Ah no why am I doing Spooktober agaaaaaiiin?
As established last Halloween at excruciating length, I do not actually like horror as a genre - unless, of course, we are talking about horror comics drawn by Jose Ortiz, in which case I am most definitely on board - and after establishing this about myself by consuming nothing but horror media for the full calender month of October 2022ad, I even ended up avoiding horror media for the whole year since then, so now I have a backlog to work through in the vain hope of achieving every internet dweller's dream: creating content that will in all statistical likelihood be completely ignored by everyone else on the internet, because if they want to subject themselves to the ill-informed opinions of a terrible media critic, there is literally every other social media platform on the face of the internet to choose from before they even get to Blogger.
BLOGGER? What am I, 58? 58 and living in the year 2004?
Like a racist saloon or honky tonk in 1950s America, I have a sign outside my Blogger that says "no zombies, no dogs, no Irish", because after it being run into the ground over the last couple of decades I just hate zombie fiction so dang much that anything with the undead in it is an automatic pass, though I will make an exception for the exceptional, like if I decide to watch The Last Of Us or Last Train To Busan in the coming month - I hear they are very good - but otherwise you are all on my dime now and I will most probably be watching horror that has spaceships, robots or werewolves in it - preferably all three - and nothing else.
October 1st: JAWS 1: JAWS BEGINS- oh damn it looks like I'm binging on franchises again this year. Jaws is a classic and still holds up fantastically well, including as it does a couple of iconic scenes, most notably the USS Indianapolis monologue delivered by Robert Shaw in the third act - a scene so iconic it inspired a whole character and sub-plot in the third season of Star Trek: Picard, which is surely the height of creative achievement. I put this on as moving wallpaper while I worked because it's currently available on Netflix, but it's just so dang good that it draws you in sooner or later, demanding your full attention.
October 2nd: JAWS 2: MORE JAWS - this second one felt a bit more meandering than the first, but I'm not sure if it's the plot of the film that's at fault and more that the first movie is just so iconic and burnt-into my mind that this felt like a cynical rehash - which, of course, it was. Still has some great moments, even if the whole "a second beast of unprecedented power and cunning" thing is stretching credulity because this isn't a franchise just yet - I guess it's one of those "I'd have two cents, but it's weird that it happened twice" deals - but some of the basic setup doesn't really make sense, mainly Chief Brodie still being viewed as some kind of crank despite his experiences in the first movie validating pretty much everything he'd said in that movie and this one. On the other hand, ACAB, and perhaps I should be supporting my fishy comrade in his quest to find a square meal in this gig economy. He didn't ask to be a shark, and maybe his preferred dinner is dying because of pollution and his snacking on summer people is a critique of gentrification, probably.
October 3rd: JAWS 3D: THE QUAIDENING - Careful what you wish for, I suppose. Changing the cast and setting rather than just doing another rehash like the second one, the third Jaws was bolted onto a 3D gimmick at the time, so there was a lot of poop getting flung at the wall for this one, most of which doesn't stick. I did like the idea of faking out the audience by appearing to kill the shark really early, though most people would have figured out that there was at least an hour of the movie left and the film doesn't really do anything to seed the notion of a second killer shark before it appears, which is a shame as I liked the sudden cut to a big fin impatiently slapping against a cage in the middle of a seemingly-unrelated conversation. When it gets playful, the film seems to work much better, and I particularly liked the view from inside the shark's belly when it's eating Manimal to a backdrop of loud crunching noises, but even without the red and green post-production 3D effect laid over the film, the 3D gets in the way with lots of jarring into-the-camera bits - particularly fake-looking body parts.
Denis Quaid claims to have spent the entire film out of his gourd on cocaine, so at least someone had a fun time during Jaws 3, and it also occurs to me that I should really have workshopped the idea of reviewing these films as critiques of capitalism seeing as this one is set in a theme park and there is a literal capitalist played by Louis Gossett Jr making things actively worse by doing capitalist things at various points. The first two movies' main conflict is between a safety officer and greedy capitalists trying to extract wealth from vulnerable tourists while a dangerous predator for some reason movies out of its natural environment to encroach on human spaces... ach, the path not taken.
October 4th: JAWS 4: THE REVENGE - Michael Caine has famously reduced his participation in this to an entirely mercenary exchange that paid for his house and a holiday in the Bahamas, which tells you something of its quality and damn, he is such a massive Tory, too - I really should have leaned into that capitalism angle for these reviews.
It begins with a shark setting an ambush for the son of Chief Brodie from the first two movies, but we're not informed if this shark is related to the sharks from those films - realistically, it could just be a coincidence that he is also called Jaws - and so must assume that he is motivated by racial supremacism, as his antagonism towards the Brodie family and/or cops is otherwise never explained. After joining her spare son in the Bahamas to recuperate from the loss, Brodiewife begins to experience psychic flashes from the shark as it stalks her remaining family...
Yeah, I don't need to add more, do I? Although infamously terrible, I always assumed this was bad in either the "original movie set a high bar and this sequel just isn't anywhere near as good" or "just not a good movie" kind of ways, but this really is an objectively terrible film. All the same, I liked how the shark starts out with admirable anti-cop sentiment before being corrupted and radicalised by the politics of reactionary violence to the point he begins attacking scientists investigating climate change OH GOD DAMN IT why didn't I go with an anticapitalist angle for these reviews - it's all right there on the table.
It could have been a lot more fun if it leaned into the badness of it all, but it presents with just enough seriousness to defuse any hope of enjoying it as camp, which is pretty unusual in 1980s horror and is really more of a recent thing.
October 5th: The BABADOOK - I more know this movie as the secret origin of Bobby Duke, star of the Scaredy Cats Youtube channel, who was dreamed up by his Scaredy Cats co-star Mildred while they were high on marijuana edibles, and when I came across it on the website of the hated BBC, my first thought was "EYYY, I'm a metaphor for grief over here!" and expected a lot of laughs like one might expect from the movie Police Academy, but instead the film was frightening and sad, like the movie Police Academy. I stole that joke from the Simpsons, only the Simpsons did it better. Remember when the Simpsons did jokes good? God I'm so old.
I don't think the Babadook is a metaphor for grief, I think it's an exploration of the intrusive thoughts and depression that can afflict trauma survivors, and I liked it overall but it had that really annoying sound design thing where some things are really too loud to be in a movie where you have to turn the sound up real high because modern tv speakers are so slim and weak that everyone talking in an even remotely normal fashion sounds like they're mumbling, and when the movie does the jump scare sounds it just seems obnoxious and suggests that the movie makers didn't trust you to get scared at things like stories or concepts. It can make even good films like this seem like nothing more than a jump-scare delivery vehicle, and I do not like that. "Old Man Shouts At Cloud" is also a good Simpsons joke, fyi.
It has Essie Davis in it, most famous for playing the lead role in the Miss Fisher Mysteries, the tv show that answers the question "what if Miss Marple was also Bettie Page?", and here she obeys the bafflingly specific international law which stipulates that any Australian actress appearing in a movie has to dye their hair blonde. She's great, as is the actor who plays her son, who is totally convincing as a kid who would drive someone batty.
October 6th: EVIL DEAD RISE - how is this turkey only 90 minutes long? It feels significantly longer, filled as it is with Everything Wrong With Modern Horror Films, particularly the washed-out colours, po-faced delivery and that "screaming/silence/music sting with sudden movement" thing on a constant repeat cycle for the entire runtime. That Old Man Shouts At Cloud callback feels more relevant than ever, and I shall compound my sin by mentioning that I recently watched all 264 episodes of Murder She Wrote and one thing I took away from it was that it's great when it's an utter rotter being done in, because there's always a subtext that they had it coming and people will be better off with them gone (an awful lot of MSW episodes ended with rushed exposition about two characters finding each other or following their dreams, something that was previously impossible while the murder victim was still alive), whereas Evil Dead Rise takes so much glee in body horror, in seeing its characters suffer, yet all I could think was that I can't enjoy this gory carnage because these people don't deserve it. God I'm old.
October7th: ALIEN - okay, I just watched this one again to round off the first week of horrororor watching because it was sitting there on the HDD. It's great, what can I say? I even struggled to think of something interesting about it last year when I watched it as part of some sort of franchise binge. It's hard to add to the decades of deserved dissection and examination that the film has accrued, but if you're feeling curious, there's a fuzzy recording of the stage play adaptation some teenagers produced back in 2019 currently available to view on the Youtube Channel of unstoppable sci-fi producing machine Mark Scott Zicree.
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