Dir - Josh Ruben
Overall: WOOF
Two movies named Scare Me came out in 2020, one a campfire anthology and the other serving as the full-length directorial debut from actor Josh Ruben. Ruben also wrote, produced, and stars in the lead, essentially playing a less successful version of himself, (write what ya know), who rents an isolated snowbound cabin to work on some screenplays when he meets another author and they both spend a power blackout evening being obnoxious assholes, making up and acting out scary stories to tell each other. You know, like real people would never do in a billion years. They also argue and pontificate upon gender and race dynamics, and then Chris Redd shows up as an equally insufferable pizza deliver guy who apparently does not have to get back to his job any time soon and can just chill out and share in the pizza that he holds vertically. This is a staggering example of ninety-three minutes of human beings not acting anything like actual human beings, that is unless they are acting in a Josh Ruben movie. Films where characters endlessly hark on horror cliches while they also feature those cliches are inherently grating anyway, but Ruben makes it so, so much worse with his particular penchant for littering his movies exclusively with quirky, over-the-top dipshits who you just want to punch in the face.
Dir - Anonymous
Overall: MEH
The only mystery bigger than the one presented in Murder Death Koreatown is the mystery of why so many goddamn found footage movies keep adding scary music to them. This trope is consistently ruinous, as well as laughably moronic, but it is not the only thing that works against what is going on here. A unique entry into the genre in the fact that no credits are listed anywhere, (no director, no cast, no nothing), it is a damn shame that it is not presented in an appropriate naked format to slam home an aura of authenticity that found footage movies in general work best to adhere to. Instead, this no budget endeavor that was shot with a cell phone is edited together like a conventional film, with call backs, freeze frames, and as mentioned, ambient scary noises and music. Aside from harking on how much more affective it could have been if it was stripped of cinematic artifice, the story itself is an interesting examination of true crime obsession, classism, oblivious racism, paranoia, and severe mental instability. Our unseen narrator is an unemployed Caucasian who talks like Kermit the Frog and embarks on a futile investigation into a senseless murder that occurs in his neighborhood. His absurd straw-grasping, reckless narcissism, lack of social awareness, and compulsive behavior would be hilarious if it was not so increasingly sad, since the backdrop of an impoverished Los Angeles neighborhood littered with homeless people and those struggling with their own affairs, (including those of our spiraling crime sleuth and documentarian), paints a harrowing picture to be sure.
Dir - Brian Patrick Butler
Overall: MEH
An experimental indie full-length debut from actor-turned-filmmaker Brian Patrick Butler, Friend of the World is bold despite its meager means, but it also comes off as meandering and unfocused. Mostly done in black and white save a few flashback sequences that are presented as footage shot by Alexandra Slade's aspiring filmmaker protagonist, it throws the viewer into the deep end after some cryptic biblical text where we see an underground bunker full of presumably murdered bodies. Slade is one of those bodies who is still kicking, and she eventually runs into Nick Young's aggressive and bulbous military general, at which point they aimlessly wonder around while discussing whatever post-apocalyptic scenario they are currently trapped in. The details are persistently nebulous and probably not important, but the movie never seems to establish what is important. There is a generational tension between our lone polar opposite characters, but it all seems lost in the haze of its numerous influences. Kubrick-esque black comedy, Lynch-esque weirdness, Cronenberg-esque body horror, Romero-esque societal collapse, Carpenter-esque monsters, Twilight Zone-esque sci-fi, some of Dan Trachtenberg's 10 Cloverfield Lane in there, some of Robert Eggers' The Lighthouse in there, some William S. Burroughs' rambling in there, etc. Some of it is interesting and funny as pretentious cinema can often be, but it shows more promise than concrete results.
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