by ·Comments Off on Talk to Me (2022, Danny & Michael Philippou)

Typical dumb-youth peer-pressure setup, the idea of grabbing the cursed severed hand and letting random angry ghosts inhabit your body for a couple minutes quickly turns from an unthinkably bad idea to a hilariously fun drinking game. The movie makes summoning demons for social media clout seem like a realistic idea, then after a wild possession party, Mia lets her little brother Riley participate, and while possessed he smashes his face and blinds himself, so party’s over.

Mia and the kid are still somewhat possessed, making a series of bad decisions (he is violently suicidal, she steals the demon-hand and decides to murder her dad). Craziest part was the sound mixing, when watching at home through the soundbar, you turn up the volume to hear the mumbly teens then the sounds of match strikes and knives whistling through the air are loud enough to shake the walls. The directors are famous youtubers who’ve already got Talk 2 Me and Untitled Prequel on their filmographies.

Riley, Mia, Young Jason Momoa from Aquaman, Jade:

Already my second movie of the month where someone stabs themself in the face – I rewatched The Empty Man, which is referenced in Adam Nayman’s Ringer article:

Talk to Me is closer to something like Zach Cregger’s brute-force B-movie, Barbarian, than Peele’s intricately intellectualized “social thrillers.” But whatever their pretensions — or lack thereof — the Philippous are keen observers of a marketplace where it pays to attach some kind of pedigree to terror, and underneath its adroit shock tactics, Talk to Me makes a fairly significant concession to the elevated-horror model by hinging its plot on a case of capital-G Grief. The reason Mia is so susceptible to possession is because she’s heartbroken over the death of her mother, whose overdose may or may not have been an act of self-harm. Where her friends are just chasing a hedonistic thrill, she’s trying, if at first only unconsciously, to reconnect with a loved one — a difference that ends up dooming her above the others and rerouting a story line bristling with unpredictability into a fairly conventional trajectory.

by ·Comments Off on The Hitcher (1986, Robert Harmon)

Thought I’d watch a Classic and Current horror double feature with Talk To Me, then had to admit I’m very old now and the mid-’80s counts as classic. Feels like a Duel remake amped up to self-parody… kid discovers that the hitcher is murdering people, the hitcher knows he knows, and becomes an invincible revenge spirit to destroy the kid and everyone he meets. Of course Rutger Hauer is our hitcher and eventually his Flesh + Blood costar JJ Leigh appears as a waitress who believes the kid’s crazy story and joins the chase only to get horribly murdered (offscreen) in the end. I kept waiting for C. Thomas Howell to show up since that’s an old man’s name, but it’s the kid – he’d been one of the Outsiders and a Red Dawn-er in the past few years. I think his character is a cross-country car deliveryman, like in Vanishing Point. Harmon has also made a JCVD action film and a string of Tom Selleck TV movies. Adam Nayman’s review is good.

I love the wide shots:

by ·Comments Off on Clive Barker’s early shorts

Salome (1973)

Girl finds a mostly-nude boy in the catacombs, they start making out but he strangles her. The vibe is a murkier, cultier Jean Rollin, with light and fog effects so heavy they turn the actors into abstract imagery. It’s content to roll along in its slow dreamy way without getting caught up in story – I suppose if you’re familiar with the Oscar Wilde play you can follow along but I’m going by a few year-old memory of the Ken Russell version. Music sounds newer than 1973, like Coil Concrete – aha, this must’ve been recorded for the late 1990s home video release, which means I am free to listen to Secret Chiefs 3’s Horrorthon during the next film.

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The Forbidden (1978)

Horrorthon mentions Faust in the dialogue clips, and if you skip the “preview” first track and start the album with the movie, the circus music that plays when the nude man (Barker?!) starts dancing around is very funny. Barker made these films and his theatrical works before writing the Books of Blood – I always thought of him as a novelist who came to filmmaking late, but I was off. This has the most nudity in any Faust film outside the pornography realm. The image processed in negative, surfaces seem to glow. The opening mathematica and later full-body tattooing recall Book of Blood, and rotating light over pins/nails predict Pinhead and Leviathan at once.

by ·Comments Off on Boxing Helena (1993, Jennifer Lynch)

Celebrating the start of SHOCKtober with a movie I’ve always wanted to see, and finally found in watchable quality. And in true SHOCKtober tradition, it’s bad, and I should not have bothered.

Julian Sands, still traumatized from the death of his hotmom (Meg Register of Fulci’s Demonia), hangs out with buddy Art Garfunkel and antagonizes rival surgeon Malcolm’s Dad (my second Kurtwood movie in a month), but completely freaks out when he sees Sherilyn Fenn. She’s a sensuous neighbor who spends her spare time fucking Bill Paxton (who works at “the club”), comes to Julian’s house party and takes a slow-mo shower in his garden fountain.

After Sherilyn gets run over by a truck Julian stops going to work, focuses on feeding her and amputating more of her limbs. Already kinda psycho, he starts imagining his nude mom being mad at him, and bringing home a girl to fuck in front of Sherilyn (this might have been Nicolette “no relation” Scorsese), and fending off a jealous Paxton. But it turns out the whole thing was a dream (seriously).

Nothing classically Lynchian here, all late-nite pay-cable aesthetic. Music by the guy from SPK, shot by the Twin Peaks DP, with the editor of Warlock, and bankrolled by suing Kim Basinger for dropping out of the lead role.

by ·Comments Off on M3gan (2022, Gerard Johnstone)

I was stressed to learn I’d been tricked, that this was only cowritten by Malignant‘s James Wan, actually directed by the NZ guy who made Housebound, but it didn’t turn out to matter – good movie about twisted AI, quite timely. Doll scientist Allison Williams is running secret experiments behind the back of idiot boss Ronny Chieng, cutting corners (like parental controls) to get an evil doll to befriend her newly orphaned niece. Then after the company discovers the doll’s capabilities and decides to mass produce it, Allison switches to trying to interrupt the public launch by proving the doll did murders (she did – chasing a creepy boy into traffic after ripping his ear off, and melting the neighbor’s face with lawn chemicals).

This happens to all murder-droids in the end, and it only makes them angrier:

by ·Comments Off on Skinamarink (2022, Kyle Edward Ball)

Crazy low-light texture, the picture swimming in so much grain that you can’t tell if things in the rooms are moving or not. Perverse framing from angles that rarely show the characters. Doors and windows appear and disappear, leaving blank walls with a humming sound. Mention of the boy having fallen down the stairs while sleepwalking, back now from the hospital, though we don’t see any of this. He takes a break from watching public domain cartoons (The Cobweb Hotel) to visit the master bedroom, where dad is blairwitching and vanishing like the windows, replaced by mom. Most dialogue is whispered, and the jump scares are bad. A distant doom voice orders Kevin to sleep. Scene in a cartoon where a character disappears plays on loop to demonstrate a point before a toy in the room also disappears.

Movie itself isn’t scary, but it productively made me remember actual nightmares I had as a kid… the sense of being in a dark house with strange light where time and space can’t be trusted. It rules that this barely-narrative experimental nightmare was in theaters for a month.

Reverse Shot:

The dread that pulses through the film’s empty spaces soon gives way to a permeating melancholy, as it becomes clearer just how helpless Kevin and Kaylee are within their own home. Toys and cartoons, at first objects of childish comfort, begin to be manipulated by the malevolent force within the house, reminders of the fear induced by pseudo-parental control. Time in the house becomes deliberately indefinite to create a perpetual night, a horrific extension of Kevin and Kaylee’s daily reality.

by ·Comments Off on SHOCKtober 2022 Shorts and Roundup

The Beholder (1983, Chris Sullivan)

A restaurant scene and a street preacher, in constant states of absurd transformation, first-person camera flying through it all. Sound is field recordings, or a good approximation. Blobby watercolor, with inspired animation, comparable to Bill Plympton. Sullivan made a few shorts then got to work on his 2+ hour feature Consuming Spirits, which was recently on Criterion.

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The Fall of the House of Usher (1984, John Schnall)

One problem with reading Poe aloud is that “acute illness” sounds like “a cute illness.” Usher House looks like an American suburban house from outside, but still has a butler. Ol’ Rodrick is worried about his sick sister, whom he maybe buried alive. The musician here can’t match the spoken phrase “the wild improvisations of his guitar.” Calm, soft candle-lit drawings with some good closeups. Schnall turned in the occasional short for the next couple decades, worked on Sesame Street, lives in New Jersey. These were both from the “Animation of the Apocalypse” video.

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Hideous (2022, Yann Gonzalez)

Yann stages a talk-show transformation to four songs by The XX, or technically from their singer’s solo album. So it’s a music video EP. We need more stuff like this.

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The Telephone Box (1972, Antonio Mercero)

I knew the general premise (man gets trapped in telephone box), but always imagined it as a cheap-looking b/w short, not this eye-popping Prisoner-era color. What seems like a stupid accident escalates when a procession of townsfolk can’t free him from the box, then apparently a phone-box truck arrives to fix the mistake, but nope, they pick up the box with man inside and cart it impersonally to a warehouse full of phone boxes with men trapped in them. Feels like a metaphor for oversized companies that set stupid procedures in place which keep merrily humming along even as they wreck people’s lives, but maybe this Comcast telephone hold music is influencing my thoughts.

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Also watched an episode of Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, and need to see the rest.

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I feel like horror is underrepresented on the year-end lists, and deserves its own award show, so here are the 2022 SHOCKies nominations:

Best Writing:

Best Directing:

Best Acting:

Best Shocks:

by ·Comments Off on Barbarian (2022, Zach Cregger)

Really does every hotel and rental in Detroit fill up when “there’s a convention in town?” That’s how two strangers, jobseeker Georgina Campbell (Hang the DJ) and jazzman Bill Skarsgård (Atomic Blonde), end up in the same airbnb on an abandoned block. Good writing as they assess the situation, but the movie isn’t about their suspicions at being unwilling roommates, it’s about the mole people they discover in the basement, which immediately kill Bill and capture Georgina.

Shock cut to Justin Long, canceled rich guy retreating to the rental house he owns. He will prove at every point to be a despicable person, but after she escapes and the cops are total dicks to her, she still tries to rescue him. Big actiony ending ensues, the basement-bound incest-mom proving surprisingly athletic. Pretty fun but I should’ve given Don’t Breathe 2 a shot instead. Richard Brake (The Munsters‘ Count Orlock) plays the suburban perv who built the catacombs.

I haven’t seen an FPS perspective like this outside a Nintendo 64 game:

by ·Comments Off on Swamp Thing (1982, Wes Craven)

Adrienne Barbeau visits swamp scientist Ray Wise, when bad guys attack, wanting the secret formula. I saw Barbeau last week in The Fog, and saw this plot last week in Five Dolls for an August Moon… but in Five Dolls the scientist got dispatched with a rifle, and in this one Ray’s plant-animal-hybrid concoction turns him into Swamp Thing.

S.T. uses his E.T. healing powers on the cool kid who assists Barbeau:

I guess it’s nice how the wide shots emulate photos of bigfoot sightings. Everyone seems to have done the best they could, given low budget and talent. Shapeshifting baddie Arcane also starred in a 1977 Dracula and a haunted mirror movie. His strongman Bruno returned to the swamp for Hell Comes to Frogtown, and the guy in the monster suit would be back in Return of Swamp Thing.

Bruno gets turned into a little beastie, just for fun: