Category Archives: Film

Red Christmas (2016)

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Red Christmas is an Australian horror movie which, with the numbers filed off, is a fairly decent flick. Family gathering for Christmas Day, except a weird guy in bandages and a black hooded cloak shows up to settle some history with Dee Wallace[1], with the result being blood and gore and, you know, the various types of things that would make your Christmas red. (It sure wasn’t going to be white! Australia, remember.)

Unfortunately, the numbers are not filed off, and I have not been this unhappy with the premise of a movie since Snowpiercer. Said premise, which you cannot help but be aware of if you watch the first bit of the movie interspersed with the credits, is that the mysterious stranger is in fact an aborted fetus who survived. The implicit lie already had me on edge, but then the rest of the movie, despite making a valiant effort by naming this character Cletus, leaned into the “storytelling possibilities” by making it horror mashed up with family drama, instead of just horror, and offensive family drama based on a pure falsehood of a premise is just… I’m still pissed, is what.

This is a terrible movie that should feel bad and no longer have its rights sold. Shame on you, Shudder + AMC.

[1] Unlike most times when I see Dee Wallace’s name somewhere, this really is the lady who played the mom on ET, instead of secretly being Dee Snider instead, who did not.

Run (2020)

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Hulu still makes movies. Which is sad, because any time I watch a movie on another service besides Shudder, I feel a little unfaithful to the cause? Moreso when it’s not Netflix. I cannot justify any part of this, I should be clear.

On the bright side, it’s not like an Amazon movie, where it’s terrible[1]! This particular ironically titled film is about a mother and daughter on the cusp of nest exit. The plot twist to this situation is that the daughter is home-schooled and almost entirely homebound, due to a number of ongoing medical conditions, including, as the text fades at the beginning of the movie helpfully point out, asthma, heart arrhythmia, a weird rash thingy that probably also had a medical name attached, and of course paralysis of the legs, causing her to be wheelchair-bound, which means, as the text fades also helpfully point out, that she cannot walk or run.

Due to genre conventions, this is not an inspirational story about overcoming adversity, so I will dispense with the idea that talking about the [extremely] broad strokes of what happens in a thriller count as spoilers. And anyway, it is mostly bog standard fodder for the genre, elevated in two or three ways.

One: the performances are solid, both by the girl, who I understand to be a first time credited actress, and by Sarah Paulson, who thanks to American Horror Story is maybe in danger of being typecast? But her face really is made for this kind of movie, with sharp, haunting features. Two: It does an excellent job of portraying in a realistic way how damn quickly a house of cards can fall apart, once someone has a realization that the house is in fact built of cards. And, Or Three: this is a rare example of an antagonistic film where both of the main characters are female; and in fact two out of the three secondary characters are as well. (It’s a sparse cast, which was the right way to go.)

Anyway: worthwhile if you’re into this kind of thing, probably not elevated enough above its origins to be worthwhile if you’re not.

[1] Note: I have probably not watched an Amazon original movie, and am not talking about those. They just have a catalog of truly awful dreck that had to find a home somewhere, right? (Plus, I’m glad they do, despite myself.)

Satanic Panic (2019)

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I’m going to cut straight to the chase here: what Home Alone did for burglars, Satanic Panic does for devil worshipers.

You have no idea how much I want to just stop there, but I feel obligated to say at least enough that the text reaches as far as the poster, you know? So, this is basically a lazy comedy of errors in which the pizza delivery girl rides into the rich neighborhood hoping for a big tip, and instead finds herself entangled with Satanists on the night of the annual(?) sacrifice, and hijinks? Why yes, they ensue.

Despite my diss above, it was actually pretty funny. It’s just that the plot doesn’t make a lick of sense. But the pizza girl’s wide-eyed innocent irritation makes up a lot of ground, and with all the blood splashing around and the fish out of water laughs and the bumbling, ineffective devil worshiper laughs, I didn’t actually care about how nonsensical the plot was.

Basically, if you’ve always secretly believed that rich people are not like you and me, because they got their money and power as a result of sacrifice rather than hard work, and also that they hold orgies on the full moon? (And who hasn’t, at one point or another?) If so, whoever made this movie made it for you. Also, I learned in the last scene that this was made in Dallas, and yeah, if I was going to pick a city where that is what the rich people are like, Dallas or LA would have been the coin toss. (I know, I know, you’re thinking, what about Houston? But the climate was survivable, so Houston was already off the table.)

Bushwick (2017)

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I’ve been to New York City once, in the late ’90s before things got “cleaned up”, whatever that means. So I saw Central Park when it was scary, and based on the looks I got in my giant cloak, apparently I was the scary person in the park. Which is okay. And I saw all the peepshow spots on what I have to assume some 20 years later was 42nd Street. The posters in the windows say “a quarter”, but you cannot get into those places for a quarter. Which is false advertising, but “cleaning them up” for false advertising seems a little harsh. About the only other thing I did was, because I was young and foolish, go to the Hard Rock Café. I’m cooler now than I was then, in most ways.

Nevertheless, I have a point to make with all of this, which is that despite my well-traveled worldliness as documented just now, most everything that I know about New York City, I know from Marvel comics. And a place Marvel has never put a spotlight on, at least as of winter/spring 1985, is the Bushwick neighborhood in Brooklyn. So this is definitely a sort of “today I learned” moment, for values of today equal to a couple of days ago.

Anyway, Bushwick is a neighborhood kind of story, in which blonde grad student Lucy emerges from the subway into a war zone. Why are there black helicopters and commandos everywhere, blowing things up and shooting people? Between the targeted violence and the random opportunism, can she make it the few blocks to her grandmother’s house? Will Dave Bautista save her? Will she save him?

The funny thing is, this comes across as a high octane pulse-pounder, when really it’s a quiet portrait of two people just trying to get along in a quiet portrait of an urban neighborhood that Mayor Rudy forgot to “clean up”, except that the quiet introspective moments that fill the portrait are punctuated by explosions and gunfire. I can see why this is a movie that would make fans of exactly no genres happy, but for me, it was a very rare kind of mash-up, and I dug it.

Into the Forest (2015)

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Into the Forest was sold to me as an apocalypse movie, and I’m not quite sure that’s right. It’s a (usually) quiet family drama about young adult sisters and their father living in a remote but fancy home in the forest, with technology that still codes as “near future” even though the film is five years old. Only, some kind of long term power outage strikes[1] and all the fancy technology is no longer quite so useful.

Which reminds me of the speech on every Walking Dead graphic novel about being forced to start living now that we no longer have all these modern conveniences. So I suppose in a way it is an apocalyptic movie after all, despite the lack of zombies and/or regularly paced explosions? Mostly, it’s daily life plus survival in a quiet but never quite empty world.

It was also described as a feminine take on an apocalypse, insofar as masculine takes involve trying to Get to Somewhere and Solve Everything, whereas this is about staying in one place and staying alive. I’m not sure that’s quite right either, at least the motivational gender split, but I agree that it was definitely a non-traditional take, and also that it was created by and largely populated by women, so maybe that one is more fair than I’m giving credit as well.

Either way, it was a worthy way to spend a few hours. Downside for you: it will only be on Netflix for a few more hours, and after that, man, who knows?

[1] the state? the coast? the nation? the world? Who knows, when the lack of power and rapidly dwindled gas supply means news is not really forthcoming.

From the Dark (2014)

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There’s something to be said for a tidy, self-contained monster movie. I mean, look at Alien!

From the Dark is one such entry into that genre, in which a happily bickering Irish couple run into trouble when the driver[1] ignores GPS instructions, resulting in their being stuck in the mud, way off the beaten track[2] and just after sunset, but conveniently near a farmhouse where the old man who owns the place is sitting in the dark in his living room, mumbling incoherently and totally incapable of providing the assistance for which they had gone looking. Things go from bad to worse when they discover something else is out there in the dark with them.

Late October is the perfect time to watch this movie. Not only is it scary movie season anyway, but also the gray dreary outside keeps the house nice and dark any time of day, which fits the extremely minimal lighting aesthetic of the flick. As you can see, I don’t really want to say anything else about the movie itself, as, spoilers, but: it was a good ‘un.

[1] Guess which one was the driver. Go on, have a guess.
[2] Get it?

Party Hard Die Young

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There are two kinds of slasher movies. The first kind is a gradually building sequence of events and accompanying tension in which targeted characters first learn that murder is on the menu and then over the remainder of the film try desperately to stay alive long enough to find out who is behind the murders, in the hopes of saving themselves; this of course does not work for virtually any of them, but that’s the tenor of the semi-genre. Examples: Friday the 13th, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (aka part 5), the majority of one-off slasher films.

The other kind is almost always a member of a longer series, and everyone knows who the killer is because he’s[1] an unstoppable supernatural force. The trying to stay alive part is the same, as is the success rate, just without the false hope that figuring out what’s going on would help. Examples: any movie set on Elm Street, the remainder of the F13 franchise.

Party Hard, Die Young is a literal-minded (or, more to the point, -titled) example of the first kind of slasher movie, about a small group of graduating German high school seniors, or whatever they might be called instead in Germany, who were all in the same home room, or however German classes are divided up. Eight or ten of them, anyway? I lost track of that sentence. Let me start over. It’s about a group of German teens off to a summer EDM[2] festival on an island in the Adriatic, to party hard before going off to college, but then most of them die young instead.

Get it?

The description on Shudder and in IMDb makes reference to how slick and stylish and post-Scream it is, and, man, I just can’t tell what they’re talking about. Like, it has a modern feel to it, both the film quality and of course the lighting and soundtrack; it’s definitely not an ’80s slasher movie. That’s fine, but if you say post-Scream to mean everything looks and sounds better, instead of grainy 35mm film stock and spooky sound editing, man did you miss what made Scream ground-breaking.

In summation, this was a pretty good albeit by the numbers slasher mystery, and mainly it made me hungry for someone to make the same movie, but the setting is Burning Man.

[1] Where, I ask you, are the female-led supernatural slasher serieses? Get it together, not-Hollywood!
[2] Electronic Dance Music, boomer

Guns Akimbo

I have heard of Guns Akimbo before, so the Amazon Prime rule does not apply.

So, remember BumFights, where people would pay bums to, y’know, fight each other, and record it on their phones, and then upload those videos and charge people to watch them, and voilà, instant albeit troubling profit[1]? Imagine that world advanced by technology and the decline and fall of civilized society, and you have Skizm, a website where people pay to watch random folk hunt and murder each other.

Now imagine that Harry Potter hadn’t been a wizard, so he ended up as a mobile game software developer with a way too cool girlfriend who came to her senses and dumped him, and now he’s got nothing going for him, so he trolls the Skizm website insulting its viewership one at a time. Until he insults the wrong person, and ends up home-invaded, knocked out, and wakes up with a pair of guns literally bolted to his hands, because he has become the latest contestant, with 24 hours to kill or be killed by his opponent.

Sure, the plot is a little deeper than that, but you know everything you need to know. Either that’s hilarious and you want to watch it, or you’re a better person than I am.

[1] I did a modicum of research and determined that it was too long ago for phone recordings, was released on DVD, and also maybe what I’m remembering was more backlash hype than reality. But that’s not important to the metaphor.

The Love Witch

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Movies in the ’60s were weird. Because they had all these eye-popping colors, and would film people in sharp focus while driving and the background looked like completely different film stock, even though I think it was actually real instead of matted, and everyone’s performance was very earnest and serious, like the fate of the world depended on finding a new boyfriend or solving that mysterious murder or discussing whether feminism is worthwhile in the modern world. No naturalism to speak of in really any aspect of a ’60s movie, is I think my point.

The Love Witch was made just a handful of years ago, but you’d believe the filmstock was kept in an airtight container for the past 50+ years, if not for the occasional modern vehicle in street shots, because every other aspect is pitch perfect. Elaine, per her interior monologue, recently lost her husband and became a witch, and now she needs to find love again, which she plans to do by finding a man, giving him everything he could possibly want[1], and also a love potion she mixed up on top of that. That premise established, all that remains is to find out whether she actually knows what she wants, as well as how far she will go to get it. Plus a bunch of random burlesque dancing, naked coven ceremonies, creepy MRA-disguised-as-ultra-feminist warlocks, largely gratuitous tarot, and the most random, tiny renfaire you ever did see.

And a theme song that must be heard to be believed, “Love Is a Magikal Thing”.

[1] Free access to sex and sandwiches? I’m only barely clear on what else she had in mind, if anything.

Humanoids from the Deep

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I cannot justify any claim that Monster (Humanoids from the Deep) is a good movie. First of all, were coastal fishing towns in California ever even a thing? I have the sense that every inch of usable beach is for being beachfront for zillionaires, not for fishing boats that compete with each other and sometimes blow up and also there’s a cannery being built that will save the town, unless it will violate a treaty with the local tribe and they decide to sue about it and ruin the town. It’s like, what even was the point of manifest destiny?

None of that has anything to do with any humanoids from the deep, but then again neither does a guy in a tent seducing chicks with a ventriloquist dummy (and the same ventriloquism jokes you hear every time that concept is raised), and yet here we are. My point, if I am somehow failing to make it, is that this movie doesn’t make a lick of sense, and is also generally offensive in that 1980 second card on the late night double feature kind of way.

But that’s okay! It revels in being nonsensical, since really everything that happens is a vehicle for ladies to get naked so they can be chased (and as you can clearly see on the poster, be mated with) by fishmen (not to be confused with the fishermen, although clearly this also happens from time to time; the difference is the fishermen understand consent) who have evolved for… some reason? The scientist who was clearly an inspiration for the scientist lady in Deep Murder explained it at some point, but I didn’t really follow.

Roger Corman was probably not a good man? But he knew how to produce a B-movie, is all I’m really trying to say here. Another thing I suppose I cannot justify is how to square being a modern liberal with loving this kind of trash. Mostly I don’t try, though. It’s just who I am?