31 Days of Halloween: Nope

2022, Jordon Peele (Get Out) -- download

Starting in 2011 we (Marmy and I, as Kent is not much of a horror fan) began celebrating the Halloween season (all of October, of course) by watching too many horror / Halloween related movies, most of them bad.  2012 had a few flicks but not the full month. Un/Re-employment killed 2013. Apathy slayed 2014. But we returned in 2015 with a full run. 2016 had a good start, but stalled in the last few days, likely due to work life. 2017 almost started with a fizzle, but then I remembered, "It's October 1st !"  It still fizzled. Life abounds. And in 2018, almost the entire year was Halloween *ahem* as in the year of posting was mostly October. 2019 did alright for itself, considering I went off to Las Vegas sometime in the month. 2020 was it's own horror fest, and I am not kidding or being pithy in the least; the horror movies we watched were almost a relief. 2021 was in full form, some good, most OK and some great/terrible.

This year was another of mostly, "Let's just save that movie for October." I downloaded the big ones, made note of those that turned up on streaming services, but really never made any concerted effort to build a list. I just have a feeling we will have plenty to watch, which is a good sign, no?

Did I know what this movie was about? I mean, beyond the trailer references to Things In The Sky? Nope. Somehow I resisted the usual urge to spoil the spoilers and just dig into what the movie was actually about. I didn't resist the urge to play on the title. But I glad I did so (on both accounts) as I was very very pleasantly surprised by what we got for our first entry for this season.

Spoilers Abound! Like, truly, if you want to be surprised by this movie (yes, it's more than just a UFO movie) then stop reading.

Well, fuck. Again, when I think about no longer being That Guy, and find myself just watching endless number of shitty, or at the very least middling, movies it at least leaves me in awe of just watching some proper directing. Like Shyamalan, Peele will probably be judged as Not As Good As His First One forever, but at least he approaches each movie with a painfully sincere skill & art of movie making. This movie has it all. Cinematography worthy of me finding a proper 4K copy and watching again, characters you want to know more about, a pace and tension that had me slide up from my usual slouching so as to better pay attention (and keep my toes away from the monster under the sofa), and horrible things happening that just made me cringe, physically and emotionally.

At the beginning of the movie, OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya, Skins) and his father Otis (Keith David, The Live) are going through what must be a familiar banter about the business, a horse ranch that provides for Hollywood, and his place in it. Actually, the movie begins with a scene of a bloodied chimp, but I will leave the commentary of that to the Explainer Posts on all the entertainment sites. Anywayz, something eerie happens, things fall from the sky and Otis is killed. OJ is left with the ranch, which one gets that OJ doesn't really want, but will be damned if he will leave it to his sister Emerald (Keke Palmer, Alice [adding to my To Be Seen list]) to deal with, as she seems to determined to be the fuck-up her dad thought she was. There's a complicated history there, that my one sentence doesn't do any justice.

Almost immediately this is a UFO movie, but it had to provide fodder for the trailers. One of the horses escapes, gallops off into the night, to disappear amidst horrible screams that no animal should make. "That's not just the wind," Marmy said, and she was right. Something dark and circular is swooping silently through the sky above. OJ and his sister become determined to make some money off a definitive video of the UFO, or UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena), as the guy from the local Fry's, who sells them surveillance equipment, corrects them. They are setup to get The Oprah Shot.

And then its not an alien spacecraft, but the alien itself. Woot! First movie is my desired creature feature! The non sequitur with the murderous chimp turns out to be an eerie tie-in with the belief you could "tame" a predator, and possibly the most horrible scene in the movie, in which we see how said creature claims and devours its prey. From then on, OJ and crew are determined to take down the monster that has been eating (being fed) their horses.... and neighbours.

We know Peele's fondness for The Twilight Zone and the compactness of short-story science fiction, and part of me wonders if this didn't start with a postulation, "What if the idea of cows being levitated out of fields by UFOs wasn't about Lil Green Men experimenting, but just a feeding process?" There's no attempt to understand the Where or How this thing came about, just the understanding of what it will take to bring the creature down. Peele is able to merge the tension, and humour with which he is known, with the tropes of Dragon Slaying. The visuals are incredible, once we dispense with the idea it is a ship, and just when you think you know how it will be depicted, he goes one step further, finding familiarity in deep sea creatures, and just becoming more... alien.

I loved this movie. I loved being able to see the fondness for the genre and film making that Peele has. I loved seeing that he gets people to work on the same wavelength as he, from the laconic nature of OJ to the boisterous Em, to the utter weirdness of Angel (Brandon Perea, The OA) and auteur film maker Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott, The Crow).