I figured double-featuring this film maudit with The Sixth Sense would mean that at worst, only half of my evening would be wasted. Most people agree this is terrible, but as an established Trap enjoyer, maybe I’d join the sickos calling it a masterpiece? Turns out I’m in an even smaller group: those who thought it was fine. A solidly constructed, terrifically shot thriller showcasing the most idiotic human behavior. Maybe idiocy is the point – this isn’t humanity at its finest, it’s the same dummies who choked the planet into violently defending itself – but there’s no excuse for those two stupid boys knocking at the cabin until they get shotgunned, or for Zooey Deschanel. All told, a slight improvement on Long Weekend (The Happening of the 1970s, which shows up on best horror lists).

Opens with the Cabin in the Woods girl on a park bench as the mass suicides begin in the densest cities and spread into ever less-populous spaces. Marky (whose brother Duddits was in Sixth Sense) is dismissed by Principal Cameron, then he and Zooey take colleague John Leguizamo’s daughter so John can go on a doomed hero mission towards his wife in New Jersey (the garden state, oh no). The three get a ride from hotdog-obsessed plant growers. Marky tries to make everything about himself, but the hotdog husband (Turturro’s evil brother in O Brother) has a good sense of what’s going on, while TV news hosts blame the government. Later they get a meal from an ornery white-haired woman (The Horde’s psychiatrist in Split) who refuses all news from the outside.

“Be scientific, douchebag” – the movie has a healthy sense of humor about itself, Marky talks to a plastic plant like it’s holding him hostage, and of course characters try to run away from the wind. Some disquieting death scenes via gun and glass and lawnmower, multiple oblique 9/11 references. Victims’ language malfunctions right before death – this the same year as Pontypool.

Adam Nayman in Cinema Scope calls it “deeply stupid”:

This idea of needing to split off from the herd to survive is endemic to the apocalypse sub-genre, but it has a greater significance for Shyamalan. Simply put, the guy has an isolation fetish … when Elliot concludes, “We’ve got to get away from other people,” it’s more than a plot point: it’s the author’s rallying cry.

Most notable thing here after watching Trap a couple times last month is how still and quiet this is, a properly haunted-feeling movie completely unlike M. Night’s post-Signs style. Besides being seen as a weird loser at school, Haley Joel is always swinging between unease and complete terror as he’s visited by the recently-dead. Child psych Bruce helps HJ develop ghost communication strategies, and HJ helps Bruce realize that Duddits Wahlberg murdered him last year and that’s why Bruce’s wife Olivia Williams doesn’t speak to him anymore. Toni Collette is too young in this – she’s excellent as HJ’s mom but doesn’t look Collette-ish enough yet.

M. Night sometimes likes to be grim and serious or to talk earnestly and endlessly about his big ideas, and sometimes he likes to weave murderous tension into scenarios so ridiculous they border on hilarious – a mode I far prefer, which is why this movie joins Old Beach and Lady in the Water among my favorites.

Josh Hartnett never better, not even in Valley of the Gods. With M. Night’s daughter as Lady Raven, Scott Pilgrim’s drummer Alison Pill as the mom, Jonathan Langdon as the merch guy with the outstanding dialogue, Rob Lowe’s wife from Stir of Echoes 2 as a fellow parent at the show, Bill & Ted 3‘s Kid Cudi as the guest star, and trap veteran Hayley Mills as the police psychiatrist.

Gay couple in Pennsylvania gets tied up by apocalyptic home invaders. Jon “King of Hamilton” Groff gets a concussion, Ben Aldridge of the latest Michael Showalter movie tries to fight and reason their way out, pokes holes in their story. But Dave Bautista, Nikki Amuka-Bird (the only member of Old Beach here) and Abby Quinn (Shithouse) are not to be reasoned with, and they ritual-sacrifice fourth member, Racist Rupert Weasley. Two sacrifices and three world-historic catastrophes later, our guys gain the upper hand, then Ben kills Jon to make the planes stop falling out of the sky.

Writer M. Night doing good work with the premise, not so good with the dialogue and details – and Director M. Night just going to town with the photography. Love the roving wide-angle long takes especially, but the whole thing looks ravishing. DP Michael Gioulakis also shot Us and It Follows and Under the Silver Lake, and is currently one of my favorite people.

AKA Old Beach: The Beach That Makes People Old, but most of them die one-by-one from various misfortunes, only Gael and Vicky make it to cute-elderly status. Dr. Rufus Sewell goes mad, or was mad from the start, and stabs Underground Railroad star Aaron Pierre before Vicky gives him fast-action blood poisoning. Sewell’s wife Abbey Lee (one of the Fury Road wives) has brittle bones and dies in agony chasing the kids through a cave. Ken Leung (cop in Saw) simply drowns trying to escape. Nikki Amuka-Bird (Jupiter Ascending) has fatal seizures, funny since the mad scientists studying curative drugs in unwilling time-accelerated test subjects call her case a success. The kids are more complicated since they’re played by multiple actors, but most notably by siblings Alex “Hereditary” Wolff and Thomasin “Soho” McKenzie, and as Alex’s short-lived girlfriend: Beth March of Little Women.

Adam Nayman sums up my pleasure in talking about a different film: “The fun of Malignant is watching Wan apply such sophisticated technique to ridiculously dumb material.” Also wrote down a line from Social Hygiene the next night: “Stupid and useless things are often the most beautiful.” Great movie.

“The broken are the more evolved.”

Three girls get kidnapped by Kraftwerk James McAvoy, who turns out to be one of many James McAvoys, collectively calling themselves The Horde. Light-haired Haley Lu Richardson (Columbus) wants to fight, dark-haired Jessica Sula (The Lovers) is freaking out, and Anya Taylor-Joy (The VVitch) had a hunter or survivalist father, stays cool and follows orders. Horde’s psychiatrist (Betty Buckley of Carrie, Frantic) seems to admire him, and knows more than she lets on. I had my doubts about watching a multiple-personality McAvoy thriller but M. Night knows how to put a movie together, and now that he’s lost The Visit handheld camera gimmick, this was a damned good time, with a hell of a surprise cameo at the end.

First off, happy SHOCKtober. I kicked off the season with the restored Phantasm at the Alamo. Surprisingly complicated mythology for a late-1970’s indie horror. I’ve covered the series before and will be watching again when blu-rays (and part five) come out. I want to say I noticed the Bad Robot 4K remastering job and that the movie’s new transfer was a revelation, but nah – I’ll probably have to compare a couple scenes to the old DVD to notice the difference.

In related news, I never understood the “happy holidays” War On Christmas controversy until I started seeing everyone refer to SHOCKtober with the bland name “31 days of horror”. Come on, people.


“It’s exploitative. I have cinematic standards”
“No one gives a crap about cinematic standards, okay? It’s not the 1800’s.”

His last few movies got some rough press coverage, so this is the first M. Night movie I’ve watched in a decade, since Lady in the Water (which I liked). And it’s… pretty good. Said to be a “found footage” movie, but that seems a misuse of the term. It’s a fake documentary “shot” by its teen actors – and edited by them too, since they survive the ordeal, so the footage hasn’t been “found” Blair Witch-style.

Mom Kathryn Hahn (Parks & Rec) hasn’t spoken to her parents in 15 years but they wanna meet their grandkids, so she sends her two preposterous teens – pretentious-vocabulary Becca and junior-rapper Tyler – to visit them alone. The twist that they’re not really the grandparents but mental patients who have murdered the real grandparents and stashed them in the basement occurred to me pretty early, so instead I pondered why they’re doing it.

A couple of good things: the first-person camera technique is obviously being controlled by a very good cameraman (or the kids have been well-trained to hit their framing marks). Documentary-vet DP Maryse Alberti also shot Velvet Goldmine, and despite what I’ve heard about M. Night’s Last Airbender 3D debacle, he wants his movies to look good, so we don’t get an indifferent-looking movie. And for most of the movie, the “horror” is explained away by the fake-grandparents as embarrassing troubles of old age. The secret in the barn is incontinent grandpa’s old diapers, and the bumpy scratchy noises in the night are caused by grandma’s sleep disorder. So it was heading in an interesting direction (aging is the true horror) but then no, they’re psycho killers. I thought the emotional epilogue about forgiveness worked better than the critics seemed to.

Adam Cook in Cinema Scope was feeling emotional as well:

[Post-twist] the film gains a new dimension, one that upon a second viewing reveals the film to be aching with pain, not just between our heroes with regards to their father, but between this mentally ill couple who, in their own demented way, are trying also to reconnect with their deceased children – who died by their hands. Mental illness has figured into most of Shyamalan’s films, and the separation between sane and insane is an uneasy one that complicates the film’s layers of trauma … Found-footage horror may seem an unlikely way to create a tender portrait of damaged people clinging to each other, but then again Shyamalan’s tales have always used unusual means to tell personal stories of hope that resonate deeply – that is if you can take the leaps of faith they require.

The “worst movie of 2006” label affixed to this is one of the most kneejerk backlashes I’ve seen. And people are attacking M. Night for his acting, but I think they meant to say his casting, putting himself in the martyred messiah role. Whatever.

Paul Giamatti is a superintendent with a tragic past who thinks he has no purpose in life. Bryce Dallas Howard (Ivy in The Village) is a fairy come to earth to do… something. Paul has to send her back to her homeland by keeping the evil grass wolf away long enough that the giant eagle can pick her up. To do this, he has to find some key people who live in the building. He gathers them all together, finds out he’s done it wrong, and gathers a different group instead. Meanwhile they throw a building party and a pessimistic film critic gets taken out by the wolf. Jeffrey Wright from Broken Flowers is in there as a crossword puzzler, and the kid from Heroes is his son. And Bryce tells M Night that he’ll write a book that will inspire a great leader to change the world.

Moving story about finding your purpose, about helping others find theirs, about hope for the future. A fairy tale. I loved it, especially towards the end. The eagle pickup shot from inside the pool is terrific. Amazing looking movie, bizarre/cool compositions confused me at first but turns out it was shot by Christopher Doyle so that explains everything. Katy thought it was okay, but lacked in execution in a few places, “some of the dialogue was terrible” and she “totally disagrees” with me for thinking it was awesome.