Hell Night (1981)

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Do they have Hell Night outside Detroit? My understanding is that it is a) the night before Halloween (or maybe night of, or night after?) and b) restricted to Detroit and environs, and c) has mostly died out but was a big deal when years started with 19.

Anyway, they used to, not that this movie took much advantage of it. A few tracking shots of mansions and/or parking lots that had been toilet papered and a busy police precinct with an annoyed desk sergeant pretty much covered the nod to verisimilitude.

Otherwise, what you have is Linda Blair and three other aspiring Greeks spending the night at a potentially haunted and definitely abandoned mansion after a family murder/suicide took place there 12 years ago. If they make it til dawn, they can join! As hazing goes, this seems quite a bit better than homoerotic paddling. I mean, unless someone survived the murders and never left the house and for some reason wants to kill everyone even though this isn’t the first year the mansion has been used as a haunted hazing ritual… but that’s pretty implausible.

Honestly though, my biggest problem was the pacing. Non-stop exposition to set up the meat of the movie? Okay. Sex and drugs and whatever it takes to demonstrate that teens are gonna die? Inevitable staple. Confusion as the body count rises? Also pretty standard. Blond dude running around town trying to convince someone that Linda Blair is still in danger in that house? …yeah, that one doesn’t track. The whole point of putting the entire cast in one place with a killer is you don’t let anyone leave that place with the killer unless the credits are going to start rolling in the next fifteen seconds. So there’s this entire 20% chunk of the film that a) isn’t teens in peril and b) distracts you from remembering what teen is in what peril, because there’s a stupid blond kid running around what I still assume per above is suburban Detroit trying to find help. Or maybe Ann Arbor? I hear there’s a college there.

Twins of Evil

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that if Peter Cushing is in a Hammer film, he must be in want of vampires. But I admit I was thrown off by the initial presentation, in which Viennese twins are hanging out in what I first mistook for the colonial countryside, what with all the British accents and Puritans burning witches.

But eventually it is made clear that there’s a devil worshipping count who lives in a castle and is protected(?) by the Emperor(??), and Peter Cushing is approximately as much of a bad guy as the count is[1], and really the only thing left is to determine why it’s called Twins of Evil when a) one of the twins is pure as the driven snow and the other one is basically just bored with exile to the sticks, and b) it takes almost 90% of the movie for the count’s seductive new protégé to unleash her twins of evil, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

[1] In retrospect this must have been practice for the Grand Moff Tarkin role

Freaky

Horror movies are often funny. It’s a structural thing, I think. Movies with unrelieved dread are hard to watch. So you throw in some tension-relieving fake-outs or a stoner, to name a couple of common examples, and get the audience laughing, so they feel a little better when Kevin Bacon gets it through the box spring. …okay, bad example of a moment when the audience would need to feel better.

My point is, some horror parodies are straight comedies without an iota of actual horror to be found, and many horror movies (especially slashers) can be funny at times. And some horror movies are unintentionally hilarious, of course. But the idea of a horror comedy is a rare beast indeed. …and then try to imagine mashing that up with a family movie like, oh, I don’t know, The Parent Trap or, say, Freaky Friday.

A thing I know in my heart is that the pitch meeting had the movie named Freaky Friday the 13th, and I wish they had stuck to their guns. Trimming it down made me expect something a little more serious, and if I’d believed I was going to get to see Vince Vaughn hamming it up as a high school misfit with a tough past 17 year old girl turned fish out of water serial killer suspect, well, I might have tried harder to see it in… haha no, it was in theaters last fall right after everything opened up but way before anything was safe, didn’t it? But I mean, I would have had larger regrets about the zero percent chance of seeing it under those circumstances.

But I saw it last night, so that’s good too!

EndZeit (2018)

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I have not seen many German movies, so I do not know how commonly they are weird and existential. But I am predisposed to believe the answer is “always”, you know?

Ever After is apparently based on a graphic novel in which the zombie apocalypse has wiped out everyone on earth except two cities in eastern Germany[1]; city number one with a German name survives by ruthlessly slaughtering anyone who has come into contact with the virus, while city number two with a German name is working on a cure, at least according to rumor in German city number one.

Later, two girls wrestling with the demons of the past set out on a trek to GC#2 for reasons of their own[2], but encounter… well, things, people, and events that are weird and existential, was my original point. Predictably, this mostly takes place in the Black Forest, home of German horror stories for longer than the US has had access to horror stories.

I really kind of want to talk about the existential weirdness of it all, but spoilers, but who is going to watch this to care about spoilers? Man.

[1] I’m not one to shit on a premise, but… how would they know? I’m willing to sign on for “the only two cities in central Europe”, but once you range much farther than that, man, I just don’t know that it’s a supportable claim.
[2] I think this will never be unseated as my favorite line from a comic. Random Marvel C-tier supervillain monologues to himself, “And now, I will go to Greenwich Village, for reasons of my own.” I can just see the moustache-twirling villainy of it, and at the same time see anyone who happened to be listening be befuddled by how not-ominous that intent was, to be accompanied by such highly ominous phrasing.

Elizabeth Harvest

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You know the old story of maybe, um, Blackbeard? Bluebeard? Somebeard, anyway, and he marries a young beautiful wife, and tells her “here’s my awesome house, I’ll be out pirating (let’s say) a lot, but this house is yours to wander to your heart’s content, EXCEPT don’t go in this one room. Okay? Cool.”, which is itself basically a retelling of the Garden of Eden? Both are fable-complexity statements on human nature, but for some reason dressed up in misogyny.

Enter Elizabeth Harvest, which is a pretty boilerplate retelling of the Somebeard version, except without the explicit piracy links. At least, it seems that way until Elizabeth goes into the forbidden room on literally her first day alone, maybe ten minutes into the movie. This is the point at which it becomes clear that a different and more complex tale is being told, with more twists in the offing than a Texan rattlesnake metaphor.

Eagle-eyed readers will note my use of the rarely-seen (outside of direct to premium cable movies from the ’90s) erotic thriller tag. I did not expect to ever break that one out, but while this movie doesn’t quite follow the standard template that all such movies hew to, I still think it is the most correct choice here. Horror for sure doesn’t cut it, and unmodified thriller misses an essential piece of the flavor on display.

Like Me

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When I read the description of Like Me on Shudder, what I imagined was a chick in a spree murder movie, and spoiler, that is not what it actually is.

Instead, it is at times a psychedelic romp[1], at times a buddy road trip movie, at times[2] a meditation on social media fame and infamy, at times almost a comedy, and at times shockingly violent[3].

I think I’m glad to have seen it, but I’m simultaneously not convinced it is worth the effort for anyone else to.

[1] As movie reviewers like to say so that they can be quoted on posters and DVD covers
[2] And unfortunately the most boring times, since you can tell by the title that this was the point they were driving at
[3] This makes no sense. It’s nominally a horror movie! But something about the YouTube lens of the thing made the actual violent moments feel a lot more real than I’m used to when just watching a movie or TV in general, much less a horror movie in specific.

Colossal (2016)

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Colossal is a movie that is very easy to spoil, so I’m going to be careful for a little while here, and it’s going to be tricky because most of the things I want to talk about fall squarely into that territory. So first, a brief plot summation.

Anne Hathaway gets drunk a lot, so her boyfriend kicks her out of New York City, and she has to move back to her parents’ home (they’re dead already and the house was just left empty I guess?) and figure out how to be a person again, or else get a job at a bar and continue her life-destroying alcoholism. Meanwhile, a giant monster is stomping around Seoul, destroying infrastructure and killing people. These facts are completely unrelated, OR ARE THEY?

I nearly and mostly liked it, despite my complaints below the cut, for which this is your warning that spoilers are forthcoming. I think the more I think about it, the more the scales will tip from the “nearly” side to the “mostly” side.

Spoilers ahoy!

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Fear Street: Part Three – 1666

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A movie trilogy if 15 days. What a concept! …although truth be told, if it were something I cared more about, I’m pretty sure I’d want it to be slower than this? I hate using things up this fast, perhaps.

The good news is, 1666 was the best of them, at least from a trilogy perspective. (1978 will remain my favorite as standalone.) Usually the end of a series is a little bit of a let down, because you know what’s going on and are just looking for the beats to get hit at the right moments, in the right ways, and they almost never are exactly what you think they should be, even though you have the broad strokes correct. But in this case, I really didn’t know what was coming, and the plot points came together in a way that made perfect sense and retroactively corrected perceived flaws in the prior entries.

As a standalone, it was… fine? The 1666 part of the movie was good, but not quite what I wanted, possibly because the 17th Century horror genre is not really broadly explored enough to warrant an homage, as such. Or maybe it was written a little too modernly? Either way, it was excellent at telling a compelling origin story and fixing a lot of minor problems I had been having with the series as a whole, like I said. And the “let’s resolve the original issue” part of the movie was maybe a little too easy and maybe a little too silly, but it was both of these in exactly the right ways, especially the all too brief Battle Royale scene.

Will not rewatch or actively recommend, will watch future sequels in the unlikely event that they exist.

Fear Street: Part Two – 1978

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As a sequel to Fear Street 1994, the middle entry of the trilogy is perfectly serviceable. There’s a good five to ten minutes of material in a nearly two hour movie that advances the overall plot of the Fear Street series, and, okay, that doesn’t actually sound very good, does it?

But if you view the connective trilogy tissue as 5-10 minutes of digression from a 1970s summer camp horror flick, well then, that’s not very much digression at all, now is it? And I appreciate the movies from that perspective. As much as 1994 was a slick Scream homage[1], 1978 is… well, okay, also pretty slick, at least visually, but let that go. It’s an homage to the murder as a morality play days of the late ’70s and early ’80s when most of the people who got killed were horny teens who “deserved” it. And you could tell they just wanted a good excuse to go to that particular retro well.

If they’d wanted to movie about murders in the 1950s, or 1930s, or even earlier, instead? That is not well-traveled ground, and the premise super allows for it. But what they picked was the genre’s bread-and-butter, and while on the one hand: lazy!, on the other hand, I liked it better as a movie versus the first one, even though it did so little with the advancing that overall plot thing as I’ve mentioned.

Still gonna watch the third movie, yep.

[1] Minus the whodunnit aspect. We already have known all along that the creepy 17th Century witch done it.

Black Widow (2021)

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I have only a handful of thoughts about Black Widow, I think because it’s been in a holding pattern for so very long. I know practically nothing about the next several movies, and I’ve known practically nothing about the onslaught of Marvel TV shows, but this one: it’s just been hovering in the atmosphere, out of sight but you knew it was there. It’s had to be there, somewhere, for just years now.

As imdb sparsely has it: “A film about Natasha Romanoff in her quests between the films Civil War and Infinity War.” And it is definitely that. It’s the best kind of retcon, where you can look at it from every angle, and it just fits.[1] It has a well-realized version of a villain that I would not have expected to work, it has a solid dynamic between every character, and it has… well, okay, the plot was fine, at best.

The thing is, the movie is not about its plot, and is instead about its characters. It’s a love letter to the Black Widow, in the midst of a film about what family means. There simply haven’t been many quiet, homey movies in this series, and maybe there should have been? I like about the comics that you always eventually get to see the characters on their days off, and this was like that, even though there were like two huge set piece fights and several more small set piece fights.

Not that you asked, but I also think I’ve talked myself into liking this better as a retcon than maybe I would have had it come out in sequence between other movies as indicated by its place in the timeline. It just works better retrospectively, I think?

And finally, in response to a lot of talk I’ve seen along the lines of “too little too late”: a) I will definitely not argue about too little. I think that Winter Soldier was always halfway about Natasha, and while I won’t defend her taking this long to get a movie, I do think her character got solid development over the course of this long series of movies. (Way more than, say, her non-powered counterpart Hawkeye.) But intent matters, and visibility matters, and she never got much. b) I will 100 percent argue about too late, though. In addition to my thoughts above that this maybe plays better here as a retcon in the first place, I also solidly reject the idea that it can be too late to care about something, or to do the right thing.

Very very lastly: IMAX is still pretty cool. People buying tickets adjacent to ours, however, is wildly uncomfortable. I think I’ll have to find emptier theaters or stricter policies, now that I’ve experienced that misery.

[1] Well. The coda that was designed solely as “and then she re-entered previously established canon” was about as forced as I made it sound just now. But otherwise!