There’s a lot going on here for a film with the simple and straightforward title ‘House,’ and not all of adds up for a coherent or clear minded horror flick but it’s still a lot of warped, gooey fun with some great 80’s practical effects, a decidedly anthology vibe despite, well, not being anthology at all really and the same kind of mischievous, rambunctious, irreverent tone to the horror that one might find in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead films. It’s also directed by Steve Miner who has deep horror roots, having helmed the very first Friday The 13th long ago so the force is solidly strong with this one, in terms of horror speak. William Katt plays a writer who moves into a creaky old house with his family and before they even have a chance to unpack their shit his kid goes missing, like literally before you even get properly introduced to the characters, it’s wild and hilarious. As the ominous yet silly tone is set we also meet all kinds of other ghosts and ghoulies including some spectacularly gruesome monsters that live in the closet, a fat bottomed zombie girl who keeps showing up to torment him (this is where the film feels most like Evil Dead), some pesky sentient gardening tools that follow him around, George Wendt as his sorta friendly sorta nosy neighbour who keeps bringing him beer in offers that he rudely snubs and the mummified remains of an old Nam war buddy (Richard Moll) who come back to haunt and remind him of some psychological incident regarding the war that can’t be put to rest. There is a LOT going on and unfortunately the film can’t make proper sense of it or make it all feel like it’s coherently connected beyond a kind of scattered episodic feel, hence my references to anthology films above. However, what it lacks in clear vision it makes up for in cheer lunatic energy and boisterous charm, each oozy new set piece and special effect clearly showing a level of artistry, creation and off the wall deadpan humour that is impressive and fun, the acting from everyone, Wendt in particular, is very good and it all feels like everyone was having a good time.
It’s fascinating how human beings crave resolution, airtight narratives, explanation and a clear roadmap of where they’re going at all times, characteristics that that are evident in our creation and consumption of art. Every time a narrative comes along that eerily ducks the expectations of a clean, neatly wrapped and satisfying ending the resulting reaction can be hostile and downright explosive, and some of the reactions to John Lee Hancock’s unconventional cops vs killer thriller The Little Things have been just that. This is a script that was written in the 90’s I’m told, and shelved until it was dusted off for production this year, so naturally we have a measured, paced, atmospheric and story based film that feels not necessarily dated but just a little bit.. “untethered from time’ in a sense, and the effect is mesmerizing. Denzel plays Joe Deacon, a once hotshot homicide detective who lost it all over an obsessive hunt for a serial killer that resulted in divorce, a heart attack and being relegated to county sheriff somewhere far outside LA. When he returns for a simple day trip to evidence swap with colleagues, he swiftly gets pulled into the mystery of another killer operating near the city and teams up with the eager rookie detective (Rami Malek) assigned to the case, much to the concern and unimpressed huff of his former lieutenant (Terry Kinney). Is this the same killer who once drove him to the absolute edge? Is this case related in any way to the tangled web of mysteries from Joe’s past? Who is the impossibly creepy loner (Jared Leto) who taunts them both with very real details from the murders yet always seems to be one step beyond any suspicion or proof of involvement? This is a tantalizing, deliberately opaque jigsaw puzzle with quite a few pieces missing, hidden or otherwise unaccounted for, and the result can be maddening for some, mildly frustrating for others or an outright dealbreaker for those who simply can’t reconcile a story left unfinished. One has to invest laser focused attentiveness and studious detection skills to arrive at the same conclusions alongside our leads and have any idea what just happened, and this is even before the big reveals, or lack thereof. It evokes a genuine sense of mystery and I honestly wish more big Hollywood films had the nerve to pull narrative stunts like this, because it would effectively ween viewers off of the oversimplification, excessive exposition and ravenous need to make sense of everything that permeates North American filmgoing culture. Denzel is terrific here, letting the intensity and introspective obsessiveness his detective no doubt once had simmer on a dim low burn that comes with years of searching for answers to no avail. Malek does his wife eyed nosferatu shtick again, I’ve never been able to really connect with him as an actor but there’s no denying that he has presence, the exact essence and intention of which still eludes me. Leto is undoubtedly spooky as all hell but perhaps falls victim a tad to mannerism and histrionic flexing, yet still does a fine job in a difficult role to pull off. Director Hancock uses some absolutely sensational camera movements to create tension and atmosphere, as we see a lone girl jogging down an unlit side street, an ominous black car slinking in after her and then a slow time-lapse panning shot up over the LA horizon as the sun rises, just purely inspired creativity there. Thomas Newman does excellent music work as always, his score here is a melodic, fretful jangle of electronic rhythms and nocturnal passages that feels like the highway, the sky just before dawn, unanswered questions and decades of dark rumination wrapped up in one transfixing musical chorus. This film won’t be for everyone but I hope it at least imparts the harsh reality that not all stories are neatly wrapped packages of comforting resolution and beat-by-beat bullet points of what you can always expect to find in a serial killer thriller, because how boring would that be, to always and forever be able to predict narrative patterns and never once be surprised, scared or left in the dark? This story isn’t afraid to go to those dark intangible places, and more importantly, isn’t afraid to not return from them. Great film.
There was a long period of time where I didn’t even know there was a Punisher flick from the late 80’s starring Dolph Lundgren, and I blissfully lived under the assumption that the character never entered cinema until 2004 when Thomas Jane tried it on for size, and although that’s still my favourite take on Frank Castle to date, in terms of both performance and film overall, the Dolph one is a pretty badass slice of retro action pulp that I greatly enjoyed. It’s not an origin story and doesn’t have much use for exposition, time spent on tragic backstory (beyond a few haunting flashbacks) or dark rumination, it’s strictly a blast of violence, chases and genre thrills built around the visual aesthetic of the Punisher. He’s already been doing this for quite a while here, and Lundgren, strikingly brunette here, imbues Frank Castle with a sort of tired and unimpressed yet still viciously violent edge as he teams up with an equally sardonic cop (Louis Gossett Jr) to take on pretty much every criminal faction in the city including a tribe of psychotic matriarchal Yakuzas and one pissed off drug Baron (Jeroen Krabbe) who initially hired Frank to find his kidnapped son and then inevitably can’t be trusted not to be a backstabbing lunatic. There’s an absolute ton of exciting, well staged action set pieces here including an extended bus chase all over the city, endless thundering shootouts and Frank roaring around on a huge black motorbike that he uses to descend into the subterranean tunnels below the city in a decidedly Batman-esque flair. This version is stripped of much of the mythology behind The Punisher and is more just a straightforward, bloody, pulpy action extravaganza, and had the film not been called Punisher and Dolph not been credited as Frank Castle it would just be another day at the Lundgren races. However, they chose to make it a Punisher film and it’s better for that, Dolph fits the role like a glove, and although my only complaint is that he didn’t get to wear that classic skull logo on his chest that we know so well, he inhabits the gritty, browbeaten, heavy artillery sporting viciousness of Frank very well, whether he’s beating hordes of goons mercilessly or literally mowing down more of them with a fucking Gatling gun he found somewhere. It’s brutal, urban, feels just ‘comic book’ enough to fit the aesthetic and has a ballsy, very dark final stroke to the script in the last act that is a borderline taboo shocker but let’s you know this Punisher isn’t fucking around. Good stuff.
Karen Moncrieff’s The Dead Girl is one of the bleakest, most depressing and soul dampening films I’ve seen recently, so much so that it seems to take a bit of you with it after the experience. It’s also quite an important film though, serving to illuminate and highlight the downward trajectories that human lives take after being abused and mistreated as children, and the ripple effect these lives have on others as the years pass on. It’s an ensemble film full of amazing talent that falls into the groove of vignette, and while each episodic chapter isn’t quite as immediate or powerful as others, the ones the work are something profound. In the opening segment a socially stunted woman (Toni Collette) finds the decomposing corpse of a teenage girl in the desert, and struggles to deal with her horribly abusive, bedridden gasbag of a mother (Piper Laurie in curdled Carrie mode), while going on a hopelessly awkward date with a weird grocery store clerk (Giovanni Ribisi). This chapter didn’t really resonate with me whatsoever beyond her finding the dead girl (the connective tissue between all of the episodes) so that’s all I’ll say about it. The second sees college med student Rose Byrne and her parents (Mary Steenburgen and Bruce Davison) dealing with the aftereffects of her sister going missing years before and the new knowledge that the dead girl in the desert could possibly be her. The next segment, starring Nick Searcy and an infuriating Mary Beth Hurt, is one best left not talked about because it’s spoiler territory, it’s well done but maddening. The last two are where the film really shines and finds its broken beating heart, as the mother (Marcia Gay Harden, brilliant) of the dead girl visits the ramshackle motel she was living in with another prostitute (Kerry Washington) who knew her well. Both actresses give a master class in pain, anguish and the brittle regret of lives gone wrong and paths taken from which there is no return, they’re two characters from very different walks of life who find solace as they mourn the daughter, sister and companion they once had. Kerry Washington in particular is so heartbreaking, so absolutely present in her flawlessly pitched performance of outwardly guarded toughness barely hiding the wounded, abandoned soul frying out for help beneath and her work here knocked me just flat. Finally in the last sequence we meet the dead girl in question, played hauntingly and painfully by the late Brittany Murphy in one of her blessedly candid, frenzied performances that shirks mannerisms for uncanny realism and emotion that comes across not as orchestrated by an actress onscreen but organically bubbles and wells up from a living, breathing human being, she was that good. Others make fleeting appearances to round out the ensemble including James Franco, Chris Allen Nelson and a degenerate, crack piping Josh Brolin. The film doesn’t let anyone off the hook, doesn’t hand out happy endings to the ensemble like goody bags and hasn’t a care in the world for conventional catharsis, neatly resolved narratives or crowd pleasing, it’s a film whose outcomes and arcs will leave you cold, hurt, confused, angry and completely disillusioned in humanity overall. So why watch it? Well, aside from being a beautifully acted, directed, scored and edited film it’s important as a mosaic narrative, especially in the final two chapters, because we see how the actions, abuse and effects of one life can scintillate out into others, and how this dead girl, an abuse and trauma victim from a broken home, despite being in a life situation some may regard as utterly hopeless she is still desperately clinging onto one glimmer of light in her life, a plot thread I won’t spoil but one that she so fervently keeps in her mind and thoughts that even after a life of tragedy ends in unconscionable untimely death, her intentions, pure heart and undimmed desire to be there for someone ripple out after she has passed away and affect those she left behind, in the film’s only life affirming aspect. I think that’s incredibly important to observe, and while the film’s first three chapters are important parts of this tapestry, it’s the final two that radiate forth as the most integral, and the showcase acting work from Murphy and Washington that is so good and so essential I felt like life was unfolding for real. Brilliant film.
Trust Ireland to give us what for me now stands as the scariest film I’ve seen since Ari Aster’s Hereditary. I realize that is the boldest of claims and before anyone chimes in with the obligatory “welL HEridiTARy didntT scAre me And wasNT evEn thAT GOoD”, just keep in mind there are many of us who were scared piss-less by it and keep your edginess to yourself. Damian McCarthy’s Caveat is a brand new addition from Shudder, an Irish mood piece with some unique ideas, atmosphere so thick you could choke on it and some of the most skin crawling, sleep with the lights on moments of sheer terror I’ve seen in many a moon. I didn’t say it was a perfect film and the plot, such as it is, is kind of a murky one in areas but best I could surmise it is: a shady English dude (Ben Caplan) hires an also somewhat shady Irish dude (Jonathan French) with amnesia to babysit his adult niece on an isolated island cabin. The girl has some form of schizophrenia of schizo-affective disorder and is out of it most of the time, but one of the conditions of this well paid for agreement is that Irish dude must wear a leather harness attached to a chain that prevents him from entering certain areas of the house, to make the disturbed girl feel safer… I guess? It’s a premise with so many loaded questions attached that you just kind of have to surrender to the atmosphere and experience, and it’s here that the film not only shines but unearths something almost profoundly spooky. There are ghosts in the film, and they are so scary you’ll wish I’d never recommended this to you. You know that special feeling after you’ve watched a film that genuinely, tangibly provoked real fear in you and you have immediate, dread soaked regret that you ever watched it? Yeah I got that from this one, which is rare for me these days and it may not hit for everyone like that but for me it was effective in that elemental, hair raising way. There is an actual plot to the film and although I wasn’t entirely clear on all the ins, outs and beats it did feel like it was trying to impart a discernible narrative while still being a decidedly arthouse mood-board experience. There’s also a creepy little toy rabbit, as you can see by the poster, and he serves as both a mascot of sorts and also a proverbial ‘canary in the coal mine’ device, as he seems to beat his little drums with relative sentience whenever it feels like malevolent forces are near. The eerie score, suffocating abandoned house atmosphere and deliberately spatial camera movements all place you right in the front seat of terror and apprehension as you wander the mildewed halls and decrepit rooms of this broken down house and encounter things you really could have done without seeing at 2am when you’re alone in your own house and the cat is making noise somewhere. It’s a staggeringly well made film for a first time director and I can’t wait to see what he does next. Terrifying, immersive, hypnotically unsettling, a fully realized horror experience that will fuel the darkest of nightmares. Streaming now on Shudder.
After the absolute trip to WTF-ville that was Highlander 2 I kind of felt the franchise had scraped rock bottom and I didn’t think anything could ever be as bad as that. I’m happy to report that Highlander 3: The Sorcerer is not only an improvement (obviously) but an incredible sequel that captures the magic of what made the first such a special film for me and, in my eyes, is on par with it. I know the second film has this big huge production history and that’s why it’s so weird, bad and off topic from the mythology, but for this one they have stripped away all that bullshit and distilled the story back down into what made the first Highlander so great. Christopher Lambert’s immortal Connor McLeod tells us of a new chapter in his ongoing life, wherein a Japanese mystic (Mako) trains him further in the ways of battle so that he can fight another remaining member of his race of beings, the evil Hun-like Kane (Mario Van Peebles). Their battle begins in 500ad or so and rages across time until Connor finds himself in 1990’s New Jersey where Kane follows him. Connor falls for a beautiful archeologist (the lovely Deborah Kara Unger) who is the reincarnation of a girl he knew during the French Revolution and circles a final battle with Kane which, naturally, is staged inside one of those classic ‘smoke and flame’ sheet metal factories that are utilized for showdowns in everything from T2 to Batman 89 and Roger Ebert loved to make fun of so much but try and tell me that in New Jersey there isn’t a large chance that a final fight would realistically end up in one of those buildings, I mean the place is only made of them. Mario Van Peebles is great as Kane, ditching his usual persona for a growling, leering, barbarian type of performance that pays dues to Clancy Brown’s Kurgan without outright aping him. He’s got magic illusion powers, snazzy tattoos, great taste in metal music and is so culturally hopeless in the 90’s that when a hooker gives him a condom he puts it in his mouth in puzzlement, immediately spits it out in distaste and just proceeds to raw-dog her. I’ve talked this film up and you gotta realize that it’s a ramshackle threequel to a cheesy 80’s cult classic that does its best to clean up after a totally irresponsible, ridiculously off the wall sequel and while I was sometimes utterly confused about the timelines or how this chronologically connects to the first, I though it did a pretty damn good job of salvaging tone, style and aesthetics and steering this canon in a serviceable direction. Lambert and Unger are adorable together and have not only a smouldering sex scene that might be among the hottest the 90’s has to offer but actual romantic chemistry to back it up. There is the obligatory helicopter shot of Lambert running and training amidst the gorgeous Scottish scenery that somehow manages to be silly as hell and deeply rousing in the same stroke, here set to a gorgeous Celtic song called Bonny Portmore by Loreena McKennitt. The finale battle between Connor and Kane is like a thunderous fireworks show of lovingly creaky 90’s FX and music that reaches a biblical crescendo and serves to reinforce that even when a franchise has seemingly reached its doldrums, a crowd pleaser like this can come along and shake out the cobwebs. If you go into it cynical over the fact that it’s a Highlander sequel and keep your nose upturned on principle, well you’re only robbing yourself of a fun time, because to me this had everything I wanted from one of these flicks and was a hell of a lot of fun, capped off by a genuinely sweet ending that gives you the option to stop here and have this as the final note of Connor’s story, or continue on in the series for more adventures.
Psycho Goreman is a hell of a title for a film and anyone one that dares use must ensure their art lives up to it, and this one sure as hell does. It’s one of those deft, near miraculous efforts that dances an impossible yet flawless ballet between genres of horror, SciFi and comedy and almost fuses them all together for something entirely new. The titular Psycho Goreman is a hulking alien warlord with a penchant for violence, torture and all sorts of melodramatic menace, who arrives on earth only to be outwitted by a incredibly feisty ten year old girl (Nita Josee-Hanna) who snags the magic gemstone that controls him and now calls the shots. There is an entire galactic Narmada of silly funny weird creatures who are trying to track and destroy him though and they eventually follow him to earth for all out warfare. The terrific thing about this film is how deftly it balanced extremely graphic, hard-R gore with a genuine childlike sensibility and the kind of dark, deadpan humour that is so funny and so pointed that I just can’t even describe it in a review, you have to see the thing to get it. It’s sweet yet still has a jaggedly nihilistic tonal edge, hilarious yet feels truly gnarly and almost… ‘Troma’ in its levels of schlock and splatter and just the perfect mix of everything fun. Director Steven Kostanski also made the brilliant 2017 cosmic horror The Void, which is in my top ever made in the genre and I always wondered what he’d follow it up with. A true winner that blazes new trails and shows his devotion, invocation and passion for practical effects based horror. The costumes, makeup and gore effects are pure bliss here, with every extraterrestrial creature owning their own distinct, hilarious and lovingly campy anatomical design, the gore is unapologetically ruthless, bathed in buckets of blood n’ body parts and the the script laced with indescribably hysterical wit, comedic inspiration and overall horror nirvana. Wonderful film.
Lorcan Finnegan’s Vivarium is one of those films that takes one simple premise and attempts to wring just about as much mileage out of it as one feature length story possibly could and it’s… *mostly* a successful endeavour. As it opens a young lower middle class couple (Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg) are house hunting for something in their price range. She’s an elementary school teacher and he’s a landscaper, relatable choices I admired from the writer, as you don’t normally see this down to earth demographic in the protagonist arena. They browse into a development office for a project called ‘Yonder’, that seems to have units affordable to them, the estate agent (Jonathan Aris) bizarrely informs them, he’s one of those eerily, painfully cheerful characters that you just want to boot in the jaw and trusting him is definitely their first, and gravest mistake. They go with him to Yonder which is basically the kind of horrifying, cookie cutter, piss green pastel suburbia that even Dr. Seuss would shudder at, and before they know it they’re stuck there, for good. It seems to be a kind of labyrinthine ‘living algorithm’ that traps them, and even when they try to drive away they consistently just end up at the house this guy was showing them, and he’s never seen again. What is this place? Can they ever get out? Who is the absolutely nightmare fuelling Little Rascal reject (Senan Jennings, dubbed over with someone else’s impossibly scary voice who isn’t listed anywhere and I’d like to keep it that way) who one day shows up and demands to be fed, cared for and raised as if he were their own kid? I’ll let you come to those answers on your own because it’s quite a fuckin ride. Imogen and Jesse give fantastic performances, stripped of their usual comedic flourishes and trademark mannerisms for two portrayals that are dark, desperate, down to earth, strikingly emotional and show none of their usual personas. The visual landscape of this artificially tranquil doldrum they are stuck in is both beautiful and threatening, orchestrated by something that knows what a human neighbourhood with cloudy skies above it *should* look like but can’t properly make it look that way because… well, you’ll see. The score by Kristian Eidnes Anderson (Von Trier’s Antichrist) is an unsettling aural piece that seems to hang languidly in the very air of this place and emanate from around every spooky deserted suburban street corner, a very effective lowkey composition. Everything works… so why didn’t I like this film as much as I should have? Well.. I can’t say because it’ll spoil the experience but I will say that this is one disquieting, unpleasant, hopelessly bleak tale in terms of thematics. There’s a scene right at the beginning of the film where Imogen teaches one of her students about a particularly nasty reality in the animal kingdom and the kid bluntly observes “I don’t like nature, it’s horrible.” To which Imogen replies, “It’s not horrible all the time.” This is very true, but this film is pretty much horrible all the time and it is essentially the forces of nature simply playing out on a much grander scale, and we have to watch two inherently decent and kind people preyed upon, broken down and used most heinously. To quote that kid: “I don’t like it, it’s horrible.” That’s not to say I disliked the entire film, I just felt like shit after. There is one moment late in the third act where all seems to be lost and Imogen cradles Jesse in her arms as they share a moment of reminiscence back to the day they met. It’s a beautiful, sweet, tender moment that is handled with maturity, gravity and staggering emotional intelligence from both actors but still served to further accent their despairing situation. It’s a good film and everyone involved should be very proud of their work, and I would never lay blame on artists for how *their* narrative and tone made *me* feel, but I’ll sure as hell be honest about it and this one felt like the world just might end.
Countless films give their visual interpretation of what purgatory and the afterlife may look like, and Ryan Whitaker’s After paints a misty, darkly entertaining tale of two souls stuck in the great beyond who must work together to discern their situation and escape. As a greyhound bus ploughs through the rural night, it’s two lone passengers (Steven Strait, Karolina Wydra) are strangers who flirt briefly before the bus takes a wrong turn and crashes horribly, sending them both hurtling out the windows. When they awaken they are trapped in some sort of deserted, hazy twilight zone version of their hometown, as a curtain of ominous black vapour surrounds the area on all sides, walling them in. It soon becomes clear that they are both stuck in comas out there in the real world and inside this sort of, spiritual simulation if you will, they have to delicately find a way out by delving deep into their respective pasts, processing painful memories, finding the right key (literally and metaphorically) to escape this hovering inter-zone and either pass on to the other side in ethereal form or reawaken once again in the physical realm to continue this incarnation. It’s heavy, philosophical stuff that is given the somewhat surface level thriller treatment yet still manages to be just metaphysical enough to keep me intrigued. There’s a terrifying Stranger Things type monster that hunts them and is clearly there to represent the trauma in both their pasts manifesting in tangible form to haunt them. There’s a romance angle that I’m not sure if I altogether bought but the film and actors seem assured enough in and some of the finer plot turns could have been more richly developed, I found myself wishing that this concept could be done as a long form 8 episode miniseries or something, but the film serves well enough as a perfectly decent told story with a truly fascinating concept. Good times.
There’s a lot of trash been talked about the Alien Vs Predator films and.. yeah, I’m not going to argue, they’re not the greatest thing in the universe, let alone the canon. But at least the second film, given the appropriate subheading Requiem, had the decency to actually be R rated and go for broke with gore, violence and ooze as we are accustomed to from each respective franchise and, as dutiful fans, no doubt deserve. While the first film was a lore-heavy, multidimensional Antarctic set SciFi horror with a ton of exposition, this one ditches all of that for a lush Canadian Pacific Northwest setting and a very thinly plotted slasher aesthetic wherein the residents of a quiet Vancouver suburb encounter both species when a predator research spacecraft carrying a bunch of alien face-huggers crash lands nearby. I won’t go too much into detail regarding the characters because they are just beyond cliched. Hot dumb blonde dating the asshole jock, underdog pizza delivery boy hopelessly in love with her, cue violent altercations blah blah who honestly cares, the writers literally put less than no effort into that arena. Tough guy town sheriff (John Ortiz) rallying the troops to fight these beasties and a mysterious army colonel (Robert Joy, adding the film’s only recognizable horror pedigree as far as cast goes) who has some egregious agenda connected to the Yutani corporation. Much of the film is shot in dim or dark settings like the first, so the action isn’t always discernible or legible, but there are a whole parade of Xenomorphs just crawling all over the place which is fun. One way this one succeeds is in its gruesome viciousness; the gore, kills, splatter and deaths here are an absolutely spectacular array of surprisingly nasty (we see kids and a pregnant mother in a hospital butchered by the marauding Aliens) set pieces and carnage, and when it comes time for the two species to have their WWE Smackdown the series of fights between them are brutal and not disappointing. The film has zero mythology and strips down all of that world building for a simple tale of one Canadian town being decimated by these two warring species as they beat each other senseless, and that’s pretty much it. I didn’t hate this film, and I didn’t love it but I sure as hell admired its willingness to go full on hard R like these franchises were always meant to be, unlike its pansy ass predecessor. And one more thing: this is the only film on record in either canon to feature an Alien/Predator crossbreed creature that seems to show up out of nowhere, and while that probably just means it was created in a lab by the Predator species who appear to be busy bees as far as experimentation goes here, I’d fondly like to think that at some point two of them fucked and had gnarly acid-lubed intergalactic alien sexy time, and I’ll leave you with whatever lovely mental image that may conjure up. Good bloody fun.
Podcasting Them Softly 