reviews

Morgan (2016)

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Ever since Anya Taylor-Joy made her grand entrance as a name to watch in her stunning, starring role in The Witch (Swampflix’s 2016 Movie of the Year), she’s continued to be a compelling presence in modern genre cinema. Perhaps typecast for her wide-eyed, witchy visage that appears as if she just stepped out of a Victorian oil painting, Taylor-Joy has continued to dwell in genre cinema corners ranging from the Gothic horror vibes of Marrowbone & The Miniaturist to the highly stylized modernist thrillers Split & Thoroughbreds. I’m unsure if that reflects her personal taste in choosing roles or just the range of options being made available to her, but it seems constant to her career path stretching back even before her name became synonymous with The Witch. The same year The Witch was released to wide audiences, Taylor-Joy starred as the titular character in a more mainstream production that made much less of a splash. The sci-fi horror Morgan, directorial debut of Ridley Scott’s son Luke Scott, was largely dismissed in its initial run as merely being an obvious, Hollywood-style rehashing of the superior work Ex Machina, perhaps rightfully so. As hyperbolically negative as I find the film’s general critical reputation to be, I somewhat understand that dismissal and can mount no defense of the mediocre-at-best thriller as some great lost work worthy of reclamation. After recently falling in love with Anya Taylor-Joy’s screen presence all over again in the BBC miniseries The Miniaturist, however, I did find Morgan worthy of a revisit, if not solely for the merits of her performance.

Like Ex Machina, Morgan is a Turing Test thriller where an outside party is hired to determine the commercial viability of a femme A.I. creation in captivity at a remotely located science facility. Toby Jones, Michelle Yeoh, Rose Leslie, Paul Giamatti, and Jennifer Jason Leigh round out an over-qualified cast of scientists & staffers assigned to this A.I. experiment, but they mostly amount to archetypes who hang around to get slaughtered once things inevitably go wrong. Only two characters really matter in this movie: Anya Taylor-Joy as the titular, dangerous A.I. creation and Kate Mara as a corporate “risk management consultant” hired to assess the artificial creature’s commercial viability. A very human-like creation with a recent history of violent episodes with the staff, Morgan presents two ethical questions the movie only pretends to wrestle with: “Is her advancement of technology worth the risk of her potential violence?” and “Is she a person or is it property?” These very basic sci-fi concerns are mostly just time-wasters in the lead-up to the film’s true payoff: Morgan’s escape & horrific slaughter of every human that held her captive, even the ones she once considered close friends & family (as much as an A.I. creature could). These horror genre leanings are reinforced by the sci-fi lab’s locale in a spooky Gothic mansion & a few last-minute, telegraphed twists that are much more concerned about in-the-moment thrills then they are philosophical ponderings. Morgan’s main concern is an attempt to be coldly creepy, and it’s something the movie often pulls off well thanks to the seething animosity that binds Mara & Taylor-Joy’s performances.

As a sci-fi horror about an A.I. creation that escapes captivity & erupts into bloodshed, Morgan doesn’t offer much of interest that can’t be found elsewhere. As a showcase for Anya Taylor-Joy’s acting range, the film does feature some deviating touches in performance that feels like a far cry from her more typical modes in The Miniaturist & The Witch. Although often cast in spooky genre fare, Taylor-Joy typically plays a traumatized, delicate victim, batting her giant doe eyes to convey innocence in a world ruled by evil (deceptively so in Thoroughbreds). Here, she’s allowed to be fierce & dangerous throughout, even opening the film in a vicious lunge to tear out one of her captor’s eyes. Taylor-Joy plays Morgan with the brooding anger of a teenage girl who’s been wronged and stripped of her agency, expressing a quiet, violent anger halfway between explosive emotional outburst & cold, machine-like calculation of who exactly to strike. You can even sense this atypical use of her screen presence in her costuming, which forsakes her usual period-specific garb for a modernist sweatpants & hoodie combo – the comfy outfit of a pissed off teen locked in their room by parents who Just Don’t Understand. Her striking looks are intensified by a cold makeup effect that almost renders her silver, as if she’s in black & white while the rest of the film is in color. It’s a different approach to how her appearance & talents are typically deployed in genre films and that deviation is largely what makes Morgan a worthwhile watch. As a Hollywood companion piece to Ex Machina the film could only suffer through comparison, but as a demonstration of explosive teenage anger from a compelling actor who doesn’t often get to express it, it finds a way to feel worthwhile.

You’re unlikely to walk away from Morgan with any intense interest in whatever follow-up project Luke Scott has in the works. The film is competent enough to get by as a passable sci-fi horror diversion about a Killer A.I., but it’s ultimately nothing special in terms of style or texture. The takeaway is more the question of what other sides of Anya Taylor-Joy’s abilities as a performer are we not yet privy to this early in her career. I appreciated seeing her as a teenage killing machine here, but I’m even more excited by what that indicates about what she might be able to unleash in future roles. It’s a career worth keeping a (gigantic, doe-like) eye on, to say the least.

-Brandon Ledet

Orphan (2009)

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Jaume Collet-Serra is an interesting fella. I’ve gotten to know the Spanish-born Hollywood director through his recent string of high-concept, single-location thrillers like The Shallows, where Blake Lively fights a vengeful shark while stuck alone on a rock, and The Commuter, where Liam Neeson takes down a global conspiracy network from a pedestrian commuter train. However, before Collet-Serra was making over-the-top Liam Neeson thrillers that could be reductively described as Taken on a Train (The Commuter) or Taken on a Train (Non-Stop), he got his start directing mainstream horror productions for Hollywood bigshot Joel Silver. The first was a fairly innocuous remake of the Vincent Price classic House of Wax, best remembered for its stunt casting of Paris Hilton. Collet-Serra’s sophomore effort was something much more novel, an aughts perversion of The Bad Seed that leaned heavily into shocking twists & children being depicted in sinister, adult scenarios. 2009’s Orphan was a modest hit that has been largely forgotten in the decade since, only remembered by those most incensed by its controversial amorality & head-on dedication to tastelessness. It’s also quite possibly Collet-Serra’s best work to date, as it allows the director to chase a new bonkers idea every few minutes instead of tying him to a single concept at feature length. As much as I’ve come to respect Collet-Serra for essentially remaking Speed with a new novelty conceit in every subsequent picture, Orphan is wildly entertaining for setting him loose and allowing him to indulge in whatever silly idea inspires him from minute to minute. It’s a movie that deserves to be forgotten for its sins against good taste, but I can’t help but be tickled by it.

Vera Farmiga stars as a grieving mother whose third child was miscarried, stillborn. Nightmares about horrific, gory childbirth scenarios and guilt over past relapses into alcoholism plague her marriage with an insensitive oaf played by Peter Sarsgaard. To help alleviate the trauma of losing her would-be youngest daughter in childbirth, she decides to adopt – turning a family tragedy into an act of charity. The adopted child is a precocious, morose little girl with a cold Russian accent & a mysterious past, coming across like a 90s Goth update to Rhoda Penmark. The titular orphan’s old-fashioned wardrobe (including a ribbon choker she refuses to be seen without) looks like it belongs to a fairy tale princess, teasing a supernatural twist in its gradual reveal of her background. Whatever the cause, she’s deliciously evil, taking perverse pleasure in staging “accidents” that harm other children, purposefully spying on her new parents mid-coitus, and eventually just full-on murdering adults with guns, knives, and hammers. The reveal of her true biography & motivation to kill is astoundingly tasteless, ludicrous, and easy to guess well before it’s explained; the journey to get there is still a perversely fun ride. Collet-Serra turns each set piece & heinous act into a new toy to play with, the same way he’d later gleefully fool around with all possibly novelties offered by the planes, trains, and bloodthirsty sharks of his subsequent thrillers. The ill-considered morality of Orphan suggests that there is great danger in adopting an unknown orphan with a foreign-born past, which is a much more harmful angle to take than movies like Cooties, The Children, and We Need to Talk About Kevin, which reflect parents’ fears of their own kids. My guess is that neither Collet-Serra nor fist-time screenwriter David Leslie Johnson paused long enough to consider that morality as they chased this preposterous scenario’s potential for over-the-top, in-the-moment thrills. To be honest, the movie is all the more entertaining for it.

I’ve come to associate Collet-Sera most closely with over-the-top visual gimmickry, which is his most consistent auteurist tell. As absurd as their basic premises can be, some of the things that most stand out to me about the director’s post-Taken thrillers will be the way he constructs a time-lapse montage in The Commuter or the way he makes text messages appear visually dynamic in Non-Stop. Orphan’s best quality is in the freedom it allows Collet-Serra to indulge in this visual gimmickry in a variety of locales. The way he shoots kitchen window reflections, POV angles from car doors & paintings, and (in an early precursor to A Quiet Place) children communicating via American Sign Language is endlessly fun, as there’s a new toy for the director to play with in every new set piece. The pinnacle of this over-stylized visual artistry is a sequence set on a children’s jungle gym in a public park, which Collet-Serra shoots like a Gothic horror set in a maze. The menace of children-at-play on plastic slides & monkey bars is delightfully handled with a straight-faced terror, concluding with a genuine jump scare despite the tableau’s built-in absurdity. If made a decade later, Orphan might have been entirely set in that single jungle gym set piece, with the titular villain chasing around the same pint-sized victim (presumably not played by Liam Neeson) at feature length in a challenge to see how far the premise of that chase could be stretched. Here, it’s allowed to thrive for just a few minutes as an isolated novelty before the film moves onto its next ridiculous indulgence (and there are plenty more to come). It’s a willingness to visually experiment & indulge that keep the movie perversely fun despite the amoral implications of its twisty, ill-considered plot.

There’s a generous reading of Orphan that sees its fear of adopted children gone murderously rogue only as a reflection of Vera Farmiga’s character struggling with her own anxieties as a “flawed” mother with a shaky past. Farmiga sells the emotional core of that conflict as best she can, especially in arguments with a husband (Sarsgaard) and a therapist (esteemed character actress Margot Martindale) who are cruelly dismissive of her skepticism over her new adopted daughter. The film just has too much gleeful, amoral fun for that reading to fully play out, especially in scenarios where the orphan is beating victims to death with a hammer or inserting herself into adult, sexual scenarios with a perverse curiosity. The Babadook is a film about a mother who is unsure of her own stability & value as a nurturing parent. This film is more of an update to The Bad Seed, where it’s the kid who’s clearly at fault & taking pleasure in the chaotic violence that surrounds them. It’s a set-up with some disturbing, half-cooked implications about the adoption process as a result, something I wouldn’t fault any viewer for finding too distasteful to be entertaining. Personally, I consider Orphan to be an exquisite slice of mainstream-horror trash and a thoroughly entertaining showcase for a visually-skilled director who can’t help himself whenever afforded an opportunity to over-indulge in a set-specific gimmick. I’d love to see Collet-Serra return to this style of filmmaking, where his tones & gimmickry are allowed to be more free-wheeling & varied in their minute-to-minute whims instead of being dedicated to a single concept for an entire film. It’s a looseness in premise & morality than I believe has produced his best work to date.

-Brandon Ledet

Body Double (1984)

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What if Vertigo wasn’t about vertigo, but was instead about claustrophobia? It feels like this is the catalyzing question that went through Brian De Palma’s mind when he first came up with the idea for 1984’s Body Double, a risque homage to one of the Master of Suspense’s greatest works (there’s also a little bit of Rear Window thrown in there just for good measure). In place of Jimmy Stewart’s Detective “Scottie” Ferguson, we instead meet Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) on one of the worst days of his life: after freezing up in claustrophobic terror on the set of the low-rent vampire flick in which he’s starring, Scully is sent home early, where he finds his girlfriend in the throes of passion with another man – she doesn’t even have the decency to stop. After running into friend-of-a-friend Sam Bouchard (Gregg Henry) a couple of different times at auditions and being rescued by him from an apparently emotionally abusive acting exercise in which he revisits the memory of being trapped behind a freezer during hide-and-seek as a child, Jake takes Sam up on the offer to house sit for him while he is out of town performing in a play. Sam takes Jake back to the home in question, the famous Chemosphere (aka Troy McClure’s house) and shows him the amenities: a fully stocked bar, rotating bed, and a telescope perfectly placed to watch the nightly erotic dance of a beautiful neighbor.

On his second night of housesitting, Jake witnesses a creepy-looking older man also watching the woman; the following day, he realizes that the other man is following her, so he pursues them both to a mall, where he overhears the neighbor planning to meet someone at a seaside hotel. He pursues her there, too, where the creep also lurks before snatching her purse. Jake chases him down, but is unable to follow him more than a few feet into a tunnel before his claustrophobia renders him immobile. The woman introduces herself as Gloria (Deborah Shelton), and the two share a passionate kiss after she confesses that she is unhappy in her marriage. Unfortunately, Jake’s new (and creepy) romance is over before it can truly begin, as he sees the villainous peeper burgling her home and arrives too late to save Gloria. The police are suspicious, but there are other witnesses, and though they are all rightfully disgusted by Jake’s voyeurism, he is released. Jake finds himself in a slump, until he sees porn star Holly Body (Melanie Griffith) performing a very familiar dance on late night television. So begins a journey of mistaken identity and duplicitous disguises that traces a path across LA, from reservoirs to the seedy (but also maybe kind of fun?) underbelly of the porn industry.

There are a lot of scenes in Body Double that draw on the visuals from Vertigo, and which highlight the Hitchcockian influence on this sleazy thriller. When Jake enters the tunnel and is paralyzed by his claustrophobia, the visual distortion that communicates his distress echoes the iconic top-down shot of Jimmy Stewart attempting to climb stairs. There’s also a shot of the famous tower at Fisherman’s Wharf, which calls to mind distant shots of the tower that becomes the site of the older film’s climactic showdown. Jake’s voyeurism reminds one of Jimmy Stewart’s other most famous role in a Hitchcock film; Rear Window presents Jeff’s peeping as largely harmless and ultimately beneficial to the resolution of a murder investigation. Body Double follows some of those same story beats, it doesn’t shy away from the fact that in the real world, such surveillance is deviant and creepy, happy ending or no. And then, of course, there’s the inclusion of Melanie Griffith, daughter of Tippi Hedren, star of The Birds (and Marnie, but let’s not talk about that). It’s admirably clever that De Palma, like John Carpenter before him when he cast Psycho star Vivien Leigh’s daughter Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween, creates a rhetorical space in which he identifies himself as one of the next filmmaking generation’s Hitchcock successors by using the daughter of one of Hitchcock’s actresses. And that’s leaving aside the fact that Griffith is fantastic in this role, bringing vivaciousness and an unusual brand of smarts to what could otherwise have been a very of-the-era “dumb blonde” role. While Wasson’s Jake is an interesting character study, a seemingly ordinary man who easily falls into depravity, Griffith’s Holly is a porn star with a sense of humor and who won’t put up with any creeps giving her a hard time. She also knows her limits and is up front about them from the beginning: “I do not do animal acts. I do not do S&M or any variations of that particular bent, no water sports either. I will not shave my pussy, no fistfucking and absolutely no coming on my face. I get $2000 a day and I do not work without a contract.” In contrast, Jake is a man who’s never thought about what his limits are, but he finds that with very little prompting, he’s perfectly willing to perv on a strange woman long distance, stalk her around a mall, and follow her to a presumable hotel tryst. And, of course, steal underwear out of a trash can (it makes more sense in context, but only just).

The presumption that the audience will sympathize with Jake (which you do, to an extent; when this film was introduced as part of this summer’s Unhitched series, Wasson’s character was referred to as a “nebbishly inept weirdo”) is something that really dates this movie, but there’s another element that I don’t think De Palma could have predicted. I won’t name the actor to avoid spoiling it for you, but there’s a latex mask reveal (possibly foreshadowing De Palma’s eventual fate as the director of the first Mission Impossible film) in this movie that is completely undercut by the fact that the mask that the killer wears pretty much looks like the actor underneath does now, nearly 35 years later. The villain is also consistently referred to as “The Indian,” which is . . . not great. It’s a product of its time, a sleazy De Palma take on a Hitchcock classic, and as such it’s an oddity that I can’t recommend more highly. It’s definitely not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it for months. There’s a new 4k restoration making the rounds, and it’s well worth the price of admission. And, as Halloween approaches, if you generally like your scares a little more cerebral than slashy but still want to feel a little bit dirty, Body Double could be your new go-to.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

A Star is Born (2018)

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I was almost an hour into A Star is Born when I realized Oscar Season had truly started, because it was then that a very familiar, mildly unpleasant feeling washed over me: I was pressured into watching a competently made, exceptionally performed 3-star drama opening weekend because of its value in the discourse, not because I was especially excited to see it. This fourth iteration of the classic Hollywood tale of fame, jealousy, and tragic romance is a decent movie packed with great performances, one that’s destined to sour in audiences’ collective memory as it’s over-praised in the next four months of Oscars lead-up. Great effort will be made to land Lady Gaga a (perhaps deserved) Academy Award for Best Actress and Bradley Cooper a (not at all deserved) Best Director statue; and the best possible outcome in either case is that they fall just short of winning, so that they don’t suffer significant critical blowback for being overdiscussed & overexamined. Frankly, I find this stretch of the cinematic year to be the most exhausting & unfulfilling, a feeling that hit me about halfway into this totally okay, already overpraised melodrama.

Whether you’ve seen this story play out before with Barbara Streisand, Judy Garland, or (if you’re a thousand years old) Janet Gaynor in the lead, the basic narrative structure of A Star is Born is too familiar to require recounting in a review. The most interesting creative decision Bradly Cooper makes as this version’s auteurist voice is in acknowledging that familiarity by allowing his players to color as freely as they wish within those lines. The entire film boasts an improv looseness in its performances, which are freed up by the rigid structure of its narrative to search for tossed-off, believably natural tones. Drunken (and deliberately unflattering) conversations between Cooper & Gaga’s leads in the film’s early, pre-fame stretch are especially impressive in their immediacy & cavalier looseness. Domestic home life exchanges of overlapping dialogue lovingly shouted between Gaga & Andrew Dice Clay (playing Gaga’s father) also land with a pleasant naturalism, even recalling the similar home life snapshots of the Oscar-winning Cher classic Moonstruck. Unfortunately, that exceptional-performances-contained-by-an-unexceptional-premise dynamic wears thin by the time the film demands that you emotionally commit to its melodrama, especially when Cooper pretends he has something useful to say about that authenticity instead of just letting it be.

Part of the reason I could already feel myself getting exhausted with Oscar Season discourse halfway into A Star is Born is that I was preemptively starting to have very strong, negative takes on how it handles its music industry subject matter, where the material isn’t distinct or daring enough to support that passionate of a reaction. I found the dichotomy Cooper establishes between meaningful, “Authentic” rock-country Americana vs. supposedly frivolous, high-gloss pop music to be gross, especially since the gruff nostalgia & macho guitar noodling that was supposed to stand for good, Authentic art is not at all my cup of tea. Lady Gaga’s drag bar Edith Piaf covers & high-production SNL performances of pop songs about butts struck me as far superior art when compared to the singer-songwriter ballads Cooper’s character “elevates” her to when they collab as a romantic & creative couple, which is the exact opposite of what the film was attempting to convey. I could feel myself getting increasingly angry with the movie’s macho, old-fashioned attacks on the high-gloss, traditionally femme corners of pop music (where Gaga cut her teeth as a performer in real life) for being in-Authentic, until I had a post-screening epiphany: it ultimately doesn’t matter. The movie is too modest in its artistic goals & achievements to justify any real, substantial umbrage; I was just forming a strong take on the subject because of its Importance in the discourse.

Someone with a much kinder ear for the proto-country Dad-rock Cooper & Gaga perform as a duo in the film will likely have a much easier time swallowing its attacks on the Authenticity of high-gloss pop music than I did. Even if not, the improv looseness of the film’s early, pre-popshaming stretch (including brief appearances from RuPaul’s Drag Race vets Shangela & Willam) is infectiously charming, enough so that it carries the film though much of its second-half rough patches. It’s just much easier to enjoy the film for those performance-specific touches once you divorce it from the context of Oscars talk. A Star is Born is a good movie boosted by excellent performances, but also one hindered by more than a few thematic disappointments (the pop music patronizing is where I personally fixated & soured, but there’s plenty more grossness to pick at elsewhere). The more it’s lauded as the cinematic achievement of the year, something that absolutely must be seen by all, the worse its memory will fare in the ether. That is, until this year’s Oscars statues are doled out and the merits of the performances are all we remember. And then the whole cycle starts over again next October, if not earlier, with the first high-profile melodrama of the Fall. Honestly, I’m already a little tired of that movie too.

-Brandon Ledet

Hatchet for a Honeymoon (1970)

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Hoo boy, is this cut a mess. Recently, the one true and original (read: “Austin”) Alamo Drafthouse weekly Terror Tuesday feature screened Creepers, aka the original botched American cut of Dario Argento’s Phenomena, which was trimmed from the full running time of 116 minutes to 86(!). Host Joe Ziemba defended this decision, made by a guest programmer, by noting that this was the cut that he had been raised on. This wasn’t really uncommon at the time, as films were cut both for content and length. I managed to come away with a few treasures from a recent VHS Swap Meet that was held in conjunction with Fantastic Fest, including Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia and what appears to be a Rapture preparedness video (I’m saving that one for last), but I also ended up with a heavily butchered (no pun intended) copy of a Mario Bava film that was originally titled Il rosso segno della follia (literally translated as The Red Sign of Madness), released by Charter Entertainment, a home video company that doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page (although there is an extensive library of their covers online). Their edition utilizes the title Hatchet for a Honeymoon, which isn’t consistent with the translated title, the film’s Wikipedia page (which calls it Hatchet for the Honeymoon), or the film’s listing on IMDb (which calls it A Hatchet for the Honeymoon). It’s also not consistent with the film itself, which features a cleaver and exactly zero hatchets.

John Harrington (Stephen Forsyth) is a dressmaker, specializing in wedding dresses and negligees: everything a woman might need for her wedding day—and night. He is also quite mad, as he explains in his opening voiceover; according to the film’s Wikipedia page, he also explains in this monologue that he has an Oedipus Complex and is impotent, but this isn’t in the Charter release outside of subtext throughout the film that would make much more sense with this inclusion. He is married to an “older” woman, Mildred (Laura Betti), with whom he has an openly antagonistic relationship despite the fact that she has funded his fashion house and also flatly refuses to give him the divorce he so desperately desires. Their morning breakfast is interrupted by Inspector Russell (Jesús Puente), who is still trying to learn the fate of three of Harrington’s models suddenly disappeared on their wedding nights; Harrington, of course, reveals in his continuing interior monologue that all three women are currently buried in his hothouse. New model Helen Wood (Dagmar Lassander) appears to take over as a model for the most recent victim, and Harrington is impressed by her moxie and intelligence, but he is distracted when model Alice (Femi Benussi) announces that she will have to leave the business, as she too is marrying. Harrington takes her to his creepy secret vault, in which dozens of mannequins wear various wedding dresses, and tells her to pick the one she wants to wear on her happy day. As soon as she tries one on, however, he hacks into her with his cleaver (again, not a hatchet) and cremates her body in his hothouse furnace and spreads her ashes about as mulch. We also learn that Harrington watched his own mother being murdered as a child, and that he thinks that by killing other women he will be able to acquire all the pieces of this puzzle in order to make sense of his past

Mildred announces that she will visit a sick relative, leaving Harrington alone for a week. He takes advantage of this opportunity to romance Helen, but when he returns home after a night out, Mildred is waiting for him, announcing that she has no intention of ever letting him out of her sight, and that he has failed her test. In a fit of rage, Harrington kills her moments before the inspector arrives with the late Alice’s fiance in tow, demanding to know Alice’s whereabouts and what all the screaming was about. Harrington convinces them that the noises were from the television and they depart, suspicious but empty-handed. Of course, this is when things get really strange: Harrington now finds himself followed by Mildred’s ghost everywhere he goes, but in a twist, it’s not Harrington who sees her specter, but everyone else, other than in the moment when she tells him the rules of this new un-living arrangement, in which he will never be free of her.

Here’s where things actually get interesting, as a heretofore fairly standard, if barely comprehensible, giallo proto-slasher takes on a bizarre supernatural element. Much like our most recent Movie of the Month The Pit mixes together conflicting horror: the psychological horror of having witnessed a murder as a child and not knowing who was responsible; the standard slasher horror of a murderer who fetishizes something and seeks particular victims because of it; and, finally, a strangely gothic ghost story straight out of the 1800s. It’s got everything! Even with all the cuts to the film, this twist happens too late, as it’s the most interesting thing to happen. Harrington even goes so far as to dig up Mildred to make sure she’s dead and then cremating her like his other victims, then trying to get rid of said ashes multiple times. The best scenes follow this, like Harrington tossing the ash-filled valise out, only to have it show back up in his house, or when he takes the bag of ashes with him to a bar and the waiter patiently waits for Mildred’s spirit, which Harrington and the audience cannot see, to place an order. Harrington also tries to throw the ashes out in the middle of a rainstorm, and it’s pure poetry.  The reversal of the normal “only you can see me” ghost story trope is surprisingly fresh, and it’s a shame that it’s stuck in this otherwise mediocre movie.

Of course, even a bad Bava is still Bava, so there are some visuals that are at turns intriguing and gorgeous, despite the lack of depth in character and storytelling. The vault in which Harrington keeps his mannequins, all adorned with wedding dresses, is a sight to behold both for its creepiness and ethereal beauty. When we see flashbacks to the young Harrington sneaking out of bed to figure out what’s wrong with his mother, he pulls his lacy white blanket over his head and it trails behind him like a bridal dress train, which makes for some lovely visual symmetry. There’s even a Psycho-esque scene in which Harrington tries to evict the inspector from his home before he notices the hand hanging over the upstairs banister, slowly dripping blood onto the carpet below. Strangely enough, I had just seen Phantom Thread in the morning before watching this film at night; not only are they thematically similar in that each film revolves around a European dressmaker whose bridal gowns are renowned and play a pivotal role in the story before his wife enforces behavioral changes through drastic means, but there’s even a scene in which the married couple eat breakfast passive aggressively, right down to the scraping of burnt toast.

The average movie viewer won’t find much to love here, but if you’re a Bava fan, there’s enough visual magic to offset the unimpressive screenplay and distracting histrionics of the lead. It’s not a Halloween classic, but for a completist, it’s worthwhile.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Haunting in Connecticut (2009)

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Nothing gets me more hyped up than when a “based on true events” title card appears at the start of a horror movie, so when those words graced the screen at the beginning of The Haunting in Connecticut, I had a slight adrenaline rush. I watched the film for the first time this past weekend during a horror movie marathon with friends, and it was the first title on our watch list. I would later learn that it was wise to watch this one first since it was surprisingly boring for a horror movie “based on true events.”

In the film, the Campbell family moves into a home to be closer to the hospital where their teenage son, Matthew (Kyle Gallner), is receiving cancer treatment in the form of a clinical trial. They soon discover that the home was once a funeral home, so surprise, surprise, the house is totally haunted. Matthew is the first member of the family to witness supernatural occurrences in the home, but his family thinks it’s a side effect of the clinical trial. They are all eventually forced to face the reality that Matthew is in his right mind.

The Haunting in Connecticut is based on the Snedeker family’s supernatural experiences in home in Southington, Connecticut. The Snedekers really did move into a house that was previously a funeral home run by morticians who were, supposedly, also necromancers. Necromancers in Connecticut, imagine that! The idea of necromancy occurring in a small, all-American town is absolutely terrifying, but the film doesn’t really get into the necromancy aspect of the story all that much, which is completely bonkers to me. This is what makes the story so unique! Now don’t get me wrong, there are some creepy moments that are necromancy related (e.g., box of human eyelids is discovered under an attic floorboard), but there’s just not enough to make the film worthwhile. Instead, it follows the basic haunted house story line: family moves into house with a dark past, one of the family members starts to see ghosts while the rest of the family thinks they’re crazy, the haunting gets more intense as time goes by, and it all comes to a close in a fast-paced, extravagant ending.

There’s really nothing that special about The Haunting in Connecticut. It’s doomed to be lost in the realm of average, not-so-great haunted house movies like The Conjuring and An American Haunting.

-Britnee Lombas

A Simple Favor (2018)

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Paul Feig is a strange animal. Freaks and Geeks is classic television, Bridesmaids is certainly popular even though I couldn’t quite get into it, and I’m probably one of the eight people in the world who saw Other Space, and I really, really enjoyed it (I’m still over here waiting for Karan Soni to really and truly break out). Never was Paul Feig’s eccentricity more clear to me than in the recent (all-too-brief) resurgence of The Soup under the Netflix banner as The Joel McHale Show with Joel McHale. Feig, who was a producer of TJMSWJM, appeared in every single episode. There was a lot that was . . . off about TJMSWJM. The Soup‘s recurring characters appeared organically as part of sketches and happened to reappear only if there was a reason or they struck a chord with the audience, while TJMSWJM seemed to be forcing new characters onto the show without any rhyme or reason and segments like “That Happened,” while occasionally funny, were completely tone deaf about who the show’s demographic was and who they wanted to appeal to. If there was one element of The Soup that I would have forsaken when rebooting, it would have been the once-per-episode celebrity appearances; TJMSWJM actually compounded this problem, as each time Feig appeared on screen, the show ground to a halt (although I did get a kick out of him using the money gun in the finale). I like him, I think that he has a great sense of humor, and you’d be hard pressed to find a white man in the business who is so consistently and effectively using his privilege to promote women in the industry, but I also feel that he has the problem that some comedians I know personally have, which is an inability to recognize when something doesn’t quite work. In short, I’m not sure that Feig knows how to kill his darlings.

A Simple Favor is one of his least uneven films. There are still some comedic moments in it that feel very out of place; the worst offender in the film comes at the conclusion, when a comic bit of action happens and a very minor character reappears to say a terrible line, which is then followed by several much-better lines from our main characters. It stands out because, for the most part, the comic timing in the film is pretty perfect, but when it clunks, it clunks hard, in a way that is more noticeable than in some of his other work since this one is much more intricately plotted.

Widowed single mother Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick) is a mommy vlogger whose son Miles befriends his classmate Nicky, which leads to Stephanie entering into an unequal friendship with Emily Nelson (Blake Lively, giving the best performance of her career). Emily is the PR manager for a fashion house that is run by your standard fashion mogul type, and her ultramodern home, huge income, hands-off parenting, hard drinking, and high fashion conflict with Stephanie’s tendency to commit to every school event, her recognition that her late husband’s insurance money will soon run out, and her felt-and-pompom arts and crafts aesthetic (although she does wear this cat study Anthropologie apron, which I recognized because don’t ask, so she’s more “Hollywood broke” than “real world poor”). Emily’s husband Sean (Crazy Rich Asians‘s Henry Golding) is a failed writer who teaches at a local institution, although Stephanie read his only novel as part of her book club years before. As their friendship grows (at least on Stephanie’s part), Emily elicits a dark secret from Stephanie under the guise of compassion and interest before asking her to pick up both boys one afternoon. Then Emily . . . disappears.

The police initially suspect Sean, but his alibi is solid. When evidence starts to point toward suicide, Stephanie refuses to believe it and launches into her own investigation, winding into and out of the lives of such disparate people as Sean’s T.A. (Melissa O’Neil, who I’ve been sorely missing since the unfortunate cancellation of Dark Matter), a painter who was once Emily’s lover (the ever-wonderful Linda Cardellini), and Emily’s dementia-afflicted mother (Jean Smart, always a pleasure). Her investigation leads her to the offices of fashion magnate Dennis Nylon, a Christian summer camp, a burned-out wing of a formerly glorious mansion, and even Emily’s gravesite. Emily–if that’s even her name–was not who she seemed to be. But then again, maybe Stephanie isn’t either . . .

Multiple reviews of A Simple Favor have drawn comparisons to the 2014 thriller Gone Girl, and with good reason, especially given that the film’s marketing seems to place it firmly in the largely humorless thriller genre (if there’s any way to describe Gone Girl, “humorless” is pretty high up there on the list). What appears to be taking audiences by surprise is A Simple Favor‘s comedic lightheartedness amidst all the sociopathy, implied and explicit violence, half-incest, debatable paternity, and arson. There’s a lot going on, but it’s never overwhelming, and if you’ve ever seen one of these movies before then there will be revelations that will lead you say, “Oh, I know where this is going,” and then the film promptly goes there. Regardless, there are still a few surprises buried in its bones, and the performances are strong enough to carry the film even when it seems to be simply following the outline of thrillers of this ilk. As noted above, this is probably the first film in which I’ve really been thrilled by a performance from Lively; I know that her shark movie was well received around these parts, but after Oliver Stone’s Savages I had no interest in another Lively vehicle. She’s really dynamic here, and it’s fantastic.

The only real problems in the film are the moments in which the comedy doesn’t land. Unfortunately, it’s the more ostentatious (and dare I say more Feigian) humor that thuds lifelessly on screen, and unfortunately those moments are more memorable than the praiseworthy subtle humor that’s woven throughout. Still, the actors and the French pop music lift the film when the plot starts to flail, and it would be a mistake to let this curiosity slip into obscurity without giving it a watch.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Predator (2018)

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Everything about The Predator makes it sound like it’s exactly My Thing. Director Shane Black’s most recent feature, The Nice Guys, is one of my favorite comedies in recent memory. His 1987 collaboration with screenwriter Frank Dekker, The Monster Squad, was a personally formative introduction to classic horror tropes & monsters for me as a young child. The original Predator film (in which Black appeared as an actor in a minor role) isn’t exactly my favorite Arnold Schwarzenegger classic, but is still a wonderfully tense, over-the-top sci-fi creature feature with an incredible monster design. Black’s latest sequel to that action-horror milestone even participates in a suburban-invasion monster movie trope that I’m always a sucker for, making me far more forgiving than most audiences for little-loved films like The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Strange Invaders, and even Alien vs. Predator: Requiem. That’s why it’s so baffling that The Predator is likely the worst experience I’ve had with a movie all year, a total letdown.

After the laugh-a-minute slapstick violence of The Nice Guys, the last thing I expected from The Predator was to relive my discomfort watching the Deadpool movies. The same performatively #edgy, coldly sarcastic, Gen-X throwback humor that makes Deadpool so exhaustingly unfunny is rampant here, with Black & Dekker indulging in their worst impulses as provocateur humorists who believe they’re pushing the envelope of Political Incorrectness but at this point are only reinforcing the status quo. The difference is that watching Deadpool with a live audience is an alienating experience where everyone in the room Gets The Joke but you, whereas The Predator’s humor falls flat with the entire room. Jokes about “Assburgers,” Tourette’s, “loonies,” and men named Gaylord play to laughless, stony silence. An extensive bit where Olivia Munn must strip naked to escape death is only made more uncomfortable by extratextual reports of the actor’s anger over been tricked into working with an undisclosed sexual predator in the cast (in a since-deleted scene). The problem isn’t that this style of juvenile shock humor is too offensive or tasteless to be enjoyed in public. It’s that it has become so old-fashioned that it’s too hacky to be funny.

A UFO crashes, releasing a Predator at the edge of the suburbs. The government attempts to cover it up. Escaped mental patients feebly attempt to kill it. A precocious child (played by Jacob Tremblay, who might need the talent agent equivalent of Child Protective Services at this point of his career) saves the day through his autistic superbrain. It’s all wacky, disconnected nonsense barely edited together with any sense of linear coherence in service of franchise-minded worldbuilding. Some of the franchise set-up is admittedly fun – namely in the film’s conceit that the Predators are intergalactic travelers that purposefully merge their DNA with various species, leading to hybrid specimens like dog-Predators & gigantic mega-Predators. Mostly, though, it makes The Predator feel like an inconsequential episode in a franchise looking to reinvigorate itself for future follow-ups. In true Deadpool fashion, Black & Dekker even joke about that franchise-wide storytelling style in the dialogue, having a government goon explain that the Predators have arrived on Earth before in ’87 & ’97, “but lately visits have been increasing in frequency,” a blatant dig at projects like the Alien vs. Predator crossovers and 2011’s (totally fine, but mostly forgotten) Predators. The problem is, though, that like most of the film’s humor, the joke falls flat and only serves to question what we’re even doing here, why we’re even bothering – both as creators and as audience.

Not everything about The Predator is horrendous. Olivia Munn & Trevante Rhodes mostly escape with their reputations intact. Sterling K Brown is, despite the material, genuinely fun to watch as a scenery-gnawing government goon, making even the emptiest phrases like “Fuck yeah,” land with surprisingly satisfying humor. Jacob Tremblay & Keegan-Michael Key fare the worst, but can’t be blamed for the idiocy they were employed to recite, dialogue where phrases like “Shut the fuck up!” are considered the pinnacle of verbal quipping. Some of that failed humor is softened by the cheap-thrills payoffs of the film’s hard-R gore & creature feature delights, which are admirably dedicated to practical effects. Speaking as a shameless gore hound & a lover of over-the-top monster movies, though, there’s no amount of practical splatter or space alien badassery that can fully cover up the stink of a comedy that fails this disastrously to be funny. The jokes are plentiful here, but plenty unamusing – sucking all of the fun out of the room with each #edgy punchline. There have likely been worse releases this year, but none I would have seen on purpose, none with this amount of unfulfilled promise.

-Brandon Ledet

Assassination Nation (2018)

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In a single month I’ve seen three highly divisive theatrical releases that appear in their advertising to be fun, over-the-top parties, but are actually grueling descents into the depths of human cruelty & misery: Mandy, BlacKkKlansman, and now Assassination Nation. What’s challenging about that third title is how long it waits to reveal its true nature as an ugly, unforgiving portrait of modernity. The earliest stretch of Assassination Nation feels as if it were a conscious effort to update the Heathers style of teen-girl black comedy for a new generation – the same way that titles like Jawbreakers, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Mean Girls, and The Edge of Seventeen have in the past. What most Heathers descendants miss, however, is how genuinely shocking that film, which glibly joked at length about a teen suicide epidemic, would have been in its late-80s cultural context. Heathers is wildly funny, but it’s also genuinely upsetting in its amoral grotesqueries. Assassination Nation updates that dynamic by adopting the glib, dark humor of Twitter-speak, where all human experience – even the worst misery & public embarrassment imaginable – is fair game for a flippant, casually tossed-off joke. This weaponized, empathy-free brand of online humor sits on the stomach with an unease, only to gradually erupt into full-on, gendered violence once it escapes the anonymity of the internet and devolves into a very public display. Assassination Nation may be costumed like a glib, modernist Heathers descendant, but it’s ultimately less interested in making you laugh than it is in making you sick to your stomach. Once you catch onto that nausea being its exact intended effect, it’s an incredibly impressive work. It just asks a larger stretch of initial adjustment than you might expect – and even then its cruelty & misery never feel entirely comfortable, nor should they.

This isn’t a film with a plot so much as one with a premise. Assassination Nation reimagines the Salem Witch Trials for the Internet Age by filtering them through the user-interface cyberthiller horrors of Unfriended & the politicized home invasion thriller tones/Anonymous worship of The Purge. Four high school teens are unfairly accused of creating social chaos at the center of this tale, a conflict instigated by massive leaks of private citizens’ data on the Internet. Caught between conflicting demands of desire, control, disapproval, anger, and lust from the men in their lives (boyfriends, peers, authority figures, total strangers), these young women are given no room to exist in the public sphere without being targeted for perceived transgressions against proper femme behavior. When societal order breaks down and private online activity erupts into in-the-streets public violence, they suffer the brunt of the blowback as outraged, hypocritical men’s #1 target – the same role young women filled in Salem’s historical atrocities. The war that emerges is framed as four teenage girls fighting an entire town of morally fascist men (to bloody death), but that image is clearly meant to be emblematic of America at large’s sexually repressed, self-righteous war on all youthful femininity. By leaking private info from citizens’ laptops & smartphones, the film’s anonymous hacker is uprooting deeply ingrained, violently gendered shame – inspiring their targets to lash out in violence against a scapegoated social group that doesn’t deserve the blowback, but has historically received it anyway: young women. Like how this year’s The First Purge & BlacKkKlansman have examined America’s continued, blatant, public failures in its racial divides in the most unsubtle, uncomfortable terms possible, Assassination Nation does the same for our despicable handling of gender & sexuality. Its blatant confrontations of our sexual repression & gendered oppression are often miserable in their in-the-moment experience, but that feels like an honest reflection of where the country is right now in its cultural discussion of these topics.

My initial attraction to Assassination Nation was largely due to my undying love for technophobic cyberthrillers, especially ones willing to pull from the imagery of social media apps’ user-interfaces. The movie thankfully doesn’t shy away from that stylistic indulgence, finding plenty of eerie imagery in sexting, chain emails, Twitter rants, and WorldStar-style cellphone footage of psychical violence. Its greatest achievement to that end is an early party sequence collaged together in a triptych of vertical smartphone aspect rations, when that image is typically centered & letterboxed instead of tripled. For the most part, though, the film finds its Internet Age discomfort in the rhythms & dialect of online communication. This starts with the glib, callous Twitter humor of the opening act, as well as a long list of rapid-fire trigger warnings meant to scare off skeptical viewers who have no chance of ever getting on its wavelength (either for genuinely being triggered by its content or for finding its overall tone too obnoxious to stomach). What’s most impressive about the film’s technophobic finger-wagging is how it digs deeper than superficial concerns like social media addiction & curation of false online identity to explore less often discussed aspects of online culture: how the Internet is used as a cultural tool for misogyny and how online anonymity allows the average user to be loudly judgmental & self-righteous, but a leak of private digital information (photos, messages, porn search history) would reveal an entirely different reality of who we are as a culture. It’s easy to make glib jokes about a stranger’s private life online, but once public scrutiny is targeted at your own private data (especially the sexual variety) the mood immediately sours. As with all of life’s punishments & humanity’s cruelty, this is doubly true for women.

It would be misleading to say that the entirety of Assassination Nation is dour & devoid of fun. Twitter can be fun; it just turns ugly if you dwell there for too long or stumble into the wrong feeds. This film’s femme cynicism, Rainbow Shops fashion, music video aesthetics, and final moments of bloody revenge on The Patriarchy all find plentiful moments of pure genre cinema pleasure. Even its third-act home invasion sequence, which pushes its ugly, gendered violence into its most explicit extremes, can be uncomfortably pleasurable to watch in appreciation for the craftsmanship of its staging (pushing the 360° robbery-exterior of Spring Breakers to a new level of technical indulgence). Its cumulative effect is more sickening than humorous, however, matching the blunt, unsettled political climate of the world outside in its own unsubtle, confrontational terms. Besides maybe Revenge, I’m not sure I’ve seen another film match the extremity of its gender politics exploration this year, something that feels just as necessary & cathartic as it is unsettling. It’s a topic that’s now inextricable from the tones & tactics of modern life online, something the film was smart to recognize & tackle head-on. Its overall spirit is prankish & prone to bleak humor, but Assassination Nation is less of a comedy than it is a violent uprooting of cultural misogyny & sexual repression in the Internet Age.

-Brandon Ledet

Mandy (2018)

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For a few years now, I’ve considered Deathgasm the most authentically metal film I’ve ever seen, but Panos Cosmatos’s psychedelic freak-out Mandy may have just usurped that distinction. In Deathgasm’s version of heavy metal cinema, the demon-slaying D&D power fantasy that visually defines the genre’s iconography is depicted as decidedly fun & badass, an escape from the mundanity of teenage suburban boredom. Mandy’s vision of metal soundscapes is something much darker & more sinister, fully capturing the way a funeral-doom beat or a stoner metal riff can feel like a Hellish descent into the darkness of the human soul. Mandy dwells in metal’s emotional catharsis, bathing itself in the grotesque blood & grime of human misery. It only pauses to laugh at the absurdity of life’s continual embarrassments, finding a much more sinister humor in metal’s extremity than the gory slapstick of demon-slaying horror comedies like Deathgasm. That same absurdist humor was present in Cosmatos’s debut, the tongue-in-cheek psych horror Beyond the Black Rainbow, but the hideous emotional catharsis of this follow-up feels like new, freshly rewarding territory for the director. It also feels metal as fuck, just in a more devastating way than the badass power fantasy that descriptor may imply.

Nicolas Cage stars as Red, a gruff logger in alternate reality 1980s overrun with LSD cults, demonic bikers, and cosmic chaos. His heavy metal girlfriend (Andrea Riseborough) is the titular Mandy, an amateur fantasy artist who spends long stretches painting & drawing in the woods while Red works in remote wilderness locales. The tragic couple temporarily seal themselves away from the “crazy evil” of the outside world in a perpetual state of insular, marital bliss. We mostly see the world through Mandy’s POV in this early stretch, which filters reality through the D&D fantasy and heavy metal album cover aesthetics that also guide the art she creates & consumes. It’s in the second half of the film that reality breaks completely. The acid cults, biker demons, and cosmic menace that command the world outside take Mandy away from Red, whose grief takes on an ugly, punishing violence as he exacts grotesque vengeance on the “crazy evil” that destroyed his blissful home. On paper, the film’s plot sounds exactly like the macho revenge power fantasies that have lingered on the big screen at least since the Death Wish-style thrillers of the 1970s. In action, it’s a slow, gross descent into the hell of personal grief; nothing about Red’s revenge on the world’s Evils feels macho or badass. It’s all bleak, hopeless, and haunted by the memory of Mandy – all while monster doom riffs & washes of punishing synths (provided by recently-deceased composer Johann Johansson) overwhelm the soundtrack.

Besides its bifurcated POV, it’s the relentless overload of those brutal sights & sounds that differentiates Mandy from typical revenge thriller fare. Like in Beyond the Black Rainbow, Cosmatos throws himself head-on into the most sensory concerns of filmmaking indulgence, approximating what a Guy Maddin film might look like if you were Robo-tripping at 3am. As someone made helpless by the simple combination of synths & neon lights in any genre cinema, I was automatically charmed by the film’s punishingly loud soundtrack & washes of intense, artificial colors. Cosmatos himself seems to be taken with these indulgences even more than your average 80s-nostaglic genre enthusiast, turning the combo of neon & synths into an almost fetishistic religious ceremony. Mandy is so gorgeous & deafening that its aesthetic indulgences become a grotesque, horrifying display. This is less of a revenge thriller than it is a Hellish nightmare, a dream logic horror-show that drifts further away from the rules & sensory palettes of reality the deeper it sinks into its characters’ trauma & grief.

Like Vampire’s Kiss, Drive Angry, and Knowing before it, this is a film that’s going to be best remembered for Nic Cage’s more extravagant, meme-ready freak-outs. I highly doubt anyone solely looking to laugh at those stray dialed-to-eleven moments from the notoriously absurd actor are going to leave fully satisfied by the slow, traumatic doom metal march to oblivion they find instead. While 2018’s Mom & Dad is a meme-friendly party movie worthy of being shared with friends over beers & jeers, Mandy is more of a headphones listen, a solemn knockout that leaves you in a stupor. Nic Cage’s over-the-top, absurdist humor shines through in isolated moments of cartoonish what-the-fuckery, but when considered in the context of the hideous grief his character is working through, the effect is just as ugly as it is amusing. His performative extremism is less of a for-its-own-sake novelty than it is in service of Panos Cosmatos’s auteurist vision of a heavy-metal emotional Hell. Nic Cage may slay biker demons with a chainsaw & a self-forged axe in his personal war against religious acid freaks in a neon-lit, alternate dimension 1980s, but Mandy is not headbanging party metal. It’s more stoned-and-alone, crying over past trauma to doom riffs metal, where the flashes of fun & cosmic absurdity are only reminders of how cruelly uncaring & meaningless it can feel to be alive.

-Brandon Ledet