Dir - Max Minghella
Overall: GOOD
Another dark comedy body horror movie fueled by female beauty standards which immediately recalls the same year's The Substance, Shell is the lesser known and less successful of the two, but it still has its fair share of commendable attributes despite the fact that it simultaneously beats a dead horse. Cynical viewers may take issue with the fact that it was both written and directed by men, (Jack Stanley and Max Minghella, respectively), whereas The Substance was the sole vision of Coralie Fargeat, giving that film a point of view that was specifically relatable to its author. On this note, the identical themes, (and several identical plot points), found here are more surface level and obvious, but one of the things that Minghella and Stanley's film has going for it is a steady B-movie sense of humor that only takes itself as seriously as it has to. It of course also helps to have the always wonderful Elisabeth Moss and Kate Hudson on board as the two women on polar opposite ends of the power spectrum who are both justifying their desire to stay beautiful, confident, and relevant in a superficial and dismissive landscape. The last act twist is ridiculous and will permanently convince viewers that they have been watching an unmitigated farce the entire time, but such tongue-in-cheek silliness is necessary, (and refreshing), to strip it of being highfalutin.
Dir - Dutch Merich
Overall: WOOF
The third and by leaps and bounds worst entry in Dutch Merich's meandering found footage franchise, Horror in the High Desert 3: Firewatch is bad enough to pull the plug on this entire pointless endeavor. Whereas the first film from 2021 set up an intriguing missing person premise that it promised to deliver something on, the 2023 follow-up ignored all of that and told an unrelated story in an even more teasing manner. Things circle back around to the initial Gary Hinge case here where yet another loner decides to follow in the missing blogger's footsteps to see what happened, but what we get is an insultingly cheap and, (even worse), insultingly inconsequential waste of another ninety minutes. There are only so many times that viewer's can be duped into thinking that they are finally going to get somewhere with a needlessly drawn-out narrative that has a simple enough starting point, and this third installment abuses any kind of trust that Merich may have procured along the way. The talking head segments dish out virtually no new or interesting information, yet they are done in a hyperbolic and painstaking manner that grows only more irksome each time that we cut back to our hapless protagonist who only manages to capture about three or four vague sound effects and a micro-millisecond of a "Wait, maybe that was something?" image amongst aimless amounts of footage. The final set piece flashes a "viewer discretion is advised" warning, only to proceed with ten straight minutes of absolutely nothing before the credits quickly hit afterwards. Believe it or not, this is the most "exciting" moment in the entire movie.
Dir - Johannes Grenzfurthner
Overall: WOOF
One of the most aggressively asinine horror movies to emerge in some time, Austrian filmmaker Johannes Grenzfurthner's Solvent is his third in a self-proclaimed and nearly as insufferable trilogy which also includes 2021's Masking Threshold and 2022's Razzennest. Grenzfurthner has unmistakable ambition, that much can be said about him as each of these films go for a type of rambling intimacy where obnoxious characters prattle on endlessly without us seeing their faces. The POV gimmick is an interesting one on paper, where we can witness the psychological downfall of our protagonist, in this case a contractor who returns to the scene of a tragedy suffered by his crew. There is plenty of backstory present involving a former SS officer who goes missing and seems to have manifested himself through a pipe in a wine cellar, (or something), but as is the case with Grenzfurthner's other work, it is the presentation that becomes impossible to endure. This is no doubt by design, at least to a point since he favors extreme, hyper detailed closeups of nauseating images, usually rapid-cut together in an increasingly disjointed manner as to mirror the mental spiral of the person off screen who never, ever shuts the hell up. To add to the frustration, the performances here are outrageously poor, maybe a step or two down from an English dub over a Japanese video game where all of the terrible dialog is lost in translation and the actors crank it up to eleven as jarringly as possible, perhaps to compensate. In any event, the film is unwatchable.
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