Celia (1989)

directed by Ann Turner

Australia

97 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I was planning to watch this on Christmas because it takes place around Christmastime, but it didn't work out that way and I don't really regret it because there's basically nothing Christmas-related in this film and I'm pretty sure Christmas is only mentioned in order to establish that the film is set during the summer. I got a projector for Christmas and spent the night in the living room watching bad holiday movies. That's your personal anecdote for the month, have fun with it.

I expected this to be much more of a horror movie, but it's the kind of film where the horror is experienced from a child's perspective, and so, while the imagery used in this case is still pretty creepy (those Hobyahs were awful), horror is part and parcel of the experience of being a child, rather than a separate motif of something terrorizing the child. What this movie is really about is how the worlds of children and the worlds of adults are often totally incompatible and incomprehensible to each other. The title character is a nine-year-old girl who actually has a relatively normal childhood insofar as any childhood can be called "normal", with all of life's mysteries still yet to be revealed as mundane and all the adults in her life doing things that seem incredibly unfair. She very much has her own view of the world, and again, none of the adults around her seem to realize that she's her own person operating according to her own method of living life. A lot of adults treat children as if they're tiny adults intentionally misbehaving instead of people who have their own ideas and conceptions of reality.

A really good example of this is the way the film deals with politics. A running theme is the ruling by the then-PM of Australia that all rabbits, including those belonging to children as pets, are to be rounded up and killed as they are considered vermin. Celia has to deal with this despite not having the capacity to understand it the way adults do. At one point she draws devil features on a picture of the PM in class and is told off for it by the teacher. While the adults view this as extremely disrespectful, they don't see that Celia is interpreting the PM's actions according to the rules of engagement that govern her and her peers: it does not follow that this man should be above recourse, he's a stranger who is telling Celia that her beloved pet is to be surrendered and killed, what is she supposed to do? Celia has no idea of politics or the concept of respecting someone solely based on their office- she treats him the same way she treats her group of friends.

Another running theme is the adults around Celia attempting to force her into cutting off relationships based on their fears of communism. Celia also deals with this the same way she'd deal with a contemporary: you tell me they're communists, and that they're bad people, but they've never hurt me or my friends, and they're always kind to me, so how can they be bad people just because you say they are? The logic the adults follow is the strange stuff here, not what Celia does- the fallacy of shunning some people because of their beliefs and blindly following the rule of others even more distantly removed simply because they hold the highest office in the land is presented as a more childish belief than the rituals and games Celia involves herself with.

The way Celia's most heinous act (not spoiling it) is dealt with is also interesting because I think a lot of other movies would make that the thing that ends the film. They wouldn't show, afterwards, her doing something else that could have ended in a similarly disastrous fashion, but didn't. They would make it a black-and-white issue- as soon as Celia did that, she would have been established as in the wrong. But the mock hanging of her friend afterwards shows that the balance between life and death, justice and injustice, and the definition of what is and isn't a violent act does not hold constant between the worldviews of children and those of adults. It doesn't cast judgement on Celia for what she did or place blame on the people in her life for not teaching her right- it presents her as someone with agency who made a logical choice according to the way she understood justice and reciprocity. I very much enjoyed this movie and despite it not turning out to be what I'd call horror I thought it was one of the better films to explore the unique anxiety of being a child.

3615 Code Père Noël (1989)

directed by René Manzor

France

87 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I was looking forward to seeing this because it had been eluding me for a while, and to my understanding it's kind of a cult classic in some circles. In all honesty, though, I don't... really know how I feel about it? I guess it's my fault for not looking into it further because I may have realized, if I had, that it's not my kind of movie, but I was left with such a weird taste in my mouth after watching it that I'm conflicted about whether or not I actually liked it.

This movie is just so tonally weird that it was hard for me to be comfortable with it. I still don't know if it was intended to be played straight or if it was meant as a very dark comedy, or some kind of bizarre mixture of both. The plot is basically that a little boy, alone with his ailing grandpa in an absurdly massive and complex house built by the riches of his family's toy company, is assaulted by a lunatic dressed up as Santa Claus, and must summon all of his combat skills- gleaned from playing war with his dog- to root out and kill the intruder before the intruder kills him (and his grandpa). That could be funny, I guess, but it's so genuinely sinister in this instance that it makes me really baffled to see so many glowing reviews saying that the kid is badass and the film is awesome. Like... but he was in mortal danger from a murderous pedophile the whole time? And he's depicted being absolutely terrified and losing his childhood while in constant fear for his life? That's... badass? Really?

Writing this all out makes me feel like I'm coming off as the biggest wuss on Earth. I can't help it if I object to seeing a child terrorized for an hour and a half. "But Home Alone!" you might say. The difference between that movie and this one is that Home Alone is so clearly a comedy that you can't mistake it for anything else: seeing a small child beat two comically inept criminals is funny because it doesn't feel like he's ever genuinely threatened, and also, crucially, the criminals don't care about Kevin on a personal level because of his being a small boy. Code Père Noël just goes too far. There's so many different tones in this that, like I said, I have no idea what it was going for. You can't really mix together a sicko dressing up as Santa so he can stroke little girls' faces, a boy running around the house playing games with his dog, the same boy carrying his dead dog while a weird song about becoming a man plays in the background, and the dreamlike, just slightly out-of-proportion house he lives in. None of those things make a movie that makes sense when you throw them in together, it just creates this weird mess that doesn't come off funny or serious but a distinctly uncomfortable vibe all, unfortunately, its own.

I guess I didn't hate this, because it's fun from a visual standpoint- the house that most of the film takes place in is so labyrinthine and full of over-the-top Rich People Stuff that it makes for a really cool set. There's a secret room in the basement crammed full of random toys that are implied to have been discarded by every previous generation to ever live in the house when they were bored with them, and that's just... normal I guess. The lead kid has the most intense mullet I've ever seen on a young child and he's a frighteningly good actor at times, especially in the final scene where that haunted look in his eyes both cemented the fact that this movie gives me the willies and the fact that the kid did an excellent job in an uncomfortable role. I think I was just expecting something fun out of this, and maybe I don't have a sense of humor, but I don't find it particularly fun to watch somebody try to kill a child. Again, Home Alone makes it very clear that the power imbalance is tipped in favor of the child, and the criminals are way more bumbling and silly than threatening. The villain in Père Noël is too much. Apparently the filmmakers either sued or considered suing the filmmakers of Home Alone for stealing their idea, and I'm the very last person to defend English-language remakes of anything, but in this case, I think the Home Alone creators were right in thinking that a version of this film that's less stomach-turning would make for a much more enjoyable experience overall.

I apologize that this isn't the most positive review to post for my Christmas """special""", but I haven't been watching a lot of Christmas movies lately, and the ones I have, I haven't been reviewing. I've seen some truly stand-out films this month- just not holiday ones. If there are any humans out there reading this, I wish you all the merriest holiday possible. 2021 is gonna be our year if we have to take it by storm.

Hosts (2020)

directed by Richard Oakes, Adam Leader

UK

89 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Oh boy I loved this movie. I totally didn't expect to. Each year when winter rolls around and I turn my eyes towards the crop of new holiday horror movies, I do not expect them to be good; if I can get a laugh out of them, that's great, but more likely they're just slop on the pile of really, really bad holiday-themed horror movies and that's that. This is where I was coming from when I started to watch Hosts, and I got completely blindsided by a movie that was genuinely disturbing, a gut-punch in various ways. If this was not set at Christmastime I would still have thought it was a brilliant movie, but Christmas provides some context for the events of the film that is important in two ways, one of which I'll get into now and one I'll talk about later.

So one of the many things this film is good at is creating characters who you really don't want to see die (and then killing them, of course). It is extremely heavy on the familial love and some romantic love as well, and if you're particularly jaded about that it could definitely feel cloying, but to me the performances were authentic enough that it didn't bother me how hard the film seemed to be emphasizing the bonds between its characters. We don't spend a lot of time with the couple who will eventually become the antagonists, but their little gift exchange on the couch together is enough to establish a warm feeling towards them; they come off like a young couple genuinely in love and then something happens very suddenly that I won't spoil, but that made me realize I was in for something better than the cut-rate holiday slasher with some possibly demonic twists that I expected. If you've seen this, I think you know what scene I'm talking about. I did not expect the possession to look like that. I've never seen possession look like that.

Another really interesting thing this does is tell us that the things happening are happening everywhere else too, outside of the scope of the film. Await Further Instructions, a movie I recently rewatched that cemented my opinion on it being one of my favorite horror movies of the past five years, also does this. The hints from scenes where characters are watching the news that they are only a random couple of victims in something that's turning into a country-wide phenomenon makes everything feel much more hopeless.

There are other elements that are used in the development of the film's villains that make them both interesting and genuinely terrifying, and this is the other thing I mentioned earlier that hinges on this being a Christmas movie. A really common theme in Christmas horror is for the villain or villains to kind of represent an anti-consumerist mindset- maybe it'll be somebody who's traumatized by Santa and fed up with the empty commercialization of the holiday, or maybe it'll be Krampus, who, uprooted from his Alpine origins, has become a symbol for those disillusioned with the common Christmas symbols or just not fond of the holiday and wanting to celebrate something more macabre. But each time, when something like that is used, there's always a sort of wink-nudge to the viewer that we're supposed to, on some metaphorical level, sympathize with the villain- after all, the commercialization of Christmas is bad, and everyone is tired of having Christmas music shoved down our gullets. We're not expected to excuse murder in the name of being tired of Salvation Army bell-ringers, but the sentiment is something we can agree with: aren't you just exhausted by all of this? Aren't you tired of people faking charity and togetherness?

However, what Hosts does is use that basic premise (and this is done extremely artfully, only hinted at, never exposition-dumped on us) to construct a backstory for its villains- but it does not make them sympathetic. The implication that the entities that possess the first couple were/are something that existed pre-Christianity, and that they were duped into thinking there would be a place for them within Christianity, only to be driven out and painted as sacrilegious, is something that, in this case, is not presented as a sympathetic backstory. In this case, it makes them bitter, enraged, and fearsome. Despite, again, a lack of direct context, you get the sense that these things are old and very, very angry. It's not funny and ironic when they return, fueled by hatred for the new Christian holidays that subsumed their own worship, it's terrifying, because their power is coupled with an intense desire for revenge that's as illogical and self-absorbed as the fae, gods, and various other entities of old always are.

It's a latecomer, but this is definitely high up on my favorites list of the year. I would happily (well, maybe that's not the right word, as it is quite brutal and violent) watch this any time, not just around the holidays. There is something to be said about the real-life stigmatization of Pagan worship and the way this movie plays into the idea that it's a negative, dangerous thing, but... that's a whole other discussion.

Anything for Jackson (2020)

directed by Justin G. Dyck

Canada

96 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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First of all, I'm absolutely stunned to find out that the guy who directed this made like 6,000 Hallmark-type Christmas movies and then this. To go from "Baby in a Manger" to "film where some Satanists kidnap a pregnant woman and try to force the soul of their dead grandson into her fetus"? The range!

But anyway. The thing that left the biggest impression on me about this movie was its ability to throw things at me that I completely was not expecting. It has few actual jump scares in the traditional sense of a sudden wham! ghoul-in-your-face moment accompanied by a loud noise, but it's really fond of doing stuff out of nowhere: right from the cold open, where we see two people going about a morning routine that seems totally innocent until they drag in a screaming woman from outside their front door, this movie is great at hiding what's about to happen. There are two other moments I want to highlight where the film does this, and obviously don't read the rest of this paragraph because they only work if you don't expect them. The first is less explosive, and just involves someone sticking their head into a woodchipper unexpectedly, but the second is an extremely sudden gunshot-suicide scene that came after the wood chipper incident and totally caught me off guard, and that's where I knew this movie was doing something unique. To have been able to get me so good again right after the woodchipper incident is, I believe, an indicator of quality. I had to be distracted enough to not anticipate anything, and I had to be unaware that I was being distracted.

On the whole, this is just a really good movie. I didn't expect it to be because the premise sounds so silly. But the thing about it is that it doesn't just adhere to a straight line as far as the plot is concerned, there's several different roadblocks and branching paths brought on by various challenges and hurdles the couple face in the process of doing nefarious stuff with a fetus. I was so surprised by all the twists and turns that kept happening. Also unconventional is that the pregnant woman the couple kidnaps is not really a defining character- this is not a story about her struggle to escape against the odds; the bulk of the film is spent on the Satanist couple and their somewhat misguided efforts to bring their grandson back. I guess the whole gimmick is that the two of them aren't who you expect Satanists to be, and it only works because it's not explained why these two random grandparents happen to practice dark rites in their spare time. Maybe they've always been into it? Maybe they just started out of desperation after their grandson died? The explanation isn't important, just the aesthetic of the most whitebread grandparents ever dressing in black robes and speaking incantations out of a thousand-year-old tome. And it's not even played for laughs- on some level you respect these people and their desperate measures. I still don't like that this implies all Satanists are working to summon forces of evil and hatred into the world, but I guess I can't expect in-depth explorations of Satanism from someone whose bread and butter is movies about, like, surprise weddings and Christmas romance. I'm sorry, I just can't get over that.

This was so good, in fact, that I'm finding trouble saying anything about it other than "this was good". When you like a movie so much after not expecting to like it at all it's kind of hard to examine it in the moment. I'm just impressed by all of it: the aesthetic, the depth of the plot and the way nothing feels predictable, the dialogue, everything. I absolutely loved the ghosts that come up out of the woodwork when the summoning goes haywire. There's such a great mixture of darkness and tension in this, and it's all done in moderation, so it never feels like it goes overboard with the foreboding and becomes unrealistic. Which is strange to say for a movie with a plot like this one's, but that's the whole deal with this- it's realistic, it feels believable. It's just good.

Mister Designer (1987)

directed by Oleg Teptsov

Russia

103 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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My book club recently discussed the Strugatsky brothers' "Roadside Picnic", and a lot of us remarked on how the book seemed to us like it never spoke directly about anything, always dancing around statements instead of saying them outright. I figured this was a specific quirk of the translation, but it made me realize that this is actually something I see in practically every Russian film or book I watch/read.

While I was watching Mister Designer, it felt like it made close to no sense at all. The imagery was presented in disjointed scenes that appeared to lack context; vignette-like, carefully staged individual moments that, together, somehow made up 103 minutes of film. But I gradually realized that the plot was there, and it was actually fairly linear and understandable, in contrast to how dreamlike and disconnected the whole film feels. This is a visual language that I am not familiar with but am very interested in, being as different as it is from anything I'm used to: instead of presenting us with a narrative told like a book, with a beginning, middle, and end, Mister Designer- and a lot of other Russian fiction as well- conveys the story in broader strokes, like it's being told by associations. Telling us about one event involves telling us about the events leading up to it and the events that happened afterwards, not simply informing us of the event itself. What at first appeared as a lack of context is, actually, a film composed of almost nothing but context.

So far as I can tell, Mister Designer is actually a potent horror story, though it may at first glance appear so arty that it defies genre. The protagonist is a well-known artist who creates mannequins that he aims to make more and more lifelike, and there's an element of playing God to it, an element of mortality that the artist is forever trying to escape. There's something real-life disturbing about this that I do have to mention- it's really uncomfortable in how it depicts a very young girl; while the artist's fixation on her is never directly sexual, she's still shown with no shirt on and cast as a figure who is, if not sexual, than definitely sensual, far more than a girl who is said to be fourteen- and acknowledged outright by other characters as a child- should ever be. The actress was seventeen at the time, which is... still extremely creepy, considering every man in the film appears well over forty. This fits with the persona of the artist; he definitely feels like the kind of slightly unwholesome character who would develop an obsession with a young girl that would ultimately lead to his downfall, but unfortunately the film doesn't play out that way. The girl is without a doubt evil, it's not the artist's own disgusting tastes eventually working against him. It's the girl's fault and her power that fulfills the artist's fear of mortality.

It really is unfortunate that this girl was way too young for her role, because she's the most interesting and enigmatic part of the film's story. I wish she'd been played by someone of age so it didn't feel so genuinely creepy. She's implied to be some kind of immortal being- again, this isn't outright stated but is revealed with agonizing slowness and subtle hints- and her presence throughout Mister Designer makes it deeply haunting and strange. Her real identity and the extent of her powers is never elaborated upon, and she feels like an entity that the protagonist just happened to stumble upon, something that would have moved through the world unseen had he not disturbed her with his hubristic search for eternal life.

I'm interested in seeking out the original story by Alexander Grin to see if it makes more clear the things that this film deals with so indirectly. It's absolutely gorgeous, full of that early-20th-century Russian opulence and a weirdly unfitting synth-opera hybrid soundtrack, and the oddities of the acting and dialogue just make the whole thing feel more dreamlike. I still can't make heads or tails of a lot of this but I did get the sense that it was more purposeful than it might initially seem.

The Vigil (2019)

directed by Keith Thomas

USA

88 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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This caught my eye because as far as I'm aware there are few entirely Jewish horror films, especially not relatively mainstream ones like this (it's produced by Blumhouse). 2020 seems to have dealt it a hard blow as far as actually getting a widespread release is concerned, as is the case with almost every movie intended to come out this year, but it is out, in some capacity at least. The primary complaint I kept seeing in reviews was that this film relies too heavily on jump scares and atmosphere, but really, that just made me want to see it more. I don't always hate jump scares, honestly. Sometimes it's fun to be startled, you know? That's half of why I watch horror in the first place. And combined with a heavy, oppressive atmosphere is kind of the only way jump scares can ever feel appropriate- they only really bug me when they're used cheaply, just out of nowhere in broad daylight.

Up front I should mention that I don't know much of anything about Orthodox Judaism, and as such if anything about The Vigil is heavily offensive it was lost on me. It didn't help at all that I didn't anticipate how much of the dialogue would be in Yiddish, and I couldn't find subtitles for it. The main character is conflicted about his religion, having left his community after a tragedy, and now attends a support group for others who have also fallen out of their respective circles. I don't think this is framed as implying that Orthodox Judaism is at all bad- just that some people eventually leave because it doesn't fit with their lives, which happens in pretty much every religion, and if no one had that option of leaving, it would be serious cause for concern. The main character has deep-seated issues around his religion and his past, and Dave Davis does a startlingly good job portraying him. This movie wouldn't have been half of what it was had he not been in the lead role. He is so convincing in the way he shows emotion and reacts to his situation that I really just felt an overwhelming desire for him to get a hug and some therapy. At no point does anything this movie deals with feel like it was handled clumsily or rushed or brushed over. It's an extremely heavy film. Far heavier than most Blumhouse offerings.

One of my favorite niche sub-sub-subgenres of horror is films where someone has to spend one night guarding a corpse. Anybody who has seen Viy should know that this situation can get creepy really fast. I'm not going to compare Viy to this because the act of staying with a body overnight is a distinctly Jewish practice in this case, so the two films are coming from different backgrounds, but they're similar in the plain fact that they involve a person alone with a body and a mysterious, malevolent force. I could add The Autopsy of Jane Doe to this grouping of films as well, although, again, not specifically a Jewish film. The important thing with these films is that everything takes place over the course of one harrowing night, and whether for good or bad, when the sun rises the next morning, the events of the previous night are thrown into a new light- in this case, far more complicated than "good or bad".

I can see why a lot of people might get bored by The Vigil and see it as an aimless build-up of dread punctuated by some jump scares here and there, and I can even agree with small parts of that statement, because it does take a while to feel like anything is actually going on, but the last 20-30 minutes are phenomenal. The way the demon is handled is amazing. It is genuinely one of the most unnerving and actually forceful-feeling demons I've seen in a recent horror movie. You don't see it too much but its presence when it's onscreen is intensely disquieting but always visually ambiguous; the way the main character describes it as "blurry" at one point really sums it up. It does do other generic demon things like imitate people to confuse the protagonist, but when it's best is actually when it's onscreen, in contrast to a lot of other ghouls & goblins of the horror genre- it just looks so creepy, it looks like there's something wrong with it; at one point when the protagonist is toe-to-toe with it its face changes into this incredibly bizarre beaked thing for a split second and I wish I had gone back and paused it right on that image because that design was unlike anything I've seen. I just loved the way this thing looked. Again, that last half-hour is perfect horror cinema as far as I'm concerned. I don't feel like this overuses jump scares, and again, they fit with the sinister atmosphere when they are used. I can't say this is far and away the best horror film of the year but it is one of the most unique and I enjoyed watching it very much.

Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010)

directed by Panos Cosmatos

Canada

110 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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I don't think I got this the first time I watched it because I was still under the pretense that there was something to get. There is a plot here- and I'll get to it in a moment- but it is far and away the least important thing to the viewer when considering how to approach this movie. I'm reminded of the idea that an atom is 99.9999...% empty space, with a nucleus in the middle that's the equivalent size of a pea in the middle of a racetrack. That pea is the plot and the rest of Beyond the Black Rainbow is filled with pure aesthetic. Another thing that made me appreciate this more was watching Mandy. I'm still a much bigger fan of Mandy than I am of this, but now I think I understand how the two are connected, if they're connected at all (and I think they are).

Beyond the Black Rainbow is one of the most aesthetically perfect films I've ever seen, and that's why I love it. I don't love it for the plot or for the acting, I love it because it's an insane, acid-drenched vision of 1970s metaphysical self-help culture turned brainwashing telepathy cult. Vague hints of Cronenberg crop up here and there, but for the most part this is its own beast. If you go into it expecting to understand on the first watch or even on the second, you'll be disappointed, not because it's too dense to parse but because it's just not that deep. I'm gonna try to lay it all out here as best I can figure it out, mostly for my own benefit:

Sometime in the 1960s a quack psychiatrist founded a phony institute based on generic claims of energy healing and being your best self and whatnot, only he was tapped into some truly weird stuff instead of just multi-level marketing like most of these things are. His "son" (none of the familial relationships in this film are ever elaborated upon, I'm just filling in the blanks with what I believe) underwent some kind of bizarre experiment that may have involved dunking himself bodily in a pit of LSD. He came back from this twisted and had a child (again, it is not stated that Elena is the doctor's child, but I think she was), possibly with his own mother, who he also gave this LSD baptism to, but it rendered her nearly catatonic instead of driving her malevolently insane like the doctor. An adolescent, she's now being held captive, either drugged to the gills or actually disabled, inside the labyrinthine institute.

While this is very similar to Mandy in a lot of ways, it has something that Mandy doesn't in that there's sort of a good vs. evil narrative going on here. Another undertone that is extremely faint but is intertwined with the whole kooky self-help cult vibe is neoliberalism, Reaganism, capitalism, that kind of thing. I think the doctor ended up so hateful and violent because he was brought up in an environment where America was rapidly becoming isolationist, and so his experiments with psychic power and psychedelic drugs lead him to obsess over power and control. Elena, raised in captivity and indoctrinated with her powers as an infant, never had that exposure to an outside world and culture. So she was able to manifest a "pure" psychic power that the doctor never managed to gain. Her as a pure good, him as a corrupted evil.

And returning to the acting... Michael Rogers is doing something in this movie, I have no idea if he's doing it on purpose or not, but it's definitely something. It is no surprise that Panos Cosmatos got Nicolas Cage to be in Mandy because both his character and Rogers' in this film have the same essence about them. Like they're doing something totally different to everybody and everything around them. I have seen Michael Rogers in other movies since this and I think he is actually just a bad actor. But somehow that works for this film.

It's really hard to describe Panos Cosmatos' distinct style because it's something that you have to either completely give yourself over to or you won't have a good time. If you're constantly trying to figure things out and ridicule what is unrealistic, it takes you away from experiencing the film as one whole. You just gotta get into the rhythm of it, that's the only way I can describe it. It rolls over you. You don't need to understand. You only need to be shown. Image without context. Hidden meaning. This could have gone on for another hour and I wouldn't have felt bored watching it.

Koko-di Koko-da (2019)

directed by Johannes Nyholm

Sweden/Denmark

86 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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The only really comprehensible thing about this movie is the beginning. It starts off with the sudden and unexpected death of the main couple's young daughter on the eve of her birthday, and the next time we see them is three years later, still together but with a lot of unresolved issues. The grief and lack of communication between the two is what sets up the whole film following the initial death, and from there it slides further and further into inexplicable fantasy. I feel like I'm going to look extremely foolish if I talk about anything that happens in this movie as if it was meant to be taken 100% literally, because describing it to an outsider, it sounds like it's so obviously absurd and intended as metaphor that no one could ever take it seriously. But I just can't figure out what was going on with this, and that's why it's so deeply unsettling, it never allows you to get comfortable and imagine that you know what's going to happen next, or lets you say "aha, so this was the way it really went". Maybe everything really happened, maybe it didn't, but it doesn't really matter in the end what may have genuinely happened.

The couple is accosted by a trio of bizarre characters: A huge man in suspenders carrying a dead dog, a tall woman with a living, aggressive dog on a leash, and a short, older man whistling a tune that seems to be some kind of nursery rhyme (I'm unfamiliar with Swedish nursery rhymes, so fill me in if this is incorrect). They assault the woman, then sic the dog on the man. Then the man wakes up, realizes it was something halfway between a dream and a premonition, tries to escape, and it all happens over and over again. Something always happens to suck them back into the same loop of violence and humiliation- it's just this black hole of inevitability, and somehow the three mysterious assailants become far more terrifying in their inscrutability than any shadowy demon figure from any mainstream horror film. Metaphor or reality, they are some kind of manifestation or representation of extreme negative energy, whether just happening to exist that way of their own accord or having been summoned up- as I believe was the case- as a physical representation of the couple's unresolved grief. The first time they stalked onto the screen, even without knowing what would come next, I just felt this dread at the sight of them- that's what this movie does, it creates a deep-seated dread and anxiety in you because you know something horrible is about to happen and it won't make sense or have a clean resolution or way out.

That's the whole thing with this: the senselessness. It begins with the random act of the daughter's death, the terror that something so unjust could happen without warning, without reason, and it takes that injustice to an illogical extreme. What if people came out of the woods and assaulted my wife? What if they were creatures from a weird fairytale? What if they were led by a jolly, cavorting imp who laughs as he coaxes a girl to shoot me in the balls and releases a slavering dog into the tent where my wife is? These trains of thought are bizarre and nonsensical, but they mirror the nonsense that everyday life is, and once something happens to you that's as unexpected and horrifying as the death of your child, I think a part of you just goes sure, whatever, if this could happen, so could anything. I think that's where Koko-di Koko-da comes from, as a concept.

There's also an interstitial sequence filmed as a shadow puppet play (or made to look like one) that is absolutely devastating. Like I said, nothing about this maps 1:1 onto recognizable real life events; you can't really point at things and go "this means that, that means this". It all just keeps coming in an onslaught of bizarre meaningless violence. And speaking of "violence", I think this movie is more effective because it does not overuse blood and gore. There is a sadistic, sickening glee in the way the three strangers set upon the couple, but it's not the sadism of a Saw film, because it's not inventive, it's the same sequence of actions over and over: catch the wife while she's vulnerable, play with her while the husband watches, set the dog on one of them, aim the gun, wake up. I can't define what exactly is so unsettling about this film, but it's one of the most unsettling films I've seen in a while and will probably stick with me forever now even though I don't really want it to. I think it has a good ending but honestly I don't even know.

Visitor to a Museum (1989)

directed by Konstantin Lopushansky

Germany, Russia, Switzerland

128 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I watched this as a kind of companion piece to Stalker, not because they share any thematic similarities but because I had the urge to watch multiple two-hour-plus Soviet science fiction films in short succession. (This urge probably only comes to me and maybe five other people.) I am a huge fan of Lopushansky's other work and I'm always happy when I can actually watch it, being as rare as it is to find any of it with subtitles.

It is somewhat amusing to me to describe the main character of Visitor to a Museum as a disaster tourist, because he is. He comes from the city to a place where the world is ravaged and transformed into a giant landfill, searching for a feature of some repute (the museum) and taking in the decimated surroundings. The exact reason for why the world has become so bogged down by trash is never stated, but it doesn't really have to be- like many Soviet films dealing with the apocalypse, this posits that the world is slowly getting worse, that its inhabitants are losing their moral grip on life, and that the ennui of existing is inescapable and will eventually lead us down two paths: total screaming despair 24/7, or frenzied indulgence; ritualistic capitalism, party party party. I can think of no vision of hell that feels more accurate than the leering, frantic faces of the people in their lavish outfits this film depicts dancing with wild abandon. The sobbing masses pleading with an absent god to bring them up from their misery feel perfectly relatable, while the dancing and cavorting of the elites, lit dimly in red and black, looks like a vision from the inferno itself.

About that lighting- sometimes this movie is so dark that the screen is almost entirely black. Most of the time, the color palette is dark red and deep, deep black with no other colors. This means you really have to strain your eyes to actually be able to see anything (and it's even worse if you're watching a stream that's already sub-par quality), but I also can't imagine a more perfect filter for the hellish world Visitor to a Museum creates. Like I said, those scenes with people pulling their faces into exaggerated expressions of happiness and living it up in the name of ignoring the destruction of the environment feel more like a Boschian vision of hell than anything else I can think of.

In contrast to what I have referred to as the "elite"- those people in the film who continue to live a semi-normal life, doing things like running taverns, inns, and scorning anybody who acknowledges and understands the escalating degradation of the planet- there are the "degenerates". Now this is an aspect of the film that is... not great, to say the least. Degenerates are people mutated by the effects of the ongoing environmental catastrophe, and are kept in reservations and treated like animals by those fortunate enough to be physically untouched by the ecological crisis. These people are portrayed (mostly) by actors who are actually handicapped. The degenerates are depicted in this film as the ones who understand what's going on and who bear the weight of the full knowledge that they're living in the apocalypse, and they form a sort of quasi-religion around this- a concept which is incredibly powerful. I'm fascinated by the idea of society dividing itself up into rigid sects along a line separating people who deny the problem and people who are so overwhelmed by it as to have it become an all-consuming, ego-destroying panic that controls their lives and belief systems. Not, like, in real life, of course. That wouldn't be great. But in fiction, this is an interesting way to look at the class divide: The people shunned and scorned for appearing imperfect, the ones directly influenced by the crisis produced by rich people consuming and consuming without worry for the resources they're using up, are, of course, going to be the ones shouldering the burden of the awareness of impending doom. But depicting disabled people as sacred bearers of a holy knowledge is, while not the same as depicting them as bumbling and incapable, still ableist.

There is still something about the underground movement of people turning apocalyptic doom into a religious movement that I feel really deeply. This kind of response to existential dread is, in my experience, somewhat rare in Russian/Soviet sci-fi. Typically, anxiety towards the future manifests in a kind of resigned apathy, like how Stalker depicts all of the land outside the Zone as this sepia industrial nightmare where there's no human comfort or joy. Visitor to a Museum shows ennui like a panic attack. The response to the weight of it all- to everything we're going through now, only worsened so much in the time since this film was made- is just so snap. To fully give yourself over to the sorrow and the horror and the irrationality of it all. To form huge masses and wail and scream and moan and beg your god with everything you have to get you out of there. That resonates with me very much. The closing shot of the film really captures everything in one scene. No sense, no reason, no logic in the face of such a monumental thing as the continued decline of our planet. Nothing to do but just scream at the sun.

Stalker (1979)

directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

Russia (USSR)

162 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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My book club is discussing Roadside Picnic next month, so after reading the book I found myself wanting to revisit Stalker to see if it was any different with the added context of the source material. The two share few similarities other than the basic concept of the Zone, and I want this review to focus mainly on the film, so aside from a few points here and there, I will try to avoid talking too much about the book.

However, I do think the book and the film share the same main theme, out of which branch several avenues of thought that make up the framework of the story: The arrival of an outside force causing humanity as a whole to have to truly reckon with its own insignificance for the first time. The book and the film go about depicting this in different ways, with Roadside Picnic taking a brasher, grittier approach and Stalker immersing itself fully in suffocating existential dread. But in both instances, the matter of the Visit itself- an alien encounter not elaborated upon but presumed to have happened a decade or two prior to the events of the story- is far less important than the aftermath, in which we have to reconcile thousands of years of self-importance with the newfound knowledge that we're not alone in the universe. The title of Roadside Picnic provides some more important context that carries over into the film; it refers to the idea that the alien visitation and the subsequent scraps and artifacts left behind, as well as the creation of the Zone, is nothing more than the equivalent of a car full of careless teenagers stopping to have a picnic in a forest somewhere and leaving behind their trash. That kind of cosmic indifference has a profound effect on how humanity views itself, and I regard Stalker as a film taking place after a moral apocalypse, a shift which is so great that the essential worldview of every person on the planet changes irrevocably.

I think I wanted Stalker to be more of a science fiction film than it is. It would be lovely if this absolute monolith of a film were science fiction, if the genre had this esteemed and deeply culturally embedded object to call its own. But unlike Tarkovsky's more outwardly science-fictional film Solaris, Stalker does not deal directly with the impossible, and in fact dances around any mention of alien visitation or unnatural physics to the point where those things are almost absent entirely. Stalker is a movie about philosophical speculation, more or less, and not even in the face of a specifically extraterrestrial presence; the Zone is, here, an environment that triggers examination of the self and the id more than it is a landscape to be mined and picked over for alien artifacts. I do not believe, in Stalker, that the simple act of crossing over the boundary into the Zone brings some physical change into play. Rather, the act of crossing from the familiarity of the land outside the Zone into an area of such incomprehensible mystery causes one's mind to turn in on itself of its own accord.

I spent some time thinking about the significance of the change that occurs when the characters enter the Zone and the color palette of the film goes from pure sepia to natural color. Throughout the entire film it is emphasized that the Zone is unnatural, that it's a space that has been tainted by something foreign and is no longer subject to human laws and boundaries. But it's the "normal" space that the characters inhabit, their dreary, damp town and depressing industrial backdrop, that is colored unnaturally. I think it is the world outside of the Zone that has become "unnatural" since the arrival of the Zone. The new mindset forced upon humanity has warped their once-familiar environs into something new, and the untouched wilderness of the Zone has become an idealized space of natural beauty. The longing to return to this space that has been taken from humanity and reclaimed as something partially alien festers in the brain and causes venturers into the Zone to re-examine their role in the natural world.

I can't stop thinking about a conversation between the three characters towards the end of the film, when they approach the room deep in the interior of the Zone that apparently grants the deepest wish of anyone who enters it. The Stalker tells his two less experienced charges about a former stalker who took his own life after being granted riches by the room. This stalker's brother had died, also in the Zone, and he entered the room believing that the wish he would be granted would be the return of his brother. But instead, the room gave him piles of money. This is, I believe, the most profound statement in a film that is full of other profound statements. The utter decimation of one's character that one must feel after believing that what one truly wants is something altruistic, something that would lead to the return of a loved one, only to be presented with the reality: You are not that selfless. In the end, you are shallow. How do you come back from that rebuke? How do you come back from being shown that your true self is not who you thought you were?

There has been much debate about what Stalker is truly about, and I'm not aiming to end that debate here, or even really contribute anything original to it. I just want to talk about one of my favorite movies of all time. The only thing I can understand is that human insignificance is the driving force behind most of what the characters run up against. The Zone represents a threat to human superiority. I do not believe Stalker is fully without the supernatural- there must be some element of actual metaphysics or the Room would not have been able to grant the doomed stalker his fortune- and I believe the black dog who follows the protagonist is also a manifestation of the alien visitors. But much more than being science fiction, Stalker is a debate about "true" human nature and a breaking down of the boundary between natural and unnatural, human and inhuman. It doesn't feel so much like a film as it does an object. There are few films that clock in at nearly three hours that I could be content to watch at least once a week for the rest of my life, but this is definitely one.

Run (2020)

directed by Aneesh Chaganty

USA

90 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This was a last-minute watch for me. I didn't know anything about it beforehand and most of the decision to put it on was based off of how much I like Sarah Paulson. It's probably that way for a lot of people, because she is good, but I hope to change at least some minds towards watching this for Kiera Allen. This is her first credit, which is pretty unbelievable, and her performance deserves to be the reason you see this. It's also incredibly important that she's a disabled actor playing a disabled character, because the vast majority of wheelchair users in film are unfortunately not played by people with experience using a wheelchair. I will be talking major spoilers throughout this review so please avoid it if you're unaware of the particulars of this film.

The movie starts out on a hopeful note: Paulson's character describes her daughter, who uses a wheelchair and has multiple other chronic health conditions, in only good terms, conflicting strongly with the people around her in the support group she's attending who cry and fret about their children being incapable of existing in the world. To hear Paulson's character genuinely have confidence that her daughter is exactly as strong and capable as anybody with the use of their legs is, indeed, not something you hear often in a movie with a disabled character. This isn't a triumph story, it doesn't infantilize the lead or make it seem like her disability is a burden. It treats her as a whole person, not one with something taken away from her. And even though her mother is later revealed to be a reprehensible person, her confidence in her daughter is never something that's called into question because of what she does.

Now this is interesting because the big reveal (which some may have been able to see coming because really- what other twist could there have been?) is that the lead is actually not disabled. I think I probably shouldn't put it into such black and white terms, though- there's not such a strict binary here between Disabled and Not Disabled, and the lead character's health issues do persist despite finding out she's been lied to about their extent. The point of the reveal- and this is another instance where this movie stands out from other disability narratives- is not, gasp! She was really able-bodied all along! The point is that she was lied to for her entire life.

The story this tells is not necessarily a brand new thing, because we have heard about people being lead to believe by their own parents that they had a host of health conditions, which were in reality all made up because the parents enjoyed the attention having a sick child brought them. Again, though, it isn't quite like that with these two characters- the mother does not seek sympathy for her daughter, she does not milk her disability for her own emotional gain; her intent in shaping her daughter to be a certain way is related more to the loss she's suffered than a need to receive outside validation for being such a strong person for taking care of a disabled child. That's where a less thoughtful movie would have gone, and that's where Run doesn't go. So even though the basic framework of the plot isn't original, it's executed in a far more interesting and just altogether better way than anything else would have been.

I love the way this looked, too. It's so blandly Pacific Northwest that it looks really real. There are a couple things I can't figure out about it in relation to the setting, though. First off is the fact that the characters shop at Kroger. I live in the South, I've worked at Kroger. I have also lived in Washington, where this movie is set. I don't think there are Krogers there. From sitting through boring company history meetings, I believe that the Pacific Northwest arm of Kroger only operates stores under names such as Fred Meyer, and there are no Krogers themselves in that region. The other strange thing is that the film specifically mentions Derry, Maine; as in the fictional Derry that Stephen King invented. I have no idea if this is just a shoutout because the director is a fan or if King had some direct involvement with this, but I can't see any link to Derry. It is very strange to specifically mention Derry though, because you wouldn't do so without a good reason, since it doesn't exist.

The only reason I gave this four stars instead of five is because I didn't really like the ending. The last five minutes is the only time where I felt like this faltered. I don't see why the main character would do what she did- seven years later, after having established herself in a career helping others and making progress towards undoing the damage her mother did to her, I don't see why she would still tie herself to her abuser and choose to do something that would actively put herself in danger of being put in jail. I'm not making this argument based on real people, so please don't extrapolate my feelings about this movie onto the real world- I 100% would never outright wonder why someone doesn't leave their abuser, because abusive relationships are complex and just leaving is not always an option. But in the context of this movie, it didn't make sense to me that such a strong and intelligent character, who had already spent seven years living her own life, would return to the source of 17 years of confinement instead of leaving her past behind. That's my only nitpick, though, the rest of this movie is excellent. The kind of thing that makes me realize how rare it is to actually watch a good movie.

Travelling Salesman (2012)

directed by Timothy Lanzone

USA

80 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Math is... not my strong suit, to say the least, and it's kind of a sore spot for me that I'm so bad at it, but I do understand the P=NP problem, vaguely, and thanks to Wikipedia, you can too. It's considered the most important unsolved problem in mathematics and can be defined, if one has to do it in a single sentence, as: Can every problem whose solution can be verified quickly also be solved quickly?

Onto the actual movie. There's very little of a traditional narrative in this and the bulk of it is spent in a single room, around a single table, with four mathematicians arguing with a government employee about the applications of their research after they've solved the P=NP problem. It doesn't show how they solved the problem; it all takes place after they've discovered the solution while apparently being contracted by the U.S. government to do so, the reasons for which are unexplained, but we all know that the government rarely researches anything if they don't believe it can be weaponized.

While I might not understand math, I can certainly understand what the mathematicians are arguing with the man from the government about. They're concerned about their work being used in the future the way research into atomic energy was used to develop bombs that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Oppenheimer and other scientists working on the original projects that later became the nuclear bomb are cited multiple times, and although, again, I don't fully comprehend the direct path from solving the P=NP problem to weaponizing it, the specter of mass destruction is always present behind the mathematicians' (or at least some of their) arguments. One person is really the main character here, because he has the strongest opinions about the way his research should be used and he's the only one of the four who has any kind of background story. It should also be noted that this movie is almost comically masculine; there is a single woman in the entire film, who doesn't have a speaking role and is dressed down and dismissed inexplicably by the main character, then never shows up again. I guess there are no women mathematicians in the universe of this film.

I'm going to talk about spoilers from here on out, although by nature this is a difficult movie to "spoil" since it's largely just five men arguing in a room. I'm seriously impressed by the skill of all the actors in this to convince me that they really believed in what they were saying. It's one of those rare marriages of screenwriting and acting where I didn't feel the hand of a writer but was able, instead, to fully believe I was watching real people. I can't imagine any of these actors not playing a mathematician. They were so embedded in their roles that I have to believe they had at least some experience being the type of people they were portraying. 

Actually, you know what, I'm looking up the filmographies of the actors in this film and it is ruining my suspension of disbelief. The lead actor's other two credits are something called "Bad Girls Dormitory" and a film about a demon baby. One of them seems to have been in nothing but films about Blue Öyster Cult. I wish I hadn't done this.

Anyway, the interesting thing that this movie does towards the end is it becomes something that makes you rethink the lead character's motives and his role in determining the path of the film. While this whole thing is impersonal to the extremes most of the time, at the end it becomes almost a character study. Things are brought to light about how the lead character views the role of math in society that make you question whether anything he did was ever impartial at all, or if it was to advance his own philosophy. It's a shift in tone that's almost frightening- think about if you were watching a movie where someone had a nice day out for 90 minutes, and then in the last thirty seconds, they returned home and began putting on a suicide vest. Travelling Salesman is not as extreme as that example, but it saves the revelation until the end, when it dawns on you that the lead character had reasons for solving the problem that pertained more to his personal worldview than to the pure pursuit of knowledge.

I am not sure if the film itself was intended to share his worldview or if I am attributing extremism to his philosophy because it's one that I personally detest (the idea that any technology, even when it's beneficial to humans, like an artificial heart, is a crutch and must be eliminated), and if the latter is the case, I could be totally wrong in feeling like the film took a turn towards being a much more sinister study of a disturbed person than it originally appeared to be. In the end, like how I don't understand math, I don't understand everything about this movie. It has deeper layers than are apparent from the surface, and that's why it's so great. The cinematography is terrible and makes 2012 look like it was 20 years ago, but the content is what's important. The Primer comparisons are justified.

Friday the 13th (1980)

directed by Sean S. Cunningham

USA

95 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Somehow I've made it through many years and many, many horror movies without having seen this, so I decided that a real-life Friday the 13th was an appropriate time. It's no longer Friday as I'm writing this, and it was only still Friday for about an hour when I watched the movie, but... you know what I mean. And an excuse is really not needed to watch a movie this good, even if it is more fun to do it on a certain day.

The more I watch early slashers like this, ones from before people started playing with the format and dressing it up, the less I understand why slasher movies have some conservatives so up in arms. The rule of thumb in early slashers was if you have sex, you die. Sometimes it's not even necessary to go all the way, or even to have sex- sometimes if you sneak off to do drugs, or look the wrong way at a girl who's in a relationship, it's enough to summon whatever lurking madman with a sharp weapon stalks through the film. This idea that only the people who "sin" get in trouble- that's everything the kind of people looking to ban movies with gore in them are advocating for, isn't it? I have to wonder if maybe their revulsion at slashers such as Friday the 13th is less due to perceived depravity and more because they don't want to accept that their behavior is more similar to the killer than the brave final girl fighting for survival. I realize that this term may fall out of fashion in the future and badly date this review, but Jason's mother is the ultimate "Karen": She blames other people for something that probably wasn't their fault, and she doesn't care if they weren't involved, she will get compensation for her pain.

I'm trying to figure out why Friday the 13th feels so authentic despite the acting not being any great shakes most of the time. Everybody in this acts like it's their first time acting any role at all (even though I'm sure that isn't true for most if not all of them). They pronounce their words deliberately and move in rehearsed ways around the sets. But somehow they embody the mood of naive campers and counselors; kids goofing off, totally oblivious to the creeping horror. Especially in the opening scene, where the ill-fated camp cook's dialogue is stilted and awkwardly written, but there's just something that feels real about her. In her you can see all the women who've ever been caught in the wrong car with the wrong man at the wrong time. It was watching Halloween for the first time that really made me realize that the most crucial part of slashers is the victims, and that you can't make a great slasher just by throwing some half-nude teens at the blade of an axe, you have to create characters who we genuinely don't want to see die, even if they're only onscreen for a handful of minutes.

The concept of Jason is really interesting to me, and I think in all the sequels he kind of gets boiled down to that standard "hulking figure with an axe and a mask" trope, but in this first one there's something different about him. I'm very surprised that nobody really addresses his mother- I mean, yeah, she gets her head chopped off, but this franchise is famous- possibly even spawned the trope- for finding increasingly unlikely ways to bring Jason back after he's supposedly been killed For Good This Time. Jason never dies, right? But what about his mother? What about this weird, semi-psychic relationship they have in which they seem to share one mind? There's something I find oddly compelling about a woman who looks like every white person's aunt you've ever met, dressed in a chunky sweater and commanding her dead-but-undead son while somehow also channeling him at the same time. Until the abrupt twist ending, Mrs. Voorhees IS the killer in this film, and I think that's incredibly unique, even if it didn't turn out to be fully true- this middle-aged lady just absolutely wild with righteous indignation over her son's death, so distraught that she embodies him, justifying her actions in his voice. It would be interesting to see a horror movie where the killer is an old woman, played totally straight, not for shock value, just because this old woman happens to harbor murderous hatred for whatever reason.

This is probably all stuff that's known already to the whole horror-watching world, but because this is my first time watching Friday the 13th, it's still new and fascinating to me. I did find myself extremely bored during the middle of the film and I could see it easily cut down to like 80 minutes from its original 95 (maybe this is sacrilege to say, I don't know, I'm sorry) but even the drag has purpose, has meaning. Getting bored of watching how easily and inevitably these teenagers all get murdered is part of the enforcement of Jason as a relentless, unstoppable entity. I love how you can tell what shots are from Jason's POV and which aren't by how shaky the camera is. That method of having him be on screen without actually showing him was brilliant. As with most movies, maybe at least a couple of the sequels are worth watching, but the first is a moment in time that should be appreciated as a singular object as well.

Death of Me (2020)

directed by Darren Lynn Bousman

Thailand, USA

95 minutes

1.5 star out of 5

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Every so often I watch a movie that is bad. Not bad in a fun way, not bad in a funny way. Just a terrible movie that had every chance to be good. A movie that had a large budget, decent actors, and was set in a beautiful location, yet somehow, all talent and skill was squandered. Death of Me is one of those movies. I got roped into watching it because of Alex Essoe and Maggie Q, but I have regrets now.

I had hoped that the horror genre had largely left behind the popular "American tourists go to another country and get into a pickle with the locals" plot except for when it's done in parody to show how inept and self-absorbed the tourists are. Apparently it has not, and those movies still exist. I'm not the biggest fan of Darren Lynn Bousman either but I expected him to at least make something that was watchable- not the case here. He handles the "lost American tourist" plotline with full seriousness; the tourists are rude and believe themselves to be privileged and it's never commented upon, it's just their default mode of being. They're established so that the whole of the film is about the horror of them not having everything handed to them. They don't even have chemistry as a couple, so one of the integral elements of the story- that the girl doesn't believe her boyfriend could ever hurt her, even though they find a tape showing him strangling her- doesn't work at all because it's just not believable that the girl trusts her boyfie enough to not run screaming in the other direction at the slightest hint of abuse.

Every stereotype of "backwards natives" is upheld here. The message is: Americans are special, all of the locals are talking about you in their native language behind your back, they are all obsessed with you and you are the center of their world on this little island where you are probably the only Americans there until the next tourists come. You are unique and deserve special treatment just by virtue of being American. You can insinuate yourself into any local tradition you want. It is the locals' problem that you don't speak their language, not the other way around. All of the strange customs practiced on the island are indeed mysterious, dark rites designed, again, to target you specifically. This movie is American exceptionalism personified.

There's a scene where one of the leads abruptly joins a random parade and starts filming it, and he remarks to his camera that it is "May 10th, not a significant day in the Thai or Buddhist calendars". Because I'm the worst, I fact-checked this. While no holiday specifically falls on the 10th of May each year, both Vesak- which I would consider extremely significant as it is the Buddha's actual birthday- and the Royal Ploughing Ceremony could easily fall on May 10th depending on lunar cycles, which are what determine the dates of those holidays. In fact, in Cambodia, the Royal Ploughing Ceremony fell on May 10th this year. In Thailand, it was the 11th. Is this knowledge crucial to your understanding of the film? No. Did it take me about five seconds to Google it and make the character who claimed there were no holidays look like more of an ignoramus? I think so. I am sure this had a budget in the millions of not tens of millions and they couldn't afford a five-second Google search. At least I have the satisfaction of knowing it grossed only $41k worldwide, but that could easily be pandemic-related.

Nothing about this is outstandingly bad in a technical sense, other than that incredibly annoying song they kept playing every two seconds. It looks nice and it... has actors I guess, everything like that. It's just conceptually awful, it's everything that sucks about the horror genre brought to light and played totally straight. I didn't think we were still doing movies like this. I thought everybody could see how bumbling American tourists are a thing to be made fun of rather than precious humans who must be protected from the scary natives and their creepy magical ceremonies at all costs. This is the last I'm going to see of Bousman's films. I don't know why I've seen any at all.

But hey, it's Friday the 13th! Go watch a better movie than this.

Save Yourselves! (2020)

directed by Eleanor Wilson, Alex Huston Fischer

USA

93 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Let me lay bare my genre biases first: When I watch a movie I know is going to be a sci-fi/comedy, I usually get really bored if the comedy part outweighs the sci-fi. I don't watch a lot of comedies and if I am promised aliens I expect to see aliens, not just jokes about aliens. Save Yourselves! (I love movies with punctuation in the title) seemed to be leaning more towards the comedy angle, at least for a while; as it goes on it becomes more and more fantastical until it eventually does go full tilt towards the impossible. But all throughout, it's really charming and cute. Looking at it from a place of "oh I'm not going to like this if it does x" the way I did is a bad attitude to have.

So. The film is about a modern couple who are inseparable from their electronics and decide on impulse to take a week-long vacation at a friend's cabin in upstate New York, turning off all their devices and tuning out the outside world for the duration of their stay. This is another point of contention for me- having a message of "people are weak because of big scary technology" is a sure way to get me to resent your film. But Save Yourselves! is not like that, it really doesn't feel like it comes from a place of condescension in its attitude towards tech. It feels like it's coming from a sympathetic point of view, like someone saying "ugh we should probably turn off our phones and get back to nature" as opposed to a snide older person making fun of millennials. And really, in the end the point isn't even that turning off your phones is good- I don't even know why the synopsis chooses to focus so much on the technology-vacation part of it, because even though that is a big plot point, it's not relevant to the ultimate outcome of the film. I will talk about spoilers lightly from here on out so be forewarned.

The lead couple have a natural chemistry that's crucial to making this, like I said, a very charming movie. It's all a bit twee and if cute relationships rub you the wrong way you might want to look away. And yeah, even to me, who is very tolerant of twee, there's something a little bit privileged about this whole thing; it's lucky that the lead couple can afford to go away for a week, can afford to cut off from their family because they have no one urgently depending on them, can afford to be lackadaisical about how they live their lives. But- and I keep coming back to this point of it feeling like an insider's perspective- it never feels preachy or superior. It just feels like a good and positive movie.

The ending is... I don't know what to say about that ending. "Abrupt" and "unexplained" and "rushed" are all understatements. Somehow, though, it didn't entirely fall short for me when the movie basically just cut off, because I thought the very sudden ending worked well with the rest of it. This is a story entirely focused on two peoples' individual experience of an alien takeover of Earth. It's not about the aliens, or why they came, or what they're doing. It's not even about how the rest of the world is faring- and it seems to be faring pretty badly. It's just about these two people. For the ending to be wholly unexplained is a perfect conclusion for something like that, because if there were an actual alien invasion in real life, sure, a lot of people would devote themselves to methodically figuring out as much as possible about the aliens, but some people? Some people would be exactly like the couple in this film, not concerned at all with who these invaders are but just trying to keep their body parts intact and their ethanol un-harvested. They learn nothing about the aliens (other than that they harvest ethanol) and are totally at their mercy in the end. That's a more realistic picture of what will probably happen to the majority of us if aliens ever invaded than most media cares to envision.

This is running long, so I'll end it on a note of appreciation for the aliens themselves. Like I just said, they're not the most important element of this, but I loved them! The crew did such a good job making aliens that looked physical! I'm sure it was all due to their simplicity, but those aliens looked like real flesh-and-blood creatures and had such a strong physical presence that they fit right in with the scenery like any chair or desk or lamp. Even the more improbable scenes of them using their weird Yoshi tongues to suck stuff up looked convincing. Excellent alien design, I'm 100% here for the poufs from outer space. And points added for Weyes Blood, of course.

His House (2020)

directed by Remi Weekes

UK

93 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I'd been looking forward to this not only all October but ever since I first heard about it. I am very interested in the vein that seems to be opening up in the horror genre of utilizing familiar horror tropes to tell stories about the im/migrant experience. As a general disclaimer, I'm not a refugee nor an immigrant of any kind, so I can't speak to that experience personally. I think the horror genre is possibly the most powerful tool that can be used by marginalized populations when telling their stories because it's full of conventions that are typically used by white creators to speak to white audiences, but are so clearly better wielded as metaphor in the hands of people typically not given space in the genre. Most horror stems from unfamiliarity, after all, but we're used to seeing that over and over- what is more horrific is to be the one who is unfamiliar, to face the stares of people who don't want to see you, to have to acclimate to a hostile environment that you're uncomfortable calling home.

So that's the basic atmosphere of His House. The main characters are two South Sudanese refugees living in England and trying to adjust to the prejudice and setbacks they face. They're put up in a ramshackle old house in a run-down housing development and told in no uncertain terms how they can and cannot behave in this new country- terms which sound little better than jail. This alienation and their regrets and traumas boil over until they become part of their physical world, manifesting as spirits the couple carried over from South Sudan that take up residence in the walls of their house. A rift also opens up between them as they have different beliefs about the purpose of their haunting and what to do to get rid of it. All the while they still face discrimination and systemic oppression.

There's a scene that's interesting to me because it depicts something that a lot of films won't address: When Rial attempts to trek to the doctor's office on foot but gets lost in a labyrinthine configuration of concrete walls, she finds some Black teenagers and appears relieved that maybe they'll be kinder to her than the uncomprehending white people she's faced so far. But the teenagers are as rude and eager to make fun of her as everyone else- her accent, her origins, she's too marked as an Other to be accepted by them, because they've swallowed the doctrine of Britishness too thoroughly. This is unique because most films are satisfied to portray racism as a literal black/white issue. His House shows that it's a larger culture of racism that makes people racist.

This is a really unpleasant movie that's filmed gorgeously and acted incredibly well too. There's just nothing comforting in it, there's no space where the characters can relax. You hope to at least see them find refuge in each other as a married couple, but their differences in approaching their haunted house as well as processing their own grief makes them unable to reconcile. I appreciated that the flashbacks to their time on the boat were kept to a minimum, because that's something that I struggle to believe can ever be depicted well in fiction- things like genocide and refugee boats are parts of peoples' history that they have every right to tell if they're comfortable doing so, but when it's fictionalized, even when done tastefully like this, it's hard not to feel like there's an element of sensationalism. I just think that certain subjects are impossible to depict in fiction. That such things are real is bad enough. Making up instances where they happen to fake, made-up people feels questionable to me.

But this movie is so well-made and so unique among a massive amount of horror movies where the closest thing to being a refugee the characters experience is moving into a house that has three bedrooms instead of four. Or the perennial "I know this cabin in the woods with no neighbors for miles is falling apart, honey, but it's ours!" Imagine what the "new house horror" genre could be if it was not just new house but new country horror, and throw in the horrors of war, alienation, hatred, racism, financial oppression, guilt, and basically everything else under the sun, and you have a starting point for how to think of His House. I recommend it just because there's so much garbage on Netflix and this is something really new and important. But like I said it is not an easy watch.

In Fabric (2018)

directed by Peter Strickland

UK

118 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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I'd been wanting to see this for a long time- so long, in fact, that it somehow slipped under my radar when it actually came out. Better late than never, I suppose. Peter Strickland remains basically unblemished as a director, producing nothing but films that are more stylish than anything has the right to be, and marry soundtrack, image, and atmosphere seamlessly in a three-way union of perfection. It is easy, when describing this film, to slip into borderline nonsensical talk of luxury and retail allure the way Fatma Mohamad's mannequin-like saleswoman does to goad interested customers into submitting entirely to the will of her "trusted department store".

This is one of those movies that feels in some way magical, the level of aesthetic sublimity it achieves seemingly beyond the reaches of normal film and editing equipment. I mean, y'all, it looks so good. I was getting a vibe similar to Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani's work from this, but less random and with less of that very French feeling of, like, "shock value but make it art". Strickland is, in this film and in his others, strongly influenced by giallo, which shows in the bright coloring and the impossibly red blood, but this is also something completely new. It's full of anachronisms- parts of it seem modern, but people sit and watch television sets that look like they never saw the last quarter of the 20th century. A large part of the plot involves one of the characters meeting men through the classifieds section of her local paper, which feels inherently dated to me, regardless of whether or not people still do that. The department store is a mixture of different eras, the saleswomen all wear what look like mid-calf-length Victorian mourning dresses. I can't pinpoint an exact time period for this film, and that makes it all the more surreal and dreamy.

And then there's the plot, which is interesting on its own, but is supplemented by so much hypnotic imagery and small details that it feels like just the center jewel in a massively encrusted tiara. It's the story of a "cursed" dress that fits everyone who wears it, regardless of whether they are its size- a 36, consistently, no matter their measurements- and leads them to a strange but inevitable death, beginning with the model in the department store's catalogue. Now that I'm thinking about it, the whole scenario reminds me a ton of the killer masks from Halloween III. People watch, enraptured, as ads with bizarre subliminal imagery entice them to buy a product from a company which is nothing but a front for some occult organization, which then alters their body before bringing them to an untimely end. I don't know if that particular reference was intentional but it does follow a very similar format. The curse on the dress is not the beginning and end of its foreboding nature, though, and I hesitate even to reduce whatever is going on with it to simply calling it a "curse", because there seems to be so much more beneath the surface. The department store is clearly hiding something. Clearly everyone working there is in on some secret that we're not- they don't even seem human, most of the time. But we're never privy to whatever goes on behind the scenes, and as a result the film's sense of humor- and it does have one, as strange as it is- has the sense of someone laughing at a joke that is only understandable to members of a specific elite.

It's not as explicitly kinky as The Duke of Burgundy, but there is an extremely heavy sensuality to In Fabric that is part and parcel of the allure of it. It's suffocatingly, dizzyingly sensual. The takeaway I got from it is that there is power in submission: When one party satisfies every need of the other, caters to their every whim even before they know they have it, that party, although technically in submission to the other party, gains power over them. The whole of In Fabric is a dance between desire and fulfillment, consumer and consumption.

Don't expect to be able to follow an easily-recognizable thread of logic when watching this, because more often than not it doesn't make sense, but everything is communicated that needs to be communicated. Like I said, there is a strong "in-joke" feel, like if somebody with the correct insider knowledge watched it, they would understand everything, but that person does not exist outside of the coven running the department store in the film itself. There's layers and layers of nuance to this, and its style and Cavern of Anti-Matter soundtrack make it an immersive and memorable experience.

The Thing (1982)

directed by John Carpenter

USA

109 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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Not even considering its massive cultural impact, this is one of my favorite movies. I think it's also objectively one of the best horror movies ever made, with one of the most interesting and well-executed concepts for a monster. Even though that concept is not original, having been adapted from another film that was itself adapted from a book, it's done so uniquely in this iteration that it stands out as being very clearly the best at what it does.

The first time I watched this was when I was only just getting into movies, and I wasn't "good at" watching them: stuff just didn't occur to me, I would miss huge parts of the plot because I wasn't paying attention to anything. I don't know if it's because of that or just because it's been a while since I saw it, but so much in The Thing jumped out at me that didn't the first time. The film's opening scene follows a dog across the frozen white Antarctic landscape as a helicopter tries desperately to track and shoot it, for reasons as yet unknown to us viewers, and it has to be one of the best openings to any horror film. The Norwegians' desperate attempts to kill the dog and warn the U.S. base, attempts that fail, but may have been in vain anyway, are the frontispiece to what will become a building of dread that never stops throughout the whole movie. It really struck me upon this rewatch that this movie is just that- dreadful. It has an ominousness to it that maybe can only be understood when you've seen it and you know what's coming, which might seem counterintuitive given the anticipatory nature of dread, but somehow watching capable people encounter an entity that they don't (and can't) understand gives off such a strong feeling of wrongness that it fills the whole atmosphere with dread.

I also did not know how to appreciate practical effects the first time I saw this. I didn't recognize that besides the very obvious fact that the effects in this are some of the best ever put to film, they're also used to perfection, at the perfect times; enough is shown that we feel like the alien- or, technically, the organisms the alien possesses and attempts to imitate- is flesh, a real creature. I can't really say that it doesn't tip over the line into being excessive, because the whole thing is an excess of blood and guts; entrails whipping around to find purchase and dragging itself along by its organs, body parts sprouting new, horrible limbs never glimpsed by any Earthly creature. But it's one of the only times where such a liberal application of grossery is needed, where it's used as real, genuine horror instead of a cheap attempt to shock.

I want to talk about the alien. I could talk about it all day and all night if I was given the chance. Because like I said, this is one of the most enduringly frightening concepts in horror that I've ever had the pleasure of giving space in my brain to. It is something that has no physical body itself or has a physical body that can be discarded at will, something that exists only as a possessing spirit. The Nostromo crew references the Xenomorph as the "perfect organism", engineered for pure hostility and survival, but that title belongs to the transformative entity that hides in The Thing. It is an organism that is only concerned with survival, and it has the ability to alter its body plan in the blink of an eye to do whatever it can do evade injury and continue its goal of infecting as many indigenous life forms as possible. There is something so uncanny about the concept of a being that can just sprout new appendages if needed, it doesn't have to conform to evolution's idea of an ideal body plan honed over millions of years because it can reach out a coil of intestine as a grasping limb or grow a new mouth full of teeth on whatever spot its body needs one. And all of this is depicted with what I'm calling accuracy- it may be a misnomer considering that such a creature (thankfully) does not exist and so there isn't a way to depict it "accurately", but the practical effects team created what felt like a true-to-life depiction of the concept.

That scene where one of the infected men tries to run from the others but is found half-mutated, his hands horrifically misshapen and a blank alien look in his eyes. The noise he makes. That's fodder for a thousand nightmares. I can see how that single scene echoes in my favorite horror film of all time, Banshee Chapter.

I could go on even longer about this movie- how Jed the dog is one of the best canine actors of all time, managing to convey not the obvious snarling threat that an angry dog would, but cunning. Malice. Granted, a lot of that is more a credit to good editing than the dog himself, but I want to point out another specific scene, and then I'll close this review: Towards the beginning, when Nauls is told to turn down his Stevie Wonder, refuses, and then the camera explores empty corridors with the sounds of "Superstition" playing muffled in the background. We see the husky silently slip his nose in the door, silently pad down the hallway until he finds a room with a human, and enter, as the human's shadow on the wall turns toward him, and then the scene cuts. I felt like I was watching a wolf, a mountain lion, some predator that stalks and hunts, but driven by an actual evil, not the natural prey drive of an Earthly animal. I think maybe it's the segue from light humor to that vision of dread that does it. That you can still hear humanity in the background while you watch the beginning of its downfall on four legs. That scene and every other in this film is why it's one of my favorite movies of all time.

The Funhouse (1981)

directed by Tobe Hooper

USA

96 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I wasn't expecting to like this as much as I did, being as it's a "lesser" Tobe Hooper film without the immediate name recognition of Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The poster is also somewhat misleading as it falls victim to the tendency a lot of slasher posters have to depict women wearing clothing (or, I should say, not wearing clothing) that they never wear for even a single scene in the actual film. But I guess you can't really complain about posters when Texas Chain Saw Massacre is one of the best movies ever made and all of its posters are, well, advertising a movie called Texas Chain Saw Massacre. But I digress: The Funhouse is a sobering and intensely atmospheric movie, and I believe it holds up against Hooper's more widely-regarded work.

Towards the beginning of the film, Amy, the closest thing we get to a protagonist, responds to her jockish boyfriend's teasing about how her father is surely just trying to scare her into believing everyone is out to get her with "How could you say that? You don't even know my father," and the way she delivers that line is so earnest and sounds so genuinely hurt that it took me off guard. One of the most crucial things you can do when making a slasher movie is give your characters brains. I'm not saying that they should be geniuses, because then they would never get into a slashing situation in the first place, but the teenagers in The Funhouse really don't make any decisions that are too outlandishly stupid in the long run. Deciding to sneak off and stay in a haunted house overnight is inadvisable, but people have done worse; same thing with snatching money from a carnie's lockbox, which is probably overall the dumbest thing anyone in the film does. Creating these characters who don't go out of their way to get into trouble but instead just try to live their lives as wild and free as they can, as American teens in a more lawless period of the preceding century, means that nothing that happens to them is inherently their fault. And if nothing that happens is their fault, the events of the film take on a kind of cosmic cruelty- how can people be decent and still end up at the mercy of horrific killers? How can the world harbor such dangerous people that even in the course of a semi-normal life, one can come face-to-face with them?

I'd say at least half of the movie's running time, if not more, is spent just following the teens around this increasingly sinister carnival and revealing more and more details of its darkness to the audience while the teens remain oblivious. I know I've complained before about how a lot of the time in movies where we know something bad will eventually happen, the period of time between the start of the movie and whenever the bad thing comes in feels forced, like the creators set out to do one thing: make a horror movie, and they didn't put any effort whatsoever into the parts that were not horror. That's the opposite of The Funhouse. I lost track of time because I was just so enveloped in this dark underbelly of the carnival- except you can't even call it an underbelly, because everything horrible is just there, in the open, masquerading as itself. The family of killers who runs the carnival have found a place where they can hint at their weirdness in public and not be found out for what they are.

The aesthetic is immaculately grimy and distinctly of its time. Nothing like this could ever happen today. The Funhouse was born out of an era where safety was a minor concern and it looks and feels every bit as dingy and fake as a real cut-rate carnival slapped together to make money off of young people who want to go there to smoke weed and maybe see a two-headed cow (there are actual deformed cows in this film and they're adorable).

The trouble starts when the characters decide to sneak off beyond the bounds of where the public is supposed to go and find out what's beneath all the slapdash paint and wooden stages. One of the most common reasons I've heard for why people are afraid of clowns is that they think their makeup is hiding something- I find that an interesting concept, and it comes into play in The Funhouse as well. The fear is not of the clown's makeup itself, no matter how terrifying and uncanny that might be, it's of the chance that there might be something worse underneath it. The carnival in this film is chock-full of dingy animatronics, uncanny animals, weird people doing weird things, blatant prostitution and exploitation, and choppy mannequins that jump out at you on dark rides. But while those things are scary themselves, they're only the surface level of something that goes much deeper. We're supposed to be afraid of creepy carnival rides, but it's only supposed to last the duration of the ride- if the horror doesn't stop once we get off, it violates everything we held true about our safety, and it hits something deep in our psyche.

I have to admit that the best part of the film is the percentage of it that takes place before anybody is aware of being in physical danger. Once it gets down to slicing and dicing, it becomes more of a typical slasher film and you can predict where everything is going. But before the killers are revealed there's a genuine air of possibility, that anything could happen and you're just waiting to see what awful exhibition is behind the tent flaps. The world The Funhouse constructs is one where old women screech that God is watching us, where carnival barkers exclaim "Alive, alive, alive" as if taunting us to see how long we can remain that way inside their house of horrors. I don't see why this isn't more highly-rated. It's methodical in its use of atmosphere and has aged incredibly well despite being a time capsule of its era. Ideal for dark, stormy nights in October.