Tag Archives: thriller

Lucky (2020)

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I don’t know that I exactly liked Lucky, but I respect the amount of catharsis it must have provided for the writer / star, Brea Grant, and probably for a non-trivial number of people who have watched it.

So there’s this self-help author whose premise is Go It Alone, ie how to fix yourself instead of relying on someone else to fix you, and that premise was a best selling big hit with multiple printings, but now the publisher is not sure if they even want her next book, plus she doesn’t especially have one. Okay, fine, but then at night in bed with her husband, she sees someone outside, and he’s very blasé about how it’s the guy who comes to kill them every night. She is understandably confused about this, so he calls her a drama queen and leaves.

And then the dude comes back. And keeps coming back. Unraveling what the actual hell is going on constitutes the remainder of the movie. We learn more about May, more about her husband, a little more about her career, and a lot more about how capable she is at self-defense / how incapable the dude is of killing her. It’s sometimes pretty funny, usually mind-bending, eventually over the top in a way that was probably not necessary to get the point across, and ultimately a little opaque right at the end, post- the Message Received part.

I think the best chance this has to be a good movie instead of a useful one is if it was a critique of her self-help premise, in addition to the rest of what it was, which was a metaphor about the lived experience of American women. But I’m not 100% sure if it actually was both, since, like I said, it’s a little opaque. Probably it lost its way making sure we got the metaphor part.

All in all, I preferred Promising Young Woman.

Blind Rage

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Since October, I have been buying cheap (or often free) Kindle books. Like, 99c for seven books kind of thing. I’ve spent maybe $30, and increased my digital library by hundreds of titles. Are most of them garbage? Okay, probably. But it gives me something to read when I don’t have anything but my phone handy.

The first of these books that I’ve actually read is Blind Rage, the first volume of an eight book series called Under the Breaking Sky. It steals heavily from Cell, and is otherwise about what you’d expect out of a not quite zombified airport thriller. Set in Denmark and with maybe five or so main characters, it tells the story of the day a weird hole appeared in the sky that causes anyone who looks at it to go blind and enraged, such that they hunt down anyone they can hear, to rip them apart or bash them to pieces. (But not each other.) Then the thing in the sky goes away, until it comes back again 12 hours later. And again. And again.

So, I lied earlier though. A small percentage of the population is unaffected. Most of the main characters are this type, and the book (and probably the series) is entirely about them trying to stay alive, and maybe eventually trying to figure out how this is even happening? Beats me, and I’m not holding my breath. It’s an apocalypse, I’m just a long for the ride.

Creep 2

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Because of an intriguing series on Shudder, I believe I mentioned that I watched Creep a few months ago. In addition to that show, there was also a sequel, and now I watched it too! Please note that this review will include spoilers for the first movie, although I think not any for Creep 2, which wears its premise on its sleeve with no coyness of any kind.

There’s this lady Sara with a youtube series called Encounters, where she trolls weird lonely people posts on Craigslist so she can film it, and gain a viewership via awkward art. And she comes across the eponymous creep from the first movie, now going by the name Aaron, who wants to tell her his story about being the most prolific unsuspected serial killer in history. We as the audience know this is almost certainly true, but she as the unwitting subject of her own film does not, and that is the tension of the movie.

It’s hard to judge the effectiveness of the first movie’s “is he or isn’t he” premise, since I already knew. So take it with a grain of salt when I say I liked this one better. But the character in the first movie was definitely going against his own instincts way past the point of believability, even if (and this is key), the creep had just been an awkward dude who wasn’t going to murder anyone. Whereas Sara definitely knows he’s hinky and troubling right out of the gate, but she keeps staying because this is the fulfillment of her dream, and she deems the payoff worth the risk.

And so they dance back and forth, and I can honestly say that at no point did I know how the movie would turn out. When you consider that this film came between a prior movie and a six episode TV series, that’s kind of impressive?

Cam

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It’s been so long since I last heard my podcast that I no longer remember exactly what the category was that led them to choose Cam. At a guess, modern and doppelganger? But I’m not sure that’s right. (It would really help if I could remember other movies they discussed watching instead, but, here we are. Or I could write most of this review, then listen to the beginning of the podcast episode about this movie to get the answer, but I have another review yet to write, so that seems like a bad idea. So I’ll just shrug and move on.)

So there’s this camgirl, Lola. (Or Alice.) She’s trying to move upward in the ranking on her site, which I think is determined by donations rather than views? Though it’s hard to tell since they correlate. Anyway, her character thumbnail sketch is “cambitious[1], not out to her mom, out to her kid brother, has a devoted following and a few industry friends”. What sets her apart from anyone else is she knows enough about practical effects to do pretty extreme shows that go in directions you would maybe not expect of a porn biography but maybe would expect of a horror flick.

Anyway, that would be the whole movie, except one day she wakes up to find herself on cam, by which I mean the stream is running and she’s onscreen, but she’s also in bed watching it, because whoever is on the stream isn’t actually her. And then the rest of the movie is a genre I like very much, wherein it’s impossible to prove to anyone that you’re really you, because if the system is rigged, the system always wins. Even the people who know you, they’re not inclined to doubt the evidence of their eyes, especially if you’ve been keeping secrets.

Naturally, therefore, I loved the rest of the movie[2]. …right up until the end, where it kind of just sputtered out. Alas.

[1] This is a word I made up, not a term of art. But I can believe it could be, you know?
[2] Except for the scene with the whale, which was more than a bit disturbing.

Creep (2014)

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Shudder just started a new series called (I want to say) The Creep Tapes, that I decided to take a look at, because why not. And then I learned it was based on a movie from ten years ago, called Creep. The show was good enough for me to say (again), why not, and here we are.

So this guy named Aaron has been hired via Craigslist by this guy named Josef, for the princely sum of one thousand dollars, to be his videographer for a day. Josef explains that he is dying of an inoperable brain tumor, and has an unborn or very young child[1] that he wants to leave a remembrance for. And that’s it, that’s the whole set up.

The only thing worth knowing from here forward is that Josef is incredibly awkward. His sense of humor is almost but not quite mean-spirited, his sense of boundaries is non-existent, he gets way too emotional with a complete stranger way too fast… it’s more or less one of those embarrassment / shame / The Office (British) style of scenarios.

….or is it?

I have a feeling this is more worth watching if you’re not spoiled, and I also have a feeling that the TV show might actually be better than the movie in some ways, mostly relating to improvement via shortened run time. All that to say: both are pretty good, if you’re okay with the premise.

[1] I forget, for the justifiable reason that these are the only two characters in the movie. Hmmm. I guess there are two and a half, but the half also isn’t the aforementioned child, so.

I Spit on Your Grave III: Vengeance Is Mine

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I did not care for the sequel to the remake of I Spit on Your Grave, which to be clear is an outstanding movie, and I will not be taking any questions on the topic. So anyway, there was a 3, and I’ve known there was a 3 this whole time, but after how down I was on 2, I never bothered. Until earlier this week, when I just bit the bullet and went for it. And you know what? It’s an actual sequel to the remake, not just another story about a different woman taking different revenge.[1]

I Spit on Your Grave III finds our heroine some years later, with a new identity and haunted by both what she went through and maybe a little by what she did. She joins a rape survivors support group thing, and makes friends with one of the other members, who is tough and brash and has some ideas about how to get justice. Then, when something goes wrong, the main character finds herself going deeper and deeper down the “justice” rabbit hole.

I said the last movie was a cross between the original and one of those European torture porn movies. This was more like a cross between the original and Death Wish. Which, both being movies from the ’70s, is clearly the better fit. The main thing I cannot figure out is if we’re supposed to root for the murders despite several lines of dialogue being way, way over the top, or if we’re supposed to think she’s gone too far and that’s why the dialogue is quite as silly as it is. Either way: man, that’s some rough dialogue.

But if she wanted to make more rape-revenge features, I’d probably get around to watching them.

[1] Also, it appears there may be a sequel to the original as well?! I’ll need to look into that.

A Nightmare Wakes

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This was a weird one, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. See, Mary not quite Shelley and Percy Shelley and Mary’s sister (I think) and Lord Byron are all hanging out at Byron’s place, just like we saw in a recentish episode of Doctor Who. And they made a bet to write a scary story, which as we all know was the genesis of a certain Modern Prometheus. Fine so far.

Only Mary also had a miscarriage, and started getting obsessed with this idea she had for a book, and Percy is getting more and more grossed out by her whole vibe, and meanwhile she’s got Victor Frankenstein (who is just Percy except dressed in black and nobody else can see him) stalking and/or courting her, and basically the whole movie is this obsession she has with her book, or maybe the book is haunting her? I was at first really unhappy because it seemed like they were saying she was being externally haunted and the book was being given to her, which is kind of a bullshit take. But I’m pretty sure it’s the obsession or maybe haunted by the book as she goes[1] but at least she’s really the one writing it angle instead, and that’s alright.

I did a shallow dive into the history of a handful of characters afterward, and while they are certainly taking some liberties here, the movie was in the end at least a reasonable fiction of how it might have happened. (But it definitely did not happen this way, all the same. Also, not for nothing, Percy Shelley, good poet though he might be, was kind of crap at being a man.)

[1] A Nightmare Wakes kind of implies the latter haunted version, but only kind of.

Emelie

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I have to say, babysitter horror movies[1] cannot possibly hit the same if you don’t have kids who need to be watched, if you are ever to leave your house and go on a date. Like, I don’t mean you have to have empathy to enjoy a film, that is not my point. I mean, having experienced the same type of movie before and after, I can tell you with certainty that the one I watched while in possession of a four-year old hit harder than the one I watched without one. And so we have Emelie, a movie about a babysitter implausibly named Anna, and about her unique methods of childcare. Subjects include pet-feeding, puberty, uncommissioned art, and hide and seek.

On the one hand, I feel like I should say more. On the other, what more is there to say? This is exactly the movie you expect it to be, and why should I spoil it for you, if you were inclined to watch it? The one thing I would say is a relatively big spoiler, but it’s worth mentioning. I liked the movie a lot better when the babysitter’s motivations had not yet been explored. That reveal was a big disappointment, even though in retrospect it also is exactly what you’d expect. Unfortunately.

Maybe worth pretending it never happened, or wasn’t true.

[1] That is, the ones where the babysitter is the threat, not the ones where the babysitters are the victims

Hunted (2020)

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Don’t hold me to this, but I think Hunted is a French movie. This is apropos of almost nothing, except that I will later use it to explain my problems with the movie, which are for the most part a little unfair.

So there’s this girl out for a night on the town, and she’s getting her flirt on, and before you know it she’s consentingly in the back seat of a dude’s car, when it suddenly turns out that he and his friend who climb into the front and starts driving, they do not have the noblest of intentions. And then she improbably escapes (not for the last time), and the hunt is on!

Anyway, French I said. One thing that I do not know is if the movie is dubbed. I think it maybe is not, but a lot of people in it, especially the primary antagonist, have incredibly annoying voices. Are their voices annoying because they do not match the person talking? I mean, that could be a sign of dubbing, but it could also just be a sign of someone with an unlikely voice. And since I already kind of hate my own voice, it feels crappy to rag on someone else’s, and yet… it was a distraction.

But the main problem is that it put me in mind of two other movies, both of which are substantially better. First, because of the woman’s ubiquitous red jacket, I thought constantly of Little Red Riding Hood, which in this context means I was thinking of Freeway[1]. And second, for pretty obvious reasons, I Spit on Your Grave[2]. And it is possible to make a mashup of two other movies stand up on its own, but this one, for whatever reason, just didn’t work for me.

Not to say Hunted did not have its charms. Here I am especially thinking of the survivalist bow-hunter mother and son, and the incredible uses of that one arrow. The pair of scenes to which I am alluding were very nearly enough to turn me around on the whole flick, so if you’re still curious, it might be worth your time after all.

[1] Unreviewed here because I saw it on The Last Drive-In, with Joe Bob’s full commentary supplanting my own, but I kind of loved it is the short version. Maybe the only dark, grimey for the sake of grime movie I’ve ever felt that way about. Starring Reese Witherspoon before she was anybody and Kiefer Sutherland before he became somebody the second time around.
[2] Which, as you know, I saw at the Alamo Drafthouse hosted by Joe Bob Briggs, back before his comeback was fully established.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout

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Another few weeks, another new Mission Impossible movie. And boy are these things getting more and more serialized!

Fallout concerns itself with all the[1], ahem, consequences of cutting the head off the Syndicate serpent in the prior film. You see, all the employees left adrift were themselves well-trained spies, so they just kept on keeping on, and now Ethan Hunt and his team have to secure a few loose nuclear weapons.

Blah blah action-cakes and chases and things, but here’s what I found most interesting about this movie after you cut past the (at this point) recycled world-in-danger plots and revenge plots and double crosses and explosions and all: Tom Cruise isn’t smirking his way through each threat anymore. I’m not sure if it’s that he’s older, or that Ethan is older[2], or that the writers want me to buy that there’s more on the line than there used to be, despite prior plots centering on a highly transmissible and extremely deadly synthetic virus and on global thermonuclear war, and Ethan not having all the answers with a snap of his fingers is the way they thought of.

Whatever it is, I liked seeing them have to work for it this time.

[1] oh hey, I just got the double entendre
[2] Yes yes, Tom = Ethan, but I really do think there’s a meaningful distinction to be drawn between the two possibilities. Tom being older is about him also having a more realistic world view and admitting that all of these things shouldn’t come so easily as they do, even in a fantasy action world. Ethan being older is about his growing awareness of his own mortality in a body that is beginning to run out of steam a little faster than it used to, as well as his growing awareness that nobody can maintain a win streak forever.