Trap

Trap (2024)

Posted in2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, Yemen

½*/****
starring Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Shyamalan, Hayley Mills
written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Walter Chaw I try sometimes to put myself inside the mind of the creator, to imagine the route they took to the art they made. Maybe M. Night Shyamalan was at a concert, looked around, and imagined what it would be like if everyone there was searching for him. How he would have trouble blending in, but someone who looked like, say, Josh Hartnett, might have an easier time of it. He kind of took a run at this with the football game in Unbreakable, right? But why would Night imagine people were looking for him in the first place? Did he want that? Did he want the discomfort of being recognized in public, the struggle and obligation to be magnanimous towards strangers while remaining present for his family? Was the sacrifice of it appealing, a chance to display unusual charm and grace and build on the self-mythology he started in SPORTS ILLUSTRATED reporter Michael Bamberger’s hilarious, bathetic The Man Who Heard Voices, which begins: “Night’s shirt was half open, Tom Jones in his prime.” Not Henry Fielding’s fortunate foundling, for sure, but the Welsh sexy beast notorious for the amount of ladies’ lingerie tossed in his general direction on stage. Maybe Night was feeling the burden of being semi-famous in a specific location that night at this theoretical concert. Maybe he was feeling the burden of not being more famous.

Cuckoo

Fantasia Festival ’24: Cuckoo

Posted in2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

**/****
starring Hunter Schafer, Dan Stevens, Jessica Henwick, Márton Csókás
written and directed by Tilman Singer

by Walter Chaw For the most part, Cuckoo is the species of movie people who don’t like Yorgos Lanthimos accuse Yorgos Lanthimos of making. It’s a deadpan, mordant, deeply affected comedy of bad manners that distills human interactions to their component, lizard parts. In Cuckoo, marriage is merely a state-sanctioned reproductive arrangement designed to secure the reproductive potential of women; children are evolutionary guinea pigs for rogue geneticists; and love is a label for a biological reaction rather than a spiritual one. The picture’s main selling point, and what lends it depth, is star Hunter Schafer, fresh from HBO’s “Euphoria” and, from what I can tell, a capable and empathetic actor. But what serves this film particularly, perhaps cynically, is her identity as a prominent transgender activist. For me, a horror/sci-fi flick about a kind of human/cuckoo bird hybrid that, with the help of a secret cabal of mad scientists, implants their fetuses in the womb of unsuspecting hosts, is primed to be read as a trans parable. Being born in the wrong body? Feeling alien in one’s skin? Ostracized by family and dependent on doctors? I get it. Indeed, even in an age in which a woman’s reproductive choice is up for grabs again in the United States, seeing Cuckoo as a metaphor for the trans experience is the only way I could read it. I’m still trying to parse whether that’s to its benefit–because it gives it purposeful subtext–or an unfortunate distraction too unsubtle to be subtext, thus making the film feel didactic at best and like an exploitative vanity project at worst. Probably, it’s a “me” problem.

Originally it was East and West Dakota (Dakota Fanning in The Watchers)

The Watchers (2024)

Posted in2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Horror, Ireland, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Dakota Fanning, Georgina Campbell, Olwen Fouéré, Oliver Finnegan
screenplay by Ishana Night Shyamalan, based on the novel by A.M. Shine
directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan

by Walter Chaw Let’s get something straight: I love terrible movies like Ishana Night Shyamalan’s The Watchers, a handsomely mounted, well-cast, high-concept bit of folderol that swings wildly at a soft, underhand pitch…and misses. But you can’t fault the effort, the desire in that swing–the arrogance of it. It’s the hubristic brio of a Ken Griffey Jr. tearing a rotator cuff striking out at t-ball. M.’s daughter isn’t exactly the Mighty Casey, but the lead-up to The Watchers carries with it the same mythopoetics, the same anticlimactic denouement, the same whiff of mustiness that comes with a reference to Ernest Lawrence Thayer in 2024. Granted, that’s my fault for noticing it. I also thought a lot about “People Are Alike All Over,” that “Twilight Zone” episode where astronauts figure out they’re the new exhibits in an interstellar zoo, and another “Twilight Zone” called “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” in which five disparate individuals find themselves in a mysterious container, isolated from the outside world. I thought of Walter Kubilius’s incredible 1954 novella The Other Side, which influenced Peter Weir’s exceptional The Truman Show, and of Raymond Feist’s 1988 Faerie Tale, one of my all-time favourite horror novels. So hail to the skilled excavators, or at least the dedicated raiders of popular culture. Hail to the hyphenate debut that feels like something I picked up on 99¢ VHS rental Friday at King Soopers in 1991. Hail to nepotism working as it should by reintroducing the concept of the mid-level genre piece to curry favour with a former A-list director who keeps letting the air out of his own tires. And hail to the new “Night Shyamalan” who has learned her lessons exquisitely, the good and the bad. Just like that, she’s neatly doubled the number of directors of terrible movies I will like a little bit.

"What would really get me hot is a ceasefire." K-Stew and Katy O'Brian in Love Lies Bleeding

Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

Posted in****/****, 2024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

****/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, Jena Malone, Ed Harris
written by Rose Glass & Weronika Tofilska
directed by Rose Glass

by Walter Chaw Love is like a lamb and love is like a sledgehammer. Love crawls into your head and fills the empty spaces, the canyons and tunnels and holes in between, making it so full of noise it makes you fucking nuts. It’s too big, but it keeps growing. It kills you, but it won’t let you die. Love makes every love story a tragedy. Everyone writes about love, but the only person to ever do it right was Maurice Sendak, who wrote a survival guide for the fury called Where the Wild Things Are. Therein, a little boy named Max threatens to leave his friends, monsters on an island where they all jamboree. They beg him to stay: “Please don’t go. We’ll eat you up we love you so.” And they will, you know, because they have fangs and dangerous desires and horrible appetites. Love growls and gnashes its teeth. Love’s claws rattle like castanets. Love roars. Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding is a love story about two terrible women and two terrible men who do bad things to one another and for one another because love is the fire in which, happily, we burn.

Eileen (2023)

Posted in2023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Mystery, South Korea, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Eileen

***/****
starring Thomasin McKenzie, Anne Hathaway, Shea Whigham, Marin Ireland
written by Luke Goebel & Ottessa Moshfegh, based on the novel by Ottessa Moshfegh
directed by William Oldroyd

by Angelo Muredda Thomasin McKenzie gives the armpit-sniffing Mary Katherine Gallagher a run for her money as the eponymous weirdo loner in William Oldroyd’s Eileen, an admirably icky take on the Ottessa Moshfegh novel of the same name, adapted by the author and her partner, Luke Goebel. An awkward, horned-up femcel, Moshfegh’s Eileen is the kind of ostensibly normal but secretly maladjusted creep you’d find in a Patricia Highsmith novel–as relatable as she is perverse. While Highsmith’s work has lent itself to any number of successful treatments (including Carol, the film this one most closely resembles in its melding of pulp and queer desire), Moshfegh’s text is less of an obvious sell for the movies, fixated as it is on its protagonist’s unruly gut feelings, which frequently extend to her actual bowel movements. While Eileen, with its lovingly upholstered retro-1960s aesthetic, is a tidier affair than the novel, it’s to Oldroyd’s credit that he realizes something of its shabby outlook on the human experience, where violence is your best, if not only, ticket out of your crummy small-town New England existence.

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Mystery, Robert De Niro, Theatrical, Thriller, Western

Killersoftheflowermoon

**½/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons
screenplay by Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese, based on the book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw I think Martin Scorsese is perhaps too principled a filmmaker to indulge in the dark poetry of Killers of the Flower Moon; too bound by limitations he’s aware of and wary of violating, too respectful of the horror of the history to mark it with the crackle of verve and vitality. A sober topic deserves a sober treatment, no question, yet Scorsese at his best is doing lines off the hood of a vintage Impala, not running lines with actors and advisors, all with competing interests and hardwired biases, to find the most cogent, most reasonable way to approach a tripwire. He’s so careful not to set off the powderkeg that is the Osage Murders of 1921-1926 that he doesn’t set off any sparks at all. While I don’t think Scorsese is capable of making a bad movie, with things like Hugo and even The Irishman, he’s shown he can make movies that are enervated in the fatal way of a conversation you have with a beloved elder you’re lucky to engage with but dread, too, for the repetitiveness and dusty formality. I’m not saying Scorsese was the wrong person to adapt white-guy journalist David Grann’s NYT-feted true-crime book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, a celebration of an organization that has done grievous harm to these very people it swooped in belatedly to protect this one time. On the contrary, he’s told what is probably the most palatable version of that story–but it’s a story I don’t want to hear. I guess I’m saying I have a hard time investing much in devalued institutions and their saviours.

TIFF ’23: Sleep + Smugglers

Posted in2023, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, South Korea, Thriller, TIFF

Tiff23sleepsmugglers

SLEEP
Jam
**/****
starring Jung Yu-mi, Lee Sun-kyun
written and directed by Jason Yu

SMUGGLERS
Milsu
***/****
starring Kim Hye-soo, Yum Jung-ah, Park Jeong-min, Zo In-sung
screenplay by Ryoo Seung-wan, Kim Jeong-yeon
directed by Ryoo Seung-wan

by Bill Chambers Jason Yu’s Sleep had me at hello. Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) and Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun) are a young couple expecting their first child. One night, out of the blue, Hyun-Su starts talking in his sleep. “Someone’s inside,” he says. Soo-jin wonders if he’s trying to tell her something. It’s the opening scene of Poltergeist with considerably less grandeur, but horror, like punk, thrives in lo-fi. (The movie’s biggest formal swing is to instantaneously alter the mood of a scene through jump cuts or abrupt lighting changes.) Though Hyun-Su has no memory of the incident, he thinks he knows why he said what he said: because he’s an actor and one of the lines he has in his current project is, “Someone’s inside the building.” It’s enough to placate Soo-jin until the following night, when he dozes off and…well, you’ll have to see for yourself. Soon, bedtime becomes a jack-in-the-box full of nasty surprises that have Soo-jin sleeping with one eye open. A doctor gives Hyun-su what would be very practical and hopeful advice for someone suffering from an actual sleep disorder, but is that what’s going on? Or is something supernatural waiting until he lies down at night to use him as a marionette? And what, if anything, do the new downstairs neighbours, a single mother and her adolescent son, have to do with his condition?

Fantasia Festival ’23: Raging Grace

Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, UK

Fantasia23raginggrace

***½/****
starring Leanne Best, Jaeden Paige Boadilla, Max Eigenmann, David Hayman
written and directed by Paris Zarcilla

by Walter Chaw What sets something like Paris Zarcilla’s Raging Grace apart from similar servant/master, immigrant/colonizer stuff like Lorcan Finnegan’s Nocebo is how it offers glimpses of joy amid the suffering. We see a community at play and worship, united in song, celebrating one another, exultant and safe–at odds with how their oppression is generally centred in otherwise sympathetic texts. Jubilation, it turns out, is a useful tool to ratchet up the tension in a film about isolation and domestic enslavement. When you grasp what can be lost, the stakes become unbearably high. Raging Grace isn’t a happy film, but there’s happiness in it, starting with the hopefulness of its hero’s name, Joy (Maxene Eigenmann). Joy’s a homeless Filipino house cleaner on an expired visa to the UK struggling to care for her impetuous daughter, Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla), on very little money and under the constant threat of discovery and deportation. The two survive by squatting in clients’ homes while they’re away, and Zarcilla has a lovely touch with the stolen days where mother and daughter pretend to have a place of their own. The rest of Joy’s life is a hustle: to get more work, to hold onto existing work, to keep her kid entertained and hidden, and to try to leave the panic out of her voice when she talks to family she’s left behind in the Philippines. Before Raging Grace becomes a horror film, it’s already a horror film.

Boston Underground Film Festival ’23: Nightsiren

Posted in2022, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Czech Republic, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Mystery, Slovakia

Buff23nightsiren

The Nightsiren
***½/****
starring Eva Mores, Iva Bittová, Jana Oľhová, Juliana Oľhová, Natalia Germani
written by Barbora Namerova, Tereza Nvotová
directed by Tereza Nvotová

The Boston Underground Film Festival runs from March 22-March 26, 2023. Click here for more info.

by Walter Chaw Tereza Nvotová’s Slovakian folk horror Nightsiren joins films like Robert Eggers’s The Witch (2015), Lukas Feigelfeld’s Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Tale (2017), Igor Legarreta’s All the Moons (2020), and Goran Stolevki’s You Won’t Be Alone (2022): gynocentric celebrations of the power of women and the lengths to which patriarchal social systems seek, and have always sought, to suppress it. A glance at the Republican docket in the year of their asshole of a lord, 2023, finds it full of extraordinary, unseemly interest in women’s bodies–their reproductive capacity, their allure to troglodytes raised to see women as objects to be owned and mastered, their perceived unfitness in a world most-of-the-way destroyed by the jealous rule of “qualified” men. What these films have in common besides a woman as their centre are the overlapping, parallel superstitions of a range of countries, each fabricated as pretense (and then codified into law) to injure women: socially, physically, mortally if necessary. What’s different about Nightsiren is how the cries of “witch,” the public excoriations and publicly-sanctioned mortifications, happen in the present–in the wilds of a modern Slovakia that feels ancient for its remoteness but eternal for the extent to which “difficult” women are blamed for the plague and end times promulgated by the bestial cupidity of men. Dress it up however you like, but we’ve only evolved the ways we pretend at civilization–and even then, not much, and not consistently. Is it progress that we’ve essentially stopped pretending? We are only shaved apes, so we act accordingly.

Boston Underground Film Festival ’23: The Unheard

Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

Buff23theunheard

***/****
starring Lachlan Watson, Michele Hicks, Nick Sandow, Brendan Meyer
screenplay by Michael Rasmussen & Shawn Rasmussen
directed by Jeffrey A. Brown

The Boston Underground Film Festival runs from March 22-March 26, 2023. Click here for more info.

by Walter Chaw I consider myself a fairly boring, credulous person who nevertheless, based on a couple of experiences I can’t explain, believes in ghosts and is disturbed by stuff like the Electronic Voice Phenomenon, not to mention the tenuous wisdom of playing with Ouija Boards. Jeffrey A. Brown’s The Unheard catches me right in my irrational fears with its story of Chloe (non-binary actor Lachlan Watson, playing the role of a young woman here), who returns to the isolated Cape Cod of her youth a decade after losing her hearing there from a case of meningitis. Her mother vanished around the same time. She was once thought to be a runaway, but it’s looking more likely that she was the victim of an active serial killer. At least, that’s what Chloe’s hallucinations, for lack of a better word, intimate in the flashes of clarity they offer between the white-noise blatting from the closed-circuit television at her house in Cape Cod. She’s come back to clean up the old place, make peace with her ghosts, and recover from an experimental treatment for her hearing loss from earnest, hopeful Dr. Lynch (Shunori Ramanathan). She hasn’t, I don’t think, thought things all the way through.

Scream VI (2023)

Scream VI (2023)

Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Melissa Barrera, Courteney Cox, Jenna Ortega, Hayden Panettiere
written by James Vanderbilt & Guy Busick
directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett

by Walter Chaw There’s a fine line between satire and simulacrum, between an ironic commentary on a thing and the thing itself. It’s a tone more than anything, and context, of course. Timing most of all. Fall too far on the one side and the sarcasm is so strident it becomes sour. Overcorrect to the other and it becomes precisely the thing you wish to lampoon. I liked last year’s Scream, Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin’s “requel,” for taking on toxic fandom and the expectations it imposes on franchise filmmaking–almost certainly the lingering topic of fascination for future cultural archaeologists excavating this period in our popular history. I thought it was a smart way to continue the series’ penchant for metatextual self-evaluation while upping the visceral stakes with stalking and kills that levelled up the intimacy and brutality. The movie was self-conscious without being mired in self-admiration, a neat trick–and one, it turns out, difficult to replicate.

A-Maize-ing Grace: The Children of the Corn Saga

Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2011, 2018, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Mystery, Stephen King, Theatrical, Thriller

Amaizeinggrace3

DISCIPLES OF THE CROW (1983)
***½/****
starring Eleese Lester, Gabriel Folse, Steven Young, Martin Boozer
based on the story “Children of the Corn” by Stephen King
adapted for the screen and directed by John Woodward		 CHILDREN OF THE CORN (1984)
Stephen King’s Children of the Corn
**½/****
starring Peter Horton, Linda Hamilton, R.G. Armstrong, John Franklin
screenplay by George Goldsmith, based upon the story by Stephen King
directed by Fritz Kiersch
CHILDREN OF THE CORN II: THE FINAL SACRIFICE (1993)
***/****
starring Terence Knox, Paul Scherrier, Ryan Bollman, Ned Romero
written by A.L. Katz and Gilbert Adler
directed by David F. Price		 CHILDREN OF THE CORN III: URBAN HARVEST (1995)
***/****
starring Daniel Cerny, Ron Melendez, Mari Morrow, Jim Metzler
written by Dode Levenson
directed by James D.R. Hickox
CHILDREN OF THE CORN IV: THE GATHERING (1996)
*/****
starring Naomi Watts, Brent Jennings, Samaria Graham, William Windom
written by Stephen Berger and Greg Spence
directed by Greg Spence		 CHILDREN OF THE CORN V: FIELDS OF TERROR (1998)
½*/****
starring Stacy Galina, Alexis Arquette, Ahmet Zappa, David Carradine
written and directed by Ethan Wiley
CHILDREN OF THE CORN 666: ISAAC’S RETURN (1999)
*/****
starring Nancy Allen, Natalie Ramsey, Paul Popowich, Stacy Keach
screenplay by Tim Sulka & John Franklin
directed by Kari Skogland		 CHILDREN OF THE CORN: REVELATION (2001)
*/****
starring Claudette Mink, Kyle Cassie, Michael Ironside
written by S.J. Smith
directed by Guy Magar
CHILDREN OF THE CORN (2009)
**/****
starring David Anders, Kandyse McClure
screenplay by Donald P. Borchers and Stephen King, based on the short story by King
directed by Donald P. Borchers		 CHILDREN OF THE CORN: GENESIS (2011)
***/****
starring Kelen Coleman, Tim Rock, Billy Drago
written and directed by Joel Soisson
CHILDREN OF THE CORN: RUNAWAY (2018)
½*/****
starring Marci Miller, Jake Ryan Scott, Mary Kathryn Bryant, Lynn Andrews
screenplay by Joel Soisson
directed by John Gulage		 CHILDREN OF THE CORN (2023)
*/****
starring Elena Kampouris, Kate Moyer, Callan Mulvey, Bruce Spence
based upon the short story by Stephen King
written and directed by Kurt Wimmer

by Walter Chaw Kurt Wimmer’s Children of the Corn prequel/reboot is drab, uninspired, witless I.P.-sploitation. I first read Stephen King’s same-named short story in the movie tie-in edition of Night Shift (the one with the red cover) in sixth grade and loved the Lovecraft of it, how it begins in the middle with a car-tripping couple hitting a kid running out of a cornfield in bumblefuck, Nebraska and leads said couple through a forensic reconstruction of the doom that came to Gatlin. I see in its setup and execution both the tendrils leading backwards and the ones nourishing stories like Clive Barker’s “In the Hills, the Cities.” It has a feeling of the inevitable uncanny that is underestimated in King’s best work: a sense that what is happening has almost finished happening, and it’s too late to do anything but bear witness to our collective ruin. Of the dozen films in the eclectic Children of the Corn franchise, only the third feature, subtitled Urban Harvest, hints at that feeling of Elder Gods infecting the innocent to act against the innocent and the generational end times attending that. None of the rest deal with the horror of good kids from loving families falling into an apocalyptic blood cult and suddenly murdering all of the grown-ups, choosing instead to paint the victims as abusive or absentee so that they kind of deserve whatever’s coming to them. That’s a revenge fantasy, not horror.

Knock at the Cabin (2023)

Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

Knockatthecabin

*/****
starring Dave Bautista, Jonathan Groff, Rupert Grint, Ben Aldridge
screenplay by M. Night Shyamalan and Steve Desmond & Michael Sherman, based on the book The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay
directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT FOR BOTH THE FILM AND THE BOOK ON WHICH IT’S BASED. M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin is an accurate and appropriately vile portrait of Evangelical Christianity and a conservative mindset based on a sense of righteous indignation that their ignorance and bile are not well-received by people whom they despise for receiving the gifts they themselves have not received. The maxim of the meek inheriting the Earth is not, after all, a promise of something good, but rather the herald of small, terrified people emboldened by their shared ignorance and repulsive mythologies to exterminate everything that is not as morally bankrupt and spiritually unmoored as them. They imagine they’re the good guys, the ones magnanimous in their mercy and forgiveness, when in fact they are the reason mercy and forgiveness are necessary in the world. If it were not so, the Sermon on the Mount–the keynote address by their ostensible human godhead–would be the document they’re pushing to be posted in every classroom instead of the Ten Commandments and the Pledge of Allegiance to precisely the type of golden calf their fairytales warn against. The world is ending, not because of gay marriage, abortion, or immigration, but because of the prosperity gospel. In many ways, Knock at the Cabin shares an ideological space with Scorsese’s Silence, yet only one of them reckons with the Christian god’s promised, and thorny, non-intervention in the affairs of its creation. Only one of them, in other words, isn’t a piece of ecstatic, ecclesiastical hoohah.

Infinity Pool (2023)

Posted in2023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, France, Horror, Hungary, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

Infinitypool

**½/****
starring Alexander Skarsgård, Mia Goth, Cleopatra Coleman, Jalil Lespert
written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg

by Angelo Muredda Brandon Cronenberg delivers his own visceral riff on the resort satire trend with Infinity Pool, a high-concept thriller that shares obvious genetic material with its precursor, Possessor (2021), but feels more like the runty kid brother in terms of its ideas. With his third feature, Cronenberg hones his skillsets in grounded sci-fi storytelling and kaleidoscopic montage while continuing to make a meal of the charge that he’s merely following in his father’s footsteps as a new purveyor of brainy body horror, boldly playing once more with the motifs of inheritance and imitation where less confident nepotism babies might dodge the comparison outright. Yet in the absence of stronger material, these predilections don’t ripen into rich artistic fruits so much as they rot, leaving Infinity Pool‘s success riding largely on the back of its occasionally startling images and self-effacing cast, who, like Cronenberg, are riffing on the roles we expect from them.

There’s Something Wrong with the Children (2023) – VOD

Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, VOD

Theressomethingwrongwiththechildren

*/****
starring Alisha Wainwright, Zach Gilford, Amanda Crew, Carlo Santos
written by T.J. Cimfel & Dave White
directed by Roxanne Benjamin

by Walter Chaw Roxanne Benjamin’s There’s Something Wrong with the Children is a tired retread in the folk-horror category of evil children that doesn’t break any new ground and certainly doesn’t tread any old ground with anything resembling energy or invention. It’s just lugubriously competent, cozy in the way of a broken-in boot or a well-loved terrycloth robe–an “I’ll be right back, you don’t need to pause it” movie. Indeed, one doesn’t need to pause it. For what it’s worth, the best evil-kid movie is probably Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s Who Can Kill a Child?, although my favourite is the repugnant, deeply wrong 1981 Lew Lehman freakout The Pit. In that one, unhinged 10-year-old creeper Jamie (Sammy Snyders) discovers a pit in the middle of the forest behind his house that’s swarming with carnivorous troglodytes he thinks are communicating with him through his teddy bear. Between feeding bullies and football players to the pit, Jamie spends his time making passes at his teen cheesecake babysitter and peeping on her while she’s in the shower. Yes, that movie has it all. Alas, There’s Something Wrong with the Children is aggressively forgettable, even freed of comparisons to films it’s so obviously aping: a pair of evil kids, check; a pit in the forest full of evil? Check. Parents too wrapped up in their bougie bullshit to notice their offspring are breaking supernatural bad? Check. You’ve seen it. We’ve all seen it. Better versions.

White Noise (2022)

Posted in2022, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Horror, Mystery, Streaming, UK

Whitenoise

*½/****
starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy
written by Noah Baumbach, based on the book by Don DeLillo
directed by Noah Baumbach

by Angelo Muredda “Everything was fine, everything would continue to be fine, would eventually get better, so long as the supermarket did not slip,” says professor Jack Gladney midway through White Noise, Don DeLillo’s satire of contemporary middle-class American family life tested by catastrophe. DeLillo’s protagonist is marvelling at the grocery store’s capacity to endure unaffected in the face of a transient disaster that’s hit his charming town, impressed by how the so-called “airborne toxic event” that’s blown through (and now over) his community has, if anything, only enhanced the store’s unnaturally perfect wares, which always seem in-season no matter the time of year. He could just as well be marvelling at the elasticity of DeLillo’s novel, which holds up in the face of the ongoing global catastrophe it prefigures in many ways, a pandemic that briefly forced westerners to interrogate their insulation from the kind of suffering they normally watch on television.

The Thinker: FFC Interviews Rian Johnson

Posted in2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, Mystery
Walter Chaw interviews Rian Johnson, writer-director of

GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY

I met Rian Johnson when his directorial debut, Brick, was making the festival rounds. In the middle of interviewing him, I received a panicked call from my wife that my infant daughter was sick and had been vomiting. Rian overheard some of it, saw my reaction to the rest of it, and, as I hung up, handed me a piece of paper with his cell phone and email on it and told me we could continue talking if I wanted after I was sure my kid was okay. We’ve been friends ever since. I can confidently say that through the rollercoaster of a Hollywood career, he’s remained the same person: kind, funny, available for a chat, able to navigate the absolute highs and troll-infested lows of fandom with equanimity and a notable lack of ego. Speak to his collaborators and you’ll hear the same stories about what seems like a unicorn in show business–but I’d add the caveat that Rian, in addition to being a truly nice guy, is also razor sharp. He’s the kind of person who likes to play board games and will beat you at them; who will make a bet about his beloved Dodgers with some idiot who has to root for, say, the Rockies, and never let you forget it. His unique genius is on display in films as varied as Knives Out, a morality play about righting a complex social injustice as much as it as a whodunit, and The Brothers Bloom, a puzzle-box all of sleights-of-hand and the love of the grift. Wanting to talk with Rian about the sublimated outrage, the righteousness, of his new film Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, I began by asking him to identify the pleasure that films like Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun held for him as a kid:

The Conjuring 3: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Posted in2021, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

Vlcsnap-2022-11-15-21h39m35s071Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Ruairi O’Connor, Sarah Catherine Hook
screenplay by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick
directed by Michael Chaves

by Walter Chaw I like the Conjuring movies–or, rather, I’ve come to appreciate them independent of their actual quality. I like them not because of their supernatural stuff or sometimes-expert jump scares, but because they’re a popular mainstream film series–one that has suspiciously little to do with any conjuring–about a corny, middle-aged, 1960s married couple who are hot for each other. They own a small business together and respect the unique skill sets the other one brings to the table. Their marriage is as solid as American steel. Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) thinks Ed (Patrick Wilson) is the manliest man that ever manned; Ed thinks Lorraine is the most spiritual spiritualist to ever spiritual. In each other’s eyes, they are the utmost. I bet the sex is incredible. Ed and Lorraine are based on real-life couple the Warrens, who earned a living as the kind of sideshow hucksters James Randi made it his holy mission to expose. Yet as immortalized in this flourishing billion-dollar franchise, they are golden and perfect. They are Ozzie & Harriet: Demonologist Exorcists, and these movies are vehicles for their vintage, good ol’ middle-American can-do spirit. They’re what Republicans used to be before devolving into domestic terrorists and Christo-fascist cultists, and so they carry with them a trace of nostalgia for a time before this country seemed irrevocably divided. In this cinematic universe, the threat isn’t only from within.