Haunt (2019)

directed by Scott Beck, Bryan Woods
USA
92 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I'd been hearing some good things about this movie, but I was skeptical because I feel like there's nothing new under the sun with regards to movies about extreme haunted houses/escape rooms, especially when they include evil clowns. That may still be true, but Haunt shows that even unoriginal premises can be done well.

Haunt starts off feeling fairly uninspired, with the typical set-up of a protagonist who has a troubled personal life, is the quieter one of the friend group, all that good stuff. She's goaded into going to a mysterious and possibly dangerous location with her rowdy pals and soon they all end up in mortal peril. You've seen and heard this all before. But before too long the film begins to reveal itself for what it is: not something innovative or spectacular, but something that does what it does right. Where other escape room movies feel like a constant barrage of scares with nothing to break them up and no consideration of tone or pacing, Haunt metes out its scares thoughtfully, and whether or not you're personally frightened by them is your own experience, but in my opinion it almost seemed like the thing in mind with this film was the impact of the big picture as opposed to the fear generated by one single scene here and there.

When I find a horror movie interesting or well-made, typically it's because it has the kind of restraint that creates an unsettling atmosphere. I talked about this recently with The Blair Witch Project and how its lack of a visible witch made it more terrifying. Any movie that successfully pulls off a slow burn and leaves us imagining horrors rather than putting them in front of us tends to take precedence over things where we can see the monsters. But Haunt is something else- it isn't a slow burn, but it also doesn't bombard us with more than we can handle. It's like turning a corner and seeing a sheet ghost just standing there motionless: the ghost isn't hidden or hinted at, but it's also not doing anything; it's not an axe-wielding murderer you know is going to try and kill you. You can't tell where the threat lies when something isn't moving. Haunt follows this structure of only showing us things when it really matters that we see them, not hiding them for tension. This works because its aesthetic is so good, and every image feels meticulously set up, from each room in the haunted house to every mask the "actors" wear.

There's not a whole lot of gore in this and what there is isn't constant, but the kill scenes are absolutely spot on. As someone who's generally a pacifist I feel weird saying that, but in horror I do genuinely enjoy seeing a creative death, not because I enjoy death but because I enjoy seeing practical effects pushed to their limit. The stuff I thought was going to be cliche- clowns, haunted houses, goofy friends goofing off- are all used with more care than in the movies that have made me mistrust them in the past. The main character's tragic backstory didn't work for me, and the ending was really confusing, but I was surprised at how good this is. Not game-changing, not genre-defining, just good.

Mandy (2018)

directed by Panos Cosmatos
USA/Belgium
121 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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Panos Cosmatos' first feature, Beyond the Black Rainbow, seemed to be a fairly divisive film due to its slow method of storytelling and sparse plot that often took a backseat to a parade of trippy visuals. It took me a bit to warm up to it, but ultimately I think it's very nearly essential viewing if you want to watch Mandy, because it'll get you familiar with that extremely unique, almost entirely visual tone.

Every inch and every second of Mandy drips with atmosphere. I've never seen a film more singularly devoted to its own aesthetic, and that aesthetic is doom. Doom. Doom. I think I've talked once or twice before about how a lot of movies that are really dedicated to inhabiting a world like Mandy's, a world full of mounting dread and cataclysmic, cosmic darkness, tend to get categorized as "grimdark" because they get so deep into that darkness that it can feel like parody. Mandy is the sincerest grimdark movie I've ever seen- the severity of it, the bloody mess that it is, the immaculate coloring and the haze and the dirt and the dark. It is nothing but that. It's the type of movie that makes the air feel heavy. I watched a Food Wishes video to calm down afterwards and nearly got whiplash. It makes your breath slow down and you blink less often. Seeing this on the big screen must feel like a kick in the chest.

I think Mandy has more plot than Beyond the Black Rainbow, at least in the sense that you can discern what's going on after only watching it once. But it's so immersed in its own world that it disregards conventions about reality. I admire this point especially, because it does involve drugs, but it also explicitly involves genuine otherworldly entities, and too often the latter gets explained away as the former in film. It leaves enough to the imagination to make it feel like it hasn't explored every single possibility despite its two-hour running time, which could be disappointing to some, but so many unanswered questions made it feel like this was just how the world operated and it was of no use to question the order of things. Even the journey of revenge felt certain. In the great pulp fantasy paperback of the universe, every motion of every character played out exactly as described. The only injustice is that Mandy herself ultimately languishes, as so many movie women do, as little more than a catalyst to make a man go on a quest.

There was something really interesting to me about the cult leader's ravings- Red describes the cult as "Jesus freaks", but the cult leader seemed to have a disdain for Jesus and only invoked imagery of the crucifixion as a kind of reminder to do better than that. There's a lot of masculinity in this movie (unsurprisingly), and the "Him" and "He" of the cult leader's delusions almost felt more like references to a sort of archetype rather than any one entity. This doesn't really work as a motivation for his villainy, though, as Red is most certainly also an archetype of masculinity.

It's difficult to talk about this movie because it is so solidly a film that you experience, that lodges inside your skull and stays there. It would not be possible for it to exist without a large team of people with expertise in making the most metal film in existence and filling it with details and colors nearly to bursting. I could have watched four more hours of this. It would be a wonderful post-holiday food coma watch.

Deadly Dreams (1988)

directed by Kristine Peterson
USA
79 minutes
2 stars out of 5
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Since it gets harder every year to find Christmas horror movies I haven't seen, I have a pretty loose definition of what those parameters include, so a lot of the time I end up with movies like this that only barely have anything to do with the holidays. I also don't tend to watch "horror-thrillers" (or thrillers in general) because although I see no distinction between horror and thriller other than that people don't want to call thrillers horror for some reason, I also generally think thrillers are weak, watered-down versions of horror movies that don't have any creeps n' ghouls in them and are thus too boring for my pea brain.

Deadly Dreams is... kind of weird, I guess? The basic premise is that a man whose family was killed around Christmastime by a disgruntled former employee begins having strange dreams/hallucinations that the murderer has come back from the dead to kill him too. It's one of those things where everything is mostly normal and boring but one element eludes explanation and remains half in the realm of supernatural the whole time, this element being the dreams the main character has. Everything is revealed at the end and it all makes sense, but leaves us with the feeling that there was something a little stranger going on. Mostly, though, it's very boring. The fact that there's no explanation for his prophetic dreams isn't focused on.

Part of why I wanted to talk about this movie is because it was directed by a woman and features the kind of "objectification" of its main man that we typically see of women in films directed by men. I put "objectification" in quotes here because I do not believe men can ever be truly objectified; their bodies are not a commodity for anyone of any gender to consume the way women's bodies are commodified for men. But the camera's gaze upon the protagonist is nearly identical to the way the camera can undress a woman when helmed by a man. He spends a lot of his time shirtless, just being hunky and forlorn. There's a lot of tension between him and... well, basically everyone, and between everyone and him. Oddly, though, when it comes to relations between him and actual women, typically creepy "nice guy" narratives are employed. Him repeatedly trying to ask an uninterested girl out and spending $50 on a background search to find out her name is presented as romantic (*barfs*). This, I'm guessing, is because it was written by a man despite being directed by a woman.

I'm kind of baffled that I made it through this whole thing, even though it's only 78 minutes long. It's that boring and feels that inconsequential. The acting is fine, the script is fine, the general idea of it is just fine. There's something there that could have been really disturbing if it was set free of the prison of cheesiness. It's so 80s in style and aesthetic that you can't divorce it from that, even though the concept is interesting. I also don't know any of the actors, so I'd imagine that recognizing them from other 80s things would also break your immersion a little more. But like I said, it's just fine- hard to feel much of anything towards it, unless you like shirtless, hunky, forlorn men.

Winterbeast (1992)

directed by Christopher Thies
USA
80 minutes
2 stars out of 5
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It's 27 degrees out, it's less than a week until Christmas, and it's time to pull out the worst Christmas horror films I can find. Technically, Winterbeast isn't a holiday film at all, but it's got enough of a seasonal feel that it distracts from the fact that it's too cold to snow where I am and I absolutely hate the winter anyway.

Hope you like claymation, because this movie certainly does. This is one of those films that have to be appreciated outside of the normal standards of judging a movie, because it won't stack up to what we think of as conventionally "good" films, but it's got charm all of its own. And really, in this case I don't even think it's that bad- most things about it, including the writing and acting, are kind of clunky, but the actors don't feel as truly inexperienced or fond of chewing the scenery as most actors in these super low-budget, DIY 80s/90s* horror movies do. There's something here that's actually good, it's just not at a level of technical proficiency that allows most people to recognize it as such. I could see this being remade with exactly the same plot and most of the same dialogue and it being, if not a blockbuster, at least the kind of generic B-horror that gets chucked onto Netflix immediately upon release. In fact, I think there are a bunch of generic horror movies with virtually the same plot, just with slightly different creatures.

Unfortunately, as is also fairly typical for films of its ilk, it's pretty gross about women. I was particularly put off by the guys at the beginning trading skin mags and packs of dirty playing cards, chortling and remarking upon the women's nude bodies like they're nothing but objects. The theme of guys objectifying women continues throughout the film, which is weird, because this also has a vague undertone of being super gay. It does the same thing with Native Americans, too, but without the sexualization; the Native aesthetic- or the idea of it- is definitely commodified. I guess I should have anticipated this from the whole "possessed totem pole" idea, but that somehow slipped my mind when watching this. The "final boss" ("Winterbeast" seems to refer not to a single creature but to a barrage of different claymation horrorterrors) and the only one that is done with a guy in a suit instead of claymation is a remarkably racist demon-Native-caricature thing. This whole film smacks of the idea that Native Americans now only exist as myths and legends and a general "look" that can be sold in gift shops.

This can be a fun watch for monster enthusiasts, if taken with a grain of salt and the recognition of terrible stereotypes. Really, the best part is the monsters, the rest is just boring. It's worst of all towards the end because in the last 30 minutes they seem to have run out of ideas entirely and resorted to playing the same irritating soundtrack on a loop while people grunt and fight monsters. There could have been far more monster footage in this than there already was and it would have been more satisfying.

*this was filmed in '86 and forgotten about until '92

The Fare (2018)

directed by D.C. Hamilton

USA

82 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This is a hard one to talk about because it's one of those movies where all the gripes I had at the beginning were mostly explained away by a twist ending. I had this uncomfortable feeling at the start that this movie was going to be casually misogynistic, for two reasons: One being the main man's dismissive response to hearing feminist talk radio, flipping the station over to a woman talking about orgasms and proclaiming "That's more like it!"; the other being the way the main woman is treated as something incredibly special, almost inhuman, while the cab driver gets to just be some dude in a long-sleeved tee-shirt.

Trust me when I say, though, that there are very good reasons for both of those things. Nothing that seems trite and misogynistic on the surface is there solely because the people who made this are misogynists. I mean, maybe they are, I don't know, but the plot isn't intentionally sexist. In fact, this was actually written by Brinna Kelly, who also plays the woman in the film, so she definitely knew what she was going for with her character and she's not written from the perspective of a man. I knew I'd seen her somewhere before and it turns out she was with this director once already in Midnight Man, but unfortunately her character in that film really was as much of a misogynistic stereotype as I was fearing she'd be in The Fare.

Another reason why this is hard to talk about (and I promise I'll get to actually talking about it after this) is because it switches gears towards the end when it drops that reveal on you, and the gear-switch is so fascinating that I was almost bummed that the whole movie wasn't based around that story. It starts off in Twilight Zone territory, with the black-and-white and the mysterious, inexplicable goings-on being a pretty clear callback to the series, and ends up somewhere entirely different by the time the credits roll. Doing the things this movie does is extremely ambitious; not only is it a deep and meaningful film with strong character development set almost entirely in a taxi cab, it's also an exploration of mythology with some serious rewatch potential due to all of the things you instantly realize you missed the meaning of when the twist hits... set almost entirely in a taxi cab.

I do love mythology films like this one. There is tradition in imitating the style of ancient Greece when telling ancient Greek stories, and I think humans have been telling each other "this is what it was like in ye olden tymes" stories since time began, but transporting myths to a modern setting is always so interesting and creates so much potential to take characters that a lot of people would otherwise find stiff and unrelatable and turn them into you and me. I'll always think there's something really special about how we keep finding new ways to tell thousand-year-old stories.

I Lost My Body (2019)

directed by Jérémy Clapin
France
81 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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This one has been quite popular, albeit quietly so, and although it's pretty far outside the comfortable bad horror film rut I find myself in currently, I wanted to see what was up with it. Animated films blow me away every time I watch one, even if I don't particularly like the style, because the amount of effort that goes into making them is unbelievable.

Tonally, this film is not what I expected. Netflix's synopses have been trash for as long as they've had a streaming service, so I don't go off of those, but even then, I got the impression that this would be a vaguely twee, adorably awkward sort of romantic comedy, one of those terribly French ones that I think are cheesy but always somehow make me feel sad about being single in the end. It isn't like this at all. Instead, there's a feeling of deep, deep melancholy, of probing at old wounds and reliving the worst parts of your life while the world continues to turn around you. The universe in this film is kind of passively magical; things happen like severed hands scuttling around under their own volition that belong to the category of supernatural, but at the same time, there's something a little downtrodden about the whole thing. Not hopeless or outright depressed, just... you get the sense that the characters have gone through some stuff.

I loved this more realistic turn. I absolutely loved watching something where nobody was perfect, and not in that cute "nobody is perfect!" way where everybody is actually perfect but is a little clumsy. I don't hate twee French animated films (Ernest & Celestine has my entire heart) but seeing one be a bit more honest was a relief.

Another way that this different from my expectations and indeed from the promotional blurb was that it's barely a romance at all. The main character pursues a girl, but she actually steps back and sort of rejects him, and that isn't made out to be a flaw of hers. It isn't total disgust, but she has her moment where she's like "I know you think you're being coy and romantic but honestly this is weird and just asking me on a date would probably have been a better option for everyone involved". How many times do you see that in films where a guy goes after a girl? How often do we see a girl framed not as a reward for successful pursuit but as a separate person who may or may not want to be pursued?

For as much as I liked this, I'm still not sure entirely what was going on, but I'm okay with that. The story involves memory and time in a way that makes it slightly confusing, but the vital emotional elements of it still shine through. Possibly reading the book it's based on would help. It's one of those movies where you don't realize how much it affects you until you're tearing up.

Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County (1998)

directed by Dean Alioto
USA
93 minutes
2 stars out of 5
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This is a remake-slash-expansion of the vastly (and I do mean vastly) superior The McPherson Tape. I'm such a big fan of the original that I was surprised to realize I hadn't seen this. I figured some tiny bit of the original's goodness would rub off or be captured or get absorbed through osmosis by it. This isn't the case.

I'm still planning on reviewing The McPherson Tape, so I want to keep the comparisons to a minimum, but that's difficult to do since Alien Abduction is literally The McPherson Tape with everything that made the latter film good taken out of it. The same person made both films which I find somewhat hilarious, because it's like he got more money and just went "You know what? What if I remade my best film... but worse?" If he was deliberately trying to dumb it down or follow the trends of other contemporary films with the remake in order to appeal to a wider audience, he definitely succeeded, but he lost the authenticity that made the first one scary in the process. The difference between the first alien encounter scene in the original and the way the same scene is done in this one is jarring. In this film it doesn't feel tense; it doesn't feel like the characters are witnessing something they shouldn't, the fear and the genuine human reactions are not there.

This one also utilizes far more typical found-footage tropes that make it much more trite. Interspersed between warnings about "graphic content" are short interviews with "experts" about why the film is so scary, ooooh, it's the scariest thing we've ever seen, aaaaahh, it can't possibly be fake because it's so scaaary. When the "horror director" came on and said he was mad he hadn't made the film himself I scoffed like a pretentious old film critic. Some FF films can pull off that level of self-referential reputation-bolstering with fake interviews detailing their own veracity if they do it well enough, but not this one.

The aliens have most of their mystery removed, because they're treated like a Bigfoot and only shown through blurry and corrupted video. The McPherson Tape was scary even though it used cliche depictions of aliens because it didn't pull tricks when it showed them to us; they were right there with nothing to disguise them. They looked too real. Also there is a really weird plotline about one of the family's daughters bringing home her black boyfriend and her white father throwing a fit... I just don't understand why that was there. It's made abundantly clear that the father was in the wrong, but it's bizarre that that was added at all.

The one good and interesting thing about Alien Abduction is that the little girl has a bigger and more mysterious role. At some point she seems to become possessed (by aliens I guess?) and starts relaying instructions to the adults in a curiously emphatic tone of voice that all of the adults are too preoccupied to notice. The little girl does a fantastic job at being sinister enough that the audience catches on, but not so much that the adults get worried. Really, she was the best actor out of the bunch here. I love the scene where she gets one of the shotguns while everyone else is out of the room and unloads it. Such a strikingly weird thing to see a little kid do. It's disappointing that we never found out what was going on with her.

Terrified (2017)

directed by Demián Rugna
Argentina
88 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I'd been trying to find somewhere to watch this for a long time. Argentinian horror is generally always great, and I'd heard some good things about this movie in specific, so it's annoying how hard to find it is if you're a chump like me who doesn't have a Shudder subscription.

"Terrified" (originally Aterrados) is a very appropriate name for this film, because it is a film that seems solely dedicated to being scary. It doesn't resort to cheap grabs, it's just genuinely scary. A lot of people who don't watch horror movies have the same reaction- "Don't you get scared?"- when they find out I watch tons and tons of horror, and maybe it's just me, but I find that there's a wide spectrum of different ways that a horror movie can go about being horror that can't be boiled down simply to "I got scared". It's like being sad because you got paint on your pants versus being sad because your cat died. There are depth levels to horror, and there are flavors. All of this to say that Terrified hits a really rare sweet spot where the horror of it is aggressive, right in front of you, unrelenting, and yet it's not sleazy grindhouse maniac-with-a-chainsaw horror. I seldom see a movie like this that manages to take elements of a slow-burn and turn them into something faster. Where cheaper films would craft some of the more gory scenes in Terrified (specifically that first really graphic one with the levitating woman) in a way that would make them feel less frightening because of how much they show, Terrified takes those scenes and makes them feel as scary as restrained, below-the-surface horror.

Another aspect that I typically see in slow-burn films that this one manages to turn into a quick-burn (for lack of a better term) is the setting in a neighborhood or domicile that's just wrong. Polluted. Typically, haunted house movies and other scenarios where people find their living spaces somehow corrupted are better suited to slow, bump-in-the-night horror; it would feel inappropriate for a movie about a haunted house to feature the ghost running down the hallways with a big bloody knife. We're used to ghosts- and others who inhabit houses illicitly- being only half there. The creatures in Terrified do have that element of being only half there, but they're absolutely capable of dealing death and serious mortal injury in a way that we don't usually see mixed with the pervasive miasma of something not being right. The level of personal harm done in this movie generally doesn't gel with the subtle air of discomfort it has, but somehow, it works perfectly here.

Nothing is really explained, it all just sort of comes at you for 87 minutes and you're left wondering what happened before and after, if anybody got any peace or if that specific street in Buenos Aires was doomed to become more and more soiled with the unfortunate residents' emotional turmoil forever. Some of the CGI is a little dodgy but it reminded me of Banshee Chapter, which, as I've mentioned many times, is one of my favorite horror movies ever.

Mermaid Down (2019)

directed by Jeffrey Grellman
USA
91 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I expected so many things from this that I think it's fair to say I didn't actually know what to expect. I guess mainly I was nervous because I thought it would follow the same path of disrespectful treatment of mentally ill people that practically any movie set in a mental hospital does. It's not perfect whatsoever, but it is distinct from what I expected in that it treats mentally ill people as human beings who have personality traits. It shouldn't be so rare to find movies where people staying in mental hospitals are just... people in a group home.

But there's a more central element to this that I was also unsure what to expect of. A more fishy element. Since I stopped being a child I haven't watched a single movie with a mermaid in it (no shade to adults who like mermaid stuff, I just don't), much less one made by adults for adults. The unnamed mermaid in Mermaid Down garners the kind of attention that basically every woman deemed attractive does: men try to claim her, obtain her, scrabble madly after her in an attempt to catch and hold her for themselves. I don't even know what the doctor character wants with her after a certain point. Towards the beginning it seems like the guys who first catch her want to sell her tail as a curiosity. But after a while the line between the curiosity being her tail and the curiosity being her becomes so blurred that I can't see it anymore, and the reasons for her abduction become even darker and more sinister than I'd thought possible. Although progressive in many ways, this movie is still pretty gross towards women, and while it does have a fairly happy ending, there's a whole lot of violence and brutality between the beginning and it.

Alexandra Bokova doing an awesome job being a mermaid is probably the whole reason why this movie is as good as it is. I'd argue that she isn't given quite enough room to explore the physicality of the role, though, because again, even though it's not as gross as it could be, there's still a fair bit of fanservice and it feels like a lot of the shots are more deliberately sexy than they should have been. Strangely, one of the most unnecessarily sexy scenes has the mermaid not nude for a change; she's put in a weird skin-tight one-piece garment that's entirely too clingy and thin to have been functional. I liked when the ghost girl noticed she was cold and just cocooned her in blankets. We should have gotten a whole film full of comfy cozy mermaid in a blanket nest.

Oh yeah, did I mention there's a ghost girl? Did I mention there's a (very ambiguous, fairly unsatisfying) romance between her and the mermaid? If nothing else, please watch this for the ghost-mermaid love story. It's implied that mermaids can all somehow see ghosts which is fascinating lore and even more chilling when you realize the sheer amount of dead bodies that are in the ocean. There's a whole lot of hinted backstory that could have been explored, like the mermaid learning sign language from pirates. They could have stuck those things in where the weird and unnecessary fanservice was.

Pilgrim (2019)

directed by Marcus Dunstan
USA
80 minutes
2 stars out of 5
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In my opinion, we've yet to get an actually good Thanksgiving horror movie. I suspect it's because the holiday itself sucks. But since not a lot of movies with that specific setting are being made in general, I had high hopes that a modern look at it such as Pilgrim would rise above the other mediocre films and finally do better.

I was wrong.

Another aspect of making a Thanksgiving horror movie in 2019 is that more people than ever realize how incredibly flawed and downright insulting, inaccurate, and harmful the concept of Thanksgiving that we were taught in school is. This could be used to make a really great horror movie that becomes a commentary on colonialism, or you could do what Pilgrim does, which is pull out a performative "but what about the Native Americans?" moment and then not bring it up anymore. While acknowledging what's wrong with Thanksgiving is better than presenting the whitewashed version without objection, Pilgrim essentially says to us, "Oh, by the way? Genocide? Bad. But are we going to do anything more than state that we know this, like address ongoing colonialism? Nah, being cynical about Thanksgiving is all we really need for Woke Points."

It is also not a very good movie. The premise is awesome- murderous pilgrim home invasion? count me in- but in execution it feels like little more than something made with a couple buddies, which is surprising considering this director made The Collector and its sequel, as well as The Neighbor, and as such is definitely no small, struggling indie talent. Tonally this movie is just completely weird- there's one scene in particular where a modern character and the pilgrim woman, Patience, are having a strained conversation in the kitchen, and the way this scene is shot is so deeply bizarre that it feels comedic. The camera drifts around like it's suspended on a wire, yet somehow, the frame still manages to cut off everybody's chin and forehead. Random zooms are peppered throughout the film which, again, feel comedic. I get that some aspect of this would inevitably be funny with an outlandish premise like the one it's got, but it doesn't feel intentional. It's got this weird, hallucinogenic vibe that's totally out of line with even the less decent other Into the Dark episodes. I really don't understand what they were going for here.

Another thing that irked me and made this feel more like a sub-par student film is that they didn't even make the pilgrims look or act accurate at all. I was confused about whether or not they were meant to be time-traveling supernatural pilgrims or just a bunch of people who dress up and murder partygoers, because the film itself can't seem to commit to either explanation. Even though I sometimes want to, I try not to be a stickler for historical accuracy, because overall enjoyment of a film is by and large more important than getting each detail down pat (although achieving the latter can lead to the former). That being said, I feel like they could have at least made everyone's various hat and shoe buckles not look like they came from Party City on clearance.

Girl on the Third Floor (2019)

directed by Travis Stevens
USA
93 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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Before I start, a small disclaimer: I know CM Punk is in this movie, however I have no idea who he is or why he's famous, so I don't know if it's unusual for him to be in a horror movie, and I'm not gonna talk about him being there. I do live under a rock, thanks.

Anyway. This movie starts out strong because it uses such distinctly horrific imagery; the bodily fluids leaking out of every crevice of the house are deeply unsettling, and it feels like it's going down that path of house-as-character that is so fascinating to see in a horror film. The house feels like it's watching the protagonist, doing the old "stare at your back but turn away when you turn to look at me" thing. It's a positively sinister house and I love sinister houses in horror. However, I think I can pinpoint when this movie turns weird, and it's when it decides to go off the path of being a film about a house that has something very bad going on with it and becomes just a haunted house movie. Spoilers ahead.

When the protagonist's wife shows up at the house and becomes the main character is when everything goes wrong. I don't see why this movie felt the need to turn the presence(s) inhabiting the house into something we could see and parse, something with a story behind it, when having the house simply subsume its inhabitants with psychological torture and icky fluids was much creepier than giving us an all-access tour of the house's dark secrets. The separation between the previous inhabitants and the house did not need to be there and made for a less creepy, less original idea. A scenario where the house has slowly become the people who died in it sounds to me like something I would much prefer watching over a generic haunting, and I like hauntings. The film feels too literal-minded; ambiguity is okay- and desirable- when you have something as enigmatic as this.

This movie is also kind of weird about gender roles. I feel like it wanted to be feminist but it was only achieving that in the offhanded way that a lot of dudes will say they're feminist and then turn around and use that claim as a bargaining chip to get points from women they want to hook up with ("how can I be rude? I'm a feminist!"). There is, literally, a scene where the main character's friend and a bartender, both men, declare that they're feminists while the main character shakes his head. This is a weird moment, but it might not actually be as weird as it looked: I think the real beast of this movie was the main character's misogyny. It was repeatedly hinted at that the house is receptive to the people who live in it, implying that if they're abrasive and cruel to women- like the protagonist- they wouldn't have a good time. But there's so many holes in the way the movie uses this plot that it's useless as any kind of statement. Why would the house go after his wife if its main problem with him was how he treated women? Why would it go after her baby? Why would it kill a dog??? Maybe I'm interpreting everything wrong and nothing I'm saying here is the way the movie was intended to be taken, but... how else should it have been taken?

The movie is also bad on a technical level, which is something I don't usually talk about since I know nothing about the process of making a film and I stick to talking "from my gut" about how movies make me feel rather than critiquing their specs. But even I can tell that having the camera focused full-frontally on characters every time they talk feels awkward and unnatural. The cameraperson is not interviewing the actors whenever they speak. There's also random quick zoom-ins that are so jarring they honestly felt comedic. I guess I just didn't vibe with whatever this movie was going for, both technically and in terms of story. I wanted to, because it had cool ideas, but something about it was undercooked.

Perfect (2018)

directed by Eddie Alcazar
UA
85 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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It somehow evaded me that Flying Lotus had done all the music for this film, despite him being one of my favorite artists. That's kind of baffling to me now after watching it, because while the dark, twisted, futuristic aesthetic is very much in line with his style, its subject matter feels uncomfortable.

So let's talk about the good stuff first, because this is, in my opinion, a good movie. Aesthetically it is immaculate- the opening credits alone are absolutely gorgeous in a disgusting way (and have some harsh strobing lights, so skip to about 3:05 if you're sensitive to that; you won't miss anything) that reminds me a lot of the sort of artwork Arca has always utilized. The way it's filmed is just beautiful, it's immersive in a way that hits you immediately and keeps you in its world for the entire running time. People move with an aching slowness, forcing us to take in every detail, every movement of muscle and skin, every shadow they cast and every shadow cast on them. It's like everyone is moving through this miasma, a glittered oil slick of humid air and darkness. It's almost exactly like Mandy except not as good and with trippy electronic music instead of trippy metal.

Unfortunately, this aesthetic perfection is marred by being thoroughly gross about women (and gross in general, but about women too). This is essentially the story of a privileged little mommy's boy who gets sent off to a cushy "retreat" because he did a whoopsie and murdered his girlfriend. Like, it's an amazing movie, it looks gorgeous, but that's what it is. The main character is very blatantly the only person who matters in the entire film. Virtually no other men but him are present in any significant manner. The women that surround him are his playthings. All the women in the film are there to... I don't know, eat berries? Wear little clothing? Pose seductively? Get strangled? It's really a shame how little regard Perfect has for women because otherwise it's very enjoyable. It just takes you out of it when a woman wanders into the frame and is immediately crushed like a bug under the ego of a boring white boy. There's also one scene that casts transfeminine people as disturbed fetishists which, alone, put me off the whole film quite a bit.

Also, there's a good chance the immense amount of nonsense psychobabble will turn you off. I don't think any of the narration in this actually means anything, or if so, it's solely in reference to the main character's situation and not an attempt to philosophize in any real-world capacity. If you cut out 99% of the narration, this would have been even more amazing, because you could let that pulsating darkness wash over you without being distracted by somebody talking about stuff that only makes sense to them.

This is the apex of style over substance. Ostensibly there's a point to all this, a story about redemption (if not perfection), but I can't shake the feeling that the place it comes from is one of privilege and elitism. I chafe at sci-fi that only includes flawless people with the world at their fingertips, and if they don't currently have the world at their fingertips, then all of the technology in the film serves to aid them on their journey to get it. The end of the film has the main character returning to his life, having- we are to assume- learned that most difficult lesson, Murdering Girls Is Bad Actually. I would have probably liked this more if everybody had shut up.

Antrum (2018)

directed by David Amito, Michael Laicini
USA
95 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

I wanted to see this for a long time because I'll check out any kind of "cursed movie"-themed anything, even if it's trash. It's my absolute favorite niche horror subgenre. I knew very little about Antrum beforehand and somehow I got the impression that it was going for the comedy angle, but it is not. Some parts are unintentionally funny, but I'm fairly certain all of it was meant to be played straight.

So this movie's schtick is that it opens with a few minutes of documentary footage presenting the story of a lost film from the 70s that is supposedly so cursed, practically everybody who comes into contact with it bursts into flames or dies in some other horrific manner. Lots of people are interviewed who reference fictional films with similar concepts, like John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns, so this is a movie that knows its horror- although you can definitely tell that fact just from watching it, even without the name-dropping. After some introduction and several warnings about how the filmmakers cannot guarantee that we won't spontaneously combust or have heart attacks or whatever, the "real" Antrum begins.

Despite how hard the opening segment tries to convince us hapless viewers that the images presented in Antrum are somehow capable of doing real-world damage, the actual film doesn't seem to have done enough to really push the "cursed" angle. I just feel like you need to do more than insert a screen saying "666 satin the devul" for 0.02 seconds and call it ~*subliminal messaging*~ in order for something to feel genuinely foreboding. I think that's what this lacks, when you get right down to it: an atmosphere of dread is not present because it seems far too focused on creating imagery that is explicitly connected with evil. Again, presenting me with a contextless image of a horned-goat "Satan" will not make me feel ill at ease. There has to be something behind it, not simply the picture. I sound like I'm saying I didn't like this movie, but I did- like I said, cursed films are my favorite thing, I love practically anything that dips into that idea- I just felt like it was extremely un-subtle, especially for something that pretended at subliminal messaging.

I did genuinely like the fake Antrum movie, though. I would be upset if I was at a showing of it and got interrupted by the dude next to me catching on fire. It's not terribly believable as a 70s film, but it's entirely believable as something made by people who enjoy 70s films, and if you're another person who also enjoys them, the visual language serves as a kind of in-joke where you'll immediately understand what they were going for. However, this is one of those films that starts off slowly, hits its stride midway, and then almost immediately begins to taper off to boringness. I really dislike the ending. It shifts from a creepy mystery to something known, something tangible and easily imaginable, and that ruins the whole curse element because it no longer feels like the curse fits the film. They even seemed to be going for a "but was it all in their heads????" explanation which would have been a dramatic departure from the entire philosophy of the thing. This was still good, though, and still worth the wait. It's just less of a stick-with-you film and more of a watch-for-a-good-time film.

Banshee Chapter (2013)

directed by Blair Erickson
USA/Germany
87 minutes
5 stars out of 5
----

After my most recent rewatch, I figured it was high time to do a better review of something that has slowly become one of my favorite horror movies. It feels strange to have this be one of my favorite films because objectively it seems so random, like it should have been a blip on the radar in 2013 that got relegated to the back rooms of Netflix and never remarked upon. But nothing else is like this movie, nothing scratches the same itch for me that it does.

The reason why I love this movie so much is because of its basic concept, but more specifically because of one single line that defines that concept: "It wants to wear us". I'm no stranger to cosmic horror, I'm a big fan of beings that stalk us puny humans from other galaxies and whatnot. But that one line encompasses something more frightening than even what Lovecraft started with From Beyond. Generally, the motives of interdimensional beings such as the ones in that story and in many other works of cosmic horror are either obtuse and vague or much too grandiose: either they just want to kill us for some unspecified reason, or they must rip the entire planet apart and gnaw on its core with their slavering jaws, etc. In Banshee Chapter, they- whatever they are- want to put us on like a skin. They want to wear us, for indeterminate reasons. They are not very good at wearing us- they stretch us out like a tight shirt, making deeply upsetting imitations of humanity with all the details wrong. "It wants to wear us" implies a being that is so much more powerful than us that it can easily seek us out, utilize our shells, and discard us for its own unfathomable goals, and there's little we can do about it. That is why I've seen this movie so many times; because nothing else hits that exact note of horror.

Banshee Chapter feels like one of those horror movies where the people who made it didn't know how to make anything other than a horror movie. I have to wonder whether the development of a half-baked love story between the main character and the guy who gets yoinked by interdimensional demons at the beginning of the film was organic or if it was demanded by whoever financed the film. It's almost laughable how underdeveloped and rushed it feels; maybe it's just me because I was so thoroughly invested in the horror aspects of the film, but that attempt at a romantic sub-plot would have been better off left alone. The camerawork is also really weird in this movie and is obviously a turn-off to many people, judging by the bad reviews. I kept forgetting it wasn't actually a found-footage movie because it really feels like it was filmed by somebody with a camcorder and very shaky hands. I don't know that this adds anything to the bigger picture- it may be the only part of this movie that I don't like. But it's certainly not enough of an issue to have distracted me from that sweet, sweet cosmic horror I came for.

I could go on about this for much longer, and I've had to delete a paragraph or two here because it's embarrassing that I like this forgettable (to most) horror movie as much as I do. Those beings are just so creepy that I can't get enough of them. This movie nails the inherent creepiness of sitting next to somebody and having them say they can see something that you can't. Maybe when somebody else comes along and makes a better movie about skin-stealing interdimensional horrorterrors, I'll like that more, but for now this is the good stuff, the best stuff indeed. Blair Erickson, please come back and make another horror movie. Where did you go.

Free Fire (2016)

directed by Ben Wheatley
UK/USA
90 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I wanted to see this really bad when it first came out, but luck was not on my side. I'm happy to finally have gotten to watch it even if it was on the small screen. It was almost worth waiting until I could watch it with headphones, because everybody has a gorgeous accent and it was nice to be able to hear them all well.

I found a lot of similarities between Free Fire and A Field in England, which, as I've mentioned many times before, is my favorite Ben Wheatley/Amy Jump film and one of my favorite movies in general. Mainly: both films are set in a kind of interim, in a space that should have only been occupied momentarily before moving on, but instead becomes the setting for the whole film through a series of various accidents. A Field in England is set during a war but away from the war, on the outskirts where the fighting never reached. Free Fire is set in an abandoned factory where two parties meet for an arms deal, a location that was only supposed to be a halfway point, but then somebody makes it personal and it becomes a staging area for an all-out skirmish. I also think it's important to consider that no one in this film, despite their ample access to guns, feels like a smooth, intelligent career criminal- this is all just a bunch of crooks who can't aim trying to look tough.

The violence in Free Fire is not sophisticated; it's a down-and-dirty gunfight between a whole mess of people who are only very loosely on each other's respective side. People get shot in the back, there's no honor here. It doesn't even matter that everyone knows where everyone else is. The knowledge that if you move, they'll shoot you, and if they move, you'll shoot them, keeps people crouched behind rubble but still shouting insults at each other. All that matters is cover, not concealment. There are probably invisible lines that could be drawn between who shot who, who shoots at who, who dies, and who survives, and you can feel that choreography of the fight coming through, but at the same time it's messy. This is the central tenet of the film and the reason why, I feel, most people will either like or dislike it: it's messy. It's not plot-driven, it doesn't have much for you to get invested in since practically everybody in it is a terrible person. It's literally just a fight scene that lasts an hour and a half. Even though you know that, you still feel like every character is internally going "come on already, let's finish this up so we can leave". Which they probably were- except no one leaves because they get shot, set on fire, whacked with crowbars, run over by a van, and so on and so forth.

Ben Wheatley is such a strange director sometimes because I do genuinely consider him one of my favorites and I have yet to see a movie of his that I don't like, but at the same time, a lot of his movies just... are. I like him because this is a feat in itself, to create something that doesn't feel like it's urgently requiring me to feel anything but rather just exists for me to watch and digest it. Kill List is like this up until the finale, and A Field in England is definitely like this- it's not that there isn't action in either film, it's just that it all feels less glamorized. I wouldn't consider this radical filmmaking or anything but it's a different way of looking at how a narrative can be presented and I will always get excited when this duo releases something new.

Bog (1979)

directed by Don Keeslar
USA
90 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
----

Bog! Bog! Bog! Bog! I'll watch anything having to do with bogs. This of course means I end up watching a lot of terrible movies, and I expected this to be one of them, with a heaping helping of exploitation due to the synopsis mentioning a creature that needs female blood. This wasn't the way it turned out.

The tone of this movie is... weird. It's like Person A came up with an idea for a typical sleazy creature feature, showed it to Person B, and Person B said "Now wait just a minute, young man. That doesn't sound very respectful." I kept expecting this to succumb to the exploitation of women that a lot of monster movies fall back on and it just didn't. I was displeased that the first two characters to die were both women, and that they seemed to have been treated as disposable in favor of their husbands, but there's two other women (I know, I know, a whole two compared to a cadre of men) who are disparate in personality and motives and who stay alive for most of the film. One has a weird and unnecessary romance shoehorned in, but you can fast-forward past it and its accompanying cheesy theme song. All of the women in this are significantly older than the giggling teens who usually get devoured by monsters on film, too. Actually, it isn't just the women, everybody in this is at least 40. It really feels like a movie that was going to be much grosser but somehow took the path of least misogyny.

Bog is also very restrained in terms of showing us its titular bog monster, and that's for the better. It still would have been fun if they hadn't shown it to us at all. Seeing it at the end, that lumbering fish-monster with crab claws, was hilarious, but as long as it was just a shape in the shadows voiced by what sounded like a guy talking into a box fan, it had an air of mystery to it that was more interesting than any walking fishman could be. In the film, there's a woman who lives out in the woods and can... commune with the bog being somehow, in a way that isn't really explained in any depth, and her part was genuinely good, not trashy-good. While the physical appearance of the bog being was cheesy enough to render everything about it inherently ridiculous, the forest woman's talk of deep time, of inexorably long sleep, of the frozen depths birthing creatures cut off from the world, gave the bog being an almost Lovecraftian feel.

This is mostly one to be watched for the laughs. The lady asking if there's "some sort of Dracula" running around out there, the blood scent machine that pumps out the smell of blood in a thick red mist, everybody continuing to dynamite the lake when dynamiting the lake was what woke up the bog creature in the first place, everybody continuing to dynamite the lake without considering that the bog being might not actually be in the lake at the moment... it's just a mess, the whole thing, and it's a really fun and somehow strangely endearing mess.

Sweetheart (2019)

directed by J.D. Dillard
USA
82 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

I'd heard a lot of early good reviews of this, but I deliberately kept myself in the dark about the plot, which I like doing when a movie is hyped, because it's more fun. I certainly had fun trying to figure out what was going on in the time before the reveal, and when that reveal came, it made me rework the way I'm used to thinking about horror movies. There may be spoilers ahead but it seems like almost every other review has revealed the identity of the monster, so everyone (but me prior to watching this) probably already knows.

It's incredibly refreshing to watch a movie where a single woman has to survive in the wilderness where she's actually depicted as capable of doing that. She makes it seem easy. I mean, she makes a fish weir for Pete's sake, how many people would make a fish weir when alone on a deserted island? That this ability to survive is shown without comment makes it even better- character backstory and interpersonal relationships are not this movie's strong suit, and that's just fine; not being privy to the irrelevant details and only getting an outsider's picture of the inner workings of characters can sometimes- sometimes- make them feel more real. Once more people show up, there's also repeated emphasis on how the main character is apparently not to be believed, and much blame for the initial shipwreck is placed on her, not due to a flaw in her own character, but rather the inherent desire of most white people to want to believe black women are untrustworthy and prone to hysterics. That nobody believes the main character has no bearing on the plot- they believe her eventually, when they get kicked in the ribs by sharkboy- but it's an element of realism. The title itself comes from a single line of condescension that is, again, irrelevant to the plot, but what woman hasn't been called "sweetheart" against her will at some point?

The reason why I said this made me rethink my views on horror is because I am so unused to seeing a creature that's shown to us full-frontal for a relatively large portion of the film. I'm so dedicated to loving horror movies that utilize the slow-burn technique over things that are this proud of their monster that it took me a minute to realize this was a good movie at all. Which it is- it's really fantastic. But some part of my brain has been relegating monster movies that deign to show off their monsters to the backlot of horror, the ones that, while they may be fun, can never be interesting or scary because they don't leave anything to the imagination. This is a big fat Bad Opinion.

The monster in Sweetheart looks so good. I was floored at how beautiful the practical effects work on it was. Seeing so much of it was, again, a bit of a shock to me, but then I couldn't get enough. When it was swimming in the water, the way the intricate designs on its back moved like the skin of a real creature was just gorgeous. Even its head looked nice, although that moment where it popped up through the bottom of the raft was inexplicably comical. Believe the hype- this might not be the shadow-shrouded, nighttime horror you're used to, but it's a ride that packs a fish-scented punch.

[REC] (2007)

directed by Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza
Spain
78 minutes
5 stars out of 5
----

I re-watched this recently because I was feeling bummed out and it occurred to me that I've never given it a proper review, despite it being my favorite horror movie and the movie I've watched the most times. I'm not going to say that it's the most well-made horror movie or even really the best one, but it's my favorite. It's my comfort movie. That's just the way it is.

We start with a totally cold open- no title cards telling us that the following footage was recovered from an abandoned building, no credits, no fake theme song. And this is the way it unfolds until that terribly inappropriate rock music over the end credits. For 75 minutes this movie just goes, moving steadily back and forth and then up further and further through the apartment building until finally reaching the top, with nowhere left to go. It feels claustrophobic because all the characters seem to have a tendency to sort of clump together, I guess partially out of fear and partially out of a need to have everybody in the shot at once. The gore is also really good and I admire the restraint used- when it's there, it looks gnarly and realistic, but there's not too much of it. I've seen this too many times to be able to tell if it's scary or not, but to me this is the perfect tone for a found-footage movie: not too much of a slow burn, with just enough chaos to feel disastrous.

Upon really giving it some more attention, this is also one of my favorite premises for a zombie outbreak because it's so unique. I'm still not 100% sure what was going on but it was definitely much more complicated than a simple contagion. The best I can figure, somebody found a genuine case of demonic possession in a little girl and began doing experiments on her, and from those experiments, they discovered some kind of biological element to the possession, but something went horribly wrong- as it always does- and they just kind of... locked her in the attic and tried to forget about it. The set design on the upstairs apartment is really spectacular at conveying that mad-scientist feel, and we barely even get to see it since the lights are broken most of the time. The idea of a contagious demonic possession is just really cool to me, and it's something I really have never seen before in a zombie film. I don't know if we can even call these folks "zombies" if possession is the case.

I love Manuela Velasco's character too, I love how she freaks out and starts yelling at everybody all the time, instantly going from preppy news anchor to unwilling member of the zombie apocalypse in half a second. I can see how this might be perceived as overacting, but it felt more like a personality trait to me. You can tell that for a couple of minutes after things get serious, but before things get too serious, she's loving it; finally getting to cover something interesting.

I don't really know why this is my favorite horror movie. I think I watched it for the first time in a bathroom with all the lights off. It just endures in my mind for some reason, and every time I watch it, it still feels fresh. I've seen all the sequels too and they are mostly bad. This is the one for me.

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

directed by Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez
USA
81 minutes
5 stars out of 5
----

This was one of the first horror movies I watched as a young teenager when I realized "hey, I can watch horror movies when I'm alone and no one can stop me". I was in a pretty temporary living situation, and absconding off to a corner of the house to be alone for an hour and a half and watching The Blair Witch Project was fun. I know people are of many opinions on this film, but to me it's a dear favorite.

Claiming that this movie was the first to do most of the things it does isn't fair to the found-footage movies that came before it, but I do think it has to be recognized how innovative this still was. Even though it wasn't the first found-footage movie, it's one of the best ones I've seen in terms of feeling really real. This was achieved, so the story goes, by keeping the actors somewhat in the dark: I haven't read every detail surrounding the production, but essentially they were given a limited script and not told what was going to happen around every turn, as well as (I believe) occasionally startled for real on set, so a lot of the fear you see in the film is genuine. It doesn't feel like the footage we see in this movie was for us. We're not privy to the details of the relationships between the characters. They don't give interviews that tell us of their intentions with the film or their personal hopes and dreams. Things get ugly, friends scream at each other and make each other cry. The footage we see was never meant to be released, except for maybe as behind-the-scenes snippets on Heather's forever unfinished Blair Witch documentary.

As everyone knows, we never see the witch. We don't even get a clear picture of what she looks like, or really nail down who she is or why she does what she does. This is both characteristic of a folk legend- the varying physical descriptions of the witch, the "well I heard" stories from everybody and their sister- and it serves to make her a much more frightening image in our minds. A lot of found-footage movies will show interviews with eyewitnesses where they say things like "I saw the witch and she was six feet tall with long craggly nails and grey hair!" and later in the film, lo and behold, we see a six-foot witch with craggly nails and grey hair. In Blair Witch, we're told the witch is many things: covered in coarse hair from head to toe, nonexistent, a grey mist rising up over a river. People don't really claim to have seen her personally, it's always secondhand or in legend only. Few, if any, other horror movies have come close to touching this kind of strategic restriction-of-information-as-development, and it's probably the most crucial part of making this such an iconic and terrifying movie.

I know I've mentioned this before when referencing this movie, but you really can't do this stuff today. We're all far too good at the internet now. I'm not trying to make it out like people in 1999 were living in caves, getting their news off of shadows on the walls, but it was easier to present somebody with a VHS tape and say "this is real" than it is today. I love The Blair Witch Project for being a 1999 time capsule, something that probably won't be done again- I don't lament this, I don't disparage new horror movies, I just appreciate the rarity of this one.

Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel (2018)

directed by Stephen Cognetti
USA
89 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
----

The first Hell House LLC was good, possibly even great, which is why I've been so reluctant to touch any of the sequels. I was dismayed by the thought of such a solid movie heading in the direction of becoming one of those series that just crank out increasingly incoherent films year after year. I was mildly surprised by Abaddon Hotel, but please keep in mind that I am a garbage-lover with a high tolerance for found-footage horror, so the objective truth is probably closer to the many one-star reviews than my take on it.

Abaddon Hotel is a very mixed bag- it almost feels like two different people were at the wheel the whole time, which is unusual seeing as the same director has remained on for all three Hell House LLC movies thus far. Sometimes it's genuinely really creepy, and sometimes it's "aaaaah everybody run from the life-sized clown doll". This second entry into the series leans more towards "aaah clown" scares, but there is one moment that for some reason was really freaky to me, to the point where I had to look away: Toward the beginning, they show several videos from social media accounts whose owners disappeared after going into the hotel, and in one of them, the cameraman rounds a corner to see nothing but a pair of legs, only visible from the waist down, standing on a staircase. He says "Sorry. I'll go now." in an unnaturally flat voice, but the talk show host presenting the footage tells us that the camera remained on, stationary, all night, until the battery ran out. The legs never move. They just stand there. This is a completely unnerving moment because there is no musical sting whatsoever; it's the polar opposite of a jump scare and that's why it works. For something so deeply disquieting to exist in a movie where getting chased by clown mannequins is a huge plot point gives me whiplash.

This is how the rest of the movie proceeds, for the most part. I feel like it's much better at explaining the horror as opposed to showing it to us. Single lines- "they're all in the dining room" "they have no eyes"- create images in our head that are much creepier than anything we could see on screen. 

The narrative timeline switches back and forth between a couple of characters being interviewed on the morning news, as in the beginning, and footage of the characters going into the house. In addition, a couple minutes of "police interview" after the final girl is found bloodied and traumatized are tacked on at various points. This all is as confusing as it sounds. Having the news interview remain throughout the movie didn't feel like it had any purpose; I don't see why there were all the jumps back and forth when it would have been more coherent and kept us viewers more focused to dispose of the interview first and then get to the meat of the story.

And that ending really fell off a cliff. This movie combines leaving stuff to our imagination with showing way too much right there in front of us in a way that, again, is whiplash-inducing. I gave it a tentatively higher rating than a lot of other people because some of the scares are genuinely effective, but overall the movie seems to be too enthusiastic about shoving them in our faces sometimes.

Wounds (2019)

directed by Babak Anvari
UK
94 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
----

I'm genuinely confused. I had heard nothing but negative opinions of this movie. Every time I saw it mentioned online, it was always followed by a reply like "I heard that one wasn't looking too good". Did everyone see a different movie than I did, or am I just a big fan of awful things? Because the Wounds I just watched is one of the best movies to come out all year.

Where I think some people might be getting tripped up is if they lack context from the source material. "Wounds" is a short story surrounded by other stories that expand upon its central theme- Hell- in various ways. Nathan Ballingrud's Hell is ancient and alchemical, inhabited by Hieronymus Bosch demons. This Hell is accessible through our world; dying isn't necessary. Ballingrud doesn't trivialize Hell with the same characteristics that many writers do, simply trotting out the old standards about a lake of fire and evil things that are essentially shaped like humans with horns; he creates a place that is utterly anathema to everything we hope to be, that operates on a logic not intrinsically good or bad but simply there. It's like a scientific description of a horrifying predatory fish living at the bottom of the ocean: while humans, up here on land, may recognize these things as creatures out of a nightmare, in objective reality they're only functioning the way evolution guided them to function. However, this doesn't rid us of our instinctual fear of big-fanged monsters with huge white eyes lurking in the darkness.

This movie sticks exactly to the story. It is a 1:1 translation. The things I was imagining in my head while reading the story were right there on screen. When we first see the main character's girlfriend watching that video of the tunnel, I was startled by how much it matched the description in the book, and how incredibly menacing it was. It's exactly as described- that inexorably slow movement through an unnatural space. I haven't seen something look so blatantly cursed since The Ring.

Even though this is an incredibly dark movie, I feel like I'm making it out to seem heavier than it is. The remarkable thing about Ballingrud's writings about Hell is that they don't feel excessively brutal, like- and I hesitate to make this comparison because this is another author whose work I enjoy, just for different reasons- Clive Barker's explorations into ultraviolence. It doesn't draw overly on religious tradition, or emphasize the importance of good/bad morality. The people who seem to be in control of the game all the other characters are unwillingly dragged into playing are just a bunch of soft-looking college kids. The idea is that Hell is, literally and metaphorically, around the corner.

There's something about the poster for this movie that led me to believe maybe the bad reviews would be true: Armie Hammer holds a cell phone to his ear, screaming, as the back of his head dissolves into mist, presumably in horror at whatever is on the other end. It's overly graphic and almost entirely unrelated to any scene in the movie in the way that I'm used to hand-painted posters for schlocky movies of the 80s being, and it set me up for something corny. Instead I got a movie that so closely matched the tone of the original material that it was deeply, deeply disturbing.

In the Tall Grass (2019)

directed by Vincenzo Natali
Canada
101 minutes
3 stars out of 5
----

I had just finished reading the short story this was adapted from a couple of hours beforehand and decided it would be fun to watch the film while it was still fresh in my mind. I'll try to keep this review relevant to the movie and avoid slipping into talking about how good I thought the story was. Even with the necessity of adding material to make a sub-100-page story into a 101-minute movie, I was surprised at how much was changed up in this film, although to its credit I suppose it did mostly keep the same spirit. Or maybe the spirit was entirely in my head due to having read the story so recently.

There's a lot I liked and a lot I didn't like about this. Dislikes come first just to get it all out of the way. After about the first fifteen minutes, the film feels like it departs from the story entirely to become this sort of vaguely action-y romp through the titular grass. The issue I had with this is that it went too far- I'm not talking in any way about gore or violence here, it's just that it takes something that was horrifying because there were so few real, tangible elements of it (the grass/Tobin/the Man/the rock) and throws in stuff like weird CGI grass people that really didn't need to be there. The original story felt so hopeless. Generally I am not one to like horror movies more when they're devoid of the possibility of a happy ending (which is why I enjoyed the ending to the film), but the true and pure malevolence of the other people the main characters encounter in the field was chilling and largely absent in the film.

Some of the things that were added in made it better, however. If they'd totally gotten rid of all the CGI it would have made a huge improvement, but certain plot elements were very interesting. They added in a point about the rock supposedly being the exact center of the contiguous United States and that was fascinating to me because it creates almost a nesting doll of liminal spaces. First, the field is inside the liminal space of the imagined Exact Center, a point that's impossible to be at and not be conscious of your position in the world. But at the same time it's impossible to be conscious of your position inside the field, which itself is liminal- you're nowhere when you're inside it; you move but you go nowhere. I almost wish that line about being the center of the continent was elaborated upon a little more because I found it added a lot. The aspect of time dilation is a huge, almost the most important, element in the film as well, where it was barely an aside in the story.

I really chafed at the grass-faced people because the scariest thing about the original story was that the field was the monster, it wasn't that it had monsters in it. Stephen King and Joe Hill both have always been good at imbuing places with a sinister energy without the need for a humanoid persona to represent it (though they do that well, too). Vincenzo Natali's thing is futuristic horror with large dollops of CGI. Those two styles don't necessarily play well together. I really did enjoy this movie for what it was, and I think it's worth your time and was worth mine as well, but there's a lot of things that beg to be pointed out about it.

The Dead Center (2019)

directed by Billy Senese
USA
93 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I was anticipating this movie for a long time, because in this house we love Shane Carruth and watch anything he has anything to do with. I wasn't certain what it was about, and when I found out it involved a psychiatric hospital, my immediate concern was that it would have a reductive, cliched idea of mental illness- but this is not the case at all, and I found myself feeling like I had to apologise for my own assumptions that nobody is capable of handling mental illness without being offensive.

People with a whole range of different personalities are shown in The Dead Center, there's no monolithic idea of the screaming or laughing "maniac" as depicted in most horror movies: a girl quietly but emphatically complains about her bed being too close to the door, a woman worriedly says she doesn't want to go home, a man insists that he isn't getting better and he's going to die, and one old woman seems to be there simply because of dementia, but none of these things are presented as frightening or making them lesser people. It isn't perfect, but it's a far more nuanced understanding of mental health than I often see.

Apart from that, I also wasn't sure whether or not this would be a horror movie, but it definitely, definitely is, and it has a very unique way of going about being horror. It's about a man who comes back to life and escapes the morgue he was in, becoming a living patient of that hospital instead, and the doctor who becomes interested in treating him and finds out eventually that both of them- the undead man and the doctor who got wrapped up in his life- are involved in something unearthly. I think this is a very intelligent movie because it really feels like it knows where others have gone wrong in presenting the concepts it wants to present. It's very cautious, it doesn't hit us right off the bat with the whole "wooo what if there were spooky monsters waiting for us when we die" thing; it spends a lot of time building up the concept that the dead man is trying to convey, unfolding it mostly through an outsider's perspective, piecing it all together. One not-so-great side effect of the patient way The Dead Center establishes the things it's saying is that it can feel like it's grasping for something and never reaching it- sometimes you want to say, okay, but what is it? Why is it scary? But you just have to wait. Because you do find out.

It seems like this was a short film with some of the same actors before it was a movie, and the director also made Closer To God, a very middling film with some similar themes of a mixture of medical science and the supernatural. For years and years the only thing I've wanted was for Shane Carruth to direct a horror movie, and I guess technically that hasn't happened yet, but he's starred in and produced one now, so I'm pretty happy. The one issue I had with it is the repeated association of dying with your mouth open as automatically implying that your death was traumatic- that's just how a lot of us die. It takes muscle tone to hold your mouth shut, dude! Muscle tone you lose when you, y'know, stop being alive! 

Luz (2018)

directed by Tilman Singer
Germany
70 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I think this is one of those movies that will inspire some debate about whether it's horror, "horror", or not horror at all. It is too brightly-lit and artsy to be immediately recognizable as the same kind of horror that people who may not be frequent fliers with the genre define "horror" as. But there's something really dark in Luz, although it might not be as dark in the literal sense as it could be. Things linger in shadows and fog and, most importantly, in memory. The individual characters are less focused on than the things possessing them.

Aside from that there is an entity and it takes hold of several people over the course of the film, I couldn't figure out a whole lot of what was happening here. Just when I thought I had the timeline figured out, I got messed up again. But the ambiance and the way I got sucked into every scene, especially when the actors were so good and could exert such a gravitational pull over the entire movie, more than made up for some blurry details. There's something about the opening scene with the man and the woman in the bar that I really loved, because it felt to me like she was embodying the archetypical "crazy woman" but that that wasn't necessarily being cast in a bad light. And it made it all the more interesting that she transmits the thing inside her to him- instead of the usual course of things where the crazy woman has to be taught, has to be made right by a man, she indoctrinates him to herself. It's a situation where her craziness is power instead of an impairment.

Although this is definitely a movie about possession, it's obtuse and vague about it. Strangely, it follows some conventions about the trope- particularly, the summoning of the demon by a couple of rebellious Catholic-school girls via the chanting of an extremely profane altered version of a prayer- but discards almost everything else. There was one line in particular that hit me because it was one of those lines that's so succinct but conveys so much deep menace that it single-handedly tells us a lot about whatever creature is speaking it: when the psychiatrist is possessed and his assistant asks "Since when can you speak Spanish?" and he answers "Since it was invented." Really good demons or other ageless entities don't need to give the whole blah-puny-humans spiel, they don't need to tout their might and fearsomeness, they just have to give small lines like that which reveal the length and depth of their existence.

There's something just so solid about this movie. A lot of possession-themed films could take cues from this. It's hard to describe how it constructs its world, how the grainy film and vacant, late-night locations create a place where nobody is safe, where nothing feels real. It's amazing that this was a thesis film. 

The Death Wheelers (1973)

directed by Don Sharp
UK
85 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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The Death Wheelers, AKA Psychomania, is a movie that doesn't quite seem to know how ridiculous it comes off and is all the more endearing for it. It's about a group of terribly British, motorcycle-riding youths who basically just ride around being delinquents and scaring mothers pushing babies in prams. And they also happen to come back from the dead. After one of them discovers, courtesy of his mystically-inclined mother, that weird powers running in his family allow him to commit suicide and come back invincible, he convinces the other gang members to off themselves as well, giving them all the time in the world to continue knocking over stacks of cereal boxes and antagonizing the local police force.

Yes, this is a movie where, for all the airs of menace the bikers put on, all the unashamedly dreadful things they do, all their leather jackets (sidenote: I love any gang that has members calling themselves stuff like "Chopped Meat" and "Hatchet" alongside some guy named Bertram) and suicides, it still feels somehow quaint. The violence is fleeting and almost entirely directed inward- there's no actual gore in this, just a lot of people getting knocked over by bikes. It feels so utterly non-punk that it's kind of adorable. When the leader of the gang dies for the first time, before he comes back, his compatriots have a nice little funeral for him where they sing folk songs and make flower garlands. Then they immediately go back to trying to make old women crash their cars on the highway.

I'm kind of... a little weirded out by the whole concept behind killing yourself and coming back immortal. Mostly I'm weirded out that nobody else in the movie itself was weirded out by it. I would expect that police and probably some scientists would be scrambling to make sure this secret never came out, because if the general populace learned that all it took to become immune to death was to die and just, like, cross your fingers really hard that you'd come back to life after, there would be mass panic in the streets, I assume. Another thing about this movie is that it does operate on a loose string of logic, whereas a lot of movies dealing with similar topics would just wave their hands and say ~magic~. You need certain charms and rituals to make the coming-back-to-life happen. And those charms and rituals involve frogs, for reasons that are never revealed.

I'm assuming this would be a little more frightening to an audience used to a steady diet of Hammer horror in the early 70s, but it feels totally tame and a little bucolic to me now. The coloring is gorgeous if you can get a good copy of it and the score suits it so well. It's a movie that perfectly fills out its 90 minutes, and though a lot about it should be cheesy- and arguably is, really- there's also something genuine about it.

Occult (2009)

directed by Kôji Shiraishi
Japan
110 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I find it difficult to describe the tone of Occult, despite it being one of my favorite movies. It has a lot in common with Kôji Shiraishi's more well-liked movie Noroi, but it goes off into an altogether weirder direction while still carrying many of the same ideas. You kind of necessarily have to be open to weird conspiracy theories and listening to people talk about them- no matter if you believe them or not- because that's basically what Occult is; a succession of people talking about miracles and UFOs with 100% confidence. It's just weird. It's all surreal and doesn't make any sense. It doesn't fall back on any typical format like UFO abductees telling their stories or any other recognizable trope. It's its own thing and I'm very fond of it.

More than anything else, it cultivates an overwhelming feeling that something is coming. Over the unsuspecting people of Japan, in fast food restaurants and cafeterias and bus stops, things loom. Things that can drive people to commit violent acts, things that we can't seem to touch, but that touch us, even if we can't see them. Occult is a document chronicling these creatures, but never explaining them. We can't know their motives. That's why it manages to be so creepy even though the filmmakers' chosen method of depicting these creatures is via wiggly CGI. It's their presence, not necessarily their appearance, that's so unnerving. But their appearance does lend a lot to the vibe too- it's scarier that they're undefined, that they're just blurry squirming masses of ???? instead of little green men or ghosts with people faces. This is one of my favorite depictions of beings that are arguably "extra-dimensional" because I feel like it at least approaches their incomprehensibility in a way that feels genuine.

There's no strong characters in this, which is both a good and bad thing, because on one hand it makes the whole film feel exceptionally organic and real, but also makes it very boring to watch. Kôji Shiraishi plays himself, but he mostly stays behind the camera and does stuff that any regular non-director character would do. The guy he's following around with a camera is a boorish, entitled drifter who keeps imposing more and more on other people throughout the film, eventually escalating to verbally abusing the only woman character. There's really no reason for him to have been like this, it doesn't serve a purpose or make the movie easier to watch, it's sort of just another element of realism, I guess- sometimes, the people who bear witness to bizarre events turn out to be real jerks, and that has nothing to do with their credibility or the truth of their experiences.

This movie has an extremely controversial ending which I will defend forever. It's funny how much of a defining moment of the movie it is for a lot of people- you watch the whole thing, it's excellent, keeps the same tone throughout, and then the very last ten seconds smacks you in the face and either makes it or ruins it. I love it because of the same reason why I love the rest of the movie: it's undefinable, it's not explained, and it's so just plain weird that it feels like a genuine depiction of either Hell or somewhere else. I love Kôji Shiraishi, but I don't understand how he can make uncanny masterpieces like this and Noroi and then make mainstream, commercial-feeling stuff like Teketeke and Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman.

Gags The Clown (2019)

directed by Brian Krause
USA
89 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I am almost mad at this movie for being so good, because I don't like scary clown movies and it's forcing me to reconsider. It's not that I don't like clowns, it's that every single movie about them seems to totally fail at being creative or interesting. One of the main reasons for this is because they don't do enough outside of having a scary clown in them; there's not enough plot, they just figure that the image of the clown will be enough to make the movie worthwhile. Gags the Clown doesn't make that mistake. It's almost better at being a found-footage movie than a found-footage scary clown movie.

The other thing that sets this apart from every other generic clown horror on the planet is that it's genuinely made well. The story is comprised of multiple viewpoints, mainly from four groups of people: two cops and their bodycams (the least relevant or interesting characters), three teens and their terrible ideas, an unbearable conservative talk show host and his cameraman, and two reporters, one of whom is played by Lauren Ashley Carter. She's actually the reason I watched this and she's also the reason why it's so good. Without her, all of the characters would have just been okay. The dialogue is all pretty decent and so is the acting, but Carter's character brings a kind of casual, witty realism to the whole film that really pushes it over into feeling like actual footage instead of a contained, constrained world like a lot of found-footage movies are.

It also feels like it could bleed over into the real world, to an extent- apparently the director actually did some clownin' in the streets of Green Bay as promotion for the film, and the whole ambiance of the town partying in the middle of the night feels, again, less like a movie and more like a real town being filmed for real.

The actual clown isn't anything special, it's the people both pursuing it and being pursued by it who make the film good. The character is pretty clearly implied to have been something a little more sinister than a person in a clown suit, because the film uses that whole "video distortion whenever the creature gets close" effect that, to me, always signals that the camera is trained on something with supernatural energy that's interfering with it somehow. Because the movie focuses more on Gags' influence on the people of Green Bay, we never get into where he/it came from or what he/it is, and that's the key to making a creature scary. This film clearly went to the Pennywise school of "is it a clown or something entirely more horrible?" and graduated top of its class. A rare good effort in a sea of boring clown flicks.

Tex Montana Will Survive! (2016)

directed by Jeremy Gardner, Christian Stella
USA
82 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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So this movie is available free and legally in full on youtube and it's made by the same people who brought you the zombie-buddy-comedy (I promise it's better than it sounds) The Battery, which gives nobody any excuse to not watch it. It's about a disgraced adventure show host who is half-forced and half-decides to see if he can live up to his reputation and survive out in the woods alone. It really doesn't go all that well. It was a weird watch for me personally because I watch such a large amount of found-footage movies that I was expecting this to go all Blair Witch at any time, but it never transitioned into horror the way I'm so used to seeing mockumentaries set in the woods do.

It could be a weird watch for other folks as well, because it is literally one guy, one big old buffoon, one inexperienced blowhard, talking at the camera for a little over 80 minutes while getting progressively further from any hope of survival. I admire Jeremy Gardner for being talented and funny enough to pull this off, because he literally does carry the whole thing alone, and if his jokes were bad or his acting not great it would have been incredibly tedious. I mean, there's not even any animals in this. Tex regales us with stories of fighting and/or eating animals but we never see them or fully know whether to believe him or not. Tex is a man alone with his own hubris- a man who thinks he's going through a journey in which he's pitted against nature, but is really only an enemy of himself. He's also genuinely a scumbag as revealed by a quick mention of some nasty doings with his editor at a holiday party. We're not supposed to like him.

Even though this has the same genuine feeling as The Battery, you won't automatically like one just because you like the other, since their genres are so different. I personally enjoyed the friendship aspect of The Battery (along with its soundtrack) the most, and Tex Montana Will Survive! is a solo show with the only soundtrack being bongos played with baby bear bones (which, nonetheless, is quite catchy). But it's good anyway. The running gag of Tex continually tripping and destroying his lean-tos got me every time.

Hex (2017)

directed by George Popov, Jonathan Russell
UK
88 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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I tried to see this a while ago but failed because I couldn't find anywhere to watch it. I'm really glad that I didn't forget about it, though. It's top notch.

Films about war don't interest me in the slightest, but if I have to watch a movie set during wartime, I want it to be something like Hex; set in the background, away from the big, fate-determining battles and heroic last stands, just two people facing each other with the realization that they're both human beings. Maybe elsewhere the outcome is being decided by bloodshed and trauma, but in films that steal away so far into the forest that the only traces of war are the people carrying it in their minds, things get far more interesting. Many comparisons between Hex and A Field in England have been drawn and they are not unwarranted (although Hex has far less shrooms). The period setting is really well done and the dialogue doesn't feel pretentious, nor does the acting.

This is a movie that's extremely restrained with its horror, to the point where for like 2/3rds of it, it's just not a horror movie at all. It becomes this meditation on the meaning of being a soldier, on whether fighting and killing simply because you have a grudge against someone's king, not actually them, is worth it (spoiler: it isn't). I admire that this movie is not afraid to sit a minute. There's no room in that forest for big-man arguments and constant skirmishes, although there is a lot of skirmishing at the beginning. It's more about the pair's personal demons possessing them the way they fear the witch in the woods will possess them.

I also admired how many facets there are to both of the characters. In the end, both of them do something reprehensible, but it doesn't feel like a total departure from the two people we got to know over the preceding rest of the film, because they were so constantly in flux that they felt like real, unpredictable human beings. Having read and watched some things about the actual history of witch trials and the falsehoods involved, I was disappointed- but not surprised- that this seemed to be going in a very literal direction in which witchcraft is what it seems like on the surface and some women really are just evil. My disappointment was taken care of by the appearance of the actual "witch", however. The characters in this are just two men in the English Civil War united by a common cause: hating women.