blumhouse

Into the Dark: A Nasty Piece of Work (2019)

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Although the Hulu/Blumhouse collaboration Into the Dark has come to an end, I was still holding out on catching up on the episodes I hadn’t seen yet, since it was a tradition between me and Erstwhile Roommate of Boomer to watch them together, and although we have seen each other in person several times this year, as things start to open back up, catching up on movies from an anthology series wasn’t really at the forefront of anyone’s agenda. The series was never very far from my mind, however, as I still managed to mention it several times, whether I was saying that The Unholy or Black Box felt better suited for the series, or including one of its installments at number 13 in my Top Films of 2019 list. However, after getting my little family unit to buy in on the delightful Deadly Games, I didn’t want to push things by nominating another subtitled Christmas horror flick, and there was much objecting to the Creepshow holiday special (you still have one fan in this house, Anna Camp), so we switched from Shudder to Hulu and checked out the 2019 December/Christmas release, A Nasty Piece of Work. Some spoilers! Big ones! But not of everything! 

Ted (Kyle Howard) just can’t seem to get into the good graces of his unpleasant and unpleasable boss, Steven (Julian Sands, star of the worst Phantom of the Opera), especially in comparison to and competition with perennially brown-nosing Gavin (Dustin Milligan). After a particularly embarrassing incident in which he put himself in harm’s way to retrieve and deliver Steven’s golf clubs in an ass-kissing attempt, only to be dressed down by Steven for doing so and shown up by Gavin, who mocks him for picking up Steven’s [dumb rich people bullshit] clubs instead of his [also dumb rich people bullshit] ones, Ted destroys the mirror in an executive bathroom with said implements. He’s got impulse issues! Later, following the announcement at the annual office holiday party that there will be no Christmas bonuses that year, Ted sees Steven alone on the office balcony and at first seems to be planning to push the older man to his demise, but instead delivers a clipped corporate platitude of gratitude about what an honor it is to work there, etc. Steven takes this opportunity to invite Ted out to his home for a special Christmas celebration, implying that he plans to share more information about a promotion for Ted then. 

When Ted and his wife Tatum (Angela Sarafyan) arrive at the party, they barely have any time to bask in the opulence of the exterior of Steven’s home before they’re nearly run down by Gavin in his Porsche; he and his wife Missy (Natalie Hall) have also been invited. Although Ted spots someone in an upstairs window, Steven’s wife Kiwi (Molly Hagan) insists that the three couples are alone in the house. What follows is an evening of increasing mind games, some of which work and some of which are purely fantastical. Kiwi and Steven go full Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with her withering remarks about his priorital elevation of his business over starting a family as well as his present impotence, while he bons mot about her drinking and other indulgences. Paul Soter of Broken Lizard fame is the credited writer here, but there may as well be a “based upon characters created by Edward Albee” thrown in there for good measure, since we even get a staged shooting, just as in Woolf, although this time when Steven splatters Kiwi’s “brains” all over the marble walls, he immediately turns to Gavin and Ted for recommendations for plans of action to ensure none of them see jail time. It bears mentioning here that, like their husbands, Tatum and Missy are also fundamentally different. Tatum is a down-to-earth woman who works as an insurance mediator and is excited about her snowflake earrings. Missy, for her part, is an astrology-espousing unemployed trophy* wife who shares her husband’s drive for sucking up, although she’s less successful at it; when she tells Kiwi that the older couple’s home has excellent feng shui, Kiwi playfully says that at least designers don’t charge extra for that, but her contemptuous scowl doesn’t disguise just how little she thinks of this input. Missy’s not a complete slouch, however, as when Steven prompts his employees for a solution for what to do about Kiwi’s “corpse,” Gavin is speechless, while Missy manages to kick him into gear, and when Ted reluctantly joins in, Tatum is justifiably horrified. 

Things only get stranger from there, and although the film never really got quite as weird in the way that I wanted, it exceeded my expectations in other areas. Kiwi jokes that they got a great deal on the house due to a series of murders that were performed by people living in the walls, which, in combination with Ted’s aformentioned spotting of masked people in an upstairs window and a sequence in which Missy is watched by someone peeping from a hidden room, makes you think that this little Mike Nichols LARP is bound to take a Bad Ronaldian twist any second, but the actual resolution of that particular plot thread is an underwhelming revelation that will have you saying “You’ve got to be Eyes Wide Shitting me!”, which sort of makes sense in context and which I thought was very funny, although no one else laughed. Instead, things take a turn for the even more bizarre. For instance, we learn that Ted’s been lying to Tatum about his Friday night activities, which everyone initially infers to mean that he’s an adulterer. Instead, he’s actually visiting a boy, Daniel, whom Ted paralyzed as the result of a traffic accident that Ted catalyzed by driving in while in an infuriated state following a previous work outburst, years before he and Tatum met. This twists further when Kiwi and Steven reveal that they have Daniel (Nico Greetham) in the house with them and plan to adopt him, and that if Ted doesn’t fulfill Steven’s latest demented command, Daniel will be intentionally subjected to a life of neglect and abuse, but that scene alone contains at least two more additional revelations that push the absurdity to the extreme, but I couldn’t help loving every minute of it. 

Essentially, this is a movie in which we get not only such genre-standard classics as: 

  • Rich old creep creeps on his employee’s wife. 
  • Drunk rich lady creeps on husband’s employee in front of her husband.  
  • Chekhov’s guns!
  • Rich old creep creeps on his other employee’s wife. 
  • Intramural voyeurism. 

We also get such strange new heights as: 

  • Bros wearing a suit of armor. 
  • Angrily smashing delicate face masks.
  • Drunk rich lady threatens to kill herself by tying her scarf to a life-sized poolside statue and pushing it in. 
  • Schrödinger’s ammunition!  
  • A truly outstanding amount of gaslighting and preparation.

Contemporary criticism of the movie from closer to its release largely focused on the film’s lack of discussion of class friction. While that’s a valid critique, I suppose, most of them cite that there’s little discussion of the vast differences in wealth between Steven and his employees, and I’m not really sure that I agree, especially because my biggest problem with the film’s economic commentary lies in what it doesn’t talk about, rather than what it does. Essentially, I have the same complaint that I’ve had about National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation for years: the money problems that Clark Griswold faces are not relatable to me, as he has a large and lovely home, no trouble providing for his family, and doesn’t seem to be in any danger of losing his job if he takes a truly staggering amount of vacation time.  Clark just wants a Christmas bonus so that he can get a swimming pool, and because he assumed he would be getting it, he made plans for it without making sure funding was secure; Christmas Vacation requires Cousin Eddy to show up and good-naturedly antagonize Clark because otherwise the only conflict is the result of Clark’s bad decision. Likewise, we never really get a very good explanation of why Ted and Tatum need this bonus so much. Ted’s so angry about being shown up by Gavin in one scene that he destroys a very expensive bathroom, but the fact that he, like Clark Griswold, has so much riding in a bonus, makes him feel like an artifact from a different era. 

Clark Griswold is unrelatable because, in the 1980s, a middle class chucklenut was living the American Dream. In a 2021 where everything is worse, Ted’s desperation for a bonus, when he seems to be doing better than a lot of people, is a premise that is alienating in just how out of touch it is. One of the strengths of Into the Dark is the way that it streamlines its storytelling, and this installment (like most) takes place almost entirely in one location (Steven and Kiwi’s house), other than a couple of bookend office sequences and an interior dialogue scene in Ted and Tatum’s car. They don’t openly talk about their financial straits on that drive; they just talk about the long hours that Ted has been putting in, and because of the budget constraints that force these smooth-running narratives we see nothing of their home and the life they lead therein. There’s no sense that Ted feels distant from his wife or that she feels a particularly sharp loneliness because of their long hours apart. Of the two, it’s Gavin who’s having money problems because he’s leveraged his credit to create a facade of wealth to impress Steven, while Tatum and Ted seem to be… fine. Only 12% of employers provided bonuses in 2020, with that number up to 23% in 2021, and while that’s self-reporting from businesses, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics data from 2019 backs this up, with year-end/holiday bonuses ranging from 6-15% depending on the industry and type of bonus. I happen to be fortunate enough to work a day job where I usually get a bonus at the end of the year, but it’s not every year and I know better than to count on getting it in order to maintain financial stability (and all of them added together for the past 6 years still wouldn’t get me a swimming pool), and most people don’t at all. I certainly never got one from working in the public sector as a teacher or in academic support, and the only bonus I ever got while working retail was a frozen turkey. Hell, if we’re going to crib from Albee and Harold Ramis, why not bring old Dickens into this and give Ted and Tatum a son who needs an expensive treatment, or maybe one of them has an ill parent who needs full time care. Even being behind on a mortgage payment because of a surprise short term medical emergency would add a little bit more urgency to the proceedings. 

That same need for an aerodynamic production process and quick and easy cash returns on investment that are a hallmark of even the best Blumhouse releases is great, because they’re the only company giving any real money to small-scale productions, but those pursestrings are tight when it comes to locations. Usually where Dark succeeds or fails is in the performance and the style. Director Charles Hood made only two features prior to this, and if you don’t recognize the names of the TV shows he’s directed episodes of, I don’t either. Cinematographer James Kniest, however, is a frequent Mike Flanagan collaborator, and that shows in the shot choices and composition here, elevating this episode of the anthology above some of its less ambitious peers. Milligan is known more for his comedy roles, and while he’s good at playing dim-witted here as he did on Dirk Gently, there’s a talent in the way that he can deliver a serious scene, as he does here as Gavin while Steven plays back unkind things that Gavin said about Missy in front of her, then effortlessly and seamlessly transition right back to childlike wonder. Molly Hagan is the real MVP here, however. Hagan’s an actress who has made a single appearance in virtually every television show produced between 1992 and 2015. Scarecrow and Mrs. King? Yes! NCIS: New Orleans? Of course! The Golden Girls? You bet! Chicago Hope? Uh- huh. Six Feet Under? Well, obviously! Numb3rs, Monk, JAG, and Friends? Yes, yes, yes, and duh. But here she really gets to be Elizabeth Taylor, and she does it with style and aplomb. 

So yes,  A Nasty Piece of Work is more than the sum of its parts. If you happen to have Hulu and want to have a little fun with a horror-adjacent Christmas special, take another journey into the dark. 

* The film does seem to pretend that Sarafyan isn’t a beautiful woman, and later in the narrative Missy calls her “podunk,” but the rest of the movie doesn’t really sell that, other than a moment wherein Kiwi compliments her boots and Tatum talks about getting them on sale, to which Kiwi gently chastises her that rich people don’t brag about that sort of thing. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Shiva Foreva

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I recently had the pleasure of taking off an entire week from work to do Nothing – casually filling my time with movies, meals, and household chores instead of cramming those activities into the tight crevices between pushing papers & sleep.  It was a necessary, restorative break from my usual routine, one I’ve been reluctant to indulge in since the pandemic-era version of a “vacation” really just means extended time alone on my couch.  I managed to watch 18 feature films over that 10-day stretch, sometimes cramming in four a day and sometimes watching none at all to make room for “social” activities like podcasting and watching pro wrestling with friends.  As a result, most of the films didn’t have much space to stand out as anything distinctly noteworthy (with the major exceptions of Hackers and Pig), but I did notice some striking similarities shared between a few of the pairings.  Without a doubt, the most highly specific, niche double feature in that week-long binge was Shiva Baby & The Vigil: two incredibly tense new releases set at Jewish funeral rituals.  Neither stood out to me as personal best-of-the-year material the way I hoped.  Still, they were both impressively energetic, nerve-racking debuts from first-time filmmakers, and their shared Jewish funeral rites context only underlined their strengths as a pair.

I’d feel much worse about lumping these two unique, otherwise unrelated films together purely for their shared religious context if that overlap hadn’t already been covered by other blogs (most notably the Jewish outlet Alma‘s post “A New Kind of Jewish Horror Film Has Arrived“).  Shiva Baby in particular suffers the most in that pairing, since the film is already fighting off frequent comparisons as the Jewish, bisexual version of Krisha.  To be fair, Shiva Baby is a lot more similar to Krisha than it is to The Vigil, at least in terms of its tone & genre.  Set at a shiva ceremony following a distant relative’s passing, a college student & sex worker finds herself trapped at a nightmarishly awkward “party” with her parents, her ex-girlfriend, her Sugar Daddy, his wife, and their baby – struggling to keep them all apart so they don’t accidentally tattle on her triple-life.  A low-budget, 77min immersion in the sweaty panic of that disastrous wake, there’s a lot going on in Shiva Baby that directly recalls the familial tensions of the Thanksgiving-from-Hell setting of Krisha, right down to the winding tension of their plucked-strings scores.  I just don’t remember Trey Edwards Shults’s film being so Funny.  Writer-director Emma Seligman makes Shiva Baby so painfully, overwhelmingly awkward that it transforms into a kind of black comedy.  At the very least, she wouldn’t have cast Fred Melamed & Jackie Hoffman in bit parts unless she was aiming to wring out some laughs, no matter how dark.  The film even ends with all the main players converging into one cramped, chaotic space like a true farce, capturing the feeling of when your life is going so catastrophically bad that all you can do is laugh to release the tension.

The Vigil is much shorter on laughs.  It relieves its own dramatic tension in a much more traditional, straightforward way – aiming for classic haunted house scares that just happened to be staged in a highly specific cultural context.  Whereas the shiva ceremony of Seligman’s film is a post-funeral celebration & communal mourning, Keith Thomas’s haunted house horror covers the time before a funeral, when an assigned “shomer” sits vigil with the deceased so their body is never left alone.  In this case, a recent defector from an extremist form of Orthodox Judaism is reluctantly roped back into his old community as a one-night shomer for a total stranger, because he desperately needs a paycheck.  The premise is perfect for a horror film, locking a freaked-out shomer alone in a spooky house with a dead body while supernatural happenings creep in from the darkness.  The Vigil manages to cram a lot of unexpected details into that straight-forward set-up too: cult-deprogramming, Evil Internet tech, found footage video cassettes, body horror, demons, etc.  It reminded me most of the recent movies Demon (2016) & The Power (2021), but it does a great job in setting itself apart from them in its mood & scares, even beyond the specificity of its cultural context.  It would especially make for great Halloween Season programming, breaking up the usual cultural settings of by-the-books haunted house movies while still delivering the expected beats & scares of its genre (as indicated by its distribution under the Blumhouse brand).

If you’re looking for a film that’s invested in the specifics of traditional Jewish funeral rites, The Vigil is probably the more rewarding programming choice of this pair.  I personally found Shiva Baby to be the more promising debut, but its context as A Jewish Film was more generalized & cultural than The Vigil‘s.  If nothing else, it plays with the same buttoned-up comedic tension of non-Jewish films like Death at a Funeral, just with a younger, harsher edge.  It’s incredibly cool that both films were able to find proper funding & distribution around the same time to reach audiences outside the festival circuit, which is typically where culturally-specific films like this premiere and then immediately disappear.  I look forward to a time when there are enough films set in these types of niche cultural environments that they’re no longer a novelty as pairings.  For now, the significance of their cultural overlap helped them stand out among all the other, more familiar movie premises I drifted through during my on-the-couch vacation – even more so than their shared penchant for chokehold dramatic tension.

-Brandon Ledet

Black Box (2020)

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Black Box is the story of Nolan (Mamoudou Athie), a man suffering from amnesia following severe injury in a car crash that also claimed the life of his wife. He struggles with keeping up with the basics, like eating breakfast, making dinner, turning off the coffee pot, and picking up his daughter Ava (Amanda Christine) after school. Although he wants to go back to work as a photojournalist, his editor (Gretchen Koerner) gently rejects his new portfolio, citing both budget cuts and that his work doesn’t have the spark that it used to. After receiving nothing but negative prognoses for the return of his memories from multiple doctors, he’s not very optimistic when his doctor brother Gary (Tosin Morohunfola) recommends he see a noted specialist, Dr. Lillian Brooks (Phylicia Rashad), who works in the same hospital as Gary. Brooks, through a combination of hypnotherapy and virtual reality brainwave augmentation, tells Nolan that there is hope to retrieve his seemingly-lost years with his wife and daughter. As Nolan starts to go deeper into the titular black box, however, what gets pulled out of his subconscious doesn’t seem to match the life he’s living now. Was he someone else once? Was Nolan once the person who could have done the things that he now remembers? 

Charmaine Bingwa and Donald Watkins also star in this sci-fi thriller from first time feature director Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour, who also shares a writing credit with Stephen Herman. Both men have experience with several shorts, and it’s not immediately apparent that this is their first feature. It does feel a little slight in places, and it’s not a surprise when Jason Blum’s Executive Producer credit shows up in the early credits, as this feels very much like a slightly off-brand episode of Black Mirror, which is an appellation that could also be applied to some of the more sci-fi slanted episodes of Into the Dark, like All That We Destroy or Culture Shock, but with a sensibility that’s more in the realm of Bloodride. This works better than any of those, however, as it never feels like a TV show, but it does exist in the realm of the near-future speculative fiction indie realm that features pictures like Marjorie Prime.

Between the time that I first started writing this review and picking it back up to complete it, I reread the Wikipedia page for it, and wouldn’t you know, there’s a reason it feels so much like Into the Dark: it’s an “installment in the anthological Welcome to the Blumhouse film series.” Still, it’s worth noting that Into the Dark has still produced multiple films that are actually quite good, and one of them (New Year, New You) even made it into my best of 2019 list. Like New Year, New You, Black Box uses its “smallness” as an asset instead of fighting the smaller budget and trying to make something outside of its grasp, creating a world in which the stakes are personal and rooted in internal struggles with the worst elements of our nature. The twist that centers the film comes very late in the game, but it’s well-seeded with just the right amount of foreshadowing, and there’s still sufficient screen time in the movie’s relatively lean 100 minutes that follow that reveal to let us explore the implications of what we’ve learned and the ethics of what our lead has to do next. But one of the ways that Black Box spins its humble budget of straw into passable onscreen gold is in its cleverness.

For instance, the representative mind world inside the box features a frightening creature in human form but which moves with distinctly inhuman noises (like the cracking of bones) and motions (crabwalking in the upward bow yoga pose); this is accomplished by the hiring of contortionist Troy James for the role, but instead of attempting to CGI a different face onto him, every face in the dream world is initially blurred Ringu style. This is incorporated into the narrative as part of the process, as the blurry face represents an incomplete memory for Nolan to reconstruct. A lesser movie would try to do something more complex and ultimately overcomplicate things, but by leaning into the limitations, Black Box turns them from flaws into strengths. 

I don’t want to spend too much time talking about the film because writing around the twist is always a little tricky. In films like this one, that’s often the main drawing point, and my lifetime love of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Outer Limits, and Twilight Zone proves that I’m always on board for it, as long as the twist is good. This one’s a little more complex than normal, and it requires a bit of suspension of disbelief, but you’d have to be a real taskmaster for realism to be unwilling to go along with this one. It’s not the strongest one I’ve ever seen in this type of film, but as someone who has the unfortunate writer’s tendency to try and guess the next twist instead of letting the work take me on a journey, this was one in which I couldn’t guess the twist, and that’s always a plus. Luckily, Black Box doesn’t depend solely on that twist, as it becomes a different story afterward, about what the reframing of what has happened so far and what could happen next is a pivot that changes the film but doesn’t muddy it at all, which would be a feat for even a more experienced director. Its only real crime is that it lacks a truly cinematic eye, which is clearly a matter of budget in this case and not behind-the-camera crew. It remains to be seen how many pies Jason Blum can stick his thumb into, and Into the Dark has already run thin in a few places, but you wouldn’t know it from Black Box

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ma (2019)

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One of the more unexpected pop culture joys of 2019 has been the mainstream revival of the psychobiddy genre. What started as a dual career rejuvenator for Old Hollywood legends Bette Davis & Joan Crawford in the camp classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? stuck around for much of the 60s & 70s for other aged-out-of-leading-roles actresses like Shelly Winters, Debbie Reynolds, Tallulah Bankhead, and Olivia de Havilland in lesser drive-in marquee filler. Coined as the “psychobiddy” thriller or the “Grand Damme” horror or, most crudely, “hagsploitation,” the post-Baby Jane tradition of actresses Hollywood deemed too old to be fuckable reviving their careers in dirt-cheap genre work far below their skill level has given us some of the greatest slices of over-the-top schlock ever seen on the big screen. If nothing else, I’d easily rank the William Castle picture Strait-Jacket, which cast Joan Crawford as an axe-wielding maniac, among the greatest films ever made – full stop. I welcome any signs of a new psycobiddy wave with open arms, then, even if the genre label could be construed as a cruel insult to the actors cast as leads under that umbrella. 2019 hagsplotation has given us Isabelle Huppert dancing her way through over-the-top cartoon villainy in Greta, Robin Riker tormenting her pregnant granddaughter in the Lifetime movie Psycho Granny, and now Octavia Spencer partying with (and cruelly torturing) teens in the Blumhouse horror Ma. I sincerely hope there’s more to come.

The only thing preventing Ma from fully participating in psychobiddy tradition is the age & status of its star. At less than 50 years old and appearing in Oscar-worthy features as recently as the 2017 Best Picture-winner The Shape of Water, Octavia Spencer should likely be disqualified from being considered in a hagsploitation context. Every other aspect of Ma qualifies her performance and her character arc for the label, though. Like all psychobiddy villains, Ma is a sympathetic sadist who was only driven into violence & madness by a world that was cruel to her in the past. That sympathy does little to soften the severity of her crimes, though, as she veers from menacing threats & light stalking into full-on slasher villain & torture porn tropes as her psychoses worsen. Most importantly, the character is an excellent acting showcase for Octavia Spencer’s full range as a talent who’s too often relegated to one-note supporting roles. She’s given room to run wild here as a full-blown one-woman spectacle, often tearing through every emotion & tone imaginable with a machine gun efficiency: the deep hurt of a wounded animal, the slack-jawed thousand-yard stare of a Norman Bates descendent, the jubilant dancing of an invincible party girl, and the disarming sweetness of a family friend you’ve know your entire life. It’s at first baffling to learn that Tate Taylor, the doofus responsible for The Help, also directed this deliciously over the-top schlock, but it gradually becomes obvious that the goon simply loves to watch Octavia Spencer devour the scenery and it just took him a while to find the proper context for that indulgence – the psychobiddy.

A group of fatally bored teens waste away their youth in a small industrial town by drinking & vaping at the old rock quarry – the exact drab spot where their parents guzzled liquor decades in the past. After allowing the teens to talk her into purchasing their alcohol for them, an unassuming vet tech (Spencer) feigns concern that the kids might be drinking & driving and offers them an enticing alternative to their usual weekend spot: her basement. Gradually, all the teens in the area start partying in Ma’s basement as if it were a hot new nightclub, but Ma herself remains fixated on the few teens from the initial group, inserting herself into their lives outside the bounds of the party. Caught between enjoying the teenage popularity she was never afforded as a bullied outsider in her youth and avenging a mysterious trauma that’s haunted her since high school, Ma fluctuates between a fun party girl and a murderous biddy psychopath with the flip of a switch. She dances The Robot and karate-chops pyramids of beer cans like the party mom these kids ever had. She also stalks the teens she obsesses over the most on social media, eventually attempting to permanently collect them in her basement as tortured captives. The best moments of the film are when these two modes clash, as when she mutters the lyrics to Debbie Deb’s club jam “Look Out Weekend” to herself while maniacally scrapbooking. Spencer is mostly a wonder for being able to alternate between these tones with rapid-fire efficiency, often playing sane & friendly in one beat then zoning out in a lapse moment of murderous meditation the next.

The filmmaking craft in Ma is similarly all over the place, but to more of a frustrating effect. The film opens with the cheap inspo-pop & teen melodrama of a CW series, but also conjures occasional surprises like the drastic split-diopter shots of a classic De Palma thriller. In either instance, neither the visual stylings of Tate Taylor nor the inner lives of Ma’s teenage victims are the draw in this picture. This is purely Octavia Spencer’s show, and she adeptly delivers all the tragedy, fun, and cruelty you could possibly want from this kind of genre trash. She may be a little too young and a little too prestigious to be indulging in a psychobiddy thriller at this point in her career, but the result is so deliciously campy & genuinely upsetting that it would be foolish to complain about the method. Ma is an A+ actor’s showcase in a psychobiddy context, a clear standout in the genre’s (albeit minor) 2019 revival.

-Brandon Ledet

Us (2019)

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“I’m not very good at talking.”

He’s done it again, ladies and gentlemen (and assorted individuals of a nonbinary nature). Jordan Peele has submitted his CV for any and all who might have been foolish enough to have doubted his legacy as the heir apparent to Rod Serling (or Hitchcock, or Shyamalan if you live in a particularly uncharitable part of the internet). The second film helmed by the director who inexplicably turned Blumhouse Productions into a semi-prestige film production house because they were the only ones willing to take a chance on Get Out is more ambitious than its predecessor, meaning that sometimes it swings a bit wider but ultimately has the same meticulous attention to detail, from literal Chekovian guns to a multitude of characters being literally and metaphorically reflected in surfaces both pristine and cracked to even something so small as apparently intentionally offbeat snapping.

Us opens with a birthday outing for young Adelaide (Madison Curry) at the Santa Cruz boardwalk in 1986, where her loving but inattentive and immature father and her worried mother take her around the carnival games while arguing, obviously not for the first time. When Pops (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is distracted by a game of Whack-a-Mole, Adelaide wanders off and finds herself lost and terrified in a hall of mirrors, where her reflection stares back at her from every angle . . . except one. Later, the traumatized and speechless girl sits outside of a child psychologist’s office, who explains to the parents that Adelaide appears to be suffering from PTSD, prompting mom (Anna Diop) to declare that she just wants her daughter back, back to the way she was before. In the present, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) is married to the nerdy but devoted Gabe (Winston Duke) and has two children, teenaged Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), who is considering quitting the track team, and elementary aged Jason (Evan Alex), an apparent budding horror fan who wears a Wolfman mask as much as possible. They go to Adelaide’s childhood home for summer vacation, where Gabe proudly shows off the boat (the Craw-Daddy) that he has recently purchased, and he convinces his wife to take the kids down to beach for the day to meet up with their friends Josh (Tim Heidecker) and Kitty (Elisabeth Moss) and their two teen twin daughters Becca and Lindsey (Cali and Noelle Sheldon). At the same beachfront where something unknown but traumatic happened to her as a child, odd coincidences begin to occur: a red frisbee lands on a towel covered in blue polka dots, perfectly covering one of them; a man that she recognizes from her childhood as a boardwalk vagrant is seen being loaded into a waiting ambulance, and Jason wanders off just as she herself had before he appears, none the worse for wear. Back home, Adelaide tells Gabe about the night that changed her life, moments before Jason appears in the room to tell his parents that there’s a family in their driveway. And then the real fear begins.

Us is a movie that it’s almost impossible to discuss without getting into spoilers (and not just about the ending twist, which is one of those perfect reversals in that about 5% of people are complaining about how “obvious” it was, 10% of people are complaining about how it was “spoiled” by promotional materials, 60% of people are pleasantly surprised by how it was cleverly seeded within the text and fits so perfectly that one realizes the story couldn’t actually exist in any other form, and 25% of people are vocally overemoting about it to any audience that will give them the satisfaction), but we’ll try. From the earliest moments, including the scene of little Adelaide watching an advertisement for Hands Across America (which apparently some people thought was made up for the film, which is sad because that means those people have never known the joy of watching classic Simpsons, apparently) on a television that is framed by VHS copies of the films The Goonies, The Right Stuff, and C.H.U.D. (the last of which prompted one of my friends to text me that the scene made him feel like he was at my house for a second, which warmed the cockles of my cold dead heart) before the screen goes blank to reveal the reflection of young Adelaide, soaking it all in. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video, the repeated number 1111 (as a time, a Bible verse, and even evocatively in the logo for Black Flag, appearing on several characters’ clothing), Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, and the meaning of the line “We are Americans”: as with Get Out, no detail is too small to warrant inspection, even if this time around Peele is playing with audience expectation and subverting a more obvious and consistent interpretation of his symbolism for a more thoughtful and disquieting notion of significance. It doesn’t give too much of the film’s message away to say that it is about class and the way that it creates dark mirrors for ourselves everywhere, the way that getting out of the darkness of poverty is often impossible, and that those who manage to somehow embody the mythological idea of social mobility must do so at the expense of others, ultimately becoming complicit in the suffering of those who might otherwise have been your peers. Of course, with a film like this one, there are going to be other interpretations, but it’s all there.

Consider: Adelaide’s father, playing Whack-a-Mole, knocking down facsimiles of rodents as they try to rise up out of the darkness underground. Consider: that Gabe constantly finds himself trying to one-up Josh, only to find that Josh himself is imitating his own decisions, in an orobouros of attempts to keep up with the Joneses. Consider: that “I Got 5 On It” is about how one person covets an entire object despite said object being a dime bag that both parties going halves should share between the two of them (“I got some bucks on it, but it ain’t enough on it”). Consider: the power of art as the impetus to empower the recognition of interclass economic struggle and the ability to transcend (or at least ascend within) it. Consider: the repeated refrain of the “Itsy Bitsy Spider” that eternally attempts to climb and is forever pushed back down. Consider: when arriving at the beach house, the family eats fast food, except for Adelaide, who eats strawberries; why? Consider: what does a Black Flag t-shirt mean in 1986 when worn by a teenager working long hard hours versus being worn by the child of a comfortably wealthy family in 2019?

The performances here are powerful. It takes a powerful actor to be able to embody two different characters within a single work, and Nyong’o joins the ranks of Tricia Helfer and Tatiana Maslany in her performance as both Adelaide and her doppelgänger, “Red.” Red’s initial monologue that explains herself and her family in the format of a twisted fairy tale is particularly astonishing, as is her final speech. Duke is fantastic as the embarrassing dad as well, and every moment that he is on screen is a delight. As of this writing, I’m pretty sure that Brandon hasn’t gotten a chance to see this one (event though he is editing this review), so I’m choosing my words very carefully, but this movie comes with my highest recommendations, with a few caveats. I’m not a person who lets minor unresolved details derail my enjoyment of a film, but for those who are prone to pick at nits, there are . . . logistical issues that are never specifically addressed and which are ambiguous enough that I have no doubt those who require not only absolute realism but also utter explicitness in their art would consider them “plot holes.” So, you know, don’t take that friend with you (don’t worry, we all have at least one). Just get out and see this one, although from the box office numbers, you probably already have.

P.S.: My favorite joke is the fact that the “find yourself” hall of mirrors, subtly, has gotten a more socially conscious rebrand in 2019 to get rid of the Native American legends and myths motif for a more politically correct wizard.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Truth or Dare (2018)

/ swampflix / 13 Comments

There are two competing gimmicks at war with each other in the gleefully idiotic trash-horror Truth or Dare?. As suggested in the title, one gimmick involves a supernatural, deadly version of the schoolyard game truth-or-dare that drives the film both to explorations of contrived ethical dilemmas and to even more contrived novelty indulgences in demonic possession clichés. As delightfully silly as a haunted truth-or-dare game is for a horror movie premise, though, it’s not the gimmick that most endeared the film to me. It’s Truth or Dare?’s stylistic gimmick as The Snapchat Filter Horror Movie that really stole my trash-gobbling heart. Whenever demonically possessed participants prompt contestants in the titular game to answer “Truth or dare?” their faces are altered with cheap digital effects to display a sinister, impossible grin. It’s a design that unmistakably resembles a Snapchat filter, which is explicitly acknowledged in the dialogue when a character reports, “It looked like a messed-up Snapchat filter.” I’ve already exhaustively stressed in the past how important high-concept/low-budget horrors about the evils of the Internet are for being willing to document what modern life online looks & feels like in a way that classier productions would tend to avoid. Films like Unfriended, #horror, Afflicted, and so on are doing more to preserve the history of modern online communication than they’re given credit for, specifically because they’re willing to exploit pedestrian trash mediums like Skype, Candy Crush, and webcasting as foundational gimmicks for feature-length narratives. For its own part, Truth or Dare? has earned its place in cheap horror’s academic documentation of online discourse by exploiting Snapchat filter technology as a dirt-cheap scare delivery system. As silly as its titular gimmick can be, it wouldn’t have deserved camp cinema legacy without that secondary Snapchat filter gimmick backing it up.

It’s tempting to bail on enjoying Truth or Dare? in its initial setup & character introductions, which make for a very shaky first act. In an opening sequence so cliché it was parodied in The Cabin in the Woods a half-decade ago, a group of college age friends embark on their Last Spring Break Together and are met with a supernatural evil on the journey. Lured into a drunken, late-night round of truth-or-dare by a mysterious stranger in an even more mysterious abandoned Mexican church, the group is locked into a demonically-possessed version of the schoolyard game that follows them home and threatens their lives. Taking turns in several rounds, each character is challenged by hallucinations of the Snapchat Filter Demon into following through on truth-or-dare prompts or violently dying in refusal. Besides a closeted gay character and hilariously oblivious party bro (“I can’t say no to shots. Everybody knows that.”), none of these College Kid archetypes especially stand out as distinct individuals. They’re instead used as personality-free placeholders for the movie’s deployment in awkwardly staged moral dilemmas. The dares indicated by the film’s title are almost exclusively acts of lethal violence, but the real hook of the premise is in exposing the truth behind people’s desire to be seen as charitable & good. The demonic game of truth-or-dare forces characters to act out their unspoken desires and to confess their most shameful secrets in grand displays of public humiliation. The hidden selfishness of the self-righteous is a particular fixation of the game, as characters are challenged to back up statements like “I didn’t have a choice” or to prove claims that they’d sacrifice their own lives to save many strangers’. Honesty is the most highly valued virtue in Truth or Dare?’s worldview and it’s one the movie searches for in the most gleefully cruel ways possible.

Although the initial setup is a little labored (a probable side-effect of having five writers share one screenplay), Truth or Dare? gets exponentially more ludicrous (and, thus, fun) as its titular game escalates, ending on a surprisingly ambitious note with implications that are incredibly far-reaching & clever, considering the film’s lowly starting point. It’s possible to find more fully committed versions of the film’s central gimmicks in better works. The pitch-black exploitation comedy Cheap Thrills offers an even more cruel indulgence in depicting a series of violent dares gone out of hand. While Truth or Dare? verbally admits its Shapchat filter gimmick in the dialogue and adopts cell phone aspect ratios in its opening credits, it has nothing on the fully-committed Sickhouse, which is essentially a The Blair Witch Project remake staged through a series of Snapchat posts (and originally posted on the Snapchat app itself). Nerve might even be a better midpoint between the two gimmicks, where a series of escalating dares are filtered through the language of social media. The acting & character work in Truth or Dare? are aggressively bland. The music feels like faux-inspirational Chariots of Fire/allergy medicine commercial runoff. The PG-13 rating indicates both its potential for truly disturbing violence and its loyalty to genre cliché. On the Blumhouse scale, this film is more Happy Death Day than Get Out. On the Evil Internet horror scale, it’s more Friend Request than Unfriended. Still, its specificity as a Snapchat filter horror (as opposed to a Snapchat platform horror) distinguishes it from previous app-based schlock and its follow-through on the implications of its demonic truth-or-dare premise wholly makes up for its first act unease. If nothing else, I can report that the film’s ending is the most satisfying trash-horror resolution I’ve seen since the evil doll cheapie The Boy, a reference I intend as the highest of compliments (it did rank high on our collective Top Films of 2016 list, after all). Between leaving me on that high note and generating its terror through a disposable mode of online discourse, Truth or Dare? very easily endeared itself to me. I wish more people were having this much fun with it.

-Brandon Ledet