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.