Dir - Damian Mc Carthy
Overall: MEH
Overall: MEH
The sophomore effort Oddity from Irish filmmaker Damien Mc Carthy is brooding with atmosphere yet flimsy on narrative fortification. Shot at the same converted barn which hosted his debut Caveat, this is a natural cousin to said film, with Caveat's harbinger of doom toy rabbit even making a cameo, plus Mc Carthy's script once again hosting its fair share of implausible character behaviors. It achieves its goal though to put the viewer at persistent unease by trapping its characters in a single location with textbook creepiness. Here it is an isolated and square-shaped country house that looks more like a fortress with a wide open courtyard in the center of it. Spooky things happen inside of its walls, the timeline jumps ahead from the intro, Carolyn Bracken plays a set of siblings, (one of whom is blind), Gwilym Lee works at an insane asylum with some naturally sketchy patients, there is a life-sized wooden doll that looks like a cartoonish outdoor Halloween decoration, ghosts are captured in camera flashes, etc. Once we get the full explanation as to who murdered who and for what reason, the story becomes less interesting than it promised, but for viewers that are in the mood for a goosebumps-ridden mood piece, there is plenty here to get a kick out of.
Dir - Curry Barker
Overall: WOOF
Found footage has long proven itself to be a genre that anyone with a camera can dip their toes into, churning something out with a nifty premise and next to no budget that if things go well, can get some solid buzz going for it and maybe even make a career for the person behind it. Milk and Serial is the full-length debut from actor/filmmaker Curry Barker, and while he comes off as no less ambitious and well-intended as your Oren Pelis, Tom Fanslous, or Turner Clays, his work here does everything not only wrong with the sub-genre, but also dumb with it. Serial killers chronicling their own escapades has been done in Man Bites Dog, The Last Horror Movie, and Be My Cat: A Film for Anne, plus having a premise of YouTubers going for likes while putting themselves in peril lends itself naturally to the sub-genre and has been done in at least Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum and Deadstream. Lack of freshness aside, Barker takes a page right out of Patric Brice and Mark Duplass' worst of the worst Creep by insulting the audience with a lack of plausibility from about fifteen minutes in until the finish line. Adding insult to injury even there, Barker's antagonist is both relentlessly obnoxious and a moron, with a master plan that can only be written off as "crazy" due to how illogical it is. The movie is a grating mess and primarily focused on awful people, with nothing clever to say and only mean-spirited stupidity at its disposal.
Dir - Tilman Singer
Overall: MEH
A mess of a movie that weaves its singular premise in confounding directions, writer/director Tilman Singer's long-awaited second feature Cuckoo does as many things wrong as it does right as it does wrong again. Set in the Bavarian Alps, it teases at a mystery throughout its first two acts; one whose outcome not even a single viewer would be able to predict. This gives Singer's script a solid and head-scratching hook, but it also sets the film up for failure. We are treated to bizarre scene after bizarre scene, many of which become repetitive as both quirky comic relief and gut-wrenching trauma are dished out by the performers. Hunter Schafer is marvelous in the lead as an emotionally destroyed seventeen year-old girl who is forced to live in a foreign land after her mother's passing, only to find herself getting routinely and severely injured, not believed by anybody, and both annoyed with and being annoying to her family. Meanwhile, Dan Stevens hams it up as a sly villain with a German accent and a language that anyone unfamiliar with his recognizable mug would swear was his native tongue. We eventually get an explanation as to what is going on and it is a disappointing one, namely because it is both stupid and underwhelming. Tilman still seems to be enjoying the act of toying with the audience's grasp on his aggressively strange narrative choices, (though nowhere near as aggressively or strange as he did with his debut Luz), but his efforts get tonally blundered for this round.
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