65 (2023)

March 11, 2023Posted in2023, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

65

*/****
starring Adam Driver, Ariana Greenblatt, Chloe Coleman, Nika King
written and directed by Scott Beck & Bryan Woods

by Walter Chaw Bryan Woods and Scott Beck’s 65 is a straight-line exercise: You are familiar with where it begins, you are familiar with where it ends, and you are familiar with the line it travels. It starts with a man of action mourning a lost child. He has an opportunity to become a surrogate father to a kid who has lost her parents. Their time in our company ends with them jetting off to further adventures. If it’s true there are only one or two stories in the Western canon, then it’s not about the what but the how. The how of 65 is piew piew piew lasers and rrrrraaaawr rwar rwaaar! dinosaurs. When I was in elementary school, my best friend and I decided the greatest movie ever would involve aliens fighting dinosaurs, because, as children, we were undemanding of our entertainment to do anything beyond satisfy the most simplistic desires of our pea-sized lizard brains. We kept spending eighty 1980s dollars on Atari 2600 games because we could imagine they looked good. It was during this period that I saw most of the terrible movies I still love unconditionally for their ability to remind me of how much more promise the world seemed to hold back then. I even have an Atari 2600 connected and in working order. I’ve been grateful to have grown out of being that easy to please, though now I can’t think of a single reason why.

Scream VI (2023)

March 8, 2023Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

Screamvi

**/****
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.

Cocaine Bear (2023)

March 4, 2023Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Theatrical, Thriller

Cocainebear

*½/****
starring Keri Russell, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Ray Liotta
screenplay by Jimmy Warden
directed by Elizabeth Banks

by Walter Chaw The first 45 minutes or so of Elizabeth Banks’s Cocaine Bear deliver everything the title promises: A bear, behaving erratically, mauls European hikers and precocious children daring one another to eat a tablespoon of what Jay McInerney would know as Bolivian Marching Powder. The last 45 minutes are an enervated slog heavy on convention and eager to pull all the punches the film was landing with malicious glee in the first half. It’s almost as though a switch is flipped right around the time a pair of hapless paramedics, Beth (Kahyun Kim) and Tom (meme-meister Scott Seiss), stumble on a terrible scene before becoming the centrepiece of another–almost as though a decision was made to suddenly try to carve out a coherent three-act structure from agreeably bloody chaos. To what end? To make a play for awards-season consideration? To appease some imaginary audience coming to Cocaine Bear for an adventure story with not one happy ending but two? The only audience it’s ultimately pandering to are non-creatives with a say in the process, congratulating themselves for forcing a movie about a bear doing murders while tweaking on nose candy to wrap up its various threads in tidy little bows. What a shame.

Training Day (2001) – DVD|4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

March 1, 2023Posted in2000s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Thriller

Vlcsnap-2023-03-01-21h26m51s591Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**½/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras B+
4K ULTRA HD – Image A+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke, Scott Glenn, Eva Mendes née Mendez
screenplay by David Ayer
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw In Antoine Fuqua and Dominic Sena’s race to become David Fincher, Fuqua, with his colour-bleached urban noir Training Day, pulls slightly ahead. Essentially a feature-length version of the Fuqua-helmed video for Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise,” Training Day is dankly lit, grim, and edited with a veteran music-video director’s need for speed (though there are considerably fewer cuts than those found in Fuqua’s previous efforts Bait and The Replacement Killers). So smooth and accomplished is the harsh vérité look of the piece that the sun-drenched streets of Los Angeles are as much a player in the film as its leads. But the striking cinematography, sharp screenplay by David Ayer, and undeniable chemistry between Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke aren’t enough to disguise that Training Day is one bravura performance away from being the umpteenth rote grizzled vet/greenhorn rookie policier. (With a healthy dash of Casualties of War tossed in for that Captain Bligh/Mr. Christian dynamic.)

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

February 27, 2023Posted 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.

Swallowed (2023) – VOD

February 9, 2023Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Thriller, VOD

Swallowed

**½/****
starring Cooper Koch, Jose Colon, Jena Malone, Mark Patton
written and directed by Carter Smith

by Walter Chaw Carter Smith’s Swallowed is a bitter pill. It’s cruel and sardonic, positing as its Emerald City the California porn industry and the lead role in a movie where “strangers cum on” the face of our hero, Benjamin (Cooper Koch). “But you look so sexy doing it,” says Benjamin’s cis but bi-curious friend, Dom (Jose Colon), and all the tender moments like this play as angry and insincere. I’m not saying the characters don’t mean it, I’m saying the whole tenor of the film is punishingly nihilistic. When Benjamin later gives Dom a gentle kiss at a moment of crisis, it feels more cynical than romantic: one friend condescending to the performative allyship of another. Indeed, though Dom gushes that Benjamin means more to him than an entire parade of ex-girlfriends he lists off as proof, he also refuses to go to L.A. with Benjamin and doesn’t, in any case, think he’ll ever see him again. It’s easy to say you love someone when every string attached is about to be cut. When Benjamin subsequently plants one on Dom, it’s undercut by the film’s overriding message that the world is dangerous for pretty boys like him; professions of love are more often self-serving than earnest. I confess I love Smith’s The Ruins for that same uncompromising, nails-and-broken-glass nature, but here the chilliness makes Swallowed feel like an Ari Aster movie. It is, in other words, an asshole. Your tolerance for time spent in the company of a sentient sneer, one that either despises or patronizes its characters, will determine the extent to which you’re able to find value in its depiction of interpersonal and systemic trauma focused in on the LGBTQ community.

Knock at the Cabin (2023)

February 7, 2023Posted 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)

January 27, 2023Posted 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.

Blood (2023)

January 27, 2023Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Thriller, Vampire

Blood

***/****
starring Michelle Monaghan, Skeet Ulrich, Finlay Wojtak-Hissong, Skylar Morgan Jones
written by Will Honley
directed by Brad Anderson

by Walter Chaw Of the films Brad Anderson’s made over the course of a long and varied career, the ones I remember best are his slow-burn haunted-asylum movie Session 9 and his portrait of progressive madness, The Machinist. Both are focused on how a person can get fixated on obsessive thoughts, and how elastic reality might become to conform itself around those fixations. He’s the perfect chronicler of this fraught moment where belief has come to be as valued as fact–and more powerful, too, in the defense and inspiration of division and atrocity. His Blood is a queasy folk horror, its title referring to the thickness of it in relation to water as well as the only sustenance, the human variety, a little boy named Owen (Finlay Wojtak-Hissong) can tolerate after encountering something that lives in the hole of the dead tree in the woods behind his house. The two, family and its enervating qualities, are inextricable. In one way, Blood is about the evolutionarily proscribed madness of becoming a parent to a parasitic lifeform you love, whether or not it loves you back–that it would devastate you to lose, even as it’s born with no ability to survive on its own.

Alice, Darling (2022)

January 18, 2023Posted in2022, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

Alicedarling

***/****
starring Anna Kendrick, Kaniehtiio Horn, Charlie Carrick, Wunmi Mosaku
written by Alanna Francis
directed by Mary Nighy

by Walter Chaw Not quite the sequel to Alice, Sweet Alice I was hoping for, Mary Nighy’s Alice, Darling is actually a principled character piece about a woman named Alice (Anna Kendrick) stuck in an emotionally controlling–indeed, abusive–relationship with manipulative artist Simon (Charlie Carrick). Simon’s determined, as these pricks tend to be, to isolate Alice into a codependent situation in which she rejects her best friends, Sophie (Wunmi Mosaku) and Tess (Kaniehtiio Horn), in favour of a singular fixation on his wants and desires. Ripped, according to Kendrick, from personal experience, Alice, Darling feels, for lack of a better word, real. Real enough that I recognized a few terrible tendencies from the villain in my own dating history as a much younger man–people I’ve hurt in my past because I was too insecure to be alone, too selfish to be a partner, too stupid to know how to be better. I needed the help of a brilliant and fierce partner to set me straight. It is the work of my life to unlearn the things that were taught to me, and to feel whole enough not to require someone else to complete me. I don’t hope to get there; I do hope to get close. No one deserves to be the final piece in an incomplete person’s puzzle. It’s an uncomfortable thing to see everything you’ve despised about yourself reflected in a movie character, but there you have it. Simon is a bad guy who doesn’t kill people (this isn’t a Sleeping with the Enemy thriller), though he’s a destructive child who abuses a woman psychologically until she relies on his approval. Alice is through the looking glass, and she knows it.

M3GAN (2023)

January 5, 2023Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

M3gan

***/****
starring Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Amie Donald, Jenna Davis
screenplay by Akela Cooper
directed by Gerard Johnstone

by Walter Chaw That the Internet works the way it does and evolved as quickly as it did likely had everything to do with it being the finest distributor of pornography the world had ever seen. If a band of apes created something like the Internet, for instance, they would use it primarily to inflict violent dominance over others–and for sex, if possible. No “ifs” about it: we are, and we did. When an artificial intelligence was tasked with machine learning via the Internet, it became a misanthropic, misogynistic racist almost instantly. The Internet is also the single greatest anthropological bellwether ever created, diagnosing who we are when we’re not obsessively adjusting our mask of civility; 100% pure id. I love Alex Garland’s Ex Machina because it understands that if a robot that looked like Alicia Vikander were invented, men would try to fuck it, and no expense would be too great in that pursuit. It doesn’t even have to resemble Alicia Vikander–it can just be a flashlight with a rubber hole in it. Which brings us to the question M3GAN refuses to confront. If you make a little blonde doll that looks like a 12-year-old Fiona Gubelmann, you’re opening an entire hornet’s nest of uncomfortable issues that would be fascinating to address. What happens when unfettered tech capitalism collides with pedophilia? I mean, the Replicants in Blade Runner are soldiers, teachers…and prostitutes. Even Spielberg’s A.I. recognizes that great leaps in technology are historically tied to warfare and rutting.

Nocebo (2022)

November 6, 2022Posted in2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Ireland, Philippines, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Nocebo

**½/****
starring Eva Green, Mark Strong, Chai Fonacier, Billie Gadsdon
written by Garret Shanley
directed by Lorcan Finnegan

by Walter Chaw Lorcan Finnegan’s Nocebo would fill an interesting double-bill with Jaume Collet-Serra’s Black Adam, both violently rejecting the interventionist and exploitative tenets of colonialism (traditional and neo-). The reasons these films at opposite ends of the production spectrum might manifest within days of each other in 2022 are cynically self-evident, perhaps, but it doesn’t lessen the fascination of their parallel genesis. The world is being destroyed by unfettered, voracious capitalism in ways so obvious that even widgets extruded from the intellectual-property mill are compelled now to occupy the same sociopolitical spaces as an independent film. I don’t know that it’s possible to qualify this development in that while it seems like progress, history has a way of reducing revolutions almost instantly to T-shirts and freshman dorm-room poster-ganda. Capitalism is undefeated. I loved Vivarium, Finnegan’s previous film, a great deal, mainly because it played out manifold variations on its philosophical theme: to what extent does biology determine behaviour? Nocebo is similar in that it, too, asks a question about guilt and vengeance, then works over through multiple approaches to the answer before landing on the same conclusion that notions of good and evil are arbitrary distinctions imposed on innate compulsions. A mother will be compelled to avenge her child because a creature is obliged to reproduce itself. Anything else is merely obfuscating chantilly on an intrinsic cake.

Nope (2022) [Collector’s Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

November 3, 2022Posted in2022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Horror, Japan, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Vlcsnap-2022-10-30-00h18m06s553Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version.

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
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?

Poltergeist (1982) + The Lost Boys (1987) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

October 25, 2022Posted in****/****, 1980s, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Tobe Hooper, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Spielberg, Teen, Thriller, Vampire

Vlcsnap-2022-10-25-13h40m42s064Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

POLTERGEIST
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring JoBeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson, Beatrice Straight, Heather O’Rourke
screenplay by Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais & Mark Victor
directed by Tobe Hooper

THE LOST BOYS
***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Corey Feldman, Jami Gertz, Corey Haim, Dianne Wiest
screenplay by Janice Fischer & James Jeremias and Jeffrey Boam
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Bill Chambers Although Walter Chaw’s already written definitive reviews of Poltergeist and The Lost Boys for this site, so much time has passed since they were published that I feel obliged to say something original about these films before moving on to the Blu-ray portion of this review. Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist and Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys, each celebrating milestone anniversaries this year (fortieth and thirty-fifth, respectively), have aged unusually gracefully. Partly this is due to the Star Wars-festooned bedroom of Poltergeist and the comics-store hub of The Lost Boys being evergreen–though what was once indicated by Robbie’s C-3PO lightswitch cover (his middle-class privilege) and Sam’s pedantic knowledge of Superman lore (his lack of social life) may not come across as clearly to a generation of viewers that has grown up with Jedis and superheroes as the inescapable sum of pop culture. Moreover, these are not naïve films that invite condescension, and any doubts about their sophistication (aesthetic and otherwise) are laid to rest by the instantly dated attempts to drag them into the 21st century: Gil Kenan’s remake of Poltergeist and the dtv sequel Lost Boys: The Tribe.

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival ’22: Mother, May I? + Old Flame

October 22, 2022Posted in2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

Bhff22motherflame

MOTHER, MAY I?
*/****
starring Kyle Gallner, Holland Roden, Michael Giannone, Chris Mulkey
written and directed by Laurence Vannicelli

OLD FLAME
**½/****
starring Rebeca Robles, Andy Gershenzon
written and directed by Christopher Denham

by Walter Chaw Laurence Vannicelli’s sophomore hyphenate feature, the two-hander Mother, May I?, feels timid given the richness of its premise and, for the places it’s not willing to go, really has only enough going for it for a short–a proof of concept, maybe, a long trailer that hints at dark psychosexual undercurrents. At its current length, it all comes to nothing, a gothic horror about possession and maternal/filial relationships that has all the elements but not the will to put them together. I heard a description once of serious cognitive decline as having a slice of bread in one hand, a toaster in the other, a bottle of jam and a butter knife on the counter, and having no idea how any of it comes together. That’s Mother, May I?, which finds Emmett (Kyle Gallner) and his fiance Anya (Holland Roden) tasked with cleaning out his recently-departed mother’s expansive manse in the woods, complete with a reedy lake and an overly friendly neighbour, Bill (Chris Mulkey). It’s rich, made richer by a mindfuck game Emmett and Anya play in which they set a timer and then force each other to speak truthfully about past traumas before it runs out. Emmett has a few: his mother abandoned him at some point in the past, orphaning him in her affections, and her death has left him nothing but a windfall in the eventual sale of the family reserve. During one of their ersatz therapy sessions, Anya playacts as Emmett’s dead mom, and Emmett starts wondering if his mother hasn’t actually taken over Anya’s body when she doesn’t snap out of it after the timer goes off.

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival ’22: Influencer

October 16, 2022Posted in2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Canada, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

Bhff22influencers

***/****
starring Sara Canning, Emily Tennant, Cassandra Naud, Rory J. Saper
written by Tesh Guttikonda & Kurtis David Harder
directed by Kurtis David Harder

by Walter Chaw Much like the higher-profile Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, Kurtis David Harder’s Influencer takes aim at Zoomers with a sharp eye for critical detail and an even sharper ear for cutting dialogue. It’s plotted with machine-like precision and delivers a series of switches–and switch-backs–that aren’t just amusing: they speak ironically to the very interchangeability of Influencer‘s stars that the film seeks to satirize. I don’t know if this is intentional, but it’s appreciated. I especially loved the subtle shots at both a culture that would “other” someone with a physical deformity and that same culture that would still “other” but “other for profit” the same deformity. That’s some dour shit about the state of things, providing the film a bracing jolt of topical venom. It’s not the murder and identity theft getting under your skin in Influencer, it’s the full-frontal assault of the new beauty myth as it transitions from makeup conglomerates to social-media stars turning a side-hustle of self-objectification and narcissism into a six-digit lifestyle. There’s a lot going on in this movie, in other words, though on its surface it’s a fleet thriller with charismatic leads who manage to give their objectionable rakes a legible undercurrent of depth and humanity. Squint a little and Influencer is a sly update of de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses, only one of the partners in this classist love triangle is eternally missing: a ghost in the worldwide machine.

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival ’22: Mother Superior

October 16, 2022Posted in2022, Austria, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

Bhff22mothersuperior

*½/****
starring Isabella Händler, Inge Maux, Jochen Nickel, Tim Werths
written and directed by Marie Alice Wolfszahn

by Walter Chaw Marie Alice Wolfszahn’s Mother Superior is an overly familiar period piece about a young woman engaged as a caretaker for a mysterious and ailing older woman in a rambling country house–a plot most recently explored in the superlative Saint Maud and Sebastián Lelio’s pretty good The Wonder, due out soon. It’s possible to mine interest and value from a template so threadbare, but there’s a built-in danger of playing with a premise the audience has likely already started to unravel as soon as the particulars are established. In Mother Superior, the young nurse is Sigrun (Isabella Händler), whom, we gather from the opening-credits sequence, is maybe the offspring of a Nazi breeding program. She goes to work as a nurse for creepy Baroness Heidenreich (Inge Maux), who is suffering from Parkinson’s disease–though it only really manifests in some trembling when she tries to drink tea. Why would an aspiring anesthesiologist agree to be the hospice nurse for the Baroness? also-creepy caretaker Otto (Jochen Nickel) would like to know. Unfortunately, five minutes in, most everyone who’s seen another movie would be able to tell him.

Halloween Ends (2022)

October 14, 2022Posted in2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Streaming, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Halloweenends

***½/****
starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Andi Matichak, Rohan Campbell, Will Patton
written by Paul Brad Logan & Chris Bernier & Danny McBride & David Gordon Green
directed by David Gordon Green

by Walter Chaw I think the point, if not the pleasure principle, of franchise entertainments is the illusion of ownership over them, the obsessive knob-polishing of arcane knowledge not so very different, in many cases, from the pursuit of doctorate degrees in the liberal arts. You dedicate your life to learning so much about an exceptionally narrow field of study that you eventually come to a place where you know a lot about a little and not much about the rest. This monocultural–and, in most cases, monotextual–training tutors one in identifying deviations from the mean, so that what was joy in discovery becomes jealous taxonomy in defense of the tiny corner you’ve painted yourself into. The point of it all, ultimately, is to complain. When a totem such as John Carpenter’s Halloween arrives, it carries with it the inspiration for epistemological/maniacal cults: entire fields of worship in which the limited revelations provided by a singular text serve as the foundation for religion. Hungry for more tablets, new installments are met with jeweller’s glasses and tests of fidelity to the one true Word. The complaining, in other words, starts immediately. Is this new version of the Golden Calf walking the right way? Is it behaving as it should? Slow, not fast, or fast, never slow? Is it savage enough? Is the hero worthy? Is the lamb worthy of the blade? Each new film in any long-running series that earns enough each time out to warrant a continuation receives the scrutiny attending the unearthing of a new book of the Bible. Sources are vetted, false prophets are suspected, bloody debates are had in the town square, and finally, it’s either the grudging acceptance into a growing canon or a casting off into the wilderness. The complaining is the point. It solidifies a community like the negging built into Evangelical outreach missions, and it’s instant. The only thing verboten is if the franchise threatens the fragile identities of the high priests of its insular cult of personality.

Telluride ’22: The Wonder

September 30, 2022Posted in2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Thriller

Tell22thewonder

**½/****
starring Florence Pugh, Niamh Algar, Kila Lord Cassidy, Ciarán Hinds
screenplay by Alice Birch and Emma Donoghue and Sebastián Lelio, based on the novel by Donoghue
directed by Sebastián Lelio

by Walter Chaw Sebastián Lelio’s The Wonder aspires to the scabrous experimental satire of Lars von Trier’s Dogville, down to establishing itself on an open soundstage, but it doesn’t quite have that film’s intellectual rigour, nor its nihilism. Some would say that’s to its credit. I guess I’m glad I didn’t feel like swallowing a shotgun after The Wonder, but I do, er, wonder if its effectiveness isn’t undermined by its essential hopefulness. I had a similar problem with co-screenwriter/source novelist Emma Donaghue’s Room, which treats severe trauma as not only a thing small children don’t suffer for some reason, but a thing small children are designed to heal in adults. It’s appalling. Evidently, Donaghue is stuck on a theme, as The Wonder is also about sexual abuse and the imprisonment of a young woman. It’s also, again, about a child tasked with redeeming the soul of a family and a society. But as the film ends right at the point the real consequences of the atrocities it portrays are about to bloom, we can at least imagine that its happy ending will be marred by the howl of PTSD’s florid demons. The Wonder is an improvement over Room as well in the sense that it’s a full-frontal attack on the patriarchy and its repulsive handmaiden–organized religion–rather than a somewhat tepid thriller with mishandled social grenades. Any full-bore offensive against systems of oppression, especially one as handsomely helmed and brilliantly performed as The Wonder, has undeniable value. Yet I can’t shake the feeling that Donaghue, for all the darkness of her narratives, is mainly interested in the fairy-tale ending.

TIFF ’22: Sick

September 25, 2022Posted in2022, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller, TIFF

Tiff22sick

***/****
starring Gideon Adlon, Dylan Sprayberry, Beth Million, Jane Adams
written by Kevin Williamson
directed by John Hyams

by Angelo Muredda The Spring 2020 lockdown gets pulled out of the cultural memory hole in Sick, where vulgar auteurism favourite John Hyams proves himself a capable new aesthetic partner for screenwriter Kevin Williamson’s aging Gen-X insights. A satisfyingly nasty and well-executed cold open sets the scene, updating Scream‘s terrorism-by-home phone set-piece with a killer who’s a passive-aggressive texter and summarily dispatching a reluctant young mask-wearer who comes home empty-handed during the great toilet paper drought of April 2020. From there, it’s off to a remote country house with actual protagonists Parker (Gideon Adlon) and Miri (Beth Million), the latter more COVID-conscious than her reluctantly isolated social-butterfly friend. Their plan to ride out quarantine in relative seclusion soon falters when Parker’s sometimes-boyfriend shows up, paving the way for a worse door-crasher: the athletic, text-happy, black-clad killer from the opening sequence.