2023 Horror Part Thirteen

EILEEN

Dir - William Oldroyd

Overall: GOOD

 

The sophomore effort from British filmmaker William Oldroyd, Eileen subtly weaves through a series of moods before arriving at a disturbed, black comedy destination that only slams home a likely delusional sense of newfound enlightenment for its title character.  Ottessa Moshfegh and husband Luke Goebel adapt the former's own novel for the screen; a novel that sees a lonely daughter of a retired, drunk, curmudgeon police officer and who is partial to flights of fancy, weaving through an inconsequential existence until circumstances arise that give her a means to escape.  Set at some point during the 1960s where the women's liberation movement was likely not even in its infancy, both Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway portray characters who are on the outskirts of accepted society; McKenzie's Eileen being more introverted in her independence, (or dreams of independence), while Hathaway' psychologist is more cocksure on the surface yet harboring her own frustrations.  Oldroyd keeps the atmosphere light yet grungy, toying with some of the taboos of the story's era before the plot makes an abrupt shift into the third act.  A couple of "only in screenplay" monologues aside that the actors handle as professionally as can be expected, the performances are delightful, with everyone busting out their best Boston accents and helping to give the material some charm amongst its more disturbing attributes.

LORD OF MISRULE
Dir - William Brent Bell
Overall: WOOF

 

A derivative folk horror outing from schlock-peddler William Brent Bell, Lord of Misrule may try and disguise itself with an earthy and gloom-ridden aesthetic, but it gradually unravels in an increasingly and unintentionally comedic manner.  The fact that Tom de Ville's screenplay pits Christian and pagan faiths against each other is merely one such primary swipe from The Wicker Man, with suspicious acting townsfolk in robes and animal masks, festive rituals that only seem joyous on surface level, endlessly ominous drawings that spell out all of the details in plain site, ancient books that also spell everything out, an ancient deity with antlers, no one on screen who is trustworthy, disturbing alters with twigs and animal parts, old people acting weird while pissing themselves, and innocent people being set on fire while the locals sing joyous hymns.  Added to this is Bell's hackneyed presentation that rarely lets the ominous tribal violin score shut the hell up, has scratchy noises signaling the scary jolts, and a rustic color pallet that gives it zero distinguishing visual characteristics from every other folky nightmare out there.  Granted Bell is hardly going for originality here and instead a type of post The Witch/Midsommar comfort food, but when the protagonist is the dumbest person in the room and the entire plot proves to be pointless upon its conclusion, there is nothing left to recommend besides Ralph Ineson's reliable, ground-rumbling baritone.

IMMERSION

Dir - Takashi Shimizu

Overall: MEH

 

Similar to the work of his J-horror contemporary Hideo Nakata, Takashi Shimizu melds vengeful spirits with modern technology in Immersion, this time exploring a virtual reality landscape that gets inhabited by a long black-haired ghost that is doomed to inflict her wrath on anyone within striking distance.  In keeping with Shimizu's later efforts, the final product overstays its welcome and could use a more streamlined approach to shave off about twenty-odd minutes from the run time, taking on multiple side plots that muddle up the "be careful what tech you wish for" through-line that is being worked out.  Thankfully though, the director's ability to maintain a melancholic and foreboding tone is as strong as ever, even if the chosen story fails to find any refreshing byways to differentiate it from others that pit young characters up against supernatural, folkloric forces.  The tradition musical score never becomes overbearing and the lush scenery of the island location is well-shot, evoking an isolated ghost land both within and outside of its digital avatar version.  It loses its way during the third act with an unnecessary and drawn-out second ending, but it is still well-made if not revolutionary.

2023 Horror Part Twelve

SALTBURN
Dir - Emerald Fennell
Overall: GREAT

 

An even more twisted cousin to Bong Joon-ho's South Korean, 2019, upper class take-over dark comedy Parasite, Saltburn finds ideal footing in the U.K. where traditional, separatist systems have persistently been in place to ensure that those of non-noble birth are kept at a distance from the table of the exorbitantly wealthy who have maintained that wealth thorough no accomplishments of their own.  Here lies the crust to Emerald Fennell's sophomore effort, which is a more ambitious work than her debut Promising Young Woman; yet another revenge film with gnarled and enjoyable results.  The trick that Fennell pulls off here is more nuanced and drawn-out, though the finale comes off as an uncorking of an inevitable bottle as opposed to a jaw-dropping twist.  As the anti-hero Oxford scholarship student with something up his sleeve, thirty-one year Barry Keoghan is obviously over a decade too old, but somehow this never becomes distracting or relevant since his small stature, celebrity physique, and naturally aloof charm rings perfectly as he pulls a spell over both the audience and the family, (or at least some of them), that he has set his eyes on.  Pathetic and manipulative all at once, Keoghan is one of several mesmerizing aspects to the film, all of which are used with stylized whimsy by Fennell who turns the country house of the title and its occupants into a coveted wonderland that only a prodigy child who "really does notice everything" would be able to divide and conquer.

 

IN ITS WAKE

Dir - Lee Foster

Overall: WOOF

 

For his second full-length In Its Wake, indie filmmaker Lee Foster fuses a throwback synth score with an uninteresting story, obnoxious characters, inane dialog, and several lousy performances.  A low-budget Canadian production set in the midst of winter even though we cannot see any of the actor's breath outside, (and few if any of them bother to even act cold), things get off to a rocky start with Elvis Stojko's punchable preacher delivering a long-winded sermon that merely suggests at what the rest of his biblical ramblings are going to be like.  Stojko is either nailing his pretentious character or ruining him with his wide-eyed, wooden, and blabbering mannerisms, yet in either event, the movie suffers detrimentally when he is on screen.  Elsewhere, completely unlikable assholes argue with each other within their own "friends" groups, let alone when they run into strangers who they immediately pick fights with.  Both parties cars run out of gas at the same time, we see some boobs, a whole lot more arguing happens, and then an evil baboon thing shows up well into the third act.  The film is competently shot by cinematographer Bryan Piggott, plus co-screenwriter Ryan Kobold's music sets a fun, eerie tone, but it all ends up being an awkward and snore-inducing mess with no one on screen to tolerate.

LOOP TRACK

Dir - Thomas Sainsbury

Overall: GOOD

While it fails to tighten up all of its loose ends, Thomas Sainsbury's Loop Track still proves to be a successful pairing of nature and psychological horror.  A New Zealand hike gone awry, Sainsbury plays the lead roll on top of writing, directing, and producing; this marking a sharp enough contrast from his otherwise strictly comedic works as a standup, playwright, and social media personality.  We are given a less than agreeable amount of backstory concerning Sainsbury's persistently downtrodden character who seems to be fleeing his family life for some reason, all in order to spend time in isolation.  Whether this is for repentance, self-examination, a mental recharge, or all of the above is not made clear, but his trek is quickly interrupted by a good-natured yet annoying fellow hiker who insists that they tag-along with each other, only to run into even more unassuming people while a gradual danger seems to be lurking in the bushes, just out of definite site.  It plays the common game of utilizing the protagonist's already-established emotional turmoil as a means for both the audience and other characters to not take his paranoia seriously until it is too late, but the final act is both alarming and intense, which is further heightened by some excellent practical effects.

2023 Horror Part Eleven

THANKSGIVING
Dir - Eli Roth
Overall: MEH

 

Sixteen years in the making, but Eli Roth finally unleashed his full-length Thanksgiving after dropping the hilarious faux-trailer in Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse double feature.  Bailing on the throwback vibe of the aforementioned trailer, Rodriguez' Machete, and Jason Eisner's Hobo with a Shotgun, Roth delivers a contemporary-set, formulaic slasher outing that is comparatively more in line with your Terrorizers or the late 90s abysmal teen horror boom than anything adhering to 70s exploitation.  Hinging on an over-the-top Black Friday fiasco gone deadly, the plot gets cooking in an appropriately campy manner, even if most of the actors take the proceedings more seriously than they deserve.  Though Roth's penchant for snarky humor that is either intentionally or unintentionally cringe-adjacent is as on point as ever, the practical, nauseating gore effects and kill scenes are delightfully ridiculous and worthy of some laugh-out-loud gasps.  Elsewhere though, this is painfully generic stuff that will hardly convert those who have long tuned-out slasher movies, holiday-themed or otherwise.  Its point seems to be in delighting the already converted though so in that respect, it gets the job done.

THE PORTRAIT
Dir - Simon Ross
Overall: MEH

 

Spearheaded by an emotionally exhaustive performance from Natalia Cordova-Buckley, director Simon Ross' full-length debut The Portrait plays a bog-standard psychological horror game that affords few surprises.  Scripted by producer David Griffiths, the artwork of the title is a self-portrait of Ryan Kwanten's odious ancestor who was a sadistic scholar and according to his wife Buckley, looks exactly like him.  There is plenty going on here as Buckley is wrought with guilt after having inadvertently caused her husband's permanent brain damage due to a domestic quarrel, rendering him mute and unpredictably violent, which is not helped by the unassuming painting in the attic that casts a sinister aura over a wave of frustrated trauma that is thick enough that it could be cut with a knife.  There is little doubt that the quasi-supernatural elements, (which are underplayed to begin with), are not entirely in the troubled psyche of our protagonist, which makes this more of a melancholy affair than anything since we are likely just witnessing the impassioned breakdown of a woman who only wants to make amends in a desperate attempt at a miracle that will ease her own grief.  It fails to challenge the tropes that have long been laid-out by similar stories, but Ross maintains a sorrowful tone which makes Buckley's commitment that much more powerful.

APORIA
Dir - Jared Moshe
Overall: GOOD

 

An unassuming sci-fi drama that removes all of the aesthetic spectacle from the genre, Jared Moshe's third feature Aporia instead has a simple, emotional residence concerning the conundrum of undoing the past in order to negate traumatic episodes in our lives.  The pseudo-science details are wisely left vague, since dedicating more screen time to a plausible time travel explanation would have pushed things into unintentionally goofy terrain, not to mention the fact that Moshe's script is about its characters and not its tech.  Judy Greer, Edi Gathegi, and Payman Maadi are all wonderful in their respective performances as a husband/wife duo and their colleague who undergo a series of universe-altering experiments after each one proves successful.  Once things get going, none of their behavior is motivated by selfish impulses as the weight of their actions are persistently debated and mused over until they can justify removing a troublesome life in order to benefit many others.  It is a common quagmire for science fiction works to tackle, yet it is also thankfully one that is ideally suited to explore the type of deep-seated grief that comes with fate's cruel gut-punches.

2023 Horror Part Ten

IT LIVES INSIDE
Dir - Bishal Dutta
Overall: WOOF
 
Though it comes in just shy of being insultingly terrible, Bishal Dutta's full-length debut It Lives Inside frustratingly blows a rare opportunity to represent Indian culture and some of the trials that come with Westernized immigration.  Dutta's script has its heart in the right place, examining a teenage girl's struggles with complying to the customs of her foreign parents and the relationship with her best friend of the same ethnicity, on top of the usual tribulations associated with assimilation into normal, high school life.  It is nothing that has not been shown in films countless times, but the execution is especially lazy, particularly when the third act throws caution to the wind and bombards the audience with monotonous, laughable plot-holes and hackneyed sentimentality.  As far as the horror aspects are concerned, Dutta seems allergic to anything that could be accused of being a refreshing deviation, with endless jump scares, creaky-to-blaring monster noises, a CGI demon that looks about as scary as a Spirit Halloween decoration, and pathetic excuses to get characters behaving illogically at all times.  Not that the story properly establishes its supernatural details in the first place, taking a loose approach to its folklore that seems just as cut-and-pasted as all of the other genre films that it is constantly adhering to.

 

SUITABLE FLESH

Dir - Joe Lynch
Overall: MEH

Barbara Crampton's production company Alliance Media Partners makes the inevitable shift to Lovecraftian horror with a loose adaptation of the author's "The Thing on the Doorstep", which doubles as a spiritual successor to the work of Crampton's frequent collaborator Stuart Gordon.  Though nowhere near as gooey or laugh-out-loud ridiculous as the aforementioned filmmaker's Re-Animator or From Beyond, it still has some campy fun with the updated source material which hinges on a handful of actors sleazily portraying a body-jumping immortal.  The tone gets mangled here or there as it balances some schlocky sentimentality with more horny and violent silliness, plus the dialog is hokey and the plotting becomes cumbersome after awhile since the story runs out of things to do besides having the evil entity switch flesh suits over and over again.  Crampton, Judah Lewis, Bruce Davison, and Heather Graham seem to be having fun though, with the latter getting the most screen time, (and largely nudeless sex scenes), as the prerequisite, doomed Lovecfraft character that ends up with the short end of the stick as far as sanity is concerned.  Mediocre maybe, but it has the right amount of throwback passion behind it.

MY ANIMAL
Dir - Jacqueline Castel
Overall: GOOD

 

For her full-length debut My Animal, filmmaker Jacqueline Castel ventures into 80s throwback, lycanthropian lesbian terrain in a stylistically sincere manner that mitigates the would-be exploitative value of its premise.  Underplaying its horror elements to the point of being inconsequential, it unfolds more like a ticking time bomb of repressed frustration than it does a conventional coming-of-age story, focusing on Bobbi Salvör Menuez' protagonist who is isolated in rural Canada, has a dysfunctional home life, is gay, either bullied or neglected by both her peers and elders, shunned by her friend/the young woman who took her virginity, and is a werewolf.  With more on her plate than even the most dow n-trodden of teenagers venturing into adulthood can bare, it is no wonder that Menuez lets loose with an inevitable bout of fury at her hopelessly miserable situation.  The performances are top-to-bottom wonderful, particularly Menuez and Amandla Stenberg as her also troubled love interest whose blossoming relationship propels the first two acts before things go tragically sour.  Stephen McHattie is also memorable as the supportive yet somewhat aloof were-father, though Kids in the Hall fans will be disappointed by Scott Thompson's wasted three scenes, only two of which he delivers any dialog in.

2023 Horror Part Nine

WHEN EVIL LURKS

Dir - Demián Rugna

Overall: GOOD

 

The latest from Argentine genre filmmaker Demián Rugna, When Evil Lurks, (Cuando acecha la maldad), is an unflinching downer of a demonic possession movie and one that utilizes fairy tale logic with zero humor or any semblance of redemption.  Notable as Shudder's first Spanish-language production, Rugna's screenplay won the 2021 runner up prize at the Sitges Pitchbox event which was hosted by the Sitges Film Festival and Filmmaker Hub, and the resulting movie is hardly for every viewer's tastes.  The supernatural evil here acts as a disease that is more akin to zombie fever than straight unholy entity body-jumping and the story can clearly be seen as a metaphor for how overpowering sickness ruins a family from the inside out.  These characters are fueled by their understandable yet reckless impulses under such an otherworldly strain; impulses that lead to a spreading vileness that meticulously consumes yet leaves standing only the ones that have suffered the most, all so that they can suffer even more.  Such a nihilistic approach could be either refreshing or unbearable depending on the audience member, but as it steers far enough away from flat out torture porn, Rugna therefor deserves props for sticking to his guns and delivering something that is still uncompromising in its sinister brutality. 

 

V/H/S/85
Dir - David Bruckner/Scott Derrickson/Gigi Saul Guerrero/Natasha Kermani/Mike P. Nelson
Overall: WOOF

The V/H/S series has had its ups and downs since the first entry emerged in 2012 and eleven years later, V/H/S/85 represents an unmistakable nadir not just for the franchise but for anthology horror in general.  Shot back-to-back with the previous year's V/H/S/99 which had all new personnel on board, this one brings back David Bruckner who contributed "Amateur Night" to the initial movie, yet his framing narrative "Total Copy" here is just as ill-conceived as every other segment.  This is the main problem in that each premise is either asinine or poorly executed, from a magical lake that grants immortality/meets a Caucasian family that has a tradition of murdering people for no reason, to an earthquake that brings forth Mayan cannibal gods or something, to an obnoxious performance artist who gets killed by a virtual reality demon, to a Goth kid who videotapes his dreams of his dad murdering people.  Plot holes are rampant, nearly every character on screen is an unintentional parody of a "dumb person in horror movies", no justification is given as to why anyone keeps on pointing the camera at things once they go haywire, it is all edited like a conventional movie instead of a convincing found footage one, and it also all results in a lazy mess that throws caution to the wind with its lousy ideas from a crop of filmmakers who have all done far less embarrassing work.

 

NO ONE WILL SAVE YOU
Dir - Brian Duffield
Overall: MEH

 

A gimmick film with only one line of dialog uttered at an hour and nine minutes in, No One Will Save You serves as the second directorial effort from screenwriter Brian Duffield.  Playing within alien takeover stereotypes where the quasi-adorable look of the wide-eyed, yoga-posing extraterrestrials, their flying saucers, their twitchy motions, and the aggressive monster movie noises that they make are all painfully formulaic, Duffield focuses on other ways to tweak such conventions in the presentation itself.  We are given vague clues as to what trauma Kaitlyn Dever's protagonist has undergone and why she both lives alone and is aggressively shun from the other townsfolk, with such a revelation predictably arriving during the finale since Dever literally has no one to talk to the entire time.  Even when such an opportunity presents itself, the script keeps finding loose enough ways for her to remain silent and that coupled with the monotonous cat and mouse nature of the plotting is something that works against the movie's would-be suspense building.  Laughably unconvincing CGI is another detriment as the cartoony aliens pose absolutely zero visual threat, but Dever thankfully remains compelling throughout even if the story cannot come up with anything for her to do besides look terrified and hide.

2023 Horror Part Eight

FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY'S

Dir - Emma Tammi

Overall: WOOF

 

Eight years in the making, the Five Nights at Freddy's movie finally emerges with a misguided thud and is a tonally askew hodgepodge of the usual pratfalls that doom many a PG-13 horror film.  Surprisingly, the video game franchise's creator Scott Cawthon did not just take a gigantic check from Jason Blum and sail off into the sunset, instead co-writing the script with Seth Cuddeback and director Emma Tammi, reworking much of his established lore into something both bafflingly hare-brained and unrecognizable from its source material.  Granted, staging a ninety-minute movie as nothing more than a single person trying to not get killed by animatronic Showbiz Pizza stand-ins would be a fool's errand, but the plot line devised here is laughably convoluted and schmaltzy, taking itself way too seriously for a movie that is simultaneously trying to balance kid-friendly scares with child abduction and brutal violence.  The results are something that is likely to frustrate many and please none, straying far enough from its roots to piss-off the diehards and causing everyone else to check out due to its monotonous structure, inconsistent character behavior, hackneyed plot contrivances, awkward attempts at humor, and failure to fully commit to all of the plates that is is trying to spin.

A HAUNTING IN VENICE

Dir - Kenneth Branagh

Overall: GOOD

 

For his third Agatha Christie adaptation portraying the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, director thespian Kenneth Branagh chose to take on the lesser-known, 1969 novel Hallowe'en Party, here changed to A Haunting in Venice.  Boasting a top-notch cast who are all doing splendid work, an emotionally impactful screenplay by Michael Green which explores post-war-torn baggage, and all done in a grandiose style that brings expressive camerawork and digital, pristine detail into an old timey period piece of the whodunit variety, it has plenty going on to keep one invested.  Though occasionally punctuated by snappy dialog and unimposing humor, Branagh maintains an aura of supernatural gloom where every house in Italy is presumed haunted by something.  The particular setting for this overnight murder mystery is far from an exception; a sprawling palazzo with a disturbed past that is ripe for otherworldly allusions to go along with all of the intricate plot revelations.  It may not deliver the chills in the most unique manner as it relies on jump scares and over-used ghostly tropes to give it a mild, horror movie sheen, (even if a horror movie it technically is not by several definitions), but it is a refreshing and elegantly photographed throwback all the same.

 

THE FORBIDDEN PLAY
Dir - Hideo Nakata
Overall: MEH

Unintentional doofiness runs amuck in Hideo Nakata's latest The Forbidden Play, (Kinjirareta asobi); a bit of J-horror silliness that throws subtlety to the wind in place of loud, CGI-ridden scare tactics.  Scripted by Nakata's past collaborator Noriaki Sugihara and first time screenwriter Karma Shimizu, the story reworks the central idea in Stephen King's Pet Sematary, except by throwing in some half-baked ideas about a religious cult and generational supernatural powers that manifest in a barrage of arbitrary ways.  This is the type of formulaic horror movie where characters behave irrationally by failing to tell people pivotal information, failing to tell people all of the unexplained things that they continue to witness, and proclaiming that the problem is solved when there is still over twenty minutes left in the running time.  The choice was also made to present the first act in a non-linear fashion, which makes it confusing to get one's footing before the plot settles into a conventional timeline for the remainder.  Performance wise, it is a mixed bag of actors displaying a combination of wide-eyed bewilderment, unconvincing emoting, accidentally funny face-making, and good ole fashioned scenery-chewing.  Nakata delivers it all with rudimentary set pieces that seem as if they were plucked out of a hat, which of course leads to an over-the-top conclusion full of yelling, lighting storms, axe-smashing, and horrendous digital effects.

2023 Horror Part Seven

HAUNTED MANSION 

Dir - Justin Simien
Overall: WOOF

Two attempts, twenty years apart and Disney still fails to turn their celebrated dark ride into a not-terrible movie as the latest Haunted Mansion reboot painfully proves. Inevitably compared to the universally panned, 2003, Eddie Murphy-stared vehicle, this attempt may be even more groan-worthy and certainly more bloated. In development hell, (cue "Where it should have stayed" joke here), for a number of years as one of countless would-be projects that Guillermo del Toro was attached to, the inevitable, juvenile, and sentimental CGI spectacle finally emerged with Justin Simien behind the lens and Katie Dippold getting sole credit for a screenplay that had boatloads of other people shoehorning ideas into it. While the humor consistently lampoons cutesy family movie tropes which may seem like an improvement over the lazy writing found in the aforementioned Eddie Murphy version, the tonal inconsistencies are fumbling all over themselves, with the usual hackneyed insistence on undermining every sincere emotional moment or performance with more nod-and-a-wink jokes and scenery-chewing. Unfortunately this tactic is uninspired, aggressive, and consistently not amusing, plus the digital effects work is as cartoony as in any other contemporary, general audience popcorn spectacle out there.

BIRTH/REBIRTH

Dir - Laura Moss

Overall: GOOD

 

A grisly debut from filmmaker Laura Moss, Birth/Rebirth contextualizes the mad scientist movie into a disturbed essay on motherhood.  Body horror in some respects, it tackles heady themes along with gross-out, matter-of-fact visuals that are not for the faint of heart.  As two personality-opposed women bound over their mutual obsession, Moss and co-screenwriter Brendan J. O'Brien gradually shift the audience's knee-jerk sympathies towards them.  Marin Ireland's on-the-spectrum pathologist comes off as almost humorously cold and lacking in empathy compared to Judy Reyes' over-worked/single mother/maternity nurse who gets hit with the most tragic of blows in the first act.  Yet as things progress, the plight that each women has burdened themselves with takes its tole and moral complexities then arise.  It becomes less judgemental of an affair overall though, intimately asking the question without providing the answers of what "playing god" truly encumbers; not so much in the name of science, but in the name of grief.  Both Ireland and Reyes turn in nuanced performances considering the uncomfortable subject matter and Moss handles it with a brutal yet humanistic agenda.

EL CONDE

Dir - Pablo Larrain

Overall: GOOD

A stylishly breezy satire, Pablo Larrain's El Conde, (The Count), fuses together vampire tropes, black comedy, and infamous historical figures.  After Princess Diana, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Pablo Neruda, Larrain along with frequent screenwriting collaborator Guillermo Calderón take on Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet this time, though a standard, biographical saga this hilariously is not.  Instead, Pinochet is envisioned as a centuries-old member of the undead who decides to bequeath his horded wealth to his frustrated children and wife, only for a French nun with her own agenda to arrive on the scene and complicate an already ridiculous situation.  The humor is played dry as a bone, which creates a wonderful, ethereal atmosphere against Edward Lachman's lush black and white photography and the deliberate pacing.  Instead of making unabashed greed and hubris the mere byproducts of vampirism and the lumbering weight of the immortality that comes along with it, the film presents everyone, (undead or not), as being morally dubious to varying extents.  This makes Jaime Vadell's ruthless dictator a charming fellow against the lot of everyone else, though warts are both exhibited and lampooned for everyone on screen.  What metaphorical things it may say about Chilean politics, (either unflattering, disturbingly patriotic, or both), is open to interpretation, but it certainly skews the biopic formula to a surreal and humorous extent.