Tag Archives: mystery

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

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First, I didn’t watch Twin Peaks when it came out. Then I didn’t watch it for an additional 35(!) years. Then, the podcast people decided to[1] watch Fire Walk with Me, which meant I had to watch 32 episodes of TV to be ready for watching the movie. Which I have done, over the course of the past maybe not quite a month. And now I’m supposed to review the movie.

I was prepared for how weird the show would be. I was not prepared for how soap opera it would be. I can really see a direct throughline from this show to Passions. Which makes me sad I never went back and watched it before now, but at least it’s now. Another thing I can say is that it predicted modern television, insofar as 10 episodes for this kind of show is about perfect. The second season, at a traditional 22 episodes? It was a complete and total mess, and definitely needed to be shorter. If it had been two more seasons of 10 each, then a little shorter is still not nothing, but also the arcs would have been more tightly described I suspect.

What I loved the most is how seriously it took itself. When the FBI guy throws rocks at a bottle while the sheriff’s office reads the names of suspects, and the one that got read when he breaks the bottle becomes their prime suspect, and the sheriff’s reaction is awe at how good a detective he is? Actually, the thing I liked least about season two is when the sheriff complains that he put up with a lot of strange behavior from Cooper. Because part of what makes the show work is that nobody ridiculed him or took it as strange. It’s just how the FBI is!

Anyway. That brings me to the movie, a prequel in which some stuff happens a year ago and starring different FBI guys which had 5% bearing on the rest of the movie so far as I could tell, and then picks up during the last week of Laura Palmer’s life[2]. It’s a decent movie. As a character study of a girl who is slowly being destroyed by her family life (and her school life, but mostly her family life), and of the people around her who love her (her best friend) and who think they love her (her boyfriends, who do not know about each other, and also that family I mentioned), it’s definitely a David Lynchian character study, but that’s okay. As an explanation of how Bob and her killer interrelate, it… fell short. Massive spoilers for the show and at least partial spoilers for the movie follow, so see footnote [3].

But anyway. I cannot imagine watching this movie first, or especially as a standalone feature. It would never work. And I’m not really convinced it was entirely necessary, with a handful of exceptions. But was it good? Yeah. Mostly pretty good. And whatever else I might say about it, at least someone finally made me watch Twin Peaks.

[1] Well, random, whatever blah blah. The style was sequel plus, I remember that, but the scare? Man, it’s been weeks. I have no idea.
[2] If you do not immediately associate Twin Peaks with the phrase “Who killed Laura Palmer?” then you were not watching television in 1990. Not sure what else to tell you.

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Malignant (2021)

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I swear I’mma watch a semi-generic action movie soon. I even have one in mind! If I can just get to a stretch of more than zero movies in a row on the horror podcast that I have actually seen before. Well, it didn’t happen yet though.

Malignant is “split” for the scare and “dumb” for the style. I will say that I understand why people would have called this movie dumb, but it honestly kind of worked? Maybe better if I hadn’t pre-known the genre categories they were aiming for, but if I’m being real, I’d kind of forgotten / zoned it out by the time I actually watched.

To business! See, there’s this pregnant lady and she has had a lot of miscarriages, apparently because her boyfriend is down to just shove her into a wall so hard the back of her head caves in the drywall. But that’s okay, because a shadowy mysterious figure obliterates him later that night. And now Madison and her sister are in a race against time and the ever more suspicious police to figure out who the figure is, why she keeps having visions of his murders, what he has to do with the fact that Madison is adopted and remembers nothing of her childhood before that, and what all of this has to do with the psychiatric hospital in the first prequel scene where things were not really going well for the staff.

Were there dumb character decisions? Unquestionably. Who breaks into an abandoned hospital in the middle of the night to look for old files and just assumes everything will turn out fine? …okay, besides me. I would absolutely do that. But who else? This is not survival behavior! Was some of the plotting dumb? Here I mean plotting around certain emergences and especially certain retractions, about which I should not say more. But the special effects were cool and it did undo a previous massive plot hole.

My point is, I’ll forgive a lot when a movie can keep you guessing for a little while and is also, if not scary, at least pretty horrifying to boot. I’m not sure how I missed this one, to be honest. I think when it came out I mentally classified it as part of the Conjuring cinematic universe and then completely tuned it out. I now deem this to have been a mistake, but 5 years late is better than usual, to be honest? Still, I hope they do not make a sequel. It’s a complete story! Let it be, y’all.

Honogurai mizu no soko kara

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I was so excited to see a movie in the upcoming list for my podcast that I had actually seen before. It’s been so long in a row that I’m kind of losing confidence in whether I’ve ever seen any horror movies. Then I got to the point last episode where they were doing the randomizing, and, you know what, aquatic scare, based on a book style? Yeah, that tracks. But then they did something that was incredibly obvious in retrospect but which I never saw coming. They picked the original Japanese version of Dark Water. Why wouldn’t they, unless the style was specifically “remake” or something?

Like I said, I’ve “seen” this movie, so there wasn’t a lot I needed to figure out about the plot. What details I had forgotten were non-critical, for sure. Thus, I was mostly watching for character beats. In the cast, we have: one kindergarten aged child, with no agency; one kindergarten aged ghost, with minimal agency; one ex-husband, who exists only to be an antagonist; one lawyer, who exists only to be a white knight; a handful of apartment employees, who use their agency to avoid taking responsibility for anything that’s happening; and one mother, who abrogates her agency whenever possible. Indeed, the pivotal moment of the story is her finally deciding to take an action, instead of being acted upon. (And even then, I could make a pretty compelling argument that she had no meaningful options open to her in said pivotal moment.)

If it sounds like I’m unimpressed, well, I am. But not with the acting or the plot, just with how the writing was on such hardened rails that all I could do was be annoyed with people for not making choices or with the story for not giving them any. Said story, at its bones, was this: an ex-wife is fighting for custody of her daughter against a father who never showed any interest until now, and he’s playing dirty tricks. So all her money is tied up in white knight lawyers, which means she has to get a pretty bad apartment. Like, water damage on the ceiling, cloudy water in the faucets, half the residences are empty, even the floors in some cases. And also there’s a spooky kid’s bag that keeps showing up in her daughter’s possessions, and missing child posters from years ago. And then it gets creepier.

Mood, mystery, I already mentioned acting, these were all fine. And I already complained about how few of the people who felt like real characters were also characters who could (or would) take actions. So I guess that’s the movie. All things considered, I think I liked the Jennifer Connelly version more. But, I would, wouldn’t I?

Update: I just learned from Google Translate that the name of the movie on the poster above is From the Dimly Lit Depths of the Water, and that’s just an all around better title. (I mean, unless you need to market it to American audiences as a horror movie, maybe.) So there is one thing I like better about the original, after all!

Wake Up Dead Man

Did you know they made a third Knives Out movie? Of course you did, it was like two months ago and you’ve already seen it. …and now I have too!

Wake Up Dead Man is a locked room mystery in which a fire and brimstone priest with a small but dedicated congregation is murdered, apparently by the new assistant priest (who has some specific Catholic title, and I will not be able to help you more than that) with a motive of “stop ruining the church”. But once Benoit Blanc gets involved, well, you know there’s going to be more to it than that.

The movie did a thing I’ve never seen before. Well, first it did something I’ve seen lots of times, which is dole out information in a way that recontextualizes what you thought you knew. And it does this several times. I could tell I was in for a treat when I had the idea it was basically all over but the “gather everyone in a room and tell them what really happened” scene, only to realize there was more than an hour left. Which brings me to what it did that I had never seen. The consulting detective, having been called in to solve the case, actually shows up in the middle of things and well before the events of the case are even over.[1]

Anyway, it’s a mystery, so I don’t really want to go crazy with detail, but I felt that the subject matter was treated with surprising kindness, even though it was ripe for lampooning or even axe-grinding. The typically star-studded cast was as good as you expect them to be, I could not stop chuckling, and every time I thought I had a handle on what was going on and felt very clever, I was 25-50% right at best, but never in a way that felt cheap or like I was actually writing the smarter story in my head. Good stuff.

[1] I know. Christie had Poirot onsite for murders all the time. The difference is, he just happened to be there when the events were set into motion. This was a different thing where you would expect the police and famous detective to only show up once the crime is over, but in fact the crime still had days left to go. Look, it’s unusual, okay!

Weapons (2025)

The guy who made Barbarian[1] just made another movie. In Weapons, a whole classroom of kids just up and run away from home, on the same night, at the same time. As you can imagine, everyone in town finds this event to have been very wtf. If you are anything like them, you are wondering: how did this happen? Why did this happen? If you are anything like humans in general, you are also wondering: who can we blame?

Anyway, that’s it. That’s the movie. If you want to know what happens next, or if you liked Barbarian, then you definitely want to watch this movie. Barbarian is a better horror movie, but Weapons is I think closer to mystery than pure horror in the first place, which makes a difference in comparing them. Either way, they are structured similarly, and I like to think they are set in the same universe of Zach Cregger’s mind, a universe in which I’m excited to see what comes next.

[1] I just saw that again, earlier in the weekend. Man, it is an all time baller.

Caveat (2020)

I saw one of those too clever mystery movies that is amazing if you let it wash you along, but as soon as you start to think about it, everything kind of falls apart. So there’s this scruffy, apparently partially amnesiac drifter who gets hired by his former landlord to watch the landlord’s niece for a few days out in the backwoods. See, the niece is mentally imbalanced, and the uncle is just, ugh, I can’t cope, but I’ll pay you to cope! There’s just this one little Caveat…

Okay, maybe two. The house is on an island, only reachable by boat, and the uncle intends to leave with the boat for the aforementioned few days, but mainly it’s that the drifter has to be locked into a harness with a long chain to allow him to wander some of but not all of the house, as the niece doesn’t want him to be able to get into her room, for example.

It’s a pretty interesting premise, on the face of it. What happened here? Why is the uncle being so weird? But if you think for too long, you’ll start asking other questions, like, why would anyone ever agree to this job? Why is there a lockable harness chained into the basement cement that can reach most of the house but not all of it? If the niece is unstable, why let her have a crossbow? Why is the spoiler in the basement untouched by the passage of time? And so on.

It’s not that it’s a bad movie, it’s just that maybe don’t trust it to have good answers to any of these questions, and enjoy the atmosphere instead. Because there’s definitely atmosphere out the wazoo. Not the least of which is the gratuitous screaming foxes.

Never Flinch

Stephen King keeps writing murder mystery novels, possibly because he likes the genre but I think mostly because he likes his mystery solver character Holly Gibney. Never Flinch actually has two such mysteries. In the first one, there’s a serial killer who is targeting random people but naming them as proxies for the jury pool of a man who was innocent, but sent to jail and then murdered there. In the second one, one of those religious nuts that likes to blow up abortion clinics is hunting a lady who is going around the country encouraging people to vote for better state representatives to expand abortion access on a state by state basis.

As I know I’ve said before, King with an axe to grind is simply not as good of an author as King with his imagination flowing freely. I agree with all of his politics, and I nevertheless continue to wish they would not infect his books. It’s just too… apparent. Takes me out of the narrative, it does. And in this case, it’s half the plot. So, y’know. There’s that.

All the same, one of the things at which he excels is weaving disparate pieces of a narrative toward each other like three freight trains that seem to be on different tracks but it turns out they’re all headed for the same place, and if you think only two trains can crash into each other because of the way that train tracks work, well, that’s sort of my point, innit? So that’s the part of the story that was great. (And also, I share his enjoyment of his character.)

The only remaining downside of this book is that, the pieces of the plot woven together, the crescendo reached… the weaving was great, you see, but the crescendo was… fine. It was fine. It was not great. All in all, it was a mid book, which still means I followed it breathlessly and wanted to know how it turned out the whole time, because you see it was a mid book on a Stephen King scale. And I do love me some King. Ask anyone.

But I can also be honest with myself in the aftermath of that aforementioned trainwreck.

Communion (1976)

Horror movies in the ’70s sure had a lot of names. IMDb says the original title was Communion, the title card called it Holy Terror[1], but the search terms and the podcast called it Alice, Sweet Alice. Which is not without its charms, to be sure, although the girl being like 12 or something makes it iffier.

So, there’s this girl Alice, and she’s not not a psychopath. Withdrawn because she’s unhappy with her parents’ divorce is a way to look at it, but most withdrawn kids don’t dress in feature-concealing transparent plastic masks and terrorize basically everyone around them, but especially their kid sisters portrayed by babby Brooke Shieldses. It doesn’t help matters that, rightly or wrongly, Alice perceives that everyone likes her sister in equal measure to how much they apparently dislike her.

Naturally, therefore, babby Brooke Shields winds up dead. And suddenly the movie becomes a giallo, in which the cops and Alice’s absentee father try to solve the mystery of who killed Alice’s sister, and why it was Alice. It was interesting, because I’ve never seen a US ripoff giallo, at least not since I knew enough to recognize one. Also, it was pretty good, and frequently pretty disturbing!

[1] My personal favorite

Star Trek: Section 31

People have been lining up to deride Section 31, the most recent Star Trek movie that was originally supposed to be a TV series instead, and yeah, it definitely feels like a two episode pilot in a lot of ways. But is it really worse than Star Trek V? It seriously isn’t. Come on.

This is not to say the movie isn’t problematic. As a story, it’s perfectly fine. You take an anti-hero you’re already familiar with from previous stories, and she’s played by Michelle Yeoh in full scenery-chewing mode. And then you enlist her in a Suicide Squad caper with several other misfits-in-search-of-redemption, and they’re off to save… I dunno, probably the quadrant? …from utter destruction, in about 90 minutes. Dark antihero capers full of impossible odds, inevitable betrayals, and sudden death are cool.

But, and this is a big enough but that Mix-A-Lot is contractually obligated to like it:

But, this is Star Trek. Section 31 is the least Roddenberry thing that was ever introduced into Trek, and The Suicide Squad is about as big of a tonal mismatch with Trek as I can imagine, even when I acknowledge the existence of Section 31. (Which, if you don’t know, is the Federation’s black ops division.) So… yeah. As a story, it’s fine, like I already said. As a Star Trek movie… I’m glad they didn’t make it a series instead.

The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy

I’m gonna read some books to the boy that aren’t these, for the next little while.

That said, yes, I still like the Three Investigators, while recognizing that the first one was quite a bit better than the next couple have been. The good news is, that doesn’t mean The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy was bad.

You can really tell it’s a different time: the mystery hinges around a mummy found 25 years earlier, which the professor who found him is considered the owner of(!), and he’s been graciously loaning the mummy to a local museum in Cairo. But when he decided to bring the mummy home to southern California for further study, that’s just a thing he can do, since he found it in a tomb back in the day. Like, there are modern rewritten editions of these books and how I wonder did they rewrite the central premise of the story to explain away that this is not the way archaeology works anymore?

Nevertheless, that premise settled, the story itself is pretty good, what with a plausible curse, a mummy who seems to be talking (but only to one man), villains who are sufficiently threatening, scary car chases, and also Anubis, because how are you supposed to mention ancient Egypt and just leave out Anubis?