31 Days of Halloween: Rabbit Trap

2025, Bryn Chainey (feature debut) -- download

I feel that I have to watch at least one UK movie that highlights its wild, bleak and gloomy countryside. If it also adds in a touch of the fae, bonus! 

Daphne (Rosy McEwan, Vesper) and Darcy (Dev Patel, The Green Knight) are a married couple who have come to the Welsh countryside from London. Daphne is an established electronic musician and Darcy is ... her sound man? I was never sure what Darcy was, but he was as enraptured with collecting sound as Daphne was in creating it. It should be noted that it is 1976 and thus all of Daphne's electronic musical instruments are giant, modular analog monstrosities. Its odd that I was offered this movie, considering I have just become aware of "Look Ma No Computer", a YouTube musician known for his use of modular synthesizers. Not that he is anything like Daphne's music, which is more akin to Laurie Spiegel. Anywayz, Daphne is into discordant soundscapes, and is suffering a bit of a block, while Darcy is out recording water dropping and murmurations.

One day while wandering a forested hillside, Darcy comes across a pool of water obviously reacting to an unheard sound. He puts on his headphones, adjusts his big mic and hears.... music & voices, if you stretch your mind enough to call the sounds that. He follows them, comes across a fairy ring and before we can yell at the screen, "Don't walk into that !!" we find him waking up in its centre.

What has Darcy done...

Not long after Daphne sees someone watching the house. Darcy, on one of his wandering treks, also catches a young... boy (?) hiding in the grass. The child (Jade Croot, The Witcher) is obviously a wild creature of the hills and moors, threadbare coat, thick Welsh accent and very odd nature. Darcy introduces them to Daphne and thus begins a co-dependent relationship. Both are obviously seeking something from the other, including inspiration for Daphne's music.

Meanwhile Darcy continues to suffer from night terrors, a dream of a looming figure at the foot of his bed, which leaves him with sleep paralysis.

The Child, which never gives the couple their name, begins to manipulate the situation more and more, until they have a "gift" for Daphne, and the two walk out into the woods, through a tunnel under a hill (again, we yell at the screen, "Never do that!!") and into an ancient wooded area. By this time Darcy is already panicking and has to follow, but ends up having more and more visions. Daphne ends up being incredibly disturbed by the experience, finally seeing the Child as being something strange and otherworldly and ends up asking them to leave, after a strained night where they claim to have become the couple's child.

It gets worse for the couple.

This is an incredibly well shot, well recorded movie with powerful performances especially from Jade Croot as The Child. The problem lies in that its not sure what it can do with this obviously sly, manipulative fae creature as it shies close to folklore but also to metaphorical family trauma. The ending is weird, gross and mystical but not entirely satisfying.

31 Days of Halloween: The Watchers

2024, Ishana Shyamalan (Servant) -- download

Yes, Ishana is the daughter of M Night Shyamalan. She cut her teeth on his show Servants and has served as second-unit director on a few of his movies, but likely being raised in a household with such fondness for horror movies led her here.

There are many movies we watch during this season that I enjoy during the act of viewing, but in thinking about them, so I can write about them, they leave me cold and disappointed. The premise of this movie, and thus the trailers, was pretty grand. A woman lost on a mysterious forest is brought into a room with a giant windowed wall, where she is to stand, to be viewed, watched, by whatever mysterious creatures are on the other side. Its a Twilight Zone style premise, and TBH, something probably best left to a sub-thirty minute episode, for the premise almost immediately breaks and becomes and entirely different movie.

The funny thing is that we have seen enough of the "entirely different" movies, and enjoyed them, that, as I mentioned, in the act of watching, I was enjoying myself. That different is hinged on the idea that this is an Irish movie, a movie set in a forest in the west of Ireland, a forest we have seen in a few other movies, and we know what is usually hidden in forests in Ireland? Yes... spoilers!

Mina (Dakota Fanning, The Runaways) is an American living in Galway, Ireland. She's a depressed girl working in a pet store who likes to spend her nights dressed up as other American women in Galway. The town cannot be that big; eventually someone should realize she plays that game. Its the anniversary of her mother's death, she is ignoring calls from her sister, and instead of dealing, she takes on the task of delivery an exotic parrot to a zoo in Belfast.

Unfortunately GPS takes her into The Forest where the UFO Thing happens -- her car breaks down, her cell phone dies and the radio goes all wonky before it cuts out. So her and the parrot go traipsing into the forest, for some unknown reason. She doesn't even make note that the GPS brought her into a wood on a road that is no longer a road, but before she can turn around there is no car, there is no road, there is nothing but trees and an older woman yelling for her to follow, to run!

They run to the bunker with the big window wall. Inside, just before dusk, she is instructed on the rules: always stand facing the window. They will come, they will watch. The humans inside don't have to do anything, just be... themselves. Inside are Mina, of course, and Madeline (Olwen Fouéré, Texas Chainsaw Massacre) the already creepy enough looking old lady, young Ciara (Georgina Campbell, Barbarian) and younger Danny (Oliver Finnegan, Creeped Out). From inside, the wall is just a mirror so they cannot see their watchers, just hear them doing the usual litany of monster chittering, scratching, growling and ... applauding?

The rest of the movie is Mina deciding she will get out, she will ignore the entreaties of the others to just follow The Rules, because she has Main Character Syndrome, which is helped by her being the main character. We know, by these movies, that she will eventually discover things, do things she shouldn't, and by such activities learn more about what is going on, and she will lead them away, but not without some danger & death.

Now, the major spoiler, the thing I hint at of the top. When I saw the trailers, before I knew this was a movie set in that forest in Ireland I thought, could it be aliens? Could it be creatures from another dimension? Humans from the future? The idea of not knowing was the juicy bit. But once I knew where this movie was, it was not hard to guess it would be The Fae. And I was OK with that, except the movie spins entirely out of control once it explains itself.

The idea that a mad professor, an expert with Irish mythology, obsessed with Shape Changers, Changelings or "halflings" would find a spot in the woods to build a bunker from which to study them, a place stolen from Lost, is... mildly interesting? But dude, the premise states that all things powered die once you enter this part of the forest. Even if you accept he got some sort of counter-magic generator to keep things going, it does not explain how all the construction equipment required to dig out and build a BUNKER underground could happen. Sure, they hand wave some things by stating he conned people into helping him doing it, that he would leave outside to be eaten by the monsters in the wood, it still stretchers believability.

And I won't even go into how as the movie comes to a conclusion, that the characters have escaped, that it still wants to go on. It wants to tell more, to do a Shyamalan Twist, which by this point, we were both rolling our eyes and looking at our phones.

Oh! I cannot leave without mentioning that the movie also has redirections, that wants to lead us to believe that Mina, and her twin sister Lucy (Dracula fan their mother was?), are something other than just Americans with a tragic history. But.... it never explores it, it just hints at it, and abandons.

Of note, the "other movies" were The Hole in the Ground which shared the exact same holes in said ground, and The Hallow.

Watching: Renegade Nell

2024, Disney

We are also watching The Completely Made-up Adventures of Dick Turpin set roughly in the same period and roughly about the same thing (British Highwaymen) and both feature a highwayman named Nell. But they are very very different shows.

Very.

In the early 1700s, as the monarch is Queen Anne, Nell (don't call her Nelly) Jackson (Louisa Harland, Derry Girls) is just recently widowed, her soldier husband killed in war, the same battle that supposedly killed her. She returns home to her father's Inn, but on the way she bumps into the dandy highwayman Isambard Tulley (Frank Dillane, Fear the Walking Dead), is possessed by a Tinkerbell-liked spirit and thoroughly trounces Tulley & his highwaymen -- basically she is embowed with superpowers.

Not long after actually getting home to her welcoming family, her father is murdered by the local nobleman's son and she is framed for murdering said nobleman. She has to grab her sisters and go on the run, for who will take the word of nobody woman, and it doesn't help that Thomas Blancheford (Jake Dunn, The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself), the nobleman's son, is being supported/manipulated by the Earl of Poynton (Adrian Lester, Hustle), using black magic against Nell. Thomas proves too weak for the responsibility, and his sister Sofia (Alice Kremelberg, The Sinner) is more than happy to step into the role of family protector, and black magician.

Nell gets embroiled not only in a need to clear her name, but also in the Jacobite conspiracy led by Poynton, and whatever otherworldly agenda the sprite Billy Blind (Nick Mohammed, Ted Lasso; doing his usual Mr. Swallow routine) has. You would think an adventure show about faeries and political conspiracies would run roughshod over the women of the show, especially considering the time period, but much of the show is focused on Nell, and others, recognizing and attaining their own agency. 

There is a lot going on in this show, and while only occasionally uneven, you can see the skill with which showrunner Sally Wainwright navigates not only the Disney landscape (PG! family focused!) but also her own legacy (she is known for British shows Happy Valley and Gentlemen Jack which I have seen neither, but everyone raves about them being smart smart smart) as she writes a balance of quippy, snappy dialogue but also works to provide a proper story for each and every character. Complexity is usually death knell (ba dump, pssssh) of swashbuckling adventurer shows but it works rather well here. 

31 Days of Halloween: You Are Not My Mother

2021, Kate Nolan (Catcalls) -- download

Sombre. Its a word that often can be attributed to Irish horror cinema. Usually they are family related, but then again, many many horror movies begin with the introduction of a family dealing with something. Much of You Are Not My Mother is focused on young Char (Hazel Douple, Michael Inside) dealing with her mother's depression, and the bullying at school. Even when her mother Angela (Carolyn Bracken, The Lodgers) returns from an assumed suicide attempt, radically changed and improving (?), much of the movie focuses on the tension between all. The colour tones and lighting is all grey and moody, never a bright ray of light to be seen. Irish horror cinema in a nutshell.

So, yeah, her mother returned ... different. Its Irish, so immediately I wondered if changelings were to be involved. Enjoyably, or maybe the opposite if family drama is your trigger, much focuses on whether Angela was ... different, or just in a deeper spiral from her depression. That is, until she starts committing murderous acts. Then, the movie shifts to defense mode, as Char has to come up with a way to unveil the creature pretending to be her mother, with only her former bully to assist. 

Even for our love of The Different. the faithful to setting, this movie was just ... OK. Everyone was well acted, the setting appropriately bleak, but nothing really jumped out. And no, I don't mean jump scares. Its just well done family drama mixed up with a bit of otherworldly mythos, but not much else. I am never sure how to communicate what is lacking, but nothing was ever truly terrifying, nor eerie or even heart breaking. Its just as if bleak was the tone they achieved, and that was as far as they went. By year 10ish, maybe I am beginning to want more? 

31 Days of Halloween: The Hole in the Ground

2019, Lee Cronin (Ghost Train) -- Netflix

Faery Tale, Fairy Tale, Fae, Fey, Fairies and Faeries. All the myriad spellings and mispellings I use to refer to the little folk of UK mythos. While watching The Hole in the Ground I could not help but think back to The Hallow from our 2016 run, about a black fungus goo that takes over people, but made a thin connection to the Fae and changelings, and the taking & replacing of children. Most of my fey posts are going to be more fantasy related, but every so often someone does something to connect horror to faery tales, and not in the Grimm Bros sense, but in an exploration of the ancient sources of what could have eventually evolved into the typical fairy worth being avoided.

Sarah (Seána Kerslake, Creation Stories) has moved to the country with her son Christopher, to an older house on the edge of an old forest - well as old as Ireland can get. But still, tall stands of pines loom on the horizon (as only forests in horror movies can) and its the sort of place you shouldn't wander at night, even if there aren't any predators left in Ireland. She has had a rough go at it, an abusive husband and having to leave a life behind. There must be an entire sub-genre of single mothers moving to the country to escape toxic men; sad it exists enough to be a trope.

Things start up when Sarah finds the titular big fucking hole in the ground, off the beaten path, in the forest. This is the kind of sink hole that you call the authorities about. Its massive, swallowing up everything for about fifty feet, and still sucking down soil and trees. But no, she just ponders it nervously, and tells Chris to never go into the forest by himself.

We also get a sub-plot about the local crazy lady, a neighbour, who was said to have "accidentally" run over her son after claiming he was no longer her son. Changelings and a hole in the ground, perhaps what was once a mound? Yup, Unseelie abound!

Eventually Chris must wander into the forest he shouldn't have, as what shows up next is a well enunciating, attentive and well behaving boy -- not Christopher. He also makes frienthds easily, which is something boys in these movies never do. Very very quickly Sarah figures things out, freaks out in public and challenges the kid. Changeling Chris does not handle it well, tossing mommy around like a rag doll. But she has drugged him, and is able to lock him up in the cellar before he can kill her.

And now she has to check out the hole. Seriously? I get that she needs to find real Christopher, but its been days, if not a week or more. The poor kid, if at the bottom of that hole, is likely DEAD. Also, evil fairies? I would think him eaten. But nope, she jumps into the hole and is sucked into the slimy underground where she finds her half-buried son. She drags him out, chased by more of the ugly not-human creatures, escapes, but not before she sees one wearing her face.

The last little bit of the movie is just a "she escaped! happy ending!" that ignores all the realistic things that would have happened after she pulled her son out of a hole in the ground. She's back in the city, things are happier, Christopher is alive and well. I get that these movies always have to solidify the happy ending, but this all seemed so tacked on.

But still, this was a fun, if not novel, little film. But considering the role the hole (hee) played in the movie, I wish it had been... more addressed.

I Saw This!! What I Have Been Watching: 2019 Edition: Pt A

I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our feature wherein Kent(!) or Toasty attempt to write about a bunch of stuff they watched some time ago and meant to write about but just never got around to doing so. But we can't not write cuz that would be bad, very bad.  Smells bad, bad.

What I Have Been (or Am) Watching is the admitted state of me spending too much time in front of the TV. And despite what I said above, I have been avoiding telling you about what I have been watching. But let's try with what's on right now, and stepping backwards in time until I get entirely lost. The bad smell should help me find my way back.

Let's start with not-yet-completed Carnival Row, likely by the time I get around to finishing this, I will have completed the 8 episode Amazon series of Faeries in a pseudo-Victorian England but let's lead the paragraphs with initial impressions and see where they end up.

And this is NOT the "new Game of the Thrones", more "the new Penny Dreadful".

Let's just say this up front -- I've been looking forward to this one for a good while now. The trailers really caught me; I actually put something on my horizon that I knew I would love. The trailers were tight and emotive, highlighting the world and the leads and and all the wyrd darkness the show would have. Fairyland is real, and has been beset with war. Refugees end up in The Burgue, an analog for London (edit: whoah, NYC actually), to be mixed up in a Victorian-style murder-mystery where star-crossed lovers reunite amidst chaos and xenophobia.

Aaaand done. After only eight episodes, a very very VERY big world is barely scratched. This is one of those times where the New Order of TV got mixed in with the Old Worlde. By that I mean, that this new streaming service style of high budget, great looking, challenging but short-seasoned TV got stymied by a writing style that was meant for 13-21 episode season style.

Carnival Row introduces a world where the Land of Fairy, or Tirnanoc, is real. Its across the ocean from The Republic of the Burgue. A pair of other humanocentric countries (the Pact) invade Tirnanoc to conquer and loot. The Burgue sends soldiers under the auspices to protect the Fae, but its more about keeping them out of the hands of the Pact. The war is a failure and ends with Burguish soldiers abandoning the land, but not before soldier Rycroft Philostrate or "Philo" (Orlando Bloom; Lord of the Rings) and Faerie Vignette Stonemoss (Cara Delavingne; Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets) meet & fall in love. When The Burgue abandons northern Anoun to the Pact, Philo has to abandon Vignette, for her own good.

Years later finds them both in The Burgue, the capital city. Philo is a cop who works Carnival Row, the bad side of town full of Fae, and Vignette is a refugee who naturally falls in with this wrong side of the city. Not that they can help it. Despite Burgue's intervention in the war, its not like anyone there likes Fae (or Pix, or Puck, or Critch; choose your slur). And I mean nobody. Oh, some tolerate and work along side, or hire Fae as servants, but there doesn't seem to be a single person who actually is not racist, besides Philo, which doesn't ingratiate him with his peers. And when a series of horrific murders put Philo on a dangerous path with personal connections to his past, his situation only gets worse.

There's a lot going on in this show. But its wrapped up in a classic TV formula, with a broad cast of characters and unexciting tropes. Not being based on anything prior, its all TV. Given a full traditional season, I think we could have said so much more about the world and its people. But while I really enjoyed watching this show, I didn't come away seeing anything astounding, besides the incredible design. Everything from the sets to the flying faerie effects to the look & feel of the city had me enraptured.

Meanwhile, the OTHER big Amazon show re-imagines a world of superheroes being utter shite and who has to deal with them.

The Boys was also a short season, but utter binge worthy, based on comics by Garth Ennis (The Preacher), starring Karl Urban as Billy Butcher, a brutish British man who takes "wee" Hughie under his wing after the love of his life is killed before his eyes. Not just killed, but horrifically destroyed by a coked up speedster superhero who runs right through her. Right. Through. Her. Hughie is left holding only her hands.

Billy's proposal is that the supes have to be spanked (punished). Someone has to hold them accountable. They are untouchable celebrities in this world, backed and protected not only by their powers, but by the most powerful corporation on the planet, that covers up their indiscretions and worse. On the outside, The Seven in that  world's Justice League of America. Behind the scenes they are debaucherous, hedonistic and amoral, at best. Psychopathic at worst. How does Billy intend on doing this? Via some backing from the government, who is afraid the supes will be sanctioned for war actions, and lots of illegal activities to gather info hoping to reveal to the public some of the things they get onto.

Entering into this point in the game is a right proper superhero, utterly sweet and innocent Starlight. She is not aware of the true nature of The Seven, but learns quickly. But she still wants to do Good, so she stays, hoping to weather the storm and find a place. She and Hughie connect in ways that can only be about sharing their mutual disillusionment, and cannot end well. Which is exactly how the bitter, manipulative Billy would have it.

This show is diabolical, to quote Billy. It doesn't really hold back and powers through the plot at a break-neck pace. It takes the comic telling format, and tweaks it enough to generate TV format, but keeps enough of the source material to make this actually fresh viewing. That is what was lacking from Carnival Row in that nothing felt fresh, while this show kept on surprising and often just plain SHOCKING. I don't expect every show to be as daisy fresh as Legion but I like the attempt at least. The Boys more than succeed.