The Night of the Hunter startlingly opens with heads floating against a starry sky. A few of them are children and one is an old woman. The old woman is giving a bible study lesson about Jesus. I’m not quite sure what I expected from this movie, but I don’t think I was anticipating anything this strange. But it’s actually a really perfect intro into what the movie is: a fairy tale- not the Disney kind, but the true dark kind of fairy tale where people die and children get eaten.
This movie has an otherworldly quality, which is not just from the floating heads. One part of that is the strong expressionistic influence. There’s a lot of monstrous shadows being cast on walls. Nosferatu-esque shots of creeping up stairs. There are sharp black and white angles. The nighttime of this world is strongly opposed to the daylight, which is idyllic and warm. The day feels safe and reassuring. The night is all around eerie.
In the middle of the Great Depression, two children John and Pearl are playing in the yard when their dad, Ben, rushes in with a gunshot wound. Fed up with his children having to live in squalor, he’s robbed a bank. Before the cops catch up with him, he hides the money inside of Pearl’s doll and makes both children swear not to tell anyone where the money is hidden. He gets arrested and sentenced to death. While in jail Ben meets the big bad wolf of this story, Reverend Harry Powell (played by Robert Mitchum). Harry Powell manages to marry the children’s widowed mother while in search of the money. John and Pearl soon after have to flee the murderous Reverend, as he gets increasingly violent towards John while asking about the money.
Reverend Powell is an iconic villain, right down to his knuckle tattoos, which read “LOVE” and “HATE,” that are referenced time and time again. When he displays these tattoos, his hands resemble terrifying, gnashing jaws as he makes them play wrestle each other. Perhaps most terrifying of all is his charisma. He summons up a whole town to his cult-like fire and brimstone sermons. He can flash a disarming smile and get his way almost every time. It’s terrifying to watch a villain with so much self righteous evil gain so much control.
I like the way this movie is scary. Yes, it feels like a fairy tale, but all the reasons to be afraid are very real. It’s scary because the town the kids live in is very judgmental and single minded while posing itself as idyllic. This town is susceptible to a charismatic stranger changing all of their views, and it’s scary because small towns often function this way. It’s scary because there’s no witchcraft or magic. This is just a regular man, which realistically there are few things scarier than a bad man. It’s scary because John is a kid isolated and no one believes him as he’s pursued and there’s few things more frightening than having bad things happen to you and having no one listen.
The Night of the Hunter tells the classic tale of good versus evil, love versus hate. The black and white cinematography drives home the point with it’s sharp dynamic lighting. It’s chilling, uncanny and even ruthless at times, but it also has so many makings of a good fairy tale: lost children, evil step parents, and even a fairy godmother in the end.
If you read this blog regularly you might be surprised that there’s no Camp Stamp perched at the top of this review. Trust me, I’m even more surprised than you are. I went into Nerve expecting a trashy thriller version of Unfriendedand, in some ways, that’s exactly what the film delivered. However, I was shocked to find myself genuinely engaging with its smartphone app paranoia instead of chuckling at that gimmick’s over-the-top absurdity. In fact, I think Nerve is actually kind of brilliant? Like, maybe one of the best movies I’ve seen all year? What am I even saying? There’s something really special about how the film adopts the action thriller genre for teen girl sensibilities that I find really smart & fresh, if not long overdue. Other YA action properties like The Hunger Games & The Divergent Series might have female protagonists, so Nerve isn’t exactly unique there, but they typically appeal to a much wider demographic within a certain age range. Nerve, on the other hand, is the single most aggressively feminine action thriller I can ever remember seeing, an aesthetic that mixes with its killer smart phone app technophobia premise to create something really fun & truly memorable without devolving into so-bad-it’s-good schlock. This film is the biggest surprise of the summer for me & I’m already prepared to watch it again, being “the watcher”that I apparently am.
I guess I should admit up front I was already a little predisposed to root for Nerve‘s success before I even reached the theater, because its trailer promised that it’d indulge in one of my favorite recent movie tropes. Something that really excites me in modern genre pictures is when directors incorporate new, cheap forms of disposable digital imagery in their visual palette. I’ve been delighted by the real time Skype horror of Unfriended, the psychedelic emoji & social media game kaleidoscope of #horror, the pixelated flip phone video footage of Amy, etc. The only time cheap digital imagery has actively bothered me in a film was in David Lynch’s persistently ugly standard-definition work Inland Empire, but I’m willing to chalk that up as a failed early experiment. Nerve joins the fray, picking up with #horror‘s particular adoption of social media game imagery in its story about fame-hungry teens completing an escalating series of dares for large piles of cash. It’s basically Do It for the Vine: The Horror Film, with a steady flow of “like” cartoon hearts & glitchy animated .gif imagery backing up its online visual palette with a kind of creepy, “dark web” terror & grotesque message board sense of humor. The visual choices are not subtle here. When the film wants to conjure Anonymous, it breaks out the Guy Fawkes masks. It is, however, very much of the time and, in my opinion, a fascinating new avenue of visual discovery for cinema to explore while it still feels current to the cultural zeitgeist.
Although the film’s premise of teens competing for social media fame obviously carries a lot of millennial-shaming baggage in its basic DNA, Nerve‘s secret weapon is in how it celebrates teen-specific adventurousness within that digital-age moralizing. High school photography student Vee (Scream Queens‘s eternally hoarse Emma Roberts) finds herself frustrated with her reputation as a boring nerd & decides to shake up her safe, suburban life by adventuring into the big city (think of a less racist Adventures in Babysitting) in a game of Nerve. Hideously self-described as “a game of truth or dare without the truth,” Nerve is a social media game that combines modern surveillance state mining of personal information from various online profiles with a deadly version of reality TV game show gawking not too far off from Roger Corman & Paul Bartel’s creation in Death Race 2000. This teeny bopper millennial version of The Running Man drags a reluctant Vee far outside her comfort zone, Trojan horsing a surprisingly potent coming of age narrative inside a tawdry action thriller shell. Nerve might indulge in some occasional eyeroll-worthy Hollywood touches, mostly in its pairing of Vee with a cute romantic partner (“Lil'” Dave Franco, whose brother James apparently exists in this universe as his famous self) & its depiction of female-jealousies competitiveness between Vee & her best friend, but those relationships are actually determined & manipulated by the game’s “watchers”, so they’re more a part of the film’s audience indictment than a blind misstep. For the most part, this film is about Vee’s journey to find her own strengths & desires in a wild, out-of-character night of teenage rebellion & Bling Ring-esque excess set to aggressively girly pop music beats & the same neon lights nightlife palette of films like Drive. Vee is likeable, but also vaguely undefined in a way that allows her to serve as an audience surrogate for the kids playing along at home (both in the movie & otherwise). I can’t remember the last time a dangerous action thriller was so unashamedly marketed for teen girls. I have to say, it felt refreshing.
Unlike the film’s trailer, I don’t want to give away too much of Nerve‘s plot here, but things do get a little more complicated as the film indulges in some Hackers-style onsceen coding on “the dark web” in the third act. Vee & her mysterious suitor find themselves “prisoners of the game” where “the only way out is to win,” unless they can tear the whole system down against in a life-threatening race against the odds or whatever. In some ways it’s actually a miracle, given how much ground it covers & cinema’s current climate, that Nerve wasn’t adopted from its YA novel source material into a years-long trilogy with a two-part conclusion. Instead, we’re blessed with a fairly concise & effortless action thriller that I expected to find delightfully corny but instead just found delightful. The two leads are cute. The internet-specific imagery gimmick afforded the film some all-important distinctiveness. When two girls have a climactic argument it’s over something much more personally significant than boys (despite that conversation’s catalyst). There’s a moment where Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.” is actually put to important, narratively potent use, maybe even standing as my favorite pop music cue of the year so far. There’s a “White People Problems” punchline that’s somehow legitimately funny despite this not being 2009. I’m not sure if this technically counts as a spoiler, but my entire theater gasped with joy when Samira “Poussey” Wiley appeared onscreen halfway into the runtime, which was the best communal at-the-movies moment I’ve had in a long while. For the most part, Nerve just made me feel great, an escapist high that marks the best aspect of the summertime action thriller.
It’d be easy to treat Nerve like a campy farce, thanks to its ludicrous premise or details like its drone-based jump scare or its tense shot of a mouse cursor pensively hovering over the “like” button on a Facebook post. However, I genuinely enjoyed the film far too much to treat it that way and those elements mostly play like self-aware summertime fun once the overall tone finds its appropriate groove. It’d also be easy to fault the film for its millennial shaming in the way it depicts teens as smart-phone addicted fame chasers, but I don’t thank that reading holds water either. If anything, Nerve presents a fantasy world where technology actually makes people more adventurous instead of less insular (the same argument a lot of folks tend to use to defend the popularity of Pokémon Go). Instead, I’d pin the film as the most surprisingly successful popcorn flick of the summer, a thoroughly enjoyable action thriller that shouts its teen girl femininity just as loudly & proudly as its instantly dated, 2016-specific pedigree. I’m honestly still in shock over how much that dynamic worked for me.
The only thing I knew about the Spanish sci-fi thriller Timecrimes going in is that people often accuse the time travel horror Triangleof blatantly ripping it off. It’s easy to see how that accusation gets tossed around. Both films feature a similarly-masked killer and a tortured/confused protagonist stuck in a Groundhog Day-type time loop that becomes increasingly inevitable each time it plays out & progresses. Although Timecrimes beat Triangle to the punch in some ways I found myself less in love with what it delivers than the much more supernaturally bizarre film that followed. It’s probably best for Timecrimes‘s sake to ignore that comparison entirely & enjoy it for its own small scale, economical thriller charms. It works perfectly well outside that context & is a must see time travel thriller for sci-fi junkies on its own terms.
Timecrimes begins with a fairly typical horror film setup: a married, middle-aged man is violently punished (stabbed in the arm) for ogling a young topless woman through binoculars while he is supposedly bird-watching with his wife. Things get much stranger form there once he’s tricked into entering a time machine that brings him back to that exact same time of day. In order to avoid altering the trajectory of time already established he forces the young woman, a kind stranger, to disrobe so his alternate version can ogle her through binoculars. You can already see where this is headed, I’m sure. A lot of the fun in Timecrimes is in watching the ever-complicating plot set up its Rube Goldberg machinations & to scratch your head over its self-creating paradoxes. You know exactly where the plot is headed, but expect many twists & betrayals to be revealed in the process and it’s fascinating to watch a character climb into his own grave and then retroactively dig it. As the time machine operator puts it, “The machine doesn’t solve problems. In fact, it creates them.” As these “problems” stack up to an insurmountable fever pitch Timecrimes finds a nice little groove for itself, like needle slowly spiraling inwards on a record.
Although nicely layered, Timecrimes‘s plot structure is a lot less complicated than similar time loop features like Triangle or Groundhog Day or, the most complex of them all, Primer. What I most appreciated about the film, though, was not its structural complexity, but its interest in constructing a moral dilemma. It’s difficult to tell for sure if the film’s protagonist is an objectively bad person or just a victim of circumstance doing objectively bad things in order to maintain the integrity of his preferred timeline. It’s also interesting how the film turns the passive ogling of a stranger’s body into something much more violent & predatory. By the end of the film when he proclaims, “I had no choice” in regards to his escalating mess of questionable offenses, it’s all too easy to call bullshit. He had plenty of choices. He just chose to be selfish & self-preserving at every turn.
Timecrimes was obviously made on a shoestring budget, which often shows in the acting & script (I’ve never seen anyone so goofily trick a stranger into a time machine outside a UCB sketch before), but it makes the most out of its resources. Time-marking talismans like Blondie’s “Pictures of You” & the masked killer’s Darkman-esque getup are brilliant uses of simple tools at the film’s disposal and it really does get a lot of mileage out of the moral crisis of its plot despite its trashier impulses. If Triangle “borrowed” heavily from Timecrimes, I’d say it improved on its formula significantly, but the film really is an enjoyable, efficient sci-fi thriller in its own right and there’s more than enough room in this world for both works to be their wonderfully strange, independent selves, regardless of when they were released in time.
A body of a rich man is found on the main street of a small Mississippi town. Bumbling local authorities luckily mistake Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) — a quick witted, sharp-dressed homicide detective from Philadelphia — for a suspect. After being taken in, he is dragged into the investigation and small town politics, butting heads with the police chief, minor rednecks, and rich good ole boys. Virgil makes his way surrounded at all times by potentially violent white supremacists, who resent him for not only being black but also for being successful, with only facts and quick reflexes as he plunges headfirst into town drama.
The setting of the South itself is as much a character as Virgil. The hot weather permeates every scene of In the Heat of the Night with its humidity. There’s squeaking air conditioners and sweat rolling off of everyone. Every backroad is dusty and treacherous. There’s fields of cotton with hunched over weather beaten pickers right before a scenic driveway to a plantation. The broken down desperation is constant. In the Heat of the Night could have simply been a crime movie (at some point I thought to myself that this movie vaguely has the same feel as a really good Columbo episode) but the setting is everything. Virgil is a successful black man in a town run by poor, angry white men. The heat is as oppressive as the prejudice and bigotry.
The setting is hostile. The people are racist. But it’s pretty satisfying to watch Sidney Poitier play a no nonsense successful detective constantly proving everyone wrong and blatantly disobeying people who order him around like a dog, calling him “boy.” One of the best moments of the movie is when a rich racist man slaps him and without hesitation he slaps back. Being from 1967, this feels like such a rallying point: that finally on film a black man can slap back.
During the opening credits, one thing I found kind of surprising is that Hal Ashby edited this film. I wasn’t aware of his editing work, so I was kind of eager to find out what the guy who directed Harold and Maude and Being There could bring to the editing table. It turns out a lot. His quick cuts and the cinematography of Haskell Wexler (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) result in a movie that’s just as moving technically as it is acting and story-wise.
In the Heat of the Night is a well paced, beautifully shot thriller. Just watching it, you can feel the humid Southern air. Poitier playing a stubborn and heroic bigotry-defying Tibbs is definitely iconic. And even if it weren’t for all of that, it would still be a good crime movie.
With his last two features writer/director Jeremy Saulnier has carved out a nice, little niche for himself in constructing intimate, terrifying thrillers about folks who are in way over their heads (in blood & viscera). His last film, Blue Ruin, was a tightly-wound revenge thriller in which a doomed, ordinary man took on an organized criminal syndicate despite his ineptitude for violence in a private war he instigates (or avenges, depending on your perspective). His attempts at violence are ugly & disastrous, as he fucks up constantly, but the inertia of the plot doesn’t allow him any viable options but to continue on anyway. There isn’t much of a difference in Saulnier’s follow-up, The Green Room, except a change in scenery and a shift in perspective from revenge to survival in its central plot concerns. The Green Room somehow feels less special & more pared down than Blue Ruin, but it’s still an effective thriller that never loosens its chokehold on the audience’s throat throughout its runtime thanks to an increasingly limited set of options for a positive outcome for any one of its characters, protagonist or otherwise.
Fictional hardcore punk band The Ain’t Rights (featuring Burying the Ex‘s Anton Yelchin & The Final Girls‘s Alia Shawkat among its members) are struggling to make it home from a disastrous road tour, resorting to siphoning gas & camping roadside to ease their financial desperation. Keeping their punk band ethics D.I.Y. & internet presence free, the band finds themselves in the fragile situation of playing one last gig for an isolated skinhead (ne0-Nazi) community (run by a no-nonsense, ice-cold Patrick Stewart). As soon as The Ain’t Rights open their set with a cover of the Dead Kennedys’s classic diddy “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” the vulnerability of their situation becomes terrifyingly apparent & only gets worse as the plot thickens & the chokehold tightens. After their set The Ain’t Rights accidentally uncover a couple nasty secrets their racist/militaristic punk show hosts are hiding at their concert venue/compound and the situation snowballs into a total nightmare where they’re locked in a small, windowless dressing room with no hope for escape except an all-out bloodbath where the ill-prepared youngsters aren’t likely to survive. Spoiler alert for those unfamiliar with this kind of genre fare: most of them don’t.
If there’s a prevailing concern that drives every scene of The Green Room it’s authenticity. Scenes of D.I.Y. punk kids drinking beers, listening to records, getting dead serious about their biggest artistic influences during college radio interviews, and having out-of-body religious experiences while thrashing around in a mosh pit all feel true to the punk scene as I know/remember it, albeit without the stench of body odor that would seal the deal. Apparently The Thermals frontman Hutch Harris was brought in as a coach for this aspect of the film, which is about the cutest thing I’ve heard of since Deb Harry handed out “punk rock merit badges” to the Frog Scouts on The Muppet Show. I only have to assume that the skinhead scene is represented with the same level of authenticity, as I’ve thankfully had very few experiences with their presence at New Orleans D.I.Y. shows. I’d like to see a version of this kind of punk scene thriller without these white power monsters’ involvement, but the movie seems well-researched in their representation. At the very least it gives the same fetishistic attention to the various designations of their bootlace colors as Friedkin gave to the gay S&M scene’s handkerchief coding in Cruising.
The Green Room‘s authenticity doesn’t stop at its depictions of D.I.Y. punk culture, either. The violence is some of the most horrifically brutal, gruesome gore I’ve seen in a long while, not least of all because it’s treated with the real life severity that’s often missing in the cheap horror films that misuse it. Each disgusting kill hits with full force, never feeling like a frivolous indulgence, and the resulting tone is an oppressive cloud of unending dread. From the Dead Kennedys cover to the end credits my veins were pulsing so hard they felt as if they might explode. That’s a sign of a highly effective thriller, but it wasn’t necessarily a feeling I’d wish to return to at any point.
The Green Room amplifies the hopeless situation of Blue Ruin by confining its action to an extremely limited space & uping the potential number of lives at stake, but I couldn’t help but find the plight of Saulnier’s in-over-their-heads protagonists a little repetitive here. There are some truly great, small moments in the film (the religious experience in the mosh pit especially stands out), but in a larger context I felt it was mostly delivering a heart-racing sensation of fear & apprehension. It was intense in the moment, but felt like somewhat of a cheap thrill once I reached the relief of the end credits. As a genre picture I think The Green Room checks off all the right boxes & delivers everything you could ask for as an audience looking to cower & sweat. However, I’d love to see Saulnier switch gears in the future & push where else he can take that intensity/authenticity with an entirely different set of genre expectations.
One thing that’s always disturbed me about “doomsday preppers” & “survival” enthusiasts is that they always seem to be perversely looking forward to the post-apocalyptic scenarios they’re supposedly preparing against. When preppers warn of possible end-of-the-world scenarios that will tear society to shreds, the first thing that always comes to mind is the question “Who would want to survive that?” Whether the world as I know it ends by zombie outbreak, alien attack, or (most likely) nuclear fallout, I’d honestly rather die that pick through the wreckage with the paranoid, power-hungry bullies who had been anticipating that downfall. Apparently I’m not alone in that opinion.
10 Cloverfield Lane is less of a “sister film” sequel to the (shrill, annoying, insufferable) 2008 found-footage sci-fi horror Cloverfield & more of a tense, horror-minded thriller about the monstrous spirit lurking within doomsday prepper culture. I’m not sure that it’s the first film to depict the selfish nastiness & misanthropy at the heart of “survival” types in the context of the horror genre, but it’s the first I’ve seen and it’s damn effective. After a brutal car accident, a young New Orleans woman (played by Faults‘s un-deprogrammable cult fanatic & Scott Pilgrim’s mall punk girlfriend Mary Elizabeth Winstead) finds herself chained to the wall of a mysterious basement wearing only her underwear. Her captor (played by a beyond terrifying John Goodman in what might be a career-high performance) attempts to convince her that she’s “lucky” to be contained in his bunker because “there’s been an attack” & “everyone outside [the shelter] is dead.” Skeptical of her captor’s “generosity” & the idea that “getting out of [there] is the last thing [they] want to do”, our hero carefully attempts to piece together exactly what the strange man wants her for, what’s waiting for her in the outside world, and what’s her safest, most expedient form of escape. 10 Cloverfield Lane keeps the answers to these questions shrouded for as long as possible, but one thing is certain throughout: whatever monstrous threat is waiting outside the shelter could not be has as awful as the one running the show within.
Part of the reason 10 Cloverfield Lane is such a great film is that it’s the exact opposite of its predecessor. Ditching the shaky cam blur that made Cloverfield such a nauseous mess, the film adopts a very grounded, straight-forward visual style that recalls William Friedkin’s masterful stage play adaptations Bug, The Birthday Party, and The Boys in the Band. More importantly, the first Cloverfield film never developed its characters beyond shrill archetypes fleeing danger. When someone’s endlessly shrieking “Rob’s got Beth on the phone! Rob’s got Beth on the phone!” and you don’t know or care who Rob & Beth are, it’s difficult to be anything but annoyed. 10 Cloverfield Lane, by contrast, locks its audience in a basement with a small cast of fearful doomsday survivors suffering under the power dynamics of the cycles of abuse. It’s much easier to be engaged by a film on an emotional level in that kind of scenario.
There is something very essential that both Cloverfield films share, however: the overwhelming power of their central mysteries. If these two films are to be understood as a loose anthology, it’s the basic trick of keeping the audience in the dark that binds them. 10 Cloverfield Lane ups the ante by not only clouding the truth about what exact outside force is looming as a threat over its proceedings (zombies, Russians, Martians, nuclear war, and mutant space worms are all suggested at some point), but also introducing a complexly monstrous threat from within the characters’ ranks that is simultaneously abusive, protective, and difficult to understand. The film’s woman-in-captivity terror is far from unique (actually, it seems to be somewhatof afull-blowntrend recently) but the way its Stockholm syndrome familial bonds & doomsday prepper cultural context complicates that narrative allows the film to crawl under your skin in a way that its predecessor never even approached, whether or not its threat was just as mysterious. All of this, a go-for-broke third act that throws all caution to the wind, an expert use of the Shondells classic “I Think We’re Alone Now” to boot. 10 Cloverfield Lane shook me, surprised me, and confirmed my deepest fears about “survival” nuts’ ugly thirst for post-apocalyptic power grabs. That’s far more than I could’ve expected from a “spiritual sequel” to a found footage horror I failed to enjoy all three times I gave it a shot.
In my reviews of The Legend of Boggy Creek and Anna to the Infinite Power, I mentioned my fascination with Maitland McDonough’s old TV Guide column “Ask Flick Chick,” in which she answered questions about films in general and provided readers with the titles of films that had haunted their subconsciouses for decades. Both Creek and Anna were films that were frequently asked about, as individual readers remembered disparate elements from each, and there were several other movies that would reappear as the answer to a new question with some regularity. Another such film was Francois Truffaut’s La Mariée était en noir (The Bride Wore Black), in which a woman whose husband was killed on their wedding day seeks out and visits revenge upon the five men responsible, crossing out their names one-by-one in her notebook. If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. There are certain obvious similarities to Kill Bill, although Quentin Tarantino is insistent that he has never seen the film. It’s not unreasonable that he plucked this idea from the ether, especially given his openness about the films from which he did draw ideas and images for Kill Bill, but I’ll leave it to you to decide whether or not that was the case.
Julie (Jeanne Moreau) is prevented from leaping out of a high window by her mother. Unable to end her life, we see her begin to call upon and kill one man after another. The first, a reformed womanizer (Claude Rich) preparing for his wedding, is talked into attempting to retrieve her scarf from a precarious balcony ledge; she tells him who she is before she pushes him to his death. The next man she kills is a messy, lonely bachelor (Michel Bouquet) to whom she sends tickets for a musical performance; she poisons him even as he protests that her husband’s death was an accident. Her third victim is a would-be politician and unsympathetic adulterer; she traps him in a small closet and allows him to suffocate as he reveals the circumstances that led to her husband’s death: the group of men liked to hunt and chase skirts, so they would get together from time to time and play cards; one of them was showing off his rifle and another picked it up and shot Julie’s husband without realizing the gun was loaded. They then escaped in order to protect their futures and careers.
Julie is understandably unmoved by this confession, and moves on to Delvaux (Daniel Boulanger), but he is arrested for an unrelated crime before she can exact her revenge. She then ingratiates herself with the artist Fergus (Charles Denner), modelling for him as he slowly falls in love with her. Her initial attempts to kill him fail, but she eventually shoots him with a bow he gave her to use as a prop. By this time, a mutual friend of Fergus and her first victim, David (Serge Rousseau), has figured out the connection, and he has her arrested at Fergus’s funeral. The end of the film shows that this was part of her larger plan, as she is able to kill Delvaux on the inside of prison.
This is an almost perfect film. François Truffaut had just finished a long series of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, and this was his attempt to make a Hitchcockian thriller. Truffaut himself also expressed disappointment in this film for a long time, and it was only recently that this was revealed to have been due to artistic friction with cinematographer Raoul Coutard. Coutard worked with Truffaut previously but had worked with other directors in color before he and Truffaut reunited. As a result, they had conflicting ideas and the two would often have days-long arguments over composition and lighting that ultimately led to a very difficult shoot. Offscreen friction aside, however, this film has definitely only improved with age, featuring a uniquely French approach to the art of the mise-en-scene, which lends an air of the auteur to the film overall without forsaking the Hitchcockian elements that make it function as a mainstream picture as well.
Cop Car is the second feature helmed by 34-year-old director Jon Watts, and it is hands down one of the best new thrillers that I have seen in quite some time. Somehow, it’s a Coen Brothers crime thriller that features no involvement from either Joel or Ethan, an unblinking gaze into Everytown, America, full of heartless thugs and killer cops, long empty highways, oppressive silence, and inevitable death. There are only five characters of significance, all but one in search of an exit, and the sweet, sweet voice of Kyra Sedgwick as the unseen dispatcher. It’s moody, cinematic, and not to be missed.
Two elementary-age boys, Travis (James Freedson-Jackson) and Harrison (Hays Wellford), have run away from home; after travelling what they guess must be fifty miles, they stumble across a cop car in a thicket. After a series of escalating dares, the two end up finding the keys to the car and taking it for a joyride, where they nearly run Bev (Camryn Manheim) off the road. Unbeknownst to them, the car belongs to Sheriff Kretzer (Kevin Bacon), who left the vehicle behind in order to drag a corpse to what I can only describe as his “murder hole,” a covered hole the size of an old well, where he drops the corpse and sprinkles it with quicklime. He returns to discover the car is gone, along with the other body (Shea Whigham) in the trunk.
I can’t really say more than that without giving away too much; I only recapped what could be gleaned from the trailer in the paragraph above, and even that feels like it verges on being too spoilery. The film’s appreciation for the seemingly endless vastness of rural living, the way it extends for as far as the eye can see while you’re standing in the middle of it, is captivating in its paradoxically warm yet clinical approach. There’s an inherent serenity to the calm and quiet of dry country, and the way that this peacefulness is disrupted and destroyed throughout the film is effective every time. The tension in the film begins almost immediately, and the way that it builds as the boys innocently and stupidly play with deadly police equipment (including a defibrillator which one child is preparing to shock himself with before he is distracted) plays out like a Fibonacci sequence of increasing anxiety as things get worse and worse, in the best possible way.
Bacon plays the sheriff’s spiraling mania and intermittent calm with perfection, and Whigham’s character is also delightfully terrifying. The film has a great deal of trust in its audience’s intelligence, which is a rarity in contemporary film, and the movie refuses to spell anything out for you or hold your hand through the narrative. The most Coen-y thing about it, however, is the way that you, as a member of the audience, are expected to fill in the blanks and the backstory. We never are told for certain who Whigham’s character is (he’s never even named), why exactly the Sheriff had him in the truck, or who the other person was, although it can be assumed that it has something to do with drugs. Why are these boys running away from home in the first place? That’s for you to decide, making the film more immersive than it would be if we knew more about the characters’ home lives than the tidbits we get. If you actually want to be on the edge of your seat this year, check out Cop Car.
Watching Do You Like Hitchcock? reminded me of one of my favorite guilty pleasures. In much the same way as Britnee discovered The Boyfriend School on cable late one night, so did I stumble upon the nearly-forgotten romcom crime thriller Head Over Heels. Two parts standard turn of the century romcom, one part Rear Window, with just a dash of genderbent Zoolander, this second feature from director Mark Waters (following the darkly comical Parker Posey vehicle House of Yes) was despised by critics and the general public alike. Roger Ebert gave the film a scant 1.5 stars, and the film has an abysmal Rotten Tomatoes score of 10%. To put that in perspective, Dario Argento’s Phantom of the Opera, a movie so bad I would recommend screening it as punishment for unrepentant murderers were that not potentially a war crime, has a 13% approval rating. People hate hate hate this movie. And I love it.
Amanda Pierce (Monica Potter) has a talent for choosing terrible men. Born in Iowa, Amanda now works as a restoration artist in the Renaissance wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where her lesbian best friend Lisa (China Chow) warns her that if she devotes too much of her life to her work, she’ll end up like the three elderly spinsters who work in the same department. When she tries to surprise her boyfriend (a cameo by Timothy Olyphant), she catches him in bed with another woman and leaves him. She finds an unrealistically cheap room in an gorgeous apartment, and although she is initially skeptical of her roommates, a quartet of international fashion models, she bonds with and helps ground them as they help her become more outgoing and engaged with the world. They are: Holly (Tomiko Fraser), the one who skipped a free ride to Stanford to model; Jade (Shalom Harlow), the most approachable one; Candi “with an ‘i'” (Sarah O’Hare), an Australian woman who grew up on a farm under the eye of her creepy uncle and receives various facial surgeries throughout the film; and Roxana Milla Slasnakova (Ivana Miličević), a Russian woman with deadpan delivery.
Amanda has a meet cute with their neighbor, Jim Winston (Freddie Prinze, Jr.), that involves a Great Dane named Hamlet whose rambunctiousness is a recurring joke. Although she is immediately weak-in-the-knees attracted to the young fashion entrepreneur, she and her four roommates spend some time watching him through his windows from their living room, Rear Window style, because she assumes he must have a hidden flaw if she is attracted to him. After several potential negatives turn out to be misunderstandings, the models convince Amanda to crash a party that they see Jim preparing for. The two eventually hit it off, and Amanda returns home to share her experience with Candi (unable to attend after her most recent surgery), only to watch in horror as Jim apparently murders one of his guests after the party is over.
Here’s where the movie really kicks into high gear, as Amanda and her entourage of supermodels must take up their own investigation after the police fail to take them seriously. This includes more Hitchcockian hijinx, including Holly’s frantic attempts to alert the other women that Jim is in the hallway while she watches them search his place for clues, culminating in a scene where Jade, Candi, and Roxana must hide in the shower while Jim takes a really gassy bathroom break. It’s not the highest form of humor, but it’s toilet humor that works somehow. Of course, once Amanda is finally convinced that she can trust Jim, it turns out that he really isn’t who he says he is.
It’s no surprise that Waters would go on to direct Mean Girls just a few years after this, as that film has a similar tone, although the differences in sensibilities between the two make it obvious that one film was written by Tina Fey while the other was initially conceived by the chuckleheads behind There’s Something About Mary. Still, this is a movie about unlikely friendships between women who empower each other as much as it is about a woman who finally finds Mr. Perfect, and there’s a lot to be said for that. The supermodel characters could easily be stereotypical airheads who are always the butt of jokes, and although that description isn’t entirely inaccurate, the film never treats them disrespectfully or cruelly, and their specific knowledge ends up being critical in the solution to the crime at the end of the film. Although they are beautiful, vain, and err on the side of ditziness, they are nonetheless good people who care about Amanda and genuinely want the best for her, and it’s refreshing to see a group of attractive women in a movie written and directed by men who don’t conform to being characterized as catty or combative.
This is also a very witty movie, which I suspect is part of the reason it was so poorly received upon release. The filmmakers have said that they conceived the movie as a deliberate throwback to stylized comedies of yore, with urbane and carefully composed dialogue delivered amidst slapstick visuals and ridiculous setpieces. With regards to the dialogue, Miličević is obviously the MVP here, as her background in stand-up comedy makes her perfect as the punchline spouting Russian sexpot. Potter is a surprise comedian, as she generally plays the straight man against whom the jokester acts out (Patch Adams probably being the best and worst demonstration of this); here, she gets in on the action with her rapid-fire witticisms and her willingness to go all the way with her slapstick. Amanda tumbles down stairs, gets tackled by a giant dog multiple times, and takes a dive from a catwalk, and it’s absolutely hilarious.
The verbal jokes are also great, and I found myself laughing out loud all alone while rewatching this movie, which rarely happens. The models grow very tense when Amanda mentions that her boyfriend was cheating on her with a lingerie model, and their palpable relief upon learning none of them was responsible is great (Jade: “I’m so glad we don’t have to deal with that… again.”). Every character gets to be funny, even the villain’s henchman at the end who is present when the gang realizes that the mafia isn’t laundering money but smuggling diamonds (Jim: “If this had been a rhinestone I could have bitten straight through it instead of chipping my tooth!”), who realizes this is the reason why the mafioso never let him take one of the diamond-encrusted dresses “To give to [his] girlfriend! Or [his] wife!” This is also a surprisingly queer movie, especially for a film from 2001. Beyond Amanda’s teen sweetheart (whom she catches kissing another guy at homecoming) and her friendship with Lisa, there’s also Jim’s building super, who lets the women into his apartment in exchange for Roxana’s leopard print dress, which we see him wear with great delight.
Head Over Heels is not a great movie, but it’s also not nearly as terrible as critical contemporary reception would lead you to believe. It’s a delightful bit of romcom fluff with enough self-awareness and love for Hitchcock to carry you past the wayposts that all romcoms seem to have. In only 86 minutes, Freddie Prinze, Jr. will sweep me off my feet–I mean, sweep Monica Potter off her feet, and you’ll get a fair number of chuckles from it. If you catch it on cable late one night, give it a chance; just try not to wake your housemates with your giggles.
Director John Landis is typically known for his work in comedies. His name is synonymous with comedy milestones like Animal House, Kentucky Fried Movie, Trading Places, Blues Brothers, and Coming to America. That’s why when we were discussing October’s Movie of the Month, Landis’ vampire mafia oddity Innocent Blood, we were a little surprised in the director’s interest in horror as a genre, previously thinking of his cult classic An American Werewolf in London mostly as a one-off fluke. It turns out that Landis has a long history of working within horror, dating all the way back to his very first feature, with nearly ten credits to his name as a director that fit right into his work in Innocent Blood & An American Werewolf in London. Listed below are all of John Landis’ horror credits (or at least the ones that I could find) in chronological order, each ranked & reviewed.
Schlock (1973)
If there were any question about whether or not John Landis’ displays for gleeful love for oldschool horror in An American Werewolf in London & Innocent Blood were a fluke, it’s answered as soon as his very first feature. As you can tell from its succinct/accurate title, Schlock is a silly love letter to the very silly history of silly B-movies, particularly in the 50s sci-fi horror drive-in era. In the film Landis himself plays the titular Schlock, a missing link primate dubbed The Banana Killer by the press both because he leaves banana peels at the scenes of his crimes (He’s an ape! Bananas! Get it?!),which have an escalating body count of more than 200 dead, and because whoever committed these crimes “is obviously bananas.” That kind of hokey humor is typical to the film & it works best when it’s incongruously paired with depictions of violence. For instance, a local news station covering the Banana Killer murders holds a “Body Count Contest” where viewers can guess the number of mangled bodies contained in a group of garbage bags for a prize, as if guessing the number of jellybeans in a jar at a little kid’s birthday party. Not only is this moment sublimely silly, but it also jabs at the way news coverage of mass murders can shamelessly turn tragedy into entertainment.
Unfortunately, the Body Bag Contest gag is among the very few of the film’s inspired moments. If Schlock had been structured like Landis’ Kentucky Fried Movie and stuck to a pastiche of B-movie inspired sketch comedy (as in the excellent 2000 mockumentary The Independent), it’d amost certainly be a cult classic. Instead, it gets unnecessarily bogged down in the logistics of telling a complete story about a murderous missing link, playing a bit like a full length parody of the little loved, little remembered movie Trog. You can feel the sketch comedy structure screaming to break out from within, like in a last minute gag that promises/threatens a sequel titled Son of Schlock & in a trailer-like intro that proclaims, “First, Birth of a Nation. Then Gone With the Wind, 2001: A Space Oddyssey, Love Story, See You Next Wednesday [which doesn’t exist outside of Landis’ ongoing inside joke]. And now, Schlock! Schlock! Schlock!” while Landis’ literal monkeyshines are intercut with a playground strewn with dead bodies & banana peels. Another interesting moment features Schlock, aka The Banana Killer, watching The Blob in a movie theater, focusing on a scene in which characters are watching a scene in a movie theater before a Blob attack. SO we’re watching a movie in which a killer ape watches a movie in which unsuspecting teenagers watch a movie just before an evil alien blob threatens their lives. This tactic of showing appreciation for the history of horror films by actually showing those films is repeated in Innocent Blood, where several televisions are tuned into old midnight monster movies in the midst of vampiric mayhem. Too bad Schlock is a little too accurate to the format of the trashy sci-fi horror films it’s mocking/paying tribute to. It has a few standout, bonkers scenes that make it interesting as a relic, but the task of watching it in its entirety is a bit of a chore.
American Werewolf in London (1981)
While we were watching Innocent Blood for our Movie of the Month discussion it was difficult not to consider the film’s merits in the context of what Landis had already accomplished in An American Werewolf in London. Titles like Animal House or The Blues Brothers might be considered the apex of his career as a whole, but American Werewolf is easily his most well-regarded feature film as a horrormeister. In a lot of ways, American Werewolf‘s reputation works to its detriment, drumming expectations up to an almost unmatchable standard. In reality, it’s actually an unassuming little horror comedy. Besides a couple practical effects spectacles in its werewolf transformation scenes & creature design (provided by horror make-up genius Rick Baker) and a climactic sequence of epic monster movie mayhem, there really isn’t that much to the film. That’s not to say it isn’t enjoyable. To the contrary, its alternating gruesome/amusing tone is pleasantly unrushed & by the time it reaches its fever pitch conclusion of beheadings, car crashes, and oldschool werewolf attacks it’s nearly impossible not to be won over by its charms, which is about the same reaction I had to Innocent Blood.
The plot of An American Werewolf in London is fairly simple, straightforward stuff in terms of the werewolf genre. Two young American lads are backpacking through Western Europe when they reach a spooky tavern in a small community that has pentagrams & religious candles hanging amongst its dart boards & pints of lager. Picture the tavern in the original Wicker Man movie & you’ll have a good idea of the vibe. Anyway, the spooky locals warn the boys to stick to the road, advice they obviously disobey, which obviously leads to them being attacked by a werewolf. One friend dies & the other transforms into a mythical man-beast, much to the surprise of the big city doctors that help him recover from the attack. There are a few surprises in the formula: dreams in which the protagonist is hunting naked in the woods, a nightmare sequence in which uniformed space monsters burn down his home & murder his family, a growing army of his victims’ ghosts that urge him to commit suicide, etc. For the most part, though, this faithfulness to oldschool werewolf horror is entirely intentional, solidified by the film’s constant references to the Lon Cheney/Bela Lugosi famous monsters classic The Wolfman (a tactic echoed in Schlock & Innocent Blood). If the intent of American Werewolf was to update The Wolfman-type monster movies for modern sardonic senses of humor & special effects capabilities, I’d say it’s mostly successful. At the very least, I think I enjoyed it slightly more than 1981’s The Howling, which seems to be a good reference point for where Landis was aiming.
Twilight Zone: The Movie –Prologue & “Time Out” (1983)
It’s tempting to skip over Twilight Zone: The Movie in this write-up, both because Landis’ segments of the production barely qualify as horror & because of the infamous on-set disaster that resulted in three real-life deaths, a tragedy that has haunted the director & the movie industry at large for decades. The two segments Landis directs in the Twilight Zone movie are a prologue in which Dan Aykroyd scares fellow weirdo comedian Albert Brooks with a scary face (provided again by make-up genius Rick Baker) and a who-cares story about a racist prick getting a taste of his own hateful medicine at the hands of Nazis, the Klan, and so on. The prologue section is mostly nonsense & the thriller-esque anti-racism fantasy segment somehow feels even thinner. The funny thing about Twilight Zone: The Movie is that the film’s two producers, Steven Spieldberg & John Landis, directed the film’s weakest vignettes by far, while contributors George Miller & Joe Dante actually delivers a couple short-form horror classics. In short, Landis was greatly upstaged here, which is funny because I felt his werewolf movie just a couple years before greatly upstaged Dante’s somewhat similar (Rick Baker collaboration) The Howling.
Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” (1983)
The music video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” is by far the best example of John Landis’ horror work. It’s tempting to say that the economy of a 15 minute short film leaves little room for Landis to drop the ball in any significant way, but his two segments in The Twilight Zone: The Movie barely ammount to more than that & they aren’t nearly as effective or as memorable as the “Thriller” video. It’s more that Landis pushed himself to include every hallmark of his horror work into the video’s short runtime that makes it so enjoyable. It was rick Baker’s incredible make-up work in An American Werewolf in London that got Landis the job in the first place (as that was the only Landis film Jackson had actually seen at the time he was hired) so the special effects genius worked with the director one last time to turn The King of Pop into a werewolf. The affection for 50’s monster movies are on display in the video’s movie theater scene (featuring Landis himself enjoying a tub of popcorn) and promotional posters for Schlock & The Masque of the Red Death. There’s no choreography in Landis’ other work, but the video’s infamous dance routine of the undead reflects the irreverent humor he’s known to bring to the table. You can even feel Landis’ geeky love for horror in a Vincent Price “rap” that includes the lines “The funk of 40,000 years & grisly ghouls from every tomb are closing in to seal your doom.” There’s no other way to put this really: “Thriller” is perfect. It’s not only Landis’ most iconic work in the horror spectrum; it’s also just one of the most perfect specimens of the music video as an art form.
Side note: Jackson apparently thought the “Thriller” video was so perfect & enticing that he included this warning, “Due to my personal convictions, I wish to stress that this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult.” That’s how powerful “Thriller” is. Jackson was worried it was going to start a wave of Satanic converts.
Innocent Blood (1992)
Much like how Landis’ much better-regarded An American Werewolf in Paris feels like an average werewolf movie until its technical marvel monster transformations & last minute mayhem set it apart from its peers, our current Movie of the Month & the director’s only horror feature since American Werewolf, Innocent Blood plays like an unremarkable combo of the vampire & mafia genres until it devolves into delightful chaos. This change that gets kicked off sometime around when the head mob boss, Sallie “The Shark” Macelli, is turned & starts assembling cinema’s (as far as I know) very first vampire mafia. There’s some respectable noir influence in the dark alleys & detective work of the front half of Innocent Blood, but until the vampire mafia starts to take rise, it feels like a dull compromise between far too many modern vampire films & bargain bin Scorsese knockoffs. It’s the black comedy & campy vampire mob shenanigans once the plot gains momentum that make the movie shine, especially in scenes like Don Rickles’ horrific vampire transformation or a never-ending, super-kinky, thrust-heavy sex scene that equal any ridiculousness you’d find in American Werewolf. The competent production & surprising jaunts of violent cruelty (including some truly grotesque body horror in Don Rickles’ Big Scene) combined with Marcelli running around converting his dopey goons, balance Innocent Blood‘s darkly humorous (and entirely intentional) campy tendencies with the more straightforward genre fare of the first act. Robert Loggia (whose version of apoplectic rage I’m most familiar with in Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie) is brilliantly funny in his role as Marcelli, thoroughly unraveling in his newfound, undead state, to the point where he’s playing more of a vampiric humanoid raccoon than a vampiric mob boss, holding down most of the movie’s charm.
Landis backs up this silliness & genre play with copious televisions playing ancient B-movies featuring familiar monsters like stop-motion dinosaurs, escaped gorillas, Bela Lugosi, and Christopher Lee (the same kind of onscreen references he brought to Schlock, American Werewolf, and “Thriller”). At the same time, on-screen televisions also take time to play more respectable fare, like the Hitchcock film Strangers on a Train. I think these movie selections are a great representation of what Landis was intending to accomplish here: marrying a schlock aesthetic with the higher production value of a “real” film. It’s that exact push & pull that made me fall in love with Innocent Blood as a dark comedy, when I initially wasn’t expecting to get much out of it. The film also smartly goes light on its dedication to the generally accepted rules of cinematic vampirism, despite its reverence for its cinematic ancestors. The same way silver bullets aren’t required to kill werewolves in American Werewolf, vampires in Innocent Blood may be averse to garlic & sunlight, but their reflections appears in mirrors & victims are disposed of with shots to the head (much more akin to zombie rules) rather than stakes to the heart. It’s curious to me that Innocent Blood is the sole screenplay credit for writer Michael Wolk, as I believe he did a fantastic job of establishing a distinct kind of mob-themed horror comedy that I’ve never seen on film before, one with a surprisingly deft balance between honoring mafia & vampire traditions, while still knowing when & where to stray. Like with American Werewolf, when the screenplay works it really works, flaws & false starts be damned.
Masters of Horror: “Deer Woman” (2005)
Unfortunately, Innocent Blood & An American Werewolf in London proved to be the only Landis horror features to date. There were some vague horror elements to his work in the anthology pictures The Twilight Zone: The Movie & even vaguer yet, Amazon Women on the Moon, a more sci-fi-leaning B-movie spoof flick without nearly enough horror elements in Landis’ segments to be included here. Otherwise, Landis’ horror work has been restricted to the small screen, starting with the Michael Jackson music video. The three most recent examples of his horror work have been hour-long segments in anthology television shows, starting with Showtime’s short-lived Masters of Horror. Surprisingly enough, Landis’ two Masters of Horror vignettes were actually far more enjoyable than his similar work in Twilight Zone: The Movie. Perhaps it was working alongside names like Dario Argento, Stuart Gordon, Joe Dante, Takashi Miike, and John Carpenter that inspired him to step up his game. Since Spielberg, Joe Dante, and George Miller failed to do the same, though, its more likely that the more inherently goofy format of the televised anthology horror simply allowed Landis to bring much needed levity to his horror work, something he excels at, given that he mostly cut his teeth in the comedy genre.
Landis’ first contribution to Masters of Horror, “The Deer Woman”, is a sublimely silly story about a Native American legend involving a beautiful woman with the legs of a deer that tramples unsuspecting victims to death. The episode is riddled with subpar dialogue & even less-commendable performances from its actors, but still proves itself to be memorably goofy by its conclusion. The titular deer woman is a non-verbal knockout of a woman, who seduces her victims merely by smiling & nodding. Once she lures them into a dangerously secluded place, she snaps off their erections & tramples their corpses into goop. Although the title gives away this reveal far before it arrives, “The Deer Woman” is still written like a police procedural, which works only because it’s amusing watching the central detective, who is essentially a small-town Agent Mulder, try to piece together crimes that don’t quite make sense. In one scenario, he imagines a beautiful woman beating her victims to death with a taxidermy deer leg. In another, he imagines a deer dressed in flannel & jeans punching victims to death as if in a barroom brawl. This cartoonishness mixed with the episode’s grotesque sense of gore is a mostly winning combo, one commendable in its dedication to inanity. The episode serves as John’s son Max Landis’ very first screenwriting credit, but the father-son pair apparently bickered about the details of the story’s conclusion to the point that John insisted on including his name as a writing credit as well. With cheeky references to An American Werewolf (cited as evidence for the faux-Mulder’s monster killer theory) & Frida Kahlo’s self portrait The Wounded Deer, “The Deer Woman” is a perfectly-suited small-scale entry in Landis’ horror catalog, especially once the the titular deer woman is using her deer legs to gallop from rooftop to rooftop in a ludicrous display.
Masters of Horror: “Family” (2006)
Landis’ second contribution to Masters of Horror was a grotesquely comedic portrait of a serial killer building a family of bleached skeletons that’re something of a Norman Rockwell by way of Norman Bates display. Norm! from Cheers is the serial in question, fairly amusing here as he bickers with his skeleton family & listens to spooky blues music in his basement/skeleton lab. The back & forth switching between the serial killer’s fantasy & reality are darkly amusing, such as in a scene that alternates from him bathing his “mother”/melting the skin off her bones with acid. As he tries to add a young couple to his collection & expand his family with a younger, sexier set of bones, he makes himself vulnerable to discovery and, worse yet, punishment for his evil deeds. As enjoyably goofy as “The Deer Woman” can be, it’s fairly safe to say that “Family” is the best example of Landis’ televised horror anthology work. It would easily fit right in with the best episodes of Tales from the Crypt, especially once it reaches its disgusting last second reveal. If you’re going to watch just one of his post-Innocent Blood television episodes, this would be your best option.
Fear Itself: “In Sickness & in Health” (2008)
There really isn’t much at all to say about John Landis’ most recent entry in the horror genre. When Masters of Horror was denied a third season by the Showtime network, the show was transformed into a one-season failure titled Fear Itself on NBC. The transition to network television was not kind to the horror anthology program, since it severely limited what it could get away with in terms of gore & vulgarity (although those restrictions have surely been more laid back in the seven years since). Besides John Landis, the only notable director from the Masters of Horror era to return to Fear Itself was Re-Animator‘s Stuart Gordon. Besides those two names, nothing of note came from Fear Itself’s pitifully short run. As for Landis’ entry in particular, he tells the story of a wedding day ruined by a mysterious, hand-delivered note that reads, “The person you are marrying is a serial killer.” Absolutely nothing of interest happens between that note’s arrival & the final reveal that *gasp* the note was delivered to the wrong person & the protagonist bride we’ve been following the whole time was actually the killer. Okay. The episode is mostly a bore, made fascinating only by the inclusion of the actor who played The X-Files‘ “Smoking Man” dressed in priestly garb. It’s an interesting image, but nothing to get too excited about, since “In Sickness & In Health” is nearly an hour in length.
I sincerely hope that this most recent example of John Landis’ horror work will not be his last, as the director has proven in the past that he has much better work in him. I’d love to see him return to the genre on the big screen on last time, perhaps for a Frankenstein or zombie picture, since he’s already covered the werewolf & vampire genres in the past. As long as brings a sense of goofball comedy to the production, it could be worthwhile.
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