Ashley Greene – Podcasting Them Softly

Summer’s Moon, also given the slightly less exotic title Summer Blood, is a fascinating little family centered psycho sexual treat, starring an actress who previously hadn’t ventures into such intense territory. Ashley Greene is a porcelain beauty best known for those Twilight train wrecks, and its that marketing style these filmmakers have latched onto because of her involvement. The poster has a hazy hue that almost hints at the dreaded vampiric sparkle we’ve come to loathe. It’s picturesque to be sure, but doesn’t really provide any warning to the disturbing, gritty and uncomfortably intimate nature ofnthe story. Greene plays Summer, a wayward drifter who arrives in a small bucolic burg, out to find the father she never knew. Enter the Hoxeys, an I’ll adjusted family of serial killers claiming to be her long lost family, and beckoning her into depravity with all the charm and hospitality that small town folks can muster. Her brother Tom (Peter Mooney) keeps a kidnapped girl in the basement as a plaything and sleeps with his unstable mother (Barbara Nixon), and that’s but a taste of the horror that Summer has waded into. The film takes on new virility when the resident patriarch Gant Hoxey blows back into town, played with visceral ferocity by veteran tough guy Stephen Mchattie. Intense is the word for this guy (ever catch his cameo in A History Of Violence? Christ), and he’s a beast as Gant, Summer’s estranged father, a man who functions on violence and feeds of fear. The film examines how a clan of murderers might indeed function, right down to twisted lover’s spats and drama right out of an R rated Addams Family special. Greene nicely shatters her teen image by bringing us a broken protagonist who finds her dark passenger through resilience and torment, the blackness that sweeps over her soul clearly visible, loomed over by Mchattie’s grim reaper influence. Murder and the desire to do so is regarded as a genetic trait in this film, passed along the line of kin, generation to generation, wreaking havoc in the process. A film that I underestimated going in, a terrific horror entry that takes its it’s with character and suspense, slow burning up to a spectacularly gory third act filled with tension, blood and Mchattie, that icy voiced devil who steals every scene he’s in. Well worth your time.

Everyone has that one psycho ex. Well… not everyone. But a lot of folks. I do, many do, enough do for there to be a whole lot of movies on the subject. Joe Dante’s Burying The Ex takes that predicament one step farther, straight into the realm of the supernatural, as the director always does. We haven’t had a Dante flick in a while (he’s the genius behind Gremlins, Innerspace and Small Soldiers, for those who don’t know), and it amazes me the lack of marketing which led to me taking my sweet time in seeing this. Glad I did, because it’s a treat. Any headline that boasts Dante, Ashley Greene, Anton Yelchin and the luscious Alexandra Daddario in the same film is automatically a rental, before I’ve even read a synopsis. This one is a darkly comic zombie romantic comedy and subtle Hammer Studios homage, an irresistible flavour indeed. Yelchin is a lad who works at a halloween FX store, has an affinity for retro horror and all things macabre, and is dating prissy Ashley Greene, who couldn’t be more different than him. She’s an abrasive, vegan type A personality jealous manipulative control freak banshee who is sinking their relationship quicker than the Titanic. Enter Alexandra Daddario, a hip, horror movie themed ice cream parlor owner, and sparks fly between her and Yelchin. Those sparks are shot down by a dagger glare from Greene, and it’s in that moment Yelchin realizes he has to dump her. Before he can do the deed, she’s fatally hit by a bus, dies and essentially solves his problem. Or does she? Cue gothic organ music. Before he can take Alexandra on one date, she rises from the grave, now a sex starved psycho zombie bitch hell bent on keeping him for her own, pretty much forever. Quite the situation eh? Dante is never one for metaphors and heady trickery (a refreshing trait), all of his premises are straight up, face value, 100% genre simplicity. She’s dead, he needs to somehow kill her… again. It’s charming and lighthearted, while still retaining the macabre, like Tim Burton by way of Stephen Sommers. Greene is disarmingly hilarious as everyone’s worst nightmare of an ex, Yelchin is earnest and exasperated in equal doses, and Daddario is a babe and a half, always winning me over with them eyes. They all frolic in Dante’s casually R rated inter zone where everything is purely rooted in movie-land, and nothing needs to be seriously thought out. The writing is sharp, heartfelt and riddled with easter eggs for fans of horror from back in a better day. Brilliant stuff.