by ·Comments Off on Crawl (2019, Alexandre Aja)

Haley (Kaya Scodelario of Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights) is a student swimmer who stupidly drives into a hurricane evac zone to find her stupid father Barry Pepper, who is trapped in the crawlspace of his house because the storm flooding brought alligators. It’s a fight for survival and escape, and you assume the body count will be low, but we get looters then cops then rescuers, all of whom become gator chow. Not impressed by the characters or dialogue, but the storm looked cool and the lighting was excellent.

From the two writers of Carpenter’s The Ward. I haven’t caught up with Aja in a while – after Haute Tension and The Hills Have Eyes Remake came Kiefer Sutherland horror Mirrors, horror-comedy Piranha Remake, Last Ten Minutes entry Horns, then a psychological thriller nobody saw.

Rescuers: Down Under

by ·Comments Off on Crossroads 2020 program 2

I read a couple good write-ups of this festival, then realized the whole thing was freely viewable online for a limited time. I skipped around, but these are all selections from their second program.

–
Demoiselle (Eeva Siivonen)

The camera is in a garden, getting very close to leaves and flowers, so close that I don’t know how it can focus clearly, surely none of my cameras could. I was not expecting Alain Resnais to pop up and start questioning the filmmaker, who is creating a tribute to Claude Monet, and requesting alongside his all-male crew that she step aside.

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Dusty Wave (Eeva Siivonen)

This time a dead forest at night, lit by flashlight, the subtitles a story told by a moth.

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Camera Sick (Jeremy Moss)

Jeremy takes a camera (a film camera! avant-gardists love the texture) into the desert and spins around until he falls over. Some good stutter effects when it spins faster than the framerate can keep up. You can’t just use the “Tammy’s in love” song in a movie, it’s already been reclaimed by Terence Davies.

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Noonwraith Blues (Kamila Kuc)

Field and scythe, a smear of mud, and much mothlighting in between.

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Fire Fly EYE (Kerry Laitala)

Forest fire embers, electric ghosts and starling murmurations entwine over a locked-groove ambient track. Output from a “dual projection expanded cinema work,” which had me very suspicious, but my recent obsessions over fires and birds and electricity all come alive here to thrilling effect.

–
Fragment (1988, Laura J. Padgett)

More patterns and close-up objects over murmured conversation

by ·Comments Off on The Assistant (2019, Kitty Green)

Portrait of a hostile work environment. Full of small insults and ironies: she gets a papercut opening a dinner invitation from the White House. The two guys sharing her office space only pitch in to help when she has to write apology emails to the boss (“I won’t let you down again”). Interesting approach to never show the monster boss, and to follow someone who’s an indirect victim, not one of the casting-couch hotties or the girl from Idaho (the actress actually from Norway) who shows up to work with no experience and is being put up in a swanky hotel where the boss keeps visiting. For a while I thought the boss’s activities would remain a background buzz and never be directly addressed, but no, her conversation with a real wormy HR guy (the 2005 Mr. Darcy) is the movie’s centerpiece. The movie isn’t Akermanian exactly, but it’s more Akermanian than most films. Star Julia Garner is from Ozark and Sin City 2.

A.S. Hamrah in The Baffler: “The Assistant is the only film in which I’ve seen the shame-filled, eating-in-a-Manhattan-bodega aspect of life in New York City portrayed so acutely, or at all.”

by ·Comments Off on Bill and Ted Face the Music (2020, Dean Parisot)

“In case you’re wondering I’m essentially an infinite me.”

They finally did it. I haven’t rewatched the originals since their premieres, but all essential backstory is dutifully repeated here. I love that in all their possible messed-up futures, Bill and Ted are still together – it’s never even dreamed that they wouldn’t be together. Their daughters Billie and Thea, traveling through time collecting famous musicians like in the first movie, are clearly being set up as the actual chosen-ones who will play the song that heals all of time and space – so clearly that the actual reveal is less of a “whoa” and more of a “yeah finally” – but maybe this was designed to distract us from the movie’s real twist, that the perfect song Bill & Ted spend all movie (and half their lives) looking for doesn’t exist. It doesn’t matter what they play, as long as they all play it together. This… should not have made me cry… and I’m not saying it did… but it’s been a heavy year, huh?

From the original writers and the director of Galaxy Quest. Thea is from Three Billboards, Billie from Action Point, Kristen Schaal replacing Rufus (who appears briefly as a hologram), and they’ve got the original Death. NoHo Hank from Barry plays a robot assassin, and I love this guy in everything. Brittany Runs a Marathon star Jillian Bell is couples therapist for Bill & Ted and their princesses (who have been recast to be younger: Erinn Hayes of Childrens Hospital, and Jayma Mays of American Made). Kid Cudi is most excellent as himself.

by ·Comments Off on Doctor Sleep (2019, Mike Flanagan)

“Running away from myself, I guess.” From the moment Ghost Scatman appeared to dump exposition, we know this is gonna be a big obvious movie. This was my token stinker of the month, which I watched in segments while falling asleep after having watched a proper movie… most of my notes consist of the timecode where I left off, and variations on “movie is so bad.”

“I know that head of yours is like a radio sometimes” – nice True Stories reference. Shining-era flashback actors are recast, and present-day Danny (Ewan McGregor) teams up with his 12-step sponsor (Cliff Curtis of M. Night’s Last Airbender) and a young psychic named Abra. Meanwhile, King turns this into a mini-Stand, the villains also gathering. We get an intro to Rose The Hat’s vampire gang who feeds on shining-kids when Rose (Rebecca Ferguson of the Missions: Impossible) recruits Snakebite Emily Alyn Lind (who was in Enter The Void when she was six, oh my) outside of the Plaza Theater (!) and we meet the others, led by Carel “it is happening again” Struycken, who soon dies of shining-starvation.

Billy dies when our heroes ambush the baddies, killing most of them, then Danny leads Rose to the Overlook to trap her somehow. He chats with Lloyd the bartender doing a mild Jack impression, played by the E.T. kid (another Spielbeg-Kubrick crossover so soon after Ready Player One). Danny blows up the hotel (what, again?) to kill the vengeful ghosts that killed Rose, I guess. Think I heard a Dark Tower reference… definitely noticed one house address was 1980 (ugh). Real TV-movie energy with very talky villains – the actors seem game, so I’ll blame this on King and Flanagan.

by ·Comments Off on Threads (1984, Mick Jackson)

Thought it’d be fun to watch an apocalypse movie during an actual apocalypse, but it was not. Early scenes set up a couple families with typical problems (Jimmy’s girl Ruth tells him she’s knocked up) while global news stories play out casually on background televisions and title cards ominously tell us the population of Sheffield. Then – nuclear war!

Jimmy likes birds, and his brother dies in the blast along with the finches. The families are separated and never reunite in the chaos. The movie flashes forward in regular intervals, family members dying of illness and starvation, finally ten years later, Ruth blind and ravaged by fallout. In other news, the producers bought the rights to Johnny B. Goode, and they’re damn sure gonna play it.

by ·Comments Off on The Resurrected (1992, Dan O’Bannon)

Another Lovecraft movie to go with our Re-Animator duo (and with the same composer). A man named Ward has made a bloody impossible escape from some institution, detective March is closing the case via dictaphone in flash-forward, then there’s… a flashback from the flash-forward? March is the boring, lumpy John Terry (of a Timothy Dalton Bond movie), his client Mrs. Ward is the unnaturally terrible Jane Sibbett (of a Mary-Kate and Ashley movie). Too much voiceover, maybe to make up for the dialogue recording being pretty bad – overall competence here is low, though eventually there’s a doppelganger, a living skeleton, and some good monstrosities, so it’s not a total waste of time.

John Terry… and John Terry… in A Bronx Tale

Christoph Huber in Cinema Scope 83 called this movie “superior” and “neglected,” so maybe I was just tired and unappreciative. O’Bannon is of course the Alien creator who also made Return of the Living Dead. Corman’s The Haunted Palace, the first IMDB-credited Lovecraft-based feature, is an adaptation of the same story, featuring Vincent Price, Elisha Cook Jr., and surely far less blood.

by ·Comments Off on The Devil’s Nightmare (1971, Jean Brismée)

Nazi baroness dies giving birth in bombarded Berlin, the movie unconvincingly marrying perfect interiors with very rough stock footage. The baby is murdered, then in color the present-day baron speaks of a family curse, and a dirt-digging reporter gets her car pitchforked and runs headlong into the woods.

From here out, it’s your traditional story of a busload of people arriving at a haunted castle then getting killed one-by-one by a hot succubus in a revealing black dress, while the alchemist baron and his butler gradually parse out secrets. Not a generically bad horror movie though – it’s pretty much excellent from start to finish, including the ending where the devil deals with a priest to trade his soul for the bus people, then they all awaken and immediately die in a fiery bus crash.

Mouseover to manifest a succubus:
image

Brismée’s only feature, unfortunately! The writers made some 70’s porn, and this script was remade in 2012 by some low-budge Massachusetts residents. Rififi star Jean Servais plays the baron, Erika Blanc (The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave) the succubus, and Daniel Emilfork (OMG, Krank from City of Lost Children) the devil.

Naughty Krank:

by ·Comments Off on The Queen of Spades (1949, Thorold Dickinson)

A pretty ok movie, mostly notable for all the definite articles in the credits:

We’re in Russia – all the names and signs and newspapers are in Russian, then halfway through the movie they decided the setting was well established and signs start appearing in English. Captain Anton Walbrook (year after The Red Shoes) visits the card games every night but never plays because he’s determined not to lose. So he visits a creepy bookseller to learn some useful tips:

The creepy bookseller is overdoing it:

Anton learns about a terrible old woman who knows the supernatural secret to winning at games of chance (their big card game is just betting 50/50 on a single-card draw). He pretends to be interested in the pretty girl (Yvonne Mitchell of Sapphire) who works for the old lady (Edith Evans, Ghost of Christmas Past in the Albert Finney Scrooge) by plagiarizing love letters, gets close enough to threaten the old lady, who promptly drops dead, then idiot Walbrook tells the girl his whole scheme. He gets the secret of the cards from the dead woman, wins a fortune then loses it all (and the girl) the same night. Shocktober 2021 Challenge: no more movies from the British, they are simply frightened by everything.