by ·Comments Off on 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).

by ·Comments Off on Bad Times at the El Royale (2018, Drew Goddard)

The intro shows Nick Offerman getting killed after burying some stolen money under a hotel room floor, and between this and The Sisters Brothers, I’m having a Coen Brothers-reminiscent double-feature. Ten years post-Offerman, four guests meet in the hotel lobby: false priest Jeff Bridges, pissy Dakota Johnson (A Bigger Splash, daughter of Melanie Griffith), salesman Jon Hamm, and downtrodden singer Cynthia Erivo (Tony-winning star of The Color Purple musical), along with lobby boy Lewis Pullman (The Strangers 2). Four of these people are not who they seem (the singer is exactly who she seems), and the movie will cut back and forth in time introducing each of their backstories as they violently collide in the present day of 1970-something. I heard this movie was a fun Tarantino knockoff, and it’s kinda Four Rooms-meets-Hateful Eight, maybe not up to the high standard of Goddard’s Cabin in the Woods and The Good Place, but it looks excellent and is a fun way to spend two long hours (each scene deliciously stringing you along, knowing you ain’t got nowhere better to be).

Chris “Thor” Hemsworth is introduced in the second half. After so much violent duplicity it seems like overkill to suddenly introduce a sex/death-cult leader, but I was busy being distracted by thinking he was definitely Chris Pine, but knowing he couldn’t be since Pine has bright glowing eyes and the only person in this movie with bright glowing eyes is Jeff Bridges as the false priest. Bridges was Offerman’s partner, seeking the money after a decade in prison, and Johnson and her psycho-killer younger sister Cailee Spaeny (Pacific Rim 2) are escapees from the Hemsworth Manson/Morrisson cult. Hamm is an FBI agent looking for God knows what but stumbling across the surveillance system in the hotel, run by self-hating Vietnam sniper-turned-heroin addict Pullman. Everyone kills everyone else, but Cynthia is too sympathetic to die, so she makes it out, possibly with the cash and/or Jeff Bridges, I don’t remember. Desplat lays down some fun music, but most of the entertainment comes from the jukebox songs and the ones Cynthia sings, sometimes in fragments, pausing and backing up.

by ·Comments Off on Hearts Beat Loud (2018, Brett Haley)

The one where Nick Offerman and his daughter (Kiersey Clemons of Flatliners Remake) start a band, and he takes it really seriously, wanting to take the act on tour, while she just wants to start college like a normal person. I am easily irritated by lightweight feelgood indie dramas and by auto-tune indiepop, and mostly didn’t mind this at all, except when Offerman’s record store had a going-out-of-business sale selling new vinyl at ridiculous low prices and the people who showed up only bought a few records each – that’s just unrealistic.

by ·Comments Off on Infinity Baby (2017, Bob Byington)

A somewhat-sci-fi movie that sets up an interesting premise – a genetic engineering mishap has created a thousand babies that will never age – then perversely dances around it, devoting most of its time to two morons who kidnap one of the babies, and their boss Kieran Culkin, a metaphorical infinity-baby. Starts in the middle, sociopath Kieran meeting an older woman (Martha Kelly of a Zach Galifianakis show about a clown college) on a first date and quickly rejecting her, then backs up to him dumping a girl with help from his “mom” Megan Mullally. For the bulk of the movie he’ll date Alison (Trieste Dunn of Cold Weather), who laughs a ton, and is too sweet for Megan to help Kieran break up with, so he manages on his own.

Meanwhile, the morons are drunken unhealthy asshole Larry (Kevin Corrigan) and gentle bowl-cut Malcolm (Martin Starr of Silicon Valley and NTSF) who goes blind when sprayed in the face with cleaning products by Larry. They nearly kill the baby, taking it to Stephen Root for disposal, but it turns out alright. And everyone is working for Nick Offerman, whose Infinity Baby business model is unclear.

As with Byington’s Somebody Up There Likes Me, it likes to jump forward in time. Kieran ends up with his dream girl, someone young who’s into drugs and partying. Larry is in bad shape, and Blind Malcolm turns out to be a good father to the stolen baby, who is growing older (I’ve forgotten the explanation for that). Writer Onur Tukel made Catfight last year. Music by Aesop Rock!