race-looking girl, a somewhat fat comedic relief guy, a blonde Karen type girl, and another dude that looks like a stereotype of a 'loner' with a weird haircut and tattoos. It's like a fucking focus group. Make them feel like real people! That might actually lend your movie some humanity.

I guess the story is this girl Laura, basically a wax mannequin that talks, befriends this weird girl with a black hoodie always over her head! The girl, Marina, immediately gets weird as she starts commenting and liking everything Laura posts, sending her strange messages and all that – oh and she has zero other friends. Who the fuck has ZERO other friends? There was nobody else?

It would be easy just to press the ‘block’ button, but don’t tell the movie THAT… instead, they just have Laura unfriending Marina and then going to a big luxurious party that’s about as expensive looking as your average presidential candidate Wall Street fundraiser. Like holy shit. How are we supposed to care about these people? Not really leaning on sympathy here, movie. It’s like this was made by those jackasses that think $170K a year is “middle class.” “Oh, they’re so relatable, they only have TWO pontoon boats!” “You only drink $600 a bottle wine? You fucking pleb!”

But yeah, then the Marina girl kills herself on video after ripping up a picture of Laura! I guess the ghost of Marina posted the suicide video on Laura’s Facebook, too. This causes the police to investigate in the best way possible – by calling Laura into the principal’s office and interrogating her about it. The cops say the video posting thing means she should delete her account, which is the funniest thing in the movie bar none – just the cops officially ordering this college girl to delete her social media. I love that. I'll never write anything that funny.

They also inquire if she knows where Marina's body might be. Isn't that YOUR fucking job, you assholes?

Then all Laura’s friends start to die off. This one guy dies from banging his own head on an elevator wall. Another chick commits suicide in the basement of a hospital – oh, and here you get the requisite Creepy Hospital Scene (TM) that every fucking horror movie has to have, with dark halls and stuff. They all see weird zombie hallucinations and wasps and shit before they die, too. Wasn’t this a movie about a Facebook ghost? Were the writers drinking moonshine the whole time?

There is also this other guy, Kobe, who looks like some kind of weird tattooed drug addict with bad hair. This guy is the stereotypical hacker character who just types in nonsense on any computer and brings up a bunch of technological gibberish and then delivers monologues on how ominous it all is. What a deus ex machina of a character! He also learns about the occult as soon as it’s revealed that Marina is a witch using black magic. Boy, this guy is just a veritable swiss army knife.

Speaking of that, yeah, that’s the origin story for Marina! Her mother was apparently a witch who lived in an orphanage and burned it down – or some bullshit like that. I honestly don’t know. The movie goes through the process of telling us that her pregnant mother, burned to a crisp in the fire, was kept alive just to give birth to her! What a pleasant image for a throwaway back story in a shitty ghost movie!

Then when she was growing up, a bunch of young boys assaulted and attacked her for years. The voice-over says she was doing pretty well against them as it shows them punching her, which is kind of funny. Though apparently later, she had them mutilated or whatever. Good. Fuck those little twerps anyway.

In the real-time again, more of their friends die – including one girl who falls out a window just when Laura and her boyfriend are driving up in the car. Convenient. Nice and snappy. An efficient death... thumbs up on the app rating for the algorithm, for sure.

Oh and I love the gimmick this movie has of showing Laura's declining FB friend count as the ghost posts more things to her account without her consent. It does it even when the fucking camera shows Laura watching her friend in the hospital with broken bones, covered in fucking bandages. Priorities, ladies and gentlemen! Fuck the immense pain. HER FRIEND COUNT IS LOWERING!!!

Then they all have to go to the ruins of this orphanage or whatever, and do you really even care? These dumb ass movies always have the characters going to some erroneous journey to some foreboding looking place. It really just makes the places so much less cool, because now they’re associated with the nonsensical writing and mundane, rote plotting. It’s like the opposite of a travel guide.

One of the only interesting parts of the whole film is when that Kobe guy turns on Laura because the ghost only wants to kill all her friends, not Laura herself. Kobe tries to kill her, thinking it could save his life. This is mildly clever at least, and could have been a kind of subversion from the usual nonsense these movies always have – oh, look, an actual character with a motive that contradicts the protagonist’s! But really I think this was just like a dying gasp of intelligence before the script just goes totally senile; like a brief, painful moment of clarity that something better could have been possible.

I guess Laura then gets killed by the ghost, and the final shot is HER in a weird black hoodie now with a laptop! Implying that the whole thing was actually transferrable. I thought the first girl was just a witch on her own. Now I guess it’s a ghost/possession/transfer sort of thing. I don’t know. I am positive whoever made this just wanted to get it over with to get the money and go save his family from the mafia or whatever.

This movie is just nonsense. The whole thing is all the cliché you ever knew from movies like this, but somehow even more disoriented and droll, like a senile grandpa just wandering in the street. Help this movie get back to its nursing home. It doesn’t need to keep straining itself.

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

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.

Image copyright of its original owners.