Blood Beat (1983)

directed by Fabrice A. Zaphiratos

USA

85 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This is a hard one to review because it is so unique and has an almost non-linear narrative (which I'm not sure was intentional), and also because I personally love it so much that it's difficult to explain why. A lot of people like it because it's familiar to them; it's from Wisconsin and apparently that fact is very obvious if you know the area. So it's got that charm that exists only in extremely low-budget, shot-on-video horror movies that make no attempt to hide their regional roots, but there's something else about it that makes it compelling that's harder to put a finger on.

This was my second watch because I barely remembered anything from the first time other than that I couldn't hear what anybody was saying. I think this requires two or more watches because, while it may seem so nonsensical that it's easy to dismiss as simply being bonkers with no logic, it actually becomes a whole different thing if you watch it already being at least vaguely familiar with it. For one thing, the plot makes sense in its own way. Or I guess I should say that on second viewing one notices that it has a plot, which is something. It's at its most conventional at the beginning, when it sets up the general idea, and from there it devolves slowly into stuff that you just have to go with because it's not going to even attempt to explain them in the slightest.

I was struck by my own love for this specific type of unique, non-traditional horror film upon rewatching Blood Beat because I could tell exactly where things would have changed if this was made today. The boyfriend's daughter and his mom, the two characters whose intensely clashing vibes basically set off the entire storyline, would have been introduced much more gradually, with flashbacks showing us snippets of their past and giving us context for their apparent psychic abilities. If this movie cared about convention, we would be given backstory about this guy's mom's extra-sensory abilities and why she immediately gets such a bad vibe from his girlfriend, and vice versa. But I love this movie still, even though it doesn't provide any of those aspects of a normal narrative, because we do understand these people, possibly even better than we would had the film gone through the requisite motions to introduce us to them the way most movies do. The mother paints these weird paintings and it's just something she does, we don't need to be introduced to it delicately; we just know that she's a painter and that's an accepted fact. Everybody is exactly as they are, like the cameras just showed up in their lives one day. A somewhat notorious scene, where a couple who eventually get murdered by the ghost samurai (we'll get to that) bicker inconsequentially, him bitching at her from a waterbed to make him a Tang and her muttering to herself while fixing generic Tang in an ugly kitchen, shows what feel like real people doing real things, even though it is scripted. These two have no plot relevance and both end up knifed, but that look into their boring life is shot and set up so well.

So, yeah, there's a samurai ghost. No, I don't know why. There is a war flashback that appears to show some generic bombings and chaos, so if one of the characters had some professed connection to the bombing of Japan, then maybe we would be able to make the link between this archetypical Japanese spirit and its need for revenge on these specific people. But none of that is ever made clear. When the samurai speaks, it/he/whatever just boasts about its own power (in a super racist accent - no one in this movie is Japanese, by the way). The reason why there's a samurai wandering around stabbing folks at random in rural Wisconsin is never disclosed, but, like the way the characters aren't set up but instead just exist in the here and now, the samurai is a fact that Just Is.

The mother and the girlfriend, in addition to having some connection to each other, also have some connection to the samurai ghost. The mother's is stronger, as she’s able to directly communicate with it, but the girlfriend seems to be able to awaken the ghost through, uh, orgasms? Or maybe her orgasms and the ghost weren't connected and the director just chose to show the two at the same time as a stylistic choice? It remains unclear. But regardless, the two women are entangled in a strange triangle with the murderous ghost of a samurai in Wisconsin. The depiction of psychic power is what I loved most about this movie because something about it does feel so raw and eerie even in a low-rent film such as this. It could have just been that I was really into the vibe, but there's something so good about those dated glowing hands effects, and the way the psychic aura overwhelms people, the way it grows more and more powerful until not just the mom but also everyone around her who's blood, and eventually just everyone around her, is psychically awake. Honestly, the only thing keeping this from being a psychedelic masterpiece in the vein of recent hits such as Mandy or Possessor is that it never explains anything. I love this movie, and it's a Christmas movie too - I think it's going to be a yearly tradition for me. This is more of a niche cult film with little mainstream respect, but I don't even think it's bad objectively or subjectively. It's just one of those movies that uses a different language.

Silent Night Deadly Night 4: Initiation (1990)

directed by Brian Yuzna

USA

90 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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If you like your Christmas movies slightly unhinged and only vaguely about Christmas, this is the one for you. I've never seen the first Silent Night Deadly Night because it always struck me as being kind of mean-spirited, but I think it's pretty safe to say that this entry into the series (which I had no idea was a series until recently) has little to nothing to do with it, unless there's more grubs in the first three movies than I had imagined. I think the original Silent Night Deadly Night is partly to blame for how difficult it is to find Christmas horror movies that don't involve a mentally ill person dressing up as Santa Claus and killing people, or some variation thereupon, so it's a little ironic that an entry belonging to the same series is so wildly unconventional and carefree.

Its Christmas vibe is, as I said, quite minimal; the main character is actually Jewish so what little Christmas ambiance there is kind of exists in the background as something that other people are involved in. This is ideal for the current time: 'tis the season, but I don't want to be, like, smacked in the face with it. But something about the overall atmosphere of SNDN4, as we'll call it, feels strangely cozy nonetheless. There's a realness to it that only belongs to movies from the past, a deliberately unpolished tone that reflects how things look in a more honest way than mainstream film today tends to portray it. This version of LA looks grubby and sort of run-down, everything is a little bit dirty and looks like it really is, not how we want it to be. The main character moves around in a world that looks like she belongs in it - the office she works in, the used bookstore that is really a front for a coven, even the interior of her apartment all look like real places that a camera crew just walked into one day. Everything felt recognizable, which only makes the overall mood all the more wacky, because the hyperreal backdrop contrasts sharply with all the bizarre stuff going on.

The plot is really all over the place, and kept switching lanes so fast I couldn't always figure out what tone it was going for. I genuinely love the main character - she's the driving force behind everything, a pissed-off reporter who gets fed up with struggling to make her voice heard in the boys' club of a newspaper she works for, not listening to nothing or nobody when it comes to how she's going to live her life. The movie itself seems to be in support of her, which is why I'm not so sure how I felt about the role played by the urban coven she gets involved with. With the presence of both a bunch of misogynistic guys and a cult of militant feminists who don't value men's lives, there was a kind of undertone of "but both sides are wrong!!!!" to this that is frequently deployed by bigots to shift blame away from themselves and back onto the target of their bigotry. But I truly don't think this is an anti-feminist movie or anything; the main character remains independent throughout it, and the film never punishes her for not fitting into roles and stereotypes. Like I said, everything that happens is so weird that I struggle to find any message in it. I thought the bug cult would take more precedence over everything, but then next thing I knew somebody was pulling larvae out of a vent shaft, and then the main character was birthing a grub, and then there was some kidnapping... this movie just does what it wants. It's best not to pin your expectations on any one avenue of the storyline.

This is one of those things that I'd recommend to anybody who is into practical effects, even if it's something you think you'd hate and you have to suffer through the movie attached just to get to the effects. There's so much slime and goop and the giant bug puppets are so good that I at times forgot I wasn't looking at a real creature. Screaming Mad George is at the helm of it all, so you know what you're going to get. I really appreciate how unafraid this whole movie is to get its characters down in the sludge and the gunk and have their bodies become gross and weird. This is an ugly film and it wears it with pride.

The Tower (2012)

directed by Kim Ji-hoon

South Korea

121 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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It's debatable whether or not this is technically a Christmas movie, even though it takes place on Christmas Day. The holiday is essentially just a backdrop, which is actually something I'll touch upon later because I felt that it could have been used much more effectively. This is mainly a disaster movie, something South Korea's film industry seems to do pretty well, and even though it doesn't diverge too far from the standard model of a disaster film, it's still good for casual viewing, if not an in-depth, critical watch.

There's a whole lot of characters in this bad boy and the first half-hour is dedicated to making sure you know who all of them are. The set-up is fairly typical for disaster movies in that a lot, if not all, of the characters are established as having something (usually someone) left hanging; a promise that they must go back and fulfill. They make a vow to someone they love, whether literal or unspoken, and that hangs over them for the entirety of the film, so that whenever they're in mortal peril we think of who or whatever they would be leaving behind. It's a pretty standard grab for our heartstrings, but nearly every film with high stakes does it at some point, so it's just a spectrum with one end being bland and emotionless and the other end being the handful of movies in which the trope is pulled off well (Train to Busan, for one other South Korean example). It does feel obvious that the romantic connections and family obligations here are being set up from the start, but in this instance I think it's done pretty well and manages to hit the emotional beats without feeling too forced.

The film takes place in a massive apartment complex consisting of two glass towers connected by a sky bridge, housing something like 5700 people as well as fine dining and everything else that typically comes with a luxury apartment. Most of the people who live and work there are extremely rich, but there are some less wealthy who can get in by winning a lottery, as well as many underpaid and overworked cleaning and kitchen staff. To create the most dazzling experience possible for the residents, who by now expect a high standard of living, a squadron of helicopters is called in to drop synthetic snow over the area of the towers so that everyone can have a white Christmas. This hubris is what leads to the literal downfall of the towers when a helicopter crashes in the high winds and sets one of the towers on fire, trapping and killing many of the residents, who must now fight their way to the bottom and try to survive.

I guess there's supposed to be a point being made about inequality here, but to me the movie didn't push it strongly enough. The mayor of Seoul is as out-of-touch as the rich residents of the towers and is behind the decisions that repeatedly ignore the people still trapped and struggling in the building and categorize them as beyond rescue without even trying. He's presented with a list of people inside the building ordered according to "priority" and asked for his word on who to save and who to leave behind like some of them don't matter. The people inside the building must continually fight against measures taken to save the few in favor of the many, such as firewalls that isolate them from any hope of exit and eventually the full demolition of the building.

But there's just no real emphasis behind it. Yes, a lot of the rich people are shown as annoying and bullying anyone they view as weaker than them. But for the most part, no fault is established. In my opinion the most horrible part of this movie was the reason behind the fire, not because the elites who ordered a fancy fake snow display were innocent, but because they wrapped people who were innocent up into their egotism. This parallels real life, somewhat, in that the super-wealthy will continue to do things for their own enjoyment or because it's more convenient to keep doing them even though they're actively dangerous and destroying the environment, and it's not them who suffer, it's all of us who they drag along for the ride. The movie doesn't really acknowledge this, though, and we never see anybody get held accountable or anything like that.

The reason why I felt like the Christmas motif was underused is because a lot of the time Christmas movies are used to highlight inequality: the end message of A Christmas Carol might be basically to not be a dick, but it also explicitly involves treating everyone right and not hoarding wealth for yourself. The Tower just kind of happens to be set on Christmas for no particular reason other than aesthetics. To be fair, Christmas is not, at least originally, a Korean holiday, so the use of it as a soapbox to talk about inequality doesn't have as much (or any) history there as it might in the West. But I'm certain that by now most people are familiar with A Christmas Carol as well as other similar media, and maybe this is too optimistic of me, but even if they weren't, I would hope that any holiday centered around giving and togetherness would inspire feelings of empathy for all humans.

In the end this movie probably isn't worth how much I'm talking about it. It is just fine as an action/disaster movie, and some parts do get a little emotional, particularly the end. The CGI seemed pretty solid but the file I was watching was in such poor quality that those flames could have been orange tissue paper and they still would have looked real to me. I am surprised that this isn't more popular, but I guess it just feels a little too generic next to the other, better Korean disaster films out there. You could do much worse, though, and I definitely got involved in the characters and the lengths they had to go to keep themselves alive. Good one for if you, like me, live in a place where it snows on Christmas maybe one year out of every ten.

Black Friday (2021)

directed by Casey Tebo

USA

84 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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I watched this on Black Friday when it came out, but - despite it being right there in the title - this makes for a seasonally appropriate watch anytime between Thanksgiving and the week of Christmas. I think "pre-Christmas" movies such as this one, that take place during the holiday season but don't actually feature any scenes on Christmas, are my preferred type of holiday movie. Everyone celebrates differently, and some don't celebrate at all, but we can all get behind how much Christmas shopping sucks. And while the inherent fun of watching a movie on the day the movie takes place adds something to the mix even for a sub-par film, Black Friday holds up anyway, at least for the most part.

What I'm going to call "Customer Service Revenge" has been experiencing somewhat of a renaissance in recent years, and like most things, the sub-genre's strength lies solely in how relatable it is. There's a very fine line between empathizing and patronizing when it comes to this kind of thing: It's usually easy to tell if something was made or written by someone who hasn't actually had to deal with demon customers a day in their life. But I can't really tell where Black Friday falls on that spectrum, because to me it felt almost messageless - I don't mean that it's bland, but it doesn't quite rise to the heights of stuff like 2017's Mayhem or the more obscure Redd Inc. The concept here is just a sort of broadly relatable "we hate our jobs" with no deeper dive into the systems that make those jobs so horrible (and low-paying, physically harmful, psychologically damaging, et cetera). It doesn't go after anybody. It doesn't look at why things are, it just gets mad that they are. I'm not saying it really needs to do that; not every film has to hash out its stance on capitalism, but I felt like in this case Black Friday was being oddly restrained and I would have loved to see it get even crazier than it did.

The plot is a generic alien mutation affair, not terribly concerned with the specifics, people just sorta get all melty and weird after coming into the proximity of an unexplained ball of goo that fell from the sky. Personally I love that - don't explain the mystery meteor that turns people into goop zombies and summons a towering amalgam of Karens from the ninth circle of hell. It's enough to know that it came from outer space and is making people go berserk. Like a lot of people, I watched this for Bruce Campbell first and foremost, but after that I watched it for the practical effects, and oh boy, I wasn't disappointed. This is a perfect example of time-tested practical effects goodness in the year of our germy lord 2021: The same methods, the same materials, but even more artistry behind it, and the ability to supplement - not supplant - it with CGI. What results from that is a glorious cesspool of clumpy space flesh, exploding heads, purply ooze, and all your favorites. Even though it really goes all-out with the aforementioned mega-Karen in the last act, Black Friday still uses a light enough touch that I feel good calling this a Practical Effects Movie™.

But it's really not, like, super great. There's something off about the characters, and I read somebody speculating that a lot of the dialogue may have been improvised, which could have explained it. The dialogue itself isn't bad, but nobody feels as defined as they should have - it's a smattering of personality traits distributed unevenly across the board, with some people getting backstory and others getting virtually none, even if they had relatively large roles. I'm kind of uncomfortable with the joke that gets brought up once or twice about "Corporate says Black Friday was racist, so it's Green Friday now". The fact that the movie is called Black Friday and all signage and dialogue within the film itself refers to Black Friday as Black Friday makes it very apparent that the film views attempts at anti-racism as a joke, at least a little bit. That just felt really unnecessary and I'm not sure where it was coming from. It didn't have to be brought up at all.

I don't know if it has rewatch value, but it's one of the better holiday-type movies I've seen recently as we prepare for the onslaught of abysmal Christmas films that always pop up around now. Bruce Campbell is genuinely great, although he's not in it that much, and while, as I said, I felt like this movie was playing it safe a little too much, it's still a pretty good time.