Tag: thriller

If you’re not up on your lore and are confused by the litany of sequels, spin-offs, and reimaginings, Halloween Ends is the conclusion to the most recent sequel/spinoff/reimagining trilogy, and allegedly, the end of the series as a whole (but come on, guys, we know you’ll exhume that corpse the second you think you could make more money off it). This trilogy has the distinct advantage of being entirely helmed by the same person throughout, David Gordon Green, a talented director with a solid resume. Unfortunately for him, and for us, he’s had to make Halloween movies, something he seems to resent. Here, he wants to tell serious stories and guide meditations on violence, but if that violence takes the form of the actual Michael Myers, it’s hard to follow his train of thought. It’s the thing that, in my opinion, somewhat undermines the entire affair. In the 2018 Halloween, it’s hard to dismiss Laurie Strode as addled and broken because it’s, you know, Michael Myers. In Halloween Kills, you can’t take any cautionary statements about mob justice seriously if the mob is organized against, you know, Michael Myers. And in Ends, when Laurie starts pontificating about the nature of evil, in another movie you’d absolutely agree with the other characters, who uniformly dismiss her as a bit of a nutbag. But here? You want to take everyone else by the shoulders, shake them, and yell, “you’re in a Halloween movie! With, you know, Michael Myers!”

That’s a sour intro, and it’s not to say that the film’s floor-to-ceiling bad. Halloween Ends takes an ambitious swing that I will not spoil but takes up most of its runtime, and it largely works. The cast is game, the crew is on point, it’s a perfectly functional and, at times, halfway interesting Taxi Driver pastiche. But this movie is yoked to an IP that won’t stop getting in the way, and we’re reminded every five minutes or so of a Halloween mythology that Ends cares deeply about but simultaneously doesn’t have much to say on. There’s small-town drama happening and Michael and Laurie won’t stop poking their heads in and reminding us this isn’t actually a small-town drama, it’s a fated clash between titans. It all starts to feel a bit silly and that, I think, is where the movie lost me. Not to say that horror shouldn’t or can’t be silly–I’m one of the entire Evil Dead trilogy’s bravest and most special soldiers–but when Halloween Ends insists that it’s a serious movie, we watch it as a serious movie, and the cornucopia of times it’s overblown, bizarre, or straining the limits of plausibility stop being fun little nitpicks and start being fatal flaws. Take, for example, Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) and her burgeoning romance with the town pariah Corey (Rohan Campbell). Allyson falls near-instantly for Corey, a visibly and violently unwell young man, and within seconds of meeting him, decides that they’re fated to be together and refuses to ever, ever cut ties. There are two paths to make this plotline work: you could paper over it and just let it happen because This Is What Happens In The Movie, or you could spend the time to pace it out, provide the detail, let the characters grow. Ends wants to take this second path, and I believe, given more time and space, it could have. Corey’s established from the jump as a sympathetic character, consistently in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Allyson’s clearly portrayed as a woman absolutely sick of midwestern suburbia who’s already got a history of unlucky relationships with violent jerks (a local police officer played by a pitch-perfect Jesse C. Boyd). But it doesn’t have that time to let this plot sit in the proving drawer–here’s Laurie Strode writing her memoir. We can’t give these characters room to breathe, because oooooooooh Michael’s back! 

It might sound like I’m grousing that a Halloween movie had Michael Myers in it, largely because I am. To clarify: it feels like Halloween Ends is two movies forced to cohabitate the same screen. One scene of Nightcrawler, switch projectors, one scene of H20, repeat. Both movies look fun, and are made decently well–neither movie pairs well with the other. Or against the original. Full disclosure: a few days before seeing Halloween Ends, I had the immense pleasure of rewatching Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween with a few friends who’d never seen it before, and boy howdy that movie still bangs–patient, careful, composed and shot with an effortless grace. The sequence of Michael attacking Laurie is still absolutely terrifying, and the movie around it is, at least in my opinion, one of the best horror movies ever made. It also, alongside Ends, feels like Goofus and Gallant. Ends wants to chronicle the story of Michael, figure out how the man is made–Halloween posits that the more frightening choice is that he just is, a latent force of nature that breaks a professional psychotherapist to the point of chasing him down with a loaded gun. Ends is lit flat and bright throughout, including a midnight showdown in a kitchen that looks like it’s happening mid-afternoon–Halloween is unafraid of using darkness, letting its shots be flooded with an indiscernible shadow. Ends’ violence is explosive, gruesome, and at several moments almost comedic–Halloween is sparing and visceral, saving it for when it matters most. Ends even uses a direct homage to a slasher movie superlative kill, as Michael, just like in the original, hangs his prey on the wall with one brutal stab. In the original, the shot stays wide, and Michael cocks his head like a puppy. Still gives me chills. In Ends, the camera pans down to watch blood drip down the victim’s foot…? To communicate that…they’re dead? Why? There’s no match cut that the blood droplets set up, there’s no real thematic presence of blood besides the obvious, and like all of Halloween Ends, it’s grim, overwrought, and ultimately competent but pointless. 

Marcus Aurelius once wrote “things in themselves have no power to extort a verdict from you”–or, in essence, it’s fine to not have a hot take on something. It’s probably already indicative of the quality of Smile that I spent its runtime thinking about Marcus Aurelius rather than a scary smile or whatever, and if you’d like, you can now do what I should have done at the movie; namely, take this early pithy little point, get out of here, and spend the next bit of your life doing something better. Read something non-fiction! Go for a walk! It’s lovely outside. 

Still here? Fine. I’ll only take a few minutes of your time, and in that time I hope I can convince you to not make my mistake. 

Smile is adapted from writer/director Parker Finn’s 2020 short Laura Hasn’t Slept, and wow, does it feel like it. Or to be more accurate, the opening sequence is a clinically tense and unnerving short with some genuine visual flair, with a listless, boilerplate movie stapled onto it, dragging its feet through the rest of its runtime. But for those first ten minutes! Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), a hospital psychiatrist, walks into a holding room at the end of her shift to help Laura (Caitlin Stasey), a grad student who’s clearly unwell. She’s whimpering in the corner, she looks like she hasn’t slept in days, she’s variously whispering and shrieking about an entity only she can see. It’s smiling at her, she says, wearing the faces of people she knows. Then she screams, knocks over the furniture, and–as Dr. Cotter calls for help–locks eyes with her, freezes into a rictus grin, and slowly and deliberately cuts her own throat. It’s fun! Or, you know, it was fun for me. Your mileage may vary. It’s undeniably well-made, at least. The set is sparse, the music is basically absent, Finn and cinematographer Charlie Sarroff keep the shot dead-on, as the actors take turns delivering lines directly into the camera. They can’t hide, and neither can we. It’s clever, and it works, and then this sequence ends and almost every ounce of creativity, of panache, even of the titular smile goes out the window. 

I should clarify something here, I think. Smile is, in a lot of ways, a cheap movie. I don’t begrudge it this–point in fact, I love cheap horror movies. I walked in expecting a cheap horror movie, because Smile is squarely marketed as a cheap horror movie, the kind of thing you put on when it’s 11PM at your junior high sleepover and you don’t want to go to bed just yet (e.g., in the weeks before its release, Paramount paid actors to stand in the crowd at MLB games and grin wickedly into the broadcast cameras). But cheap horror movies used to have a certain self-knowledge, which Smile lacks pretty desperately, I realized as the movie reveals its grand design–I’m about trauma, it says. I’m a serious horror movie, and I’m about trauma. This isn’t a bad thing. Several horror movies, including Smile’s clear inspirations The Babadook and It Follows, deal explicitly and textually with trauma as a malignant force using the parlance of the genre. Both of these movies, though, along with the other exemplars of the genre, have a clear and informed point, something worth saying, a nuanced position in both narrative and metatextual terms. Smile has a scary smile, and barely even that. I didn’t mention Marcus Aurelius earlier idly–I would have given anything for Smile to lean into itself, to be the fun, nerve-rattling spook-em-up that it absolutely excels at in the opening sequence. There’s flashes of it throughout, in dream sequences that continually taunt us as visions from a better, more honest, more entertaining version of the movie. But no, Smile insists–I’m about trauma. I’m a serious horror movie, and I’m about trauma. We can’t have fun here, I’m about trauma. We can’t bring back our scary smile at basically any point besides the first and last acts, I’m about trauma. We can afford to paper over absolutely insane leaps of logic, and the lack thereof, because I’m about trauma. We’re going to show you a brightly-lit close-up of the main antagonist, and it’s going to look like the silliest thing you’ve ever seen, a Bratz doll that you threw in the dryer, but we need you to understand it as frightening because it’s related to the main character’s backstory, and by God I am a Serious Horror Movie, and I’m About Trauma. And when we finally calm Smile down, quiet its yelling, tire out its running around New Jersey, promise to listen very carefully, what does this Serious Horror Movie have to say about Trauma? It proudly opens its mouth and declares “it would be better for everyone if you left and killed yourself.”

I suspect, and this is incredibly the idle wonderings of an amateur with barely any industry insight, that the critical and commercial success of the A24 brand of creepshow–Hereditary, The VVitch, and its stylistic siblings like the aforementioned Babadook and It Follows–has led to a belief that so-called “elevated” horror is easy. Find yourself a white family with issues, roll the camera a little bit, hurt a violin in the background, and you’re set, rake in the dough and the 88% on Rotten Tomatoes! But what this supposition ignores, lethally so, is that doing this approach well is incredibly difficult, requiring a huge amount of care and precision. There’s no shame in having a monster jump out at the camera, but if you want to wring fear out of, say, a family with PTSD, you have to fine-tune the dynamics of your characters and the world the same way that John Carpenter would calibrate prosthetics for The Thing. You can’t just extend a solid proof of concept by nearly two hours, say it’s about trauma because the main character’s had a tough home life, and call it a day.

I’m pontificating here because I’m bummed about what I have to say in conclusion: ultimately, I found myself alternatively bored and frustrated with Smile, a movie that really, really could have been enjoyable. There’s a good movie somewhere in here, but it didn’t survive the transplant to feature length. I couldn’t say who’s to blame, nor would I want to–there’s some talented folks on this thing, and I’ll check out whatever they do next. I just hope it’s either more or less about trauma than this. 

Hey, remember the Dark Universe? Back in 2017, when Universal Pictures tried to do the Marvel thing to its many classic movie monsters and give them a shared universe to fight and be fought in? And which, much like its supposed jumpstarter, The Mummy, was dead on arrival? Remember that? No? Good. You, like me, might have been beset and surrounded by cinematic universes, and afraid of having to use your own two eyes and moments of your only life to watch a trailer where the Bride of Frankenstein does a cool flip over the Creature from the Black Lagoon or whatever, made the commendable choice to stop caring. Flash-forward with me now–it’s 2020, and the fracturing of the Dark Universe has had at least two notable positive consequences:

1. There is not and will likely never be any such movie as The Bride’s Cool Flip Over The Creature From That Other Movie, Remember?
2. Instead of being yoked to a hoary crossover series of middling movies, The Invisible Man is tightly constructed, constantly unnerving, and genuinely pretty great. 

This intro is admittedly overblown, but no matter how many times I edited this review I felt like I needed to keep it to communicate how thrown I am by the quality of The Invisible Man, a movie whose elevator pitch (scion of the Dark Universe, produced by Blumhouse, inspired by a century-old property, movie about a woman getting beaten up a lot) has very little in its corner. I held my nose and made the dive for Elizabeth Moss, a consistently excellent actor, and I’m so thankful I did, because, turns out, it’s my favorite movie I’ve seen this year. 

The Invisible Man takes its title and license from the 1933 movie (and 1897 novel) of the same name, but besides its obvious central conceit it really doesn’t have much in common with either. This is a good thing, because this 2020 adaptation is, with all due respect to H.G. Wells, more nuanced than its original source, a story largely about an invisible dude who just loves killing and little else. This version, however, opens on Moss’ character, Cecilia, waking up next to someone, grabbing a go-bag, and sneaking out of a palatial seaside estate. It doesn’t tell us why, but the conclusions it lets us draw are correct, and this tense opening is not only strikingly effective as a horror setpiece, but as a mission statement–The Invisible Man, aside from its obvious central conceit, does not draw its tension from implausible sources.

The horror of Cecilia’s abusive boyfriend Adrian works perfectly as a dramatic device, and smartly, writer and director Leigh Whannell never attempts to stray far from it. Rather, The Invisible Man couches its plot entirely in the physical and emotional havoc an abusive ex could wreak, and treats the invisibility as more of a tool in Adrian’s arsenal than a central point. I’d call it clever, but clever feels dismissive of its power, so let’s say inspired–not a stretch, since it results in a cleanly constructed and shockingly resonant thriller that, despite being about abuse and gaslighting, never dips its toes into exploitation. This, too, is surprising, since it’s pretty uncommon for a wide-release film of any genre, let alone horror, to exhibit such delicacy and restraint, but it really, really works. We never have to watch a scene of the abuse that drove Cecilia out, a cheap tactic that would tank the movie. Instead, Whannell trusts Moss to tell the story and the audience to understand it, and this not only frees the film from a significant amount of sleaze but makes the whole thing more precise for its excision. It’s a Swiss watch; nearly every piece fits together in seamless ways, and the ending these pieces eventually make is so fitting and concordant I nearly cheered. 

It’s helped, of course, by formidable work from Elizabeth Moss, making an early play for the best leading performance the Academy will still ignore because it hates genre movies. Her Cecilia is immediately and wholly root-for-able, a harrowed woman determined to claw her way out of the hell thrust upon her, and Moss not only brings her signature steel but expertly measures out its emergence. Cecilia’s ingenuity and resolve aren’t a sudden heel-turn from her initial fear to step outside her house, they’re a natural growth, and Moss does a stellar job tracking this change from scene to scene. She’s helped, in turn, by an excellent supporting cast (special honors go to Aldis Hodge’s immensely likeable James) and a surprisingly versatile camera. Stefan Duscio’s cinematography is unconventional but shrewd; it’s thankfully unafraid to linger on Cecilia’s expressive face or a hallway where something might emerge. Something rarely emerges, obviously, but its capability to produce tension from this absence is impressive. Every other shot is just a little off-center, just a second too long, and in a deeply deliberate way that feels downright Hitchcockian. 

In fact, Hitchcock is an apt comparison. The Invisible Man is a well-crafted white-knuckler that’s rife with the same kind of sickening and (mostly) powerless voyeurism. Whannell’s got a long way to go before reaching a seat on that same pantheon, sure, but after the pulpy Upgrade and now this superb razor-wire chiller, he’s made some steps. It isn’t perfect–it’s still inhabited by the thousand natural logic skips that horror films are heir to–but they’re hard to notice and easy to forgive when the movie as a whole is this meticulously outlined and effectively made. The Invisible Man is the best thriller of the year so far, a nauseating film that, even with its central flight of fantasy, will keep you in fear of a clear and present danger. 

Did you get that great pun? I’ll say it again. The Invisible Man is about a clear and present danger. Right? Get it? The review’s done, but did you get it?

As I’ve reviewed thus far, I’ve eschewed giving any hard grades—stars, numbers, letters, or otherwise—for a handful of reasons. All art, and all criticism of it, is wholly dependent on the individual viewing it, and besides, to assign a film some kind of quantifiable value seems to miss the point of reviews. The first film I wrote about here, CATS, is a trainwreck by nearly any measure, but I’m still excited to see it again; The Revenant is a technically competent and well-made movie that I loathe with every fiber of my being. Data can’t find the full measure of a film, and reviews shouldn’t presume objectivity.

Except this one, because with those caveats out of the way, let me now say that Fantasy Island is, objectively, the worst movie I’ve ever seen in theatres. 0/10, two thumbs down, F-minus. Again, objectively.

From the moment the concept was teased, I was baffled—for those of you who don’t know, Fantasy Island was originally a late 70s-early 80s TV show, starring Ricardo Montalbán as Mr. Roarke, the proprietor of an island getaway that brought its guests’ wildest dreams to life (and here imagine a dramatic pause before you read) though those dreams are not always what they expect. I’ve seen little of the original series, but what I saw was chintzy and amusing fare; think a more lighthearted Twilight Zone and you won’t be far off the mark. In at least one episode, Mr. Roarke encounters the Devil, and they talk like they’re both certain the other is cheating at penny blackjack. So who is this new movie for? The people familiar with Fantasy Island 1.0 will be shocked at its reduction to a cheap, crass “careful what you wish for” vehicle, and the people who aren’t will snicker every time a character says “fantasy” with a straight face. 

Hollywood’s lack of original ideas is a drum well beaten, though, so let’s give them that. If we must be this psychotically exhaustive in our graverobbing, I’ll even grant that “Fantasy Island, but more,” isn’t an awful pitch for a modern horror film. The idea of a Needful Things vacation service, self-indulgent wish fulfillment on an island resort taken to its logical conclusion, is evocative on its own. You’ll note, though, the keyword “logic,” something the screenwriters had apparently only heard tales of from distant shores. The movie spends a significant chunk of its runtime trying to quantify, through various mouthpieces, how its mythology works, which would be impressive dedication if any of it made a lick of a sense. 

So let’s set aside the utterly wild explanation of why Mr. Roarke is here in the first place, the island’s simultaneously cavalier attitude towards and tenuous capabilities of resurrection, and the untold multitude of skips and errors, and just play along with me for a second–let’s pretend you’re a screenwriter for Blumhouse. Your task is simple today: you’re to find a suitable fate for two of your characters, a pair of gently dim party bros, played by Ryan Hansen and Silicon Valley’s Jimmy O. Yang. They (presumably) love to party, but are (presumably) beset by some kind of troubles that prevent this (you’ve already given up on writing any of this exposition). Their fantasy, their ultimate wish, is to “have it all.” How do you, the malicious and technicality-minded genie in this bottle, doom them to their grisly but PG-13 destiny? Their ambiguous wording means you could drive a truck through this loophole, so let’s get to work. If you’re me, shooting from the hip, you might do some entry-level body horror–maybe “having it all” includes “all knowledge,” which grotesquely swells their heads and/or drives them mad. Maybe “having it all” meant “consuming it all,” and they’d be forced, Se7en-style, to gorge themselves to death on their new possessions, and if we’re feeling particularly naughty, some unwilling participants. If, however, you’re one of the poor people that actually wrote Fantasy Island, “having it all” means “you have a great big party in a cool house with models, but the house actually used to belong to a cartel or whatever, and it gets raided by a black ops team trying to recover their cocaine, so you have to do an action scene to rescue each other. Now, I guess, you’ve learned the true consequence of having it all, as long as ‘all’ is someone else’s drugs, specifically.” 

Every inch of this plot is just as devoid of sense. Towards the end, if you ignore several critical elements, Fantasy Island appears to be putting its pieces together in a halfway interesting manner, until it sweeps those pieces off the table and petulantly announces it’s doing a different, more inane ending now, and then does the exact same thing once more for emphasis. The final picture it appears to be gunning for is vengeance for past misdeeds, a kind of Diet Silent Hill, but it doesn’t have anywhere near the wit, patience, or talent to achieve it. And the swirling void of the plot’s incoherence drags in everything around it. The action sequences, of which there are many, are filmed with shots so shaky it feels like the camera operator was actively falling down in every take. The collective charm of Michaels Peña and Rooker, both capable actors, is completely drained by dialogue that never moves faster than a plod, and the leads, some of whom I’ve both seen and enjoyed before, I’m no longer sure were ever good at acting in the first place. 

Look, there’s a lot I can forgive. I’m a grouch, but I like to think I can be lenient, and I get that this particular movie is yoked to a series of tricky obligations–it didn’t have much in the way of budget or shooting time, it’s a torture movie rated for teens, it’s bound to an IP several decades old that people either don’t care about or will extremely care about. But here’s the thing that wholly sinks Fantasy Island: it’s not scary. Not even once. It struggles even being intentionally uncomfortable. It’s a horror movie, or it’s supposed to be, but at no point can it scare you, and that’s the final nail in a coffin that already has so many nails it’s more metal than wood.