Tag Archives: horror

As Boas Maneiras

This movie is way too easy to spoil, and so I report with a great deal of satisfaction (both for myself as a viewer and also for myself as a writer) that I do not have to give anything away by explaining what random elements came together for this to be my next podcast horror movie. The scare was mythological, and the style was from the 2010s. See? Nothing. And the title of the movie, Good Manners, is if anything more opaque, to the point that I still do not fully understand how it fit with anything I watched, at least not in a specific way.

The movie is essentially a play in two acts. In the first act, a pregnant woman who is recently isolated from her former life hires a nanny about midway through the pregnancy, with the intent to get her help around the house and at appointments leading up to the birth, and then transition her from helper / housekeeper to full time actual nanny. The prospective nanny, herself rather isolated from her own former life such as it may have been, forms a fast bond with her employer. But then she starts to notice certain oddities.

In the second act, seven years later, an isolated mother and her son navigate their isolation, his allergies and related special needs, the secret that lies between them, and his growing dissatisfaction with the carefully crafted strictures that fence his existence. Also, mostly but not exclusively in the second act, there are random musical numbers that come across as Greek chorus-like, even though main characters are often the ones singing.

The movie: mostly pretty great. Solid slow boil tension, compelling characters, sense of impending, unavoidable doom. The music numbers: weird, but also very distinctive.

The Boy Behind the Door

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Unbelievably, I squoze in some time to watch a movie that was not podcast driven! The Boy Behind the Door is about the kidnapping of two boys. Six hours ago, they were practicing baseball and best friendship, but then they were grabbed and driven in the trunk to a remote house, where one of them is dragged away into the house and the other is left in the trunk.

What follows is 90 minutes of nearly real-time tension, usually on the right side of plausible, if usually only barely on the right side of plausible. Example: why didn’t the boy who escaped just go find the police? The overt reason, that he’s young enough to think their promise never to leave each other behind[1] is worth just getting caught again and helping nobody, is pretty believable of an 8 year old or whatever they are. The actual reason, that what if the cops don’t believe him and he really is leaving his friend to a dark fate, is… like I said, it’s plausible.

But I do have one real complaint. If you play the drinking game where every time someone leaves a weapon that they just used on the ground instead of a) continuing to use it to press your advantage, or at least b) saving it for later plus not leaving it in the hands of your enemies, if as I was saying every time that happens, you have to take a shot?

Good luck, buddy. Good luck.

[1] In a different context than kidnapping, but a promise they had just made

The Brood

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I have not seen many David Cronenberg movies. The Dead Zone and The Fly in my misspent youth.[1] Rabid, via The Last Drive-In. Videodrome recently also via my horror podcast. And now The Brood. The scare was “evil science”, and the style was wildcard, i.e. they just picked six evil science movies and then rolled again to see what they watched. So, technically, no specific style.

This was a weird movie, but until the last 15 minutes it was not what I think of as David Cronenberg weird. See, there’s this father of a small girl who easily could have been (but probably was not) Carol Ann from Poltergeist. And his ex-wife is institutionalized at a weird experimental psychiatry place that has a name that stood out to me[2] but which I can no longer recall, which the lead psychiatrist has published work about. The husband is annoyed that he’s never allowed to talk to her, but once he finds that his daughter is all bruised up after one of her weekly visits to mom’s padded room[3], he goes immediately scorched earth. Which is fair, but it’s no surprise to learn that Cronenberg had just gone through a contentious divorce / custody battle, because this script and direction, both of which he was responsible for, are informed by said battle in every frame and every line.

This does not sound like a horror movie though, right? That’s only because I haven’t mentioned yet how random deformed dwarfs[4] or possibly children have started killing everyone who might have somehow crossed the mother. Nor how everyone the father can find who has graduated from this particular psych ward seems crazier than when they went in, but also how damn few have graduated in the first place. And especially because I haven’t explained my mention about the last 15 minutes when it goes full Cronenberg and finally earns its title.

But honestly, don’t watch it for the horror or the mystery. Watch it for just how unhappy Cronenberg was about his divorce / custody battle. Because… wow.

[1] “and Dune, obviously,” I nearly said, but no, that’s David Lynch. Other people superficially mix them up, right? It’s not just me?
[2] I’m not saying he was going for the feeling of it being Dianetics, but I’m not not saying that, if you catch my drift.
[3] Probably her room is not padded. I don’t think I ever saw her in any context that was not the therapy room though, so who knows?
[4] I know what you’re thinking, but I’m pretty sure the actors were not little people, is why I am choosing my terminology as such.

Green Room

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I know I said I have a lot of new movies from the horror podcast in a row, and this is evidence of that. But even though it’s only been a few days, I could zero percent remember the categories they randomized! I’m just astonishingly bad at that. But okay, they tell me right at the beginning of the episode, which makes things easier. So anyway, Green Room is at the intersection of “hunter/hunted” as the scare and “critically acclaimed” as the style.

Which, of course it’s critically acclaimed! It has Patrick Stewart in it, what else would you expect?!

The premise is at least relatively straightforward. Unsuccessful punk band on tour in the Pacific Northwest, and they’re on their way home, one siphoned gas tank at a time (because of how they are not successfully earning the money to pay for the gas for the tour, much less any extra). Once their out-of-the-way stop based on a fan tip is a complete bust, he apologizes by promising them something that really will make them money, and is not out of the way. Just, don’t talk politics with them, because they’re the kind of punk music fans that shave their heads and have lightning bolt tattoos, if you know what I mean. …and I think you just might.

So of course they piss off the Nazis at the Nazi bar by playing as their first song something whose chorus is basically (or literally? I don’t recall) “fuck Nazis!”, but then before they are thrown bottlesed off the stage, they settle into music that is a little more palatable. So I guess everything would have been okay, only when they took their break between sets they went into the wrong, and I use this term only because the movie heavily implies it via the title, green room, and saw something they should not have seen, and suddenly they’re in a tense standoff.

I think what makes this movie the most horrifying, aside from the extensive gore I mean, is how true it is. This is exactly the kind of situation you could really find yourself in, with just one or two bad choices and a lot of bad luck. No isolated, inbred families or youth cults required, just people that we all know exist and try to stay away from the places where they congregate. …until we don’t, because gasoline tastes terrible, and options have truly run that low.

The lesson is, no they didn’t. Your options have never run this low, and your safest path to survival is realizing it. Oh well. I’m sure Patrick Stewart will be cool about the whole thing, though, right?

…right?

Gau Ji

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Another horror podcast movie. I have a lot in a row right now, it turns out. But anyway, this one’s scare was magic, and style was foreign language. So I watched Dumplings, a Chinese[1] movie from 2004 about a lady who sells specially made dumplings[2] mostly to other women, because of their implausibly effective age-defying and even restorative properties. And about the actress who is approaching the hill and doesn’t want to lose her shitbird husband, but is also maybe more curious than she should be about the cooking process employed. Or, more precisely, about the ingredients.

I think I want to say basically nothing else because of the spoilers, even though there’s really a lot to cover. I should say this, though. I have not been scared by a movie for a long time, and even then only by very isolated scenes. The film student standing in the corner in Blair Witch. The head-on mirror hair-brushing scene in Ringu[3]. The lady standing over her husband for like 6 hours straight without moving in Paranormal Activity.

However, there are movies I find disturbing. Hostel springs to mind. Human Centipede as well, solely in prospect, because I still haven’t got up the gumption. My point is, Dumplings was a hard watch. Lotta “oh no, they’re actually doing that” combined with virtually no sympathetic characters, and no good outcomes for anyone who is. Yikes.

It’s not per se a bad movie, but I think I must disrecommend to almost anyone who has not read the above and thinks they absolutely have to know / affirmatively want to feel disturbed.

[1] Well, Hong Kong. Technically the same thing by that time, but still, I think the distinction could be relevant?
[2] who could have guessed
[3] I know how they did it. But if you accept the premise within the movie, that’s some real life ghost shit.

Rökkur

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I’ve made it to December 2021. I think this means I’m still catching up? Who can say, really. The scare was (I’m pretty sure) psychological, and the style was queer, and thus I watched Rift, a movie out of Iceland about gay dudes breaking up but then talking about it for the rest of the movie while other things also happen.

The deal is Einar is posing as maybe suicidal and then a couple of days later… no, let me go back. They’re standing at a balcony, post-breakup, and Einar is wobbling his beer bottle on the railing, and says, “This bottle is me. If I fall, do you think you could save me?” And then the bottle falls to the pavement. And then a couple days later, Gunnar gets a 3am voicemail about how he’s out in the sticks and there’s maybe someone with him. So he leaves his new boyfriend and drives out into the sticks to check on Einar, and, well, things are immediately weird, and they stay that way.

It has a tiny cast. There’s Einar and Gunnar (who if it was not clear already initiated the breakup), there’s the new boyfriend but he’s only in the prologue, and then there’s a) the helpful neighbor keeping an eye on the place, b) the creepy old farmer down the road who is introduced as probably a sexual predator, c) the girl at the convenience store who says not to pick up hitchhikers, and d) the Icelandic countryside, full of wind and emptiness and dry December grass, and bends and folds from all the volcanoes off in the distance, and abandoned buildings in states of decay. Oh, and I forgot e) the creepy red car that keeps showing up everywhere.

So yeah. The movie is 100% atmosphere, which unfortunately leaves no percentage points for making a lick of sense. But still, it’s a creepy, immersive atmosphere, and that makes up for a lot of sins, you know?

Attack the Block

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I watched the new Mario movie with my kids a couple weeks ago, and it was a) not nearly so bad as to deserve the hate I’ve seen it get, but also b) I dozed a few times and thus cannot give it the defense it deserves. All that said, early this week when I was trying to decide if I should review it without a rewatch, I was accidentally notified that my site, this one here on which you are reading this post, had been hijacked by SEO storefront people. So I wrote no review, and instead spent half a week chasing down and patching issues, and breaking things, and fixing the things I broke, plus also it appears that Shards of Delirium (again, that’s this site here) is not indexed by Google, and probably has not been for years. Which explains why the site used to feel [extremely low-key] popular, and then felt like I was the town crier to a ghost town instead, with approximately two regulars. So maybe I fixed that too? Too soon to tell.

But I was talking about the hackers. It seemed like I was playing whack-a-mole with these guys, for hours at a time. Did I plug everything up? I sure hope so, but honestly only time will tell. First I locked them out. Then I found a bunch of hijacker code and got rid of it. Then I turned everything back on, and yes it was working and looked right, but also yes I was getting just astronomical attack vectors, like multiple per second. So I locked it down at the external provider firewall level, and, oops, too much. Then I opened it enough to be usable by other people, and, oops, all attackers. So then I locked down some code internally, and now the CPU is not constantly spiking, and I get a lot less spam than I’ve been getting for the past 3 or so months, and… well, we’ll see.

Which brings me to Attack the Block, the[1] story of a band of hoodlum teens led by Finn from the new Star Wars movies, who pick Guy Fawkes day[2] to mug a nurse who will someday go on to become The Doctor, only there’s something falling out of the sky that is going to disrupt everyone’s night. So it’s Moses and his gang against pretty much everyone. The ever increasing horde of aliens who are just really laser focused on our antiheroes, and the local drug lord, and the cops, and nurse Sam who they done dirty, and their girlfriends, and… well, okay, the two little kids are mostly always on their side. But everyone else? It’s just a neverending series of obstacles that crop up again and again, and every time they fix one issue, two more pop up, and in conclusion the movie basically mirrors my fight with the SEO spammers. …except that my fight involved fewer buckets of blood and alien sword fights and above all fewer fireworks.

Alas.

I have this to say about the movie, all in all. It starts out with Moses and four or five other boys mugging a nurse, and by the end of the movie, I liked them. It was a pretty deep hole to climb out of, so, bravo! Also, though? Turn on the subtitles. I promise you’re gonna need to.

[1] I should not say “sensitive” here. It’s probably trademarked.
[2] Because the style of the randomly generated movie was “set on a holiday”. (The scare was “alien”, of course.)

Ganja & Hess

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So here’s a movie I’ve one hundred percent never heard of, and starring Duane Jones from Night of the Living Dead. So at least he got to be in another movie. And frequently full frontal whangdoodle a-flopping in another movie, at that. Good for you, Ben!

The podcast people got to Ganja & Hess through a scare of vampires and a style of arthouse. The vampire part may not be strictly speaking accurate, but boy howdy the arthouse part is. So there’s this doctor named Hess, who if I understood correctly is an MD with an interest in a lost African civilization, though it would make more sense if he’s like an anthropology PhD since I never saw him do any medical stuff that I can recall. Anyway, before the movie starts, he is stabbed by someone with a dagger from this civilization that he’s investigating, and gets infected via the dagger with the civilization’s craving for blood.

I am now going to proceed to spoil the hell out of this movie, in part because I’m not convinced I actually know what happened and in part because even if I do, I’m not sure plot spoilers really affect whatever the point was. Still, if you want me not to do that, this is your exit ramp.

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Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things

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I am really looking forward to when the podcast people watch a few movies in a row that I have already seen. I’m not saying I don’t like watching new things, but I am saying that I’m really trying to reduce the number of podcasts saved to my phone, and they[1] are not making it easy! This was filed under the scare of zombies and the style of bottle episode, which is insider baseball for “takes place all in a single location”. And then they had exactly six movies[2] that fit that bill, so they randomized one more time, to land on Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, from when horror movies that were not deep and thoughtful were explicitly b-movie rolls, and leaned very hard into that aesthetic. Probably for budgetary reasons?

The deal is this: a group of six college or so theater kids, led by a [seventh?] avant-garde performance artist director, except really all of those descriptors are secret code for “is an absolute asshole”, land in their sailboat on a graveyard island[3] in, I don’t know, the Caribbean maybe? Then they snipe at each other, while the one girl with bugged out eyes whose acting style is to intensely watch everyone else as they snipe at other occasionally declaims oracular doom.

NOTE: Interrupting my flow to warn that I’m not exactly concerned about spoilers in this review.

Which (the oracular doom from before I interrupted my flow, I mean) makes sense in context, when you consider that the asshole director guy’s main goal[4] is to cast a spell with infant blood as the ingredient and Satan as the patron, to raise the dead and take control of them to use as he will. So anyway, the sniping and the spellcasting and the bugged out eyes and a handful of extremely gay jump scares constitute 80 plus percent of the movie.

Later, well, I think you can guess what happens later.

I don’t think absolutely every character gets what they deserve, but boy does the movie attempt to make a case for it. Independently of all that, the ending is kind of bleak, at least if nautical training transcends mere death.

[1] in the fall of 2021, at least
[2] Not counting options such as Night of the Living Dead that they’d already seen.
[3] No idea if this is a real thing, but apparently the idea is, the locals come out and hold funerals here, and it’s used for nothing else, and over time they re-use the same places over and over as decomposition progresses, so the bodies may be buried atop one another layers deep? Seems made up to serve the plot, but what do I know?
[4] aside from exerting his authority over everyone else

Lord of Illusions

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Another podcast movie, because there have been so many in a row I have not seen. The scare was witch, and the style was LA, and so here we are with a noir about male witches and real magic vs illusion “magic” and also good vs evil, by Clive Barker: Lord of Illusions.

It’s time I think to admit I don’t really get Clive Barker. There’s nothing wrong with this movie. It’s great to get to see Scott Bakula in his prime, and I like noirs that have modern[1] settings and sensibilities. But I feel like people get excited when they see Clive Barker’s name attached to something, and meanwhile, I have no clear idea what it is I expect when I see his name. I saw Hellraiser[2], and it was a weird family mystery that had far fewer Cenobites than were advertised to me by pop culture, and then this is a weird almost-family mystery that’s also an almost takedown of pop culture magicians like David Copperfield, plus the whole noir with the maybe but maybe not treacherous femme fatale, and a dude with his head in a spiky box who is the bad guy. I think I even liked it, but I definitely didn’t get it.

The surface level plot made sense from moment to moment, but if there’s an essential Clive Barker-ness, I am just out of the loop, that’s all. Anyway, cool magic show, somewhat incomprehensible final battle, hyper-young Famke Janssen, and best use of the Ten of Swords I’ve ever witnessed. (Plus it was awesome that the mysteriously unrevealed tarot card wasn’t just Death like always.)

Whatever else it was, I’ve talked myself into remembering that it was very stylish, and that’s not nothing.

[1] Look, I get it, the ’90s aren’t modern, I’m just old. But still!
[2] Not reviewed because I saw it on The Last Drive-In, and Joe Bob says so much about a movie that I don’t know where my opinions end and his begin.