GdT’s third remake in a row, but excuse me, it’s less a remake of the 1930’s version than a new over-faithful adaptation of the novel. I watched at Movieland, with the new Emma and Yorgos playing next door, on their second victory lap after their smart, modern, oscar-winning semi-Frankenstein. Big physical acting from both men in this, but the superior second half following Monster Elordi can’t make up for a draggy first hour spent with Doctor Oscar. Script mostly bad, but I appreciate some del Toro touches (cool set design, the monster brought to life with a battery vest like a steampunk Iron Man). Did not appreciate the CG wolf fight, can’t recall whether the novel had so many explosions in it.
Tag: Mia Goth
A Cure for Wellness (2016, Gore Verbinski)
Valerian “Val” DeHaan travels to a secluded German manor to work out a contract for his employer – is this based on Dracula? Upon arrival he signs some papers without reading them, then starts mad hallucinating, taking too long to realize what kind of movie he’s in. Gore’s ability to illustrate a creepy horror thing with big striking images makes me wonder if I should rewatch his Ring remake.
I guess Val dreams his mom dies after his limo crashes into a Very Digital Deer. Mia Goth plays the weird girl wandering the grounds, but then, everything is pretty weird. Val finds micro-bugs in the water, later panics when his scuba therapy becomes eel-infested. He sees eels everywhere, then tries to rally the patients to revolution but instead they zombie-attack him and the doctors pump Val full of eels – in the end, this is like The Matrix, but with eels instead of technology. I guess the incestuous mad doctor/baron Jason Isaacs (military guy in The Death of Stalin) is Mia’s dad, and they are 200 years old, kept alive through eels, until Val snaps out of his zomb-eel stupor and foils their plan. Partly based on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which the guys who wrote Shutter Island may have also read. Someone should program a Cure for Wellness / Road to Wellville double feature.
The Last Ten Minutes vol. 29: SHOCKtober 2024 part two
Is this our first SHOCKtober to feature two separate Last Ten Minutes roundups?
I’m not gonna look through the archives to find out!
Late Night With The Devil (2023, Cairnes Bros)
This got decent reviews, I avoided because of its AI scandal. A talk-show guest is getting carol-anne’d into the video realm, her priest and mom suffer grievous neck injuries and someone I’m going to assume was the show’s Andy Richter gets melted by the split-headed beastie, then the show resets and host Jack is back on set disoriented, experiencing time as clip-show. I guess demons Lawnmower-Manned the airwaves. An owl-headed ceremony leads him to a reunion with his dying wife, then wow it ends on “Keep It Warm” by Flo & Eddie. The host was David Dastmalchian, a regular of Batman and Antman movies.
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Smile (2022, Parker Finn)
With part two in theaters it’s time to admit I’m never gonna watch this. I don’t exactly know what it’s about but I bet someone smiles at the end. Sosie (of a Manson movie) is having the childhood trauma talk with her alive-again mom, who then becomes an overly tall hair-monster with a spooky Lawnmower Man voice. She sets the beast on fakey-fire, then goes home and explains her trauma to her man Kyle (one of the Red State kids, with a Downhill Racer poster). But she was dreaming that part, and now the hair-monster takes both their heads apart, and this must have cured her trauma because she smiles.
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Maxxxine (2024, Ti West)
Shootout at the Hollywood sign – this must be Bobby Cannavale dying in her arms, and another cop has been stabbed in the eye by her dying serial killer father, bringing postscript fame to her acting career, and the story fizzles out on her next movie set with Liz Debicki. On one hand I was right when I decided Ti West was bad 14 years ago, on the other, I don’t learn from my mistakes and watched two more of his features plus two anthology segments and the tail ends of four others. Why can’t I just leave Ti West alone?
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Civil War (2024, Alex Garland)
Ballistic and vehicular mayhem, the press is on the scene, and Dunst seems to know something the soldiers don’t, so her team wanders straight into the White House. The soldiers in the ensuing shootout are awfully accommodating to the photographers, then Dunst gets shot rescuing her reckless comrade. In the end they’re just like me, wanting to get real close to an action movie and take screenshots. Nick Offerman would be a pretty good pick for President irl.
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Men (2022, Alex Garland)
Suitably creepy and cool-looking as Jessie Buckley is chased by a little car with a maniacal driver, then encounters a nude forest god which gives anal birth to a screaming pregnant man-baby which gives alien-egg birth to… I’m guessing Rory Kinnear from Peterloo, who gives spinal birth to a bloody mutant Rory, who gives oral birth to, finally, a different guy (Paapa Essiedu). I looked up the word “portentious” to make sure that’s what this is, and, yup. Definitely a more suitable Annihilation follow-up than Civil War was, though in between he made the computer conspiracy series Devs.
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Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022, Halina Reijn)
I can’t believe these fuckin streamers. They’re computer programs, supposedly learning about you and recommending stuff to your tastes, but when I hit play on this it showed a promo for Maxxxine, the movie I just watched twenty minutes ago. It couldn’t be too hard to improve on this system. Anyway, Borat’s daughter and Amandla “The Hate U Give” Stenberg are still alive in a house full of their dead friends, having hushed talks in poor lighting. It’s nice of Bakalova to give us latecomers a tour of all the deaths we missed, then they play with their phones for a long while. The director’s Nicole Kidman age-gap follow-up is getting better reviews than this did.
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Paranormal Activity 3 (2011, Joost & Schulman)
Also, it’s unpleasant enough to type in the search field using the Roku’s NES-style direction pad, is it too much to ask for the rows of letters to wrap around, so I never have to hit left-arrow six times in a row? First-person-cam dad can’t find his family, but finds occult artwork in the dining room and a coven in the garage (the witches from part 5?). His wife knocks him down with gallows-swing-attack, and one of his daughters is a beastie, then a psychic witch snaps him in half. Not as jump-cutty as part two at least. The directors made the Catfish doc.
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Paranormal Activity 4 (2012, Joost & Schulman)
This one’s well-lit and in color. Wow, did anyone realize all these movies have the same girl in them? I figured each movie was about a different family. This one’s got static cameras in each room, and the jumpcuts are back. Mom gets psychically hurled into the ceiling then Johnny Exposition arrives with internet research on covens, but a longhair girl JCVDs his neck. The surviving girl seems decently famous, starring with Vince Vaughn in Freaky, but she doesn’t survive for long, the coven having grown to a mob of hundreds of suburban women. Instead of fun songs over the closing credits (Civil War had “Dream Baby Dream”) these just have a low rumble.
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Cell (2016, Tod Williams)
Prime movies have ads now? Fuck that, guess we’re skipping Paranormal Activity 6 and Five Nights at Freddy’s, but we gotta check out the ad-free Cell to complete our series of Lawnmower Man references. John Cusack is telling his kid the story of Orpheus and saying goodbye to his team before driving away in an ice cream truck and discovering that the transmission tower is surrounded by a very-CG mob of zombified cellphone addicts. He fires all his shotgun shells into one teenager and locates his own cell-poisoned kid within the mob, then blows the truck and tower and everything sky high – or does he??!? I was sorely tempted to read this book at one time, but went with The Ruins instead, damn. Movie looks like shit – this was Williams’s follow-up to Paranormal Activity 2 (a coincidence, I swear).
The Last Ten Minutes vol. 28: SHOCKtober 2024
Secret Window (2004, David Koepp)
Our first-ever Criterion Channel pick, to see if this movie is as silly as I remember it (yup). “The only thing that matters is the ending,” says Johnny Depp (Yoga Hosers), justifying our little project, a welcome rejoinder to Bill Pullman last year. Maria Bello (A History of Violence) arrives at Depp’s trashed place and the camera isn’t sure what to do while she looks around. Depp is lurking in a pilgrim hat doing his Southern John Turturro impression, having scratched “shooter” into all the walls. She tries to escape but has fatally forgotten how cars work. Tim Hutton (The Dark Half) shows up too late and they both get shovel-murdered and buried in the cornfield, closing on Depp relishing his homegrown corn, a meta-commentary on this corny movie, which I watched in theaters even though Koepp’s Stir of Echoes wasn’t good.
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The Watchers (2024, Ishana Night Shyamalan)
On to HBO, which I probably won’t have for long so let’s max out our enjoyment (heh). Dakota Fanning (Coraline) and Georgina Campbell (Barbarian) are waiting in a roachy house when the real Georgina arrives, turns out their friends are being possessed by shapeshifting humanoid ancient insect creatures. Now the new Dakota arrives, calls herself the daywalker, and discovers she’s part-human, hmmm. “I’m so glad it’s over” says Dakota later to her identical twin, but their CG parrot knows it’s not. I’m on an M. Night kick and was sorely tempted to watch this new one from Lady Raven’s sister, but just saved myself 90 minutes
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Godzilla II, King of the Monsters (2019, Michael Dougherty)
Sequel to the Gareth Edwards remake, starts and ends with people shouting names in rainy wreckage. Just as the family unit of Kyle (Day the Earth Stood Still Remake) and Vera (Orphan) and Millie is reunited, Rodan flies Gz into space then drops him like a bomb onto the city, then Mothra intervenes and gets vaporized. Vera sacrifices herself using an electro gizmo to lure King Ghidorah away, then Molten Godzilla rises and explodes KG and the whole city. Rodan arrives late, missed the whole fight. I saw Zhang Ziyi for two seconds! Unfortunately, Dougherty directed the great Trick ‘r Treat.
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Godzilla vs. Kong (2021, Adam Wingard)
Godzilla is fighting Mechagodzilla, Kong is awakened with a small nuclear device and a deaf girl with Rebecca Hall tells Kong to help out, so he does. Tables turn on Kong, computer guy Brian Tyree Henry helps out, and our guys fuckin destroy Mecha-G. This must be a different city, since most of the buildings are standing. I’m glad Kyle is still alive, since he was in the Peter Jackson Kong, uniting cinematic universes through his pointless presence. This movie looks more fun than the others – I actually forgot that after not liking Wingard I started liking him again.
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Godzilla × Kong: The New Empire (2024, Adam Wingard)
It’s gone fully cartoon, as all manner of CG monkeys and lizards fight in Narnia or somewhere, until Evil Anti-Kong escapes to the beaches of Brazil, followed by Power Glove Kong, Gz, and Ice Gz, who all destroy Rio, then team up to PG-13-slaughter Anti-Kong. The humans in these movies always seemed like time-wasters but now I see that without any grounding presence, all that’s left is loud empty colors. A lasting peace between giant apes and lizards is achieved, and Mothra and Rebecca Hall are still alive, fwiw.
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Saw 7 aka Saw 3D: The Final Chapter (2010, Kevin Greutert)
The timer’s countin’ down and a bunch of saps are stuck in killer traps. Sean Patrick’s nipples aren’t strong enough for him to stop Gina Holden (death non-escaper in Final Destination 3) from getting cremated alive. Meanwhile, Mandylor from the last couple movies puts an exploding head trap on Jigsaw’s secret assistant Jill, then gets taken down by Jigsaw’s secret-secret assistant… Cary Elwes, sure, why not.
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Jigsaw (2017, Michael & Peter Spierig)
And it’s over to Netflix for the prequel. Their fast-forwarding is slower than HBO’s, but the thumbnails load properly so you get a nice sense of the movie leading up to the last ten minutes. No clear winner. Two dudes are locked in laser collars, but Dr. Logan’s collar is fake, trying to get the corrupt detective (Callum Rennie of Hard Core Logo and Goon 2) to confess his corruption. It seems Jig had let the doctor live, now he’s jigsawing people himself, and his clip-show flashback explanation of this takes up the whole ten minutes. Directed by Australian twins who made an Ethan Hawke time travel movie, and the new writers would also take the next two Saws… one of which is on Hulu, who has the smoothest fast-forwarding of all…
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Spiral: From the Book of Saw (2021, Darren Lynn Bousman)
Max Minghella is already in the midst of backstory infodump, telling Chris Rock how he killed
a bunch of dirty cops and wants to apply the ITIL continual improvement process to the city police department, but Chris is more concerned that his dad (chief dirty cop Samuel L. Jackson) is hooked to a blood-removal device, which transforms into a suicide-by-cop machine. Max just takes an elevator out of the abandoned factory surrounded by SWAT and the movie ends, what?
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Pearl (2022, Ti West)
Mia Goth repression prequel to X, which wasn’t great, and reviews of this and MaXXXine didn’t convince me that it’s a trilogy worth the time. Bouncy haired girl Mitsi is over at Pearl’s place, admits to getting the dancing role that Pearl wanted, but they’re cool, still friends, oh no Pearl is chasing her with an axe. Some pretty good split-screen body-choppin’ shots.
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Madame Web (2024, S.J. Clarkson)
Okay, just for the heck of it, the year’s most mocked superhero movie. Dakota Johnson has slow-mo future-sight spidey-sense among a meteor shower of CG metal scraps in a sparks factory. Oh boy, Tahar Rahim plays an evil spider-assassin, until a giant letter P falls on him. She astral-projects to save her useless friends, then they have to save her from drowning, and Adam Scott shows up during hospital recovery. The friends are terrible: Reality Sweeney, Isabela Romulus, and Ghostbuster Celeste, and it ends by teasing a sequel where all of them become heroes. Half of the writers also wrote Morbius, haha.
Infinity Pool (2023, Brandon Cronenberg)
An hour before seeing this I learned that an NC-17 version played Sundance, but decided a missing shot or two of Skarsgard’s penis and busted face wouldn’t keep me from the theatrical experience. The Movieland’s dirty screens act similarly to 35mm film grain in helping digitally composited shots look more natural. Great title design, decent Tim Hecker score. Despite the title, we never get to see the pool. I hope he was referencing Michael Snow in some early shots… even if not, it made me think about Snow, which is always a good thing. The color-washed orgy montage a highlight. Which version/clone of Skarsgaard survives to ditch his flight in favor of the abandoned resort? What is the real motivation for the Mia Goth-led group leading him through these ordeals? Is it all a dream or a drug trip? Doesn’t matter!
X (2022, Ti West)
I keep getting Eli Roth (Cabin Fever) and Ti West (Cabin Fever 2) confused. I suppose the closest I’ve ever come to liking a Ti West movie was House of the Devil, and if I’d looked him up first I might’ve skipped this one, but a well-regarded horror about a bootstrap porno movie filming on the property of elderly murderers was too good to pass up. The camerawork is on point, and when changing scenes the editing will flip back and forth between the old and the new, a certain sense of the avant-garde like they’re doin’ in France.
Mia Goth is our entry point character, and also plays the old woman, loves to play in movies where the lead actress plays multiple roles from different generations. Cameraman Owen Campbell (paranoid main kid from Super Dark Times) dies first, stabbed in the throat for refusing the old woman’s advances, and the cowboy in charge (Martin Henderson of The Ring Remake) comes next, unwisely putting his eye up to a suspicious hole. The old man just shoots porn actor Kid Cudi (recently great in Bill & Ted Face the Music) in the swamp, actress Brittany Snow (Prom Night Remake) is pushed into the gator pond, and soundgirl Jenna Ortega (Scream Reboot) is shot escaping. The movie-in-the-movie is called Farmer’s Daughter, and they sing “Landslide” after shooting, it’s all very Fleetwood-inspired. Oh no, they’re making a prequel.
Mayday (2021, Karen Cinorre)
“Feels good to fall, you know? The further the better.” After a dream of skydiving, Grace Van Patten (The Meyerowitz Stories, daughter of the Master Ninja guy) is working a shit job at a nightmare wedding, then ends the day by putting her head in an oven, so I guess the rest is an Over the Garden Wall near-death fantasy with a Peter Pan wonderland feel. She’s recruited as a sniper by the other women on the island she falls onto, never being well advised on wtf is going on, as they’re constantly being attacked by men whose planes they steer into rocks and storms using deceptive radio practices (and the Wilco yankee-hotel-foxtrot clip).
“Maybe we should capture some instead of killing them all.”
“We’ve tried that, that was exhausting.”
The woman are actors she glimpsed at the wedding, from bride Mia Goth to bathroom attendant Juliette Lewis, now a solitary motorhead badass. Eventually there’s a music sequence with a troop of men, and Grace believing that her old life could be better if only she could return by escaping this island. A good looking movie, but the thing about taking place in a fantasy world where nothing makes sense is that nothing makes sense. The widescreen ratio means the watermark with my email address never obscured the action.
Mia and Grace go Moonlighting:
Feminist murder gang:
