Friday, 1 November 2024

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past

October 25th - DEAD SEA is kind of like Wrong Turn, but with boats at sea.  It hasn't been reviewed well, even though I thought it was about as good as these things usually are.  The central contrivance of two separate disasters befalling the characters in the middle of an ocean possibly stretches credulity, though the whole point of a horror thriller is that we're watching extraordinary events that aren't entirely usual, so if I had to guess, this has performed poorly with its target audience because it lacks the usual jump scares and dreadful sound mix that typify the modern teen horror, and there's surprisingly little gore considering some of the latter story turns.  Lots of low angle rear shots of the central protagonist mean that if you're a butt fetishist, you'll probably have a field day with it, but gorehounds will likely come away disappointed.
 

October 26th - THE BEAST WITHIN just reminds me that that Invisible Man reimagining was great, wasn't it?  Well, imagine someone doing the same thing, but with another of the classic Universal Monsters - and by "doing the same thing" I really mean just doing the same thing and transplanting the same themes and ideas to werewolf lore, and it kind of sort of doesn't actually work at all, mainly because the idea that the character who is a werewolf might not actually be a werewolf and is instead an abusive husband is only introduced in the final leg of the film after one too many red herrings have been introduced that can be explained away by the unreliable narration of a single character who is not the only observer of events.  I get that the makers wanted to make something that put a new spin on werewolf lore, but why they went the laziest route possible with something whose pagan roots are rich with acknowledged subtext that is already rarely explored in media is baffling.  Ginger Snaps managed to explore lycanthrophy as metaphor for the female reproductive cycle, Wolfen reimagined the enduring fear of wolves in a contemporary setting, Project: Metalbeast explored the pitfalls of making a werewolf an industructible CIA robot - the lore is ripe for reinvention if the will is there, is what I am saying.  The Beast Within is a fine project in theory, but something gets lost in the execution and it ultimately disappoints and fails to convince.
 

October 27th - OUT COME THE WOLVES answers the oft-asked question: what if The Grey was boring and went nowhere?  A trio of - I guess you could call them "characters" - hang out in a cabin in the woods over a weekend and old feelings resurface before it becomes overly-literal in the third act when some wolves attack.  Why?  Good question, and it is not answered.  Which sums up the film, really.  I get that they were going for thematic resonance, but I don't think they managed it.  Another wolfy disappointment.
 

October 28th - CARVED is a movie about a small town Halloween festival menaced by a murderous pumpkin that has been mutated by a chemical spill.  I love the dumb premise, and the film wastes little time getting to the bloody pumpkin rampage, but a big hunk of the second act really drags as the film struggles to fill the minutes now that it's already got the good stuff out of the way.  I like the first and third acts, though, which really commit to the premise and treat it seriously enough that it's almost scary, and I liked how the film implemented its stock characters with just enough of a spin that I could actually tell them apart - no mean feat, let me tell you.
 

October 29th - GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE is a pointless addition to the franchise, but then you can probably say that about every Ghostbusters movie since the original.  It feels like two episodes of a tv show stitched together more than it does a major theatrical movie release, and often seems like a toy advertisement.  If I could muster some enthusiasm for it, I might try defending this mercenary attitude as being a throwback to the 1980s era of nascent hyper-capitalism that birthed the franchise, and maybe someone who actually enjoyed this already made such a defence, but watching it was a chore for me, as is trying to think of something to say about it after the fact.
VHS: BEYOND reminds me of the early days of fan movies on Youtube, where talented directors and fight choreographers would film a scene where Batman would fight Wolverine or Luke Skywalker would fight Darth Maul, and these were impressive displays of what those individuals could achieve in front of and/or behind a camera, but they weren't stories with a beginning, middle and end, they were showpieces meant to garner attention and clicks, and they could get away with having little substance by looking cool.  VHS Beyond is like a bunch of such films strung together with footage from a kind of "Ancient Aliens"-type show, and while the individual segments are impressive on a technical level, as stories they are at best unfinished and incomplete, even by the infamously low standards of the found footage genre, and this film felt like a massive waste of my precious time on this Earth.  I understand that these anthologies are essentially showpieces to display to potential financiers to come produce a longform version of the shorts on offer, but nothing here really seems like it could support a full feature.


October 30th - RIPPY is what happens when someone thinks of the phrase "Skippy the undead kangaroo" and decides that's enough to base a whole movie on, and you know what?  It's hard to argue, as they went ahead and made the damn thing - look, here it is.  It's clearly aiming to make you think it's a horror comedy, but there's little in the way of comedy, even if you watch it with a charitable attitude towards some of its less original moments and view them as knowing winks to a savvy and media-literate audience - Rippy is a deadly serious horror movie whose monster just happens to be a zombie kangaroo, and it's a pretty decent creature feature if you don't mind the lack of jokes.
 

October 31st - WOLFCOP is pure trash, but knowingly so, being a crowdfunded action/horror mashup about alcoholic smalltown sheriff Lou Garou, who inherits his family curse and uses his new powers of graphic dismemberment to battle the twin evils of immortal reptilian shapeshifters and meth-dealing biker gangs.  Unlike other examples of self-aware trash, it actually delivers on its stupid premise and has some memorable one-liners and at least one scene where we get to see a man's schlong turn into a wolf's schlong onscreen - something I certainly didn't know I needed to see, but is now, going forward, my barometer for whether a werewolf movie is good or not.  It's cheap-looking, though given the high definition of modern digital cameras and televisions, this is unavoidable - but watch this in 4:3 with a CRT filter over it, the contrast turned way down and the colour saturation just a little too high, and you'd be fooled into thinking you're watching a mid-90s straight-to-video gem.
THE LIGHTHOUSE is a category-defying 2019 film described as horror by some, so that's why I gave it a go, and to be honest, I can see why its flourishes threw some people off, but there's a linear story in here for those who want it, and it can easily fit into any number of boxes if that's important to you.  Me, I viewed it as comedy, raised as I was on the classic British comedy trope of "a sane man trapped with a monster (but which is the sane man and which is the monster?)" - the basis of everything from Red Dwarf to Steptoe And Son.  I gather that some people value films that can reward repeat viewings, but The Lighthouse doesn't strike me as one of those, as it seems like it wears everything on its sleeve and you won't miss much on your first viewing - especially if you have the subtitles turned on.
I did enjoy it, but it's hard to think of anything to offer about it other than it seemes to have been a big inspiration to the game No-One LIves Under The Lighthouse.
BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25th CENTURY: SPACE VAMPIRE is the chicken soup of the soul for my Halloween viewing habits, an analogy I started writing before I remembered I hate chicken - but I looooooooove this episode of this infamously cheesey sci-fi adventure series.  Every time I watch it I focus on something new to me, like the score often veering into electronic tonalaties similar to Bebe and Louis Barron's score for the seminal Forbidden Planet, or - as noticed this year - the rather terrible government response to a potential contagion that threatens to ravage the workers at a remote space factory.  Dozens are dead and the government response is little more than a shoulder shrug, even though they are literally in space and could just seal some compartments or something to stop contaminated air circulating - I'm pretty sure they're in a post-capitalist society at this point, too, making the sanctity of production all the more baffling, even before you remember that all they make at this factory is spare parts for those weird little sex robots (there's no point pretending Twiki is anything else).  Looks like dipshit anti-lockdown sentiment is the one thing to survive the nuclear holocaust of 1987.  Great.


So, that was Halloween 2024.  I made an effort to consume horror media outside my usual milieu of decades-old werewolf movies and straight-to-video Alien knock-offs and it doesn't feel like it paid off, or at least I can't bring anything particularly memorable to mind apart from In A Violent Nature and the general post-apocalyptic nihilism of the Saw series.

I did capitulate to the inevitable and watch Alien: Romulus, though, which was actually quite good, though its cassete futurism aesthetic seemed at odds with the last two Alien movies, which it makes a point of acknowledging, and it felt suspiciously like the touchstone for the director was the Alien: Isolation videogame - I even spotted the "save game telephone" from it during the original trailer for the movie.
I have learned nothing, is what I am saying.  I am as numb as ever to the charms of the horror genre, but the list of films I didn't manage to get to this Halloween still seems like it contains a few potential gems, so who knows?  I might keep going, but it seems like no longer being able to post images on Blogger has brought me to the end of my time here and it might be best to move on to something more amenable like Instagram, or perhaps just make the jump to the Facebook with all the other geriatrics.

Now that's scary.

Friday, 25 October 2024

Come on, Pharaoh - give me a cerebral hemorrhage!

 October 14th - IN A VIOLENT NATURE's low audience scores are pretty funny, as you can just imagine someone checking this out based on its premise - a superhuman killer rises from his grave to graphically murder horny teenagers staying at a cabin in the woods - and expecting a gore fest full of obligatory topless actresses, and instead getting a series of long third person tracking shots of a mute lummox walking in a straight line from one graphic murder to another that so bores and enrages them that they immediately take to Google to give a one-star review.
Telling the non-existent story of a slasher movie from the antagonist's point of view is putting a spin on a formula/genre with a notoriously unforgiving and unimaginative audience - I should know, I used to be one of them - that just wants gore, dang it, and preferably with action narrated by characters so I can look at my phone while I watch it, but this was a hoot even if I can see why it was polorising for horror audiences.  The long, static shots of the zombie killer are meant to evoke the sense of a documentary, while commenting on the voyeuristic nature of the slasher genre, probably, but I just thought it was funny that it made a guy getting graphically dismembered by an industrial saw look so perfunctory.


October 15th - TAROT is hilariously bad, especially after watching these tropes and scenes inverted in In A Violent Nature, because if you view this as a parody, it actually becomes incredibly entertaining, its constant reliance on actors in spooky makeup coming towards the screen in jump-cuts while going "ooga booga" eliciting delight rather than my usual weary cynicism.  I can only remember one film - Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor - being so terrible it became an entertaining parody of itself, so Tarot is already in auspicious company.


October 16th - STING is a creature feature done well, and sometimes that's all you want in the spooky season.  Events take place in a Tim Burton-esque working class tenement block as an alien spider slowly grows in size and potential danger after being adopted by a lonely child as a pet.  Maybe a bit meat-and-potatoes for some viewers, but if you're indulgent, there's plenty to like.


October 17th - WRONG TURN is not the film I thought it would be, as I thought it was a film about horny teens being driven off the road by highway robbers or something, but the premise is far more whack-a-doodle than that, centring on the murderous intentions of a family of deformed mutant hillbilly cannibals who are more akin to goblins than anything else.  Having said that, it's all very straight-faced stuff despite its audacious premise, but well-made and performed.  Having seen it once, I don't see any need to revisit it ever again why yes this is a setup for me watching every film in the series, why do you ask?


October 18th - WRONG TURN 2 features a bit where an inbred hillbilly teenager jacks off while watching a topless sunbather, so his sister becomes jealous of the sunbather and murders her with a knife and cuts her face off, then the hillbilly sister wears it while she has sex with her brother.  This sequel looks abominably cheap and thrown-together compared to the first movie, but dang it, there is just something oddly affecting by how hard it tries to be gross - it just puts in the effort to be genuinely disgusting, and I respect that.
Telling the story of a reality tv show - just in case you forget it was the mid-2000s - that gets hijacked by a hillbilly murder rampage, the film becomes an exaggerated metaphor for the tensions between urban and rural America, with privileged city dwellers out of their element and unprepared to face the brutal realities of the rural, impoverished settings they stumble into, the rural hillbilly killers representing a grotesque inversion of the "American dream," living outside the law and social norms, but also some people get totally mashed up in a meat grinder - it's pretty rad if you like that sort of thing.
Really cheap-looking, but like I say, it puts the effort in.

October 20th - WRONG TURN 3 is even cheaper-looking than the last entry in the series, and the law of diminishing returns is definitely kicking in, with the flesh-eating hillbillies turning their attentions to a bus load of escaped convicts and their hostages.  It's kinda sucky, to be honest, and even the odd moment of inventive gore can't hold the attention during what is pretty much just some stock characters titting about in the woods at night.


WRONG TURN 4 sees the series smash the "reboot" button with a prequel set in a remote insane asylum where some horny teens seek refuge from a snowstorm.  Predictable, but has a funny ending that is likely not worth sitting through the rest of the film to see.


October 21st - WRONG TURN 5 chugs around and I swear, these films look cheaper with every new instalment, with this one being shot on what looks suspiciously like the set used to shoot multiple tv dramas set in small town America and it even features at least one member of the Hollyoaks cast.  The woman playing the sheriff was a noted Shakespearian actress before taking this job, so... I can only conclude the Wrong Turn the title alludes to in this instalment is her career choices after she left the stage.  This one sucks ass outright and I didn't like it at all, with a whole bunch of plot threads and elements introduced that go nowhere, with several characters just disappearing from the movie in the second act.


WRONG TURN 6 - I can't tell if this is another prequel or a reboot, but either way, it sucks.  The hillbilly cannibals are now working in a remote hotel and incest as a plot point is back on the table, just not in a fun way like it was in Wrong Turn 2.  This really is the lowest point of the series, and has pretty much nothing to redeem it.  They could have maybe done something about the inherent class tension in the premise of evil hillbillies within the context of the posh hotel and the stock trader protagonists, but they give us nothing to work with beyond the hillbillies being a scathing denouncement of the white American working class.  Yes, there is a scene where someone has a fire hose inserted into their bottom until their stomach explodes, but it's just not enough to save this turkey.


October 22nd - WRONG TURN: THE FOUNDATION is... surprisingly good.  A self-contained film with a lot of polish and some good performances, it takes the basic premise of the series - city dwellers encountering brutal rural folk in the backwoods of the Appalachians - but goes in a different direction with it, leaning possibly a bit too literally into the series' roots in modern American folk horror.  It was a pleasant surprise after the descent into aimless slop the series had become and I'll grant you that low expectations might have made me view it more favourably than I otherwise would have, though it still feels in retrospect like a solid wilderness survival thriller with horror overtones that I could recommend to others with a clear conscience.


October 23rd - CRITTERS ATTACK because yes, I can actually just watch the latest entry in a movie series without having to binge the entire series first - though in this instance, I shouldn't have bothered with watching just the latest entry in the canon, either.  This is not a good instalment in a series that already had some pretty ropey offerings, but is a good example of how not picking a lane and sticking to it can ruin the story you're trying to tell.  It's actually impressive that a comedy horror series can produce something where the horror and the comedy actually cancel each other out, but it's not really something the makers should be proud of, nor should they be proud of managing to make a fourth sequel to a four decades-old Gremlins knock-off look even cheaper and more thrown-together than usual.


October 24th - CATNADO is a bravura and self-explanatory one-word title/premise, but sadly the execution doesn't live up to it.  An anthology of terror tales connected by the titular freak weather event, there isn't the mix of styles and narrative voices one might expect of something this low-budget and everything looks like something shot during lockdown by budding actors on their phones.  I wouldn't be so mean as to call it terrible, but I think I am actually over cats now.  That's what this film did to me.

Monday, 14 October 2024

Never challenge a man who can burn rubber on a cloud

I'd attach a sketch to the top of the post as usual, but Google/Blogger is doing its usual bang-up job of dismantling existing services to concentrate on new failures.  It's a great strategy, no need for you to look up if Google has ever turned a profit on anything other than strip-mining data for advertisers.  Anyway

October 8th - SPEAK NO EVIL is a clever metaphor about British manners that value civility in one's tone more than the act of actually being civil, and in which a family is drawn into potentially fatal situations just because they don't want to cause a fuss when red flags appear during their stay with the young couple they met on holiday.  It's a metaphor that works well for times in which anti-genocide protestors are shouted down at events where they should be given a microphone, and I got on well with the film as a whole, but mainly I was tickled to see some great footage of a locale I had to draw for several episodes of ACES WEEKLY's Velicity Jones back in the day, and that footage would have been bloody handy at the time, let me tell you, as I had to pore over footage of grainy Youtube holiday videos of Croatian hilltop villages just for background art that the letterer would obscure with balloons.  God, I hate comics.
Also, please buy the comic, as insulin is not getting cheaper.

 
October 9th - SAW, SAW II, SAW III, SAW IV, SAW V, SAW VI - well, I wasn't really doing anything today, anyway.  The plots of the Saw films can be summed up thusly: "arrg, ahh, no, no stop, please", except for the one where it's "ahh stop, no please" but it's happening six months earlier.  The films pull this nonlinear narrative gag quite a few times, and to be honest, I think it only really worked once, and that was in... eurm... well this is embarrassing, I don't actually seem to be able to tell any of the films apart, but it was one of the later films, where the FBI show up and you think the film couldn't possibly be setting up yet another "they have been dead all this time" sting, but it does.  These are less films and more a kind of serialised gory melodrama, as the studio was churning them out once a year, clearly more interested in creating a franchise than making art, and as a consequence the films have little to say about the individual creators involved, and I think only James Wan, who co-wrote and directed the first movie, can claim to have made something that was definitely his own, as he went on to make other memorable trashfests such as one of the Fasts and Furiouses, M3gan, and the gloriously daft Malignant.  The other dudes are probably auteurs in their own fields and I'm doing them a terrible disservice by dismissing them like this, but I'm struggling to think of anything of worth or import to say about this series so far, and there's another four of the things to get through because you don't just stop watching a movie series when you're six movies deep - the sunk cost fallacy, like ADHD, is real.  I guess I have to say something nice, though, and to be honest, I did like that the movies pretend really hard to be deep rather than just deeply stupid, and Saw 6's ending where the protagonist just sort of lumbers into his own undoing and dies in a hilariously graphic depiction of one of the oldest death traps in all of fiction was admittedly really funny.  There are a couple of spins on old death traps from fiction in the latter films, and I guess if one were being charitable, I could say this was a commentary on the lack of imagination displayed by the killer who has taken over from the antagonist of the first few films, hinting at his being uninvested in the work he's doing, but it's equally as likely that by this point, the makers were just getting low on ideas.

One good thing about the franchise, though: in being so laser-focussed on creating a franchise from low-cost theatrical movies, it has probably kept the mid-budget movie alive in an era where the cinematic blockbuster and the arthouse indy have little occupying the ground between them.


October 10th - SAW 3D, JIGSAW, SPIRAL, SAW X - welp, I liked Jigsaw, but to be entirely clear, this was only when I had got momentarily confused by yet another nonlinear narrative switcheroo about what killings had been perpetrated by whom, and when, so that it seemed that a character had appropriated the legacy of a killer to bring a corrupt police officer to justice via an elaborate Xanatos Gambit and thus appropriated his vile legacy to do some genuine good, which was a nice happy ending for a grisly and nihilistic series - but sadly, I had simply got befuddled momentarily and it actually was just another person taking over from the original killer to enforce their own arbitrary sense of justice.  The next film in the series, Spiral, looks to be correcting course and taking aim at systemic corruption, but sadly it doesn't last - or at least, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny very long - and it becomes about graphic deaths once again perpetuated by a vigilate.  To be fair to it, I suppose only a moron or a genius messes with the formula nine movies into the franchise.  Looking at you, Jason Goes To Hell.  And Last Jedi.

Saw 3D and Saw X are continuations of the main series, being the optimistically/fraudulently-titled "Final Chapter" and requel, respectively, and both make little sense from one moment to the next, the Final Chapter ending as other entries in the series have in what I think the makers probably at the time tried to pretend was a callback, but which just looks like yet another sequel bait setup to me.  Saw X is a prequel/sequel/reboot which really just does more of the same, though this time the characters, despite being younger than they were in any of the other movies, clearly look 20 years older.  The story is dumb and it ends on more sequel bait, but I liked the bit where the guy has to perform brain surgery
on himself and then dissolve his own brain in acid, and the bit where a character uses their dead friend's intestines as an impromptu lasso - whomst among us, am I right?

Well, that's all ten movies, anyway.  I heard, as it were, a voice of thunder crying "come and see", and I saw.  I saw a load of old bollocks.


October 11th - A HAUNTING IN VENICE is the latest of the enjoyably daffy adaptations of Agatha Christie's Poirot by Belfast lad Kenneth Branagh, and it doesn't do anyone any good to take these films too seriously as anything other than acting showcases for all involved, for good (Brannagh, Reilly) or otherwise (hard to believe that his performance alone wasn't the only thing that poorly-dated the casting of Russell Brand).  Dang, Michelle Yeoh's in this, I keep forgetting she's a proper actress, as I can recall when she was constantly pegged as a beauty pagent winner who got cast in some Hong Kong chop-sockies as sex appeal and everyone in the action movie press was slagging her off because her Stalking Crane technique wasn't convincing as she initiated with a left inward stride or something and seemed to be concentrating more on "learning lines" and "convincingly delivering them while remaining in character" instead of perfecting the art of kicking Jackie Chan in the neck, and she clearly wasn't going to last in this game.
You might think that last bit where I joked about Michelle Yeoh being lambasted for acting instead of learning to fight better was some sort of off-the-cuff riff, but trust me, if you can get your hands on some copies of IMPACT: THE ACTION MOVIE MAGAZINE from the early 1990s, you will find that I am not paraphrasing anywhere near as much as you think I am.  I seem to recall the divine Maggie Cheung getting it in the neck in a similar fashion around the same period and oh yeah I think I was talking about A Haunting In Venice at some point so getting back to that, I have never seen any of the other Poirot stories adapted - I will assume that Murder By Death is not canonical - except for the Kenneth Brannagh films, and while I'm sure they were all great and it was totally my loss, I liked this just fine, it was fun, it had some of Brannagh's usual directorial flourishes, just to remind you that the camera can also be a performer, and while it's maybe not actually scary, that's okay when a movie is at least entertaining.


October 12th - THE BLACK PHONE is a horror where I got the twist ending spoiled for me ahead of time, though I decided to watch the film to at least see how it was performed, and... there is no twist ending, I was thinking of something else, so the ending of this did actually take me by surprise purely because it didn't have the bleak twist I thought it did, and I really liked it.  The kid actors are great, but then I suppose they'd have to be, as they're pivotal to the narrative rather than just set dressing in another character's story, and there's ambivalence about what the antagonist wants with all those children so it doesn't get too ick like these films usually do.  Occasionally intense, but never anxiety-inducing, this was a pleasant surprise.


October 13th - TALK TO ME is another Australian horror, and for a country that seems to export blonde actresses, I'm surprised there wasn't one fronting this.  Being the tale of a cursed hand that dipshit kids use to play occult party games, things go wrong, yadda yadda - all rote stuff, albeit performed and shot well.  The story has no great surprises, but it's well-told.