by ·Comments Off on Hellraiser (2022, David Bruckner)

The latest reboot is a Hulu Original from Serbia – not promising, but we only get one Hellraiser movie every five or six years now, so better give it a shot. Does a good job following current trends: it’s too long (the longest Hellraiser by far), the dialogue gets buried under bassy music/fx, it’s got trans representation, gay characters quoting Lord Byron, and young people with trauma.

New box, new rules – box has six configurations, solver has to make six sacrifices then can choose from six rewards. Playboy art dealer (not that one) has box in prologue, prays to Leviathan and disappears. Years later, drug addict’s new bf, secretly working for art dealer, leads her to box. Conveniently for the box’s rule of sixes, we’ve got nearly that many characters: addict, her bf, her brother, his bf, their weirdly loyal roommate. Brother goes first, the movie showing us glimpses of demons and shifting walls then vanishing the kids offscreen, then we get a freebie sacrifice by visiting the art dealer’s box-supplier in hospital, then goes the roommate, then another freebie as she stabs a cenobite (!). Perhaps I lost count, but the traitor goes to hell, the man hiding in the walls ascends and is flayed into a rad cenobite, and the addict chooses life and walks away.

From the director of Night House and writers of Super Dark Times. Lead girl is from one-take horror Let’s Scare Julie, the brother is from a couple TV movies where he plays guys who are too powerfully handsome, his bf from a Scooby Doo spinoff prequel, her bf an American Animal, the art dealer from Elektra, the roommate is Ciaran Hinds’ daughter, original box-deliverer was in the latest Blade Runner, and head hell-priest cenobite from Neon Demon.

Charles Bramesco on twitter:

There’s no belief in pleasure here, Barker’s conflicted psychosexual overtones replaced by the deadening, simply opposed evils of drugs. Instead of a perverse negotiation of desires, everything is motivated by the logistics of getting poked by a box. And for the love of god (a malevolent giant rhombus, as we all know), will someone turn on a fucking light and let me get a good look at the clearly labored-over cenobite designs.

mdfmdf:

This needed to be way hornier. Hellraiser movies work better when they’re about getting a bit carried away with your kink than when they’re about some monkey’s paw thing, or owning the cenobites with facts and logic.

by ·Comments Off on Earwig (2021, Lucile Hadzihalilovic)

House mostly bare, frozen teeth girl’s only toys are twists of paper

It’s 24 minutes before the first words are spoken: a phone call checking on girl and her teeth.

You must start preparing the girl to leave, in 13 days.
Caretaker Paul Hilton (Lady Macbeth) is to teach her how to behave outside.

Provoked by stranger at bar, he attacks Celeste with a bottle (Romola Garai: older Saoirse Ronan in Atonement). Laurence (Alex Lawther of The Last Duel) says he will take care of her. Movie follows the attacked barmaid as she recovers, Laurence invites her to live at his country house.

Guy comes and installs permanent glass teeth.

Caretaker embraces Celeste as she chews his face off.

Angelo Muredda in Cinema Scope:

Earwig resonates on much the same unusual frequency as Hadzihalilovic’s previous films Innocence and Evolution, which similarly engage the thematics of children on the way to maturity being dumped into strange institutional settings with cryptic rules seemingly designed to feed upon their bodies and souls. Viewed in this context, Earwig can easily be read as the payoff to an imagistic science-fiction triptych about the low-key horrors of parenting and being parented, and the ways in which assorted care homes and finishing schools maim the very children they try to shape.

by ·Comments Off on The Timekeepers of Eternity (2021, Aristotelis Maragkos)

Perfect example of a whim of an experimental concept getting painstakingly taken all the way, the arthouse festival-film equivalent of those people who create live-action remake videos of Mario Kart games. In Stephen King’s The Langoliers, the villain’s extreme “idle hands” anxiety has him constantly tearing paper, so Maragkos has printed the 3-hour TV version onto copy paper and ripped and torn it into an hour-long edit.

Cool concept, but the problem with your source material being a 1990’s TV movie is that your experimental film feels a lot like a 1990’s TV movie, which is quite bad, especially when the never-idle Bronson Pinchot is onscreen. Billy Crystal’s wife in City Slickers is top billed, for some reason. Dean Stockwell plays a mystery writer who has Got It All Figured Out (RIP Angela Lansbury). Frankie Faison is here to be the Black guy who gets killed first. There’s a blind Shining-child who helps out by feeling the spooky vibes. Not gonna blame King (who cameos) since I remember digging the original story, and despite all the clunky dialogue, the new version is worth the ride.

by ·Comments Off on Books of Blood (2020, Brannon Braga)

This SHOCKtober we are counting down the days until the new Hellraiser Remake comes out, and starting the celebration with this Clive Barker adaptation. Seems odd that another Books of Blood semi-anthology TV movie would come out so soon after the last one, instead of like a Masters of Horror-style Books of Blood series, or a Weaveworld adaptation, or really anything else. Trying not to focus on the fact that this (smells like content) movie and the new Hellraiser are both “Hulu originals,” maybe there’s still hope.

Kicking off the anthology framing story, hitmen Yul Vazquez (War of the Worlds) and Andy McQueen (Clifton Hill) are after the Book. But we’ll get back to them in a bit – first, Jenna (Britt Robertson of Scream 4) is sad since her parents don’t understand her, is off her meds, runs away since mom is “sending her back to the farm.” Jenna’s x-men superpower is she can loudly hear the sounds of people eating. She stops in an internet cafe and books an airbnb (what year is this?) in a spooky house with hosts Freda Foh Shen (Ad Astra) and Cronenberg regular Nicholas Campbell, has a noise-cancelled sleep paralysis nightmare and pukes CG bugs, then discovers the walls are full of people (“we relieved them of their eyes and tongues”).

You’d be depressed too if you lived in this house without curtains:

Airbnb hosts:

Next, a professional fraud-debunker (Anna Friel, not of Stephen King’s IT, but of Pierce Brosnan’s I.T.) is confronted by a “speaker for the dead” (Rafi Gavron: Aarfy in a previously-unknown Catch-22 miniseries). This guy seems to be the real thing, and Anna is convinced until he drunkenly admits his scam. Alas, the dead have highways, and the boy gets cut up by ghosts, becoming the valuable “book” the stupid hitmen think they’re looking for. And the depressed girl from part one goes back to the spooky house to be relieved of the burdens of seeing and speaking and be buried alive in their floor.

Have I mentioned that the dead have highways?

From the producers of Stallone’s Lock Up, King’s Dark Tower, King’s Bag of Bones, the Barker Dread, Final Destination, Unstoppable, Cabin in the Woods, and Family Guy (those are all different producers). The director worked with a more distinguished cast than this one on the series Cosmos, aka that show everyone thought I was talking about when I used to recommend the Zulawski movie.

by ·Comments Off on Death Trip (2021, James Watts & Kelly Kay)

Happy SHOCKtober! Kicking off the season with a tried-and-true concept: a group of young people goes on a rural getaway, and things go badly. We’ve got ominous “no trespassing” signs and creepy neighbors, but the mumbly young people keep on smoking their drugs and being generally not smart, building ill will in the viewer until halfway through I started looking forward to their violent deaths.

The movie likes to punctuate scenes where nothing dramatic happened with shock flash-forwards of our kids screaming and bloody. Kelly gets killed by a wood-wielding drifter, but wakes up just fine. It’s less dialoguey than these tend to be, with more drunken screwing around, and the music is all over the place, from strings to Drive.

In the end the terror is within – it’s not the creepy neighbor but cabin host Garrett who starts killing people, and clumsily trying to kill more. He’s not much of a murderous mastermind, and it turns into an awkward wrestling match on the ice. Maybe not an enduring classic but a good time with some subverted expectations.

The look of a killer:

by ·Comments Off on Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022, George Miller)

Three stars, raved the critics, “so garishly digital.” Two and a half stars, “a little boring.” But I see “the Idris Elba genie movie from the Mad Max guy,” and I can’t help myself, I go to the movies and watch it, expecting to be absolutely delighted. Who was right, me or the critics? I was right. Katy is not as easily delighted as I, DNF.

by ·Comments Off on The Beta Test (2021, Jim Cummings & PJ McCabe)

Startup company is like that Ashley Madison cheater-dating site but without the participants’ knowledge or initiation, so it leads to some hot blindfolded sex, but also some misunderstandings and murders. Codirector Cummings boldly plays the lead Jordan, a guy whose side we’re not on from the very start (from my notes: “why is everyone getting killed but Jordan, when does he get killed?”) tracking down how he got caught up in this conspiracy, and doing a really good job of it. The murder-suicide by vape pen was novel. Jordan’s wife was The Death of Dick Long‘s Virginia Newcomb, and his hotel hookup was in Song to Song.

by ·Comments Off on El Gran Movimiento (2021, Kiro Russo)

City-symphony intro with foreboding music. Among protests in La Paz, Bolivia, ailing Elder has arrived with his friends. They look for work, but Elder is getting worse. He’ll end up meeting old man Max who has been walking towards town having wolf visions, but not before we’re treated to an 80’s dance video in the street.

Wolfy Max:

I liked the onion ladies: