Dead Earth (2020)

directed by Wych Kaosayananda
Thailand
80 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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This was better than average. I didn't know what to expect since I threw it on without knowing anything about it, but since it sells itself short with a generic tagline on a generic zombie movie poster, I was thinking it would be a generic zombie movie. Instead, I found myself watching possibly the one thing I've always wanted to see most: a post-apocalyptic zombie movie done in the meditative, organic style of Thai slow cinema.

So this isn't, like, Apichatpong Weerasethakul levels of slow cinema (the director also made an adaptation of Tekken, so that's... something), but it definitely has that Thai film mentality of not having the characters be constantly talking or fighting or running or generally being the center of attention, which would take away from the beauty of the backdrop they're set against. Towards the end of the film there is quite a lot of fighting and running, but for the most part, it's just two women enjoying each other's company in an achingly lush, secluded former hotel where life is pretty good actually. There's something I like about this apocalypse- it's one where the struggle to survive is treated as simply the process of living, where necessary rituals to keep from getting devoured such as padding sinks and toilets with towels so you don't make even the slightest noise sit alongside putting on headphones and dancing with your lover. I don't know where this film is meant to be set because everybody is speaking English, but it's painfully obvious from how gorgeous it is that it's the Thai countryside in reality.

The lack of dialogue and action will probably take people expecting a straightforward zombie movie off-guard, but that's part of the strange serenity of the whole thing. My only complaint is that the background music felt like it shouldn't have been there because it drowned out the birds chirping and other ambient noises, and occasionally was louder than the dialogue as well. This could be an entirely different movie without the soundtrack, one that's even more patient and beautiful than it already is.

I guess I have another complaint, although I was just so happy to see a rare zombie movie with lesbians in it that it's barely a complaint: The two leads have zero chemistry. I should be thankful that the film doesn't half-ass it and just make them ~*gal pals*~; I should be thankful to have a movie with two women who are explicitly lovers (and who don't die!!!!!), and I am, but at the same time I wish they felt more believable as a couple. It's just the way both of them act, they don't have any real emotional affect or ever feel like they're doing anything more significant than doing the dishes or something. Which, in a way, suits the film's mundanity, but when it comes to romance, I think we could afford to see it handled with more depth and feeling than everything else.

There Are Monsters (2013)

directed by Jay Dahl
Canada
96 minutes
2.5 stars out of 5
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This is the full-length adaptation of a 10-minute short film from 2008 of the same title and premise that was relatively successful at the time. I liked it when I saw it, but it's one of those things that only really work if you haven't seen a lot of horror movies or are easily startled. Anyway, the long one's been in development hell for a while as far as I know, so I was happy to finally be able to see it. I guess.

So if you're familiar with the original short- and you don't need to be to watch this- you know that it uses nothing but jump scares for its horror, and those jump scares use the most ridiculous, silly-looking distorted face effects I've ever seen. Aside from some jello-y slime that doesn't make a lot of narrative sense or get explained (are we supposed to assume it's some kind of alien sludge?), this uses entirely CGI as well, and you might think that between 2008 and 2013 the ever-growing powers of computer animation would have progressed to the point where the laughable effects from the original would look good, or that at the very least the filmmakers would add in something extra to make it so those horribly cheesy too-big grins looked like anything but a bad comedy sketch. Nope!

To be brutally honest, I just... really don't know what's up with this movie. It feels so deeply bizarre that I can't even begin to give it an accurate rating. I just did 2.5 because it's half of five and I'm figuring that can stand for like a "glass half full, glass half empty" thing. This can either be interpreted as half a great movie or the entirety of a terrible one. It's attempting to be found-footage, and it tries to get past the issue a lot of found-footage movies have with figuring out how to incorporate different camera angles when the movie is supposedly being shot by only one camera by having three different people holding camcorders and rapidly jumping back and forth between them. It is nauseating. I'm not a detractor of shaky-cam, but this movie is shot like the cameras are loosely dangling from straps on the characters' wrists. I mean, half the time you literally can't see anything because it's so blurry. Sometimes it seems like it's trying to go legit and shoot over peoples' shoulders when they talk, like it's a formal interview, but the next second it'll totally abandon that and we'll be forced to look up somebody's nose because nobody can figure out how to get more than 0.3 centimeters away from each other. Genuinely one of the most weirdly made movies I've ever seen.

The annoying thing is that this is still good. The premise is so deeply unsettling that despite the poor camerawork, despite the strange choice in making the monsters look like a bad Snapchat filter, and despite the fact that the characters occasionally spew horrendously misogynistic dialogue for no apparent reason, it manages to be interesting. The idea of a switch being flipped and the world suddenly becoming occupied by things, horrible things from another place that impersonate the people you love and consume you the second you're unaware, is a great horror premise. There's a real sense of impending doom all throughout this movie because everything happens in broad daylight and while the characters are traveling. They can't get away from the monsters no matter how far they drive or how much they surround themselves with other people. I know exactly what this movie is like: it's essentially Banshee Chapter, my #2 favorite movie of all time, but terrible.

Dreamland (2019)

directed by Bruce McDonald
Canada
92 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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It's been a pretty long time since I've seen a Bruce McDonald film, but I always enjoy everything he does, and this is no exception, although it's a little different tonally from others of his I've seen. I do sometimes feel like I'm missing something about his movies just due to the fact that I'm not Canadian and I kind of imagine there to be, like, art scenes in Canada that I'm entirely too unhip to be aware of. Some of McDonald's stuff can be accessible to everyone, but other things like Hard Core Logo (which is one of my favorite movies) and his more obscure films feel made for Canadians only.

Much of the punk rock sensibility is absent in this film and is exchanged for a weird sort of Lynchian jazz nightclub vibe, although Henry Rollins is there, so there's that. Despite the surreal nature of the film, there is a plot, it's just that the story is told in such a disjointed manner that it feels a lot weirder than it is- and I'm thankful for that, because this could have been played totally straight as a sort of boring revenge thriller, and instead we get this gem of strangeness that feels less like an actual movie and more like some half-remembered hybrid of several different films you watched while you were falling asleep. Probably the most notably weird part of Dreamland is that Stephen McHattie plays two people at the same time and this is never acknowledged by anybody around either of them, but you may ask, would this film still be weird without that? And the answer is yeah probably because there's a vampire in it.

It would be pretty obvious to use one person split into two characters as a metaphor for exploring two different sides of one character, but in this particular case the two characters are so thoroughly dissimilar that there's really no way of comparing the two. They're not opposite of each other, they don't seem to represent any aspect of each other, they're just... different people. There are a few moments where the two seem to drift into each other, to echo what the other is saying, and it's really intriguing- there's an idea there that remains unexplored, that doesn't really have to be explored because it is whatever it is. Same goes for the vampire; in my opinion what you see is what you get here, it doesn't matter why there's a vampire, there just is. The combination of real-life atrocities like human trafficking with fantastical, slightly comedic things like a mob of old-timey child gangsters doesn't take away from the former being awful or the latter being funny.

As with most movies I really enjoy, looking at reviews of this I'm seeing a whole lot of hate. I actually was thinking towards the beginning of the film that it would be pretty easy to take a look at this and just see pointlessly enigmatic dialogue, obtuse situations, stuff happening for no good reason and molasses-like pacing and decide that it's an unintentionally terrible movie made by people who don't know what they're doing. I guess maybe context matters a lot for this one, because if you aren't a fan of the way Bruce McDonald directs (or Tony Burgess writes) you might not get the whole vibe. But even to me and my admittedly non-Canadian, non-hip tastes, this was an excellent film that only got better the more it went on.

Satanic Panic (2019)

directed by Chelsea Stardust
USA
89 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I haven't watched a movie in what feels like forever because my dog passed away and I'm genuinely having the worst week of my life. So I decided to ease myself back into watching movies with something that sounded like it would be funny and have absolutely nothing to do with anything that would make me start sobbing.

It takes a minute for this movie to get going, because we're plonked down in what feels like it should be minute 20 or so as soon as it starts; the main character is what she is (a pizza delivery girl) from the get-go and we don't get any backstory or anything like that. Which is for the best, IMO, because I'd much rather learn about characters on the fly than spend a long time on awkward exposition where it's painfully obvious that the screenwriter/s just wanted to get to the horror bits already. The other reason this doesn't initially seem as good as it turns out to be is because for a while it feels weirdly lighthearted despite having some un-PG dialogue. It feels like a kids' movie with some swears and sex talk, possibly because of the upbeat protagonist (whom I loved). You can really pinpoint where it starts hitting its stride because it coincides with when the practical effects start coming out and the film begins to rely more on ideas of its own than on tropes and comedy.

There's not a whole ton of practical effects, but I'd be remiss not to mention them anyway because what is there is very, very elegant and well-placed. The goopy oven-baked "soul" is kind of take-it-or-leave-it, I wasn't overly fond of that, but there's at least two different goat demons at the climax (at least I think there were two, I was falling asleep) and they both look beautiful. Just a perfect mix of something being obviously a person in a suit while also being such a nice suit that it transforms the person in it. All of the Satanic stuff in this is actually really well-done for what it is- there is a slight air of genuine menace despite the silliness of the plot, you can tell that the worshippers are capable even though they're a bunch of rich jerks with McMansions.

Looking further into this, I'm surprised and not surprised to find out that Grady Hendrix actually co-wrote the script. Surprised because I just read My Best Friend's Exorcism and didn't know he wrote for film, and not surprised because I just read My Best Friend's Exorcism and this is exactly how the book was (well, not thematically, but... it's a vibe). The truly real horror of it not overshadowed by the touches of comedy and the sense that the heroine is capable of winning just by virtue of being who she is. Not sure why I put this off so long.

The Grudge (2020)

directed by Nicholas Pesce
Canada/USA
93 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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People seem to absolutely HATE this movie. I think sometimes horror fans hate horror movies more than anybody else. The January Death Slot of Doom is never a good sign when you're going to the theater to see a horror movie, and I was literally the only person in the theater when I saw this, which is also probably not a good sign, but all things considered, I don't see how this is that bad.

How does it stack up to the original? It really, really doesn't. I'm a huge fan of the original Ju-on films (I even like most of the sequels) and this doesn't hold a candle to them, but I do think it manages to minimize the "horrible American remake of Japanese film" syndrome that a lot of movies fall victim to. In aesthetics, it can't touch the deeply disquieting urban horror of Ju-on, no matter how hard it tries. The isolation and anguish is simply not there in the huge brick houses and upper-middle-class bedrooms of America.

But to its credit, the place where this film excels while other terrible American remakes fail is that it really gets deep into the true terror of the curse. The #1 thing that made me want to see this movie was the fact that Nicolas Pesce directed it, because he had previously made The Eyes of My Mother, which is genuinely one of the only movies I've ever debated turning off because it was so disturbing. I was very curious about how that eye for depravity was going to take on something you can buy a ticket to in almost any theater in America. I think there's a real sense of pollution and filth around the curse that's captured really well in this movie- it isn't just violence, or hatred stemming from personal relationships, it's a total snuffing out of life and color. It's an unavoidable black hole that people keep falling into. American remakes tend to want to turn everything into recognizable violence, to make indistinct images of pain into angry men shooting guns. That's why I think this one is different, because it's not afraid to let the infecting, consuming aspect of the grudge remain. I can't remember if I talked about it on this blog or not but an element of Japanese horror that I usually don't see in other films is that sometimes the curse doesn't go away; sometimes the movie ends with the implication that everybody is going to keep dying forever and it won't stop. This Grudge remake uses that element heavily.

It is a bit hard for me to judge this objectively because I'm always happy to sit in a theater and watch creepy stuff. Even as I was watching it, though, I recognized that it's made up of 100% scary imagery and 0% meat. It's almost too heavy. It feels like asking somebody to chop up a single carrot and they go "Okay!" and start revving a chainsaw. On the one hand, Pesce's sense of what's truly disturbing adds a punch to this, but on the other hand, that's practically all there is to the film. It's still not nearly as bad as most people are making it out to be.

The Boat (2018)

directed by Winston Azzopardi
Malta
89 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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I understand this has gotten some festival hype, but for me it snuck up out of nowhere (kind of like a certain sentient boat). This review is going to hinge entirely on my ability to find new ways to say "This movie was really, really good" that I haven't already used before, so bear with me.

I'm very fond of movies that follow one character largely doing one task the entire time, because I think it genuinely takes talent to make it seem like the actor in question has been doing whatever job/task/hobby they're doing for years. In The Boat, I can easily believe that the main character was an experienced sailor. This is probably because I have never in my life been on a boat that I didn't blow up with an air pump beforehand, but the main character of this movie was extremely believable both as a sailor and just in general as an actual person; he looks like he's upset and in trouble rather than just reacting to scripted obstacles. That he continually runs into situations that seem almost too much like traps is entirely because they probably are traps- the unlikely things like getting his neck caught in some rope and repeatedly venturing into places where he gets the door locked on him are implied to not be coincidences once the nature of the boat comes into play.

Oh man, that boat. Das boot indeed. I just love the premise of this movie so much because there's so much potential, and the more you think about it, the more bizarre it gets. I think we've all seen our fair share of movies about haunted boats, but- save for maybe in "Triangle"- the boat itself is rarely imagined to be the source of horrors; it's always stuff aboard the boat and never the boat as a sinister presence. While still remaining subtle enough to avoid becoming comedic, The Boat goes full steam ahead with this idea of a boat that is somehow imbued with malevolent force. It looks like it might not be so at the beginning- maybe there are just ghosts on the boat, maybe somebody is trying to kidnap the sailor- but there's an absolutely brilliant scene where the sailor lashes together a door and some floatation devices and makes himself a raft to paddle away from the horrible boat, and as the camera is focused on him we can see, in the background, blurry at first, the boat begin to slowly but surely turn itself towards him in pursuit.

I'm going to talk about the ending in this last paragraph, and while this movie doesn't have any big twists in it, you may way to avoid reading further anyway. I can see how the ending can kind of be interpreted as a non-ending because it doesn't really resolve anything, but that was, to me, what made it so chilling. The place where the boat dumps the sailor was extremely well-chosen, it gave off such a heavy feeling of abandonment and scale. The scariest implications of horror are always the ones your own brain dreams up, and The Boat's ending is great because it leaves that area totally open- there's so many questions. We're left wondering why the boat did what it did, what the driving force was behind the boat, and just what in the world was happening that whole time. I loved it, I really did. I've never seen a horror film like this.

Impossible Horror (2017)

directed by Justin Decloux
Canada
76 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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There's something I really enjoyed about this movie. As others have noticed, you can clearly tell the filmmakers love horror, but the film itself is still entirely original and doesn't try to reinvent the wheel the way a lot of indie horror films do. It comes up with a premise that's unique and a whole lot of fun to watch. It's just all kinds of good.

So the general idea is that, somewhere in the wilds of Toronto, a woman becomes caught up in a mysterious repeating event wherein every night a disembodied scream issues from somewhere outside her apartment, which is then followed by a random item manifesting out of thin air. She meets a seemingly homeless girl who's been investigating these events for far longer and with a bigger team of people, boasting a collection of trash bags filled with these bizarre items (stuffed animal full of blood, saxophone, dildo, hammer- all your faves!). The duo are also stalked by beings wearing black hoodies and jeans who seem to somehow be connected to the scream- but how? Are they ghosts? Something more dangerous? What do they want, and what is the scream?

The whole idea of this happening every night and a group of people banding together to investigate it, this incredibly strange, nonsensical event in the middle of an urban area, is just so cool to me. I haven't ever seen anything like this because it's so creative and, as the title says, impossible. I'm gonna say something about it that I feel is true but I also really don't want it to be taken the wrong way: the way the main character meets up with this random girl and is immediately thrown into a strange adventure feels exactly like how it is to be a kid and have some other kid on a playground take you by the hand and show you a weird bug or enlist you to help dig a hole or something. Comparing this film to a childlike sense of enthusiasm and never knowing what comes next is absolutely not belittling, because there's nothing wrong with childhood, and many, many films could be better if they'd draw inspiration from being a child instead of going pointlessly dark and gritty. I need films with enthusiasm! I need films with a zeal for life!

I'm not too sure about that ending, though. It wasn't that I didn't like it but the film certainly went very deep into itself and I'm not sure it ever quite came back. There was a point beyond which it felt less self-referential and more like something that was trying to be a serious movie, and I think enough talent is present in both the directing and the acting that that isn't a bad thing, but it was a tonal shift I was kind of disappointed with considering how much I was enjoying the semi-light-hearted 2 Girls Chasing A Weird Disembodied Scream For Fun And Profit deal this had going on for the first 2/3rds. Still, great acting, great cinematography, great concept, in love w/ this movie tbh.

Lifechanger (2018)

directed by Justin McConnell
Canada
84 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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I tried to watch this a while ago but was immediately so turned off by it that I stopped, and even though I made it all the way through this time to find that it's a good film, I still don't think I judged it too harshly. Opening with a fully nude woman for (what feels like) shock value isn't a great way to inspire confidence in me about your movie.

The concept is undeniably really cool: a shapeshifter must constantly jump bodies to stay alive, but the faster he switches bodies, the faster he seems to be rotting. The problem this movie gets into when it tries to execute that concept, however, is that it doesn't seem overly concerned with the character's motivation other than "I'm trying to not die". I mean, strictly speaking, that's basically the backbone of all film ever, right? The characters are just doing stuff to avoid dying, unless it's one of them sad films and people are actively trying to die. But apart from a somewhat strange and creepy sideplot about the main character going to slightly stalkery lengths to get back to a girl who, for all intents and purposes, does not know him, I didn't feel like there was enough character development for me to understand the protagonist.

The end is really interesting though because- and this is a major spoiler here- the protagonist turns out to be okay. He spent so much time and energy trying to avoid dying that it made things worse both for him and for everyone around him, when in reality he would have been totally fine had he just left things to run their course. There's something really interesting in that. I don't feel like this movie is deep enough to make any sort of significant philosophical statements on purpose, but there's something that resounds with me about the concept of staving off death repeatedly until it consumes your life when all the while, unbeknownst to you, you wouldn't actually have died had you stopped trying so hard.

Another fun thing about this that makes it better is a great cast. It's fun because the majority of the characters are first seen as background people who are secondary and seemingly insignificant... until they're not. Each actor was good at not looking too conspicuous considering they are all technically playing the lead role. The dentist character was where this failed a little- personally, he felt like a straight-up comedic actor, and I don't know if it was intentional for his parts to be funny or if that was just something inherent to the guy, but it didn't fit with the rest of the film. Otherwise, though, this whole thing was mostly a success. I'm really fascinated by the concept of shapeshifters in general because it's such a bizarre concept when you break it down, and it implies the existence of either A. beings who exist as almost a sort of self-replicating virus, or B. the capability of all humans to shed our bodies, and both of those things are good movie fodder.

New Year, New You (2018)

directed by Sophia Takal
USA
90 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I've seen enough of these Into the Dark episodes to have become a little disillusioned with them. Even the best ones somehow seem to fall just short of being amazing, although the concept of the series itself is a lot of fun and I do hope it runs for a long time. That being said, this is probably my favorite episode of the series because it hit me in a way that the other episodes didn't even come close to. I was extremely close to giving it four stars but the ending sort of meanders off the path a bit.

This could have gone in an entirely different direction if made by somebody who didn't understand the reasons behind why social media is bad for you and simply wanted to own the millennials. Instead of putting forward a reductive and misguided message of hyper-sexed, duck-faced influencers teaching young girls to be """slutty""", the villain in New Year, New You presents herself as a teacher of self-love. She uses concepts that should be positive to manipulate people without confidence in themselves, with much the same finesse as a cult leader- if you're vulnerable and someone comes along telling you that you're capable of achieving your dreams, that they think you're a good and worthy person, you are inclined to trust them because they're a source of positivity that you're lacking.

Everything about this episode almost feels too real. It's barely even a horror movie until the end (which I will come back to in a moment). It lacks tension, scares, build-up, it pretty much dispenses with every horror convention it possibly can save for some heavy foreshadowing, and instead we're left watching this very realistic portrayal of what it's like to have a hot, pretty, successful, rich friend when you're somebody who can't love themself. The dialogue is funny and although at times they had to pretty obviously skirt using real-world names and titles (ah yes, my favorite red-and-white-colored streaming video website, TotallyTubular), it still felt like everything was taking place in the real world. It's all just really, really believable- they nailed influencer culture perfectly, and to be honest, nothing that the "good" characters do feels quite too far. It's got a deep feeling of catharsis. A "look what you did to me". Suki Waterhouse really gets into her performance and it's satisfying to watch.

Now the reason why I did not give this four stars is because it felt like the filmmakers went "oh, right, this is supposed to be an episode of a horror anthology" at the end and just sort of glued on some cliche slasher elements. It becomes less realistic once the knives are out. The strength of this thing, by far, is its depiction of predatory interpersonal relationships and its nuanced, non-victim-blaming portrayal of social media toxicity. I would actually have liked to see this not be a part of Into the Dark so it could have gone in a more experimental direction instead of ending on generic slasher notes.