FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

July 26, 20242024, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, Superhero

**½/****
starring Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, Matthew Macfadyen
written by Ryan Reynolds & Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick & Zeb Wells & Shawn Levy
directed by Shawn Levy

by Walter Chaw What’s legitimately fascinating about Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine is how much of its humour is based on idiotic producer’s notes and franchise-killers. It’s essentially the manifestation of the concept of irony, and it relies entirely on an individual’s knowledge of the last twenty years of “Access Hollywood”/TMZ culture: the public and private failures of the rich and famous, like who Jennifer Garner’s ex is and how Marvel hasn’t figured out how to launch another Blade movie even though Wesley Snipes and Guillermo del Toro are both right fucking there. You don’t need to have watched all of these latex flicks and their television spin-offs or to have read the comics, but it helps in appreciating the Shrek-ness of it all, I suppose, absolutely the lowest form of endorphin-mining. We have reached tentpole filmmaking as micro-transactional phone game: 99¢ to unlock a new costume, another $1.99 to play as Lexi Alexander’s Punisher–you know, the good one. It works to the extent it works because you’re like me and you watched the X-Men cartoon in its first run and have always lamented that they couldn’t figure out how to make Gambit cool in the live-action universe. The entire midsection of Deadpool & Wolverine, in fact, takes place on The Island of Misfit Toys for nerd detritus (remember that appalling multiverse sequence in The Flash? Like that, but with living actors), more or less, and manages, against every expectation, to be a little bit touching. The film works like a roast/eulogy for thinking we wanted a Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s as if we’re all Regan waking up with a bad Pazuzu hangover. What the fuck did we do? What the fuck is wrong with us?

Fantasia Festival ’24: The Soul Eater

July 25, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Crime, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Thriller

Mangeur d’Âmes
*½/****
starring Virginie Ledoyen, Sandrine Bonnaire, Paul Hamy, Cameron Bain
written by Annelyse Batrel, Ludovic Lefebvre
directed by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo

by Walter Chaw Alexander Bustillo and Julien Maury’s first film, 2007’s Inside, is a prominent member of the brief but incandescent French New Extremity movement, and so fucking good it reverberates still, 17 years later, showing up in the fetus reaction shots of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part Two and contributing to the slight feeling of dread I’ve come to feel about changing lightbulbs and getting into fender-benders. Inside‘s stylishness, lawlessness, and formal gamesmanship left such a mark on me that I found an all-region release of Bustillo and Maury’s follow-up, Livid, before it secured an American release and did the same thing again with Among the Living. Neither was as good as Inside, but both were slick enough to suggest there might be more live rounds in the barrel. I was thrilled when they landed a prequel to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Leatherface, and disappointed when it failed to push any boundaries–a running theme, as it turns out, for their follow-ups: the monster film Kandisha and the underwater haunted-house flick The Deep House. They’re still promising filmmakers, but after setting the world on fire, their work has lacked danger and urgency.

Fantasia Festival ’24: Oddity

July 23, 2024****/****, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Ireland, Thriller

****/****
starring Gwilym Lee, Carolyn Bracken, Tadhg Murphy, Steve Wall
written and directed by Damian McCarthy

by Walter Chaw Damien McCarthy’s Oddity is the perfect campfire story: self-contained, tantalizingly high-concept, and terrifying as fuck without necessarily carrying any existential baggage or greater stakes than, “Hey, some fucked up things happened to these people once, gather ’round while I tell the tale of a night just like this.” It’s the kind of story I’d love to hear while camping on the moors–the kind of thing Harlan Ellison used to write in the front window of Dangerous Visions bookstore in Sherman Oaks as a parlour trick: give him a prompt and watch him go. In Oddity, the blind proprietress of a cursed oddities shop (curses removed upon purchase) seeks to discover the murderer of her twin sister. That’s it, the long and the short of it, but what McCarthy conjures from a one-sentence pitch is an exercise in unbearably ratcheting tension, with tremendous performances and impeccable filmmaking craft. Consider a prologue that, in the first minute, establishes the existence of a motion-activated camera documenting the movements of a lone woman in an isolated location. Its shutter clicks once when she crosses before it, and then again when nothing crosses before it. I mean “nothing” in the Goodnight Moon sense, the Wallace Stevens sense, where the camera captures a nothing we can see and a nothing we can’t. The woman leaves the relative security of her home twice, and both times, McCarthy offers us a point of view on her that isn’t attached to anything. She’s being watched, see, and it’s awful. The second time, at night, she makes it to safety, but before we can relax, the pitch-black outside tests the doorknob as soon as she locks it behind her. I thought of the scene in Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton’s The Leopard Man where a mother tarries in unlocking the door for her terrified daughter, who is given to crying wolf, and then the pleas stop, and a slow pool of blood begins to spread under the door.

The Exorcism (2024) + Maxxxine (2024)

July 22, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Horror, New Zealand, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE EXORCISM
*½/****
starring Russell Crowe, Ryan Simpkins, Sam Worthington, David Hyde Pierce
written by M.A. Fortin & Joshua John Miller
directed by Joshua John Miller

MAXXXINE
**½/****
starring Mia Goth, Elizabeth Debicki, Moses Sumney, Kevin Bacon
written and directed by Ti West

by Walter Chaw Joshua John Miller is Hollywood royalty: the son of actor/playwright Jason Miller (best known as The Exorcist‘s Father Damien Karras) and grandson of bang-zoom Jackie Gleason. He’s vampire royalty, too, having played foul, bitter Homer in Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark around the same time his brother Jason Patric headlined Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys as almost-turned heartthrob Michael, making Joshua John ideal for helming a film about the goings-on behind the scenes of a genre flick. The film-within-a-film in his The Exorcism is codenamed “The Georgetown Project,” a requel/redux/remake of The Exorcist in which Russell Crowe’s Tony Miller, a broken-down, widowed, recently in his cups actor seeking a comeback, essays a role very much like Father Karras while hoping to reconcile with his offscreen daughter Lee (Ryan Simpkins), who has come to live with him after being kicked out of school. The director is unctuous piece of shit Peter (Adam Goldberg), whose main motivating tactic for Tony is to remind him of Tony’s multiple failures as a human being while dangling his career in front of the lumpen actor like a spider over a Jonathan Edwardsian abyss. Credit Crowe for making Tony’s humiliation feel so familiar and lived-in that even his flinches from Peter’s gut punches are understated and resigned.

Fantasia Festival ’24: Bookworm

July 21, 20242024, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, New Zealand

**½/****
starring Elijah Wood, Michael Smiley, Nell Fisher
screenplay by Toby Harvard
directed by Ant Timpson

by Walter Chaw Kiwi jack-of-all-trades Ant Timpson’s sophomore feature after his strong hyphenate debut Come to Daddy reunites him with that film’s star, Elijah Wood. Bookworm, a quiet, charming echo of Hunt for the Wilderpeople, tells a familiar tale of wayward fathers and precocious daughters in a light, warm-hearted way. The girl is 11-year-old Mildred (Nell Fisher), and her dad is failed illusionist Strawn (Wood). When Mildred’s mother, Zo (Morgana O’Reilly), suffers a terrible accident, landing her in a coma, Strawn materializes out of the past to reunite with the child he sired but abandoned to pursue his dreams of becoming the next David Copperfield. Meanwhile, Mildred is convinced that if she can find proof of the Canterbury Panther, a legendary cryptid that allegedly lives in the New Zealand wilderness, she’ll be able to bring her mother back from the brink. Of course, the $50,000 prize money wouldn’t hurt, either. The problem is that Strawn is fairly useless as a father and even more so as an outdoorsman, but working in their favour is Mildred’s confidence and Strawn’s desire to finally do the right thing here in Mildred and Zo’s moment of crisis. Hilarity ensues.

Twisters (2024)

July 18, 20242024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, Kiernan Shipka
screenplay by Mark L. Smith
directed by Lee Isaac Chung

by Walter Chaw Lee Isaac Chung’s Twisters is the whistle next to the graveyard, a fascinating companion piece to Adam Wingard’s Godzilla x Kong: the one a spectacle designed to desensitize against our ongoing climate collapse, the other to deaden us against widely-broadcast images of an ongoing genocide. Its only two points of interest are Glen Powell’s sudden ascendance as matinee idol and the astounding majesty of natural phenomena fuelled by man-made climate change–meaning, in its simplicity, the goal is to leave audiences with the dazed satiation one associates with the aftermath of an ostentatious fireworks display: half-deafened, eyes bedazzled, the smell of gunpowder sulphurous in the air. A gut full of barbecued meats and sugared drinks in the American fashion, celebrating our liberation from a monarchy on the back of our God-sanctioned manifest genocide of an Indigenous population. We had fun, but that hangover is a sonofabitch. For me, the best part of Twisters is the extended prologue, where I thought it was going to be a Kiernan Shipka movie.

Longlegs (2024)

July 16, 20242024, Canada, Crime, Horror, Nicolas Cage, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt
written and directed by Oz Perkins

by Walter Chaw Thematically, at least, Oz Perkins reminds me most of Sofia Coppola, in that all of his films are autobiographical examinations of the relationship between isolated, creative, depressed children and their absent parents. Not abusive parents, mind (not exactly, in any case)–more parents lost in labyrinths in the company of goblin kings. Perkins uses negative space to suggest presence in the way that absence can become a palpable thing. Not a state in which one could lurk, but the lurker itself. After a parent is gone, they’re not really gone, because the space they used to occupy can take over all the light in your world. It’s a shadow of a naught. It happens when you’re not paying attention, and it happens because the absence of what is essential becomes physical in time. The golem of being forgotten is still preferable to being alone. I have the image in my head of Frankenstein and the little girl he drowns out of love. Their filmographies, Perkins’s and Coppola’s, are exquisite autopsies of the various forms the friendship takes between golden orphans and their parents. They tell it in the way their parents might understand them. It is their gilded grief that guided them to their seat behind the camera. Film is their native language, and so what they write in it is fulsome and tactile, full of subtext raw and personal. It is the cinema of solipsism, and it tends to be beautiful, self-indulgent by nature. And sometimes, but not always, it can even resonate with lost children vibrating at the same strange frequencies.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) – 4K Ultra HD

July 15, 2024****/****, 1980s, 2024, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, FFC Must-Own, John Hughes, Teen

****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Matthew Broderick, Alan Ruck, Mia Sara, Jeffrey Jones
written and directed by John Hughes

by Bill Chambers I often begin these autopsies of John Hughes’s oeuvre by regurgitating some lore about how the film in question came to be. In the case of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, I want to correct a faux pas I made on Twitter. “I find it fascinating,” I tweeted, “that in test screenings they all hated Ferris Bueller’s girlfriend and John Hughes figured out it was because of one line where she criticizes him. They cut it and her likability quotient skyrocketed.” (“Fascinating and depressing,” I added in a follow-up.) In actuality, the line had nothing to do with Ferris’s girlfriend cutting him down to size. I should’ve refreshed my memory of the incident beforehand, say by rereading this passage from A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away (reviewed here), the 2019 memoir by the movie’s editor, Paul Hirsch:

Fantasia Festival ’24: Introduction

July 11, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Canada, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror

by Walter Chaw There is such a thing as a “festival glow”: the consequence of seeing something new in the company of other zealots while the creators, more often than not, crouch in the wings, hungry for first reactions. There are catered parties and lanyards and the promise of “breaking” the next hot moment, or catching the crest of it before it peaks. It’s a social-media phenomenon now, but distribution companies were always caught up in it. Every year, Sundance will produce a “sure thing” that’s only that one time out of ten. I can’t say I’ve always been immune to the effects of the glow. Biases are hard to root out, and there’s a reason filmmakers want their films to debut at certain festivals and maybe not others. Imagined to be egalitarian, festivals are, after all, anything but. Still, I’ve always loved Canada’s Fantasia Festival, a celebration of genre that has consistently programmed the outer limits of the proverbial envelope in defiance of any boardroom interest that might water down its presentation. Each year I’ve done it, I’ve seen at least one movie that made my end-of-year list. Whenever I sit down to watch a Fantasia film, I expect to see a new favourite.

Carrying the Water: FFC Interviews Roger Spottiswoode

July 8, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, UK

by Walter Chaw I asked Walter Hill about a moment in Hard Times, his directorial debut, where, during a little dance at a picnic, the scene pauses and runs backwards for a few frames. “On purpose,” I asked, “or because of damage? Needing an extra second to fill the scene?” Hill looked at me for a beat, then broke out laughing. “Roger promised me that no one would ever notice that,” he said, “and it was true for fifty years.” “Roger,” of course, is Roger Spottiswoode, the legendary editor turned director who cut that film and later collaborated with Hill on the scripts for 48Hrs. and the unproduced The Last Gun. They met in the early ’70s on Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway: Hill had adapted the eponymous Jim Thompson novel and Spottiswoode was the British editor of Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs who’d been brought over to America to work on his Junior Bonner and The Getaway simultaneously. Peckinpah’s next film, the troubled Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, marked the end of Spottiswoode’s association with the notorious “Bloody Sam.”

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (2024)

July 7, 20242024, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Eddie Murphy, Streaming, Thriller

*½/****
starring Eddie Murphy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Taylour Paige, Kevin Bacon
screenplay by Will Beall and Tom Gormican & Kevin Etten
directed by Mark Molloy

by Walter Chaw Two things about Beverly Hills Cop IV, or Axel F if you’re nasty: 1) it’s so exhausted, there’s plenty of time to think through what these films are really about, and 2) there’s an existential horror attached to watching ageing idols trapped in endless iterations of themselves always, of course, but especially when they’re asked to continue to do the things they are no longer capable of doing. I’m thinking in particular of how sad it is to feel patronizing towards Harrison Ford after spending a lifetime in awe of him as an Übermensch in galaxies far, far away, booby-trapped tombs about to be robbed, or the Japanese-colonized Los Angeles of an eternal tomorrow just a few days away. Seeing him attempt to be young Indiana Jones in The Dial of Destiny is…pathetic? I’m not saying I could do better; I’m saying in my glorious prime, I could never have given performances as perfectly physical as Ford did, and today, still 30 years his junior, I can’t get off my sofa without noises erupting from every part of my body. I’m saying it would be like if Michael Jordan suited up again to attempt one more NBA season at the age of 61. It’s like breaking up a brawl at the old-folks’ home. They say the toothless get ruthless, though in my experience, they get brittle and out of breath. The Eddie Murphy of Martin Brest’s Beverly Hills Cop was lithe and dangerous, echoing the Eddie of 48Hrs., who could fight a hulking Nick Nolte to a draw. Of the dozens, maybe hundreds of times I watched Beverly Hills Cop, the image of Murphy in it that persists for me is of him swinging around in the webbing on the back of a trailer during the opening sequence. He’s quick, strong, dangerous. Now? Now Eddie’s 63 and in amazing shape–but amazing shape for a man who is 63.

Vampire sitting at a picnic table with a severed head on it: "I think we can win Clacton."

The Vourdalak (2023)

July 5, 20242023, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, France, Horror, Theatrical

Le Vourdalak
***½/****
starring Kacey Mottet Klein, Ariane Labed, Grégoire Colin, Vassili Schneider
written by Adrien Beau and Hadrien Bouvier, based on the story “La famille du Vourdalak” by Aleksei Tolstoy
directed by Adrien Beau

by Walter Chaw Adrien Beau’s The Vourdalak has the look and feel of all those period horrors from the heyday of AIP and Hammer and the early years of Amicus. There’s even a touch of Jean Rollin, who brought production value and class of a sort to eroticized genre fare. It also features my favourite horror scenario: a lost traveller landing on the doorstep of a mysterious manse in the middle of a haunted wood. In films that start like this, sometimes it’s during a storm, sometimes the moon is new and the night’s so black the traveller can’t see his hand in front of his eyes. Sometimes, he is the monster, though more often, the traveller finds himself in the company of monsters. In Valeri Rubinchik’s The Savage Hunt of King Stakh, maybe the pinnacle of movies that open this way, our wayward traveller is bewitched by the sight of a beautiful woman, the lady of the manor, who haunts the decrepit, cavernous expanse like the rumour of a draft. In The Vourdalak, the traveller is prim Marquis Jacques Antoine Saturnin d’Urfé (Kacey Mottet Klein), a member of the King’s court who has been separated from his companions by bandits. The family of Gorcha, a great man currently away on a mission of vengeance against the marauding Turks who ransacked this part of the world, takes him in. Gorcha has warned his sons and daughters (and daughter-in-law) not to let him, Gorcha, back in the house should his absence stretch longer than six days. Because if he comes back after that, he says, it will be as the Vourdalak.

The Devil’s Bath (2024)

July 2, 20242024, Austria, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Germany, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

Des Teufels Bad
****/****
starring Anja Plaschg, David Scheid, Maria Hofstätter
written and directed by Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala

by Walter Chaw Did it start with Robert Eggers’s The Witch, or was it earlier? I’m not speaking of origins–indeed, the origins of folk horror are as old and as long as the origins of Man. No, I’m wondering about when it became an annual thing to release these little folk-horror movie masterpieces. Films that, for the most part, are relegated to a few niche festivals and then banished to the Neverwhere of streaming, entombed for eventual discovery by a devoted audience that will pass them around like secrets scrawled on a parchment browned and creased from the handling. I’m talking about movies like 2017’s A Dark Song and Hagazussa, 2018’s The Wind, and 2019’s Saint Maud (although most would pick Midsommar for that year’s folk-horror contribution). In 2020, we had the brutal The Dark and the Wicked, but there was also Oz Perkins’s Gretel & Hansel and David Prior’s cult-ready The Empty Man. 2021 gave us Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth and the Adams Family’s Hellbender, 2022 brought You Won’t Be Alone and Nightsiren, and last year there was Demian Rugna’s When Evil Lurks. Has it always been going on like this–as an anniversary or biannual event, something so many of these films are structured around–without my noticing? And doesn’t it make sense that we use our cave painting and darkest night, our medium of mythologizing and memorial, to put milestones on our terror? Doesn’t it?

In a Violent Nature (2024)

June 28, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Ry Barrett, Andrea Pavlovic, Cameron Love, Lauren Taylor
written and directed by Chris Nash

by Walter Chaw Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature is wonderful on a technical level, but I’m suspicious of its motives. The best you could say about it is that if it likes slasher movies, it likes them for what seems like many of the wrong reasons; and the worst you could say is that maybe it doesn’t like slasher movies at all. At best, it doesn’t understand them and, because of that, doesn’t respect them. And because of that, I had a feeling it was mocking them–like being caught in an awkward conversation with someone explaining something you love back to you as something they think is, at its heart, a silly distraction. (Or, in this case, a vacuous dispenser of cheap thrills.) I suspect In a Violent Nature‘s primary influences were not, despite a few superficial call-outs, Twitch of the Death Nerve or Halloween or even the more atavistic Friday the 13^th saga, a series commonly misread as shallow and puerile. No, what it most resembles is Gun Media’s asymmetrical third-person, open-world Friday the 13^th survival game from 2017, which allows you to play as hockey-masked Jason Voorhees while a camera follows you over your right shoulder, Dardenne Brothers-style. The difference is that the video game has Jason’s mother’s voice urging him on, coddling him with warmth when he’s dispatched another victim, thus giving him a constant prod to engage in various, fruitless attempts to be a dutiful son, the desired offspring of a lost parent. The video game, in other words, sees the slasher as a vehicle at some level for exorcizing mental disturbances caused by abandonment and unrequited love for a parent. In a Violent Nature is essentially the feature-length version of that brilliant Geico commercial where a group of twentysomething idiots eschew a running automobile and hide behind a wall of chainsaws in a well-lit kill shed instead.

The Bikeriders (2024)

June 27, 2024****/****, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical

****/****
starring Jodie Comer, Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, Michael Shannon
based on the book by Danny Lyon
written and directed by Jeff Nichols

by Walter Chaw It’s hard to feel sorry for men, because the tragedy of so many of them is that they are only able to express themselves through violence. Our culture fetishizes violence, genders it male, and admires men who enact it while pathologizing those incapable of expressing themselves productively. Jeff Nichols’s The Bikeriders is another of his films about men trapped inside repressive systems: punished for their intuition, for tenderness and kindness, for love, for heaven’s sake. His films aren’t complicated, but in their romantic simplicity, they can be dazzlingly, emotionally complex. What causes brothers to fight at their father’s funeral? A man to mortgage everything he has to build a storm shelter? Another to ferry an unusual boy he fears he can’t protect across the country to the care of people who can? Nichols’s films are the stories of us all as victims of our hardwiring, whether it’s you who stands before me or me who can’t get out of my own way. They are elegies because there are few happy endings for men who choose violence or the people who would like to forgive them even when they’ve done nothing but keep the gentle parts of themselves encased in sinew and rage. I wanted to disappear inside The Bikeriders.

Sting (2024) + Infested (2023)

June 23, 20242024, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, France, Horror, Sci-Fi, Streaming, Theatrical, Thriller

STING
***½/****
starring Ryan Corr, Alyla Browne, Penelope Mitchell, Jermaine Fowler
written and directed by Kiah Roache-Turner

Vermines
***½/****
starring Théo Christine, Sofia Lesaffre, Jérôme Niel, Finnegan Oldfield
written by Sébastien Vanicek and Florent Bernard
directed by Sébastien Vanicek

by Walter Chaw If Jeff Wadlow’s Imaginary and John Krasinski’s If are opposite sides of the same coin, so, too, are Kiah Roache-Turner’s Sting and Sébastien Vanicek’s Infested: the first pair identifying a desire for imaginary friends, the second a desire for anthropomorphized things with which to share our otherwise empty and desperate lives. Each offers different nightmare scenarios for what happens when we try to escape into our fantasies of saviours and second–or first–comings. Each serves as a warning that we are the only thing that can save us; everything else is just a distraction. (I know If is meant to be a kid’s movie, but holy shit.) When patterns appear in our culture, I find it useful to at least begin a conversation about why that might be. I mean, when fish start floating belly-up to the surface of your pond, it seems dense not to wonder what’s in the fucking water. With only a few months left until our last election, it seems a good time to leave a monument here to the bleak timeline saying that pretty much everyone saw everything coming with clarity and rage and eventually resignation and despair once it was proven the people who could make a difference had already come and gone. We are cursed to live in interesting times, and we’re loath to suffer them alone.

Inside Out 2 (2024)

June 15, 20242024, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Drama, Family, Japan, Pixar, Theatrical

*/****
screenplay by Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein
directed by Kelsey Mann

by Walter Chaw Inside Out 2 hasn’t resolved any of the issues I had with the first film, which boil down to if I’m meant to treat this conceit seriously, then you should probably treat it seriously, too. I grew up with Judy Blume and can’t recall a single instance in her books where a young girl’s emotional development was a playground for cheap gags and high concepts. The sequel’s plot is inane, of course: Riley (voice of Kensington Tallman) goes into puberty around the time of summer hockey camp and experiences the complexities of self-doubt, self-loathing, and anxiety attendant to adolescence. All her thoughts and actions are retrofitted around the decisions made by a cadre of anthropomorphized emotions as they battle for supremacy over a TARDIS-like control centre located somewhere, it seems, in Riley’s frontal cortex. The stakes are elevated because Riley is a vulnerable young woman, not because she’s an especially well-developed character. Because she’s blonde, blue-eyed, and adorable, every little thing that doesn’t go well for her is cause for people raised in this culture to tsk and worry. I would go so far as to say the stakes are outsized for what this is, i.e., a nonce of a nothing-burger, precisely because we are hardwired to cherish this species of porcelain vessel independent of any personal knowledge of her. She is a pinnacle of a cultural ideal, and if she is troubled, we are troubled.

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

The Watchers (2024)

June 12, 20242024, 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.

Lisa Frankenstein (2024) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

June 6, 20242024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Romance, Teen, Zombie

*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Kathryn Newton, Cole Sprouse, Liza Soberano, Carla Gugino
written by Diablo Cody
directed by Zelda Williams

by Bill Chambers During what I suppose constitutes the climax of Zelda Williams’s Lisa Frankenstein, the “UK Surf” remix of The Pixies‘ “Wave of Mutilation” cues up on the soundtrack. It’s broadly fitting–three people have been mutilated over the course of the picture, and our antiheroine is preparing to claim a fourth victim with an axe–and period-appropriate. (“Wave of Mutilation” came out in 1989, the year in which the movie takes place.) It’s also, like a lot of the creative decisions driving Lisa Frankenstein, amateurish in its literal-mindedness, derivativeness (anyone who knows anything will tell you that “Wave of Mutilation” (UK Surf remix) belongs to Pump Up the Volume), and clunkiness, with the song fighting a losing battle to be heard through the prophylactic of Isabella Summers’s score. Lisa Frankenstein is the brainchild of writer-producer Diablo Cody, her first horror comedy since Jennifer’s Body, a film I didn’t care for in 2008 but suspect I was wrong about, having watched it back then as some sort of Megan Fox litmus test instead of as its own thing. I’m prepared to accept that I’m similarly wrong about Lisa Frankenstein–that I’m too old and male for it, that it will endear itself to me over time, the way today’s trash turns into tomorrow’s treasure. I dunno, though. I don’t think demographics are the issue–Cody conceived it as a distaff Weird Science (hence “Lisa”), and that’s kind of my wheelhouse–and I don’t think Lisa Frankenstein is epochal enough to age like anything other than milk.

If (2024)

May 27, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical

*/****
starring Ryan Reynolds, John Krasinski, Cailey Fleming, Steve Carell
written and directed by John Krasinski

by Walter Chaw The message of John Krasinski’s excruciating If is that you are never too old to have an imaginary friend–or, rather, you will never be so old that you won’t need an imaginary friend. Let’s all just sit with that for a minute. Work it around in your head. You will never…be so old…that you won’t need…an imaginary friend. Is that a warning? A promise of mental decline? Is the innocence and happiness of childhood synonymous with having an imaginary friend? The presumption is that imaginary friends are good things and that everyone has had one, you see, and one of the tragedies of growing up is that you forget your imaginary friend. Except there’s this adorable little Asian kid (Alan Kim, already needing a new agent) who doesn’t seem to have one for some reason, so I’m already starting to lose the thread that’s connecting this world. Do all kids have imaginary friends except Asian kids? Why is that? Is it a cultural ban? A deficiency? The fuck is going on? Another premise in If is that once kids forget about their imaginary friends, they disappear–except they don’t disappear, they’re still there but invisible to their former childhood pals. Bea (Cailey Fleming, who is great; this is not her fault) can see them, though. Bea is afraid she’s about to be orphaned. Bea is possibly a monster. Maybe there aren’t rules in If. Maybe it’s madness or hallucination, a psychedelic freakout or, better yet, a true sequel to the “It’s a Good Life” episode of “The Twilight Zone”, which I know did have a sequel, but here’s another one. Work with me here.

SDAFF ’24: Love Lies + Dead Talents Society

Heretic (2024)

SDAFF ’24: Bitterroot