The Shape Of Things To Come

Year: 2018

Director: David Gordon Green

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak

Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I've already done some revisiting of previous franchise marathon entries this October, so it's only appropriate that the fun should continue with an actual movie in theaters! What a treat! We haven't seen good ole Michael Myers on this blog since we concluded our marathon with Rob Zombie's Halloween II a year late in 2016 because I could not convince myself to watch that one. And we haven't seen that pale blank face in theaters since the very same film when it was released in 2009, almost a full decade ago.

Well, here we are at a new entry that has already made so much money I wouldn't be surprised if the sequel is being rushed into theaters next weekend. That is unequivocally good, because if there's one thing I love it's a sprawling horror franchise. But as for the movie itself? Well, let's take a look.

At the very least, I'm glad Michael and Laurie are getting in on the ABBA craze.

It's Halloween, 2018. It's the only Halloween that matters other than the one back in 1978, when Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) was stalked by masked murderer Michael Myers (Nick Castle) while she and her friends were babysitting. Nothing else happened in between then and now, we promise.

Laurie Strode is now a reclusive shut-in at her survivalist compound in the sticks of Haddonfield, IL. Her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) has gone ahead and had her own daughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak). But having a teenage child in Haddonfield is never a good idea, because Michael escapes imprisonment while being transferred to a different facility (which he's already done twice before, once in this very timeline) and immediately begins stalking around town in his good ol' Shatner mask mowing down as many passersby as he can in the process.

Laurie, Karen, the cops, and Michael's new caretaker Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer) run around Haddonfield in a state of general distress while Michael wreaks as much havoc as one might expect after being cooped up for so many years.

Oh, how we've missed the big lug.

So, this is the third film in forty years to be titled Halloween. Those are some big shoes to fill, but at least the presence of Rob Zombie's remake means that it could never be the worst one. Unfortunately, this entry barely rises to the middle of the franchise ranking at large.

Halloween has certain good ideas it's working with, but it doesn't seem to have found its own personality. It's actually a lot like Halloween H20, which is now as old as the original Halloween was when it was released: We finally have Jamie Lee Curtis back to play one of her most iconic roles, but this is still a Halloween movie and we need a slate of nubile teens to be offed in the background while she does her thing. H20 very clearly had two different plot threads like this, but it wove them together with reasonable success and cemented the whole thing with a heavy dose of Kevin Williamson snark. 

In Halloween, unfortunately, the threads just unravel before your eyes. The movie can barely maintain its focus on Allyson, let alone her slate of friends, who exist in disjointed scene fragments usually in pairs but never all together. This slasher movie is really missing a unifying element, and the Halloween dance setpiece they feature early on completely fails to be that. The cast splinters off into a series of stalker vignettes which don't tie together at all, or really make much sense as to how Michael managed to get himself between them. Instead of making a mosaic, these scenes just seem like a bunch of shattered glass littered on the ground at random.

Pictured: The screenwriting process.

Even more unfortunately, none of these fragments are pulled together under a unifyied tone. We get some action hero set pieces with random shards of comic relief sprinkled in (these tend to work, actually, thanks to David Gordon Green and co-writer Danny McBride's familiarity with comedy filmmaking, though one horny teen character in particular gets a monologue that I think is supposed to be funny but it completely odious and made me want him to die all the more), and it occasionally cuts to horror sequences of the most brutal and unrelenting variety.

To that end, I will say that this is certainly the goriest Halloween film ever made, and a lot of the kills are incredibly well-realized. As a bit of a gorehound myself, it was nice to see Michael making a play to join the big boys of gruesome slasher killing (usually he's a bit of a bore, going with a couple swipes of the kitchen knife and not much else), but the murders here seem unusually mean-spirited and difficult to watch. Slasher films are supposed to be fun, especially when the other scenes are as silly or high-octane as they are attempting to be. Halloween is kind of miserable at times, making choices that do up the full-tilt horror, but feel more in tune with Rob Zombie's take on the material. Which I hardly expect anyone was actually asking for.

A la carte, though, I can accept the gore for being a very good example of the form. And John Carpenter's new original score is full of bangers, especially the droning alarm bell of his most frequently used new theme. And I'll never complain when Jamie Lee Curtis or Judy Greer are onscreen, even though the former is stuck in a retread of a character she already pulled off twenty years ago in H20. This is the rare example of a horror movie that actually gets better as it goes along, as it pares down its cast so we can focus on three generations of Strode women, all well-performed, and all kicking ass, fighting for their lives in solidarity with one another. 

And wearing wigs like the dickens.

If the whole movie was just a home invasion with the three of them squaring off against Michael Myers, it might have been the best in the entire franchise, including the first. Unfortunately, there is far too much fat on this one, and the filmmakers - especially in the first act - seem focused on delivering scenes that are quite self-evidently shaky ideas, like tremendously misguided pre-credits sequence. 

It's one I'll almost certainly visit again at some point and re-evaluate, unlike the previous two modern entries in the franchise, but there are a lot of other ones I'd prioritize for a rewatch over it. I will be first in line for any and all sequels that Halloween spawns (and it certainly will, if that record breaking box office weekend has anything to say about it), because I think there's a good movie in there, or even a lot of good movies. This one just doesn't happen to quite hit the nail on the head, and that's fine. Almost is better than nothing, and "nothing" is what we've gotten for too long.

TL;DR: Halloween is a middling entry in the franchise with many decent highs and some tremendous lows.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1211

Reviews In This Series

Halloween (Carpenter, 1978)
Halloween II (Rosenthal, 1981)
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Wallace, 1982)
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (Little, 1988)
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (Othenin-Girard, 1988)
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (Chappelle, 1995)
Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (Miner, 1998)
Halloween: Resurrection (Rosenthal, 2002)
Halloween (Zombie, 2007)
Halloween II (Zombie, 2009)
Halloween (Green, 2018)

Halloween Kills (Green, 2021)

I Used To Sit And Talk With You

I know we're full-tilt into our Children of the Corn marathon and you're just dying to know what happens next, but first I think it's due time we catch up on the newest entry in last year's marathon, which got kicked around the schedule so much after it was filmed in 2014 that I was pretty well convinced it would never actually be released at all. I was wrong.

Year: 2017

Director: Franck Khalfoun

Cast: Bella Thorne, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Mckenna Grace 

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Previously on The Amityville Horror...

Following a trilogy of mediocre but increasingly entertaining films, the franchise goes nuts with a half dozen increasingly inane direct-to-video and TV movies, the best of which involve evil objects from the original house (keep an eye out for a haunted clock, a haunted floor lamp, and - my personal favorite - a haunted mirror), until it hits the mid-2000's and one truly egregious remake. Cue the rise of Redbox, when filmmakers realized the name "Amityville" wasn't copyrighted and churned out about a quarter million knock-offs that I couldn't bring myself to watch. 

Amityville: The Awakening is not quite a sequel, not quite a remake, but it's the first film in over a decade to even seem like a valid part of the franchise proper, whatever that even means. At the very least, it was picked up by Blumhouse, a for-real production company, and its weird half-stab at a meta angle reveals that they at least have the rights to mention and engage with the original Amityville entries. So I'll take it.

Do I have to, though?

So here we have Belle Walker (Bella Thorne), a surly teenager who has moved into a new Long Island home with her little sister Juliet (McKenna Grace), her mother Joan (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and her brother James (Cameron Monaghan), who is wasting away in a coma he will probably never recover from. Wouldn't you know it, but the house they move into just happens to be the very same eyeball-windowed home where one Mssr. DeFeo shot up his family forty years ago. 

James' condition seems to improve almost immediately, but is he really getting better, or is his hollow shell of a body the perfect conduit for whatever demon/ghost/CGI blob wants to gain human form and wreak bloody havoc? I daresay it wouldn't be a spoiler to say that yes, it's totally a demon ghost thing. Bella wants to do what's best for James and mercy-kill him, but her super intense mother refuses to allow that to happen.

But it's a Jennifer Jason Leigh character. The descriptor "intense" can be assumed.

As I briefly touched on earlier, this film is aware of both the events of the Amityville murders and the film franchise that sprung from it, in a twist that is reminiscent of the other Blumhouse remake-quel The Town That Dreaded Sundown. Of course, it does almost nothing with this. The fact that the movies exist has exactly as much impact on the story as the fact that the original case happened in the first place. But we do get a scene of the requisite teen friends having an ill-advised slumber party to watch the original 1979 film in the living room of the actual Amityville house.

I'm suddenly having a bad acid flashback to last year's marathon.

But of course this goes nowhere. Nothing in the movie goes anywhere. Not even the character pictured above, who vanishes from the film along with a third, female friend (good riddance though, because he's a textbook example of a toxically annoying randy teen). All we get for the entire first 70 minutes of this features are dream sequence after dream sequence in an endless display of tired scare gags that are so dull and repetitive that they might as well be the cast of Cheers for how familiar and un-scary they are.

And I know the movie has been on the shelf since 2014, but it feels like the script has been sitting there since the mid-90's, especially as it concerns Bella Thorne's character. She wouldn't be out of place as one of Cher's classmates in Clueless, and her black lipstick with matched endless angstifying wear thin within seconds. The only human being in this movie with any sort of personality is Jennifer Jason Leigh, who's in just enough of the movie to make you feel like it's not a cameo but you still want way more. Sure, she's coasting, but JJL on autopilot is worth a hundred fake CGI scares.

Scarewise, at least the finale sequence has some tension to it (because that's the only time in the movie that anything is actually happening to our protagonist without her waking up in bed and shaking it off the millisecond the jump scare is over), as well as above-average special effects, but it's certainly not enough to recommend a movie that is this painfully lethargic. And none of it ever reaches the point of actively scary.

MAYBE it's scary if you remember that the little girl she's clutching also played Young Tonya Harding in last year's I, Tonya.

Amityville: The Awakening is like a horror film on Xanax. Everything is ground down into a gently monotonous sea with no highs or lows to speak of. Even the cinematography seems to reflect this, with the daylight scenes being just as grey and washed-out as the scenes set in the basement in the middle of the night. 

The film doesn't even feint at the potential to pick up on the original's theme of economic despair and update it for the health care struggles of the current time. Ditto the tossed-off line referencing Belle's trendily dark backstory involving revenge porn. But that's probably too much to ask for a movie that thinks exposition is a character reminding her own mother that she has a twin. 

Amityville: The Awakening isn't the worst of these (how could it be?), but it's definitely a waste of precious time and chock full of people both in front of and behind the camera who deserve a much better showcase of their talents. Or any showcase at all, because this is hardly a film, just a loose burlap sack of horror tropes that were already weathered and aged back when the original Amityville came out thirty-nine years ago.

TL;DR: Amityville: The Awakening isn't the worst film in the franchise by a long shot, but it's a weak entry that doesn't justify its return after twelve long years.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1094

Reviews In This Series
The Amityville Horror (Rosenberg, 1979)
Amityville II: The Possession (Damiani, 1982)
Amityville 3-D (Fleischer, 1983)
Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes (Stern, 1989)
The Amityville Curse (Berry, 1990)
Amityville 1992: It's About Time (Randel, 1992)
Amityville: A New Generation (Murlowski, 1993)
Amityville Dollhouse (White, 1996)
The Amityville Horror (Douglas, 2005)
Amityville: The Awakening (Khalfoun, 2017)

Popcorn Kernels: Q2 Review Purge

In which we run through some mini-reviews of current 2018 films that I either didn't have time or interest to review fully.

Tag

Year: 2018
Director: Jeff Tomsic
Cast: Jeremy Renner, Ed Helms, Jake Johnson
Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

A group of five grown men play the same game of tag every month of May, and they're pulling out all the stops for their final season, interrupting the wedding of the only friend who has never been tagged.

Tag is a hangout comedy through and through, and luckily you mostly do want to hang out with these people, even if they're textbook examples of the white heterosexual man-children that occupy so much space in the comedy arena. It doesn't hurt that one of these people is Jon Hamm, who takes to comedy like a fish to water, and excels in any of the few places that ask him to be funny. Ed Helms is also never a bad personality to spend time with, Jeremy Renner's asshole character is in too little of the movie to make a negative impact, and Jake Johnson's cartoon stoner character isn't as foregrounded as another movie would have made him,

OK, well now that it's laid out like that, maybe I don't want to spend time with these people. Who I do want to spend time with is Isla Fisher as Ed Helms' wife. She occupies the Rose Byrne in Neighbors role here, as the supportive wife who is eighteen times more invested in the antics than her partner, to the point that it's almost psychotic. She steals the movie like she's auditioning for Ocean's 9, with a relaxed confidence that is effortlessly cool and compelling.

Where Tag fails is anytime it tries to apply any sort of dramatic subtext to the goings-on. We don't care about Jeremy Renner's relationship with these people for the same reason that it's troubled: he's never with them. There is no rapport established at any point in the movie, even in the many lame slow motion flashbacks to kids running around like gremlins.

Although his character is no good for drama, Renner does give the movie its best sequences, where it turns into a slapstick action movie. He channels the Robert Downey, Jr. Sherlock Holmes with a perfectly calculated inner monologue that show what an absolute machine he is when it comes to the game of Tag. These sequences are probably a bit too violent for how seriously the movie takes the rest of its characters and their situations (there is a really bad bit where the fakeouts and reality blend in a way that is much too brutal for what the stakes of this game really are), but they're also energetic and fun bright spots in a movie that mostly presents its world in a drab color palette of slate greys and shadow.

It seems like it's trying to be one of those indie comedies that isn't really funny, but an occasional Paul Feig burst of energy emerges to save the day. This doesn't add up to anything particularly special, but I had a decent time watching it, if only to see some fun personalities chill with one another and chatter pleasantly about the good old days.

Rating: 6/10

Upgrade

Year: 2018
Director: Leigh Whannell
Cast: Logan Marshall-Green, Betty Gabriel, Rosco Campbell
Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

A man whose wife has been murdered, leaving him a paraplegic, gets a computer chip installed in his spine that allows him to exact bloody revenge.

Have you heard of the odious movie trope known as "fridging?" The more you're aware of it, the less you'll like the first act of this movie, which uses a dead woman as a kick-off to a man's arc like many an action flick. This is not forgivable by the fact that Upgrade transparently wants to be a sci-fi version of Death Wish, though maybe it's a little more comprehensible why anybody thought that plot line was a good idea in mid-2018. Maybe.

That aside, I liked Upgrade quite a bit. Other than its obvious Death Wish ties, it also seems to be a pre-remake of the upcoming flick Venom, with a murderous symbiote grafted to a Tom Hardy lookalike. It's like an Asylum studios project, only actually fun!

Set in a Blade Runner-esque near future (the fact that this movie only serves to remind you of other movies could have been a liability, but the way it mixes and matches the tropes its pulling does give it a certain madcap playset energy that does it well), Upgrade exists in a beautifully conceived setting. It's not a particularly wide world they have created, but the honeycomb design of most of the futuristic spaces combined with the still-recognizable remnants of our current society that haven't quite been phased out is a triumph of mid-budget production design.

Although the characters are stock archetypes and the plot is predictable as hell, it's still fun to watch this roller coaster ride play out through this world, and the action sequences contained therein are pretty phenomenal. Logan Marshall-Green gets a chance to show off his best Bruce Campbell impression as his body performs incredible stunts, much to the shock of his face. The duality of the two characters inhabiting one body is never forgotten, and his physical performance is terrific, adding a boost to well-choreographed fights that end in ecstatically gruesome gore gags.

Sure, Upgrade isn't the most original or provocative movie that tumbled into theaters this year, but it was a hell of a turn-your-brain-off good time. Leigh Whannell knows how to entertain an audience, and in the summer season that's exactly what the world needs.

Rating: 7/10

The Death of Stalin

Year: 2018
Director: Armando Iannucci
Cast: Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Jeffrey Tambor
Run Time: 1 hour 47 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

After the death of Josef Stalin, his political comrades struggle to fill the power vacuum he has left behind, with hilarious [sic] results.

The Death of Stalin is a comedy for fancy people. I like to consider myself a fancy person every now and again (at least in my movie tastes, though that fact that I give equal marks to Breathless and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre probably disqualifies me from the club), but boy was this movie a chore. If you took the most forgotten sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus and expanded it into a feature film, it would be exactly like this movie. Except funnier.

This is Monty Python through a game of telephone, with characters jostling for attention through a series of comic vignettes that quietly refuse to land. It's a very meat and potatoes comedy, relying on setups and gags that are creaking and musty with age. But that's probably not fair to the movie either, because Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times uses every comic trick in the book and it's still fresh nearly a century later. It just kind of doesn't work, at least for my personal sense of humor, which is obviously extremely subjective.

The thing I think people are having a hard time separating here is the difference between "something smart" and "smart humor." Sure, this movie knows a heck of a lot about Russian politics, but faithfully presenting that throughout multiple extended scenes of murder and torture isn't funny. It just... is. Death of Stalin works better as a low budget History Channel documentary than a comedy, faithfully presenting so many events that it leaches the humor right on out of them in favor of historical footnotes and endless cameos from political figures of the time.

Maybe I'm just an uncultured boor who likes things to be loud and in my face, but this one just wasn't doing for me. And the less said about Jeffrey Tambor's presence, the better.

Rating: 4/10

Deep Blue Sea 2 (For the Scream 101 episode about this title, click here.)

Year: 2018
Director: Darin Scott
Cast: Danielle Savre, Rob Mayes, Michael Beach
Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

A businessman brings a team of experts to an ocean facility where he's experimenting on sharks to create a pill that increases intelligence, and obviously the sharks eat most of those people.

And here is the movie that I'm going to give the same rating as Death of Stalin, even though my enjoyment with it took me about ten million light years further than the former. I contain multitudes, everyone.

I have seen my fair share of direct-to-video, many years later sequels, and I must say, Deep Blue Sea 2 delivered exactly what I was expecting (a pale wisp of the original that acts more as a remake than a bona fide sequel). And yet, there's some spark about it that kept me invested more than usual. I wouldn't go so far to say that it qualifies as a true bad-good epic, but it certainly flirts with being entertaining more often than not, which is more than I can say for a lot of its ilk.

There are certainly a great deal of budgetary limitations that lead to a drab set, subpar acting, and an alarming lack of shark mayhem for long periods. But those limitations also lead to some very special moments, most notably a completely indelible scene where a shark puppet spies on a conversation through a porthole. Also, the one element where the film truly feels like a sequel is by far its best: instead of the giant sharks being the villains this time around, it's a herd of baby mutant sharks that have been let loose in the facility.

These baby sharks are the stuff that B-movie dreams are made of. They're adorable partially because of their low-fi nature, they allow for some creative kill sequences that wouldn't be physically possible with a larger specimen, and they allow this film to have some sort of feeling of generational legacy and passing the baton that gives it the air of a sequel, even if it's really nothing of the sort.

Sure, I could do with a lot fewer scenes of the characters wandering down the same metal hallway and bleating about their divergent philosophies. But for my money (which, mark you, was $1.75 at Redbox, I ain't no big spender), I had a decent time with this one. Recommended to anyone who likes sharks and isn't discerning.

Rating: 4/10

Sicario: Day of the Solado

Year: 2018
Director: Stefano Sollima
Cast: Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin, Isabela Moner
Run Time: 2 hours 2 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

American operatives attempt to ignite a cartel war by kidnapping the daughter of a kingpin.

I have no large amount of love for the original Sicario, which is a beautiful but deeply unpleasant experience. But the deeper I got into the cumbersomely titled Day of the Soldado, the more I realized the value of that film. Because this is exactly the movie Sicario could have been if the script wasn't guided by the firm hands of director Denis Villenueve, cinematographer Roger Deakins, composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, and star Emily Blunt.

Replace those people with an Italian TV director, the dude who shot the "Eternal Flame" music video, the cellist from The Revenant, and, well, nobody could replace Emily Blunt, and you have stripped away everything that made Sicario great. Instead of being a slick, tense, visually stunning descent into bleak nihilism, this film is just a shotgun blast of misery that begins to falter in the third act and falls face first in the mud before credits roll.

This film has a lot of problems, but it starts by introducing a wholly unnecessary terrorism element in favor of being "topical" before completely ignoring that plotline to continue their heavy-handed drudgery about the Mexican border (a topic that in the age of Trump is even more unpleasant to engage with, by the way). This allows the movie to reintroduce Josh Brolin's amoral character in a torture scene that reminds you how unsympathetic he is, before forcing you to spend the entire movie with him.

Also returning is Benicio del Toro, whose entire motivation has been corrupted by the need to bring back somebody else from the original film. He at least gets to act across from one of the only two interesting people in the movie, the young and talented Isabela Moner (the other is also a newbie - Elijah Rodriguez as a Mexican-American living in a Texas bordertown).

But the movie is still an endless repetition of shots and elements of the original, but worse. Even the overhead shots of helicopters soaring over the Mexican desert are more boring and ill-framed, and those were literally just shots of objects moving in a straight line. This is a sequel that never should have existed in the first place, and every single thing it does serves to remind you of that fact, especially the two worst elements in the movie: a pair of pulled punches in the third act that convert the film into a half-hearted fist-pumping hero flick, and Catherine Keener as Brolin's boss, totally lost in her nothing of a character. One to miss.

Rating: 3/10
Word Count:
Reviews In This Series
Sicario (Villenueve, 2015)
Sicario: Day of the Soldado (Sollima, 2018)

Popcorn Kernels: Q1 Review Purge

On account of the fact that my computer was out of commission all weekend, and I'm not feeling particularly inspired by any of the films I watched therein, let's break tradition and knock out some mini-reviews of three recent 2018 efforts.

Isle of Dogs

Year: 2018

Director: Wes Anderson

Cast: Bryan Cranston, Koyu Rankin, Edward Norton

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

In the not-too-distant future, all dogs have been exiled to an island off the coast of Japan due to a suspicious outbreak of disease, and one young man takes a fateful flight over the water to rescue his dog with the help of a group of mangy strays.

I was honestly very surprised with how much I enjoyed Wes Anderson's previous animated feature Fantastic Mr. Fox. His fussy, twee aesthetic worked very well with the arch, British storytelling style of Roald Dahl's children's books. Unfortunately, it does not work quite so well with whatever Isle of Dogs is: an uncategorizable, scatterbrained mélange of post-apocalyptic gross-out humor, stunted emotional baggage, and wild misuse of Japanese-influenced design.

I will let other, more qualified, mouths speak on the specific impact of Wes Anderson's choice to set this story in Japan, but I will say one thing. The main character, whose name is Atari (strike one, dude), has a skin tone so yellow that it would a bowl of banana pudding jealous. Not only is it a bizarre, off-putting visual choice, it seems incredibly racially insensitive to boot, which is just... well, not great. This character is the entire lynchpin of the story, forcing you to contend with his questionable stereotyping for the entire run time. It's like if Mickey Rooney was the starring role in Breakfast at Tiffany's.

And whether or not this was Anderson's intention, because it probably was, the human characters on the mainland are underdeveloped in the extreme. I get that the dogs are the whole point of this story and it should focus on them as characters, but the amount of time we're forced to hop back and forth between the drama on the Isle with the cavalcade of stunted personalities who only get two or three minutes of screen time is intensely distracting.

The cast is reminiscent of a Valentine's Day movie, with way too many stars crammed in to give some characters enough time to actually make an impression, especially Scarlett Johansson's show dog Nutmeg and Greta Gerwig's American exchange student Tracy Walker. But these are female characters who are awarded to our male heroes for doing important things, so that's a very important role, y'know? Ugh.

It's hard not to get bogged down in politics, because Isle of Dogs kind of beckons in criticism. But look. It's fine. The dogs are amusing, the fussy sets are engagingly weird and gross, and it's a decent way to occupy 100 minutes. Is it worth sifting through all the morally and socially dubious messaging? Probably not. Just watch Fantastic Mr. Fox again. But I had a decent theater experience with this one, at the end of the day.

Rating: 6/10

Blockers

Year: 2018

Director: Kay Cannon

Cast: Leslie Mann, Ike Barinholtz, John Cena

Run Time: 1 hour 42 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

When three teenage girls make a pact to lose their virginity on prom night, their parents set out to make sure this doesn't happen.

As an ardent fan of the American Pie franchise, I must say that I'm glad the raunchy high school comedy hasn't given up the ghost quite yet. And while Blockers could never be the proper spiritual successor to that franchise due to the fact that the parents squirrel away as much screen time as the kids, it's as close as we're getting in 2018 and I'll take it.

Honestly, I don't mean to complain. I do like the parents. Presumably thanks to a Kay Cannon touch-up, the script isn't as reductive and sex-phobic as the trailer and synopsis made it seem. The parents all have their own warring motivations for preventing their children from having sex, and it stems from character flaws rather than a prudish morality play. Plus, I've long admired John Cena's comic acting (the fact that 2018 allows for a sentence like this to be written, says a great deal about the state of the world that I'm not ready to reflect on) and Ike Barinholtz always deserves a bigger platform. 

Then there's Leslie Mann, who is indispensible here. Her clingy mother routine isn't anything new (we've seen it as recently as Cheryl Hines in the also surprisingly terrific A Bad Moms Christmas), but she gives us some of the films most sterling perfect comic moments, especially a tearful goodbye scene that is a spine-tingling triumph of physical acting.

But still, you can't help but feel robbed of time with the film's three young stars, who shine bright enough to have led this movie all on their lonesome. Kathryn Newton is saddled with the most boring of the characters, but she maintains an easy chemistry with the other two: Gideon Adlon, who leads a sweet, surprisingly-transgressive-for-its-normalcy queer storyline and Geraldine Viswanathan, who is a pure magnetic presence the likes of which I haven't seen in a good long time.

Oh yeah, and the movie is funny too. I almost forgot. It's raunchy without being exploitative, that manages a terrific balancing act of six character arcs that all get their moments to shine. Just like Game Night, it's proof that scripts are actually pretty f**king valuable to comedy movies, Judd Apatow be damned. However, unlike Game Night, it doesn't offer a particularly unique aesthetic. Like most modern comedies, it's lit, shot, and cut well enough that it doesn't get in the way of the timing of the humor, but the energy of Blockers isn't coming from the filmmaking itself. Nevertheless, it's a movie I'd highly recommend, and certainly in the top 5 movies of the year so far, which is not something I thought I'd be saying at all.

Rating: 7/10

Truth or Dare?

Year: 2018

Director: Jeff Wadlow

Cast: Lucy Hale, Tyler Posey, Violett Beane

Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A group of teens on a Mexican spring break vacation stumble into a possessed game of truth or dare, where if they don't play they die in horrifying ways.

Truth or Dare isn't a film for me, at least demographically. I am a person who ditched class to go see Ouija in theaters, but let's not focus on that right now. And as much as I am a staunch defender of PG-13 horror and the potential that it has, the fact is, it still isn't for me. Would I have loved it if it was R-rated? No, probably not, but it just feels like it's operating at a level that I can't really reach anymore, even though the teens in the audience will probably love it.

There really is a lot to like about Truth or Dare. The characters and their conflicts are simply etched out, but interconnect in meaningful, narratively satisfying ways. The Final Destination-esque machinations of the game itself are delightful to watch unspool, and never ever boring. And Lucy Hale is a smart, capable performer who knows what she's doing with a script.

But the fact remains that, in my eyes, Truth or Dare pulled a lot of its punches. You'll never get on my good side by being progressive enough to include a gay character, but too gunshy to show more than half a second of him kissing a dude before demurely cutting away to something else and never mentioning it again. And then using his closeted sexuality to drum up drama for a dare, but completely excising the scene where's he's forced to come out to his father or die - which would have been the most flat-out horrifying scene in the movie, which is a little starved for genuine terror. At every turn this movie renders the character shallow, making him basically just a piece of set dressing.

While I do like the way the others characters are constructed, a lot of the movie is treated like that kid (who is played by a 32-year-old actor, naturally). The kills are noncommittal, the stakes of the game seem to ebb and flow as the narrative needs them to, and they don't even seem aware of the implications of their white characters stomping around Mexico destroying property and - in an early scene - physically assaulting a local with impunity.

This movie could have been much better. What it is is mostly entertaining, but its potential is so present and obvious that the fact that it didn't capitalize on it is even more frustrating than if it had never been there in the first place.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1470

Silent As The Grave

Year: 2018

Director: John Krasinski

Cast: Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Millicent Simmonds 

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A Quiet Place might seem like a unique entry in the horror genre, but there's a lot of precedent for it in the Blumhouse Productions canon. They've already played with huge swaths of silence dominating the sound design in the Mike Flanagan home invasion thriller Hush, and they've already given a shot at the horror genre to a former comedian director with last year's explosively successful Get Out. But why not let others in on the fun? Platinum Dunes and Paramount have had a phenomenally successful opening weekend, and let's not begrudge them of earning that off the back of a movie that isn't lowest-common-denominator garbage.

Pictured: the weekend box office once A Quiet Place hit theaters.

In A Quiet Place, which was co-written, directed, and performed by The Office star John Krasinski, the world has been overrun by hideous demon monsters that in a matter of months turned the entire Earth into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. These monsters are blind, and they hunt by sound, so the tiny remainder of the population is forced into hiding, being as quiet as possible in order to survive.

We follow the survival story of the Abbott family: a beardy, overprotective father (Krasinski), a pregnant mother (Emily Blunt, his real life wife, and this sure must have been fun for them to make), a deaf daughter (Millicent Simmonds), and a nervous, wimpy son (Noah Jupe). They get names in the credits but we don't ever hear them in the movie, so why bother?

All you need to know about him is that he is Jim and he does NOT know how to shush.

A Quiet Place is essentially a silent film: basically without any scrap of dialogue other than American Sign Language, only with all the lush sound design you'd typically expect from a monster movie. It's a fun experiment, and there's a lot to recommend it. 

First and foremost is obviously the aforementioned soundscape, which builds quivering tension through absolute silence. And when loud noises come cracking across your ears, it's not just to accentuate a jump scare. The sounds are scary not because of what they are, but what they mean. You might jolt because of the noise, but the fact that the sound is the very thing that immediately exposes the characters to danger doesn't allow you to relax, like any other horror movie shock gag. The way A Quiet Place sustains tension in its monster sequences is completely beyond reproach, constantly adding layer after layer of visual and aural complication to some immensely intense moments.

Plus, there are a handful of pretty stunning visual elements to accent this sound. Krasinski's use of red light (either from the emergency bulbs strung across their property or various other sources) bathes the frame in jagged streaks of color that crack open the aesthetic of the movie and give you something completely new and sleek to marvel at. These are the moments where the filmmaking really comes alive, because otherwise its presentation is pretty standard.

And, of course, you can't ignore the monsters. They're handled in exactly the right way. You get brief glimpses of them early on that make them even more terrifying because you can't quite make out their exact shape except that they're big and spindly and not friendly. But when you eventually see more of them, you can appreciate the fact that their design is still f**king uncanny and frightening. There are a couple extreme close-ups that are a little dodgy, but that's maybe ten seconds out of many many minutes of monster-fied terror.

But, in a way, isn't the true monster the fact that John Krasinski hasn't had a leading movie role until now?

Speaking of Krasinski, he has assembled a cast here that completely works. You're not gonna be blown away by any particular showcase moment (except for maybe one scene of Emily Blunt actually using her voice, with a hoarseness that belies years of disuse and neglect of her vocal cords), but they're all effective at drawing you into the terror, especially the kids who have no right being as good as they are.

Unfortunately, the characters themselves don't entirely serve the performers bringing them to life. The world of A Quiet Place is captivating and unique, but these archetypes are nothing we haven't seen before in a million post-apocalyptic movies or hell, even family dramas. They're rough sketches of human beings that are meant to draw up emotion because of what they represent rather than what they are, and the fact that they lean on pretty rigidly structured gender roles isn't really the format to get me on their side. Also the fact that there are an alarming amount of parallels to the characterizations in Signs are really not designed for my particular brand of entertainment.

This fact also doesn't help the slow pace of the first act, where we spend the most time with these people going about their daily lives. Their personalities are so empty and basic that their interactions aren't particularly engaging, and the way Krasinski chooses to linger in certain setup scenes can feel a little punishing.

But hey, it does It Comes at Night way better than that movie ever did, so that's a big plus in my book. I'll take a generic but effective horror movie any day. I feel like I was promised a new classic and I didn't get that, but what A Quiet Place is is still pretty neat. I've been parading around convinced that it was a Blumhouse picture for a good couple months now, and I was shocked to realize that I was wrong, because it feels exactly like their model: cheap, simple, and not always remarkable, but usually solid and reliable as popcorn entertainment. I hate being wrong, but that's really not a bad thing, I daresay.

TL;DR: A Quiet Place is a fun experimental horror flick that's a teensy bit more run-of-the-mill than I wanted it to be.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1020

Für Elise

Year: 2018

Director: Adam Robitel

Cast: Lin Shaye, Leigh Whannell, Angus Sampson

Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

How has it already been seven years since the original Insidious? This franchise is already as venerable as Saw was when it reached its pre-2017 conclusion, and that's a cold hard fact I'm just not ready to face. 

Well, more than half a decade in we've reached if not a final film, at least a turning point in this baby brother franchise to The Conjuring: the film that connects the events of prequel Chapter 3 and the original film, completing the arc of Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye's medium character, who went from being the Zelda Rubinstein of the series to helming two horror tentpole features, which is by far the coolest thing about these movies). 

The fact that a 74-year-old character actress is now headlining movies for teens makes me absolutely giddy.

Insidious: The Last Key traces Elise's roots back to her hometown of Five Keys, New Mexico. When a client calls her to investigate a haunting in her own childhood home, she and her sidekicks Tucker (Angus Sampson) and Specs (Leigh Whannell, who returned to pen the script for the fourth time, beating out Saw, which he bailed on after three entries) encounter the demon Keyface (Javier Botet), who is the key to unlocking the secrets of Elise's past.

It's literally impossible to talk about this movie without accidentally making at least 32 key puns.

I initially approached this movie looking for subtext I could use for my new Dread Central column Brennan Went to Film School (first article out January 16th!), and I had my mind blown just a teensy bit. There is a lot of material surging beneath the surface here. While I chose to focus on the feminist Me Too metaphors for sexual assault and whistleblowing, there's also a lot of material about the cycle of abuse and creating your own family. I'm just getting this out of the way now, because I won't really be mentioning these things in my review, as important as they are. You'll just have to wait for my column, folks. It's a goodun.

But as surreptitiously smart as the film is, there's still something a little unsatisfying about the way the story plays out. The plot introduces a lot of threads that are never returned to (the opening quite obviously sets up that Keyface needs to open five doors for some nefarious purpose - and his fingers even have four out of five keys - but instead of having a Thanos-esque collection of keys provide our ticking clock to some grand evil, only one door is ever opened and that plot goes nowhere), some setups with microscopic payoff (they make such a big deal out of Specs having lights on his glasses, and then he never really uses them), and in general it just reeks of cuts and reshoots.

And the intelligence of the screenplay screeches to a halt every time Bruce Davison is onscreen as Elise's younger brother Christian. He is forced through a meat grinder of maudlin, exhausting family drama tropes that simultaneously accomplish the twin feats of deflating the tension and making him look like an idiot horror movie character.

The reason this has happened is that he went to a haunted house to find a whistle he had no reason to believe was actually there. His Mensa membership card is not in the mail.

Also, the real insidious presence that has always been in this franchise is the comic relief from Specs and Tucker, who can sometimes hit the perfect pitch, but mostly feel a little jammed-in and reek of flop sweat. That stench reaches its peak here, where most of the humor is mined from their creepy obsession with Elise's much-younger nieces, who arrive about halfway through the film and are subject to non-stop leering from that point on. It's creepy and it's icky, and it ever so slightly undermines the rest of the actually smart stuff the script has to say.

But... Taking all that into account, there is some pretty effective atmosphere at work here. The Last Key lacks most of the jack-in-the-box jolts that have defined the franchise (save for one scare gag, which utilizes a hoary old trope and flips it on its head in the best possible way), relying on some slow burn creepy imagery to add fuel to that fire. The key image from the trailers - the demonic finger key going into a girl's neck - is obviously incredible, as is the Keyface demon itself (I maintain that Javier Botet is the Lon Cheney of our time, bringing incredible monsters to life and consistently being the best part in films both terrific and mediocre, including [REC], Mama, It, The Conjuring 2, The Other Side of the Door, The Mummy, Alien: Covenant, Crimson Peak, and even The Revenant).

Plus, you can never go wrong with Lin Shaye. In her long career she's been handed a lot of crap, but the woman who can take a one scene role in Amityville: A New Generation and make it a layered portrayal/highlight of the movie has earned a lead role and she crushes it.

And I won't say much about this, but there is a plot twist that will send chills down your spine, blasting into the safe PG-13 world of The Last Key like a window suddenly opened to the burning sunlight. As a popcorn horror movie, it's weaker than the previous entries, but there's still something there that's more than worth seeing, if you're into this sort of thing. And to the tune of $51 million worldwide, it seems that somebody out there definitely is.

TL;DR: Insidious: The Last Key is a little bit underwhelming, but it's smarter than it has any right to be.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 977

Reviews In This Series
Insidious (Wan, 2011)
Insidious: Chapter 2 (Wan, 2013)
Insidious: Chapter 3 (Whannell, 2015)
Insidious: The Last Key (Robitel, 2018)

Blumhouse: What You Missed

Hey everyone! It's been a while, because I've been actually working hard to stick to a regular blog schedule with my Census Flashback feature (which I'm very excited about), but here's what I've been up to over at Blumhouse.com!

The Haunted Save Mart of Chowchilla, California

Early on in an article, I made a joke that ghosts only haunt old things, not supermarkets or anything. Boy did I come to regret that when I Googled "haunted grocery store." Things got weird real fast.

THE BIRDS is Alfred Hitchcock’s Best Horror Movie

Don't tell anyone, but you may recognize this as a reworking of my original review of The Birds. I thought this would be a controversial article, but apparently more people love The Birds than I thought.

Ten Horror Franchises You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

This is my favorite article that I've written in quite some time. I love learning about weird-ass movies I've never heard of, and these franchises are made even weirder by the sheer amount of sequels that have slipped right by without anyone (at least in America) really noticing.

Wes Craven’s Top 10 Nightmare Scenes

I will never stop writing about Wes Craven.

Nine Lesser-Known Horror Titles Currently Streaming on Hulu

I started Hulu's monthlong free trial to watch The Handmaid's Tale, and considering that their catalogue is so hard to access if you're not a member, I utilized my unprecedented access to scour their horror section.

The Political Timeliness of SEOUL STATION — Animated Prequel to TRAIN TO BUSAN

Thankfully we don't do reviews on the site, because I wasn't a huge fan of Seoul Station. But I did find the opportunity to expand on what i found most interesting about the film, and it was a lot of fun!

Enjoying THE HANDMAID’S TALE? Check Out These 9 Other Allegorical Horror Titles!

Clearly my Handmaid's Tale binge influenced a lot of recent articles. What can I say, it's a good show!

Word Count: 326