31 Days of Halloween: Baghead

2023, Albert Corredor (feature debut) -- download

This was Corredor's first feature, adapted from his award winning short of the same name. Unfortunately, this movie fell into the all too familiar category of ... streeeeetch it until you have a feature film. There were some genuinely creepy things about it, all drawn from the original premise, but to make a full film, with a proper ending, they needed to expand the story.

I really need to find how many movies I think fall into that trap, but obviously enough for my brain to say "they made a short, now its a full length feature!" It has to be more than "Mama".

This season is going to be like most, rife with "meh" movies wading through the dross to find gems in the muck. Its not like we are choosing to watch bad movies, for if we wanted to do that we have Tubi or the "suggested" piles under Amazon movies, but an interesting premise and a decent trailer does not always beget an enjoyable movie, and rarely a good movie. At least we also rarely run into those that force us to turn them off.

Premise. A man (Peter Mullan, The Vanishing) somewhere in the UK owns a pub with a creature in the basement. A young man (Jeremy Irvine, Treadstone) is demanding access to "her" which the pub owner denies, as he goes into the basement, finds a witchy looking womanly creature strapped to a chair with a bag over her head. He basically claims that her hold over him is at an end, douses her in flammable alcohol and ... click, his lighter fails. When it finally works, she knocks it from his hand and he catches on fire. Screaming, he escapes the inferno in the basement only to die at the top of the stairs, as the fire dies as well. We also see these scenes interspersed with the "in case I am dead" video he is making, the exposition to tell us the viewer WTF is going on here.

Enter his daughter, his heir, Iris (Freya Allen, The Witcher), a screwup breaking into her own apartment/art studio that she has been evicted from, when she Gets the Phone Call. She immediately flies, which in UK-set movies means a really long distance, like the length of England, but possibly another country? She meets a "solicitor" (Ned Dennehy, Zone 414) who hands her keys and a deed, but claims he can have the pub sold off before the end of the week.

The wikipedia article says this is Berlin but absolutely NOTHING in the movie implies they are in Germany beyond a few, small details that could be easily hand-waved away. I am pretty sure the original script had it as such (Germany) but it was edited out and left... ambiguous.

The pub really is a character here. While it does the annoying thing of depicting the structure inside (cramped, ornate, lots of wood) not matching what we see on the outside (industrial building, big windows, lots of space) the whole space is really cool. Beyond having some alcohol on the premises it doesn't strike me that dad was running the place as a proper pub but Iris is intrigued, more as an opportunity to better understand her estranged father.

Then the young man with the money arrives. He offers her a lot of money to see what is in the basement. He walks her through what is going on. They draw the woman out, force her into the chair, give her something "the deceased" owned and then the baghead woman transforms into the dead one, so questions can be asked. But only for 2 minutes; any longer and the interaction is corrupted. The first time the young man tries, he gets his mother and lots of abuse heaped on him.

It may be indicative of horror movies, or my writing style, but I more often than not start with a detailed play-by-play of the opening, but then... fade out into the broader strokes. I think it is part of how these movies play out for me, especially the "adapted from a short" ones, in that once the premise is played through, and they have to get an entire rest of a movie from it, things get ... strained. I get bored.

Iris really likes the idea of getting money for this utterly fucking scary, insane, truly supernatural situation. Sure, her dad is finally, in death, giving her something. But she has numerous warnings this won't go well, but as per the equivalent of "don't go down into the basement" shouted (by the audience) entreaties, Main Characters never do the smart thing.

They don't even do a good job of expositing what she actually is. A witch. OK, yeah but she's immortal and angry and.... what? There needed to be something more than a secret society with an undead woman trapped in their basement.

In the end, the movie follows some tiresome trope laden paths until it does a weird WTF twist, which I guess is supposed to leave things open to a possible sequel? Too bad the only character I cared about (the pub) is finally successfully burned to the ground.