The Superdeep (2020)

directed by Arseny Syukhin

Russia

113 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I was awaiting this very eagerly, because the Kola Superdeep Borehole is one of my favorite weird little things about the world, and a horror movie about it, although it necessitates a lot of exaggeration and just plain making stuff up, seems like a logical choice. Pretty much everything about this movie is fabricated, though, which, looking back on it now, I really should have anticipated. The actual borehole is literally just a very narrow and extremely long hole going seven-plus miles into the Earth; there's nothing that even comes close to the research station located deep underground that The Superdeep takes place in. This isn't me complaining- it would be very hard to make an actually scary movie about the real-world borehole, which looks boring in comparison to The Superdeep. I just want to make sure everybody knows that while the idea at the core of this film is true, nothing else about it is.

I had my excitement dampened a few days before seeing this because some headlines started to come out that hinted at it not being very good, but I plowed ahead because I gotta have my movie about a giant hole in the ground. The issue that a lot of reviewers seem to take with The Superdeep is that it tries to do too much: it blends together too many disparate horror tropes and doesn't stick with any single one for the entire running time. You can see clear influences from a ton of other movies here, most notably The Thing and Alien as well as, probably, some Russian films I'm not even aware of. I see where people are coming from in getting frustrated at the way this movie bounced around, but it didn't bother me that much.

What did bother me a little bit was that, despite having all these influences and ideas and dealing with seemingly every horror concept at once, it deals with them all with the exact same tone. This is one of those horror movies that seems to treat itself more as an action movie. It doesn't really leave room for genuine tension in the sense of letting you get to a point where you're on the edge of your seat, instead it seeks to make you feel upset by putting the characters in survival situations that are dangerous and unpleasant. Other movies are the horror of waking up in the middle of the night and seeing a weird shadow in your room, this movie is the horror of your buddy telling you about the time his boiler exploded and singed his eyebrows off. Again, I'm not complaining- horror comes in many shades, and some of those shades are tinged with the influence of the action genre. The Superdeep certainly doesn't do its thing badly, it's just not how I like to watch a horror movie. The protagonist and basically everyone else in this film repeatedly gets into situations that should kill them in an instant, so you have to suspend your disbelief pretty hard at all times here, which is also why I mentioned at the beginning that this story is almost entirely fictionalized. If you're not going into this (like I did) thinking it's going to be really about the actual borehole, it's easier to get into the mindset of being told a story.

The saving grace of this all, and unfortunately the one thing I can't get too deep into without spoiling it, is the practical effects, especially towards the end. I was mulling over whether a movie that was otherwise fairly average could truly be elevated to greatness by superior practical effects, and I think the answer, in this case, is that it can. Without the effects or with cheap CGI, The Superdeep would feel pretty soulless. But because it wears those horror influences on its sleeve and uses some absolutely gorgeous practical effects, it made me latch onto it more. It made me able to recognize what I was seeing and its place in a longer horror tradition and that garnered some affection from me where otherwise I wouldn't have felt anything. The concept of the monsters in this movie isn't anything I haven't seen before, but I've never seen it done this well. The scene where the main character is trying to escape this lurching mass of horribleness that's making deeply disturbing sounds felt genuinely iconic. And I did love the scene where she had to go outside the station into the bowels of the Earth, it might have been a bit overwrought but the sense of scale and foreboding was pulled off nicely.

Milena Radulović carries the film really well despite a general lack of character backstory for her. I couldn't help comparing this movie to another recent Russian horror, Sputnik, because both films have a scientifically-minded woman MC who doesn't show a lot of emotion. That lead to me realizing that this movie excelled in practically every way Sputnik failed, particularly in the effects department. The Superdeep is not without its faults, but it's a good time with some specific scenes that knocked it out of the park, and I'm glad it's made it onto Shudder for everyone to enjoy.

Caveat (2020)

directed by Damian McCarthy

Ireland

88 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Lately it seems like there's been a rise in what I think can be called unsafe horror: Horror movies in which the entire atmosphere is unsafe, as opposed to a single situation that the protagonist gets into either by mistake or by force. Of course, this has always been an element of the horror genre, but I look to the past and I largely see films where the unsafe situation does not take up the entirely of the movie. Caveat, and the rest of the films of its ilk that I'm referring to, is made out of uncertainty. We never get a toehold of familiarity to grasp onto; there's never anything reassuring or good, it's just wall-to-wall dread. I've been looking forward to seeing this one for a while now and I'm happy to say it does not disappoint.

Not only is the main character in an unsafe, bizarre situation, he himself seems to be inherently unsafe due to the fallibility of his memories, which is revealed increasingly throughout the film. The protagonist's self-doubt and unawareness of his past is used by a shady acquaintance to rope him into a shady housesitting gig involving his shady friend's daughter. This is how the film sets itself up: The main character getting duped into doing something by somebody who has way more knowledge of him than he does. So while we, the viewers, are kept in the dark, so is the main character. We have to watch everything unfold at the speed he does, and instead of feeling clunky or slow, this only ramps up the tension and, as I said, removes any anchor we might have where we can sympathize with somebody. Every character in this has something suspicious about them and that prevents us from getting comfortable.

I'm really amazed by just how oppressively uneasy the overall atmosphere of Caveat is. How it manages to make what is probably a pretty small house in reality seem labyrinthine, its walls about to fall down and blanket the characters in dank moldering wallpaper and splintery boards. Isolated on an island, decrepit and lonely, it's never explained why the people the protagonist is housesitting for still live there or how they get by in such an obviously meager situation. Nothing is ever explained except for that which is relevant to figuring out how the main character came to be in the spot he's in.

I'm going to say what I usually do when I review scary movies, which is that I don't think scariness should be a measure of the quality of a horror film by any means... but also that when a horror movie does manage to stick the landing and be properly terrifying, it can be so much fun. The last twenty minutes of this movie were SO deeply unsettling that I found myself leaning away from the screen because I was just so on edge. This is one of those movies that seems to be comprised entirely of the moment before something jumps out at you. I could count the number of actual jump scares it uses on one hand, but it makes such good use of the tension right before a jump scare that it feels like the whole thing is one big one. There's a specific scene where the main character is passing his flashlight beam around a horrible, horrible room in the basement that contains horrible things, and this musical sting keeps playing that was genuinely so nerve-wracking that I felt like I was flinching every time it hit, like a nervous dog hearing fireworks or something. I haven't seen a movie this effectively scary in a long time. I feel okay discussing this as an aspect of the film, because how scary it is is integral to the story and the film as a larger picture. This can't be isolated from its creepy parts the way some horror movies can.

And the best part is that this is not without its hidden symbols and unexplained strangenesses, so even while you might be watching in peeps from behind your hands, you can still catch things that linger in your mind and require extra thinking. No cheap scares here. One motif in particular that kept coming up throughout the film was circles. They appear often enough that they clearly mean something, but it's never explicitly established what. As a horror fan the thing I immediately thought of here was Ringu and the ghostly, electric-white circle on the videotape that represents the well Sadako was thrown down. It's likely that the circles in Caveat actually represent something similar: A hint at where a body is, perhaps a final image that someone saw. But the circles are just everywhere, and are even carried around by multiple characters in the form of flashlight beams, roving portable circles that can go with them from scene to scene. It's like by cutting the power, something in the house was forcing the characters to carry around its mark on them.

I'm going to cut myself off here, because I'm going on too long about this out of excitement at something new and really really freaky, but I wanted to mention the last thing that's perplexing me about this, and that's what the dog means. Outside the nasty old house is a friendly midsized dog who seems to be decently taken care of, but is chained up in the backyard. When the main character gets to the house he is also put on a chain, so there's an obvious parallel there, and when he leaves, he takes the dog (good on him), but what does the dog mean? Why is it there? We only see it two, maybe three times throughout the whole movie, and it doesn't do anything but eat some potted meat and look cute. This leaves me with no choice but to create a picture in my mind of the dog just chilling outside the house the entire time, unaware, while unspeakably frightening things happen inside. This is probably the only time where I'm glad somebody never let their dog inside the house.

Spiral: From the Book of Saw (2021)

directed by Darren Lynn Bousman

Canada, USA

93 minutes

2 stars out of 5

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I knew going in that this wouldn't be good because of how universally ridiculed it is, but on a personal level, every time I watch anything directed by Darren Lynn Bousman I dislike it more than the last one. I decided to see Spiral (from the safety of my own home- I'm not risking getting covid for this) mostly just for laughs, but instead what I got was a movie that meanders around unsatisfyingly until it ends, also unsatisfyingly, and never even made me feel enough emotion to be amused by it.

So I think that the reason why the Saw movies have started to be less and less tolerated by the general public lately is for much the same reason as Todd Phillips' "Joker" was so strongly derided: These movies are so in love with their own philosophy, and so intent on shoving it in the audience's face like it's the most intelligent thing in the world, and that philosophy is at or below the level of a teenage boy's angsty journal rants. I'm not going to harp too much on what the "true meaning" of Saw is, because Spiral is an entirely new chapter in the series with a new killer and is really a Saw movie in name only, but it seemed like in the first couple of films John Kramer was trapping people for one of two reasons: Because they personally wronged him, or because he saw them as blindly mooching their way through life with no regard for those around them, and he took such offense to this that he wanted them to die, I guess. The whole "sheeple" theme has always been really strong throughout this whole series as a motive for why the folks who end up stuck in traps do end up there.

But the horror of a Saw scenario, to me, should come from the feeling that anybody might end up targeted by the killer because he's just so warped that the smallest mistake is cause for him to see you as worthless. The horror is in the idea that if, for example, you cut somebody off in traffic and then they go on to crash their car and their whole family dies, you're automatically on the hook for that. Spiral totally divorces itself from this idea by making everybody who ends up in a trap 100% a bad person. This is a Big Cop Movie™ and all the people who get killed for their transgressions are exaggeratedly crooked cops who do stuff like shoot people for flipping them off and cover up corruption (again, by shooting people). The audience's hand is held and bad cops are pointed out with as much subtlety as showing a child an elephant at a zoo. Again, I'm not gonna act like it's a heinous sin to make everything so cut-and-dry good vs. bad, because this movie clearly thinks it's separate from every other previous one and doesn't hold to the same standards, but the huge difference in motive behind the Saw killings is something that, if you had any ounce of respect for or interest in the series before, will make you hate this one.

Is the whole problem of this movie the fact that the Jigsaw franchise has, by now, been viciously milked dry and anything new coming out will inevitably be as horrible or worse than Spiral? I think it just might be. It feels like there was an attempt to make this feel "current" by having it focus on crooked cops and police violence, but if you're going to go about that plot by making the main character one of the "good" cops who tries to clean up the department from within, you're missing the entire point. But examining systemic racism and inherent bias doesn't fill theater seats. Samuel L. Jackson saying "motherfucker" does.

There's really just nothing about this movie that feels watchable. I can't imagine paying money to go and see this because it feels so thoroughly like something that's been on Redbox for six months already. I guess it's somewhat praiseworthy that despite the differences in character backstories and characters in general, this fits in with the rest of the series in terms of aesthetics and mood, but there's not much to like about that. Towards the end, Chris Rock's main character finds himself in a simple trap that's much the same as in the very first film. He wakes up handcuffed to a pipe by the wrist with a flimsy saw next to him- not strong enough to cut through the cuffs, but strong enough to cut through flesh, if need be. He seems to intuitively know what he needs to do, but instead of making that choice, or really even considering it, he finds a bobby pin on the ground and springs the cuffs. I don't know what Bousman's reason behind putting that in the film was, but the translation of something that was, when it first came out, genuinely upsetting into something so weak and defanged with an obvious solution feels like a metaphor for the direction this series has gone in.

Shin Godzilla (2016)

directed by Hideaki Anno

Japan

120 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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The first time I watched this, I hadn't seen any Godzilla movies, and I was largely unaware of anything having to do with kaiju beyond the most basic stuff. Since then, I've seen every Godzilla movie (well, all the Japanese ones, anyway) and got myself a damn fine Godzilla tattoo for good measure. So I was curious about how my feelings on this movie would change now that I have more context for it.

Godzilla is the main character of this. And I know that talking about Godzilla in a movie that he stars in might seem redundant, but really, enough cannot be said about the way Hideaki Anno handles the king of the monsters and his place in the world. An old standard of the series is the Japanese military and government scrambling to assemble a plan of attack against Godzilla as soon as he makes landfall, and that set-up is taken to its extreme here: basically everything about this movie is bureaucracy; the vast majority of the running time is spent in various "situation rooms" with various military, government, and science personnel figuring out how to handle an unprecedented situation. But against the backdrop of this new, updated, and entirely more enigmatic Godzilla that Anno has created, it all just feels like farce. The contrast between a panel frantically discussing political fallout, defense strategies, and biology, and Godzilla himself coming ashore and just decimating Japan without care- that's what made this movie so interesting to me. The smallness of the human endeavor, the helplessness and futility of it. You can plan and think and scheme but then you pan out and there is Godzilla looming in the background.

I think that this is possibly the closest the series has yet come to making Godzilla into a true force of nature the way he is so frequently emphasized as being. Pretty much every Godzilla film does give him some kind of a personality (which isn't bad, where would we all be without him hamming it up in Son of Godzilla?) except for this one. He feels more than ever like some animal that lived at the bottom of the ocean and just happened to get really big. But in making him so seemingly mindless, in having him show total disregard for basically anything and assigning to him the instinctual actions of an animal, is this not the most powerful, most terrifying version of Godzilla? Because what could be more frightening than a manifestation of the sheer force of nature? No motive, no emotion, no thought- just the inherent chaos of life hauling itself up onto land and reminding us of our place.

Even though this Godzilla is primarily CGI, which might seem disheartening on the surface, I want to emphasize the work that was still put into crafting him the way it always has been since the inception of the series. Animatronics were constructed but not used, and the process of designing ShinGoji and all of his intricacies (I recommend looking at a source like WikiZilla because there is so much behind the scenes) was incredibly painstaking. Because motion-capture was used, a human is still behind ShinGoji, even if it's not literally a person in a suit.

It kind of takes two watches to realize the depth of the film. The first time around, you (or I) tend to see the humans first, because they're what the film spends the most time on visually. You're shown Tokyo being razed and burned and you're preoccupied with following everyone's different viewpoint about how to handle it and what that means for them personally and for Japan as a whole. The second time, I realize that there is something deeply nihilistic about this that reminds me very strongly of Neon Genesis Evangelion, which comes as no surprise. It's kind of an indictment of how people get caught up in drawing up rules and plans in times of crisis and ignore the real-world situation that's in front of them, but I think, more than that, it's about the absurdity and unpredictability of the universe. You have to put aside the government's schemes and plans and discover that they signal the existence of a chasm that no strategy can bridge. And I almost missed this due to the poor quality of the subs, but the film is left open-ended in that the American military explicitly says they will conduct a nuclear strike should Godzilla become active again. So we're left with that threat of annihilation hanging over the film, as it ever has.

Now that I've seen all the movies and I know the ins and outs, I can appreciate the continuity that this keeps with the rest of the franchise despite drastically redesigning it at the same time. The one thing I did have issue with enough to want to mention it is the music; not Akira Ifukube's iconic themes, those are always well-placed and I love them, but in certain scenes where Godzilla was stomping around, the background music is almost... wimpy? I do recognize it from Anno's other work, but it still doesn't fit with this film. I almost felt like I was watching something where the music had been muted for copyright reasons and replaced with unfitting, royalty-free music instead. Aside from Ifukube's originals, none of the music feels appropriate here.

I would have also liked to have seen more "on the ground" footage, which is hinted at in some scenes where the impact of Godzilla on social media in real time is shown. I think we've yet to have a truly up-to-the-minute Godzilla narrative that unfolds through social media, and that could be very interesting. But I really just love this movie the way it is. It is so dark and unyielding at the center, beyond simply being a monster movie. The exploration of how Godzilla works as an animal alongside what he represents philosophically is something that even the older films fail to juggle equally sometimes.