The Kaos Brief (2016)

directed by JP Mandarino
USA
80 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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This is a good example of a movie where your personal enjoyment of it will depend on how much you can stand youtubers. I've yet to see a movie where the main character is a vlogger that I don't feel obligated to put that disclaimer on. It's a little funny how the film opens with somebody talking about a monumental conspiracy theory and introducing the following footage as proof of this, and then it immediately cuts to a generic youtuber. Honestly, I didn't mind the main characters. They're cute. No way are they "just turned 17" like the film claims, though.

The tedious part is the first quarter of the film in which we necessarily have to meet the main cast and have them go through the motions of seeing UFOs, which sets up for the rest of the film. This is more about the aftermath and the process of getting harassed by the "men in black" than it is about UFOs, which is great, because not enough movies actually address the men in black aspect of UFO lore. I enjoyed the way this movie touches on the mysterious relationship between Indrid Cold, the men in black, and aliens themselves- are they all aliens? Is/are one or some of them government agents collaborating with aliens? Are they aliens collaborating with the government? Indrid Cold's ambiguity as a figure and his moral standing are kept totally obscure in this and that's as things should be.

I feel like in a lot of ways this is a great movie stunted by its choice of main characters. Like I said, I didn't mind them personally- I'm just happy to see any film with a gay couple- but having the MC be a youtuber necessitated that specific kind of over-the-top bubbly personality, and that's a little irritating to watch if you aren't used to it. The other parts of the film unrelated to the characters were excellent, this is a premium piece of UFO horror that gets into stuff you don't usually see. I really liked the alien design- typically I'm not into humanoid aliens but this one was really something else, something visually stunning.

It's got problems but I was fond of it for some reason. It's a "cast is crew" film, it seems; some of the actors also served as camerapeople and at least one of the men in black was also the casting director. I'd love to see these people do something else because they all have potential.

Alena (2015)

directed by Daniel di Grado
Sweden
83 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
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It was fairly easy to see from the beginning where this was going, and it was going in a direction I don't like, but I found myself sticking with it essentially just because I really enjoy listening to people speak Swedish. I'm going to get into some spoilers from here on out, so you've been warned. It's not a bad movie but it fails to do much in the way of originality.

Because this is advertised as a horror/thriller, you can tell from the get-go that the bullied girl is not just going to be a punching bag the whole time. As the main character becomes the subject of her new school's rumor mill, it's kind of obvious to the viewer that there's going to be some truth to what they're saying- she's going to have secret powers, or a split personality or something like that. If you guessed "split personality" you're right on the mark, although it doesn't take much to see that coming. I suppose it's still sort of ambiguous whether or not her dark half was really, truly part of her or an evil spirit of some kind, but the film doesn't really give enough effort to make that seem possible.

In terms of how it depicts this, I guess it could be worse (and I don't have any mental illnesses that include psychosis as a symptom, so take this with a grain of salt) but it definitely could- and should- have been better. The focus is mostly on how the mentally ill character herself is suffering, rather than how others suffer being around her, which is better- but not entirely. The main character is still dangerous to others even though the emphasis is on the fact that she does not want to be. While that can serve as a kind of half-hearted attempt to bring awareness to the very real trauma mentally ill people go through, the film still clings desperately to the stereotype that people experiencing delusions will always be violent and hurt others and that's what we should be afraid of. I will once again bring up the point that mentally ill people are far, far more likely to be the victims of violence than perpetuate it.

But I watched this for the gay stuff! And that wasn't too bad all things considered. The lesbian relationship between the main character and a sympathetic classmate was a point of refuge, which was good; they managed to separate it almost entirely from anything else going on so that it didn't become manipulative or something the protag only did because of her mental illness. It also made the ending ten times sadder. I just would like to see non-mentally ill people stop making movies in which mentally ill people go through the wringer because it's tragic, or because it's what's expected to happen. Alena feels like it has empathy for some of its characters, but it still rests on a flawed premise. It is visually lovely though, Sweden in autumn appears to be like a paradise.

The Wound (2017)

directed by John Trengove
South Africa
88 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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So this is a film that inspired a lot of controversy upon its release. Because of its portrayal of gay men, it was censored and given a more restrictive rating than it should probably have gotten, and because of its depiction of the !Xhosa circumcision ritual, which is intended to never be revealed to anyone outside of the ethnic group, it garnered much protest which at times did turn violent. And now it's on Netflix USA for any old schmuck to watch. I personally don't see that it reveals enough about the ritual for me to really understand anything about it other than the vague concept, but I understand that I wasn't meant to see it. How much detail constitutes "revealing" the ritual is not up to me to decide.

I'm not sure how heavily homophobia played into the protests about depicting the ritual, but the film itself seems to have more to say about homophobia than about the ritual, although both things are presented as tied into each other and inseparable. There is, again, a lot that I can't really speak confidently about, because this is a rare opportunity where non-African people who whine and cry about all of Africa being monolithically homophobic are given a chance to see a South African perspective on homophobia, however the director of this film, while South African, is white. So while I do applaud him for giving voice to this story, the actual perspective of a gay !Xhosa person would have been even more invaluable.

But more about the film itself as a viewing experience. The dialogue is sparse most of the time, and often during romantic scenes the interaction between two characters is on a level of intimacy guided by intuition and body language, meaning that the cinematography fills in a lot of holes where verbal narration is out. It almost feels like the fear of revealing you're gay is so absolute that you can't even speak about being romantically attracted to men while romancing a man. Because of this, it can sometimes feel almost voyeuristic, which is certainly an apt way to view gay love in the context of a film all about how gay love is excluded from the characters' social circles. It's a really bare-bones, almost documentary-like film; the story is more important than the visuals.

I feel like this movie understands the way homophobia is internalized and turned into almost a social duty, and how people can be controlled by it to do acts that they typically would not do, simply because the strength of being told how to live your entire life and being told that the way you live effects the people around you is so potent. At a relatively short runtime it does go into rigorous explanation of any of its subject matter, but it displays it all with an intuitiveness that you do get its meaning. I can't help feeling that a different director might not have fallen into such a predictable ending, though.

All Cheerleaders Die (2013)

directed by Lucky McKee, Chris Sivertson
USA
89 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I'm not sure what the critical and popular response to this was when it first came out, but it definitely has the feeling of a movie that would be much maligned by people not prepared for just how bonkers it is. It starts off looking like it might be some kind of slasher/teen revenge-type flick, but very suddenly turns into an off-the-walls supernatural horror. People are calling this "Jennifer's Body's gayer cousin", but friends, hear me out: Both movies are gay, who cares which is gayer.

All Cheerleaders Die is, at its heart, a movie about power. It starts off with girls having the kind of power high school girls are typically relegated to having- the kind where they have to execute social moves by having petty squabbles and backstabbing each other because they have no real position in a system that will always downgrade them by virtue of their gender. Then they gain real power, power which makes them a serious threat to the jocks who consider them some weird hybrid of prey and trophy. Of note is that, in a literal sense, the girls have to fight for this power; the physical objects that give them power required literally dying to obtain and it's a constant struggle just to be able to hold onto them, but meanwhile, when a boy steals this power, he essentially takes it for himself with ease the same way men are handed societal privilege as a right. It's, uh, not really great that the single black character in this film is presented as almost monstrously evil. This film might have things to say about gender but it doesn't even open its mouth with regards to race.

I didn't have any expectations when I went into this, so I wasn't startled by its sudden departure from logic to veer off into fantasyland, but I was tripped up a bit by the fact that it doesn't really have a main character. Which is kind of another way that it rights the wrongs a lot of teen girl movies set- nobody is the defined "leader" of the clique, they all end up in the same undead boat with the same amount of power.

This is a really fun movie both because it plays up typical stereotypes until they're seen as the ridiculous things they are, and because it knows how to use those stereotypes to be funny when it needs to be. It has a lot of flaws but it's deeply entertaining to watch. Really a big fan of any movie in which a girl basically screams her girlfriend back to life. Jennifer's Body is better because it was directed by a woman, but All Cheerleaders Die still doesn't buy into the same bad tropes a lot of lesbian movies directed by men do. Again though, it isn't without flaws.

Book of Monsters (2018)

directed by Stewart Sparke
UK
84 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
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I didn't particularly think this was going to be any good, but in hindsight, I really didn't know enough about it to make that judgement. You really gotta take horror movies with 18-year-old protagonists on a case-by-case basis.

So I realized about halfway through this film that the only way to enjoy it is to think of it as an 80s movie. I don't think it counts as one of the multitude of films that intentionally try to be nostalgic throwbacks, but Book of Monsters has everything we think of as a trademark of 80s horror, just in a modern setting: lots of slimy practical effects, little or no CGI, hammy acting, Teen Antics™, and a random German exchange student who no one can understand (I'm kidding about that last one being an 80s trademark). Once you can get it into your head to sort of judge this film on a different level than others- which we really should do for all films, no two are exactly the same- you can begin to maybe enjoy it, if it's your thing, which it still may not be. But personally once it had gotten past the setup I was very interested in the whole "book of monsters" plot device. I don't think anybody involved in the production of this movie had the vaguest idea what a djinn is, though.

I also really appreciated that the main character is a lesbian and she's written as experiencing attraction to girls the way a straight kid would at her age- I.E. awkwardly, but not ashamedly. A lot of movies with teens who are gay seem to think there's some requirement to depict the person "discovering" that they're gay, instead of just having them 100% know that they're gay from the start. Not Book of Monsters, and I really loved it for that.

The reason I personally gave this a low rating is because after a while I just got tired of its antics. Like I said, once the book came in I thought it was more interesting because it gave the characters an objective and a puzzle to solve instead of having them all get killed messily in a shower of rubbery monster tentacles and really horrendous fake limbs. But there was a tedium to it, like, "What kind of zany thing can possibly happen next? Oh, look, killer gnomes!" This is entirely because I am jaded and no fun; I recognize that, objectively, killer gnomes are funny and this is a creative film that goes to original places with its monsters. I'm just picky. There is something really endearing about this film and maybe if I watch it again I can get that.

7 Witches (2017)

directed by Brady Hall
USA
75 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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This was still a pleasant surprise. It's a low-budget affair and its posters give off a fake-grungey vibe that reminds me of something you'd buy at a scrapbooking store, but its quality far exceeds its humble appearance. The cinematography and soundtrack are both excellent.

7 Witches keeps things mostly lighthearted for the time it takes to set the scene for the final act, and this worked well due to the actors, who all looked and felt like real people. In particular there was something I really liked about the main character's grandpa, even though he was a really, really peripheral character. I don't know if maybe he was just older than most actors I'm used to seeing or something, but that guy was absolutely somebody I could just encounter off the street. He could have been someone in my family. I'm used to a remove between me and actors in films I watch due to them all being perfect and attractive, but that one old guy was the most authentic-looking actor I've seen in a very long time. Persephone Apostolou, who plays the main character, also has a gravitas about her that only really gets to shine in the last quarter, but she's great all throughout anyway.

Being a film that ostensibly involved witches, I was of course hoping there would be lesbians, because witches and witchcraft are intimately tied to sapphic romance and nobody can change my mind on that. I was slightly disappointed when the lesbians turned out to be on the wrong side of things, but I feel like this is a rare case where that was genuinely just how things were written and it truly didn't matter who was and wasn't gay, because being gay was not involved in any way with who the characters were as people. Romance is not at all a huge part of this, though, I don't want to make it seem like it is- it's a very "modern"-feeling film in which everybody is their own person and decisions about personal autonomy are entirely up to the individual making them, and everyone respects that. This is also one of the only movies I've seen where a woman plans to get an abortion but it's never made a plot point or even really mentioned more than once, and I love that.

I want to come back to that comment about being on the wrong side of things, because I'm not sure there was a wrong side. This is a movie with a fairly typical story about a small enclave of rural villagers who have their land encroached upon by outsiders and are very bitter about it, and when we think about it, it's kind of messed up that we're so used to that trope in horror that we instantly have suspicion about setups involving towns with a secret. People fighting against unwanted development shouldn't always turn out to be bad guys the way they do in horror films. The whole "you interrupted our ancient way of life so now we have to kill you" trope really feels more and more, in the age of growing industrialization and steamrolling of forests and small communities, like city-dwellers' fear of indigeneity. Urban legends (whether they may have some truth at their root or not) like the Sawney Bean clan get passed down through the ages and teach some to fear rurality even in the modern era, even if we don't recognize it.

B&B (2017)

directed by Joe Ahearne
UK
87 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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This is a really good movie that's unfortunately difficult to find out anything about online, as for some reason a lot of movie websites and streaming services do not recognize the "&" character and will either interpret a search for this title as "BB" or not understand the search at all. I was surprised that I hadn't heard of it before now, and I think the difficulty of searching the title has a lot to do with that, but I also wouldn't be surprised if its content is enough to prevent it from becoming more popular due to bigots.

So the premise requires some backstory that is laid out rather quickly at the beginning of the film through glances at newspapers and inferred conversations, and it is that a gay couple return to a bed and breakfast that previously made the news after the couple sued it for not giving them a double bed because they were gay. They're married now, and they still can't get a double bed (the b&b claims it took them all away after they were sued and it's all their fault). They eventually run afoul of another guest in the b&b, an aggressive Russian with ambiguous motives, but really that's just the jumping-off point for the rest of the action. This is one of the most satisfyingly twisty-turny films I've seen lately that doesn't sacrifice plot and characterization for a cheap "what if this! what if that!" narrative.

By now I'm used to seeing movies about gay people where we're reduced either to a side-character or depicted in a way that makes us Just Like The Straights and ignores the possibility that our lives do have uniqueness. B&B is a movie that intimately understands what being gay is like- what the continuous, day-to-day experience of navigating social space as a gay person (a gay couple) is like. It presents this in an extremely naturalistic fashion and uses language and traits with an ease that I never see in movies that don't have an explicit focus on gay relationships (and sometimes not even then). In the end it gives us a conclusion that's tragic but avoids the common pitfall of depicting homophobic violence in an up-close, physical way: while straight audiences might fail to recognize homophobia unless it's in a form they can see and hear, I.E. being beat up or screamed at, LGBTQ audiences understand silent erasure and casual exclusion as its own, ongoing form of violence.

As a warning, there's some rapidly flashing police lights towards the very end of the film, so if you have a sensitivity to that I would advise you to just entirely skip the minute of 1:20:00 and go straight from 1:19 to 1:21. Unfortunately the lights are during one of the most important scenes, but you can easily figure out what happened from the aftermath.

The Perfection (2018)

directed by Richard Shepard
Canada
90 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
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Everybody is talking about this movie, and the general consensus of opinion seemed to be that it was a rare unashamedly hammy horror-thriller that knew exactly what it wanted to do and knew exactly how campy it had to be to get there. I'm very attracted to the idea of something being so bold about prizing sheer excitement in telling a story over ~auteurism~ in this day and age, but that is not the kind of movie this is.

See, the thing about this movie is that it advertises itself from the get-go as a "twisty" film, and it values that over all else. I wouldn't even call this a movie with twists, though, as it's far more concerned with the "gotcha" factor; it's too impatient to set up actual premeditated, plot-relevant twists, and instead its concept of a twist is more like if somebody were telling you a story and then suddenly started telling you a totally different story in the middle of it. This in itself would not be too bad, mostly just a pacing issue, but the problem with The Perfection is that it's mean-spirited about it. The twists in this are not "and Darth Vader was Luke's father all along", they're "haha, you thought this girl was getting raped!"

This is just... not how you do "women's lib", it's not how you do LGBT cinema, it's not lesbian solidarity. Setting the whole film up so that the point of it appears to be women repeatedly facing the threat of sexual assault and/or women backstabbing each other after appearing to become intimate is not creative, it's not funny, it's not clever. "Woman seems to be about to get raped and then doesn't" isn't a twist. Dangling rape in front of our faces any time there needs to be a threat is just cruelty, not storytelling. Even if the end message of The Perfection was one of women rising up and getting revenge, the way to get to that message is not to make it look- genuinely look, no illusions of control- like they're about to be violated before they finally strike back.

I really didn't get the feeling that this film was being intentionally campy either. I was expecting something like the horror films people shoot in the basements on iPhones because they just love horror and have ideas they have to get out there despite no money to back them up. The Perfection is a big-name movie from the largest streaming service on the planet and its idea of feminist liberation is beating women back to the point of no return so that they can surprise everyone by not being the weak, doomed creatures we're supposed to believe they are. Logan Browning and Allison Williams are too good for this.