Nope (2022)

July 21, 2022Posted in2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

Nope

**/****
starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott
written and directed by Jordan Peele

by Walter Chaw I don’t think you ever see the heroes getting hurt, but they limp around a lot, and I couldn’t stop wondering why. Just because it’s more dramatic to be out of breath and limpy? There’s a rule about not looking something in the eye, but I don’t know how the horses can obey it, or if horses look up and behind them when they run. I’ve never seen them do that, in any case. If there’s a rule about eyes, is the plan, in the end, to put eyes on the hood of that hoodie, and if it isn’t, why did he? I understand there’s a point being made here about how Hollywood doesn’t care about the people who work in it–especially minorities and child actors–once their usefulness has been used up, yet I worry if by equating their trauma with a television chimp who goes insane and starts eating faces that the analogy, assuming there is one, has gotten as out of control as the chimp. There’s a reveal that’s less a reveal of an important plot point than a reveal that the reveal of an important plot point was left out somewhere. There’s a powerful opening scene where something happens involving a nickel that is very effective up until the moment it’s explained, at which point it no longer makes sense; why did it do what it did and not what it does for the rest of the film? Is it attracted to movement? Noise? It seems like both–but if so, how are folks constantly escaping it by moving around and making noise? That picture she takes? It looks ridiculous and will be convincing to no one. Wouldn’t the camera and the film the famous cinematographer is shooting still be in one piece, like a black box, when the thing happens with the balloon? How is that the first balloon it’s ever seen or eaten? If I ate a balloon (and could, for instance, withstand multiple gravities of speed and possibly interstellar travel), would I explode?

Masks: FFC Interviews Scott Derrickson

July 3, 2022Posted in2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Interviews
Derricksoninterviewtitle

Walter Chaw interviews Scott Derrickson,
director of THE BLACK PHONE

I’ve known Scott Derrickson a long time–indeed, an eternity in Internet years. He grew up in Westminster, Colorado, just down the road from where I live now, in a “cone of death” where the plutonium from the now-closed Rocky Flats nuclear plant–through a series of fires, meltdowns, and misadventures–was lost into the air in particles a magnitude smaller than pollen. The site is among the most contaminated places on Earth still, though judged to be clean enough to house a “wildlife preserve” and way too much new housing, the residents of which are not informed of the level of radioactivity they’re sitting on. To this day, dogs aren’t allowed at Standley Lake because dogs…dig. We grew up making jokes about the glow coming from the plant at night. Whenever I drove past it as a kid, I would hold my breath with the thought that maybe this would insulate me from irradiation and cancer. Maybe it did.

Crimes of the Future (2022)

June 3, 2022Posted in****/****, 2022, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Directors: David Cronenberg, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, France, Greece, Horror, Sci-Fi, UK

Crimesofthefuture22

****/****
starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, Scott Speedman
written and directed by David Cronenberg

by Angelo Muredda “It’s not a completely bad feeling, at least not uninteresting,” muses performance artist Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) about his scratchy throat during a quiet moment in David Cronenberg’s career-capping Crimes of the Future, a tender affair about listening to and affirming one’s aging, sick, and mutable body–contrary to all the pre-hype about walkouts and the director’s supposed return to his grimy horror roots. Saul lives with a radical disease called Accelerated Evolution Syndrome, which causes him to rapidly spawn superfluous organs. Surgical and life partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) removes them on stage in underground live shows that fall somewhere between medical procedures you might gawk at on YouTube and ecstatic religious ceremonies. Saul is a full partner in these sensual spectacles, writhing in an open sarcophagus while Caprice mythologizes his new developments like a curator at a Francis Bacon show. Here, though, Saul is simply taking the opportunity to mind the sensations produced by his latest corporeal work of art, noting his symptoms with the observational humour and delicacy of previous Cronenberg protagonists who double as archivists of their changing forms. It’s a trait common not just to scientists spliced with houseflies but to most people living with chronic illnesses.

Scream (2022) – Blu-ray + Digital Code

May 17, 2022Posted in2022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, Wes Craven

Vlcsnap-2022-05-17-16h50m44s036

***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Melissa Berrera, Mason Gooding, Jenna Ortega, Neve Campbell
written by James Vanderbilt & Guy Busick
directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett

by Walter Chaw Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven’s Scream cycle, in terms of its influence on modern film, constitutes the most important metatext of the last 25 years in that it’s not only self-referential, it’s curious about how self-reference can be an essential ontological tool as opposed to a mere existential exercise. They’re better movies, in this respect, than The Matrix and its sequels, and, at least in terms of their popularity, they’re more important than even Charlie Kaufman’s extraordinary but limited-appeal body of work. The Scream saga, for lack of a better word, matters. Not for nothing does Scream 3, despite being the weakest installment of the original four and the only one of those that didn’t involve Williamson in any significant way, take place mainly on a simulacrum of hero Sidney’s childhood home and neighbourhood, recreated inside a soundstage like the to-scale streets of Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. If the first film is a watershed, the second is perhaps the series’ masterpiece: a phenomenal bit of pop philosophy that sees Sidney (Neve Campbell) as a Cassandra figure, literally forced onto the stage with a pack of masked murderers to re-enact her trauma from and into eternity. It’s her role in these Passion Plays to be preyed upon–and through her suffering, the “rules” of engagement between women coming of sexual age and men wanting to possess and punish them for that are forged. She has become an archetype, a thing that is representative of a fundamental truth, and the movies understand that. When she makes her entrance in the new Scream (hereafter Scream 5), standing up in a hospital waiting area to greet a young woman initiated into the abattoir, it is framed and shot as though we are all in the presence of a divine visitation.

Umma (2022)

March 24, 2022Posted in2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical

Umma

*/****
starring Sandra Oh, Fivel Stewart, MeeWha Alana Lee, Dermot Mulroney
written and directed by Iris K. Shim

by Walter Chaw Sandra Oh is very good as a woman working through the generational trauma shared by many first-gen Asian immigrants to the United States. She’s exceptional occupying a range of complex, polarized emotions, managing in many instances to pull off scenes headed towards histrionics with exactly the right amount of reserve to keep it south of camp. Consider when her amateur apiarist Amanda learns of her mother’s death from a long-estranged uncle (Tom Yi), who appears on her doorstep unannounced. He disapproves of how Amanda’s daughter Chris (Fivel Stewart), born and raised in the United States, doesn’t speak a word of Korean, and he blames Amanda for causing her mother’s passing by the fact of her absence sitting vigil at her deathbed. He gives Amanda a bundle comprising her mother’s favourite things along with her ashes, telling her to provide her a proper burial, lest Amanda herself become as vicious and intolerable as her Umma (MeeWha Alana Lee). Oh keeps her emotions steady. She holds on to them like a drowning sailor. You can see the turmoil in her face, though it’s carefully held, and when she tells him to leave, she does it without turning the table over. That’s powerful stuff. There’s an entire film here, a good one, that never goes to a supernatural place with Amanda’s baggage–one that recognizes how strong Oh’s internalization of this role is and lets her do it without things jumping out at her from the basement. The parts of Umma that explicitly fail are the horror-movie parts. It’s not simply that they don’t work, it’s that making an Asian mother the literal monster in an American horror movie is absolutely fraught with representational landmines writer-director Iris K. Shim doesn’t quite know how to avoid. Had a white creator made either this or the recent Turning Red, there’d be an uproar. A justified one.

X (2022)

March 21, 2022Posted in****/****, 2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical

X

****/****
starring Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Brittany Snow, Kid Cudi
written and directed by Ti West

by Walter Chaw Early on in Ti West’s X, a guy pulls out a guitar in the rented bungalow he’s sharing with his buddies and starts playing a familiar riff. His girlfriend sings. She has a pretty voice. Not a world-shaking voice, but she means what she’s singing, which makes up for a multitude of sins. It’s a tough scene to pull off due to it being a set-up that’s been paid off a few times, as it was in Animal House, by someone walking by and smashing the guitar against a wall. There are fewer muscles necessary to affect a snarky posture than to strike an earnest pose–less skill required to arch an eyebrow than to build a situation with fully-rounded characters we care about enough not to mock for their desire to connect with one another. How exactly, in 2022, do you do a scene where a group of kids performs “Landslide” without eliciting eye-rolls? Especially in a horror movie where a certain amount of superiority to the material is the expectation rather than the exception? Stevie Nicks wrote “Landslide” in 1974 to talk about a period of separation from her boyfriend and bandmate Lindsey Buckingham. An underestimated, perhaps superb lyricist, Nicks uses a natural disaster as a metaphor for both the violence and the inevitability of change over a lifetime: how she’ll lose her looks to age, how she’ll weather the tribulations of being in love in a temporary world. West shoots this scene without a hint of jokiness, intercutting the young folks at repose with elderly folks–their hosts–dressing for bed. The camera lingers on the sharp valleys and clefts of an old woman’s back, casting harsh shadows in the moonlight. I expected many things from X, but I didn’t expect it to make me cry.

Offseason (2022)

March 10, 2022Posted in2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Offseason

*½/****
starring Jocelin Donahue, Joe Swanberg, Richard Brake, Melora Walters
written and directed by Mickey Keating

by Walter Chaw As her star-making performance in Ti West’s exceptional The House of the Devil will attest, Jocelin Donahue makes for a compelling lead. She has about her something of Famke Janssen’s quality of toughness that isn’t undermined by a vulnerability. Lately, Donahue has shown up here and there, doing good work in supporting roles in big films like To the Wonder and Doctor Sleep and taking larger roles in smaller projects like Mickey Keating’s Offseason, where her Marie is summoned back to the family reserve upon the desecration of a relative’s grave. That should’ve been her first warning. Her second is the grizzled local colour–like the Bridge Man (Richard Brake), who tells her and her asshole boyfriend, George (Joe Swanberg), that the island they’re trying to get to is about to have the bridge connecting it to the mainland raised for the season. “How do you close an island?” George wants to know. The better question is, will Offseason be able to lard Marie’s guilt about her relationship with her dead mother with enough gravity to serve as a metaphor for an entire Silent Hill village’s bargain with some nameless, Lovecraftian Deep One? And the answer is…complicated. I think a mother/daughter thing could have provided enough subtext had Keating been in better control of the story he’s telling. The pieces are there, like a payphone receiver left off the hook and swinging for pregnant seconds, but the connective tissue seems to be missing, as in how that missed connection on a dead technology relates to Marie’s inability to connect with mom Ava (Melora Walters) before Ava’s death. I like films that eschew exposition, but what a film lacks in exposition it must replace with a persistence of vision. Without it, it’s like when you drum out a “tune” with your fingers on a table and think that anyone else knows what you’re playing.

The Seed (2022) – Shudder

March 10, 2022Posted in2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Streaming, UK

Theseed

**½/****
starring Lucy Martin, Chelsea Edge, Sophie Vavasseur
written and directed by Sam Walker

by Walter Chaw A spirited if familiar body-horror comedy, Sam Walker’s hyphenate debut The Seed showcases a sharp, clean writing/directing aesthetic that doesn’t do anything particularly novel but does the old stuff with verve and economy. Here, a trio of pals decamps to a mod-mansion in the middle of nowhere to watch a once-in-a-lifetime meteor shower. At least, that’s why “geek-hot” Charlotte (Chelsea Edge) is there. Her influencer buddy Deidre (Lucy Martin) is on hand to livestream the weekend’s events, while yoga instructor Heather (Sophie Vavasseur) wouldn’t say no to a few new clicks for her business, either. The sunbathing, margaritas, mild eruptions of personal grievance, and almost-immediate interruption of cell service are all taken care of in the first 10 minutes. Then it’s on to the uncomfortably-close meteor shower that leads to them wondering if “it’s supposed to do that?” Probably not. Suddenly a thing falls into the pool, starts gooping, is fished out by our heroes (lest Heather’s dad “kill” her), and, of course, resolves itself to be a very stinky alien. “I think God took a shit in your pool, Heather,” observes Diedre, the mean one. The rest of the film is what happens when this divine excrement wakes up.

Adams Family Values: An Interview with the Creators of “Hellbender”

February 28, 2022Posted in2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Interviews

Hellbenderinterviewtitle
Walter Chaw interviews Hellbender creators
John Adams, Lulu Adams, Zelda Adams, and Toby Poser


Of all the movies I saw last year, two viscerally exhilarated me, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end for the power of their craft and the empowerment of their messages. The first was Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, the finest spectacle film I’ve seen in I can’t remember how long–a smart updating of a well-travelled text by one of the few unquestioned masters of the medium. The other was Hellbender, the seventh film by a family of wanderers–and artists–who decided at some point to buy a rickety old RV, drive it across the U.S., and make a very particular brand of home movie to document their nights and days. Hellbender is so alive with the rapture of living that it almost pulsates; watching it is a tactile experience, and its celebration of women and coming into power feels effortless. It’s not unlike the idea of “blood harmony”–when it happens, it’s supernatural. Hellbender is the truth. So when I was offered the chance to interview filmmakers Toby Poser and John Adams and their daughters Lulu and Zelda Adams over Zoom one snowy afternoon, I was beside myself. It’s fun to catch phenoms right before they take off into the stratosphere.

Hellbender (2022) – Shudder

February 24, 2022Posted in****/****, 2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Streaming

Hellbender

****/****
starring Zelda Adams, Toby Poser, Lulu Adams, John Adams
written and directed by Toby Poser & Zelda Adams & John Adams

by Walter Chaw Hellbender is rare and wild, alive with joy, bristling with the energy of its invention. Even though its story of a young woman coming of age and discovering her power is familiar (some would say overly so), the approach the film takes is bracingly unpredictable. I’ve never seen a movie quite like it, straddling the line between experimental and conventional while managing to be free somehow of anything like arrogance or pretension. This isn’t an affectation forced upon an audience, it’s a reflection of what appears to be a genuinely unique point of view. John Waters made movies like this; so does David Lynch. Hellbender falls somewhere between them while being beholden to neither. I haven’t felt like this very often watching anything. The creators are the Adams family: father John Adams, mother Toby Poser, and their daughters, Zelda and Lulu Adams. Between them, they split multiple duties before and behind the camera. They pulled up their roots at some point a few years ago to travel across the country from their home base in the Catskills, telling stories through shooting movies and learning the technical aspects of their craft as they went along. This is the seventh film created under their “Wonder Wheel” production banner, and it’s a work of art that’s very much like a masterpiece.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) – Netflix

February 22, 2022Posted in2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Horror, Streaming, Thriller

Texaschainsawmassacre2002

**½/****
starring Elsie Fisher, Mark Burnham, Moe Dunford, Alice Krige
screenplay by Chris Thomas Devlin
directed by David Blue Garcia

by Walter Chaw David Blue Garcia’s re-quel Texas Chainsaw Massacre could’ve been a masterpiece with a minor tonal shift from deadly self-serious to wryly self-knowing. As it stands, it falls into the same Stanley Kramer pit as the Candyman reboot, where lectures take the place of plot–and infant cardboard pedagogues take the place of legible characters. Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the kind of graceless screed, in other words, that is everything its worst detractors accuse the original of being, making defending progressive messages in films like this difficult, if not impossible. Horror films in general–and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, in particular–are rich in subtext. Horror as a genre is primal (all of the Old Testament is an anthology of vile horror stories), and, as such, it’s the first one to respond when toxins are introduced into our cultural ecosystem. Horror, for lack of a better descriptor, is potentially useful as both diagnosis of what’s wrong with us and prognostication of the consequences, should we allow the poison in our systems to run its course. What’s not helpful, however, are films that eschew subtext in favour of soapbox. If you empty the basement, your basement is empty. And if you enter into a thing with the idea that you’re about to force people to get smarter, you’d better be sure that you’re smarter than anyone who might want to watch your thing. Very few artists ever get away with being didactic.

The Long Night (2022)

February 1, 2022Posted in2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical

Thelongnight

*/****
starring Scout Taylor-Compton, Nolan Gerard Funk, Kevin Ragsdale, Deborah Kara Unger
written by Robert Sheppe, Mark Young
directed by Rich Ragsdale

by Walter Chaw Rich Ragsdale’s The Long Night is relentlessly familiar–which is too bad, because it features an excellent score by Sherri Chung, and DP Pierluigi Malavasi does yeoman’s night-work and a mean drone shot. Their aptitude–indeed, elegance–is wholly at odds with the picture’s smirky script (by Robert Sheppe and Mark Young) and solid wall of daft shoutiness. Star Scout Taylor-Compton spends so much of the picture shrieking, even before the bad things start happening in earnest, that the frequency of her hoarse emissions can be either the foundation for the world’s newest and deadliest drinking game, or maybe merely The Long Night‘s most exhausting running joke. It’s hard to say what this film wanted to be about, if it ever wanted to be about more than getting made–my obvious guess being all the supernatural doings as a metaphor for a disintegrating relationship. But if that’s the case, that particular trope has been worn to a nub, and if you’re not going to provide insight or approach it in a novel way, going through the motions really works the ol’ patience muscle.

Scream (2022)

January 15, 2022Posted in2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

Scream5

***½/****
starring Melissa Berrera, Mason Gooding, Jenna Ortega, Neve Campbell
written by James Vanderbilt & Guy Busick
directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett

by Walter Chaw Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven’s Scream cycle, in terms of its influence on modern film, constitutes the most important metatext of the last 25 years in that it’s not only self-referential, it’s curious about how self-reference can be an essential ontological tool as opposed to a mere existential exercise. They’re better movies, in this respect, than The Matrix and its sequels, and, at least in terms of their popularity, they’re more important than even Charlie Kaufman’s extraordinary but limited-appeal body of work. The Scream saga, for lack of a better word, matters. Not for nothing does Scream 3, despite being the weakest installment of the original four and the only one of those that didn’t involve Williamson in any significant way, take place mainly on a simulacrum of hero Sidney’s childhood home and neighbourhood, recreated inside a soundstage like the to-scale streets of Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. If the first film is a watershed, the second is perhaps the series’ masterpiece: a phenomenal bit of pop philosophy that sees Sidney (Neve Campbell) as a Cassandra figure, literally forced onto the stage with a pack of masked murderers to re-enact her trauma from and into eternity. It’s her role in these Passion Plays to be preyed upon–and through her suffering, the “rules” of engagement between women coming of sexual age and men wanting to possess and punish them for that are forged. She has become an archetype, a thing that is representative of a fundamental truth, and the movies understand that. When she makes her entrance in the new Scream (hereafter Scream 5), standing up in a hospital waiting area to greet a young woman initiated into the abattoir, it is framed and shot as though we are all in the presence of a divine visitation.

Malignant (2021) – Blu-ray + Digital Code

December 5, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, China, Crime, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

Vlcsnap-2021-12-05-20h53m44s035

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Annabelle Wallis, Maddie Hasson, George Young, Michole Briana White
screenplay by Akela Cooper
directed by James Wan

by Walter Chaw James Wan’s Malignant is spectacularly, unabashedly fucking nuts. Not nuts in a random way, nuts in the way Oliver Stone’s The Hand is–or, more to the point, Brian De Palma’s Sisters. It’s what the Dario Argento The Phantom of the Opera should have been: not entirely giallo, not without elements of high opera; a classic “madwoman” picture as well as a possession movie. Also, that voice on the phone from Black Christmas, and also a loving homage to Stuart Gordon, and also… Malignant is a joyful mishmash that plays like a NOW That’s What I Call Music compilation for horror fans. It’s the North by Northwest of delirious genre fare: Bava if you want it, the most gothic Hammer if it pleases you, complete with a Universal Monsters monster I kind of can’t believe someone hasn’t done before. I’m not giving anything away by saying the cosplay is going to be lit.

Titane (2021)

October 22, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Drama, France, Horror, Palme d'Or Winner, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Titane

***/****
starring Vincent Lindon, Agathe Rousselle, Garance Marillier, Lais Salameh
written and directed by Julia Ducournau

by Walter Chaw In Julia Ducournau’s first film, Raw, there’s a part involving scissors wielded near a vagina that almost made me pass out. A sequence in her second film, Titane, involves another massively inappropriate object wielded near, and inside, a vagina, yet it didn’t bother me half as much. This may have something to do with Titane‘s tone and attitude towards menace: In Raw, there’s a tenderness and familiarity to it all that makes the horror invasive, whereas Titane gives off an alien, madcap, Mack Sennett vibe that announces the movie’s allegorical intentions as a barker at a carnival sideshow might. What’s constant in Ducournau’s two films is an admirably reductive drive to boil a woman’s body down to its biological functions. As Titane opens, hero Alexia (Agathe Rousselle)–badly scarred from the titanium plate behind her ear, the product of a childhood car accident she caused by wanting very badly to sing along to the car’s engine noise–is making her living as a stripper/model at an underground car show. Her body is a fetish object the way a car is to certain men, you see, and I’m thinking immediately not only of how men often assign a feminine pronoun to their cars, but also of e.e. cummings’s naughty poem “she being brand.” Here it is in full:

The Manor (2021)

October 19, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Streaming

Themanor

*/****
starring Barbara Hershey, Bruce Davison, Nicholas Alexander, Jill Larson
written and directed by Axelle Carolyn

by Walter Chaw Edited like a dog would edit something in a room full of tennis ball-throwing squirrels, Axelle Carolyn’s The Manor is terrible by almost every standard measure of quality. Carolyn’s own script is tediously overwritten, weighed down by goth-with-a-clove-at-the-all-night-coffee-shop-cum-bookstore notes like, “Oh, wormwood!” and, “I don’t know plants but I do know absinthe!” and ironic jokes about Elizabeth Bathory. The only thing missing is a dramatic recitation of a line from “Troilus and Cressida,” a red rose held in a harlequin’s flourish, and an invitation to a game of chess. Yet despite all the smug listing-off of genre bona fides, all the strained lines and lines upon lines, it still leans heavily on a hilarious bit of exposition obviously inserted in post (“It’s your fucking hair, Roland!”) at the end as if the lead up to this moment weren’t already extravagantly, explicitly spelled out, pitched to the most disinterested student in class. At least one of the alleged jump-scares is telegraphed by the reaction shot before the scare, and all that broaching of serious subjects such as elder abuse in nursing homes, dementia, and privatized healthcare for profit is handled without the slightest hint of the emotional intelligence necessary to deal with them in a substantive or respectful way. Honestly, it would be more offensive if it weren’t so clearly the product of incompetence. I don’t even know why it’s called “The Manor.”

Halloween Kills (2021)

October 14, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Halloweenkills

**/****
starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, Anthony Michael Hall
written by Scott Teems & Danny McBride & David Gordon Green
directed by David Gordon Green

by Bill Chambers Depending on your perspective, Halloween Kills, David Gordon Green’s follow-up to his 2018 Halloween, is the third Halloween II, or the second Halloween III, or the twelfth entry in a long-running serial with a compulsion to press the reset button. Though other horror franchises have splintered into manifold continuities (you’d need Ancestry.com to sort out the various branches stemming from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), Halloween is unique in that it’s not (just) a cash cow getting milked to death by new content farmers–no, a fairly consistent chain of ownership has made a habit of calling a mulligan whenever the consensus is that they’ve strayed too far from the beaten path. After a failed bid to rebrand as an anthology with the John Carpenter-backed Halloween III: Season of the Witch, whose reputation has since been reclaimed, the series resurrected Michael Myers and his Ahab, Dr. Loomis, only to fly too close to the sun with Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. Halloween H20 followed, and in bringing back Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, Michael’s sister, it wallpapered over the events of Halloweens III through VI. Then Halloween: Resurrection undid all of that movie’s goodwill, so Rob Zombie wrote and directed a remake of the first film. Zombie returned for a sequel that was roundly rejected despite being the ne plus ultra of Halloween movies for the misfit fans like myself, and the unlikely team of Green and Danny McBride took the reins, making the somewhat unconventional decision to do a legacy sequel to Carpenter’s 1978 original alone, again with Curtis but without the early retcon that Laurie and Michael are related.

Frank & Zed (2021) + Mad God (2021)

October 9, 2021Posted in****/****, 2021, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical

Frankzedmadgod

FRANK & ZED
***/****
written and directed by Jesse Blanchard

MAD GOD
****/****
starring Alex Cox
written and directed by Phil Tippett

by Walter Chaw William Blake etched the plates he used to press his poems with acid. His first books were hand-made by him in this way. He called it the “infernal method,” and the idea driving it is that every work of art is enlivened by the hand of its creator. Literally. He believed that touching a thing imbued it with animated qualities in the “soul-giving” sense of the word. I think about that whenever I watch any sort of puppetry or, as it relates to film more commonly, stop-motion animation. Maybe I’m imagining it, but I think Blake had a point. I feel like there’s a specific quality of life in graven idols that have been directly manipulated by the human hand. Traditional cel animation? The same: the little imperfections, the stutters and hesitations that keep it just the other side of the Uncanny Valley. It’s hard to put a finger on what it is, but it’s stimulating in the same way a film projected on 35mm is ineffably different from the same film streamed digitally. Shadows on the wall and all that; maybe Plato and John Lennon had something there. William Blake was, of course, a prophet.

TIFF ’21: Wrap-up

October 6, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Brazil, China, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Hong Kong, Horror, Iran, Mexico, Music, Sweden, Thriller, TIFF, UK

One_second_still_01

by Bill Chambers I’ve been covering TIFF for, gulp, 25 years now. If I didn’t expect to mark this silver anniversary in the confines of my living room, I have no complaints. Some of the show ponies were geoblocked for Canadian press or offline altogether, but although I’m fully vaccinated, I wasn’t about to risk transmission or stew for hours in a mask to see the May-December romance Dear Evan Hansen, or another remake of Dune, or a Secret Steven Soderbergh Screening that turned out to be, lol, Kafka, which is almost as good a prank as moving Best Actor to the end of the Academy Awards ceremony. I did at least get to stream my white whale, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, so no regrets. No regrets, no complaints.