2017 Horror Part Two

XX
Dir - Jovanka Vuckovic/Annie Clark/Roxanne Benjamin/Karyn Kusama
Overall: MEH 

Both Roxanne Benjamin who had done an admirable job in 2015's Southbound and KarynKusama, (Jennifer's Body, The Invitation) team up with newcomers Jovanka Vuckovic and St. Vincent herself Annie Clark of all completely random people to bring another horror anthology together in XX.  The personnel here takes center stage more than anything else and despite the feminist-centric angle, the results are standard for these kind of collections, this one getting more successful as it goes along.  The opening story "The Box" almost has a creepy premise, but is handled ineffectively; the illogical behavior of the parents is distracting and the supernatural or whatever conundrum is handled way too randomly.  Clark's "The Birthday Party" goes for subtle laughs and achieves them, but is absolutely absent of anything befitting to the genre that the film, as a whole, is in.  "Don't Fall" is the complete opposite; the most typical horror entry out of the bunch, being quick and to the point.  Kusama delivers the most solid if somewhat unoriginal moment with "Her Only Living Son", basically a Rosemary's Baby sequel, though that is not necessarily a bad thing.  The whole of XX is certainly a decent try, but it also just kind of simmers as average.

IT COMES AT NIGHT
Dir - Trey Edward Shults
Overall: MEH

Trey Adward Shult's second feature, (two for two to get a hefty amount of praise after his debut Krisha), It Comes at Night plays a very subdued game, disguising itself as a post-apocalyptic horror film when in fact it is about the unity of family and grieving loved ones.  Not that it cannot have its horror movie cake and eat it too, but the film's genre adhering moments really do come off as a ruse more than anything else.  The rather bland nightmare sequences provide the movie with its only moments to put in a trailer in order to justify it getting a "horror" tag.  The story itself is far more interesting and effective in its unease and heartbreak than it is with minimal boo scares and consistently menacing music.  Shults shows pretty considerable storytelling skills though, even when the story is barely there as in this case.  Besides the pointless dream scenes, every other frame is anything but wasted and it all comes off very realistic and rooted in believable logic.  The one-note tone is kept in check without getting too depressing and the cabin setting deliberately has no defining geography.  Nearly all of the post-apocalyptic details are kept vague as we are not even told what part of the country this takes place in.  So Shults certainly trims much of the fat and keeps things moving slow, yet moving nonetheless.  The end result is just a tad too sparse with just a few too many unnecessary, (be it brief), touches.

mother!
Dir - Darren Aronofsky
Overall: MEH

For his seventh directed film, this is more uncomfortably ambitions than any of the previous Darren Aronofsky movies that set the course, including Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain.  mother! is quintessential for Aronofsky really, with his pretensions colliding brutally.  Hand-held close ups, inspired visual effects, and many acts unfolding in front of the screen that run through grand levels of unpleasant, the entirety of the film is a build up, just as Aronofsky's career is to making it.  From the opening shots, we are let in on the fact that most likely we are not witnessing what it appears that we are witnessing.  Characters seem to be at first only a few steps away from reality, only to slam home the fact that they could not be farther removed by the end.  The rudeness and strangeness of the supporting cast's behavior intensifies and then we have a moment where it appears that things are going into a diverse direction from what came before.  This turns out to be a sneaky maneuver though as instead, the final act is on a level of grandiosity the likes of which only a handful of present-day films trash you over the head with.  This is where Aronofsky simply, (or complexly), goes too far.  There is so much detonating instead of oozing from the frame in the finale that the movie's laundry pile of themes become mute to the avalanche of savagery we are witnessing.  Assuredly, Aronofsky's results were intentional though as he has proven himself, (Noah notwithstanding), to be one of the consistently most imaginative and best American filmmakers in contemporary times.  By that same token though, hardly anyone could admit that all of mother! was necessary to experience.

2000's American Horror Part Three

FEAST
(2005)
Dir - John Gulager
Overall: MEH

The result of Project Greenlight's third season winner, Feast is the debut from director John Gulager and his writing team of Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton.  Unfortunately, this same creative force would go on to work on various levels of crap, such as entries into the Saw series and two more Feast sequels.  Essentially a B-movie with a highly recognizable cast, (Balthazar Getty, Krista Allen, Judah Frielander, Henry Rollins, Jason Mewes, etc), the movie is mostly "memorable" for ushering in some fresh new exciting ways to ruin a horror movie.  For one, the cinematography and camera work is utterly awful.  For literally every action sequence, (and there are plenty), it is hardly possible to distinguish what at all you are looking at due to the spastic camera movement and laughably poor lighting.  Everything is ridiculously dark and shaky to a major fault.  Besides some generally amusing title cards for each character, the humor fails everywhere else.  None of the character's personalities are remotely explored so their random rants, speeches, or jokey jabs all come off as bizarre, out of place, and furthermore, not funny.  The film also makes the common-for-some-reason mistake of trying to be as schlocky as possible while still having moments like a woman suffering a mental breakdown because her son gets eaten alive right in front of her.  So in other words, it is a fun monster movie folks!

1408
(2007)
Dir - Mikael Håfström
Overall: MEH

Majorly funded, (The Weinstein Company), A-list cast, (John Cusak, Samuel L. Jackson), Stephen King adaptations are a hit-or-miss ordeal surely and 2007's 1408 reeks of "studio created popcorn horror", but not in a numbingly unpleasant way.  King's initial story here is somewhat retreaded territory, but still plenty creepy as he milks the scary hotel/author protagonist premise yet again.  The concept of a single, " evil fucking room", in a hotel that goes all trying-to-kill-you-fairly-quickly within an hours time is a solid concept to be sure.  Swedish director Mikael Håfström, (who also did the fun 2013, Stallone/Schwarzenegger throwback vehicle Escape Plan), handles the material here decent enough to a point.  As the hauntings get more and more aggressive though, the film kind of flies off the rails in a blatant attempt to have a huge finish of an ending.  Going the route of subtlety would have certainly been more creepy, but also less action packed and exciting for movie-goers, hence the bigger studio vibe overtaking the proceedings.  Several endings where shot, (usually not a good idea), and the one shown in the theaters is the preferable one compared to the awful original cut which finds Jackson awkwardly crashing a funeral and seeing ghosts in his rear-view mirror.

LAKE MUNGO
(2008)
Dir - Joel Anderson
Overall: GOOD

One of the better documentary-style found footage films in the horror camp is Australian Joel Anderson's minimally budgeted Lake Mungo.  Many things can go wrong with this type of affair.  The acting can be unconvincing during the interview segments, which is even more problematic since said segments make up almost the entire running time in this format.  Thankfully the cast keeps it together here with only the most minimal, eye-ball-rolling dialog present.  The other uphill battle faced is that seeing a finished re-telling of a story in this way means that we know that all of the people who are recounting the events ultimately come out OK in the end.  This issue is bypassed though as the film solely deals with one doomed character and the struggle her family members have afterwards.  The would-be scary moments are staged well, all of them involving slow zoom-ins to photographs or video footage after we are told that the camera "caught something".  Anderson does a swell job of making these occasions consistently interesting as opposed to tedious.  All that said, the movie is scarcely frightening and has a few too many unnecessary "twists" in its story progression.  The plight of Alice Palmer is noticeably parallel in a few respects to Laura Palmer of Twin Peaks fame, (even outside of the obvious nod in the last name), though it is not successfully conveyed how troubled she was before things go down, with some of the big reveals coming off more random than they should.

Twin Peaks: The Return

TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN
(2017)
Dir - David Lynch
Overall: GREAT

Well...here it is.  A moment that seemed destined to never exist.  Not just the fact that one of the most groundbreaking, extraordinary, and frustratingly open-ended TV shows of all time actually got a continuation, but also the fact that David Lynch has directed something again and not just something.  Eighteen hours of something that if it already did not rank before, can now stand as his most definitive and paramount achievement, Twin Peaks.

As it was left twenty-six years ago, Twin Peaks already had attained legendary status both as a television program in general and, (to afford some hyperbole), as a pristine example of David Lynch's genius.  More than a cult-followed work, more than a critical darling, this show transcended itself as a pop culture event into something increasingly lauded and cherished.  Returning to it two and a half decades later, the times have obviously changed, but because this is David Lynch we are talking about, the unexpected was not only expected but necessary.  It is remarkable that with each project, (no matter how far apart they emerge), Lynch consistently proves himself as a maverick artist with a vision that is more focused and exclusive than anyone else's.  He is the single best living filmmaker, arguably the greatest of all time, and now after years of stating that he was most likely done making movies and certainly done with Twin Peaks, he has surprised us yet again, (as he is wont to do).

For that reason alone, he deserves a doughnut.

I am sure you have noticed that yes, I am a David Lynch fan.  Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me was the first of his films that I had ever seen, odd as in doing so I unknowingly ruined the original "Who killed Laura Palmer?" mystery before I even knew of the show that said film was a prequel to.  Fire Walk with Me I would still say is as good as anything David Lynch ever made and it is easily one of the best horror movies ever made, (though calling it or anything this man has made a "conventional" horror movie is not entirely correct).  Yet by the time that I saw Lost Highway, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Dr relatively close to each other, I was in for the long haul of adoring everything that this man was ever going to do.

David Lynch's last directed feature Inland Empire came out in 2006.  Since then, he has expressed zero desire in making another movie.  The film industry being what it had become, plus probably his own age and being a transcendental meditation practitioner for nearly all of his life, it all seemed to mellow him out even further into a sort of semi-retirement where he was more than happy with painting, occasionally filming a few shorts, (or a Duran Duran concert film), or simply doing whatever the hell he wanted to do, more or less.  Then again, that was pretty much always what David Lynch did; doing whatever he wanted.

Observe...

Twin Peaks had been dead and buried since it was canceled in 1991.  Co-creator Mark Frost, (who deserves a hefty amount of credit here along with Lynch for creating this universe), seemed just as content as his collaborator to let sleeping corpses lie.  Neither party was constantly reluctant to at least toy with the idea of bringing Twin Peaks back in some form or another though.  Over the course of several years and lots of legal hoops to jump through and work out, the pieces all fell into place to actually make the bringing back of this show a reality.

A long time coming with a gargantuan amount of people involved, (both behind and on the screen), Twin Peaks: The Return officially entered our lives on May 21st of this year, wrapping up on Sept 3rd.  For it to be what it had to be, an unprecedented decision was worked out with Showtime where Lynch and Frost would write the new series in its entirety and then Lynch would proceed to direct as many hours of footage as was needed to tell it.  The result was eighteen episodes of a continual arch, very different in almost every way from how conventional television is structured.  

Now that we have it, Twin Peaks truly cannot exist in any other way.  In its initial run in the early 90s, nothing on any network had ever been remotely like it in concept or delivery.  It was an avant-garde, part-parody of contemporary soap operas, except with Lynchian sensibilities i.e quirkiness that set it apart from the rest of ABC, (and everyone's) programing.  So now, a continual, eighteen-hour movie follow-up premiered at fifty-odd minutes at a time, with a week breather in between most.  Conceptually, the mythology has been deepened and taking such a long break off from movie-making, David Lynch seems to be bursting with incredibly bizarre, subconsciously-fueled ideas that are uniquely his own, but he also is as patiently in control of his medium as he has ever been.

Patience is of course a virtue where Mr. Dougie Jones is concerned.

It became apparent when watching these new Twin Peaks moments unfold before my eyes just how truly particular David Lynch really is.  You cannot overstate how no one else can possibly get away with what he does.  Yet it is not because of a nostalgic yearning from Twin Peaks or just Lynch fans as a whole willingly swallowing up whatever he gives us, no questions asked.  Well, in some ways it IS that, but there is a reason for our unwavering loyalty.  Lynch has earned our trust over an incredible career.  We know what we are getting into and we know that the conventions of story telling are going to be diligently absent.  Yet the reason that we love him for that is because of the joy that we have in entering his world again and again.  Real life can be boring and predictable.  So can most movies and TV shows.  When "Written and Directed by David Lynch" shows up on our screens though, we realize that we are entering something truly special and that our expectations to have our heads fall off will be repeatedly met.

I cannot think of a single filmmaker who spoon-feeds his audience less than David Lynch does.  On a regular basis, we are thrust into the middle of conversations and scenes that were going on before we showed up and Lynch does not play the expository dialog game at the fuck all.  More than that though, he takes a lot, (and I mean A LOT), of his sweet time letting his images and sounds create the atmosphere that they must create in order to work.  In doing so, hilariously long moments of what appears to be nothing at all happening, tons of lingering shots, and characters persistently speaking in seemingly vague and cryptic dialog transpire.  You can put together words to make the most random of a sentence, and with some eerie music that is humming away underneath it and a perfectly sculpted performance, (whether it is hysterically dramatic or unsettling and subdued), sits perfect at home in the world of a David Lynch film.

"Hysterically dramatic" you say?

Yet never for a moment is Twin Peaks unfolding its strangness willy-nilly.  In fact when it does appear that we are witnessing a scene that is not there to advance the main "plot", its inclusion is still monumentally important.  We meet Andy and Lucy's son Wally only once and it is one of the funniest moments on the show.  Does it connect directly to the plight of Agent Dale Cooper vs the powers of darkness?  I will answer that question with another question; does it have to?  You know who loves Andy and Lucy?  "Everybody watching Twin Peaks" is the answer.  So let us allow this scene to play out, (along with a copious amount of others in the same ballpark), and appreciate what they emotionally if not intellectually accomplish.

That would be a masterfully maintained tone of the hilarious, the absurd, the disturbing, the unreal, the random, and the viscerally powerful.  In other words, Lynch knows what he is doing.  What he is doing, (yet again), is not at all adhering to the prospects of traditional narrative.  Yet the tapestry of Twin Peaks is so dense and so engraved into our brains that frequent excursions into the goings-ons of hundreds of different characters is a delightful necessity regarding the whole.  Shit, it does not even have to be us witnessing what familiar characters from the original show's run are up to.  I have not done the math, but it certainly appeared that more screen time was dedicated to brand new characters this time around.  This would appear to be a "bold" move by Lynch and Frost to not indulge the diehards ad nauseum, but that may actually be the last thing we want.  The Log Lady has her place as does Big Ed Hurley and Norma's unrequited relationship, but this is a large world that we are in and there is a crucial role for Jim Belushi and Naomi Watts to play in it that is just as blissful to watch.

Jim Belushi eating cereal certainly qualifying as blissful.

The things that we are seeing are significant to the overall terrain of Twin Peaks.  Each of us watching will have our own particular off-arc that we want to go wondering in.  Some of us will get more or less of some of the things that we are naturally fascinated by, (for whatever reason), than others.  Taking all of Twin Peaks in under the big umbrella though, it is rewarding in a different light.  There are so many themes explored here that to dedicate the appropriate amount of written-word to each of them is more than I can entertainingly do here.  Yet by the final images in the last episode, (in what at this writing really does appear to be the final Twin Peaks images which we will ever be given), the sum of all of the gargantuan amount of parts seems overwhelming and beautifully so at that.

Debating what went down and what certain moments mean is not only what good David Lynch material always does, but it is what good art does in general.  Way back in 1991, Twin Peaks ended with a "Holy shit!" cliffhanger the likes of which we had never seen...and here we are again.  The difference is that the last time, the show was cancelled and the dissatisfaction was tragically unresolved.  There really was so much more to tell and The Return has proven it, and how.  More wonderful still, the amount of time that we all had to wait seems justified.  The puzzle has an infinite number of pieces, but the pieces fit and anybody else attempting any of this would fall on their ass because they are not David Lynch.  They have not done what David Lynch has done for such a long time now.

Lynch you ole tease you.

Twin Peaks is an anomaly in every sense, but was there really any doubt that Lynch did not "still have it"?  Furthermore, was there any doubt that once again submerging ourselves into this world was not going to be as awe-inspiring of an experience as it was the last time?  I would say there was not such doubt.  The only thing that surprises me, (besides the consistent surprises within the show's plot points itself of course), was that this new Twin Peaks series is probably the best thing that David Lynch has ever done.  At the very least, it is the most "Lynch" thing that he has ever done, which is saying oh so much.

We can single out many moments that are exclusively made real due to this filmmaker's ingenuity, (all of Episode 8 in particular is something that the likes of which I am calling right now, will never, ever be seen again on any other television show ever), but my jaw was hanging on the floor each and every week that I got to sit in front of my TV and experience this.  I was also so amused, so confused, and so incredibly pleased with all of the moments, but I never took it for granted either.  I never stopped being aware of how unlikely it was that I would ever be visiting Twin Peaks again, let alone with the original creators, (plus almost every actor and location, plus several dozen more), behind the entire thing.  A re-boot or re-make would be impossible for this show and christ I shudder to think if I ever live to see such a horrible idea come to fruition.  Lynch would be spinning in his grave alright.  That or his head would be floating through the cosmos whispering "blue rose" to FBI agents.  In any event, he would not like the re-boot idea is the point, let us be clear on that.

Oh how I love this show.  Let me count the ways...