Teen Homicide (Don't Do It)

Year: 2018

Director: Cory Finley

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Olivia Cooke, Anton Yelchin

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

When you bill a film as the second coming of Heathers, you know I'll be first in line. Unfortunately, you can bill a film as whatever the hell you want. The advertisers weren't lying. Thoroughbreds is a pitch black high school comedy about murder, after all. But we should all know by now not to violate the cardinal rule of reminding audiences of a movie much better than your own.

Come to think of it, you're reminding me of The Witch too. Stop it!

In Thoroughbreds, well-to-do teenager Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) is paid off by the mother of the only slightly less well-to-do Amanda (Olivia Cooke, who also held a starring role in Ready Player One, so this is a pretty big month for her) to host a tutoring session in the hopes that they'll become friends. This actually works, but probably not in the way mom was planning. It turns out that Amanda is an emotion-free sociopath, and Lily takes advantage of her total lack of conscience to plan a murder. 

She wants to take out a hit on her evil stepdad (evil is a malleable term here: we see him being generally disagreeable, but her perception of him is certainly skewed) Mark (Paul Sparks). They eventually draw in strung-out drug dealer Tim (Anton Yelchin, in what would seem to be his final role) to help with the plan.

He's the only one in the movie whose income is below like 10 figures.

Thoroughbreds is the writing and directorial debut of playwright Cory Finley, and it shows. It has all the limitations of setting and cast that a low budget debut would traditionally display, but it's also restricted to an absurdly small range of motion per scene, a pretty obvious holdover from the fact that this movie was originally written as a stage play. It's a static motion picture, and it never throws off the shackles of its theatrical origins. There's nothing wrong with a lot of scenes that are just two or three people talking to each other, but it's not presented with any particular cinematic flair. It's like eating a Pop Tart without any frosting. It's still a Pop Tart, but there's something so fundamental missing that it's not the same experience at all.

Now the script is pretty solid, of course. It's not as richly comedic as I was hoping, but there are certain dark situations and dialogue beats that raise a worthy chuckle. And the ideas it raises about emotion/the lack thereof in the teenage population, or how easy it is for wealthy people to toy with the poor are fun to chew on. 

It does tend to slip a bit too often into an over-literary mindset (this film is divided into chapters for absolutely no reason, other than to seem impressive and Smart), and the closing monologue leaves a lot to be desired - its attack on social media and technological advancements seems ripped from a completely different movie, because it has absolutely zero foundation in the story we've been watching. I don't think there's more than 90 seconds of actually even seeing a iPhone onscreen in the entire movie.

Look at these teens, so absorbed in their Chapsnats, not engaging with the real world, not going to Applebee's...

Everything in Thoroughbreds is kind of uneven in this way. Take the sound design, which sometimes creates incredible feats of audio, like the scene where the whirring of Mark's exercise machine keeps his stepdaughter awake. The noise builds and builds until she finally snaps, and you believe it. But most of the rest of the soundtrack is occupied with a truly unhinged score that sounds like composer Erik Friedlander is snapping rubber bands underwater. It's manic as hell, and while I secretly kind of like it, it's deeply distracting from the quiet dialogue-based story we're meant to be watching.

And then there are the two teen girls who lead the film. They're unequivocally great, and the fact that there are two teen girls bearing the entire weight of this movie on their backs is something tremendously fun and inspiring. Unfortunately, Anton Yelchin, who I like very much, seems to be acting in a completely different movie. He's being pushed into a cartoon character that would have worked in a film like Fright Night or even the bizarre Only Lovers Left Alive (he sure did make his share of vampire movies, didn't he?), but glances right off the grounded, intentionally flat performances of his co-stars.

Altogether I'm pretty sure I liked Thoroughbreds, but I'm absolutely certain that it takes someone of a very particular bent to love it, and I'm definitely not there. This movie makes me continue to be excited to follow the careers of Anya Taylor-Joy and Olivia Cooke, who I have seen and enjoyed in many previous genre efforts, but Cory Finley really needs to knock it out of the park next time to earn my trust.

TL;DR: Thoroughbreds has a solid dark comedy nugget at its center, but it's too stagebound to really do anything exciting with it.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 871

Captain's Slog: Stardate Summer 2016

Year: 2016

Director: Justin Lin

Cast: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban 

Run Time: 2 hours 2 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Forgive me reader, for I have sinned. I have never seen a single episode of any Star Trek series. Hardcore sci-fi fandom is a little above my pay grade. However, I have seen J. J. Abrams’ 2009 lens flare expo Star Trek, so I feel perfectly capable of reviewing Star Trek Beyond, the reason I’ve gathered you here today. However, I’m not certain Star Trek Beyond is capable of being reviewed, because it’s the most Movie movie I’ve ever encountered.

It might as well be called Captain Whiteguy and the MacGuffin Adventure.

Directed by Justin Lin of the Fast and/or Furious franchise, for the first time in this new continuity the screen is actually visible, but you kind of wish it wasn’t. Or at least, you don’t need it to be, because every beat is exactly as predictable and nonsensical as every other sci-fi/fantasy adventure in the past 40 years. Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) is getting weary of space travel, probably because he still doesn’t have a  love interest, and this film is all about slam-jammin’ forced romances into every nook and cranny. 

He is considering stepping down and letting Commander Spock (Zachary Quinto) take the lead of his crew: sassy doctor Bones (Karl Urban), visibly bored Spock love interest Lt. Uhura (Zoe Saldana), outrageously Scottish engineer Scotty (Simon Pegg, who also co-wrote this film), totally organically gay pilot Sulu (John Cho), and I’m-not-actually-sure-what-he-does Chekov (Anton Yelchin, may he rest in peace). But before Kirk calls it quits, he’ll go on One Last Mission.

Guess how that goes. The USS Enterprise is dealt a devastating blow by the forces of Krall (Idris Elba) who desperately seeks the MacGuffin they have on the ship for no good reason. They crash land on an uncharted planet and must survive the wilderness, relocate the rest of their team, and stop Krall from wreaking wicked, MacGuffiny havoc on a nearby federation base, which the movie stops dead for five minutes to show us the majesty of, even though it looks almost exactly like an M.C. Escher version of that city from the beginning of Guardians of the Galaxy.

Zoe Saldana was probably having flashbacks.

The Star Trek franchise is finally free of its lens flare prison. Praise Roddenberry! But nature abhors a vacuum, and so does Hollywood. So they’ve replaced J. J. Abrams’ shiny crutch with a truly shocking profusion of camera spins. The frame rotates this way and that like the DP used a Lazy Susan instead of a tripod, even using spinning shots as reactions to other spinning shots. It’s like being strapped to a windmill and it’s massively unpleasant.

A frustrating aesthetic is a bad starting point when your movie is this numbingly generic, because once you break through that crust there’s nothing really worth digesting on the inside. It feels like a story written with a randomized cliché generator (which might be thanks to the dozen or so studios that collaborated on this film), mixing personal favorites like “they’ve been watching us this whole time,” the convenient injury that’s only debilitating when the plot needs drama, and the Big Evil Thing in the Sky over a City, mixed with some Abrams Star Trek standbys like people having long conversations while their ship is being actively destroyed, and ludicrous technobabble monologues split between a dozen people to keep things snappy.

It’s the “celebrity PSA” method of screenwriting.

Unfortunately, Star Trek Beyond opens on one of its strongest sequence, an adventure-of-the-week scenario that depicts Captain Kirk doing his best Jason Bateman impression in a silly popcorn movie diplomatic mission. From here, you would assume that the movie will be full of frothy summer fun, but it quickly devolves once more into dour, self-serious didacticism. That unabashed goofiness returns in spurts, especially in the interplay between Spock and Bones (the only time Quinto is given anything to do other than being the film’s conduit for mourning Leonard Nimoy), but for the most part Beyond is just one more plodding downer in a summer heavy with them.

It finally loosens up for a pair of decent action sequences in the preamble to the finale, and the heavy-handed climax does do some fun (if geographically vexing) things with antigravity, but it’s too little too late for a film that already had a slippery grasp on merely being middling

It’s a thoroughly watchable CGI-laden blockbuster for the majority of its runtime, especially thanks to a charming new character played by Kingsman’s Sofia Boutella, but when Star Trek Beyond is bad, it’s atrocious. The dialogue is so wooden I’m surprised the actors’ mouths didn’t get splinters, and certain scenes are so overloaded with crashing, screeching sound effects that the words are plumb inaudible. But when you’re watching the crew tear through a bundle of half-assed video game levels, I suppose the script isn’t all that necessary.

Star Trek beyond may have shucked off the visually despicable deficiencies of the tyrant J. J. Abrams, but the franchise is left a shallow husk of itself. I suppose it’s too late to warn you away, but man what a miserable move year this is shaping up to be.

TL;DR: Star Trek Beyond is a hideously generic, mildly diverting blockbuster.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 894

Reviews In This Series
Star Trek (Abrams, 2009)
Star Trek Beyond (Lin, 2016)

Punk Is Dead

Year: 2016
Director: Jeremy Saulnier
Cast: Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat
Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

It definitely helps to have been alive during the 80’s to appreciate the punk movement. I mean, it’s not like I’m against liking 80’s pop culture (and boy is that the understatement of the century). Slasher movies form the very core of my being, and I can discuss the intricacies of the Duran Duran discography like it’s my job (Rio might have stronger singles, but Seven and the Ragged Tiger is where it’s at). It’s just that a thorough appreciation of the punk scene requires a certain nihilistic standpoint that could only have sprouted from the fertile loam of Reaganomics under the shadow of impending nuclear doom.

So as much as I’d like to live outside the established norms of society, there’s not a punk bone in my body. This severely limits my ability to connect with Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room on a superficial aesthetic level in addition to its deeper, thematic underpinnings. That’s no fault of the film’s, just my own bias. But that’s enough dilly-dallying. Let’s knock laced-up boots with that plot!

And then we’ll mosh with some analysis.

In Green Room, down-on-their-luck punk band The Ain’t Rights – led by Pat (Anton Yelchin) alongside Sam (Alia Shawcat), Reece (Joe Cole), and Tiger (Callum Turner) – get a gig at a crummy bar buried in the lush woods of the Pacific Northwest. This club turns out to be a skinhead joint run by Darcy (Patrick Stewart). After accidentally witnessing a murder, The Ain’t Rights and defector Amber (Imogen Poots) are trapped in the club’s Green room, forced to fight their way out through a crowd of Neo-Nazi thugs with guns, knives, and attack dogs.

Wow, the new Benji movie is DARK.

What Green Room has going for it is a strong directorial hand. Although Saulnier’s ponderous, nihilist indie milieu isn’t exactly in my wheelhouse, he lets his frame breathe, vividly displaying the majestic expanse of his exteriors in widescreen and reversing that aesthetic to highlight the cramped claustrophobia of our trapped heroes indoors.

And when that pace tightens up and sh*t hits the fan, we get some of the most well-realized gore I’ve seen in years. I’ve always said that movies can cut off heads and dismember limbs with abandon, but where it gets truly grisly is when the gore gets intimate. That’s the mode in which Green Room operates almost exclusively, slashing flesh with box cutters, smashing small but vital bones, and just generally showing its characters a pretty bad time. There’s a lot of it, but it’s never over-the-top.

There are no cartoonish geysers of blood in Green Room (if there were, it would be called Red Room. Eh? Eh?). There are no bombastic, gooey rippings and slashings. It’s all up close, personal, and so well made that your stomach won’t unknot for hours.

The popcorn will just start piling up in your esophagus like it’s rush hour.

Green Room also has a sly comedy edge, perhaps given away by the casting of Alia Shawcat (who, to be fair, gives a very serious, convincing performance). There are jokes slipped in so subtly that you barely even notice that your disgusted grimace has converted into a grin. Most of the greatest material is delivered under her breath by Imogen Poots, whose careless character is disconnected from our main group and thus totally unpredictable.

Frankly, it’s the best performance of her entire career, effortlessly cool but with splinters of “at the end of her rope” vulnerability. It’s the first time she’s ever stood out in any of the many great ensemble casts she’s somehow found herself in (28 Weeks Later, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, That Awkward Moment, Fright Night, V for Vendetta – she’s been everywhere and never made a mark, like a pretty blonde Where’s Waldo).

I suppose since we’re talking about the acting, I should bring up Patrick Stewart. His villainous turn is definitely a change of pace for the much-typecast actor, but to be completely honest, he’s not given much to do here. He imbues his role with a chilling, soft-spoken menace, but his scenes are so separate from the bulk of the plot, it reeks of Three Days on Set-itis. His antagonistic reversal is solid, but honestly I’d prefer either the ecstatic vamping of a Juliette Lewis in Jem and the Holograms or the intimately involved participation of a Heath Ledger’s Joker. As it stands, Stewart is performing well, but he’s pointed in the complete opposite direction of the movie itself.

At least he didn’t have to shave his head for the role.

While many individual elements of Green Room are strong, they never really cohere into a full, satisfying story. An intensely erratic lot is eventually drowned in a bucket of blood as the thriller mechanics take over, and the characters just float through their predicament. The only one who changes or adapts in any way is Pat, but we get so little sense of who he is at the beginning of the film that his descent into madness has zero frame of reference. Although, there is a pretty solid fart joke, so who am I to complain?

Green Room is a tense, effective thriller even if it didn’t make as much of an impression on me as I wish it did. It’s a swell-looking piece made by a talented team. It might not be for me, but that doesn’t mean it ain’t for you. As long as you’re OK with gruesome violence that makes you want to staple your eyes shut, feel free to go ahead and check it out.

TL;DR: Green Room is a well made, tense, gory thriller that lacks a certain sense of depth.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 969

Modern Vampire of the City

Year: 2011

Director: Craig Gillespie

Cast: Anton Yelchin, Colin Farrell, David Tennant

Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Full disclosure: I have not seen the 1985 Tom Holland vampire flick on which 2011's Fright Night is based. So I can neither extoll its virtues as a glorious remake nor detract it as a pale shadow of its ancestor's glory.

I have no idea of the quality of the original, but I'll say my opinion on the 2011 iteration couldn't be downgraded easily - the film's much too dazzling for that. Fright Night 2011 is one in a long line of modern age remakes of classic 80's horror films and one of the few to accomplish what the remakes of that period (Carpenter's The Thing, Cronenberg's The Fly, The Blob) tended to do regularly - capture the tone and magic of the original film while updating it for the modern world.

Fright Night is endlessly fun and immediately earns a spot in my top five remakes of the century. Although, to be fair, my Top Five Remakes Awards Shelf currently contains Fright Night, Evil Dead, Wizard of Gore, some dead flies, lint, and a Post-It Note that reads "NOT Prom Night."

And a collage of "Colin Farrell shirtless" Google Image results.

High school student Charley Brewster (Anton Yelchin) has risen in popularity due to another generous gift from the Puberty Fairy, leaving his geeky old friends Adam (Will Denton) and Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse and is there a film in the front half of this decade that doesn't have this guy in it?) behind in the dust. Why would he hang out with them when he can make out with his way-out-of-his-league girlfriend Amy (the hilariously named Imogen Poots) or her douchey friend Mark (Dave Franco)?

Sidebar: Amy is the worst. She doesn't want to go to prom cuz that's lame (I'm thinking she'll regret the decision to be too cool for prom fifteen years from now) and she forces him to buy her smoothies. 0/10. Would not recommend.

He lives in a cookie cutter Las Vegas suburb with his realtor single mom (Toni Collette, who has been playing this part since about the time Hollywood was invented). Business has been tough though, because of all those families in the neighborhood that keep moving out mysteriously without warning. And what's going on with that weird neighbor who only comes out when the sun goes down?

It takes about 30 seconds for Ed to warn Charley that Jerry (Colin Farrell) is a vampire and oh hey, maybe don't let your mom invite him inside.

The real horror is not being allowed to let this carefully unbuttoned man into your home.

Already the plot is moving at a fast clip (take into consideration that it took Bella Swan about an hour to figure out that Edward was a vampire - in a movie completely predicated on this plot point) and Fright Night sprints full pelt through a variety of delectable vampire setpieces as Jerry slinks around stalking his prey, as sly and calm as a jungle cat.

David Tennant plays Russell Brand Peter Vincent, a Las Vegas magician and master of vampire lore who is contacted by Charley to help maybe vanquish the guy who's been killing all his neighbors. But all is not as it seems and Vincent is as cowardly as they come, refusing to go anywhere near him. This is wise, especially considering that he's landed himself in the one remake that's actually pretty consistently scary.

Left to his own devices, Charley must find a way to destroy Jerry and somehow avoid looking like a complete psycho in the process. This leads to a variety of awkward teen situations ("What are you working on?" "...Porn") and the sudden realization that not only is this movie pretty scary. It's funny.

I'm talking actual laughing out loud intentionally funny jokes. Jokes that land! In fact, at least three moments are among the funniest scenes I've ever witnessed in any horror-comedy film (see: Ed falling in the pool and Charley's escape attempt with Doris). And one look at the credits would reveal who else but Marti Noxon behind the pen, one of the key women behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.

With a goddess of the craft in her element, a barrage of bloody vampire mayhem, and irrationally solid comic performances across the board, Fright Night is an undeniable success.

It really bites. ...You know. In a good way.

That came out wrong. I meant to say it sucks.

Screw it! It's good.

Imbuing the explosive excess of the 80's (Literally - things explode left and right here. People, houses, you name it.) with modern sarcasm, references to Twilight and The Vampire Diaries, and an unusually well-integrated use of modern iTechnology, Fright Night is a wonderful marriage of two decades of awesomeness.

With an utmost dedication to gleeful pandemonium and a balls-to-the-wall outrageous Third Act chase scene, the film overcomes even the nacho cheesiness of the 3D effects. Did I mention it's in 3D? How could it not be? Although I didn't watch it in three dimensions, which greatly hampers the overall effect of some of the more CGI-based moments.

Alongside the action and gore, the sound design works triple time in a uniquely exaggerated register that is absolutely inspiring. Not many films would be able to stand under the weight of the almost grotesquely comical sound effects (Dave Franco swinging his fist sounds like a freight train) but the film is funny enough all around to sustain and benefit greatly from it.

And although, like most 3D films, the cinematographer is mostly held at bay by the necessities of adding a whole dimension (Altering the basic properties of quantum mechanics is hard, OK?) but one shot - an elevator going down with the sun - is imbued with all the beauty the film could muster.

Kind of like Colin Farrell.

All around it's a great film that doesn't take itself seriously and allows the scary moments to bubble up naturally from within the silly scenes instead of laying them atop them like oil on water. Not for no reason is this film one of the highest rated remakes on Rotten Tomatoes (although we shouldn't necessarily trust them considering that they don't ask for my opinion)

Even if you're not a fan of horror (or perhaps especially if you're not a fan of horror), I urge you to check out this cotton candy gem. It has crazy vampire teeth, a quippy hero, Doctor Who, explosions, and even a twist ending that gets revealed in the final scene! The twist ending being that Anton Yelchin is secretly the hottest member of the cast.

Who could have guessed?

TL;DR: Fright Night is a remake that I'm absolutely not ashamed to admit is pretty fantastic.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1147
Reviews In This Series
Fright Night (Holland, 1985)
Fright Night (Gillespie, 2011)