Reviews

A Dark Song (2017)

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A lot of the reason why we’re experiencing such a rich indie horror boom in recent years is that there’s a concrete methodology to producing a solid, inexpensive horror film that can, in turn, make a tidy, near-guaranteed profit. Small scale horror scenarios confined to cheap, insular locations with intimate, no-name casts are like little assembly line machines with a set-in-stone order to how they can deliver the most immediate effect while keeping overhead in check. What’s so striking about the Irish indie A Dark Song is how this stick-to-the-basics reliance on horror filmmaking method & process is reflected in its own plot. As we watch A Dark Song’s two main players attempt to summon dark spirits in a regimented, by-the-books ritual, it’s easy to see their religious dedication to process & tradition reflected in the production of the film itself, which attempts to summon a dark spirit (and modest profit) of its own through admirably limited means. Indie horror filmmaking is itself a kind of regimented, traditionalist ritual that doesn’t always heed results, but when it works it’s (dark) magic.

A grieving mother turns to a self-taught occultist for help in staging a ritual that will aid in the process of coming to terms with her young son’s death by putting her in contact with literal demons & angels. The pair are locked away from the rest of the world in an old house for months, where they prepare for the Kaballist ritual as if preparing for battle. It’s at first difficult to take the occultist at all seriously as he switches his garb from bucket hats to ceremonial robes, but he apparently has extensive experience & hands-on research related to the task at hand. The mismatched pair purify their bodies by abstaining from food, sex, and alcohol. They draw geometric chalk lines on the floorboards in various rooms and recite prayers meant to “unshackle the house from the rest of the world” &”push off into the void.” There’s an obvious, meticulous method to this regimen, one the occultist enforces like a drill sergeant as he berates the grieving mother/paying customer in violent, overly macho bursts. Of course, his dedication to the rules of the ritual eventually do pay off in a spectacular supernatural breakthrough; there wouldn’t be much of a movie if it didn’t. Still, he often comes across as an abusive ass and the mother only puts up with his self-aggrandizing behavior because she’s as desperate to see the ritual’s result as the audience is.

I felt slightly let down by the climax & fallout of A Dark Song‘s conclusion, but it’s difficult to imagine a payoff for a movie this small-scale that could satisfy what the build-up promises to deliver. What’s odd is that the payoff almost doesn’t even matter, because the build-up of the meticulously-executed ritual is so satisfying in its own right (rite?). In the zeitgeist of modern indie horror this one lands somewhere between the aesthetics of Baskin & I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House, yet exceeds both titles in quality & overall effect because of its dedication to small-scale methodology. There’s something psychologically satisfying about watching two insignificant players follow a meticulous recipe for something much bigger than them and then reap the supernaturally outsized rewards for their troubles. I love the way that same dedication to precise regimen can be seen reflected in the filmmaking style that produced it. A Dark Song is a kind of time-tested horror movie alchemy that turns a small scale drama about two broken people alone in a house together into something much larger than its limited means. The movie itself is a kind of dark magic incantation in that way.

-Brandon Ledet

Life (2017)

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I know in my heart that it’s reductive to discuss a film solely in terms of genre, but that kind of categorization & attention to tropes is all the mental energy I can really afford the recent sci-fi horror Life. With characters & dialogue that linger with you for about as long as a fart and insipid, free-floating camera work stylization that distracts more than it enhances, Life has little to offer anyone not already on the hook for its basic genre thrills. It’s a decent enough spaceship horror with creature attacks that delight in their novelty & brutality just enough to excuse the waste of space human drama they interrupt. If you’re looking to Life for ambitious, heartfelt cinema you’re going to leave dejected. As a genre exercise, however, it’s a mild success that more or less pulls its own weight.

A spaceship packed with near-future scientists discover the first sign of extraterrestrial life. Initially the size of a microbe, this alien species grows exponentially in dimension, strength, and intelligence throughout the film until it ultimately poses a threat to humanity at large. When the size of a tiny translucent mushroom, the little Baby Genius bastard is strong enough to break every bone in a scientist’s hand. It grows from there to some kind of flying killer starfish to resembling an evil translucent Creech, making this more believable as a Monster Trucks prequel than the Venom prequel it was idiotically rumored to be upon initial release. Nicknamed Calvin, this evil little bugger is the obvious star of the show, as his wet blanket victims have nothing compelling to do or say between his shockingly violent attacks. Ryan Reynolds does his usual “lovable” asshole schtick & Jake Gyllenhaal reprises his stoic blue collar caricature from Southpaw, but for the most part our cosmonauts are a boring wash of measured British whispers, all interchangeable & instantly forgettable. I even had a difficult time differentiating the two female leads despite one of them being played by Noomi Rapace, who I’ve seen in several films before. Calvin was an interesting enough design & enough of a killer brute to hold my attention throughout Life on his own, but it is a shame he didn’t have more interesting people to kill.

As far as Alien retreads go, Life isn’t even the most interesting one to be released this year, not while Michael Fassbender is making out with himself in Alien: Covenant. The one interesting idea the film brings to that formula is in having the idiot scientist who first prods the monster with his finger actually being verbally chastised by his coworkers for acting like an unprofessional fool, when in other examples of the genre they’d all act that way. Beyond that, the film can only deliver thrilling monster attacks & an interesting creature design, unless you think an overly dramatic reading of Goodnight Moon is enough to carry an emotional climax on its own. Luckily for me, I’m already a huge sucker for space horror as a genre and found Calvin both charming & nastily brutal enough for the film to feel worthwhile. It’s reductive to say so, but your own interest level in that genre’s minor chills & thrills will likely dictate your experience with this one as well.

-Brandon Ledet

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

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The good news for dedicated fans of Ridley Scott’s highly influential sci-fi epic Blade Runner is that its three decades-late sequel, directed by Arrival‘s Denis Villeneuve, is entirely worthy of its predecessor. In the age of endless cash-in reboots & sequels, we tend to wince at rehashings of our personally-beloved properties in fear that the new material will dilute or cheapen the original’s memory. Blade Runner 2049 is more or less on par with the quality of the original Ridley Scott film, so protective fans who hold that one close to the heart can go ahead & relax. For the less avid among us, it’s not quite as exciting of a proposition. The stunning visual achievements of both Blade Runner films are undeniable in their potency. Scott’s neon-lit future-noir dystopia has influenced essentially every sci-fi futurescape that followed in its wake. Villeneuve’s hologram-filled, mustard-colored toxic wasteland is a worthy descendant of that vision, broadening the scope of its universe by stretching its tendrils into the dead spaces beyond its overpopulated urban clusters instead of simply recreating the original’s look with 2010s CGI. The stories staged within those visual, world-building achievements are much less impressive, however. Remembering details from the narratives of either Blade Runner film is like grasping sand in your palm; over time it all slips away. Blade Runner 2049 lives up to its namesake in that way just as much as it does as a visual achievement. Its surface pleasures are lastingly awe-inspiring, but the substance of the macho neo noir story they serve is ephemeral at best.

Ryan Gosling picks up the torch as the titular blade runner this go-round, following in Harrison Ford’s footsteps as he unravels a brand new corporate intrigue mystery about the future of artificial intelligence production. The manufacture of “replicants”, a form of A.I. slave labor gone rogue, has been made illegal on Earth; Gosling is employed to “retire” (destroy) the remaining Earthling replicant rebels who’ve slipped past police surveillance. They’re difficult to distinguish from naturally-born humans, but Gosling’s blade runner (eventually named some variation of Josef K, presumably after Kafka’s The Trial) is especially great at his job, mostly because he himself is a replicant, a traitor to his “people.” Between being insulted for being a “skinjob” traitor by everyone he encounters & playing out 1950s suburban domesticity fantasies with his A.I. hologram wife, K unearths a dangerous secret that might interrupt the balance between man & man-made machines while on one of his “retirement”/execution assignments. This grand scale conspiracy mystery gradually involves an expanding cast of futuristic heavies: an A.I. programmer who lives in an isolation chamber (Wetlands‘s Carla Juri, of all people); a rogue replicant manufacturer who verbally plays God through a string of philosophically empty, Bray Wyatt-style pro wrestling promos (Jared Leto, nearly tanking the picture); a haggard Harrison Ford reprising his role from the first film (hours later than you’d expect to see him); etc. K’s stoic P.O.V. at the center of this expanding cast remains a consistent anchor, though, relying on the exact same stone-faced masculinity charm Gosling employed to carry Drive. As big as the story is in an interplanetary, meaning-of-life kind of way, its focus always remains centered on the significance (or insignificance) of K’s function within it, even allowing the climax to be reduced to/resolved by a fist fight in an enclosed space.

Seeing this kind of a slow-moving, ultra-macho sci-fi noir on the big screen is the ideal setting. This is true not only because the surface pleasures of its visual achievements & sound design are its best assets, but also because it’s much less difficult to be distracted during its near-three hour runtime. Blade Runner 2049 technically boasts more sex, more violence, and more humor than the original, but it still leans heavily on the macho, hard sci-fi philosophizing of a Tarkovsky film or an academic lecture (it’s no mistake that a copy of Nabokov’s Pale Fire physically makes an appearance); that’s the exact kind of headspace where my mind invariably wanders. Looking back on its plot days after the screening I can recall big picture details in what it was trying to accomplish: a subversion of the Chosen One’s function in the Hero’s Journey, an echo of the human-A.I. entanglements of Spike Jones’s Her, whatever playing God nonsense Leto was mumbling about “storming Eden” & “the dead space between the stars,” etc. That’s not what makes the film impressive, however. What really sticks with you as the fine sand plot details slip through your fingers is the strength of its imagery. The way holograms haunt physical spaces or the way neon advertisements light the creases between the drab grey blocks of urban sprawl as a wall of synths wash over Hans Zimmer’s orchestral score is what ultimately remains as the dystopic dust clouds of the narrative clear. 2049 is true to the DNA of Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner in that way, for better or for worse.

-Brandon Ledet

Colossal (2017)

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With his intricately-constructed time travel thriller Timecrimes, director Nacho Vigalondo found dark humor in the depths of selfishness in human self-preservation, exposing the ugliness of humanity as a species through the mechanism of a sci-fi fantasy plot. His American language debut, the kaiju-themed black comedy Colossal, shifts its genre & intended targets just slightly, but mostly repeats the trick. Through an outlandish genre film scenario, Colossal gradually strips away the veneer of polite smiles & social niceties that makes human beings appear to be kind, empathetic creatures to reveal the giant monsters lurking underneath. The destructive behavior of alcoholism & pretty selfishness in particular is giving a measurable, kaiju-scale impact of real-world damage. Much like in Timecrimes, the inner lives of Vigalondo’s characters aren’t given nearly as much attention as the implications of their actions within the larger, metaphor-heavy sci-fi plot, but the mystery of how that premise works & what it implies about the ugliness of humanity is enough to leave a lasting emotional bruise on the audience.

Anne Hathaway stars as a New York City socialite whose alcoholism finally crosses the threshold from “fun drunk” to full-on dysfunction, a conscious departure from the A-type personas she’s been saddled with since The Princess Diaries. Kicked out of the apartment she shares with an uptight boyfriend (Dan Stevens in full Matthew Crowley mode), she finds herself with few options but to move back to her small-town childhood home. She’s employed as a barkeep by an egotistically sensitive childhood friend (Jason Sudeikis), which affords her way easier access to a steady stream of working-class staples Jack Daniels & PBR than is likely healthy for her. The nightly blackouts that her addiction downturn sparks start to branch out from pure self-destruction to negatively affecting millions of people: namely, the city of Seoul, South Korea. Whenever our drunken anti-hero finds herself wasted in the playground near her childhood home at the crack of dawn, a corresponding kaiju appears in Seoul and mimics her exact, stumbling movements, blindly killing anyone in its path. Once these repeating scenarios become undeniably linked, she must face hungover epiphanies like, “I killed a shitload of people because I was acting like a drunk idiot again.” Getting sober & improving herself isn’t enough to solve the problem entirely, though. As soon as she starts to get her life back together, a second monster appears in Seoul, challenging her sense of control in an increasingly ugly situation.

What’s most fun about the metaphorical sci-fi plots of Vigalondo’s work is that they continue to develop & complicate after their initial reveal. It’s not enough that the connection between the protagonist’s alcoholism and the giant monster terrorizing Seoul is made explicit. The film also pushes through to explore why the playground location & time of day correspond with its appearance, why Seoul in particular is connected to her in the first place, and what is implied by the appearance of the kaiju’s robot challenger. The answers to this mystery are lazily revealed through the device of a decreasingly cloudy repressed memory, but are satisfying enough in their impact to justify the transgression. Complicating the kaiju metaphor detracts tremendously from the energy spent on potential inner conflict & emotional depth, but also expands the film’s themes beyond the selfish destruction of addiction to include crippling jealousy, the cycles of physical abuse, and a myriad of other forms of destructive behavior. By the end of Colossal you have to ask if the bigger monster is the protagonist’s addiction or the poisonous group of self-serving men that populate her life. It’s a testament to how strong the mystery & provoked themes of the central metaphor are that it doesn’t at all matter that the characters remain surface level deep. Vigalondo’s ideas are intricate, plentiful, and mercilessly cruel to the virtues of humanity enough to carry this small-scale kaiju narrative on their own.

-Brandon Ledet

Marjorie Prime (2017)

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Originally written for the stage, Marjorie Prime tells the story of multiple generations of the family of Marjorie (Lois Smith), an elderly woman with dementia. Her companions over the years range from two separate dogs named Toni-with-an-i, a caretaker who lets her sneak cigarettes (Stephanie Andujar), her daughter Tess (Geena Davis) and son-in-law John (Tim Robbins), and a holographic avatar of her late husband Walter (John Hamm), appearing as he did in his younger years. At the start of the film, Marjorie’s “Prime,” the avatar of Walter, is still learning from her. He helps her with his dementia: providing companionship, reminding her to eat, and recounting (and editing when asked) stories of their past together when Marjorie can’t remember. Tess is disturbed by his presence and his appearance, but John convinces her of the program’s value. When Marjorie dies, Tess gets a prime of her own in the form of Marjorie to deal with her grief. And so a cycle is created, one that echoes and ripples into eternity.

This is a deeply somber and introspective film, a poignant meditation on the nature of what we call memory and how we define it as an objective history as well as how, at its core, “memory” is ultimately both fallible and malleable. As Tess points out in the film, when we remember an event, what we’re actually remembering is the last time we remembered the event, back and back and back, like a series of photographs slowly fading out of focus in a recursive loop. Or, as underlined in another of the film’s conversations that mirrors the plot, one of Tess recounts how one of her students had inherited their father’s parrot, which sometimes still spoke with the dead man’s voice, even twenty years after his death. Love and grief have a profound effect on the way that our memories evolve and devolve and undergo a metamorphosis as we age, and the ravages of time on the human body and mind also contribute to this imperfect personal narrative.

If you search for the film online, it’s defined as a drama/mystery, but that’s not entirely accurate. There is a dark family secret that slowly unscrolls and unspools over the course of the movie’s runtime, recounted in different ways by different people (some of whom aren’t people at all), but it’s not a mystery that you want to solve. The characters in the film don’t want to remember, and that affects the viewer as well; once you know the truth, you remember that the urge to expunge is often as powerful as the urge to record, that the desire to remember is counterposed by all the things we wish we could forget.

Marjorie Prime is at turns celebratory and solemn, weaving back and forth through different perspectives and memories that seem at times false and sometimes too real, and occasionally both. The direction is organic, and the audience is drawn into the film naturally, as if you are in the living room with Tess and Marjorie as they discuss Tess’s own daughter, Marjorie’s memory of the night that Walter proposed, or going to get Toni-with-an-i 2 from the pound in “the old Subaru,” and how the more time passed the more Toni 1 and Toni 2 became the same dog in Marjorie’s memories. The deft hand of subtlety is felt throughout, be it in evidence of recurring musical talent among the women in the family (Marjorie the violinist, Tess the pianist, and the unseen blue-haired Reyna and her band), or in the way that the passage of time is reflected by the appearance of new lamps and other furniture, or in the film’s final moments, which have a distinct “There Will Come Soft Rains” vibe. It’s a story that will follow you all the way home and get into bed with you, and you’ll appreciate the companion for as long as it will let you, before it too passes into the unending waves of time that erode away memory as surely as the ocean obliterates footprints in the sand.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Maze (1953)

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With most Twilight Zone-style, drive-in era horror films that save their major creative thrust for a big twist ending, it would be criminal to spoil the surprise for those not already in the know. In the case of The Maze, however, the last minute plot twist is the only reason to seek out the film in the first place, so it must be spoiled to be recommended. Read no further if you wish to avoid spoilers for a half-a-century old slice of schlock you’ll only ever run across in an especially bored 3 a.m. bout of channel surfing or YouTube scouring. In the 1950s, revealing the big secret at the end of The Maze would have been a major injustice; in 2017, it’s the only reason left for anyone to want to dig up this relic.

Two young, happy fiancées are derailed form their path to happiness when the groom’s Scottish royalty uncle dies of a mysterious illness, willing his nephew a castle. Leaving his fiancée’s side to tend to his uncle’s will, the groom cruelly cuts off all communication without warning, putting the question of their marriage in jeopardy. His fiancée arrives at the castle against his wishes in an attempt to talk sense into him & reestablish their romantic connection. She then discovers that he’s aged horribly, supernaturally, in the meantime, as some aspect of his new castle home is tormenting his soul. The mystery of what’s bringing him so much pain is obviously tied to the garden maze on the castle grounds, where no one is allowed to tread. It turns out that the hopeful groom is not the owner of the castle at all, but just a servant to the hideous beast that’s really running the show from inside the maze, a monster so terrifying it would drive any audience mad with fear.

Just kidding. The monster in the maze is just a humanoid frog. The final ten minutes of The Maze is a blissfully inane descent into mundane terror. The main “victim” of the film finally breaks into the maze and stumbles upon the real master of the castle has he hops his way to his regular nightswim in the castle pond. The frog monster isn’t even a killer, just a sadly deformed, centuries-old member of Scottish royalty. As is later explained, hilariously, “The human embryo goes through all stages of evolution, from invertebrate to mammal; he never developed past the amphibian phase.” Embarrassed when discovered by an outsider, the frightened froggy master hops his way up the castle steps & leaps to his own death, tempting everyone in the audience to think “’Tis beauty killed the frog.” Part of me really wants to feel bad for the poor guy, especially considering that the story is loosely based on legends of the real life Craven Castle. The other, louder part of me can’t get over the hilarity of watching a human actor menacingly hop around in an (impeccably made) frog costume.

The Maze is a lot like the original version of The Fly, except five years earlier and a thousand times sillier. The way the film chooses to lead up to its last minute reveal with a slow-moving, atmospheric dread puts a lot of pressure on its mysterious monster to deliver, especially since it (lily) pads out its 80 minute runtime with  direct-to-the-camera exposition & wedding celebration musical performances. By the time it actually answers audience impatience to “Get to the damn maze already!,” the monster it chooses to depict can only play like a punchline. I love its frog monster’s rubber costume and its dumb little roars that alternate between elephant & lion noises, but I can’t imagine anyone, then or now, receiving it as anything but a joke. Whether or not you believe those ten minutes of comedic bliss are worth the 70 minutes of empty horror “atmosphere” that precede it are up to you. Just know that I only provided details of the payoff as incentive for you to get there.

-Brandon Ledet

The Giant Claw (1957)

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“Once, the world was big and no man in his lifetime could circle it. Through the centuries, science has made man’s life bigger and the world smaller. Now, the farthest corner of her Earth is as close as a push-button and time has lost all meaning as man-made devices spread faster than sound itself.”

The clash of lofty sci-fi pondering & dirt cheap cinematic craft can be a rewarding comedic gem when found in the right 1950s drive-in pictures. For every two thousand forgettable B-movies of the drive-in era, there’s a Plan 9 from Outer Space or Cat-Women of the Moon waiting to remind you that drive-in schlock can be a kind of high art under the right circumstances. I found that reminder in the comedically absurd creature feature The Giant Claw. Although the film shared a double bill with the disappointing earthquake thriller mediocrity The Night the World Exploded & was (understandably) slammed by critics upon its release, The Giant Claw is a perfect little B-movie gem, an efficient reminder of why throwaway genre trash from half a century ago is still worth digging through. Its creature design is hideous, its dialogue is inane, and its lofty sci-fi ideas aren’t worth even the paper they’re scribbled on, but The Giant Claw is the rare discarded horror schlock that achieves a kind of sublime stupidity that can’t easily be found in its peers.

Much like its marquee-mate The Night the World Exploded, The Giant Claw opens with an abundance of voiceover narration & stock footage. The narrator barrels through swaths of dialogue, as if reciting exposition for a novel, providing unnecessary details right down to weather report (“sky: cloudy, overcast”). Its first few sequences where a “UFO,” described only as a “flying battleship,” disrupts military flight & disappears a few fighter jets threaten the exact kind of genre film dreck The Giant Claw stands head & shoulders above. It turns this trajectory around by introducing one of the ugliest monster puppets ever created in cinema: La Carcaña, a kaiju-sized hybrid of a turkey & a vulture. I swear the movie knows exactly how idiotic the puppet looks too. Whether it’s photobombing cameras mounted to weather balloons or chomping parachuting pilots out of the sky with a decisive crunch of the beak, the bird who rocks the titular giant claw is an idiotic wonder. Contemporary critics may have complained about the visible strings & rear projection that made it fly or the cheapness of the miniature toy trains & cityscape sets it destroyed, but the truth is that La Carcaña is too good for this world. We don’t deserve it.

There’s an inevitable romantic plotline at the center of this picture, one involving a pilot & a scientist, but it isn’t especially interesting outside its dated sex politics. Scenes where they share their first kiss while the woman is sleeping or the way she, the scientist, serves coffee & sandwiches to the boys at the airfield are certainly alarming. A lot of the dialogue is anchored to that pair’s romantic bickering, but that ultimately does not matter. Adam’s Rib this is not. What’s much more interesting (and amusing) are the sci-fi theories insanely floated while discussing the origins & vulnerabilities of the giant killer bird. After discovering that the bird is protected by an invisible anti-matter force field, it’s proclaimed, “That bird is extraterrestrial. It comes from outer space, some godforsaken anti-matter galaxy millions & millions of light-years from the Earth. No other explanation is possible.” The Giant Claw is packed with enough (flat) humor in its dialogue to let you know it’s self-aware of its own goofy quality. The movie is definitely more Gamera than Godzilla, but its outright jokes are painfully hacky, with lines like “I’ll never call my mother in law an old crow again!” This does not matter. In fact, it anti-matters.

Any one blessed shot of the big, dumb bird puppet that terrorizes its unfunny human foes is worth suffering through a thousand failed one-liners. I love its big, dumb, beautiful face and its foes’ Plan 9-type schemes to destroy its anti-matter shields with a concentrated stream of “masic atoms” is just icing on the cake. I usually avoid recommending people watch films from a “It’s so bad it’s good” perspective, but even The Giant Claw seems to think that of itself. It’s a light-in-tone creature feature that boasts the most delightfully dumb-looking creature design around. Any & all other concerns are secondary at best when gazing upon that vulture-turkey’s idiotic magnificence.

-Brandon Ledet

Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017)

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I approached this sequel with a fair amount of trepidation. The first Kingsman was an anomaly in that it seemed to fly under most people’s radar (it was in its third week when I saw it, on a Thursday afternoon, and there was not another soul in the entire theater) but was successful enough via word of mouth (after all, there is a sequel now) that it became a bit of a cult film almost instantaneously. The press for the film has been overwhelmingly negative, and I had reservations about seeing how far a follow-up to one of my favorite films of 2015 could possibly stray into territory that garnered such negative feelings.

And frankly, I just don’t get it. This movie is awesome.

Around my office I’m known as the guy who likes the weird artsy shit (and, if you’re reading this site, you probably are that guy or gal or person of a nonbinary nature in your office too), but I also genuinely love a surprise, over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek roller coaster of an action film when one somehow stumbles out of the studio system to slouch toward either notoriety or be forgotten. I wasn’t at all interested in the first Kingsman after seeing an overlong preview for it on FX during American Horror Story until a friend promised me that there was more to it than met the eye. And there was! It’s an unapologetic spy film that cribs from My Fair Lady (explicitly), blows the heads off of hundreds of people in a colorful fireworks display, and twists the familiar elements of the gentleman spy and action genres so far around that they essentially break off. It’s not the greatest film ever made, but it was an exceedingly well-choreographed exercise in bubblegum brutality and Blofeldian pomp.

The new film, Kingsman: The Golden Circle is all of those things as well. It’s a little more bloated than its predecessor in length and that nudge-nudge-wink-wink factor (it’s a fine line that’s difficult to manage/navigate), while running a little leaner on some subtlety. Sure, there are no lines that lean so heavily on the fourth wall as the original’s clunky “This ain’t that kind of movie, bruv,” but there is a salon robot that files down and a fifties themed villainous lair buried in “technically undiscovered” ruins in a jungle, not to mention the best use of Sir Elton John in a movie since Almost Famous.

We pick up where we left off last time, with Eggsy (Taron Egerton), codename Galahad, still mourning the loss of his mentor Harry (Colin Firth), the previous Galahad. We learn that he’s still dating Princess Tilde (Hanna Alström), whom he rescued from Valentine’s base at the end of the previous film and that the apparently-killed Charlie (Edward Holcroft), a Kingsman recruit who failed to make the cut, was mangled at the end of the last film but is still alive. In fact, he’s working for Poppy (Julianne Moore), a drug empress who wipes out all of Kingsman but Eggsy and Merlin (Mark Strong), the agency’s surrogate for Bond’s Q. The Kingsman doomsday vault points them in the direction of a kind of sister organization known as Statesman, which uses a distillery as the front for their off-book missions. After some of that good old-fashioned Let’s You and Him Fight nonsense, the remnants of Kingsman team with the Statesman cowboy stereotypes to thwart Poppy’s plan to strongarm the U.S. government into decriminalizing all drugs by withholding the antidote to a virus of her own design. “Champ” Champagne (Jeff Bridges) is the leader of his group: wild card party animal Tequila (Channing Tatum), archetypal honorable gunslinger Whiskey (Pedro Pascal), and shrinking violet Merlin equivalent Ginger Ale (Halle Berry). Before they reach the finish line, there’s much discussion of John Denver, a tussle or two with a couple of killer robotic dogs, a man being forced to eat a hamburger made of his friend, and a painful looking identity-erasing makeover. Also, there’s a subplot about the evil unnamed PoTUS (Bruce Greenwood) cackling and lying. And a wedding.

A lot of people have taken issue with some of the more subversive elements of the film and the way that they turn our hero into a bit of an idiot, but I like that. It’s another way of subverting the Roger Moore Bond’s tropes, because Eggsy isn’t the perfect wish fulfillment hero that Bond is. His friends are uncouth, he’s careless with his lethal gadgetry, and he doesn’t see an obvious traitor in his midst until it’s almost too late.When Whiskey and the Galahads (band name!) visit a facility hidden within some kind of ski resort, you expect that it’s going to be a play on the fact that Roger Moore’s Bond skied all the time, in A View to a Kill, For Your Eyes Only, and The Spy Who Loved Me. But nope, there’s no overlong ski chase, just a giant skyway plummeting from the sky.

Eggsy is still the un-Bond, and while this film fails to have the same (relative) gravity as it managed to maintain via the character arcs of the first, there’s a development there that I think is being overlooked by those who are decrying this as a bombastic failure, either as a follow-up or a standalone film. One of the things that people seem to be most upset about is the fact that Eggsy chooses to call his girlfriend and get permission to sleep with another woman in pursuit of the mission. Yes, it’s dumb in that it’s poorly timed (he couldn’t have called her on the way to the rendezvous?), but it reflects another anti-Bond quality that makes Eggsy more likable and relatable. For all the power fantasies that he fulfills, James Bond is an aggressive womanizer and kind of an asshole. He always gets the job done, but you know that if his marriage to Tracy Bond had lasted more than eight minutes he would have given her the old Betsy Draper special every time he was in the field, whether it was beneficial to his mission or just because he was bored. The film goes out of its way to show you just how unlike Bond Eggsy is in this way, and it’s actually refreshingly original. Also, there’s a laser whip.

I’ve also seen some responses to the political commentary in the film, which is allegedly slanted left. I was surprised to read this interpretation of the film after my screening, as I actually thought the film was rather toothless in its reflection of the current American political climate (not that I expected any deep commentary at all in this one, but by making the PotUS a major character, you invite that criticism). After all, in the last one, it was made pretty explicit that President Obama (along with essentially every political leader save for Tilde and her father and perhaps a few other dissidents) was a willing participant in villainous mastermind’s evil scheme. I’ve seen dismissal of the Oval Office subplot as being “pandering” because the evil president’s moral victor is an older blonde woman, a way of giving liberals the world that they want to live in. I didn’t (and don’t) see it that way, however. All of the reporting that we see within the film comes straight from Fox News, and, in comparison to the complicit Obama of the first film, the evil President herein is given neither a name or an explicit political party, and doesn’t have the mannerisms or characteristics that would truly make him an analog of Trump: no combover, no dayglo skin, no broken or rambling sentences or rogue trains of thought. There’s no actual political commentary here, and that’s fine; this is just another generic evil president in a long line of fictional evil presidents. If you see Trump in this performance, well, that’s up to you.

Overall, this is a sequel that works. It’s a bit paler and a not quite as fun, but it’s stylish, witty, visceral, colorful, and a hell of a lot of fun. It’s a film that’s not to be taken seriously, and it delivers on the promise that the (spoilery!) trailer sets up. On a scale of sequels that copied the template of the first film verbatim from Men in Black II to 10 Cloverfied Lane, it errs on the “scenes from the last one, but with a twist!” side, but there’s still enough new to satisfy you, as long as you’re willing to get lost in a candy kingdom of headshots and people getting cut in half. And Elton John in fabulous feathery shackles.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Happy Death Day (2017)

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As promised in its (brilliant) advertising, Happy Death Day‘s defining gimmick is dutifully reimagining the 1990s comedy Groundhog Day as a violent teen slasher. What the ads don’t convey, however, is that the slasher end of that gimmick is very much tied to the second wave slasher boom that invaded the horror genre in the nü metal days of the late 90s & early 00s. Happy Death Day‘s general atmosphere of a late 90s slasher relic extends beyond its shithead college students’ slut-shaming, carb-counting, disability/rape/queer sexuality-mocking ways to inform even its basic approach to horror. Its depictions of PG-13 acceptable violence echo the big budget action & comedy beats that tinged post-Scream slashers like Urban Legend & I Know What You Did Last Summer. There’s a masked killer who murders our (deeply flawed) protagonist dozens & dozens of times on her birthday as she relives the same time loop on endless repeat, but outside a few jump scares & moments of horror tradition teen-stalking, the film doesn’t truly aim to terrorize. Repetition allows the doomed sorority girl to adjust to her supernaturally morbid predicament and Happy Death Day gradually evolves into a girly (even if mean-girly) comedy that employs horror more as a setting than as an ethos. It surprisingly owes just as much to big budget, post-Scream slashers (and maybe even their Scary Movie spoofs) for its tonal DNA as it does to the timeline loop plot of Groundhog Day.

Not only does the sorority girl victim at the film’s center have to relive the day of her murder on an endless loop, she begins that day hungover & stumbling home from a drunken hookup’s dorm room. Much like Bill Murray’s bitter anti-hero in Groundhog Day, she’s a mean, selfish brat with an ever-growing list of enemies she pettily steps over as a sorority bully caricature. Her ethical shortcomings both set up a plot progression where she incrementally becomes a better person throughout the film and allow for a long list of potential suspects who might want her dead. Is the killer one of her socially-slighted sorority sisters?  One of her ghosted sexual partners or their girlfriends/wives? The father whose phone calls she continually ignores in each loop? A total stranger? Unraveling the paranormal mystery of who repeatedly murders this deeply flawed, but gradually improving sorority monster on her birthday is obviously a significant part of what makes the movie a dumb, fun time. Happy Death Day eventually adds accumulative stakes to its resettable scenario, but for the most part the protagonist enjoys a kind of supernatural privilege in her time loop immortality that allows her to treat her own life as a kind of consequence-free playground. Of course, it’s a repeatedly deadly playground that cyclically concludes with a violent murder by the hands of a masked killer, but it’s ultimately all in good fun.

Like with most dumb fun slashers, the ideal audience for Happy Death Day might be dark-humored teens just slightly younger than the college campus caricatures that populate the film. As with his bro-minded horror comedy Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, director Christopher B. Landon has the sensibilities of a teenage boy who just watched Army of Darkness for the first time. As an adult, Happy Death Day‘s mean teen humor can sometimes land a little awkwardly, as can its romantic subplot about a sorority hottie becoming a “better” person by falling in love with a horror nerd with They Live! & Repo Man posters on his dorm room wall instead of the meathead bozos she usually bangs (not to mention the way it congratulates him for not raping her after a night of hard-drinking, the bare minimum of human decency). That mentality feels especially gross right now, given current conversations about the gender politics shortcomings of genre film nerd culture institutions like Ain’t It Cool News, Fantastic Fest, and Alamo Drafthouse. A softer, less discerning teen mind searching only for a fun gimmick & memorable kills is a lot less likely to get hung up on those details. The film’s college campus setting & campus life caricatures play directly to that demographic as well, especially when they include images like frat paddles, school mascots, bongs, and sorority houses in their kill scenes. You even get the sense that an earlier draft of the script might have been titled Monday the 18th (the date that endlessly repeats) as a nod to its direct, Jason Voorhees-style appeal to teenage audiences.

Even more surprising than Happy Death Day‘s adherence to a nü metal 90s slasher aesthetic & mean girl sorority humor is its New Orleans setting. Watching the film just blocks away from its Loyola campus filming location was a surreal experience, one backed up by the tree moss & streetcars in the background and the school mascot/killer’s mask bearing a striking resemblance to the (even more terrifying) king cake baby mascot that seasonally appears at our local NBA games. I honestly fall a little too perfectly in the film’s target audience Venn diagram to offer an unbiased opinion: I was a teenage boy who grew up on post-Scream slashers; I consider Groundhog Day to be one of the best-written films of all time; I’m a lifelong New Orleans resident. I personally hit the full Happy Death Day demographic trifecta. Even being immersed in that perspective, I like to imagine that plenty of other people, especially 2010s teens, will have blast with the film. It’s not the clever, paradigm-shifting Groundhog Day reimagining of Edge of Tomorrow, but it’s still solidly entertaining as a dumb fun horror flick. It’s just one that admittedly focuses more on the dumb fun than it does on the horror.

-Brandon Ledet

Friend Request (2017)

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When the dirt cheap supernatural slasher Friend Request was first released in its native country of Germany, it was originally titled Unfriend. To avoid confusion with the modern found footage classic Unfriended (known as Unknown User in Germany), the title was later switched to Friend Request in its move to the US. That marketing decision may have helped distinguish this film from assumptions that it belonged to the same franchise timeline as that Blumhouse production, in which a group of shithead high school teens are hunted by the ghost of a friend who committed suicide as a result of their bullying, a story told entirely through the POV of the Final Girl’s laptop. Comparisons in quality between the two films are inevitable, however, as Friend Request is also about a group of internet-addicted youngsters (this time college-age med students) who are hunted down by the vengeful spirit of a suicide victim; it’s just not framed as a found footage narrative. The comparison does Friend Request no favors, really, as it’s the Bucky Larson: Born to be a Porn Star to Unfriended’s Boogie Nights, the Corky Romano to its Goodfellas. As the sillier, more formulaic entry into the social media-age technophobic horror canon, the film only stands a chance to excel as a campy, over-the-top novelty. Thankfully, as an airheaded jump scare fest about a Faceboook witch, it delivers on that entertainment potential (in)competently. Friend Request may be the dumbest movie I’ve seen all year, but I’d be a liar if I said it wasn’t solidly entertaining.

A second year psychology student befriends a recent student transfer to her class, a gothy Nell type, out of pure social pity. She has enough empathy in her heart to throw this newbie weirdo a friend request on “Facebook” (or some generic equivalent), but not enough to actually hang out with her or invite her to parties. After a few overly-needy exchanges online, she wisely decides to back away from this social media “friendship,” knocking the new girl’s friend count back down to a near-impossible zero. Hurt, the goth kid kills herself and uploads the video of her death to social media from beyond the grave, haunting her former “friend” as vengeance for turning her back. That’s when the traditional ghost story plot kicks in. One by one, her closest friends are violently killed by this spurned goth ghost, each “friended” by her account immediately before their deaths, despite her own demise. Videos of their attacks are posted to the psych student’s account & timeline, so that her own friends list plummets with each post under the assumption that she’s a callous, heartless monster for sharing such content. The posts cannot be deleted. The account cannot be deactivated. She has no choice but to watch as her social life crumbles and she falls to the lowly societal status initially occupied by the hopelessly goth Nell who haunts her from the digital afterworld. To make things worse, the goth ghost is also revealed to be some kind of internet-age witch who can hack & weaponize all computer devices thanks to her command of demonic code that defies the rules of our puny 1’s & 0’s, placing all internet domains under her wicked dominion.

I’m a huge sucker for this kind of modern gimmickry, where of-the-moment technology is incorporated into the fabric of disposable genre films. Of course, I can think of better examples in the social media exploitation genre (Unfriended, Nerve, and #horror all immediately come to mind), but I believe Friend Request’s novelty as an over-the-top 2010s technophobic horror will only become more valuable over time. The film is deceptively generic in its (surprisingly effective) jump scares & general haunted house aesthetic, which incorporates imagery like baby doll parts, mirrors, and woodland settings so familiar you can see them all represented in Bray Wyatt’s pro wrestling promos. What will make it more valuable later on is the way it also documents what modern social media browsing, especially on Facebook, looks like. Before the individual kills line up for the camera, much of Friend Request’s story is told through Facebook timeline montage, depicting mundane functions on the site like cover photos, deleting posts, error messages, “friending” (duh), “liking,” etc. It takes cinema this trashy to bother with that kind of pedestrian detail, which is more of an accurate time capsule of life & communication in the 2010s than any classy indie drama or expensive superhero epic likely will be able to capture. I was also tickled by the film’s decision to make its ominous warnings about the pitfalls of Internet Addiction Disorder ludicrously literal in making the laptops & PCs themselves demonic objects that must be destroyed. The film’s Facebook witch uses laptops as the modern equivalent of black mirrors, making them the source of evil spells. This not only opens the film up to the interesting imagery like characters’ reflections in the screen being overlaid with timeline scrolls; it also leads to ridiculous line readings like, “Sometimes she would stare at the computer for hours, nothing on the screen at all, just her reflection in the dark.” That’s adorable.

Comparing Friend Request to Unfriended, the Citizen Kane of its micro-genre, can only weaken its cultural value. Considered on its own, it’s a fun, goofy-as-fuck horror with a direct-to-VOD feel in its production, but a strong enough gimmick & sense of violence to leave a lasting impression, however cheap. The movie often knows it’s having fun, too, making room for obvious punchlines like, “Unfriend the dead bitch!” whenever possible. I can only report my experience as a sucker for the social media-phobic horror as an artform (as well as other gimmicky genres of its ilk), but I found the film to be a total blast, one of the year’s more surprisingly delightful slices of schlock.

-Brandon Ledet