"The Vampire Lestat" is Calling

Of the Anne Rice novels I've read, and I admit did go through that phase in high school, "The Vampire Lestat" is the one that I know the best.  It recenters the narrative begun in "Interview with the Vampire" on the character of Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid), as he decides to embrace the modern age by flouting the vampire rules and becoming a rock star.  The television series adaptation does the same thing.  The title has been changed, but this is essentially the third season of AMC's "Interview With the Vampire" series, created by Rolin Jones, with all the major cast members returning.  It's also not easy to follow what's going on if you haven't seen the earlier seasons.

However, "The Vampire Lestat" feels like a significant break from the narrative so far.  Since we've swapped narrators from Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) to the much more chaotic Lestat, the storytelling follows suit.  Most of the action takes place in the present day as Lestat and his band are on tour, with only very limited, often inaccurate flashbacks to Lestat's earlier life and history.  It's evident that the budget was a limiting factor, as several of the book's most memorable events are only described rather than depicted, and the season ends right before a major cataclysm - was a planned finale cut for some reason?  However, that's not really what the adaptation wants to focus on.  Instead, it's giving us a good, long, look into the messy psyche of Lestat, who is constantly lying to himself, self-aggrandizing in the extreme, and courting disaster as he keeps seeking the spotlight.  He and Louis have had another falling out since the release of the book Daniel (Eric Bogosian) managed to write based on his notes from last season, and Lestat is in the throes of emotional turmoil.  He's hired Daniel to make a documentary about him, which means bringing him on tour to be his sarcastic confessor and interrogator.  Also his mother, the vampire Gabriella (Jennifer Ehle), has resurfaced after a long absence, bringing more mess into the situation.  

I really like this version of Lestat de Lioncourt, who is absolutely not the same character from the books.  Anne Rice's Lestat was a bratty rebel who pushed back against the vampire establishment because he wouldn't be constrained by their rules.  Sam Reid's version is a walking trainwreck, screwed up by centuries of trauma, abandonment, epic mommy issues, and unprocessed grief.  Where the book Lestat was effortlessly a superstar, the screen Lestat is a mediocre musician at best, with songs composed by Daniel Hart.  The tour is not going well at the start of the series, and it's a running joke that the band regularly gets terrible reviews. (Personally the music isn't really to my taste either, but it works in the context of the show, so no complaints here).  What looks like rock 'n' roll impetuousness and provocation is really a combination of clumsy self-destruction or maybe very badly applied self-help.  However, those moments when Reid takes the stage and starts riling up the crowd are frequently electric, and if this is all just Lestat's idea of therapy, at least it's wonderfully entertaining to watch.  The dialogue remains very sharp, and Lestat's narration, full of terminally online social-media speak, is also frequently hilarious.      

 

There's also the matter of keeping all the regulars from "Interview With the Vampire" around for the new season, so reasons are engineered for characters like Louis, Armand (Assad Zaman) and Claudia (Delainey Hayles) to keep making appearances, which I will not spoil.  We spend far more time with them than we do with characters like Nicholas de Lenfent (Joseph Potter), Magnus (Damien Atkins), Marius de Romanus (Christopher Heyer Dahl), and Akasha (Sheila Atim), who all had considerably bigger parts in the book.  At least all of them are here, setting up future events in what I hope will be multiple seasons to come, but several of the introductions are very rushed.  The big exception is Gabriella, who has controversially been turned into a more vicious, calculating presence with her own agenda.  She's not quite an antagonist this season, but has the potential to be, which is very exciting.  

I'm not quite disappointed in the ending since I know that there's more coming, but it's hard to parse a season that feels so unfinished.  There are several episodes that I adore in isolation, with a few specific scenes and performances that are absolutely worth taking the trouble for, but there are also many conceits and ambitious reaches here that just don't pan out.  "The Vampire Lestat" is a daring, creative season of television that I'm so glad exists, but it also left me wanting far more than what I think the series is ready to provide.     

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"Buffet Infinity" Invites Your Worship

I'm not much of a horror fan, and I'm not the type to get obsessed over weird little indie movies.  However, once in a while a weird little indie horror film comes along that is so original and so exactly to my tastes, that I have no choice but to sing its praises.  So today, I invite you to behold the Canadian horror satire "Buffet Infinity," a horror film told entirely through chintzy local television commercials for businesses located in the fictional Westridge County, Alberta, plus a few local news broadcasts, and some sinister public service announcements.  

90% of the effectiveness of the film, written and directed by Simon Glassman, is just getting the aesthetics right.  I spent a lot of my childhood watching the local television stations, and especially the foreign language programming that would air these low budget ads for my very specific community, featuring the kind of people who would never be on television otherwise.  Some were creative and well-produced enough to turn a few of the spokespeople and business owners into minor celebrities.  Most, however, were just strange little curiosities that were very much of their time.  And with the advent of the digital age and the great migration of viewers to the internet, I don't think I've seen ads like this in a decade.  At least, not the kind featured in "Buffet Infinity" with the wonky video quality, the over-bright color schemes, chunky onscreen text, and directions to the location nearest you.  "Buffet Infinity" was shot entirely in Edmonton, and most of the actors came from the local stand-up comedy scene.  It does not surprise me at all that some of the fake ads are directly spoofing real ads for Edmonton businesses.

Adult Swim explored similar ground with some of their originals, like the infomercial spoof "Broomshakalaka," and the immortal sitcom-skewering "Too Many Cooks," which both combined old linear television ephemera with dissonant horror elements.  "Tim and Eric" and "SCTV" sketches  have also been cited as influences.  In order to make "Buffet Infinity" feature length, however, it offers a much more involved story.  We channel-surf through several rounds of ads for a shopping center near a worrisome sinkhole, gradually learni that the new buffet restaurant  is evil, and responsible for a large number of disappearances in the area.  Nearby businesses, like the rival sandwich shop run by Jennifer Joy Avery (Allison Bench), are systematically targeted with negative ads by Buffet Infinity, and eventually taken over.  Other recurring characters include lawyer Mostley Rosin (Kevin Singh), promoting his firm's legal services, Ahmed Ahmed (as himself) offering deals at a nearby pawn shop, Captain Savings (Brandon Vanderwall) who wants to sell you a car, a man in a series of black and white self help ads (Donovan Workun), a woman (Clare Theobald) peddling insurance, and a science-fiction author, Reverence Langdon B. Hershey (Dino Primo), who seems to be running a cult.

You would think that sitting through ninety minutes of fake ads, no matter how well done, would get old quickly.  However, "Buffet Infinity" uses the same techniques that real television ads do to keep the audience's attention, and the pleasant, lulling quality of the marketing pitches has a similar hypnotic effect.  Even without the darker, lurking forces of the larger plot, the filmmakers capture the slightly off-putting nature of the fake smiles, exaggerated claims, and passive-aggressive attempts to engage with the viewers.  Maybe that's why I didn't feel too bad about watching these television creatures become corrupted and overtaken by whatever evil force is controlling Buffet Infinity.  The production values are so shoestring throughout that the horror frequently edges into camp anyhow.

As with most wonderfully ambitious microbudget indie films like this, "Buffet Infinity" is very uneven.  I thought the first half was great, but once the plot took a turn toward more conventional horror, it started to come apart.  It probably would have turned out better if Glassman had resisted the urge to give us an explanation of what was actually going on, and leave things more ambiguous.  I'm still thoroughly impressed with what he accomplished, but I think "Buffet Infinity" will work best for those who already love weird and obscure films like this.  Frankly, it doesn't get much weirder than this.     

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"The Terror," Year Three

There's a mystery that I went into the third installment of "The Terror" intent on solving, but I never came up with a satisfying answer.  I'd read the Victor LaValle book that this new miniseries is based on, The Devil in Silver and I couldn't figure out why it was decided that this was good source material for a series of "The Terror."  The first two were historical fiction as well as being supernatural thrillers.  The Devil in Silver takes place in the present day.  It does feature some flashbacks, but I wouldn't characterize it as a big part of the book or the new season.  

Pepper (Dan Stevens) is arrested for assaulting his girlfriend's ex, and the cops decide to dump him at New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital for a few days to avoid paperwork.  Under the care of Dr. Anand (Aasif Mandvi) and Head Nurse Miss Chris (CCH Pounder), Pepper quickly discovers that he's trapped in an administrative Catch-22, unable to keep his behavior in check long enough to get out of the facility on his own, and with no one able to intercede for him on the outside.  He eventually makes friends with the other patients, including his roommate Coffee (Chinaza Uche), long time resident Dorry (Judith Light), and aggressive youngster Loochie (b).  From them he learns about the mysterious presence in the hospital, apparently connected to a room behind a silver door that's off limits.  Other members of the cast include Stephen Root, John Benjamin Hickey, and Maureen Sebastian.

"The Devil in Silver" is all around a puzzling creation.  I found it very difficult to follow the story, even though I'd read the source novel.  Unlike the previous seasons of "The Terror," "The Devil in Silver" is only six episodes, and feels extremely rushed.  The plotting is messy and haphazard, and my guess is that the episode order was cut down at least once.  I liked many of the individual performances, and I thought that the premise was very well set up, but a lot of the dramatic potential was squandered.  Worse, it was rarely very scary.  In fact, the more we knew about the supernatural forces behind the bad things happening at the hospital, the less scary it got.  

Where the series is strongest is when it focuses on the plight of the patients, who are a vulnerable population unable to properly advocate themselves, stuck in a dysfunctional, understaffed, underfunded institution where they've been all but forgotten.  The staff shows moments of kindness, but have their own problems to worry about.  Coffee and Dorry both get spotlight episodes, which are among the strongest of the season.  Dr. Anand is often put in the part of petty tyrant, but his concerns over New Hyde being shut down are reasonable.  If the place goes down, will the patients have anywhere to go?  My favorite parts of the book were likewise the examinations of systemic and social issues.

Conversely, the series is at its weakest when it's trying to be a genre piece.  The show runs into the same trouble with its supernatural elements that so many weaker horror thrillers do, which is that it spends too much time trying to answer questions that nobody asked.  Do we really need to get into a convoluted backstory to understand that there's something bad in the hospital preying on everyone?  Why do the phenomena associated with it seem so inconsistent from appearance to appearance?  Even though we have Pepper on heavy medication being an unreliable narrator to account for some of the inconsistencies, the writing is downright sloppy.  Worse, it's not nearly as much fun to watch as it should be. 

Still, the production values are excellent, and the talent involved is strong - directing duties are handled by Karyn Kusama, Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour Jr., and Craig William Macneill.  The ensemble is consistently very good, though Dan Stevens often feels hampered by weak material.  Judith Light as the dotty Dorry is my pick for MVP.  It feels ungenerous to say this, but I wish I'd seen the dumbed down, two hour version of this story that simply focused on the scares and the thrills, instead of the more ambitious miniseries version that never seems to quite know what it wants to be.      

  

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"The Institute," Year One

Here's a Stephen King supernatural series that flew under the radar last year.  "The Institute," based on the 2019 novel, strikes me as King putting his own spin on some well-worn tropes, but if you're genre savvy at all, it's going to seem pretty humdrum.  This is the kind of show that plays a gloomy, slowed-down cover of Tears For Fears' "Shout" over an opening credits sequence that has a lot of spoilers in it.  Still, we're not all genre savvy, and I like that "The Institute" plays a lot of this material straight.  There are some talented people involved, and a few good performances to take in.  This often feels like a gateway Stephen King title for younger viewers who need a little more hand-holding, and that's not a bad thing.  

Created by Benjamin Cavell and largely directed by Jack Bender, "The Institute" follows two main protagonists.  One is Tim Jamieson (Ben Barnes), a drifter ex-cop who takes up the position of "night knocker" in the small, remote town of DuPray.  The other is Luke Ellis (Joe Freeman), a bright fourteen year-old who wakes up one day in the Institute, a foreboding facility where a group of kids have been recruited to help "save the world," according to the sinister director, Mrs. Sigsby (Mary Louise Parker).  There is no contact with the outside world and everyone is clearly lying to them.  It turns out that the kids all have telepathic or telekinetic abilities that the staff is going to help them access, whether they like it or not.  

I like the early episodes of the show when it's about the kids - Luke, Kalisha (Simone Miller), Nick (Fionn Laird), George (Arlen So), and Avery (Viggo Hanvelt) - slowly exploring the Institute and learning a little more about what's going on from episode to episode.  Luke gradually works out what all the casually dropped acronyms mean, and where the kids go when they're moved to the "Back Half" of the Institute, while getting familiar with the staff - the sadistic guard Tony (Jason Diaz), the sympathetic housekeeper Maureen (Jane Luk), and Dr. Hendricks (Robert Joy), who is in charge of all the testing.  The audience is also privy to scenes of Sigsby and her underling Stackhouse (Julian Richings) running other operations to shield The Institute from prying eyes, and keeping their mysterious unseen bosses happy.  

The trouble really comes from the show also being obligated to also follow Tim Jamieson in DuPray, as he gets to know the people of the town and starts wondering about that mysterious research facility nearby that may be related to a few unexplained deaths.  Ben Barnes has no trouble keeping my attention, but watching his interactions with the initially hostile police officer Wendy (Hannah Galway), a reporter (Jordan Alexander), and the local bag lady (Mary Walsh) gets dull in a hurry, especially when it takes time away from what's going on with the kids in the Institute.  I think the show generally does a good job with pacing though.  Very few of the reveals come as a surprise, but they aren't dragged out either.  From what I can tell, the entire King novel was adapted in these eight episodes, so we get a perfectly decent ending, and this season of the show can be treated like a miniseries.

Keeping in mind that Stephen King has been writing about kids with telepathic powers since "Carrie" and "Firestarter," I wasn't expecting much in the way of actual thrills.  However, I was surprised at how much "The Institute" eschews traditional horror and plays out like a typical crime or prison drama.  The villains are normal human beings empowered by a faceless authority to do terrible things.  The kids are portrayed as pretty normal kids, and are no match for them at all.  The best parts of the show are focused on Luke and his friends trying to deal with their horribly constrained existence in the Institute itself.  This is the first time I've seen Joe Freeman in anything.  He's good at making Luke seem like the smartest person in the room, yet still completely out of his depth.  I also enjoy Mary Louise Parker as a baddie, and hope she does it more often.  However, a couple of the other actors are on the shaky side, and I'm not talking about the kids.  

So, while "The Institute" is not one of the better Stephen King shows I've seen, it's a perfectly decent watch and I'm not surprised that a second season has been announced.  

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"Wuthering Heights" and "The Bride!"

Emerald Fennell made a new version of "Wuthering Heights," and Maggie Gyllenhaal did a new take on "The Bride of Frankenstein" called "The Bride!" and I need to talk about these two together.  Both take the original stories and rework them into something different, using anachronistic elements, a lot of camp, and a lot of emphasis on style over substance.  Both function as star vehicles for their leading ladies - Margot Robbie and Jessie Buckley respectively.  I think one movie mostly works and one mostly doesn't, but both are so bold and display so much ambition that I have to offer my sincerest appreciation to everyone involved for getting the 2026 "Wuthering Heights" and "The Bride!" to the big screen in their current forms.  If nothing else, these movies are big, uninhibited, and more than a little bit bonkers.  And I love that.  

"Wuthering Heights" starts out mostly following the plot of the Emily Bronte novel, with the impoverished but headstrong Catherine Earnshaw (Margot Robbie) growing up with her foundling adopted brother Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) under the questionable care or Cathy's dissolute father (Martin Clunes).  To improve her family's fortunes Cathy marries a rich neighbor, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), though she really loves Heathcliff.  He disappears and returns many years later, unexpectedly rich, and Cathy finds her feelings for him have only increased.  And then the movie ditches Bronte and never looks back.  Cathy and Heathcliff's love affair is the centerpiece of the film, full of torrid imagery and scandalous behavior, but little actual sex.  Some of their encounters feel anticipatory of magazine photo spreads, with over-the-top costuming, dramatic color palettes, and increasingly campy, horny, and downright bizarre expressions of desire.  

And this all would have probably gone over a lot better if the movie wasn't called "Wuthering Heights," (the quotation marks are not optional) and the characters weren't called Cathy and Heathcliff.  As an adaptation, frankly the movie isn't even trying.  It tones down the notoriously cruel and damaged characters to the point of toothlessness.  It tacks on a hurried and compromised new ending that kneecaps any sense of the larger themes of the original novel.  If you have no familiarity with the original "Wuthering Heights," the new adaptation comes across as a messy, but fairly harmless bodice-ripper pastiche with a nice Charlie XCX score, inventive production design, and some amusingly trashy plot twists.  Robbie and Elordi do have some chemistry with each other, and understand the assignment - playing at a heightened, unhinged version of romance that doesn't need to make any kind of sense.  It would have probably been more entertaining if Fennell had fully embraced the darker, more sexually deviant elements that kept being hinted at, but alas this isn't "Saltburn," and nobody gets to be truly nasty in this universe.

On to "The Bride!" which is definitely guilty of trying to do too much.  Set in 1930s Chicago, Jessie Buckley plays a dual role as gun moll named Ida, and the spirit of Mary Shelley who possesses Ida one evening, full of rage and unfulfilled creative need.  This leads to Ida's tragic death and subsequent resurrection by Dr. Cornelia Euphronius (Annette Bening), who is working at the behest of a curious newcomer to the city named "Frank" (Christian Bale).  And I suppose it's not really a spoiler that "Frank" turns out to be the monster created by Dr. Frankenstein over a century ago, which means that both the monster and his creator, Mary Shelley, are characters in this movie.  The resurrected Ida, who I will now refer to as The Bride, goes on a journey of discovery exploring her identity, monstrosity, and capability for love and violence.  

"The Bride!" strikes out in a totally original direction from its very first frames, so we don't have to worry much about the source material here.  However, it's a very chaotic film that combines horror, gangster, camp, romance, and even musical elements with a big dose of metatextual commentary.  Trying to follow the "Bonnie and Clyde" plot feels like an exercise in futility, especially when a pair of detectives played by Peter Skarsgaard and Penelope Cruz show up to be boring.  However, when the movie is following Frank and The Bride, it's very watchable.  The performances are good - very good, even.  It's worth seeing the movie just to watch Jessie Buckley play The Bride with so much exuberant freakishness.  I've seen mixed reactions to the inclusion of Mary Shelley, who keeps breaking into the narrative with her rambling interjections, but I thought she was great, especially after I turned on the closed captioning so I could better parse what she was saying.      

However, the movie is simply too scattered and underdeveloped to leave much impact.  "Poor Things" was a much more subversive, more coherent take on a feminist "Frankenstein" narrative.  By comparison, "The Bride!" feels far too slick and surface level.  It's also often preoccupied with its references to Herman Melville, Mel Brooks, and 1930s movies, which are all jumbled up in increasingly obscure configurations.  I don't feel like "The Bride!" wasted my time, but I don't feel I got much out of it either, beyond a few good scenes in isolation and the most WTF needle drop of the year.  It's one of those movies that is so singular and strange that I'm happy it exists to be puzzled over, like "Megalopolis," even though I didn't vibe with it.   I also find it encouraging that Maggie Gyllenhaal got to make this at a major studio, which means that riskier films, made on this scale, are still occasionally possible.  

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"Send Help" is a Scream

Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is an overacheiving corporate worker who has been promised a VP position at her company.  Unfortunately the new boss, an insufferable youngster named Bradley Preston (Dylan O'Brien), won't give her what she's due.  However, the tables are turned during an overseas work trip, when the two are stranded on an uninhabited tropical island together, after their flight crashes.  

It's been far too long since we had an original Sam Raimi film, and this one is a lot of fun.  It's got action, comedy, bloody gore, and pig snot being flung on the camera lens.  I love that it gives Rachel McAdams a really juicy leading role.  Linda Liddle is great at her job, but she's got terrible people skills and some hygiene issues that signal that she's not very self-aware, and probably deluded about her career prospects.  McAdams isn't afraid to get gross or come off as a weirdo.  She's stellar at juggling the movie's variety of different tones, from straight drama to wildly over-the-top genre nastiness.  Dylan O'Brien is also very good at being obnoxious and awful, but also just charismatic enough that he's not entirely unsympathetic.  And that's important, given where the movie goes.  

You could classify "Send Help" as part of the recent spate of media about the class-divide, similar to "Triangle of Sadness" and "The White Lotus."  Linda turns out to be a "Survivor" enthusiast who thrives in the wild, while Bradley is useless.  However, Raimi has little interest in social satire, and puts all his efforts into thrills and mayhem.  Linda and Bradley might represent the forces of the privileged and the exploited, but it's their decisions as individuals that make the movie so compelling to watch.  It's not clear cut who you're supposed to be rooting for, all the way up to the end, and the movie gleefully keeps subverting common genre conventions and keeps the audience guessing.  What kind of movie are we even watching?  Is this a revenge thriller?  Is this a "Misery" style psycho caretaker scenario?  Is this some kind of twisted romance?  Maybe a little of everything?

One thing that I've noticed about modern comedies is that there aren't many of them that have a good grasp of comedic film language anymore.  Sam Raimi has always been fantastic at it.  There's a montage sequence involving Bradley getting dehydrated that's just a long string of dissolves of Dylan O'Brien head shots, floating over the screen one after the other.  It stood out because it had been so long since I'd seen any other action comedy attempt something similar - with the exception of last year's "Naked Gun" reboot. I hope to see more comedies that follow suit.   Raimi also manages the shifting tone extremely well.  Here, he balances cartoonish gags and heightened imagery with pretty grounded characters.  Sure, they're broadly drawn and are prone to unhinged behavior, but they exist in a pretty believable emotional reality for most of the film, so you get more invested in their clashes.   

My only major criticism of "Send Help" is of the ending, which I found too abrupt.  I liked the ultimate outcome, just not how we got there.  Maybe I was looking for more closure and maybe I was hoping for more carnage, but it feels like Raimi could have gotten more out of the material.  Then again, "Send Help" already runs 113 minutes, and hits every element you want out of a Raimi film, so it feels greedy to want more.  I hope the film's success means that we can get Rachel McAdams in more starring roles, and that it won't be over a decade before they let Sam Raimi make something similar again.  There hasn't been nearly enough screen splatter in circulation lately.

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"The Plague" Gets Under Your Skin

First time filmmaker Charlie Polinger has made a nerve-wracking film about a group of twelve and thirteen year-old boys at a water polo camp.  Everett Blunck stars as Ben, who runs afoul of the established group dynamics of the other boys, where a kid named Jake (Kayo Martin) has started a cruel game to treat the oddball Eli (Kenny Rasmussen) like he has contracted a mysterious "plague."  Desperate to fit in, Ben initially goes along with the ostracism, but also finds he enjoys being around Eli, who doesn't seem bothered by the negative reaction.

There have been many films about bullying and the way that adolescent growing pains can turn kids into monsters.  However, I've rarely seen a film like "The Plague" that lays out the forces at play so clearly.  The kids' cruelty looks harmless, but is extremely hurtful, even in the earliest stages.  It's immediately obvious that all of the boys involved in the game are vulnerable in some way or another, and most are like Ben - going along because nobody wants to be in the target role.  The ringleader, Jake, is the kind of smirking little instigator that seems Machiavellian to Ben, but later scenes make it clear that this is a child who is processing a lot of negative emotions very badly, and his cruelty is learned.  He has no real idea of the consequences of his behavior, or that the game will end up spinning out of everyone's control.  

The performances from the young leads are very good, and the writing is perceptive enough to nail the behaviors and dynamics of kids this age, even if the specific vernacular might not be right.  Ben is guileless enough to say exactly what he's thinking most of the time, and when he tries to feign amenability or aloofness, he's bad at it.  Eli seems to have no self-awareness, which seems odd for a kid his age, but not unlikely.  I found myself getting frustrated with Ben and Jake, and had to keep reminding myself that these were seventh graders who may have never been away from home for an extended period before, and whose social skills were rudimentary at best.  The kids being so young certainly increased the emotional intensity of the film throughout, and I found myself hyperaware in even the most innocuous dialogue scenes.    

You have to suspend disbelief about some aspects of "The Plague."  For instance, the only adult presence at the camp seems to be the coach Daddy Wags (Joel Edgerton), who is aware of the bullying and does his best to intervene when things get out of hand.  However, the lack of supervision was something that I couldn't help fixating on.  This is a horror/thriller, largely told from the subjective point of viewpoint of a prepubescent kid, so was this an artistic choice?  Was Daddy Wags the only adult around because that's what it felt like to Ben, and the other adults simply didn't register for him?  Was this to suggest that the camp, despite catering to the kind of rich kids who would have the money to play water polo, was financially cutting corners?  Or was this simply because the "Plague" is a low budget film and couldn't swing the cost of more adult actors?

My instinct is to go with the first option.  "The Plague" does a lot with a little, whipping up some potent horror imagery out of swimming pools, darkened bathrooms, and institutional corridors.  I especially like the opening underwater shot, where the boys appear to be headless as they tread water.  The sound design is a marvel, using human voices as part of the soundscape in places where you might not expect them.  Water is a recurring motif, naturally, standing in for the subconscious.  

Horror fans may come away disappointed because there's only one real moment of gore, most of the chills are strictly psychological, and the story stays mostly grounded in reality throughout.  However, I came away extremely impressed with everyone involved.

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"The Housemaid" and "Pillion"

Sometimes to get through awards season, you need to indulge in some trash.  And boy, is "The Housemaid" premium trash.  It's a domestic thriller starring Amanda Seyfried and Sydney Sweeney that covers all the bases - rich people problems, infidelity, psycho bosses, class warfare, a creepy kid, an evil mother-in-law, a sex scene or two, a bit of the old ultraviolence, and finally some sweet revenge.  

Directed by Paul Feig and written by Rebecca Sonnenshine, based on the Freida McFadden book, "The Housemaid" follows Millie (Sydney Sweeney), a parolee who is living out of her car, but manages to land a job as a live-in maid for Nina (Amanda Seyfried), who seems to have the perfect life and family.  Nina is married to the hunky Andrew (Brandon Sklenar), and mother to a young daughter (Indiana Elle), with another kid on the way.  Initially the job seems too good to be true, but then Nina starts showing signs of instability.  She's picky and paranoid, lies constantly, often flies into rages, and gives Millie contradictory instructions.  As Millie learns more about Nina, the dream job turns into a nightmare.

At first glance, "The Housemaid" is a terrible movie.  The characters are paper thin and the twisty plot is ridiculous.  Sydney Sweeney continues to display considerable screen presence but not much ability to emote, but Amanda Seyfried more than makes up for it.  She's so much fun to watch as the unhinged Nina, playing everything over-the-top.  And fortunately, just about everybody else involved seems to be in on the joke.  The film never quite tips over into self-aware parody, playing most of the dramatic bits pretty straight, but it's hard to keep a straight face during the cheesy seduction scenes, or the played up cattiness of the neighborhood mom group, or the physical impossibility of fight sequences.  Paul Feig and friends know we're here to see the drama and the mess, and are perfectly happy to give it to us.  The film's third act abandons all pretense and just runs full tilt into a pile of genre tropes with gleeful abandon.  I enjoyed the hell out of "The Housemaid," even though I groaned through the awful dialogue and nutty denouement.  I want a sequel immediately.

 

Now, on to "Pillion," which is the BDSM rom-com written and directed by Harry Lighton, and based on a novel by Adam Mars-Jones.  Harry Melling plays Colin, a shy, inexperienced gay man who starts a relationship with a mysterious biker named Ray (Alexander Skarsgaard).  Ray introduces Colin to a hardcore BDSM dynamic that essentially involves him taking over Colin's life, but while Colin enjoys this, he also wants more traditional things from the relationship that Ray is averse to.  Will the two of them be able to come to a compromise?  Will love triumph over their seemingly irreconcilable differences?

Despite being pretty open to what the film was selling, I didn't find "Pillion" very titillating or shocking, and I didn't find it very appealing as a romance.  I chalk this up to not being on the same wavelength as the filmmakers in regards to the aesthetics, which is perfectly fine.  Bikers and fetish gear don't do anything for me, or the focus on muscles, muscles, and more muscles.  Lighton has a good sense of humor about his subject matter, though, and a willingness to let the weird bits just be weird, which I appreciate.  However, I was concerned about the depiction of the BDSM activities - the movie goes to extremes very quickly, consent is not clear at all, and neither of the participants seem sure where their boundaries and limits are.  This seemed to be another in a long line of problematic film portrayals of BDSM - at least, at first.

Fortunately, this turns out to be the whole point of the story - that Colin and Ray need to sort out what they are and aren't willing to do for each other in order to function as a proper couple.  And this aspect of the movie turned out to be much more interesting and satisfying to see play out than any of the kinky business, and ensured that we weren't just getting a gay "Fifty Shades of Gray."  Melling and Skarsgaard both play their characters with emotional acuity and sensitivity, and by the end I was genuinely rooting for these two to figure things out.  I came away from "Pillion" feeling like I'd really gained something valuable from the experience that I never would have expected going in - a thorough dismantling of several unrealistic and harmful romance tropes.

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"Eternity" and "It Ends"

Here are two smaller, existential, high concept films that I want to recommend before they slip too far back in my memory.

The more cheerful, life affirming one is a movie about the afterlife.  Directed by David Freyne, and co-written by Freyne and Pat Cunnane, "Eternity" follows an elderly couple who have been married for sixty-five years when they die, and learn that they have to choose where to spend their eternal rest.  The deceased have a variety of different afterlives available to them, and help from "Afterlife Coordinators" like Anna (Da'Vine Joy Randolph) and Ryan (John Early) during the transition.  However, in the case of Joan (Elizabeth Olsen), she not only has to choose an afterlife, but who to spend it with - the man she was married to for decades, Larry (Miles Teller), or her first husband Luke (Callum Turner), who died young as a soldier.  

"Eternity" presents a vision of the afterlife that's a lot of fun.  The newly dead arrive in what looks like a 1960s conventional hall, full of salespeople trying to hawk different afterlives, ranging from eternity at the beach, to eternity with no men allowed, to eternity in Weimar German without the Nazis.  Joan and Larry are returned to the age they felt the most comfortable, which is when they were in their thirties, but their neighbor Karen (Olga Merediz) stays elderly.  We also learn that each eternity has an archive for its inhabitants to review old memories of their lives, which also comes in handy for exposition.  The amount of fun little details in the set designs, despite a limited budget, made me think of "The Good Place," though there's more similarity plotwise to something like "Defending Your Life." 

There's a lightness and optimism to "Eternity" which is a little old fashioned and very appealing.  Despite the big concepts, this turns out to be a romantic comedy at heart, where we spend most of the movie with Luke, trying to figure out how to make Joan fall in love with him again.  The performances are warm and winning, with Miles Teller continuing to make the case for himself as a solid cinema everyman, and Elizabeth Olsen being very charming.  "Eternity" hearkens back to much older supernatural films in the tradition of "A Matter of Life and Death" and "A Guy Named Joe," and it easily won me over.  It's currently at the top of my list of films I'd like to watch with older relatives.

Now on to a much less conventional indie film, "It Ends," which starts out as horror and morphs into something quite different.  Four twentysomething friends are in a car together, take a wrong turn, and end up on a road in a wooded area that never seems to end.  What's more alarming is that the foursome never seem to get tired, never need to eat or drink, their phones never run out of power, and the car never runs out of gas.  However, if they stop for too long, people will emerge from the woods to attack the car.  Their only choice is to keep driving.  At least, that's what they think is their only choice at first.  James (Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson), Fisher (Noah Toth) and Mitchell (Tyler) all ultimately decide to deal with their extraordinary circumstances in different ways.  

"It Ends" is one of those films where the central premise is clearly meant to be treated as a metaphor for something profound, and the audience will take away as much meaning as they bring to it.  From a production standpoint, "It Ends" is a minimal, shoestring piece of work with very green actors and not the best technical bona fides. However, it's got some great ideas, and I like the way that it starts in such familiar genre territory and gradually subverts itself more and more.  It's also very good at capturing the mood of long car trips, and the dynamics of a friend group with a lot of history.  I think it'll resonate the most with viewers in their twenties who are at the same state of life as the protagonists, trying to figure out their path through life, and which relationships are worth fighting for as people in their lives start drifting away.  I had a great time with it.

"It Ends" also has the distinction of being one of the first films distributed by Letterboxd, which is starting to pick up smaller titles in danger of falling through the cracks.  I look forward to their future offerings with interest.

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"Stranger Things" Year Five

Minor spoilers ahead.

So, I didn't hate the ending of "Stranger Things."  I thought that it delivered pretty much exactly what it advertised, giving us a final showdown between the kids of Hawkins and the horrors of the Upside Down, while offering a chance to say goodbye to these characters.  It did some things well and other things badly, but the quality of "Stranger Things" has always been extremely variable.  I wasn't surprised at all by the sloppy writing, unsatisfying character arcs, or prioritizing of the spectacle over the story.  However, it also had some highs and hit some bullseyes, and deserves the credit for those too.    

So, the citizens of Hawkins are living with the unwelcome presence of constant military activity and martial law in the wake of Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) having opened more access points to the Upside Down.  Vecna hasbeen making himself scarce, leaving the kids to deal with smaller threats like bullies and the latest evil government scientist, Dr. Kay (Linda Hamilton), while preparing for the next battle.  However, Vecna's been busy, and it soon emerges that his latest target is the youngest Wheeler sibling Holly (Nell Fisher) and some of her classmates.  There are a couple of other new faces, like Robin's girlfriend Vickie (Amybeth McNulty), and a new comic relief kid named Derek (Jake Connelly), but otherwise the show has its hands full keeping up with Mike, Dustin, Eleven, Will, Lucas, Max, Steve, Jonathan, Nancy, Robin, Erica, Hopper, and Joyce.  Frankly, there's little room for anyone else at this point.

The more time that the show spends checking in on the show's regular characters, and emphasizing the things we like about them, like Dustin and Steve's rekindled bromance, the more engaging it is. The more it ties itself in knots trying to justify all the new twists and turns of the plotting, the worse it is.  Sadly, Linda Hamilton is utterly wasted playing a generic villain whose actions don't seem to matter at all to the larger story.  Holly, a character I didn't remember existed before this season, suddenly becoming a main character was an odd choice.  It doesn't help that she's miscast - the actress is talented, but feels very off trying to play a much younger kid.  A lot of problems come from trying to juggle too many characters.  Robin shoulders a ton of exposition and emotional heavy lifting while characters like Mike and Jonathan simply don't have much to do.  Frankly, it's a minor miracle that the show finds its way to any kind of coherent ending at all.  

I'm happy to say that all the long-percolating questions about who Nancy will end up with, whether Max will wake up from her coma, and what's been bothering Will all get resolved at last.  We also get a lot more about the origins of the Upside Down, Vecna, and Henry Creel's past, those who enjoy the show's worldbuilding.  However, the vast amount of the show's time and resources, are spent creating big setpieces.  We get everything from home invasions to daring prison escapes to a giant monster battle.  Some of these are very good, and others are less so.  Suspension of disbelief is vital, as some of the plot developments make absolutely no sense, but I'm not inclined to complain because they're very entertaining.  Nancy and Jonathan hashing out their relationship in a room full of melting ectoplasm is weirdly sweet.  Erica taking point in a mass kidnapping scheme is priceless.  Will finally telling the truth is awkward, but I respect that the Duffers stopped the show in its tracks to let him do it properly.  

The three years it took to make these final eight episodes created all of this hype and anticipation that was never going to be matched by the actual finished product, and I feel bad for any fans who expected something more.  However, this wasn't the fatal stumble that the endings of the last "Star Wars" trilogy or "Game of Thrones" were for those franchises.  The ending of "Stranger Things" got the job done, without too many casualties (probably too few), and I can finally disentangle myself from this prolonged goodbye with a sense of relief.

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"Eyes of Wakanda" and "Marvel Zombies"

Two Marvel universe animated miniseries were released last year, which both skewed nerdier and more mature than Disney+'s usual animated offerings.  Both run four episodes of roughly 30 minutes each, adding up to the length of two feature films.  

"Eyes of Wakanda" explores concepts from "Black Panther," tracking the efforts of multiple Wakandans over the centuries retrieving artifacts and going on special missions around the globe.  In the first episode, a former Dora Milaje travels to the Minoan Empire to retrieve a Wakandan agent who has gone rogue.  The second is set during the Trojan War, the third in China in the 1400s, and the fourth gives us glimpses of Wakanda of the future.  All the characters are new, and don't have obvious ties to the characters in "Black Panther," which means there's some time needed to adjust to the new reality of each episode.

The series is designed to be a showcase for black talent, with the episodes written by Geoffrey Thorne and Marc Bernardin, directed by Todd Harris and John Fang, and cast with an array of black actors including Steven Touissant and Anika Noni Rose.  What stands out are the visuals, featuring a dynamic, impactful animation style that makes the action scenes look great.  The production quality is strong the whole way through, but this is very much an anthology where the individual stories are designed to be self-contained and barely connected to each other, so "Eyes of Wakanda" ends up feeling very diverting but non-essential.  I'd love to see some of the episodes expanded, especially the third where we get a crossover with a different part of the MCU, but getting "Eyes of Wakanda" made was surely difficult enough. 

However, as unlikely as "Eyes of Wakanda" is, I'm downright baffled that "Marvel Zombies" exists.  This is a spinoff of the "What If…?" episode that takes place in a dystopian version of Earth where much of the population and the superhero community have been zombified.  It uses the same visual style and brings back many of the same characters.  "Marvel Zombies" has a mature rating because there is violence galore and characters are constantly being killed left and right.  We start out in the first episode with Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), and Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) being gal-pal survivalists together in the remains of New York, who discover a mystery device inside a zombie, which might save the world.  This kicks off a long, winding journey through different realms of the zombified MCU, picking up friends and allies and much more trouble along the way.

  

I appreciate that the status quo is constantly changing in "Marvel Zombies," so it's impossible to guess what's going to happen next.  The stakes are also properly epic, as the miniseries builds to a big conclusion involving multiple big bads.  However, I wouldn't recommend this to anyone but the most die-hard adult MCU fans.  It takes a good amount of knowledge of the existing film continuity to keep all the various characters straight, and appreciate how they differ from their original versions.  The  inexpressive animation style is also not helpful in this regard.  It took me a while to realize that John Walker (Wyatt Russell) had shown up in one of the episodes, and I spent a few minutes of the finale trying to work out who another character was (It was London Master (Daniel Swain) from the second "Doctor Strange" movie).   

If you're confident in your nerd bona fides, however, and you like darkest timeline scenarios, "Marvel Zombies" can be a lot of fun.  A surprising number of MCU actors were convinced to lend their voices to the project, and I like what the series does with some of them.  A few of my favorites get great death scenes, and this is definitely the best use of Agent Woo (Randall Park) yet.  There's a focus on "Shang-Chi" and "Black Widow" characters, which hints at when "Marvel Zombies" was written, but also some fun cameos from other shows.  Also, we get an interesting version of Blade (Todd Williams) who provides hints at what his long-stalled feature was going to look like.  

Marvel doesn't get this dark very often, so if "Marvel Zombies" sounds like it would appeal to you, enjoy it while you can.        

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My Favorite Neil Jordan Film

My favorite Irish film director is Neil Jordan, who has received a lot of attention for his contemporary melodramas, historical biographies, and sensitive transgender narratives.  He also has a habit of regularly making some really gnarly horror and fantasy films, including the '90s version of "Interview With the Vampire."  However, it was his werewolf picture that I was obsessed with as a teenager.  In 1984 he made an adaptation of Angela Carter's short story "The Company of Wolves," a feminist take on The Little Red Riding Hood.  He co-wrote the film with Carter.  

"The Company of Wolves" unfolds as a literal fever dream, offering several stories about monsters, wolves, and sexual awakening through a dark fairy tale lens.  Most of the film is concerned with the familiar figures of a girl in a red hood, her storytelling grandmother, and the wolfish stranger met by chance in the woods, but in the nested realities of the additional stories told in the film, we also meet the distinguished Devil who arrives in a white Rolls-Royce, an enchantress who turns her betrayer into a beast, and multiple unfortunate creatures who are both human and wolf, or perhaps something in between.  

The film is best known among special effects aficionados for its spectacular werewolf transformation scenes, including one where a snarling wolf muzzle erupts from the mouth of the huntsman as he violently sheds his humanity.  However, other images have stayed with me longer - a woman's face smashing into pieces of porcelain when she's attacked, a wedding feast attended by wolves in human clothing, and human babies hatching from bird eggs.  Jordan purposefully leans into the psychosexual symbolism, creating this uneasy twilight world where idyllic childhood fantasies are easily twisted and corrupted into nightmares.  He also used this approach in later films like "The Butcher Boy," and "In Dreams," both exploring the psyches of disturbed killers. 

Dark fantasy films were popular in the '80s, but few were as richly rendered as "The Company of Wolves."  The surreal imagery appears throughout, often using disturbing juxtapositions and dream logic to impart a lasting sense of horror.  This reflects the origins of many folk tales as morality plays and cautionary tales, the whimsical allegories having roots in much grimmer reality.  Jordan's visuals have a beauty and a lyricism to them that is mesmerizing.  I'm not fond of most werewolf films, because they're usually so focused on the monstrosity and gore.  "The Company of Wolves" certainly has its share of blood and guts, but it doesn't forget about the seduction, that sweetest tongue comes before sharpest tooth.     

In addition to the central narrative, the film features four stories told by various characters to each other, and there were a few more in early scripts that didn't make it into the film.  They're variations on the same themes of love gone wrong and maturation bringing unexpected horrors, except the very last, which offers a more hopeful, conciliatory message.  I love that "The Company of Wolves" heavily features the act of storytelling, and it's important who tells which story to whom, and what the motives for each telling might be.  And characters who aren't telling stories are always offering advice and adages and explaining their own ideas of how the world works.  

The budget on the film was low, and clearly most of the wolves in the film are actually large dogs with dye jobs.  However, the practical effects work, the art direction, and the cinematography are all excellent, and the cast is fantastic.  Having sturdy UK thespians like Angela Lansbury, Stephen Rea, and David Warner delivering the dire warnings about never trusting men whose eyebrows meet in the middle goes a long way towards setting the mood and tone.  And it's astounding that this was Sarah Patterson's screen debut, playing our heroine Rosaleen, one of her only appearances in any film.

The moral, ultimately, is to beware of wolves in their many shapes and guises.  However, wolves lurk everywhere, as the embodiment of our deepest unconscious minds, both in men and women.  And I've never seen them summoned to the screen as beautifully as they are in "The Company of Wolves."

What I've Seen - Neil Jordan

The Company of Wolves (1984)

Mona Lisa (1986)

The Crying Game (1992)

Interview with the Vampire (1994)

The Butcher Boy (1997)

In Dreams (1999)

The End of the Affair (1999)

Breakfast on Pluto (2005)

The Brave One (2007)

Byzantium (2012)

Greta (2018)

Marlowe (2022)

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At Last, "The Long Walk"

An adaptation of Stephen King's "The Long Walk" likely would have been more effective a few decades ago, when the spectres of past wars loomed larger in the American collective memory.  However, the film that finally did get made is one that could have only been made now, by director Francis Lawrence, after helming four "Hunger Games" movies that proved that there was an audience for movies about dystopian death games featuring children.  However, none of the "Hunger Games" movies are anything close to as dark and violent and emotionally wrenching as "The Long Walk."  

Set in a dystopian United States suffering deep poverty in the wake of a major war, we watch fifty young men and older teenagers participate in a yearly endurance contest where they walk until only one is left.  If they fall below the speed of three miles per hour too many times, they are eliminated permanently.  Contestants include Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman), our major protagonist, Pete McVries (David Jonsson), who he becomes friends with, the troublemaker Gary Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer), unflappable Billy Stebbins (Garrett Wareing), and others played by Tut Nyot, Joshua Odjick, Ben Wang, and Jordan Gonzalez.  Overseeing their progress and providing encouragement via megaphone is the Major (Mark Hamill), a grizzled representative of the totalitarian government.

This audience for this kind of movie is  limited, naturally, so "The Long Walk" is a fairly low budget affair.  There are no particularly showy effects sequences and the crowds of onlookers from the Stephen King story are largely absent.  However, this allows "The Long Walk" a rare amount of freedom to be as graphic and vulgar and as unapologetically existential as it should be.  The deaths are very explicit and realistically brutal.  The walkers interact the way we expect a group of teenage boys to interact, conversing with constant profanity, crude humor, and slights against each other's masculinity.  We watch them deal with every physical challenge, including how to urinate and defecate during the contest.  But perhaps what's most surprising is that much of the movie is built on conversations that Ray and Pete have about their lives, the state of the world, and how to survive their ordeal both mentally and spiritually.  The pace of the film is never slow, but it is very deliberate, with a lot of long, lingering shots, and resulting in a mood that is often more meditative than I was expecting.      

It's strange to have to point out that "The Long Walk" is as much of a character drama as it is an action or horror picture, but this is probably the best major film about male camaraderie we've had in years.  Despite being competitors, most of the kids in "The Long Walk" almost immediately band together to help and support each other, with only a few outliers.  The deaths are horrible every time, and we see the boys risk their lives again and again to save each other, or try to stave off the inevitable.  There's a particular timelessness to this version of the story, where the characters don't talk like modern American teenagers, but the behavior feels universal and very immediate.  There are echoes of older war movies, naturally, since Stephen King originally wrote "The Long Walk" in the Vietnam War era, but the messages about young men dealing with violence and resistance and futility are still painfully relevant right now.      

Those familiar with the original King story will notice that there are some changes, some small and some large.  Some are just to make the story more filmable - slowing down the pace of the walkers, cutting down on the body horror, and reducing the number of participants.  Some are far more substantive.  Ray Garraty is given much more material, including a new character arc that might raise some eyebrows.  However, as someone who has been waiting for this adaptation for a couple of decades now, I'm happy to report that none of the changes in any way tone down the content of the original story, and the adaptation is ultimately true to King's work in all the ways that matter.    

Finally, the cast is excellent and the best reason to see the film.  Hoffman and Jonsson are fantastic as the leads, but many of the most memorable kids are the ones in the minor roles.  Judy Greer appears briefly as Garraty's mother, and adds so much.  The earnestness of the characters  and relative lack of satirical elements may feel old fashioned at times, but the performances are anything but.  "The Long Walk" joins that very short list of projects that escaped development hell after far too long, and it turns out that it was worth the wait.

  

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"Dangerous Animals," "Together," and "Him"

This is a post where I want to spotlight three of last year's summer horror movies.  They are getting awkwardly bundled together, because I didn't have enough titles for a ranking post the way I did back in 2024 - I really don't have anything to say about the "I Know What You Did Last Summer" legasequel or the last "Conjuring" movie.  On the other hand, trying to pair these leftover titles up thematically with other movies kept falling apart, so I'm just going to write bullet reviews for all three now, before they get any staler.  Some minor spoilers ahead.  

Let's start with "Dangerous Animals," which is a horror movie starring Hassie Harrison and Josh Heuston as Zephyr and Moses, a nice young couple who end up on a boat with a maniac.  The maniac is a man named Tucker, played by Jai Courtney, who likes feeding people to sharks and filming the results.  "Dangerous Animals" is a co-production of Shudder and the Australian Kismet Films, and directed by an Aussie, Sean Byrne.  This means that it's set on the coast of Australia and Jai Courtney gets to use his native Australian accent.  And Jai Courtney with an Australian accent is so much better at acting than when he's trying to sound American.  He's properly menacing in this movie!  There's even nuance!

So, despite what the poster would have you believe, this isn't so much a shark movie as a serial killer movie that also involves some shark attacks.  And it's good enough that I don't think anybody will mind too much about the confusion.  As a survival thriller it's a lot of fun, with plenty of twists and turns and fairly smart heroes to root for.  The tension is terrific.  People also get eaten by sharks.  However, the main events in psycho killer movies are always inevitably the psycho killers, and Jai Courtney acquits himself very well in the role.  This was a pleasant surprise, and I'll look forward to Courtney's future endeavors.  Well, as long as he's not trying to sound anything but Australian.   

On to "Together," the body horror movie starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco, and directed by another Australian, Michael Shanks.  Brie and Franco play Millie and Tim, a couple in a long term relationship who have decided to move to a rural community together, but are now having doubts about their further commitment.  While hiking in the woods nearby, they encounter a mysterious cave that causes their body parts to start sticking to each other whenever they get physically close.  This is also the movie that got pulled from Chinese distribution after digital alternations were made to one of the minor characters to change a gay couple into a straight one.

"Together" has a couple of interesting visual concepts, which are executed very well.  However, the material around the big effects-heavy sequences is half-baked, with a central metaphor that doesn't really work.  The relationship anxiety taking on a physical manifestation is a good idea, but it doesn't quite sync with the way Millie and Tim's relationship is progressing, and the challenges they face.  Nothing about their issues seem to be about losing individuality or autonomy, which this brand of body horror would suggest.  Also, the worldbuilding is very haphazard, with a cult in play, seemingly at random.  I feel some patience and encouragement is appropriate because this is a small film being helmed by a first timer, but "Together" really fell apart by the end.

Finally, a few words on "Him," which put out a fantastic trailer a few months ago.  This is the horror movie set in the world of professional football, directed by Justin Tipping.  An up-and-comer named Cam Cade, played by Tyriq Withers, attends a weeklong training event hosted by the current reigning champion, Isaiah White, played by Marlon Wayans.  However, Isaiah's methods are extreme, and his behavior is concerning.  Also, since Cam suffered a traumatic injury, he's been seeing visions of demonic and disturbing figures.  Isaiah's incredible success as a player couldn't possibly be because of supernatural forces, now could it?

I seem to like "Him" more than the average viewer.  I suspect that it's because I'm not put off by artsy, esoteric horror like "Berberian Sound Studio" and "Infinity Pool" that don't have a whole lot of coherent story, but do have a lot of surreal, abstracted, disturbing imagery and sound design.  "Him" is trying very hard - perhaps too hard - to be as showy and stylized as possible, with very aggressive visuals that convey a lot of intensity.  At times it's aping music videos and  NFL commercials, while pulling out a ton of visual tricks - pulsing lights, X-ray vision, Kubrickian symmetrical compositions, religious and folk horror imagery, and more.  The trouble is that very little of this is scary or compelling.  The performances are good and the concepts are interesting, but the skill level in the execution isn't there yet.  

"Him" gets frustratingly close to being something special - close enough that I hope everyone involved with this movie gets more chances in the future to try again.

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My Favorite John Carpenter Film

Some films take a while to find their audiences, and some directors aren't appreciated until they've essentially retired.  So it is with the 1982 version of "The Thing" and its director, John Carpenter.   Audiences at the time were looking for optimism and affirmation, and were not in the mood for a bleak, paranoid horror thriller set in Antarctica.  However, in the years since, "The Thing" has gone from box office bomb to cult favorite to one of the undisputed horror classics.

I want to talk about the special effects up front.  Rob Bottin put himself in the hospital for exhaustion due to his extraordinary efforts to bring the creatures of "The Thing" to life.  Though initially criticized as too gruesome, his work set the bar for prosthetics and practical effects for the next decade.  It's hard to describe them without just reciting a litany of violent horrors, each building upon the last.  There's the head that removes itself from a corpse, grows spider legs and runs away.  There's the torso that suddenly grows teeth and bites a guy's arms off.  Then you've got the blood testing and the dogs and the flamethrower scenes, all of them horrifically spectacular thanks to Bottin and his team.  The impact of the monster effects has lessened over time, but the amount of work and effort that went into them is still visible in every bloody frame.  One of the many poor decisions that doomed the 2011 remake/prequel of "The Thing" was using CGI effects instead of practical ones.  

Much of what makes "The Thing" so effective is its simplicity.  You have twelve men in an isolated research outpost who are attacked and killed one by one by an alien being.  You barely know anything about them except their last names and occupations, and the monster could be impersonating any of them.  Aside from Kurt Russell as the lead, the cast is made up of career character actors, including Keith David, Wilford Brimly, and Charles Hallahan.  It's easy to forget they're actors as the bodies pile up and we realize that nobody is safe.  John Carpenter was wary of stepping on the toes of the Howard Hawks adaptation of the same material, "The Thing From Another World," so the story was stripped down to the basics, with a focus on the bare mechanics of survival and the paranoia of dealing with the doppelgangers.  We are shown where the alien came from, but nearly everything else about it is a mystery.  The climate is inhospitable and the monster is clever.  The action and suspense are pushed to the forefront, and a happy ending is not in the cards.

Long before I saw "The Thing" I saw its influence on other media.  So many movies and shows about doppelgangers, isolated standoffs, implacable contagions, and creepy crawlies have been trying to capture that same sense of dread and disaster.  The echoes of "The Thing" are everywhere, from other horror movies like Daniel Espinosa's "Life," to Quentin Tarantino's snowbound western, "The Hateful Eight" - which also borrowed the Ennio Morricone score for "The Thing" for good measure.  The gory excess of the alien transformations broke some boundaries, but what really lingered in the cultural consciousness was the nihilism of facing a monster that could only be defeated through the cold obliteration of every living thing we see in the movie.  John Carpenter would return to Lovecraftian cosmic horror several times over the course of his career, but never with as much impact.  

Carpenter is often described as a genre filmmaker, which is fair, as he gave us classics in several different ones - action-comedy, horror, satire, and science-fiction.  If I hadn't written about "The Thing," my next choice would have been "Starman," another film about an alien on Earth that is a complete tonal 180 from "The Thing."  Most of his films were dismissed as B-movies and schlock upon initial release, but are well loved decades on.  And Carpenter did have his share of hits, helping to ensure that he had a long and fascinating career that included tiny indie projects and major studio films.  "The Thing" was one of the studio films, which gave him the resources to create a nightmare vision of grotesquery on a scale that had never been seen before.  And frankly, nobody has really matched it since.

What I've Seen - John Carpenter

Dark Star (1974)

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

Halloween (1978)

The Fog (1980)

Escape from New York (1981)

The Thing (1982)

Christine (1983)

Starman (1984)

Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

Prince of Darkness (1987)

They Live (1988)

In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

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