Sasha Lane – Podcasting Them Softly

Why we couldn’t have just gotten a third Hellboy movie with Guillermo Del Toro and Ron Perlman at the wheel is beyond me, instead of this grossly miscalculated, eye melting mish-mash of bad CGI and disorganized storytelling. It’s sad too because it could have even been decent, they got an accomplished filmmaker I really love and a handful of super awesome cult icon actors to cast the material appropriately, but somewhere along the line of creative process, Neil Marshall’s Hellboy just shits the bed and comes out largely a piss poor effort. I love David Harbour too, he’s a terrifically charismatic and versatile artist but he just doesn’t fit the bill here, his Hellboy comes across as whiny, dour and all the wisecracking fells inorganic and forced. Plus let’s face it, there just wasn’t any hope for any other actor than Perlman to properly sell the character, plain and simple, he was born for it. Harbour’s Hellboy is stuck in a murky plot line about an ancient evil sorceress called the Blood Queen (Milla Jovovich) who has been resurrected by a human/wild boar hybrid to wreak havoc on humanity in some vaguely malicious ritual that involves knockoff Del Toro creatures stomping around London ripping people in half, cue the tiresome CGI. It’s loud, messy, the gore is off putting and there’s just too much noise and commotion to properly discern story or character. Does it do anything effectively? Yes, credit where credit is due, there’s a wonderfully eerie sequence where the pace mercifully calms down a bit as Hellboy visits a terrifying monster called the Baba Yaga, it’s essentially an expository interlude but it’s handled incredibly well, full of tangible atmosphere and genuine terror. Some of the cast fare pretty well, Ian McShane is always awesome and adds a brittle, corrosive edge to Trevor Broom where John Hurt was more subdued. The lovely Sasha Lane is quite effective as a member of the paranormal defence team who is a medium and can summon dead spirits in a genie-like mass of ectoplasmic slime, but Daniel Dae Kim comes across painfully lifeless as a guy who can only be described as the offspring of a werewolf and a cheetah. Most of the supporting cast are just drowned out in a flurry of noise including Sophie Okonedo as a ghost lady, Brian Gleeson as Merlin (yes, that Merlin) and a brief, bizarre appearance from Thomas Haden Church as some dude whose name is Lobster (can you tell I haven’t read the comics?). The film just doesn’t work, aside from a few exceptions that come too little, too late. Everywhere the Del Toro films were tactile, colourful, atmospheric and well written this one is obnoxious, needlessly gory, rushed and unwieldy. You’re better off just revisiting those and pretending this one doesn’t exist.

-Nate Hill

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Daniel Isn’t Real and based on the synopsis it seemed like your classic case of ‘dark elements of one’s psyche’ manifesting themselves into physical form’, in this case an imaginary friend. But there was something.. *off* about the poster artwork, an esoteric colour scheme and title font that intuitively said “no, there’s more than that here.” Yeah, a whole lot more. This is one of the most visually unafraid, thematically complex and stylistically bizarre horror films I’ve ever seen and my hat is several miles off to its audacity, vision and immersive realm crafting. Director Adam Egypt Mortimer says he was inspired by Adrian Lyne’s classic horror film Jacob’s Ladder, which makes sense in casting Tim Robbins’ own son Miles as quiet, disturbed college student Luke. He witnessed an unthinkably violent event when he was just a boy and has been dealing with his severely mentally ill mother (Mary Stuart Masterson) his entire life and in coping with that trauma he has employed the companionship and assistance of a mysterious imaginary friend named Daniel (Patrick Schwarzenegger). Daniel is cucumber cool, adept in socially murky situations and always knows just what to do. He’s a stalwart ally and handy to have around, yet of course is only a facet of Luke’s own fragile mind… or is he? That’s where the film gets really fun and not so easy to pin down. Daniel is only a friend when things go his way, and when the hereditary tentacles of illness plaguing his mother come for Luke as well, things get downright scary. Daniel becomes reckless, selfish, sociopathic and wholly destructive, especially when Luke meets a feisty art major (Sasha Lane) he has genuine feelings for. I don’t want to reveal to much because this is so much more than just what you read in synopses as far as premise goes. This is deep, philosophical filmmaking full of dark psychological unrest, chilling ambiguity and disturbing metaphysical implications that still have me pondering the overall experience over a week later. There are some truly soul disturbing visuals once things get hallucinatory and otherworldly for the characters, made real by terrifying practical effects that look like something straight out of a literal nightmare. There are elements that reminded me of SyFy’s brilliant anthology series Channel Zero in terms of unconventional, cerebral storytelling that takes what could have been a run of the mill horror concept and elevates it to stratospheric heights using form, sound, menacing visual abstractions and unfiltered artistic expression to plant us into a world we won’t soon forget. I could not recommend this film enough to people who enjoy challenging, unabashedly dark meta-psychological horror and lots of it.

-Nate Hill