"Minions & Monsters" and "Backrooms"

I guess we're grouping the movies by color today.

I've had a contentious relationship with Illumination Studios' "Despicable Me" series.  Being frequently in the orbit of young children, I've watched nearly all of them over the years.  My tolerance of Gru has waned with time, but I always had a soft spot for the wacky little yellow minion guys, all voiced by Pierre Coffin speaking their own peculiar dialect made up of about 20% Spanish, 10% English, 10% Japanese, and 60% drunken karaoke vocalizations when you can't remember the words.  They're proper cartoon characters, who do all the physical gags and wild takes that are too often missing in the modern cartoon milieu.  And it kinda makes sense to let them pay homage to the origins of screen comedy.

In "Minions & Monsters," which has received the franchise's highest critical scores in a long time, they've spun off a group of new minions for a totally separate adventure set in the 1920s.  Among them are an artsy little storyteller who doesn't quite fit in named James, his best pal Henry, and their ASL-using friend Ed.  After multiple failed attempts to find a "big boss" who they can serve, this bunch lands in Hollywood during the silent film era.  After a few brushes with fame and fortune, James comes up with the idea to make his own monster movie, and to summon up some real monsters to star in it.  Hijinks with an all-star cast including Trey Parker, Christoph Waltz, Jesse Eisenberg, Zoey Deutch, and Jeff Bridges ensue.

Much has been made of all the classic film references that have been included in the "Minions & Monsters," from an opening sequence that sticks the Minions into early Edison and Muybridge film images, to a rollicking chase scene that manages to involve Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harry Lloyd, to Gort the alien robot from "The Day the Earth Stood Still" playing a major part in the third act.  As a film, however, it doesn't cohere together all that well.  The story is constantly switching gears from one thing to the next, and we're forever getting bogged down with digressions.  It takes too long for the actual story to kick into gear, and while the minions are great for individual gag and action sequences, the movie suffers for not having stronger protagonists.  "Minions & Monsters" is very watchable, but it's still very much a glossy entertainment aimed at small children, and it's best to go in with modest expectations.

On to "Backrooms," based on the web series of the same name created by Kane Parsons, and the famous internet creepypasta images that inspired a shared universe of dingy yellow liminal horror.  So, one day in the 1990s, a troubled furniture store owner named Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovers we can walk through a wall in the basement and enter a seemingly never-ending series of interconnected rooms where the rules of reality seem to have gone haywire.   For me, the appeal of "Backrooms" is all about the unsettling vibe of wrongness that comes about when spotting an imperfect copy or a missed glitch.   The best part of the film is the early scenes of exploration, where Clark makes his way through rooms with increasingly deranged architecture, containing collections of disturbing objects.  There are a lot of jump scares as some of the rooms' secrets are revealed, and the movie reportedly plays much better with an audience.

"Backrooms" reminds me of "Annihilation," despite bearing absolutely no resemblance to that film stylistically.  It's another one of these stories about exploring a strange forbidden zone, where some unknown force is making copies of places, objects, and eventually living things without really understanding anything about their function or purpose.  It would be a nice metaphor for an-AI anxiety if "The Backrooms" were more ambitious.  However, director Kane Parsons is content to just unleash some scary monsters and have a few characters go insane.  The plot is secondary to the vibes, which works, but it's disappointing that actors like Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, who plays therapist Dr. Kline, aren't given much to do beyond the usual funhouse scare sequences and a few bits of shallow psychoanalysis.  The imagery is memorable, though, and there are plenty of nightmarish concepts that might keep you up at night.

The concept and the moody vibe of "Backrooms" is enough to sustain this film, but if we travel back to this universe again in the inevitable sequels, Parsons is going to need more help to keep his audience's attention.

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