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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.