by ·Comments Off on One Cut of the Dead (2017, Shin’ichirô Ueda)

A really cleverly constructed movie, would be fun to watch again. Either I never read much about this, or I’d forgotten, but I assumed the first half of the movie was the entire movie, so the end credits appearing halfway through came as a surprise, and the second half was pure joy.

Starts out with a film crew making a zombie movie, which is already going badly when they’re invaded by actual zombies and have to fight to survive – all in a single take. The young leads are struggling as the director unloads on them for being inauthentic. They chill with the makeup artist (who happens to be studying self-defense) when the crew outside begins to get attacked. The director is so excited – finally, something real – and runs around in manic glee with a handheld camera. A rooftop showdown ends with the female lead killing her costar and the director with an axe. The single-take idea is cute, and it’s all timed well, but the movie has poor color and lighting…

But the second half has normal editing, and reveals that this isn’t even a horror movie… the director is really a director, taking on an assignment for a one-take zombie horror, the lead actress and makeup artist from the first half are actually his family. On shoot day for the movie, the table read goes badly, lead actress refuses to do anything gory, two actors are in a car accident and can’t come to set, and the cameraman gets uselessly drunk. So, family and crew fill in as actors, and everyone improvises new lines and situations while it’s all being filmed live. All the cameras and identity shifts (an actor plays an actor playing a zombie who becomes a zombie) must have been hard to keep straight.

This was barely even supposed to be a movie – a low-budget workshop film shot in 8 days that turned out amazing. Hardly anyone has seen Ueda’s other features, though Matt Lynch saw his follow-up Special Actors and called it disappointing. The Director followed up with a kids movie, and his daughter did a voice in that Xenoblade game I’m always playing.

by ·Comments Off on Possum (2018, Matthew Holness)

Our miserable-looking guy must be Sean Harris, villain of the last two Missions: Impossible. The miserable old man is his uncle, Alun Armstrong, a Dickens miniseries regular currently appearing in a Martin Freeman show called Breeders which is annoyingly not about the careers and home lives of the Deal sisters. These two speak in unsubtitled British, when they speak at all.

Sean has trauma… and a Babadook picture-book of his trauma… and he carries around a satchel with a trauma-spider inside. I guess Sean finally stands up for himself, pushes his uncle aside and frees the local kid that Uncle had imprisoned. That brief burst of energy comes at the tail end of a long movie of people walking in a horrified daze through their miserable lives. Holness is Garth Marenghi, and having successfully proven he can make very serious things, I hope he dials it back a bit, or combines his talents a la his costar Richard Ayoade.

by ·Comments Off on Unfriended (2014, Levan Gabriadze)

“What is a troll?”

Cyberbullies get murdered by ghost of their victim, five stars. Much of the terror here is in degraded video and waiting for sites to load. Unfortunately when I think of this movie, instead of the cool stuff like the one guy’s suicide by blender, I keep lingering on the last two seconds, which unwisely leave the desktop and show us the ghost. But movie also had positive outcomes, getting me to put the post-it note over my laptop camera again. Fun how the movie sets up Blaire, whose desktop we’re in, as a friend, paints her as a victim, then as her friends turn against each other and die, it’s revealed that she’s just as bad, and finally worse.

Blender boy is Terri from the movie Terri, and two of the girls are TV stars. The director is from Georgia (the country) and his followup was an “animated documentary” about a painter/puppeteer. The writer worked on the Sleepy Hollow series, and the gaggle of producers are the only ones who returned for the sequel.

How did Karl Krumpet’s 25-second vacation video get eleven million views??

by ·Comments Off on How to Disappear Completely (2013, Raya Martin)

Protools’d dance tracks… story of daughters having sex with their dad… story of a family with a chicken for a son (being told to a chicken). The main girl keeps coming across men with guns, and later she portrays a gun in a school play. Dammit, all the men are at a cockfight, can these stop being in movies? The title comes an hour into an 80-minute movie, which ends with low-fi handheld video of boys wrecking a cemetery then kidnapping some girls. It wasn’t horror… I don’t know what it was, overall mysterious and worth the 80 minutes.

by ·Comments Off on Sleep Has Her House (2017, Scott Barley)

Minimal music, wind noise, and… is that a horse? Falling water, reminds of Strata of the Image. Extremely low-light photography, really unsuitable for home viewing.

After a half hour of forests and streams, we are in the sky, and the music amps up. Back to the trees, back to the sky. Lighting changes and motion shifts and zooms so gradual they look like stills. Finally combining the river and the heavens in a shot of a sweet lightning storm. Much of the last ten minutes is quiet and black – just like the other movie I watched tonight – except for a final half-hearted freakout of flickering blue.

This is a screen saver or a meditation app. If you aim for slow cinema, you better not miss.

by ·Comments Off on Glass (2019, M. Night Shyamalan)

Since I already watched one movie this week where Anya Taylor-Joy costars with a guy with multiple-personality delusions. Security supplies dude Bruce is joined by his son Joseph (Spencer Clark, same actor as in Unbreakable when he was 12! Now with black Hellraiser eyes). Bruce catches up with Horde who has kidnapped some cheerleaders, and the cops take them both to the same facility where Mr. Glass is being held.

Sarah Paulson (Fassbender’s slaveowner wife in 12 Years a Slave) is a phony-sounding psych specializing in delusions of grandeur, and will spend the rest of the movie trying to talk these men out of the idea that they’re heroes or villains, saying Bruce just has a brain cloud. This is the Glen or Glenda of superhero movies, overexplaining all its ideas – I flipped off the TV more often than I usually do. The movie ends with its own clip reel getting released as a viral video, thanks to some hacker code quickly written (complete with comments, lol) by Glass. It’s the super-serious parts of X-Men movies without the fun parts. At least I appreciate that M. Night ends the story on a note of needless police brutality.

by ·Comments Off on Harpoon (2019, Rob Grant)

Not a horror, but a comedy-thriller thing about extremely awful rich people who turn on each other after getting stranded at sea. Cleverly written, every twist just makes things increasingly worse for everyone involved. The director’s fifth movie – don’t think I’ve heard of him before. Something Rob Grant and I have in common: a decade ago we both got paid to edit footage from Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules.

Friends party:

Jonah and the Narrator are different actors, but I kept thinking Jonah was the narrator. Richard is the rich-prick boat owner, Sasha his partner, and Jonah his toady friend who has obviously been sleeping with Sasha. The boat won’t start and they’re out of food, so there are long conversations about which one of them should be eaten by the others for survival. Opens with Josh getting the holy hell beat out of him by an enraged Richard, and soon Josh is the first one to get shot by the harpoon, then his hand is infected and he’s gonna lose his arm, and we feel pretty bad for him, so of course he’s the villain in the end.

Wounded villain with the nearly-final girl:

by ·Comments Off on Marrowbone (2017, Sergio Sanchez)

This actually ended up being worse than Serpent and the Rainbow, an achievement. Mom moves the four kids to her childhood home in America so “they” will never find the family, then the kids meet Anya Taylor-Joy, who will “change their life – forever.”

This ghost-child is foreshadowing:

A year later the mom dies and they become increasingly secluded, barely seeing Anya, who’s being pursued by local realtor Tom. When Tom’s new job offer turns out to be a scam he extorts oldest son Jack for their killer dad’s stolen money, which Jack has to retrieve from the haunted attic, and spawns all sorts of flashbacks and revelations – the dad found them and killed everybody, and Jack locked him in the attic and has been pretending the others are still around.

Family Portrait:

Sledgehammer Realtor:

Jack was just one of the leads in 1917, and the realtor dude was in Poldark. Other son Billy got to hang out with Anya again in The New Mutants, and daughter Mia Goth woukld reteam with Anya in Emma. From the writer of The Orphanage, which I fully intended to watch this month but after this, I’m gonna push it till next year.

by ·Comments Off on Raw (2016, Julia Ducournau)

Opens with someone in wide shot leaping from behind a tree in front of a car that swerves away and hits a tree, which is how the girls hunt for bloody victims at the end of the movie. But here at the beginning, it’s the youngest in a vegetarian family going off to veterinary college which is dominated by violent hazing rituals.

Justine rooms with Adrien (Rabah Nait Oufella of Girlhood), follows after her older sister Alex, and quickly gives into meat temptation and stops eating veggies at all – then she eats sister’s finger, sister eats her roommate, and they have to hold a family meeting and figure out what’s going on. Dad who gives J a Teen Wolf speech is Laurent Lucas of two movies in that wave of French horrors 15 years ago.