Arena (1989)

directed by Peter Manoogian
Italy, USA
94 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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This is a somewhat niche plot that I genuinely love: A lone human goes up against a host of aliens in a sports competition somewhere very, very far away from Earth. It's not that I go in for the whole rhetoric that a lot of those films seem to have about humans being the proudest, most able species in the galaxy/universe, I just really enjoy seeing humans thrown in among a bunch of aliens. I like seeing us not be special.

It didn't really occur to me until after I watched Arena that there was supposed to be a plot. I mean, there is one- it's about a lowly snack bar worker who's kind of half-coerced into fighting in a ring with various aliens who are much bigger and stronger than him, and his attempts to win despite the corrupt system. But this is all just going through the motions, it's extremely predictable. The actual plot is the boring salad and the creature design is the tasty dressing that makes it worthwhile.

This is a Charles Band picture, but somehow it managed to snag some of the better names in practical effects, so it looks really great. I specifically wanted to mention the big alien that the human fighter takes on first (the kind of sluggy/mantis-y looking one) because I was just enamored with its design. I would love to see the inner workings of it, because it seemed way too fluid to have simply been a puppet, and I think there was at least one person in there piloting the arms, but I couldn't quite figure out where they would have fit. "Horn" is a good-looking alien too just because they managed to make his mouth move really realistically for a prosthetic. Everything else is unremarkable, Star Trek-y humans in various shades of bodypaint.

Also, I kind of hate how none of the aliens were women. The women were reserved for eye candy because nobody wanted to see an alien woman (or woman equivalent) who's big and nasty and muscly and gross. Give me scaly girls! Girls with horns who are so buff they can crush watermelons with one hand! Give me slimy girls who leave trails wherever they go! Amorphous girls! Incorporeal girls! In fact, give me more genders! This film should have had as many genders as stars in the sky and yet, and yet.

But now I'm off on a tangent about a bad movie that I should, by now, know better than to expect anything from. This is a fun, goofy thing with a fluffy and unimportant plot that will definitely keep you entertained and maybe make you laugh depending on how susceptible you are to bad sci-fi humor. Not much more.

Cam (2018)

directed by Daniel Goldhaber
USA
94 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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Because of its subject matter, I was afraid Cam was going to be another preachy piece about how selfie-obsessed and vapid millennial women are. I had some hopes for it, but I honestly didn't expect it to be as good as it was. Instead of lamenting how girls are always glued to their phones, Cam emphasizes that camwork is work, and focuses on the fact that girls in the industry can never be "off"; that it's incredibly taxing having to be able to instantly put on a smile and look perky the second you're in front of a screen. I appreciated that this didn't fall into the hole of portraying camgirls as bimbos with no "real" job.

It helps a lot that Madeline Brewer is REALLY good. I think that when an actor manages to not only play their character, but also play a character who's playing a character, it's a mark of significant talent. And Brewer does this three times. She plays her character, and then she plays the online persona of her character, and then she plays the weird, unsettling entity that takes over her online persona. She's not only great at acting, she's great at acting like somebody who is acting.

This is a double whopper of a film; it's good as a mystery and a portrayal of an occupation that usually gets stereotyped and looked down upon, but it's also great as a horror film. This isn't like all the other movies where a demon invades the internet who is researchable, who has "rules" for how it possesses victims, who can be understood even though it's diabolical and wrong. Had Cam paused midway to explain itself, had the main character been able to get help from somebody who knew the ins and outs of what was happening, the film would still probably have been good, but it would have been less frightening. 

The main character is alone, and the entity further isolates her by making her seem crazy, using her face and identity- her two central aspects as a camgirl- against her. And she can't seek out others who have had the same experience because they are all dead. It's truly isolating, and Madeline Brewer doesn't understate the terror of it in her performance.

The other thing that makes this film great is its very impressive attention to details. Not Chekhov's Guns; not things that are plot-relevant, just small, minor scraps that make it look like a real world. Brand names in the background, shabby clothes, typical things like that, but also more intricate, fleeting elements: We see the main character buy an expensive couch early on in the film, and later she sits on a sofa that still has plastic wrapping on it. The profile picture of one of her regulars is referenced in a later meeting with him. It has a vague Alice in Wonderland theme that, for once, doesn't feel hackneyed. All of this leads me to believe that this was an attentively-made film with lots of effort from everyone involved. Somehow this got into my #2-of-the-year spot.

The Endless (2017)

directed by Aaron Moorehead, Justin Benson
USA
112 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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This has been my most anticipated movie for a long time, so when it finally dropped on Netflix, I jumped on it. Moorehead and Benson's previous film Resolution bothered me in a way few horror movies do, and I'd heard that The Endless had some vague ties to that film, which made me even more excited. 

The Endless is about two brothers, played by the directors, who return to the cult/commune they grew up in out of some weird sense of nostalgia. Of course, this does not end well. This is a movie that's hard to talk about without spoiling, because you basically have to watch the thing from start to finish to begin understanding what it's doing and where it's coming from. It's interesting to compare the horror in The Endless with the horror in Resolution, because in comparison to Resolution, the horror in this movie has a more concrete form- yet it's still this nebulous, overarching power; less "monster in the woods" and more "monster IS the woods". It's one part monster, one part implications. And it has a brutal way of making humans look small and powerless.

For how unsettling it can occasionally get, this movie also feels personal, and the lives of the two main characters are inextricably tied to the plot of the film as a whole. Before slipping entirely into cosmic-horror mode, I kind of felt like a lot of what was happening was subjective rather than objective- like watching two people get scared by things that scared only them. Moorehead and Benson never let the viewer forget that they're watching a narrative, and, more interestingly, they never seem to let their characters forget that they're inside a narrative, which to me is the most fascinating thing about both this and Resolution. At every turn the main characters are positioned as small pawns within the grasp of something larger, and that's a unique place for the filmmakers to put themselves in as actors: not playing themselves, but playing versions of themselves, people who, to some extent, become aware of their existence within a specific context that they can't be separated from at the risk of death.

This film is also explicitly Lovecraftian, and I enjoyed that part of it because it skips the tentacles entirely and goes straight to the heart of what makes Lovecraftian horror so horrifying. You really get a sense of something huge. It's almost as if the act of writing fiction itself is the monster. Spring notwithstanding (I'm sorry but I felt like that movie had entirely too much mansplaining in it), these two have the potential to continue turning the horror genre on its head by creating films that examine the nature of fiction while pulling existential horrors to the forefront.

Fiend (1980)

directed by Don Dohler
USA
90 minutes
4 out of 5 stars
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Don Dohler is known for being a director with some cult success who made low-budget films with a singular enthusiasm. Fiend is a departure from his other works about yokels running from aliens, but it still maintains a regional, down-to-earth vibe that makes it great. 

I also enjoyed that it's emphasized that the antagonist is a fiend and nothing else. I love the word "fiend". He's not a zombie, he's not a revenant, he's not a vampire or a wraith or any other creature, he is specifically a fiend. And he looks like a fiend, too- he's got a bushy mustache and penchant for dark clothing, he says stuff like "I'm not superstitious, that sort of thing is for children and women", he plays the violin, and his name is "Longfellow". I apologize to the non-fiendish Longfellows out there, but it is just such a dastardly name.

Every actor in this acts like they're in a commercial for a local car dealership or mattress store. I'm trying to find out if the two people playing Marsha and Gary Kender were/are married in real life because the dynamic between them is so sweet and adorable that it felt more genuine than just generic married-couple acting. As a horror movie, this feels unusually relaxed; it's not overly concerned with constant action, and it feels like while evil is definitely present, there's never a point where that evil seems unable to be stopped by regular people who dedicate themselves to eradicating it. The whole apex of the film rests on the testimony of a child, which goes to show how thoroughly this movie avoids making its good guys super-powered.

The special effects in this are also really charming & really make me remember the "animation" part of the term "computer animation". Our friend the fiend glows with red light that looks hand-drawn onto the film reel whenever he's in the middle of his fiendish doings. It reminds me of the electric zaps and energy pulses in Hellraiser that were done with such slapdash DIY-ness that they ended up looking amazing. I don't know if the red glow around Longfellow was done by hand or not but it looks really good. This is one of those films that I think is unironically great even though a lot of people might only be able to enjoy it through a lens of irony. It isn't perfect, but for what it is, including all its raw edges, I liked it a lot.

Housewife (2017)

directed by Can Evrenol
Turkey
82 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I've been thinking lately about horror movies that have freaked me out so bad I start to think "I don't want to see this anymore, please make it stop", and I can only come up with a few of them, but Can Evrenol's previous film Baskın is one. This made Housewife one of my most anticipated films of the past year or so, and although I had high expectations, I wasn't disappointed. 

It takes a very long time for this film to become fully what it is; it makes itself look like a psychological drama about a young woman lured into a cult because of her violent childhood until all of a sudden in the last half-hour it's... not. It's very clever at this because it genuinely does take a smart look at what makes people join cults: it introduces the main character to the cult while she's in a precarious mental state, and she immediately latches onto the cult leader because of something he says that, to her, indicates that he understands her personally, that he's the one she's been looking for and vice versa. This is of course not entirely true but it's one aspect of how people get lured into cults: parts of themselves that are vulnerable are preyed upon. So this is a story of a girl tricking herself and being tricked into thinking a cult leader can tap into something unearthly that turns into "Oh, this cult leader actually is tapped into something unearthly".

Can Evrenol seems to be really good at creating these kind of pocket-realities where horrible things can and do happen, yet the normal reality we're used to is still playing out in the background. It's like the world is ending only for the people trapped up in these nightmare scenarios. It's more difficult to explain the way this is executed in words than I thought it would be, but it's kind of like the narrative equivalent of leaving several apps running in the background at the same time and switching between them- they can all exist at the same time, all functioning simultaneously.

I was going to only give this three and a half stars because I felt like it honestly didn't match the gravity of Baskın, but those last few minutes really, really got me. Housewife starts out with one woman's trauma and eventually builds into a deep and all-reaching finality, not just for her but for everyone. I still feel like it stays subdued for a little too long, but once the reality of the plotline fully breaks through in the third act, it's cosmic.

Await Further Instructions (2018)

directed by Johnny Kevorkian
UK
90 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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Halloween is over (supposedly) so it's time for Christmas movies. Don't come to Await Further Instructions looking for cheery huggy family love, though. Half of the horror in this comes from the sheer torture of bringing an Indian girlfriend home to a family who ranges from awkwardly, casually racist to slur-spewingly bigoted, and then getting physically trapped in the house with those people as they all unravel. I'd have liked there to have been more from the perspective of being the Indian girlfriend who has to come home to these awful people, but okay. 

One of the most interesting characters in all of this is the father, who is the utter stereotype of unfeeling British stiff-upper-lip patriarchy, and he's meant to be a little exaggerated, but he really isn't that exaggerated. He's the type who looks at impossible things and just goes "Well, this is nonsense." and concludes that it's best to sit tight, slowly dying, while the rescue crews (because they are all also British and intent on nobly saving their fellow countrymen) are surely on the way courtesy of an efficient and sympathetic government.

The basic summary of the situation the characters find themselves in is that a strange black material clamps down on all windows and doors to the outside of their house while messages on the television begin giving them instructions on what to do- usually things that put them in obvious danger, but they don't notice because they assume the messages are coming from "the proper authorities". Things like injecting each other with used syringes that drop down their chimney, scrubbing themselves with bleach, and ganging up on one another for funsies. It's pretty obvious to a viewer that these instructions are the work of an outside actor wanting to see how far people will go when they're scared and cornered- but who's doing it? This remains the question until the end. In addition to the social issues raised, there's a really excellent body horror component. I'm discussing thematic spoilers from here on, so be cautious and don't read further if you're planning on watching this.

This movie has one of the best depictions of an alien lifeform that I've seen in recent memory and I am so enthused about it. Why have arms and legs when you can have an uncountable number of thrashing, flailing, cable-like tentacles? Cilia city, baby! This lifeform is in total opposition to everything human, a polar opposite to all things soft and warm and fleshy, and it is there for one reason only: to be worshipped. It's going to take over the planet, no questions asked. I don't usually go in for endings this bleak, and I still kind of disliked how staunchly hopeless this ultimately was, but I very much enjoyed this depiction of an alien invasion and I loved the film as a whole.

The Demon (2016)

directed by B. Tsogt-Erdene, O. Munguntulga
Mongolia
71 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
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I was looking forward to this because I feel like it can be difficult to find movies that are just from Mongolia. A lot of the time you see movies made somewhere else (usually Russia, sometimes China) that are set in Mongolia. Or, if you're watching the SyFy Channel, maybe you'll end up with a movie filmed in Texas that's supposed to be set in Mongolia. Looking at you, Mongolian Death Worm (2010).

The interesting thing about The Demon is that the backbone of its plot is so old and archetypical, even though the rest of the movie tries very obviously to be as modern as possible. For instance, there are some shoehorned-in references to Western media, like when two characters argue over whether "Last Christmas" is by George Michael or Wham!. The setting of the film (young adults partying in a haunted house) is a cliched trope mostly invented by the horror genre, but the reason for their being pursued by an evil spirit is probably older than recorded history: the house they're in is where somebody died a bad death. She wasn't a bad person who did bad things, but because her death was unresolved and traumatic, she lingers on as a hostile spirit. I just find it really interesting that we're telling the same stories over and over even though the setting has changed.

It's interesting too that most of the characters are genuinely innocent. The only person with any real culpability is the kid who decided to just go on ahead and snatch his uncle's keys even though his uncle warned him to stay away from the house. None of the people this guy invited to the house had any idea of its history, but they were still targeted because the idea behind the lingering spirit isn't that it punishes people for what they did wrong, it just lashes out because it's angry, no matter if you're a good person or not.

I did give this a low rating, because objectively it's not a good movie for a lot of reasons. As a horror film it's lazy, with no personality or body for its villain other than that she's a scary witchy-looking thing that shows up sometimes and grabs people with her long craggly nails, and no personality for most of the good guys, either. But as happens often with films made outside of the mainstream- or even indie- U.S. entertainment industry, the low rating doesn't reflect my overall opinion of this film, because I appreciate that it exists, I appreciate everyone involved in making it, and I want to see more horror movies from Mongolia and from every other country that's been neglected in favor of American summer blockbusters about teens who get killed with axes. Also this is a Christmas movie so get in the spirit y'all.

Possum (2018)

directed by Matthew Holness
UK
85 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Some horror movies have a dark ambiance about them that only climaxes into something concretely frightening during one or two select scenes, the rest of the runtime simply being filled with shadows and melancholy. Possum somehow manages to be creepy like that from pretty much beginning to end. It took me a minute or two to get into it, because it's not huge on being clear about what's happening and that's confusing sometimes, but once it "clicked" for me, it instantly drew me in. There's no light or happiness anywhere in this, except when it occurs in the lives of other people, such as the boys the main character sees joking around on the train. Every minute of this film has both the viewer and the main character trapped in a hole with no escape. And there's something in the hole with us.

The title comes from a puppet belonging to the main character. I should probably put "puppet" in quotes because I really got the feeling that this was something awful pretending at being a puppet. Since, like I said, we have very little backstory on exactly what happened prior to the beginning of the film, the origins of the puppet-thing are murky and it feels more like something that's just always been there, not something that was built. I have to give the movie props for making me go from disappointed that the monster was so funny-looking to absolutely terrified of it, dreading its appearance around every corner and having to avert my eyes sometimes. When it was onscreen I wanted it to be offscreen.

Another thing I give this movie props for is taking something as gruesome, dim, and grimy as the main character's life and still managing to make it into a source of sympathy by the end. When we find out the full extent of his stepfather's abuse in the final few minutes of the film, so much about the rest of it seems to make a little more sense: The rhyme that warns Possum will "eat and smother any child without a mother", as well as other rhymes about the fearsomeness of this puppet-beast, reflect on the main character's own feelings of vulnerability surrounding being an orphan. Even the puppet's exaggerated, spiderlike limbs suggest fingers; this will also make sense in the (highly upsetting) last couple of minutes.

I don't think the presence of real-life horrors took away from the possibly metaphysical aspect of this at all. It's so heavy on the dread and terror that ultimately whether or not the whole thing was a product of the protagonist's trauma felt incidental. The trauma in itself was horror enough. The ever-present soundtrack by The Radiophonic Workshop completes the whole thing. I hope we get a real release of that soundtrack sometime soon but I'm doubtful.

The Legend of Bigfoot (1976)

directed by Harry Winer
USA
76 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
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Apparently there are two movies with basically this same title that came out in 1976. This review is for the one about a guy named Ivan Marx who is either a hokey American farmer or somebody who wants very much to convince us he's a hokey American farmer, who happens to also be a Bigfoot expert. Or possibly he wants very much to convince us that he's a Bigfoot expert.

That's the thing about this mockumentary: you can't tell how much Marx himself believes. Does he allege that everything depicted in this film is one hundred percent the truth, and that no Bigfoot suits were used? Does he allege that everything depicted in this film is one hundred percent the truth, but staged with recreations and practical effects? Does he believe none of it and is trying to make a buck or gain notoriety? His narration is so self-righteous that it's difficult to see him as genuine, and his attempts to force folksiness and a vision of quintessential Americana make him sound like he's campaigning for something. Maybe you can be elected Bigfoot-catcher the way you can be elected dogcatcher.

The emphasis in this film is on Bigfoot as an undiscovered species, and in talking this out to his viewers Ivan Marx manages to alienate actual indigenous people. His idea of indigeneity is obviously that it's something of the past: he regales "his" America as land that is farmed and controlled (by white men) while speaking of "wild men walking out of the mountains of California" as if people uncontacted or unbothered by colonization are some kind of rare phenomenon as opposed to the original inhabitants of the land. As if California belongs to someone else, as if it's somewhere that you "walk out of" when you're indigenous. Someone else's land that you're just an inhabitant of.

I have half a mind to write an entire rebuttal paper to some guy's wacky Bigfoot fantasy from the 70s. I know it's not that deep, but Bigfoot movies run rampant with anti-Native racism. I was almost glad the narrator's dignity spared us having to watch him beat a drum and do a chant. I could truly go on and on about how pompous he is underneath his facade of being just a regular ol' guy (who never shuts up about what an outstanding, excellent tracker he apparently is) but I don't think this film or whatever it is is worth it.