2023 Horror Part Twenty-Five

SORRY ABOUT THE DEMON
Dir - Emily Hagins
Overall: WOOF

 

Sometimes one feels cruel when shitting on a movie that appears to have the best intentions, and writer/director Emily Hagins' Sorry About the Demon is just such a movie.  On paper, this is an innocent and adorable horror comedy about a down-on-his-luck schlub who is likeable, also on paper.  Yet everything that happens here adheres to a type of cutesy and obvious shtick that grows wearisome immediately, and shoehorning in endless jump scares and haunted house/demonic possession cliches that are played for nyuck nyucks makes for a persistently annoying experience.  At the film's core is a story about lamenting a failed relationship, second chances, and coming-of-age as a grown man, all of which are admirable traits that should give the movie enough emotional baggage to forgive the lame-brained humor and lazy horror tropes.  With everything combined though, (plus a bloated running time that passes the one-hundred minute mark), it overstays its already rocky welcome by undermining its heartfelt agenda with the worst kind of quippy and mugging goofiness; the kind that tries and then fails to be funny.

THE BEAST

Dir - Bertrand Bonello

Overall: GOOD

Jumping off from Henry James 1906 novella The Beast in the Jungle, French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello crafted an uncompromising tableau of impending doom and fate running rampant with unavoidable cruelty.  The Beast, (La Bête), bounces between three timelines as Léa Seydoux' solemn protagonist wrestles with an unshakable fear that has permeated through all of her past lives, past lives that can potentially be purged of their emotionally baggage by future technology.  Along the way, Bonello stylistically and thematically channels the two Davids, (Lynch and Cronenberg), presenting a world of aloof characters, cold technology, psychological playgrounds, a Roy Orbison song, and quirky yet bleak humor.  At nearly two and a half hours, the film takes its time with numerous recalls, including verbatim dialog exchanges and immediate flashbacks from different points of view, all of which slam home a persistent theme of, well, persistence.  In this wold, (as in our own), anxiety is often justified by life moving along without our permission, throwing chaos into our midst as we wrestle with what we want and what we are inescapably drawn to.  Bonello's film deals with such things both precisely and ambiguously, letting us enter the shifting headspace of Seydoux' character as if she is passing through a nightmare that we are all equally a fly on the wall to.

 

HAUNTED ULSTER LIVE
Dir - Dominic O'Neill
Overall: MEH

For anyone who really enjoys 1992's seminal BBC mockumentary Ghostwatch and is curious to see what a less good carbon copy of it would be like, writer/director Dominic O'Neill's Haunted Ulster Live has you covered.  The entire structure and presentation is so derivative of the film that is is paying homage to/ripping off that it is bound to make many an eyeball roll, and this is ultimately what undermines its potential as either a spoof or a bit of genuinely hair-raising found footage.  O'Neill tries to do both at various times, setting the story in 1998 to give it some throwback charm and dated references, but it becomes difficult to tell if the performances are tongue-in-cheek or just subpar.  Twilight Zone elements gradually reveal themselves as it inches towards the finale, but its ghostly camera glitches, urban legend boogeyman, unconvincing spooky photographs, kid acting creepy during a seance moment, and student art film montages of weirdness have all been done better in, well, better movies.  With no unique ideas of its own and no way to combine what it has into anything either funny, compelling, or scary, the movie just deserves a C+ for effort, even if its heart is in the right place and it never outright insults the audience.

2023 Horror Part Twenty-Four

BLACKOUT

Dir - Larry Fessenden

Overall: MEH

 

Indie horror mainstay Larry Fessenden continues his solemn, modern day Universal monster reworks with Blackout, this time updating The Wolf Man to go along with 2019's Depraved, which was his version of Frankenstein.  This is specifically a cinematic adaptation of one of Fessenden's Tales from Beyond the Pale podcast episodes which throws back to old timey radio serials of the horror variety, but he takes a more relevant approach by fusing daddy issues and small town politics together.  It is an interesting angle to familiar tropes and material, but there is a tonal issue present in how much of the movie wants to be introspective and timely and how much of it also wants to be unabashed schlock.  The performances are a mixed bag; sincere yet stuck within dopey dialog, forced expository information dumps, and simple-minded character traits that would be fine if it all did not take itself so seriously.  From a production standpoint, Fessenden has been in the game long enough to turn in a professional looking film on a meager budget, and the cinematography, location setting, werewolf make-up, and gore all look splendid.  In order to work though, the story deserves a screenplay that is both less-on the nose and trimmed of its unintentional goofiness.

FROGMAN

Dir - Anthony Cousins

Overall: WOOF

Predictable, obnoxious, and ergo insulting, Anthony Cousin's full-length debut Frogman is another lazy found footage entry that could have been a fun parody if not for a barrage of mistakes made along the way.  As is almost always the case with these movies, finding justification for the characters to keep the cameras rolling proves to be an insurmountable task, and here we have three unlikable dipshits who go to a town that milks their local frogman legend for tourists.  One of our protagonists caught the creature on a camcorder when he was a kid and now is determined to prove that what he saw was genuine.  While this is a stock if acceptable jumping off point, Cousins and co-screenwriter John Karsko's script piles on the hackneyed tropes, plus the presentation can never decide how serious to take things.  Our three main characters who joke around and film private moments that have no business being filmed, Nathan Tymoshuk being a mopey loser who is desperate to capture the title creature yet insists on doing it with his grainy low-def camcorder from the 1990s, locals being interviewed, the footage becoming indecipherable when the "good stuff" finally shows up, a diabolical twist that a two-year old could see coming, and the list goes on and on.  Instead of evoking genuine Blair Witch scares or taking the piss out of the formula with amped-up ridiculousness, the movie just clumsily rides its line and recalls countless other films that have done the same thing either worse, better, or just as bad.

 

LAST STRAW
Dir - Alan Scott Neal
Overall: MEH

 

After three short films, casting worker-turned-director Alan Scott Neal delivers his first full-length Last Straw; a nasty revenge thriller of sorts that takes a few clever divergents along its route.  As a tale about over-wrought young adults who spiral down a rabbit hole of bad decisions during a particularly stressed-out evening, it gets by to a point, particularly in its first act which focuses on Jessica Belkin's protagonist who gets one tough break after the next while working in her dad's remote roadside diner.  Yet when the plot takes an about-face twist midway through, the plausibility wheels start to get loose and this leads to an inevitably messy finale that sees people behaving in too barbarous of a manner to buy into.  Performance-wise, everyone does acceptable work and Neal forgoes stylistic embellishments for stark brutalism, but there is little to no humor present to make the over-the-top spiral go down smoother.  Instead, the movie becomes increasingly ugly, which does not jive with its narrative implausibility.  It short-changes itself in the end, but the attempt is at least noble.

2023 Horror Part Twenty-Three

RED ROOMS
Dir - Pascal Plante
Overall: GREAT

 

True crime fixation and voyeurism make natural if disturbing bedfellows at times, and the latest from Quebec-based filmmaker Pascal Plante examines the darker aspects of sleuthing and more importantly the detachment that is necessary to truly initiate oneself amongst the most depraved.  Red Rooms, (Les chambres rouges), is a calculated thriller to say the least.  From its opening twenty-minute single shot of a courtroom briefing where we meet our main character and are immediately struck by her impassive demeanor, the film never lets its true agenda reveal itself.  This is mirrored in Juliette Gariépy's stunning performance and the protagonist/antagonist that she portrays, who is so emotionally barren that we are constantly fixated on what and where her curious motives are coming from.  All of the film's suspense stems from this fixation since the man who has presumably committed the story's horrendous crimes is already on trail from the onset, so the focus lies instead on those who are drawn to sensationalized atrocities and what murky waters this unwholesome pull trudges through.  Several moments are startling in their intimate disturbingness, punctuating the movie with surreal jumps that somehow only intensify the spell.  Anything that goes down the rabbit hole of snuff films and the dark web is icky stuff that is never for the squeamish, but Plante's work here ventures into this abyss in such a controlled and evocative manner that it only ends up challenging the viewer in the most rewarding of ways.

THE ANIMAL KINGDOM
Dir - Thomas Cailley
Overall: GOOD

The second full-length from French filmmaker Thomas Cailley, The Animal Kingdom, (Le Règne animal), takes a concept that has been explored in David Freyne's zombie drama The Cured as well as the entire saga of the X-Men, but the presentation is unique and cuts right to the bone of the fears of "the new norm".  Here, human beings have begun to start morphing into animal hybrids, ones that have violent tendencies that are both inescapable and brought on by the rest of the world's understandably terrified reaction to them.  Complicating an already hopelessly complicated matter is that life goes on.  People still have bills to pay, jobs to get to, school to attend, college to think about, love interests to nurture, family to protect, and communities to integrate into.  The last thing that humankind needs is their teenage son turning into a wolf, losing the ability to communicate verbally, and inevitably having to find a new home amongst their mutated brethren instead of their old civilized existence.  Cailley keeps up a no-nonsense pace and utilizes some of the better CGI effects in recent times, helped significantly by excellent practical makeup and visual tricks as well.  Best of all, the film is not a nihilistic downer that offers no hope for such a harrowing outcome.  In fact, the strange turn of events are only disturbing if grief and fear overcomes all who are involved.  Embracing the "new norm" on the other hand, (with compassion and acceptance), leaves a much-needed glimmer of hope.

BOOGER
Dir -  Mary Dauterman
Overall: MEH

For anyone who cannot stand Rupert Holmes "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)", (which should include every human on earth), writer/director Mary Dauterman's debut Booger should come equipped with a severe warning since such an abysmal yacht rock staple shows up in various forms throughout.  An aloof grief comedy that falls short of hitting its mark, the film plays its quirky components close to the vest which is nice for a change, but it does lead to unrealized results.  Grace Glowicki's portrays a young woman whose best friend and roommate has just died while also, (and more puzzlingly), transforming into their missing stray cat of the title.  The audience understands what is happening early on if not why it is happening, and in fact we never get any answers to such a question, but several characters here point to the fact that Glowicki is side-stepping the whole mourning part of her buddy's death.  The problem is that this is not convincingly conveyed.  Instead, Dauterman indulges in gross-out moments, people saying wacky things once in awhile, and Glowicki not so much as avoiding her emotions about her friend as to not having many to begin with.  There is no profound revelation, just the movie going about its oddball business until it is time to wrap itself up  At this point we have entered into murky psychological terrain and Glowicki seems to be ready to be happy with those around her again, yet it is through no fault of anything that has transpired.

2023 Horror Part Twenty-Two

PANDEMONIUM
Dir - Quarxx
Overall: GOOD

Though imperfect since its Lars Von Trier-worthy cynicism becomes an intentional endurance test, Pandemonium from French multimedia artist and filmmaker Quarxx is singular enough to maintain one's interest if they can tolerate its unforgiving nature.  A fantastic opening sequence finds two humorously logical men contemplating their new otherworldly predicament as a pair of doorways appear on a stretch of road that is becoming increasingly snow-covered.  What follows are two more detours that turn the film into an anthology, and even though Quarxx throws in some opaque humor everywhere, (except in his almost unwatchabley bleak tale of a mother who cannot cope with her teenage daughter succumbing to unwarranted bullying), the story has a clear agenda that is far from user friendly.  This is that mankind is inherently evil and doomed to suffer throughout eternity, but on the plus side, the whole thing borders on spectacle as far as its aesthetics go.  Everything from the aforementioned deserted mountain road, to deformed monsters, to a glamorously decorated mansion, to the ashy underworld of doomed souls casts a fetching aura that forgives the narrative loose ends and austere tone.  It may not leave you feeling all warm and fuzzy inside, but most viewers will be hooked on the dour ride.

 

ADALYNN

Dir - Jacob Byrd
Overall: MEH

 

Coming from the indie writer/director team of Jerrod D. Brito and Jacob Byrd, Adalynn is a postpartum psychological nightmare with its heart in the right place, but its noble ambition is undermined by inadequate production means.  The story is sufficient if not unique.  Sydney Carvill plays a mother who is struggling with all of the textbook new baby blues, except she also suffers from severe OCD, panic attacks, and is instructed not to take neither her meds nor any alcohol to help levitate the symptoms when her "way too dashingly handsome to be convincingly cast as a doctor" husband leaves her alone for a number of days because work.  Carvill narrates her own journaling, gets no sleep, is impulsively moody, finds it impossible to bond with her newborn daughter, and worse yet, starts spiraling into a series of hallucinations that lead to a plot twist that most viewers will be able to predict within the first few minutes.  Everything is in its appropriate place, but Byrd is equipped with limited funds here and the more well-versed, (i.e. cynical), audience member will be able to notice the cost-cutting measures every step of the way.  This is excusable of course, but Carvill and her supporting players occasionally embarrass themselves with hackneyed dialog, plus Byrd uses scare tactics that would be unforgivably lame even in an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark?.

 

TIGER STRIPES
Dir - Amanda Nell Eu
Overall: GOOD

 

A solid, multi-national co-production between eight different countries including Malaysia from which it is set, Tiger Stripes utilizes the common coming-of-age motif where blossoming womanhood leads to bestial transformation.  The debut from writer/director Amanda Nell Eu, it has a familiar enough premise that has been used in your Ginger Snaps and Perpetrators to name but two, but the specific focus on a young girl who gets her first period while being systematically shunned by her friends, ignored by her father, and berated by her teachers and mother is given a singular trajectory.  Newcomer Zafreen Zairizal turns in a pitch-perfect performance as such a young girl who exhibits innocently rebellious behavior before she starts literally transforming into something that no one in her community, (least of all herself), can handle.  There is something to be said about the long stretches that go by where no adults seem to be either aware or concerned with the chain of events that are happening to their children, going about their routines until things have gone too far, which is when they hilariously bring in a huckster exorcist that is more concerned with getting social media likes than actually expelling evil.  Even as things become more violent and silly, Nell Eu treats her characters with nothing but empathy, making this an honest genre exaggeration about how rough it is being a kid, as well as how the expectations that we place on those kids can inadvertently unleash the beast in them.

2023 Horror Part Twenty-One

STRANGE DARLING

Dir - JT Mollner
Overall: MEH

For his sophomore full length Strange Darling, writer/director JT Mollner props up its gimmicks and clever subversion at the cost of properly exploring its subject matter.  In and of itself, this is not an automatic faux pas since there is nothing wrong with a movie that has nothing to say, especially if it is edge-of-your-seat paced and stylized to the gills.  Such is the case here as Mollner announces right off the bat that his new film was shot in 35 mm, (by known actor and first time cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi no less), is based off of a "real" serial killer, and is told in six chapters, (actually seven counting an epilogue), and then starts right in the middle with chapter three.  Every nuance to the presentation is calculated, from casting the perpetually brooding Kyle Gallner and giving his character the name "The Demon", to opening with a chase scene where he is sniffing coke, shooting a shotgun, and trying to catch up with an injured and panicked Willa Fitzgerald in an ancient Ford Pinto.  Details cannot be divulged without ruining the fun twists, but those twists are clouded by our two underwritten leads who only seem to be behaving in a way so that the audience gasps at the rug pull.  In other words, we need more information to get somewhere here.  Instead, this is a sly, violent, darkly comedic, wonderfully shot and performed whirlwind of gender dynamics played against each other, but Mollner stops short of digging into the can of worms that he opens.

 

THE VOURDALAK

Dir - Adrien Beau
Overall: GOOD

 

Shot on 16 mm, the full-length debut from French filmmaker Adrien Beau is a delightfully dour yet stylishly humorous adaptation of Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy's 1839 novella The Family of the Vourdalak, which genre fans will recognize as having been brought to the screen fifty years earlier in Mario Bava's famed anthology movie Black Sabbath.  The Vourdalak, (Le Vourdalak), takes its cue from such bygone gothic cinematic haunts out of England and Europe, but it has a singular aura that differentiates it from your typical unimaginative throwback.  The tone curiously rides a line between absurd and melancholic as a dainty courier of the King of France finds himself ambushed in the Eastern Europe countryside, only to come across a doomed family whose patriarch has recently returned as a member of the undead.  Along with the retro aesthetic, the fact that said patriarch is not played by a living organism gives the movie another gimmick, but Beau, (who also provides the voice for it), manages to make the title creature both alarmingly freaky and hilarious.  There are some pacing lulls that rear their head in the third act, but the grimy and haunting atmosphere remains in check, making this a left-of-center work to take note of.
 

RAGING GRACE
Dir - Paris Zarcilla
Overall: MEH

A frustrating yet well-intended debut from director Paris Zarcilla, Raging Grace is a relentlessly miserable watch that hinges its momentum at least in part on implausibility and tired genre tropes.  Little Jaeden Paige Boadilla delivers an agreeable performance as an ignored child who endlessly jump scares Max Eigenmann, much to the annoyance of both her and the audience.  Wide-mouthed/white-eyed screaming ghouls and a few bog-standard nightmare sequences also show up, with none of the horror bits coming off as anything within miles of unique.  The problems are not limited to unfortunate genre hacks though since the story takes a sincere look at abused immigrants who are at the mercy of their manipulative employers, but watching Eigenmann's harrowing ordeal where every break proves itself to be yet another humiliating trap is borderline insufferable.  This is intentional of course since we are meant to understand the horrendous trials and tribulations that foreign workers, (particularly single mothers), all to often have to withstand, but several of the plot maneuvers that get Eigenmann from point A to point B will have audience member's yelling at the screen due to how poorly thought out they are on the character's part.  Zarcilla can be commended for celebrating his Filipino heritage and shining a light on something that needs to be addressed, but the subject matter deserves a tighter script and less stupid jump scares.

2023 Horror Part Twenty

MIND BODY SPIRIT
Dir - Alex Henes/Matthew Merenda
Overall: WOOF

 

A frustrating full-length debut from the writer/director team of Alex Henes and Matthew Merenda, Mind Body Spirit has a nifty gimmick that is ripe for tearing faux-enlightenment influencer culture a new asshole, but it indulges in the biggest found footage no-nos along its clunky path.  On the one hand, it seems unavoidable for Henes and Merenda to utilize any other format than the found footage one since this is a story about a troubled young woman who embarks on an online journal, documenting her "journey" after inheriting her weird grandmother's old house.  Yet by going this route, the filmmakers set themselves up for an endless stream of moments that take the viewer right out of the proceedings.  This includes the use of scary music, ambient sound effects, those obnoxiously blaring noise swells that contemporary horror movies seem required by law to include, and the camera being turned on any time that the audience needs to see something scary, plausibility be damned.  Despite its subject matter which is predicated exclusively on Sarah J. Bartholomew recording herself, (except for a tag at the end), it is all edited and structured like a conventional film, plus the plot is too hackneyed with its vague occult tropes to pass Alfred Hitchcock's icebox test.  And for fuck's sake, can we finally stop with the characters opening their mouths and screaming into the camera gag please?

 

STARVE ACRE
Dir - Daniel Kokotajlo
Overall: MEH

For his second full-length, British filmmaker Daniel Kokotailo adapts Andrew Michael Hurley's novel Starve Acre, which serves as a more lackluster and cold variant to Valdimar Jóhannsson's singularly strange Lamb from 2021.  Set in the 1970s, it has a couple losing their child in the first act, (a weird kid who exhibits anti-social behavior like murdering a horse and having an imaginary friend of sorts whisper unwholesome things in his ear, or so he claims), who then embark on less than agreeable coping mechanisms in their ensuing grief.  The tone is humorless and deliberately uninviting as we are never allowed to connect with Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark's aloof characters, instead just witnessing their behavior as spectators like they are some unknowing experiment to supernatural manipulation.  One has to stretch to come to such a conclusion though since the otherworldly elements are murky at best, plus the pacing suffers because of both this and the dour atmosphere that is not helped by persistent music from Matthew Herbert.  This would work if the film had a more engrossing and underlying mystery, but it is more lackadaisical and unclear than spooky, with the curious elements spread out so gingerly as to almost be indecipherable.

SLEEP
Dir - Jason Yu
Overall: GOOD

The debut Sleep from Bong Joon-ho collaborator Jason Yu rides a thin line throughout its three chapters, chronicling the psychological turmoil suffered by a devoted couple who is both expecting their first child and dealing with the fact that one of them is a violent sleepwalker.  On paper, this is nothing new, as the horror genre has long presented its characters in vague enough lighting to put their paranoia in the perspective where what we are witnessing could be of supernatural origin or merely the unreliable outcome of a mental breakdown.  Yu does remarkable things with this set-up though, which is down to the details by which he allows us to immerse ourselves with the characters played by Jung Yu-mi and Lee Sun-kyun, (the latter sadly delivering one of his last performances before his untimely suicide the following year).  They are relatable, likeable, and seem to have a warm relationship where the honeymoon phase has yet to pass.  This both builds a solid footing for their sticking together when things get impossible and it makes their harrowing ordeal shift the earlier comedic focus into a well-earned darker tone towards the finale.  Every step of the way, we are left to ponder exactly who was crazy and who was just playing along to keep the family together, but as the characters themselves allude to, it ultimately does not matter.  So long as "it's over", they can live to fight other battles that life throws at them.

2023 Horror Part Nineteen

INFESTED
Dir - Sébastien Vaniček
Overall: GOOD

 

While most spider movies are comedic in nature, (think Arachnophobia and Eight Legged Freaks), we occasionally get some that take their creepy-crawly premise more seriously, and the full-length debut Infested, (Vermines), from French filmmaker Sébastien Vaniček is just such a movie.  That said, the hip-hop heavy soundtrack and playful bickering amongst the young cast cast at least initially gives it a lighter tone, but this is done away with quick once everyone is quarantined to a lower income apartment building and the downtrodden are forced to fend for themselves with mostly tragic results.  Vaniček proves to be a natural at delivering intense set pieces that are more white-knuckled than merely skin-crawling.  This is a scenario where things cannot get any worse yet they keep getting worse, forcing some well-rounded characters to face their own hang-ups and internal issues to the point where it becomes a harrowing ordeal for the audience as well.  It may get too overbearing for some tastes and a few select CGI creature scenes are poorly done, but this is mostly a success that takes an age old and universally unsettling premise of killer arachnids and does something more grown-up with it.

 

PROJECT EERIE

Dir - Ricky Umberger

Overall: MEH

Thankfully stepping away from his consistently flawed and silly The Fear Footage series, indie filmmaker Ricky Umberger starts what may be a new crop of found footage movies with Project Eerie.  It follows the same formula as the aforementioned Fear Footage debut, (as well as every V/H/S installment for that matter), namely introducing a wrap-around narrative that presents an excuse for people to watch a couple of vignettes that all tie into unexplained terrain.  The usual found footage motifs are present, (namely flimsy excuses for characters to be filming everything and pointing the camera at things to create a cinematic aesthetic), plus predictable scare tactics run throughout.  Umberger makes no attempt to reinvent the wheel here; instead, he seems to be honing in his craft at strictly adhering to the ever-growing number of shaky-cam horror films that are of such an ilk.  Everything here has been done before, (sometimes better and sometimes worse), but there is still an agreeable amount of enthusiasm that cuts through on screen.  Even if the scary, screechy monster faces still lurch at the camera and look like store-bought masks, some of the production values are improved upon, so at least Umberger is making a noble attempt to up his game while staying in his stylistic and micro-budgeted comfort zone.

 

THE KING TIDE

Dir - Christian Sparkes

Overall: MEH

 

Boasting a unique premise, Canadian filmmaker Christian Sparkes' The King Tide unfortunately never engrosses the way that it should.  Set at an isolated island community that has adopted a Neo-Luddite lifestyle, it throws a monkey wrench into such an "off the grid" existence where a mysterious infant washes ashore and becomes the focal point of their society.  The child does this by having all manner of healing powers, as well as the ability to draw loads of fish in so that the handful of townsfolk can remain unreliant on outside assistance.  Things go smoothly until they do not, when little Alix West Lefler's otherworldly abilities fail to work as planned, causing an immediate sense of panic where the entire structure of the commune has to struggle to cope with the downfall of an existence that they have carved out for themselves.  A case of putting all of one's eggs in a single basket, it explores what happens to people when that basket is taken away and the results take a consistently dour trajectory.  Well acted and well shot, the plot specifics seem arbitrarily placed in order to extenuate the story's themes, which in and of itself is not a bad thing, but the hooks are not hooky enough and the melancholic tone becomes too overbearing after awhile.