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.

Super Xuxa Contra o Baixo Astral (1988)

directed by Anna Penido, David Sonnenschein
86 minutes
Brazil
3 stars out of 5
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Xuxa Meneghel is a Brazilian kid's TV show host and pop star who we never got the privilege of importing to America because we're all prudes and we thought her outfits were too revealing, and also we supposedly thought she looked too white. I didn't know anything about her until I watched this but apparently she's still in the industry after like 30 years, which I have to respect. I'm using the original title of this TV special because in English it somehow got translated as "Super Xuxa Versus Satan", although nothing in it suggests any actual Satanic imagery. Also, Xuxa is pronounced "shoo-sha". I think maybe the Xs stand for "xoulderpads".

It's hard to watch this as an adult and not be overwhelmed by the sheer saccharine sweetness of it. It would probably be hard to watch it as a child and not be overwhelmed. I don't have any real problem with the content of the songs, even though the sheer high-strung energy of them is difficult to keep up with- there's nothing inherently wrong with messages about being nice and learning and being adaptable and, most notably, throwing bureaucracy in the trash. But I think this movie's biggest mistake is that it doesn't seem to separate sadness from sad people. The sequence where Xuxa starts doubting herself and visibly begins to turn into a gross ugly version of herself is confirmation of this. The idea that depression is visible is a concept that continually keeps a lot of people from getting help. Somebody like Xuxa could be having multiple anxiety attacks every day, it doesn't matter what you look like. I didn't want to analyze a Brazilian children's movie in-depth but this is my life now.

It's too bad this never got famous stateside, but I can definitely see why not, because it's just too wild for American kids TV. The message of "you must be 100% happy all the time and people who are not happy are bad people" is very in keeping with a lot of children's programming, but everything else about it is a bit bananas. There's a seemingly unlimited amount of people dressed like animals, a dog who incites class consciousness among his fleas, an unwholesome-looking caterpillar, and a plethora of hallucinogenic puppetry. Apparently Xuxa's whole show is like this. The costume design of the gross guys who live in the sewer is infinitely cooler than Xuxa's xoulderpad ensemble, and the whole thing has a kind of "cobbled together for very little money by clever people" feel. It being bananas doesn't preclude it from being visually interesting.

Kid's TV from other places is just really cool to me, especially when it's this nuts. I don't think there's much of an actual moral takeaway from this unless you're like 3 years old. I did learn that I can get genuinely sad watching a puppet dog be cartoonishly mistreated, though.

Nebo Zovyot (1959)

directed by Mikhail Karzhukov, Aleksandr Kozyr
Russia
77 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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This is the original version of a Russian sci-fi film that Roger Corman took and ran with. I haven't seen said Corman version, but reviews make it out to be one of the most truly awful adaptations/recuts in cinema history, and apparently he made it into a monster movie for some reason. It's a very American thing to take a movie like this, whose message is of friendship and open collaboration, and go "But can I put monsters in it?????"

Hailing from 1959, Nebo Zovyot (which has many names, but we're going by the original Небо зовёт) was of course released in the early days of the space race before we knew a lot about the mechanics of actually being in space as a human. As a result there's a lot of funny spacesuits and kind of awkward zero-gravity scenes, as well as an insistence upon clinging to the idea of Martian canals, although that last one might have just been a fun little fantasy they put in rather than a reflection of the popular scientific idea of Mars at the time. Its most notable feature is that it shows the Soviets acting towards Americans with some combination of brotherhood and paternalism, treating us like a sometimes brash but usually well-meaning relative who occasionally needs to be rescued from our own hubris. This stands in clear contrast to propaganda that was coming out of the U.S. depicting the Soviet Union as a faceless iron hand waiting to clamp down on us should we let our guard down.

I have trouble trusting grand gestures made on behalf of a government towards another government, because while it's ultimately beneficial to all parties for countries to be on good terms with each other, in day-to-day life it doesn't really matter that the elites are chummy if inequality still persists in society. The U.S. today makes statements all the time about how it loves and appreciates such-and-such country, but when it comes time for us to lend aid, we're wholly silent and at times actively working against said country. What matters is that governments help the actual, real-world needs of the citizens of countries they claim to be buddies with, not just do things that generate profit.

But in a climate of fear and paranoia, it is very nice to see a film like this celebrating mutual accomplishments and sending a message of supporting each other in our spacefaring endeavors. I've said this before, but the propagandization of the race to the moon is one of, I feel, our biggest failures as a spacefaring species- that we accomplished a momentous feat, left our cradle for the first time, but mainly did it because the heads of two governments were competing against each other for superiority. As for the movie itself, it's about as dry as a saltine and has much the same color palette. Which is nice sometimes, I do like the muted chromes and flat bland spaceship colors, but this is like looking at Apollo 13 and then looking at Star Trek and declaring that both are sci-fi movies. I guess films about going into space made before we went into space are more of a novelty than anything else now.

It Chapter Two (2019)

directed by Andy Muschietti
Canada/USA
169 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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This will get long.

I never reviewed the first It remake and I don't have many original thoughts about the quality of this one (it was a fun, funny, surprisingly light summer horror movie with a great cast), so instead I'm going to focus more on talking about the general concepts it presents. First off, though, I just wanted to say how disappointed I am that apparently I can't walk into a movie in 2019 without being confronted with an incredibly violent gay-bashing scene. Do straight people think it's good representation to depict gay people getting beaten to death? Do they think that's what we want? Because it's not.

I mostly wanted to talk about the It remake as cosmic horror and what that means in relation to the two things I see as its main problems: the pervasive inability of any movie to feel like an accurate depiction of a Stephen King monster, and the really hammy ending of this film in specific. There's no doubt that It is cosmic horror- it's almost the definition of cosmic, with It the creature being some indescribable force that blasted out of space and landed in little old Maine untold millions (or billions, I couldn't hear Mike quite right when he said that) of years ago. It is unfathomable, it appears as different things to different people and even seems to be able to split itself up into several aspects at once, appearing both as the traditional clown and as any number of small personal fears- flaming head Bev/nasty old grandma/shrieking eyeball bat/et cetera. But none of these things are its "true" form. Even the spider-clown is not, I don't think, it's true form. I don't even know if It has a true form. The deadlights got close, but even that just felt like an aspect of It. Maybe it's just not acceptable to human minds, which is another key tenet of cosmic horror.

It's status as cosmic horror makes it inherently impossible to depict it onscreen in a way that will accurately reflect the fact that the creature is a mind-breaking, unnatural force- how do you visually depict something incomprehensible? There is no clear answer to this, but I firmly believe, personally, that directors who render Lovecraftian creatures as giant spiders or octopi or whatever are chickening out.

However, you're kind of in this playground that you can make for yourself once you venture into cosmic horror territory. There are few established "rules" to the genre that everybody writing or directing inside of it has to stick to. Even the Cthulhu mythos is constantly getting new additions that would make Lovecraft write somebody a deeply impassioned letter about immigrants or something (and that's a good thing, we wanna disappoint old Howie as much as we possibly can). The inventiveness of cosmic horror means that, while there are things that I feel like we can all say are kind of half-baked (like the It-spider), we can't say with authority that they fail to be cosmic horror. What is cosmic horror? You make it up. If you want, it can be something where a millennia-old world-eater can truly be defeated by a bunch of people bullying it to death. The villains and creatures of this genre exist in a space where we can't comprehend them the way we can comprehend a slasher standing at the foot of a collegiate's bed. Popular opinion ("I think this is cheesy") vs genre conventions ("this does not look like what it's defined as") are different things, and for this reason I have to defend bad CGI cosmic horror even while deriding it on a personal taste level.

Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972)

directed by Amando de Ossorio
Spain & Portugal
101 minutes originally, 82 minutes recut/dub
3.5 stars out of 5
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I watched the English dub of this because I do not have the attention span for the slightly longer original, and I'm aware that the dub was cut down a bit, so I'll have that in mind while reviewing this film. It's only a difference of about twenty minutes, but you can fit a lot of guts into twenty minutes.

It's important for me to mention the cut dub because one of the things I liked about Tombs of the Blind Dead was precisely that it was a little less lurid than Spanish horror from the 70s tends to be. It seemed like it had the minimum amount of scantily-clad women getting murdered instead of the typical maximum amount. Now I know that that may just have been due to the version I was watching. However I think the bones of this movie still stand the same regardless of whether or not some blood and/or boobs were cut out.

There's just sort of an unpleasantness to this that I didn't expect. By "unpleasant" I'm talking about a general vibe to the atmosphere, not a genuinely offensive or hard-to-watch tone. Something about it feels off, skin-crawly; there's not enough plot to diffuse the horror of it and so we feel the supernatural events much more deeply than we would if they were mediated by normal everyday business. The amount of living people is too small and they're too scattered and fractured to feel like a substantial force against the horde of tatty old Templars serving as the movie's antagonists. It feels slightly hopeless. In the grand scheme of things it's not a big deal- just avoid the weird old ruins and you won't get bitten to death by undead cultists. But it's one of those movies focused on an area that has seen so much badness that the area itself becomes bad, only most of the time that simply means a poltergeist or residual haunting, while in Tombs of the Blind Dead, the dead are a physical, harmful force. They refuse to die. The centuries pass and they are still there, confined to their tombs, yet unable to rest.

There really is not a lot of plot here. People wander into the tombs, the Templars come out, they bite people a bunch until they die, over and over, again and again. There's some semblance of a police investigation and a girl who makes mannequins (absolutely perfect horror movie character occupation, by the way) and a couple of the characters' friends go looking for one another, but like I said, it isn't enough to stop this feeling like, first and foremost, a movie about death. It's so dungeony. I'm not sure about any of the others in the series but this one is pitch-perfect doom-and-gloom.

Into the Dark: Culture Shock (2019)

directed by Gigi Saúl Guerrero
USA
91 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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Horror can be an excellent tool for exploring stories about inequality and racism, but there's a fine line between telling a story and just plain torture porn. Portrayals of experiences of racism that are slightly fantasized or told through metaphor can be very powerful, but films and TV that are nothing but repeatedly re-enacted racist violence with no point perpetuate racist violence themselves. This is what I was concerned about with Culture Shock, but thankfully it was directed by a Mexican woman, and avoids falling into the same torture-porn trap as a lot of other racially-tinged horror movies do.

For the first half, this was very different from other episodes of Into the Dark in that it was much more realistic and seemed to be focusing on stark reality instead of a supernatural premise. Then it gets weirder and ventures into territory that I personally (and I'm a white, non-immigrant person, so take all these opinions with a grain of salt) saw as metaphor. The main character, Marisol, finds herself in a land where everybody comes from somewhere else, yet are all required to wash themselves of all but the most harmless, in-effectual aspects of their origins and participate in the great pastel-colored plastic amalgam that is America. Then it gets weirder. The framework of it is more sci-fi than horror and would be right at home in an episode of Black Mirror. That's about all I'll say to avoid spoiling it.

This is 100% about the experience of immigration and the dangers of being brown in a country that really really really tries hard to be white, but I also feel like it plays it a little bit too safe. I do admire this very much for being willing to take the stance that it does on patriotism. A lot of media I see emphasizes the fact that, yes, America is currently running concentration camps and wants to kick out everybody who they see as not belonging here- whatever that means for a nation where the government is 99% made up of immigrants who stole land from its original inhabitants- but it's Not Supposed To Be Like That™! Criticism of America that limits itself to "This isn't what we're about!" blinds itself to the fact that this is always what America has been about; structural inequality is how we make our money and run our infrastructure. And Culture Shock acknowledges that, at least a little, in showing that going to America and speaking English is not the only option.

The Lodgers (2017)

directed by Brian O'Malley (not the Scott Pilgrim one)
Ireland
93 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I was more excited for this when I wasn't aware that the director of it also made Let Us Prey. I disliked that movie a lot but other people seemed quite into it. Fortunately, I didn't find this fact out until after I had already started watching The Lodgers, otherwise I might not have watched it at all. This is a good movie.

I think after watching Grey Gardens, my perception of movies where characters live alone in massive houses that used to be opulent but are now just rotting and sad has changed. Even in generic haunted-house movies that use this trope, the house has more agency to me now, it feels more like an actor rather than a setting. The Lodgers is a case of house-as-actor, because the house is integral to whatever is happening to the main characters, and it seems to be a place that has absorbed enough badness from its inhabitants that it can do nothing but perpetuate that cycle of badness itself. Not just the house but also the lake on its property. There's some bad stuff in that lake. I always enjoy movies that explore the possible ways a house can become something sinister.

This movie is very gothic, but it's also rooted in a specific time and place, which I liked, because a lot of gothic movies just slap the table and yell "Victorian England!" and don't specify any further. Even though there's a heavy amount of supernatural horror going on, war and human prejudice is also an element. I've seen a couple reviews that felt like they got half or less of the full picture with regards to what was happening to the protagonists' family, but I thought that was the best part of this. We know the why of the family curse, we know what happens to the people who are under that curse, but we don't know exactly how, uh, carnal acts festered into something bone-chillingly unnatural. The unknown element is what made this such an original movie, to me.

So, points on for aesthetics and David Bradley, points off for not explaining what the hell was going on (if that's important to you; it's not to me). I couldn't find much I actually disliked about this except for the uncomfortable romantic elements of it, but those were kind of... a big part of the plot at large. I'm surprised this didn't get more attention.