31 days, 31 movies…or so the story goes. Your light reading recap CONCLUDES below:
- Quiet Place, A (2018 – Blu-Ray) – The more I’ve contemplated A Quiet Place in the days following my initial viewing – the more I’ve reflected on just what I’d seen and heard, or, more accurately, hadn’t heard – the more I found its origins somewhat surprising. This is a film that, across a mere 90-minute runtime, still plays to me more like episodic television than did even the horror genre’s most comprehensive recent success story, HBO’s lavish, gut-level cable adaptation of award-winning video game series The Last of Us. That’s because it probably belonged on the small screen all along, though not as a TV show – at least not first and foremost – but, instead, as a stealth action/horror video game itself. This isn’t intended as a criticism, by the way, but, rather, a prism through which to see why A Quiet Place feels the way it does, why its accomplishments feel so strong and its deficiencies nag so. This is just a movie that springs from a different creative sensibility. Real-life acting power couple Emily Blunt and John Krasinski play haggard parents of three shepherding their young family through a post-apocalyptic wasteland where they are hunted by otherworldly apex predators that have compensated for blindness by evolving overpowered super-hearing. Pins drop along with numerous types of other shoes over the course of A Quiet Place, and most every impact, no matter where, from whom, or how audible, rings a dinner bell sufficient to send the frothing CGI monsters running. This premise established in a merciless pre-title sequence, the movie settles into a more predictable, some might suggest game-like, pattern with few true variations but surprising moments of creative design nonetheless. Among your missions: gather supplies from a dilapidated drug store without raising alarm; escort your noisy little brother from point A to B; light a warning beacon to distract your enemies; race back to defend the homestead against a surprise attack already in progress; negotiate a flooded basement occupied by a blind but hungry creature. Counterbalance that with human moments that really punctuate the suspense, such as when the pregnant Blunt must remain silent even as a home invasion causes her to go into premature labor, or Krasinki’s desperate fervor to defend his family despite being sealed off from them across a gauntlet of cornfield and beasties lurking therein. Leaving aside the excellent question of why anybody might wish to direct deposit a crying infant into such a booby-trapped rural hellscape, A Quiet Place bets that unnaturally heightened senses can only aid in the creation of suspense. Any gamer who has booked extended stays in the worlds of Hitman or Assassin’s Creed knows intrinsically that’s a winning play, though, to its credit, A Quiet Place has a little more to offer in the realm of heart and/or soul. There must be a reason, after all, we were never confronted with the likes of Metal Gear Solid: The Movie.
- Saw X (2023 – Theater) – Revived (yet) again from an extended death that has already survived eight increasingly lurid sequels including an official Final Chapter, I think it’s safe to say the Saw franchise still has legs. Grim irony for a series whose first film climaxed with a traumatized surgeon amputating his own foot sans anesthetic. One has to wonder, given that largely posthumous track record, if the brain trust behind this series that already routinely dispensed earth-shifting plot twists like Halloween candy perhaps jumped the gun by killing off its villain in movie #3. Over the last two decades, the Saw franchise has jumped through so many logical and logistical hoops to first reinforce and then replace its fallen figurehead, inventing in the process a small army of red herrings, coffee gophers, co-conspirators, and cultish sycophants to help continue the Jigsaw Killer’s life’s work of scaring delinquents straight with extreme prejudice and an overused engineering degree, that it’s a little jarring to see the legendary John Kramer in the flesh again, not to mention in general command of both his formidable faculties and any/all manner of modified stainless steel animal traps. Set between the events of the first two movies – or so I’m told, and, if so, I have questions – think of Saw X as a post-origin origin story, as the terminally ill Kramer, played with requisite gravitas and then some by the indispensable Tobin Bell, travels to Mexico lured by the promise of miracle treatments only to find it a money-grabbing scam. Imagine the disappointment you might feel at such news, then cast your mind in the direction of the cancer-stricken, only outwardly stoic John Kramer, a lethal toymaker so enraged by the very existence of people who don’t value their own lives to his standards that his typical response is to ensnare them in customized contraptions that, left unsolved, will decapitate, dismember, or otherwise disfigure them in novel ways, up to and including the prospect of having their eyeballs sucked out through affixed vacuum tubes. He’s a one-man mobile Better Business Bureau, imposing stiffer than stiff penalties on the offending enterprise that I think we can largely cheer on as movie fans while also nodding in impressed, solemn agreement at their creative extremity. Juxtaposing some of the series’ grisliest mortal scenarios with an extended look at the infamous Kramer at his most sober and relatable – operating more in the realm of the righteous than the self-righteous for a change…he even befriends a local orphan boy! – Saw X is the legit resurrection this franchise has been hunting for for years. Here’s hoping that, as suggested by a juicy end credits insert, Kramer’s salad days yield yet more self-contained adventures of this type. Complicated, opinionated, and industrious, he’s a pretty interesting guy.
- Shining, The (1980 – Blu-Ray) – A technical marvel and case study in the slow application of pressure, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is so widely revered by audiences that otherwise would keep the horror genre at arm’s length, and considered no less than a head on its Mount Rushmore by many actual fans – one imagines a scowling face beneath lowered brows shoved into the ax-splintered recess in a bathroom door, except chiseled in granite – that I’m a little embarrassed to admit it took me three or four dedicated viewings for it to finally click. I feel as if I appreciated it sufficiently from the beginning, though from an intellectual rather than an emotional standpoint. To be fair, Kubrick’s painstaking personal approach invites, practically necessitates, just that kind of consideration, the way a museumgoer might observe artwork whose mastery they acknowledge but don’t fully “get”. Eons before internet memes were a thing, that ubiquitous face in the shattered door and accompanying catchphrase belonged to Jack Nicholson, a full-blown movie star who does not exactly count disappearing into a role among his many acting gifts. He may be playing Jack Torrence here, an alcoholic writer who goes insane over the course of a winter snowed in with his wife and son as the seasonal caretaker of the remote, infamous, quite possibly haunted Overlook Hotel, but he’s really just Jack Nicholson, who, honestly, has always had a touch of madness about even his most benign star turns. I’d be more surprised on some level if the character didn’t go crazy. This has been chief among the criticisms leveled at Kubrick’s adaptation by the author of the book upon which it’s based, Stephen King, and I think it holds water. Iconic as Torrence may be, this is hardly prime Nicholson, though, wispy, goggle-eyed, and timid to the verge of cardiac collapse as his frazzled wife Wendy, it may well be Shelley Duvall’s best work. The real star of the affair is, of course, director/ producer/ taskmaster Kubrick, relegating King, whose original screenplay met the circular file during pre-production in favor of a heavy rewrite with novelist Diane Johnson, to a purely ceremonial role. The predominant co-star then would be the Overlook itself, an austere, cavernous, snow-choked colossus at which cabin fever of some variety would seem to be a foregone conclusion. This revised billing leaves Nicholson a distant third, and we all know how he feels about sharing screen time. Still, for a movie so littered with figurative fingerprints, you’d be hard pressed to note a single visual blemish. There’s a reason why the prime spots once end credits roll are reserved for the director of photography and production designer. This is one expansive, handsomely mounted endeavor. Does all the technical prowess on display and focus on the surface of things somehow suggest a lack of heart, or are such questions a natural byproduct of Kubrick’s famously exacting approach and we should just follow his muse to the end of the line? I’d say the answer is yes. Much thought has gone into emphasizing the desolation of the Overlook and positioning it as a conduit to the kind of history that doesn’t appear as a bullet item in brochures, so that when Torrence is (repeatedly) visited by weirdness it’s an honest question whether he is hallucinating or interacting with the ghosts of the past. Debate the proper Kubrick to King ratio all you want; it hardly diminishes The Shining’s many moments of power, so many of which can be quoted chapter and verse by obsessive fans, no matter their stripe. All I can really do is stand toward the back of the art gallery and nod along in silent approval.
- Tigers Are Not Afraid (2017 – Shudder) – I know I’ve thrown it a little shade of my own in the course of this recap, but in a world that sometimes seems to boast as many streaming services to choose from as traditional cable channels, I am forever grateful for the existence of Shudder. I’d much rather pay to have an entire, expansive world of horror cinema at my fingertips than hot and cold-running basic cable reruns or here and gone Hollywood not-busters you’d have to have thrown a catered private screening for me to see. And when it comes to horror, it is a big world out there. The three foreign language films within the 31 DAEs all unsurprisingly call Shudder their home. Whether or not the descriptions always match the end product in tone or tenor, Shudder continues to forward its commitment to providing interesting, worthwhile horror, or at least horror-adjacent, content wherever it is to be found. Take Tigers Are Not Afraid, an almost cinema verite examination of a group of homeless Mexican street children living a brutal hand-to-mouth existence under the boot of the vicious drug cartel that sustains and subjugates their town. Twelve-year-old Estrella survives an outburst of nearby gunfire at school, during which her sympathetic teacher arms her with “three wishes, like in the fairy tales” that we for the moment think are merely calmative, or, at best, symbolic, only to return home and find her parents… missing. Crestfallen, Estrella sits on the stoop of her apartment in blank mourning as the furniture is repossessed and neighbors pass her by with nary a second glance. She is haunted by visions of her lost mother. Freshly orphaned and turned out into the streets, Estrella begins running with a gang of juveniles younger, more innocent, and yet much more brazen than she. We’ve already seen their leader, El Shine, steal a pistol almost as big as he is from a drunken gangster and hold it on him furiously before finally thinking better. Shine and Estrella first meet when he breaks into the ruins of her apartment to rob it, and, soon enough, they are face to face again, where her need to belong anywhere is misconstrued as a clumsy power grab. Their uneasy but evolving coexistence is the background to a daily struggle for survival, punctuated by blustery big talk and the occasional spontaneous kid’s game as a fleeting reminder of what’s been lost, as they try to evade the cartel’s notice and the omnipresent ghosts of the fallen observe them ever closer. More than that I probably shouldn’t say, so I’ll again mention the milieu, so alien and fascinating to unseasoned First World eyes, and the lead performances, by Paola Lara and Juan Ramon Lopez, which, unmannered and authentic, are fairly astonishing for their age. Tigers Are Not Afraid has garnered lots of what I can only affirm are apt comparisons to the early Spanish-language work of the great Guillermo Del Toro, and, while it is neither as dependably macabre or elegant, everything flows more or less organically. The film provides a riveting window into a world that we, with luck, will never see otherwise, and time invested in two ruined but worthwhile children cursed with the knowledge that, even though tomorrow is always another day, they will never escape that world alive.
- Totally Killer (2023 – Prime) – The time may have finally come to embrace horror comedies. Hear me out. Inevitably high concept, and too often to their own detriment, self-identified horror comedies are, by definition, a balancing act between two genres with little historic aptitude for delicacy. Push too hard in one direction and the viewer’s desire to laugh is strained. Push too hard in the other and horror’s inherent edge is sacrificed, leaving behind mush. In practice, I’d say the optimal equation emphasizes horror, which is counterintuitively the more malleable and creatively forgiving genre, at a mix of 2-3 parts to 1. High school time-travel Slasher Totally Killer comes closer to getting it right than most. Set in the fictional small town of Vernon, one of those ready-made enclaves forever coming to grips with its terrible past, ala Haddonfield or Woodsboro, Totally Killer tells the story of the intersection across time between a modern high schooler, the always rewatchable Kiernan Shipka, and the so-called “Sweet Sixteen Killer”, an off-brand Ken doll mask-wearing psychopath who massacred first her mother’s friends and then, by all appearances, her mother some 35 years apart. The intervening years have seen the Sweet Sixteen Killer become quite the cottage industry in Vernon, with on location podcasts, sightseeing “murder tours” of the various points of interest, and liquored-up yahoos by the gross sporting that same mask every Halloween. Grieving and aggrieved, Shipka is conveniently issued a science-minded best friend who, unbeknownst to all but the audience, is only minutes away from successfully inventing time travel with a repurposed photo booth as the vehicle. Sweet Sixteen attacks her one night at the now abandoned carnival promenade where the original murders occurred, the photo booth malfunctions into action, and, faster than you can say “Bananarama”, Shipka is transported back to 1987 and a suddenly bustling midway, where she is confronted with the Heathers-like clique of initial victims still walking around being all perfect and judgy, plus her doting late mother, who is somehow the biggest bitch of the lot. Though there are obviously LOL moments sprinkled in, the pleasure of Totally Killer comes not, as the producers no doubt envisioned, in watching Shipka’s woke sensibilities clash with the pre-P.C. Eighties in their full glory, but in watching her work out this overly complicated puzzle one step at a time, negotiating the interactive minefield of her parents and other townsfolk in their dumber high school incarnations, attempting to prevent the original murders, thus retroactively saving her mother in the present, and fixing the time machine with the help of her best friend’s own disillusioned mother, then conveniently also a budding inventor. There is layer upon layer of convolution here that would suffocate other movies by the middle of the first reel, but somehow it works. The not-so-secret ingredient is Shipka, an uncommonly smart and focused young actor whose presence can add plausibility to even the utterly crazy. You’ll chuckle at Totally Killer, you’ll enjoy its intensity as well as its absurdity, and you may well wonder why this isn’t done more often in the service of preserving truly classic films. I’ll sure take Happy Death Day if it means we don’t have to reboot Groundhog Day, and I’ll take Totally Killer over a new, “What’s the worst that could happen?” Back to the Future bastardization any day.
- When Evil Lurks (2023 – Shudder) – Possession is, at its core, the ultimate parasitic relationship, two entities in a battle for control over a single body, the original owner and a demonic… interloper. The malevolent intruder infects the human host and over a span of time that could last days or be as quick as a fingersnap bends their will backward, subsuming all but the exterior to its own devices while operating the now near-helpless bag of meat like a suit of armor or Toyota Corolla. Which is not to say that the owner is necessarily altogether gone. A particularly cunning demon can use not only its host’s appearance but also its knowledge and even precious memories as a wedge or cudgel against the uninfected, as in the harrowing, spectacular, consistently alarming Argentinian import When Evil Lurks, which not only targets the family of a seemingly random hardscrabble divorcee for obscure reasons but immediately makes matters personal in a way no one watching will ever forget. I thought I’d seen a lot as a horror fan, but it is rare air indeed to be confronted with a film like this. I’m not talking about some black label vomitorium that indiscriminately spews fluids and viscera for ninety minutes and calls it a movie. When Evil Lurks is simultaneously far more subtle than that and yet to my reckoning somehow more awful, because we grow to care about these characters and simply cannot believe what their lives have come to in just a matter of moments. Alternately cutting like a surgeon and carving like a butcher, Demian Rugna’s film pulls in the viewer in like a tractor beam and creates an entire replacement atmosphere of dread fascination that is pervasive and damned near inescapable. Two brothers, Pedro and Jaime, follow a trail of rumors, hushed whispers, and freshly eviscerated corpses through the countryside to a ramshackle house. Within it, alongside his helpless, terrified family, awaits an afflicted man, corpulent to the level of carnival grotesquery, as if the famous “gluttony” victim from the movie Seven had survived only to face a fate worse than death. Pedro argues with the local magistrate over what to do with the man, who has been judged “rotten” in ways beyond the reach of modern medicine. They finally determine to remove him from both the premises and locality so that his malignancy does not spread. The plan does not go well, and, by virtue of that choice, soon Pedro is ensnared in an escalating epidemic of possession that touches the whole community and threatens to consume his mother, his three kids, his brother, his viciously bitter ex-wife, and her new husband. More than that I really shouldn’t say, since the pleasure, or at least abiding fascination, of When Evil Lurks lies in the way it applies logic and rules to the patently insane, then breaks through those boundaries anyway in breathless, unexpected, and dependably horrific ways, including violence by and to animals, violence by and to children – “Evil likes children, and children like evil” says the wizened local ”cleaner” as she and Pedro prepare to enter an elementary school in search of the ‘rotten’s” now-missing, still not quite dead body – and some petty and unbelievably cruel interpersonal warfare between adults whose senses have fully taken leave. Does it count as cannibalism if the eater is a possessed human being? This movie goes there, in so many words, consistently, and is so well-written and imagined that it casts perfectly decent peers in a negative light by its mere existence and proximity. The best movie I watched this October bar none, including Nightmare Before, Elm Street, and The Shining, When Evil Lurks is not only the best horror movie of 2023, but the best in my recent memory. Just don’t watch it with someone you love.
- The Wicker Man (1973 – Blu-Ray) – Has there ever been a horror movie less in need of spoiler warnings than Robin Hardy’s sublime outland excursion The Wicker Man? Anybody reading this somehow NOT on the same page about its methods, its motives, or its raison d’etre? Good, though, if so, consider this your heads up…again. An early touchstone of the folk horror movement of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, The Wicker Man is no sunny travelog that so happens to feature an all-timer of a climactic twist just for fun – where, at the end of an exhaustive investigation, the unreformed religious zealot is shockingly captured by his primitive quarry and burned alive as the centerpiece of a pagan harvest ritual – but one of the great cautionary tales in cinematic history, digging uncomfortably deep and providing opposing windows on a case-study in the power of belief, institutional and otherwise, and, unfortunately for him, the limits of righteousness. Ramrod straight, emotionally rigid to the point of constipation, and ferociously incorruptible, Edward Woodward plays the doomed police inspector Sergeant Howie, a duty-bound Boy Scout motto made flesh with an imperious manner by default, the interpersonal touch of a post hole digger, and a megaphone for an indoor speaking voice. Suffice it to say I am not a fan. Dispatched from the British mainland to the remote Scottish seaside satellite of Summerisle, Howie is tasked with locating a missing young girl that few enough of the passive-aggressive local townspeople will concede even exists. The investigation winds through cobblestone streets and rolling countryside bearing precious little fruit but frustration, plus detail upon detail about the secret lives and unconventional beliefs of the islanders sufficient to raise Howie’s Puritan eyebrows and reflexively make his fists clench. To their credit, Woodward and Hardy conspire throughout his journey to make Howie someone who, while his mission is understandable and objectively commendable, is still very difficult to actively root for. Interestingly enough, this has served to make his eventual fate more uncomfortable for many viewers to witness and process over the years. As time passes and doors slam in his face, even that of island prime minister Lord Summerisle (a flamboyant Christopher Lee, near his most iconic), Howie’s obsession only grows and his latent extracurricular motivations come to the fore. He carries on the investigation well past the point of hope or actionable leads, Summerisle’s hospitality having given way en masse to hostility, confident, in spite of everything arrayed against him, that faith and fortitude will carry him to the proper end of his duly appointed rounds. Whether they actually did is, of course, open to interpretation, though there is no misreading the power of that finish – how the color drains from Howie’s face as they round that bend and behold the massive wooden figure that will become first his tomb then his pyre; how he bellows out defiant Christian hymns as the joyful islanders sway and sing on the cliffside beneath him; how, defeated, he shrinks into a fetal position as the flames wick and dance above and about the camera frame; how the Wicker Man, consumed by fire, crumbles into debris with a glorious sunset unfolding behind it. Then, silence. They did it all for the crops, remember. It was (technically) nothing personal.
darkadaptedeye 