31 Days of Halloween: Cold Storage

2026, Jonny Campbell (Am I Being Unreasonable) -- download/Amazon

Including the 'download' tag as I did download it earlier this year, but before it showed up on Amazon, where we actually watched it.

Another staple of the season is the ooey gooey gorey flick which we see as a nod to Peter Jackson's early flicks. This one brings a familiar trope of a space fungus which quickly infects a bunch of people and has to be eradicated before it escapes containment. Nukes are required.

Preamble. Some guy in Australia is panicking and calls a number from a payphone as a sandstorm dials up. He is transferred and transferred and transferred till he ends up at the cell phone of Dr. Martins (Sosie Bacon, Smile), in Rome, Italy. She's confused as to why he's talking to her, but it becomes quickly apparent that something hitchhiked its way back to Earth when the Skylab crashed and its ravaging his town. US Military experts Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson, Taken) and Trini Romano (Lesley Manville, The Crown) are sent to Australia (not Australian military? cuz NASA is involved, I guess?) where they find a fungus that has killed everyone. And soon after, it kills Dr. Martins after it eats through the rubber soles of her boots, her... Doc Martens... get it? She dies, they collect the fungus sample and firebomb the entire town. The sample is moved to a secure storage site in Kansas.

Years later the secure storage site is decommissioned and sold off as Self Storage, where ex-con Travis "Teacake" Meacham (Joe Keery, Stranger Things) works the night shift, along with cute newbie Naomi (Georgina Campbell, Barbarian). Something is beeping behind the cheap drywall, which leads to a US Dept of Defense storage area deep below their Self Storage. And just outside the room the two find a very gross looking "rat king", covered in the same ooey gooey green slime mould as we saw in Australia. It got out.

Things get worse. Of course they do, or we wouldn't have the movie.

Its a fun romp, but surprisingly a tight story. Usually the infection "gets out" and we get many many scenes of people getting infected, of yokels blundering into their own death. But even though the fungus does travel on a cockroach out of the storage facility to "infect" a dead cat, and afterwards the asshole who killed the cat, the story stays entirely in the confines of the storage facility. Oh, there are victims, including the owner of the facility (he bought it, cheap, from the govt) and his low rent biker friends, but mostly its about Travis and Naomi running around, trying to stay safe.

And the banter was top notch. Travis is "chatty" while Naomi is smart enough to call him loquacious. They are flirty without being a hookup, brave enough to save Mrs Rooney (Vanessa Redgrave, Black Box), as well as carry the "not a suitcase nuke" into the bowels of the facility, but not stupid. Its billed as a comedy, but everything is played straight, but does not take itself too seriously. But it has an internal continuity and direction which was refreshing for one of these movies.

As long as you ignore the fact that after Travis sends Mrs. Rooney up the stairs and out of the facility, we never see what happens to her. She does not drive away. She is forgotten, and likely edited out.

And yes, ooey gooey gore. Loads of it. The fungus, once it hits maximum yield, likes to make its host explode. Lots of splattering loads of green and red gore, but without bothering to worry about the "did we get any on us" of other movies. We can ignore that only a small amount eating Doc Martins' boot done her in, but the two "heroes", as well as (Not Just) Aging military agents Quinn and Romano could have been exposed many many times, but aren't, cuz what would the fun in that be?

31 Days of Halloween: Ready or Not 2: Here I Come

2026,  Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett (Abigail) -- Disney+

We were rather charmed by the first movie; Kent liked it as well and he also enjoyed this one. 

So, to roughly recap the first one, which I should have mentally done before clicking Start on this one, but waitress Grace MacCaullay (Samara Weaving, Azrael) married into the old money Le Domas family. On their wedding day the whole family gathers at the gothic mansion to observe an old family ritual -- pull a card from a puzzle box, which denotes a traditional game. Unfortunately Grace pulls "Hide & Seek" which says the rest of the family has to hunt her down; hide until dawn, or die. Grace gets quickly fed up and dispatches everyone who comes up against her, and survives until dawn, only to witness the remaining family explode to gorey goo, subjected to failing to abide by the curse. 

This movie picks up on the doorstep of the mansion, the morning after, Grace covered in blood, her wedding dress and yellow hightops soaked with blood and gore. She passes out and wakes up in a hospital; handcuffed to the bed. Its not like murdering a bunch of people (in defense, of course) and burning down their house would go unnoticed. She is to be questioned by the cops, but is interrupted by the arrival of her "emergency contact", her estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton, Freaky). The sisters do not like each other, Grace having walked out on her younger sister when she was 18, seeking to create a better life, before inviting Faith back into it.

Interesting. It was hard not to compare the similarities between "Ready Or Not" and the Zazie Beetz flick "They Will Kill You" but this sequel sets it up to even more similarities. 

Meanwhile a bunch of other Old Money Families are receiving phone calls from a lawyer mentioning that the Le Domases have died and a new seat has opened up at the table. Its like the John Wick world but with devil worship instead of assassination. While Grace and Faith argue it out over their family drama, one of the potentials, Bill Wilkinson (Kevin Durand, The Strain), shows up at the hospital with all his best knives, seeking to take out Grace before she can take the seat. But that's against the rules; just as he's about to kill Grace, he explodes into gooey bloody bits -- the Devil, or Mr. Le Bail (Belial? get it?) as the movies call him, has a standard gimmick. Immediately after, the Lawyer (Elijah Wood, The Monkey) appears wearing a gas mask, immobilizes Grace and Faith and takes them away.

Faith has been mixed up in Grace's (new) family drama even before she can get a read on what the fuck is going on. They awaken to Exposition Time, where the Lawyer explains that any of the families' chosen hunters who kills Grace, gets the ring, which provides ultimate power. The two girls run out into the golf course and the Game is Afoot. 

Each of the hunters has their own gimmick: the twins have a flintlock pistol and a weird fisted warhammer. Viraj Rajan (Nadeem Umar-Khitab, Brilliant Minds) wears a mask and swings an east Indian sword. El Caido (Nestor Carbonell, Bates Motel) uses a sniper rifle, badly. Wan Cheng Xing (Olivia Cheng, Warrior) has her own sword. And each of their attending family members hang out in the green room watching the show unfold. If there family member dies, they can either forfeit the chance, or sign up (in blood) to take the hunter's place. If any of them kill each other then they explode in gore, along with any surviving family members. 

Creative fights, violent deaths, betrayals and subterfuge, and quips galore, eventually leads to Grace making a bargain with Titus Danforth (Shawn Hatosy, Fear the Walking Dead), to marry him -- he gets the ring, no death required. Except Grace turns the table on that, essentially dooming every single fucking one of the cult, family members and supporting staff all, much to the amusement of The Lawyer. Grace and Faith get to walk out into the sunrise with the cult gone and ... well, the cops are still probably gonna hunt her down.

I still find it weird that we can consider Satanic Activity, murder, mayhem and exploding people as "fun" but there we are -- Horror Adjacent. There's not a lot deep going on here, but some light commentary on Good vs Evil being useless constructs when it comes to running the world. We also get some fun cameos (David Cronenburg as the Danforth patriarch, and that short gooey scene with Durand) and all the Canadian supporting actors you can shove into a movie; and Michelle Gellar as Ursula Danforth.

I think we need a proper horror movie up next.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): They Will Kill You

2026,  Kirill Sokolov (Why Don't You Just Die!) -- download

Well, that was a bucket full of bloody fun.

Part of me is wondering whether there is something wrong with us when this is the definition of a "fun time".

Should I start a new tag for movies where women are led to the slaughter, but turn the tables? Ready or Not comes to mind, but there are definitely a few more examples. Its a sub-sub-genre I can get behind, and yes, there will be a watching of the sequel (referenced movie, not this movie), but in October, probably along with all the highly praised, recently released horror movies from 2026.

Asia and her little sister try to leave their abusive father but it only goes wrong, ending with Asia shooting, but not killing him, and her having to flee into the rainy night, leaving her sister behind. Because the world is a horrible place, Asia is caught and convicted while daddy dearest recovers and retains custody of his youngest daughter, so he can go on to further abuse her.

Ten Years Later, another rainy night and Asia has shown up at the door of a creepy high rise in NYC, creepy as in it has Satanic bas-reliefs and a pentacle on the roof. She is invited in by the building manager who explains the history of the building and the exclusive nature of its tenants (i.e. rich white people, poor black servants [!!!]). Asia has come for a job, under another name. She is welcomed, given a room, but while she is sleeping, someone finds his way into the room, a someone in cult-y robes and mask. In an incredibly stylish fight sequence, she fights him off, kills him, only for more cult-y robed figures to break their way into the room. She kills them all only.... it doesn't stick. Yup, an immortal Satanic Cult.

Asia (Zazie Beetz, Deadpool 2) is here to "rescue" her little sister, now all grown up, from this cult. But first she has to survive the night. She is helped by one of the cult members who has grown tired of immortality and Satan worship and human sacrifice, and probably the racism inherent to these assholes. Sure, they think they are "enlightened" by occasionally offering immortality in replacement of sacrifice, but that's only so they can have consistent servants / support staff. And that includes Asia's sister Maria (Myha'la, Bodies Bodies Bodies); she's been offered a "position" as long as she sacrifices someone, but her sister, who she is still pissed at for leaving her behind all those years ago, has fucked that by showing up in the sacrifice's place. 

People my age, when writing about movies, compare. This feels like a Hong Kong action movie meets Sam Raimi with exquisitely well choreographed fights scenes, laugh out loud horrible gorey stuff like an eyeball with independent thought chasing after Asia as she attempts escape. Its Raid: Redemption but reusing the same antagonists over and over, because they keep on coming back from the dead. 

The fight takes her to the top of the building, to face The Devil Himself.. in the form of a very big pig head tattooed with the names of all the immortals, so she gets to not only end them but also this little conduit he had to Earth. You have to think about what this cult was actually doing. Sure, immortality is nice, but what does The Devil get out of it, beyond the souls I mean. I can only assume this rich white assholes, who were doing very well for themselves were out there in the world making Evil every day, making lives of others worse, corrupting who they could, making things more terrible for everyone. You know, beyond the sacrificing a person every year.

A fun fun movie. Will need to see what else Sokolov has to offer.

Kent's -- we agreed.

KWIF: Supergirl (+2)

KWIF=Kent's Week in Film.

This Week:
Supergirl (2026, d. Craig Gillespie - in theatre)
They Will Kill You (2026, d. Kirill Sokolov - crave)
We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021, d. Jane Schoenbrun - blu-ray)

When it comes to a superhero movie my longtime habit has been to go in feeling totally optimistic, hopeful, and rooting for its success. I want to be entertained, I want to see the comics characters I know brought to life, and I want other's to feel inspired.  I love comics. I love movies. I want this marriage to work.

I even felt this way going into the dregs of the 1990s like the Shaquille O'Neal-starring Steel and batnippled Batman and Robin all the way to modern lumps like Vin Diesel's Bloodshot or the Rock's superhero vanity project, Black Adam, and virtually everything in-between (and outside of)...  I just want the movie to do justice in bringing these things I like (or love, or even have no emotional connection to) to the cinema. Even if a comic book movie is not financially successful, then I'm happy to take the moral victory if it's a valiant adaptation of the character or story.

This is all to say that I went into Supergirl absolutely ready to champion it, to stand behind it and prop it up, even as critical feedback at large called it middling and muddy. I'm rooting for the James Gunn-led DC universe to succeed, and absolutely loved his Superman last year, so I was ready for another surprise triumph (especially having read the source material Supergirl was being adapted from...more on that later). 

It was once true that a nerd's tolerance for nerd shit tends to be much higher than your average film critic, but these days so many film critics have their nerd bona fides to back their opinions up that it's harder to just outright dismiss their commentary. Even without external critical voices, I have my own internal critical voice now, one that I have a hard time shutting off.

Supergirl opens with a montage of a girl and her dog. Kara Zor-El (Millie Alcock) and her pup Krypto are planet-hopping and bar-hopping for Kara's 23rd birthday. Getting wasted, making messes, just whooping it up to numb the traumatic memories that haunt her. Cousin Clark calls, wishing her the best, but can't hide his concern. Meanwhile Ruthye (Eve Ridley) witnesses the senseless death of her family at the hands of ruthless (no pun intended) brigands. Ruthye picks herself up, dusts herself off, and goes looking for someone who will help her avenge the death of her family. Kara's plastered in a bar on Ruthye's red-sun-baked planet (meaning her powers are waning), dancing to Wet Leg's "Catch These Fists" (piped into the space jukebox via a vintage ipod) when Ruthye announces herself and her intentions, only to be bowled over by some unsavoury dudes, and Kara needing to step in. Ruthye starts following Kara, imploring her to help her, but it's only after Krypto is poisoned by the Brigands as they steal Kara's ship (where did she get a spaceship from anyway?) that Kara and Ruthye's objectives align and adventure awaits them.

The first act of Supergirl, for the most part, is pretty solid. There are a fair amount of needledrops, some superb alien make-up work and special effects, and a largely agreeable and unique sequence aboard a space coach bus. There's life and vitality to this first act that ebbs slowly away as the film progresses past it. It's not a James Gunn film, so it doesn't have his sensibilities, but it almost feels like Craig Gillespie wanted the first act to parrot the James Gunn thing. It's moderately successful, but it's absolutely clear from the first two fight sequences that Gillespie is not comfortable or confident with such sequences and they are neither clean nor easy to follow, and both are quite poorly lit (it's also quite possible that the theatre I was in was dimming their projector, the whole film seemed overly dark). The quality of the action sequences only diminish from there.

The story in Supergirl comes from Tom King and Bilquis Evely's comic-book mini-series Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, which was King's sci-fi/superhero take on True Grit, but in a episodic format. This film, then, is a copy of a copy, translated from one medium to another and back again, and the degradation in fidelity is palpable. Having watched the Coen Bros. take on True Grit recently, it's a virtual masterpiece that even a dimmed copy should still wind up being somewhat good, possibly even great. While Supergirl isn't outright bad, I struggle to call it good. It's fine. It's a movie.

What last year's Superman had was spirit and humour -- as does True Grit -- but Supergirl lacks these, abandoning much of its humour quickly into the film and never quite finding its spirit. True Grit's tale, especially in the Coens' hands, relies completely on how the characters engage one another. Kara is Rooster Cogburn here, while Ruthye is Mattie, and even though Alcock does the work to make Kara seem like she's been through the wringer and having a tough time coming out the other side, the bond between these two characters doesn't ever get satisfactorily forged, at least not on screen. In True Grit the Coens got a lot of mileage out of Hailee Steinfeld's Mattie, for her primness and eloquence and impression of maturity, that is highlighted against Rooster's inebriated brusqueness ... something that is attempted here with Ridley's Ruthie against Alcock's Kara, but, it's not the focus of the script, so many meaningful things get lost along the way. The lightness of the contrast is lost.

The third member of the True Grit team dynamic was the virtuous lawman La Bouef, and I get the in-name-only joke of substituting bounty hunter Lobo (Jason Momoa) in here, but those are two very different archetypes, and, frankly, Lobo feels kind of shoehorned in here. There's not really any meaningful engagement between Lobo and Kara, and the relationship between Lobo and Ruthye happens largely off screen. The need for set pieces (kind of ugly and muddy setpieces at that) takes the place of having these three characters sit and talk and drink and get to know each other around a (space) campfire. (Momoa's Lobo feels like Momoa doing a Beetlejuice impression... it's fine, but there's no character definition in the script).

The film also falls into repetitive patterns that become quite tiring by the third crest and fall. Kara tells Ruthye to stay behind and be safe only for her not to listen and for Kara (or someone) to have to help her as she gets in over her head.  Or Supergirl loses her powers (instantly) only to gain them back instantly, time and time again. I get it, the Supers are so over-powered that they need such mechanisms to make them vunlerable, but it's the abruptness and repetitiveness that both bother me. The powers should diminish slowly over time, a ticking clock mechanism, while a hail mary recharge may not bring them back full throttle it should always be enough. It's the writings of someone who hasn't spent enough time with the Super-family to understand this.

The main villain is head brigand Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts), and he's kind of what everyone's chasing, the maguffin of the comic book, but here they half-heartedly try to develop him into a vile killer who does so for pleasure, and Schoenaerts tries to inject life into the character, but this character, really, should be largely unseen. The less of him, the better. And then the script adds in the fact that the brigands are a men-only club, who kidnap young (it should be noted, human) women to bear them children. It's a play right out of Mad Max:Fury Road but without consulting someone like Eve Ensler to tell them whether they should or not.

As a result, the young girl slave trade casts a pretty bleak pall over an already strapped-for-joy movie. It wallows in the trauma of Kara having lost her family (conveyed in a series of flashbacks that grind the film to a dead halt -- flashbacks are in the comics but handled very differently) and Ruthye's same-but-not experience (in spite of them both having these traumas, the film still isn't able to bond them very well on screen...there's, like, one moment where Kara, silently, realizes this).  Had the film not sidelined Krypto, there would have a been a comic relief chaos agent to make this whole pill easier to swallow. I realize he's also sidelined in the comic and his sidelining is the impetus for Kara to go on this journey in the first place, but comic books have years of character history to draw on and an established universe to traverse, while this film needs to create it all from whole cloth. They could have found something else to trigger Kara and keep Krypto in the picture. 

I wanted to love Supergirl.  As is, I don't really even like it. I do really like this iteration of the character, the attitude that Alcock portrays very well, but the film doesn't serve her too well. I came out of Supergirl feeling like I barely understand this character after spending two hours with her. At the end of the film, Kara returns to Earth, to Metropolis, uncertain of her place in the universe, but ready to find out. Yeah, that's a starting point, not an ending.

---

[Warning: spoilers within]

They Will Kill You starts with Asia Reaves (Zazie Beetz) and her little sister fleeing from an abusive stepfather. He catches up to them quickly, and Asia shoots him. The cops arrive, Asia runs, leaving her sister behind. Conceptually it's a pretty heavy, if quite brief, opening sequence that doesn't make the audience wait long to get to the point.

Asia got caught and served 10 years in prison for the attempted murder of her father, but has felt nothing but guilt over leaving her sister behind. Asia's hired a private investigator to track her sister down, he points her to the Virgil, a New York 9-storey high rise for the wealthy, where her sister was hired as a cleaner, but it has a reputation as being a place where people disappear. There is definitely insinuations of class and race disparities, and the rich being raised up on the the backs of the poor, which all sounds rather heady as subject matter.

And yet, this is just the place setting. This film really doesn't waste its time. It's only about 15 minutes before the first fight sequence happens, and it doesn't let up from there. Whatever inference of social commentary the opening few minutes might have suggested, for the most part they are pushed aside so that we can have a rollicking good time as Asia navigates the Victor's many hallways, passageways, tunnels and shafts, fending off it's blood-hungry elites.

Asia take a job with a fake ID to get into the Virgil, and instantly meets some of the fake-smile bearing residents, the head of services Mrs. Woodhouse (Patricia Arquette), and getting a very short tour of the servants quarters on the first floor. She senses she's being watched, so she secures her door. A masked behemoth finds his way into her room regardless and attempts to attack her... only Asia is prepare to fight back. Four more assailants find their way in and Asia defends herself, armed with a sawed off shotgun and a sword. 

When Asia lops off Tom Felton's head, the arterial spray is like a lawn sprinkler, just all directions everywhere. The fight with the remaining assailants is heated and brutal and bloody and very creative. Asia's taking her lumps, but she's surprisingly a warrior, and ready to take everyone on.

There are definite shades of Kill Bill here, not just in the fighting, but in the style, the edits, the pastiche, the title cards and flashbacks. And yet, it's not Tarantino-esque, because this plays as an even greater ode to Sam Raimi. 

The elite of the Victor are immortal devil worshippers who can't truly be killed. They will resurrect and reform if even a flake of skin remains. In one of the film's many incredible sequences, Asia is crawling through a between-floor tunnel system and encounters Sharon (Heather Graham) whose head she lopped off earlier in the film. After a scuffle, Asia blows Sharon's head off, and, moments later the headless body starts charging towards her (just grasping, but unable to see, hear or properly sense Asia's whereabouts). Eventually Asia finds her way to an upward shaft, but doesn't notice Sharon's eyeball, using the optic nerve like a flagella to propel itself through the tunnels to track her. Somehow Sharon's headless body is still receiving the intel, and attempts to charades the information back to the other elites. It's absolutely ridiculous and obscenely delightful. Just as the whole film is.

Much like a Bruce Campbell in an Evil Dead, Zazie Beetz keeps taking her lumps, but also keeps fighting back. She fights for herself, and she fights for her sister, but mostly, she's fighting for our entertainment. The film culminates with Asia fighting Mrs. Woodhouse with a devil-possessed giant boar's head Voltron-ed her own. Just insane, but delirously entertaining.

There's not a tremendous amount of story or character development here, there's no need for it. This is just a wicked fight movie that's having a good time going to comedic extremes, and I'm here for it.

---

It would be easy to mistake We're All Going to the World's Fair, which was released in 2021, as a COVID-era production. It's a small film that follows its protagonist, 16-year-old Casey, as she lives her life online, participating in "the World's Fair Challenge".  It's a social media trend that, according to other (in-world, off-brand youtube) streamers, changes you in unexpected ways. Casey films herself strolling around her town, talking to the camera about the changes she's feeling, the disconnecting from herself, the violent and or self-harmful impulses she's feeling. We see Casey dancing alone, or playing baseball by herself. We see her exploring the barn late at night, looking at her father's gun (we're talking an assault weapon here, not a hunting rifle or handgun), and eventually settling on the barn couch, watching not-youtube on the big screen, when a video autoplays a message that is directly for her. It features a still of Casey's face, distorted and melty, alternating with a hastily scribble warning that she is in trouble, and she needs to reach out. 

Jane Shoenbrun's I Saw The TV Glow was my favourite film of 2024, an exploration of how media can impact one's sense of identity, and an powerful closeted trans-allegory disguised as a horror film. This, their first feature shows they definitely have a grasp, and maybe even a penchant for media-identity related storytelling (their third film, this year's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma looks to be yet another, different and provocative take on this dynamic).  We see Casey not just through her videos, but also as she's making her videos, and when she's not making her videos she's engaging with other "World's Fair" content.

Schenbrun has fun building out the online world of "the World's Fair Challenge", some disturbing content from creators describing (or showing) how the Challenge has changed them. It's almost like an infection, but the symptoms differ from person to person.

The aforementioned warning comes from "JLB", and Casey decides to Skype with this stranger. JLB expresses that they're concerned about them, and asks Casey to just keep making more videos. The film's greatest move comes following this call that ends the first act, switching us over to JLB's perspective for a period of time. He is a thin, bald middle-aged man with a very hang-dog expression, and we just don't know what his deal is. He lives in a very big house, so he's obviously successful at whatever he does, or did, but he primarily hangs out and sleeps in what looks like a teenager's bedroom. There are pictures in the house but we never clearly see them. We don't know if JLB lost a kid to this "Challenge" or if he's just an online creeper, or if he's just a lonely guy looking to platonically connect with someone who also appears lonely, or if he's a psycho who has murdered the family in this home and is now operating out of it. He does spend a lot of time disseminating Casey's content though.

Beyond Casey's video in which we see her wander through a crowd at a New Year's celebration, we never see her with people. Her father, we're only aware of him because he yelled at her once (for listening to something loudly at 3am), but there's a half insinuation that she's scared of him...or avoiding him...or both. But there's so much Schoenbrun doesn't show us here that everything is up for interpretation, right through to the finale where the rug isn't so much as pulled out from under us but the fog is lifted.  

The events of the movie are recontextualized, but the question is...does it make a difference? However we view Casey, isn't the end result that she's lonely, sad, and perhaps depressed? 

"The World's Fair Challenge" is Schoenbrun interpreting the Creepypasta realm of online horror storytelling through collaboration, the realm that bore such fruits as Backrooms and The Slender Man and Channel Zero, but through a very grounded, human, individualistic lens. It very much feels like Schoenbrun is asking "is this how I would be if this type of communal storytelling was available to me when I was a sad, awkward, lonely teenager", and I feel very much the same way, that the whole Creepypasta thing would have been totally for me had I grown up in a different time.

It's eerie how much ...World's Fair is in sync with what pandemic living felt like (according to Schonebrun, it finished filming March 1, 2020) but it's not an intentional pandemic allegory. It's message is not bound by time, as a result, it is a story of loneliness, and the horror here (if you can call it that...it's more just a slow, simmering dread), is equally grounded in sadness and the truly unknowable strangers of the internet.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Send Help

2026, Sami Raimi (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness) -- download

Two people, a despicable CEO and his employee, a mouse-ish, totally messed-up "good with numbers" type wash up on the beach of a deserted island, after the corporate jet goes down. They hate each other. They will hate each other even more when this is over. In most Hollywood movies, this would be a straight comedy, an Overboard meets Castaway, except this is Sam Raimi so prepare yourself for some fucked up shit.

The first ducked up thing that struck me about the movie was how much I disliked Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams, Aloha), upon meeting her. Maybe its more than a little transference, but the pseudo Dunning-Kruger energy she exhibited irritated me -- she assumed she was "exec material" purely because she was more capable than any of her peers. But being an executive is more than just knowing the business, its about social skills and knowing your environment. She was obviously not liked by her coworkers. And when newly CEO Bradley Preston (Dylan O'Brien, Love and Monsters) turns her down for the position she angrily believes she was entitled to because his father said she should have it, at the company Xmas party, I was actually on the same page as him. Not that his college buddy deserved it either, but he's just an NPC and Linda is a real character. She should know better.

And what has me yelling at the screen in hindsight is how intentional this was from Sam Raimi. Linda is not the hero of this movie. There are no heroes. And yet, he keeps on ducking with my expectations and my feelings. Damn him.

The scenes on the plane are absolutely cringe-worthy terrible -- not terrible film making, just terrible people being terrible. Any pretense of Preston being a real human are dispensed with, and more so for his toadies. They are literally cackling evil henchmen and I swore the terrible suits they were wearing were straight out of the ancient movie Wall Street. Their evil goes cartoon level when they turn on each other.

Say terrible one more time....

Once on the island, she shines. She has watched every episode of Survivor and even auditioned. This is not just a place she can survive, but a place she can thrive. Preston survives, but barely, and is nursed back to health by Linda. He initially is grateful but very very quickly reverts to "I am your boss!" mode and expects servitude. Linda does not take kindly to that and much of the second act is that tug of war between the two. Again, if this was a typical movie, they would struggle but eventually he would come to realize the situation requires a reversal of roles. Raimi plays with us, and then Preston tries to kill her, or at the very least incapacitate her. Big mistake.

By this time, we have already seen Linda skip right past being rescued by a passing boat, as she feels very very empowered here, and we have suspicions about the full nature of the island. I was convinced that just over the next rise, past the "don't go there, its dangerous!" region of the island, there was a full on resort for rich folk. The reveal is not far off. And that ending, where the conflict finally resolves, that is where we see the true natures of both of these people. No heroes.

What? You didn't spoil it? You always choose spoilership!

This is a Sam Raimi movie through and through. Like Kent, I recognize that his movies have varying degrees of success but we enjoy them. This one, while I doubt it will gain (have gained?) much box office success, it is a solid thriller in his cabinet of curiosities. I usually, at this point, suggest that its not perfectly on point, and a little bit of polish would have elevated it to Big Success, but honestly, I am not sure I want to see a Raimi film elevate to that level. His roughness, his gorey glee left over from his splatter-horror movies is always present, and can feel out of place to the non-Raimi enthusiast, but I enjoy the big grin it puts on my face when he goes just that little bit too far. When Linda showed up and tossed the bloody head of a boar on the ground, splattering Preston with a smattering of blood, he should have realized who he was dealing with, but the movie Raimi on'd.

31 Days of Halloween: Hell Hole

2024,  John Adams, Toby Poser (Hellbender) -- download

We watched a previous film by this family of film makers called Hellbender back in the 2022 year of this series. They have a bit of a name made for themselves in the horror film festival circuit, but we know what I generally think of the horror fandom crowd (less of the crowd, more of what excites them). I could have been one of that fandom, some would probably label me as such -- I have a "horror movie" seasonal series and I did revel in both FantAsia and Toronto After Dark film festivals and attended a few years of TIFF Midnight Madness. But I could never commit. This is my way of saying, after this flick, I can say I don't really care for this family's films. They will not be added to future rosters.

Kent, are the posts you did as a guest-reviewer for After Dark still online somewhere?

American Frackers are in Serbia but halted while some local ecologists look to see if the fracking will damage the ecology of local pika's. Note, the pika is not found in Serbia. Also, the only road into the camp, which is situated on the ruins of some Soviet-era installation, has washed out.

Even with the delay, head fracker Emily (Toby Poser, What We Find on the Road) starts things off by drilling a hole. I guess the low budget of the movie, as long as you can get past the stilted acting, shows itself here, as this is more a piece of machinery used by landscapers than heavy industrial work. No matter, it drills into something bloody. But don't pay attention to that, because the movie quickly forgets that happened so it can focus on the weird cocoon found while digging a garbage trench. And inside the cocoon is a living man. Note, there was a brief preamble showing two men from 19th century France having become lost in Serbia, and were attacked by... something that exploded out of a horse. This guy in the hole is one of them. He doesn't show his hundreds of years.

Nobody knows why this guy was in this weird sack cocoon thing and nobody speaks French well, but eventually they figure out he wants them to kill him, and makes weird gestures that something is in him. Everyone argues about what they should do with him. Kill him! Protect him! Sure, they found him in a hole, and that's weird, but... kill him? Seems a little extreme for even Serbian roughnecks.

Everyone argues about everything. Everyone stands around in half circles and discusses everything contentiously. So... much... standing around in half circles!! Normally a comment like that would lead you to believe this was going to be a cerebral horror movie full of dialogue. But nope, the debate is barely conversational, just angry utterances, and even when they have the scientists do science chatter, its barely above high school level banter. The rest of the movie is either showing they spent their budget on some decent practical blood & gore effects, a painfully rubber monster and some terrible CG.

For a family that is touted as being so deep in the no-budget horror movie making, once given some budget they seem to not be able to rise above a sense of Asylum (my gauge for terrible movie making) level film making. At least Hellbender had some flair and thought to it, but this is just ... tiring. Nothing ever comes of the monster, despite the endless commentary on octopus biology. Depictions of the monster are unnecessarily juvenile and scatological, and then they just explode most of the miners and then rush head long to the "only the sympathetic characters escape" ending with the requisite... but did they escape?!?!

Terrible movie.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Get Away

2024, Steffen Haars (Krazy House) -- download

Is there an actual Swedish horror movie tradition about weird cultish people in the wilderness? I mean we know there is Midsommar but... can you name another? A rabbit hole for another day, and either way, that is the setting the movie wants us to assume, that if you wander off the well-trodden path in Sweden, seeking a nice out of the way place away from cell phones and chaos, you can find a creepy bunch of people in the woods. Or on an island. Definitely islands.

Daddy and Mummy and their two kids have a AirBnB booked on said island of Svalta. Sorry, Richard (Nick Frost, Black Cab) and Susan (Aisling Bea, Alice & Jack), and Jessie (Maisie Ayres, Criminal Record) and Sam (Sebastian Croft, Heartstopper). They have had a tough year and just need somewhere off the grid for some non-stressful family time. As expected, the teen kids hate the idea. 

First up, the ferry to the island states it will pick them up but its the last ferry for quite some time -- the island will be isolated while it celebrates its traditional festival of Karantan (you must pronounce it with a Swedish accent and an ominous pause) that was... well, that time everyone became cannibals. In olden days that islanders were starving, while the plague knocked at their doors, and ended  up eating some English representatives instead. Now, every year they remember what they were driven to with a festival and a play. That is what brought the family here. 

Secondly, the diner at the dock is your classic "creepy, rude people" common enough in diners and truck stops and gas bars from horror movies. People in rural areas never trust people from The City, or in this case, tourists from England. The ride over on the ferry is not much better as a number of islanders heading back for ...  Karantan are not exactly happy to see outsiders. And the arrival at the island is worse. The island is mostly home for a "kommune", a bunch of anachronistic looking weirdoes who do not want tourists, and the only one not part of the commune is the creepy guy renting out his later mother's house as an AirBnB.

All is Not As It Seems is the tag line for all these kinds of movies. And yet, as they are horror movies meant for horror movie fans (referential, tongue in cheek), everything is as it seems. The islanders do have a creepy festival and creepy rituals, even if they have a lot of pride in what they do and very high production values -- the creepy costume is award winning. And the creepy (yes, creepy is the word of the day) guy running the AirBnB does have his own off-putting agenda.

But that's not all. And from now on Spoilers Abound.

You see, despite everyone in the movie acting villainous, the real villains of the movie are the family. They are not a family. They are part of some sort of organization of psychopaths that organizes "get aways" for killers. This isolated island full of people with a murderous, cannibalistic background is the family's holiday, where they get to kill with abandon! And the movie jumps into the gorey killing with gleeful blood soaked abandon! Not long after the Karandan play starts, which is quite impressive -- again with the great production values (!!) -- the real killing begins, and never stops and small, vicious family attacks everyone with blades and whatever is at hand.

Is this where I just admit it was cute? Is cute accurate for these kind of movies? Sure, the fountains of blood are often the point, but once the killing started, any plot deflated for me.  You mostly knew how things were going to go and they just had to play out. They comedy only somewhat worked and whole I love watching Aisling Bea and Nick Frost be their unfettered selves, I was only mildly amused. Would have been a more fun horror movie festival watch where you could feed off the more enthusiastic audience energy.

ReWatch-ish: Rebel Moon: Director's Cuts: Pt 1 & Pt 2

2024, Zack Snyder (Dawn of the Dead) -- Netflix

Also called:

Rebel Moon – Chapter One: Chalice of Blood
Rebel Moon – Chapter Two: Curse of Forgiveness

Full disclosure. It took me from the release date on Aug 2 to now (draft: Aug 16th) to watch all six hours and eleven minutes of these new versions. And I don't intend on doing any sort of recap; I just did those. 

So, this is the world we are in now? This is the new product of the #snydercut now? All Zack's movies will get re-presented in ever longer lengths? What I want now is the theatre release that combines both extended cuts plus some more stuff, but comes with a meal voucher and a proper intermission (with cartoon) so you can make a day of it.

Anywayz, I am not going to have as much fun ripping these apart as I did the previous MegaIndulgence of Zack. I just don't have the energy.

So, there are three themes to the extended versions: blood, splodey-heads, and sex. Lots of the first two, a wee bit of the latter. I was sort of surprised at the PG-13 level of sex in the initial releases, as Snyder is known for loving his sex scenes.

"Yeah, I don’t know. I’m a huge advocate. I like erotic content in motion pictures. I don’t understand, frankly, what would be the why of that. We’re sexual creatures, and that’s what we do."

That said, the scenes are rather toss-away which makes them more gratuitous than all the exploding head (music?) scenes.

Yeah, so blood and brains. In the universe of the Rebel Moon all of our bodies are more blood-filled sacks than bone & meat we traditionally think of ourselves as. Every punch, stab, magma-bullet shot and lazer-sword slice causes a massive burst/flow of digital blood, more akin to those horror movies where in one scene, the heroine is drenched from head to toe in blood, and in the next scene, she has a slight smudge on her cheek. The decks of the spaceships must have been deadly slip zones.

And brains. The movies open with an entire new scene where we are introduced to the Bad Guys invading a planet, the populace fighting back (and losing), and Admiral Atticus Noble convincing a young prince to cave in the head of his father in return for the lives of his mother & sisters. We are subjected to an incredibly detailed scene of the kid slamming that bone-cane thing into his father-king's skull, and then Noble reaching into the crushed bone & brain matter to make very very evil comments about memories. The young prince is then dragged off to become a soldier in the Motherworld forces. And then Noble kills the rest of the family, because we all, and the queen, knew he would. And then they raze the planet.

And teeth. A repeating small detail is that those weird masked priest guys that follow Noble around like to fish out a tooth from the ruined remains of a head and shove it into a molar-mosaic portrait of the Fallen Princess they are making. If anything, the Motherworld has an appreciation for fine art.

This prince turns out to be the young soldier Aris who protects pretty-young-thing Sam when his squad is left on the Rebel Moon at the beginning of Part One.

That sets the tone for people getting their heads destroyed. Sindri, the leader of the Rebel Moon village, is not just struck down by the bone-cane thing, but his head also caved-in. And when someone is shot with those magma-bullets from the Motherworld weaponry, either most-of or all-of the victim's head disappears. Or later, during the battle scenes, with bigger guns, entire upper torsos or entire bodies just explode. 

Now, beyond the gore indulgence, does the longer lengths add to the movie? Nope, not one bit. I did some research and it can take 120 days for a grain to grow. That's assuming standard Earth rotation. So, when Gunnar tells Noble how long it will be until the crop is ready (nine weeks I believe he says), let's assume their week is longer than ours. The original cuts made it out as if Gunnar and Kora had been flying around with Kai for a handful of days, but since we have no idea how space travel works in this universe, beyond a brief scene of the dreadnoughts using big lady-shaped generators to open rifts in space, we can assume there is lots of down time between the pickup of the space weirdoes. That more believably could add up to the nine weeks, this time.

Speaking of, the giant generator lady is show to be also an enslaved being... maybe? Its shown more as a vision than reality but "she" forgives Kora for blowing her up. I had just assumed it was just symbolic Motherworld design in using a female form as the centre of the ship.

There are also some additional scenes of Aris pretending to send in reports about what is happening on the rebel moon. What Aris doesn't know is that the Space Orcs, the mercenary aliens that Noble makes use, have been surveilling the village the whole time... that is until Jimmy the Space Robot Knight smooshes their heads.

The second movie ends up not as irritating to me as much as it did the first time round. Is that the additional footage? The additional "plot" ? I doubt it. I think I am just past it all now. There is a lot more confirmed death (exploding villagers) in this cut so it does have more weight to it -- the fight comes with losses beyond the symbolic loss of a few recognizable faces. But again, the movie pair is ending with a very open ending, as if all is a prelude to something more -- a greater battle against the Motherworld, the return of the young princess (is she Sam? is she? is she?), the Rise of the Jimmies. But will Snyder get anything more? Or will he just end up relegating it to spin-off novels and comic books? 

Answers will appear in slowmo.

Watching: Fallout

What I Have Been (or Am) Watching, or now shortened to Watching, for what is life but for Change, comes from when we, admittedly, spend too much (almost all?) time in front of the TV. This time round, I will catch up in reverse-chronological order as I finish seasons of a show, as individual posts, not the usual kaiju-post broken into Parts. There are likely to be some collective posts, where I comment on incomplete seasons, or British panel shows, or whatnot. Herein ends the explainer paragraph. It will be resurrected only for said collective posts.

First up... 

2024, Amazon

Of course I watched this series, and pretty much binged it, against our better judgement. I usually try and stretch these things out a bit longer. I love the game, and I like what Jonathan Nolan does so I didn't have many worries this show would satisfy me.

So, a bit of background that you would glean from the show but also may be a bit confused by. Its an alternate reality, one where atomic power took off but all the other 50s style and technology became stagnant. Its not trying to make a lot of sense, but atomic power, robots, suits of power armour, old timey music, pinup posters, gelatin desserts, vacuum tubes, etc. And a Big Bad -- China. And China does Drop the Bomb all but devastating the US and the world. But people survived, both on the surface and in deep underground vaults, which were large scale fallout shelters meant to house entire societies, who would emerge to take back the world once the radiation levels had diminished.

Lucy McLean (Ella Purnell, Army of the Dead) lives in one such vault -- 33. Her vault trades goods and people with Vault 31 and Vault 32. After 200 years isolated underground, you have to spread the blood around or... well, you know what happens when cousins fuck. Lucy is perky, has high test scores and is the daughter of the leader of her vault, Overseer Hank (Kyle MacLachlan, Sex and the City). I was really disappointed her father's name wasn't John. 

The show begins as Lucy is meeting her husband to be, so you know, they can have sex and make babies. Exceeeeept, the people who come through the vault door are not vault 32 folks but raiders from the surface. Vault 33 is decimated and Hank is stolen away. Lucy has to get her father back, against the wishes of the interim overseers. So yeah, the entire show is her quest to rescue him but is also wrapped in a mystery to Uncover the Truth (!!) a truth Lucy doesn't know needs uncovering.

On the surface, pretty much everyone Lucy meets is trying to kill her. And her perky, all about manners, be polite and friendly and helpful demeanour is not helping things. She meets The Ghoul (Walton Goggins, Maze Runner: the Death Cure), a 200 year old man (from before the bombs dropped !), essentially a wandering cowboy with a big gun and the face of a desiccated corpse. And she meets Maximus (or Knight Titus as she thinks he is for much of the show; Aaron Moten, Emancipation), a member of the Brotherhood of Steel, militaristic zealots in power armour. And she briefly meets a scientist (Michael Emerson, Person of Interest) from some society or another that seems to have weathered the apocalypse rather well, considering his technology and white lab coat. He implants himself with a rice grain sized macguffin which has everyone chasing him. I said briefly, because he almost immediately dies, and Lucy ends up either carrying or chasing after his head. What's in the head is important to everyone.

Its a rather fun show, full of violence, gore and black comedy galore. The lore is probably basted on pretty thick but there is enough exposition to explain things to non-game-players, and soooo many easter eggs to make fans (real fans, not the whiney fanboys who will debate every inconsistency that comes with adaptations) squee. Of course, the entire season is setting up the world and the characters, with a juicy amount of pre-war background establishment, so the real meaty stuff can take place in later seasons. That is the way of TV these days.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Cocaine Bear

2023, Elizabeth Banks (Charlie's Angels) -- download/Amazon

Let's watch something dumb; where we don't really have to pay attention.

Well, that fit the bill. It was a big, dumb, silly movie without much of a point but that... was kind of the point. And it was kind of fun, if you find fun in watching stupid people get assaulted by a bear under the influence. And I guess I do.

In a long line of movies that are set in another time period, just because, and maybe because this movie was kind of inspired by some real life events, its the 80s. There was a drop of cocaine bricks, in bags, from a plane, and there was a bear who found, and ate some. As for the rest, we have vast artistic license used. And in some ways, the real life story of the bear, after it is found, is weirder than the movie. Not sequel weird, but just plain weird as only real life can be. Go Google it.

So, yes, a plane filled to the brim with cocaine packaged into duffel bags being tossed out the door, for later pickup, before the smuggler is supposed to parachute to safety. Except he's all coked up and conks his head on the door, and the chute never opens. Splat. Police investigation!

Cut to a state park in Georgia where backpackers Elsa and Olaf (Kristofer Hivju, Game of Thrones; of note, I really need to know why he voiced Jormungandr in an episode of DuckTales) encounter a coked up bear. Nice bear! “If it's brown, lay down. If it's black, fight back." It doesn't go well. Bad bear! Munch munch munch.

We then are introduced to tentative "main characters", single-mom Sari (Keri Russell, Star Wars: the Rise of Skywalker) and her daughter, and daughter's friend (Christian Convery, Sweet Tooth; this kid does a coked-up kid REALLY well!!). The kids get caught skipping school and Sari has to head into the park to find, and confront them. Meanwhile Park Ranger Liz (Margo Martindale, Mrs. Davis) is trying to flirt with naturalist Peter (an unrecognizable Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Modern Family) and end up walking with Sari. Meanwhile, gangster (Ray Liotta, GoodFellas) sends his henchman Daveed (O'Shea Jackson Jr, Straight Outta Compton) and his grieving son Eddie (Aiden Ehrenreich, Solo: a Star Wars Story) to find the missing cocaine, Meanwhile Bob the cop (Isiah Whitlock Jr, The Wire) comes to the area where he believes the splat-ed smuggler must have been flying over. Convergence, in the park, and smack dab into the face of the bear. Munch munch munch, bad bear!

Also, the FACES in this movie!!

Paths cross and disconnect, the bear attacks and acts weird/funny and kills a lot.. of.. people. Its all slap stick gore monster comedy that doesn't really need any plot, but does a decent job of pulling all the threads together. Each of the character actors do a phenomenal job of playing through their sometimes very minimal roles, so unlike most of these lower budget horror/comedy movies, getting skilled people to play their part was nice -- kudos Ms Banks.

And it was a good way to waste some time, and we actually ended up actually paying attention.

KWIF: Barbie (+3)

KWIF is Kent's Week in Film where each week (or so) I have a spotlight movie which I write a longer, thinkier piece about, and then whatever else I watched that week I do a quick little summary of my thoughts. 

This Week:
Barbie (2023, d. Greta Gerwig - In Theatre)
They Cloned Tyrone (2023, d. Juel Taylor - Netflix)
Demons (1985, d. Lamberto Bava - Blu-ray)
Demons 2 (1986, d Lamberto Bava - Blu-ray)

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It's more than mildly amusing that one of the most hotly anticipated movies among both cinephiles and little girls under the age of 10 was a movie about Barbie, of all things.  It's not really a surprise that Barbie is a box office success, but it is a triumph for many other reasons.

The fervour around Barbie prior to its debut is a testament to just how big an impact Greta Gerwig's arrival in the director's chair -- first with Lady Bird and then with Little Women -- has had on the industry.  Critics, who by and large are a tremendously cynical bunch when it comes to big budget, IP-driven films, have been exceptionally excited for the film's arrival.  As much of the hype of Barbie comes from film nerds and professionals as it does from the Warner/Mattel marketing machine, if not moreso. 

That Barbie, in one week, grossed over a half-billion dollars and has for Warner Bros. filled up the deficit gulf created by The Flash marks a monolitic shift in perception of Gerwig as a director and writer.  Partnered with her significant other, noted indie darling Noah Baumbach, Gerwig has delivered pretty much the exact payoff that the cinephiles were hoping for: a wildly entertaining, socially intelligent, visually spectacular, culturally explosive and, above all, thoughtful film whose success may finally crack the shell of cinematic universe making that has had a stranglehold over the film industry for over a decade and push it into new territory.  Maybe.  We'll see. (Hollywood has long learned the wrong lesson about successful films, so we'll wait to see if IPs wind up the hands of creators who have a strong vision for the material, or if the studios just start making more toys-come-to-life films and wonder why they all bomb).

Barbie is not perfect, not as a film and especially not as a feminine ideal.  There are a host of criticisms that can be laid upon the high-heel crippled feet of Barbie and her manufacturers for decades worth of subliminally traumatizing and dispiriting the little girls who played with her, all in the name of commerce, and Gerwig does poke at some of them, but it's also aware of the potential Barbie, in her role as the earliest of influencers to wee lassies, can do to inspire.  It's still a film in service of an IP that needs to generate a profit for its corporate owners, so there is a limit to how damning the film can be, but what it does manage to say, it says boldly, and clearly.

The film starts (with narration from Helen Mirren) in the pinkest realm of them all, Barbieland, where 50% of the population is named "Barbie", 40% is named "Ken", and the rest are one-offs (Pregnant Midge was discontinued).  Barbies hold all the most esteemed jobs (president, astronauts, supreme court justices, doctors) as well as the important ones (construction workers, trash collectors).  Kens may have a minor function, but for the most part are there to be (hopefully) noticed by Barbie.  They want nothing more than Barbie's attention.

Our main Barbie is "Stereotypical Barbie" (Margot Robbie), who exists to have the best day ever every day. She has the best dream house, the best wardrobe, the best cars, the best life. But when Stereotypical Barbie begins to have feelings of self-consciousness and fear of death, the sheen of her plastic world begins to mar. Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), the one who got played with too hard, advises her that she needs to head out into the real world and find her child, and help cheer them up.  So to the real world it is, then, (it's a filmic conceit, don't think too hard about it) with stereotypical Ken (Ryan Gosling) stowing away.

Barbie is immediately affronted by the real world of Los Angeles. She's immediately assailed by the leers of salacious men, whose every ogling carry an undertone of violence.  It's a hazy, busy world, that is thoroughly upsetting to Barbie, but Ken cottons on immediately that it's a man's world and that he finally feels liberated. Scratch that. Ken, upon picking up the nature of the world, feels entitled. The world belongs to good looking, talentless men like him.

As Barbie seeks out on her journey to try and improve someone else's life, Ken starts fixating on improving his own. He ascribes immediately to the concept of the patriarchy and heads back alone to Barbie land to bestow his newfound "knowledge" upon the other Kens.

It all, obviously culminates in a battle of the sexes, but it's not a film that sets out to demonize men. It's a film that is explicitly damning of the patriarchy and exemplifies quite effectively its harm on both women and men. 

It carries pretty potent messages for the world little girls are entering into and the one grown women have to contend with. It's not deep feminist theory, but it's a powerful starting point for the uninitiated, wrapped in the form of a comedic summer blockbuster.

It's a film that, very cautiously, does not deign to think it can change the world, but at the same time, it doesn't deny that change is possible, even if it is slow in coming. 

The film is a vibrant spectacle, with a killer bespoke soundtrack that is part of its own meta ambience. It owes a debt to Toy Story and The Lego Movie but finds its own path with "toys come to life" with its own absurd brilliance. 

Barbie should be a landshift in terms of where cinema goes next, in terms of studios and IP owners understanding the power that women - as both creators and consumers - can have when the product that is made for them is made by them as well. What's more, Barbie isn't a film made for little girls alone, or for women, it's a film that anyone but the most toxic of personalities could enjoy.  

It's not critic-proof (I've read many good critical assessments about the film's feminism-lite approach, its bifurcated scripting, its inability to fully escape commercial interests, or how the humour didn't resonate) but the wonderful thing about what Gerwig has created with this film is the expected backlash from the chest-thumping Alpha-Chads will only serve to prove the film's point and further its message about the toxicity of the patriarchy and the harm it does to everyone. 

I loved it.

The Flash Scale: dug a hole and buried it, pronounced it dead and proceeds in forgetting it ever existed.

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With a rhyming title that evokes a sense of both whimsy and alarm, They Cloned Tyrone is the debut film from director Juel Taylor (co-writer of Creed II and Space Jam: A New Legacy) that is boldly confident in its style and message, while also providing space for its three leads (John Boyega, Teyonah Parris, and Jamie Foxx) to deliver amazing performances that remind you what movie stars are.  It's a science-fiction satire that finds small time boss Fontaine (Boyega) getting gunned down by his local nemesis, only to wake up fresh and fit the next day, none the wiser.  Except pimp Slick Charles (Foxx) knows he was deader than dead, and with sex worker/Nancy Drew enthusiast Yo-yo accompanying them they begin to suss out something funky is going on in The Glen.

The most immediate effect of the movie is the grainy texture it adopts as part of its style. It hearkens back to blacksploitation and grindhouse movies of the 70's but also direct-to-video genre productions of the 80's. It's partly a nostalgia throw-back, but it also establishes a layer of dirtiness overtop of the proceedings, that is at once a lack of crispness or cleanliness, but also acts as sort of a membrane between the real world and what's on screen.  

It's a little less blacksploitation, a lot less grindhouse, and much more into 80's lower-budget scifi, and that is totally my sweet spot. It delivers a very fun romp that settles somewhere between Attack the Block (another great Boyega-starrer) and Black Dynamite, in that it's not being meta about its genre send-ups but its still sending up genre in its own way. It's taking styles of filmmaking from the past and remolding it into something both familiar and new.  This is what I wish Demon 79 from the latest season Black Mirror was more like.

 It's thoroughly engaging, really fun, very satisfying, and, like Barbie, has it's own delightfully bespoke, somewhat meta soundtrack.  For all its entertainment, though, it still has something important to say about the spaces carved out for Black and underprivileged people in America's major centers. "Projects" and "ghettos", home territories that are intentionally kept down, allowed to fester and rot by a government and taxpaying public conditioned not to care. It's the film's conceit that suddenly make these areas spaces for big sci-fi experiments, but the metaphor of how these areas are frequently subject to experiments (in planning, funding, education, zoning, or by other means) by parties both wishing to help and hold them back in equal measure.

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In the early turn-of-the-millennium, I happened upon Dario Argento. I cannot immediately recall what got me there, whether it was Phenomena or Suspiria or Deep Red but whatever it was, my affection for his work was immediate. I had many of his 70's and 80's films on DVD (I want to say they were Anchor Bay releases) but I had to cease with the acquisitions to get my finances in order.  As well, I loaned out the collection to the friend of my then fiancee, who a short while later was no longer my fiancee, and I never got the collection back.  It was (and remains) the biggest (and only) regret of that break-up.

Smash cut to 18 years later and I've just started getting my Argento collection back. It's going to be a slow process, as I endeavour to build a collection of physical media for films and directors that I've been ignoring during the heyday of streaming.  

In my impetuousness (and lack of research) I placed the Demons duology high on my acquire list, not realizing that Demons, nor Demons 2 were Argento films...or at least ones in which he was in the director's chair.  He produced them and definitely had a hand in writing them, but the style is all wrong.  In his place is Lamberto Bava, son of the great Mario Bava (another director whose repertoire I'm slowly collecting).

 Lamberto clearly learned from both his father and Argento, but doesn't show the same artistic aptitude as these two great Italian genre directors. Demons and Demons 2 aren't artless, but they don't have anything approximating Bava senior's bold colour palette, and he doesn't share Argento's flair for challenging camera movement.  He can strike a bold visual scene in these films, just not consistently.

Seeing as I didn't even know who the director was, it wouldn't surprise you to learn I also had no idea what these films were. I know Demons had a reputation for being pretty gory, but that's about the extent of it.  There's not really a plot to these films... demons possess people, and the more the scratch and maim and kill, the more demons are created. I learned from the special features on this Synapse Films release, that Demons started out as a piece of an anthology, and it would make much more sense as a 40-60 minute production than as a 90-minute feature.

There are not really main characters to either of these films of any concern or note. Cheryl, the character we first meet in Demons has zero development or defining characteristics, and after meeting George at the movies, he becomes the de-facto heroic figure, not her.  Even then, it doesn't really care about him beyond his bravado and machismo.  The first film takes place almost entirely in the movie theatre, and insinuates there's some ties between the possessions and media but never actually explores this idea.  There's no mythology presented really in either film, and the characters, in between shrieking or relaying verbally the events happening on screen, don't really seem to want to explore the whys or hows of it all.  It runs off zombie logic (becoming a "demon" seems to be an infection, and the demons don't seem terribly sentient).

Demons feels like The Evil Dead without personality. It has a lot of gross-out gags (there's an immense amount of goopy goo splattering and oozing all over the place) and some above average creature effects (the growing nails and teeth are particularly fun), and as vapid a piece as it is, it's still pretty fun.

Demons 2 borrows liberally from the apartment complex terror of Cronenberg's Shivers and full on cops the acid blood and chestbursting of Alien, but it's all to lesser effect than those films and to its predecessor. Demons 2 hits the reset button from the nihilistic ending of the first film, and then starts all over again as the demons emerge from the TV this time, rather than the cinema (and it doesn't make a lick of sense).  Again, if there's a metaphor, the film is decidedly not interested in exploring it. It's out for cheap shocks, and that's about it. Demons 2 has the added prestige of being in a post-Gremlins world, and creates and ludicrous and ugly sequence where a really silly looking puppet monster attacks a woman that seems like a knock-off-of-a-knock-off in the puppet-horror genre.  It's "hero" character is a square jawed charisma-less lunk who the film seems as disinterested in spending time with as the audience. His wife is pregnant and, had they learned anything from Cronenberg, there was some real body horror to get into with demon possession there, but, again, they take the least interesting path with it.  Even the goopy-goo is toned down, so the silly violence is that much more toothless.

They're both kind of bad movies, but in differing ways. Demons has a bad-meaning-good verve to it that Demons 2 is lacking. There's a particular heavy metal attitude in the first that seems watered down into synth pop popcorn fun for the sequel.  Neither film is particularly scary and the gross-out funnel is really on effective for so long in the first.

The Flash Scale - equal to or less than. 

31 Days of Halloween: Deadstream

2022, Joseph & Vanessa Winter (V/H/S/99) -- download

I like to think myself more in touch with technology & social media pop cultural phenomena than the average 50+ person, but ... yeah, I don't get "streamers". Then again, I was also not a fan of Jackass, which a lot of streamers seem to be trying to create pale imitations of. I do get that this is only one subset of an entire sub-culture, but its the one that gets the most off-topic attention, and... well, gets emulated in movies. 

Shawn Ruddy (Joseph Winter; yeah the director) is a popular streamer that has fallen from grace due to a stunt gone wrong. After his "apology" he needs to rise again in the ranks, so he arranges an extreme version akin to his previous stunts, in which his gimmick was facing things that scare him, usually stupid shit. And to that intent, he is staying the weekend in a notorious haunted house, and states that instead of running away from the scary things, he will run towards them. Of note, which got a loud chuckle from me, he states that this particular haunted house is not popular enough to actually cost him anything to stay in, which says something about the industry that is haunted houses. 

Shawn is all about the tech. He has multiple cameras stuck to his body, all wirelessly streaming to his site. He also tacks up more, in each scary room of the scary (and gross) house, with duct tape. The setup is pretty sweet, with multiple camera views always on, always live, while Shawn walks around with a tablet hanging from his neck, allowing him to view all the cameras, as well as paying attention to & interacting with the chat steam, and load videos and pics from his fans, as need be. Our "found footage" view of the movie is a combination of everything.

Speaking of the "found footage" motif, given that our viewing season usually includes one, a loud guffaw from me, when they did an intertitle commenting on how "streamer Shawn Ruddy disappeared during a night in haunted house" only to pull back, revealing it as a tshirt, which he of course is selling. I would buy one!

Anywayz, Shawn goes in, sees lots of spooky shit, and locks himself into the house. There are fuzzy lights, bumps in the night, creepy left behind shit, and lots of details that add to the legend of the house, involving the ghost of Mildred, a girl who hung herself. As we settled into the movie, the house really was creepy AF, and I expected the story to take a strongly serious turn allowing us to mostly root for the house against this rather annoying streamer. But instead, they do a damn good job of comedy and nostalgic horror references (Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson to name a few) combined with the conceit of the technology being used. Some of the best bits are when Shawn is focused on his own shit (usually crying or bleeding), so only we notice the fan chat stream has caught something entirely else on one of the cams, or has "helped" him by doing a bit of off-screen research, which eventually he catches onto, and it is integrated back into the story.

The jump scares are great, the gore is fun and watching Shawn getting knocked around is never not fun, which aligns well with my "old man yells at clouds" opinion of the whole thing.

This is the kind of movie I want to point at when I have to turn off incredibly low grade indie movies because they don't seem to even have the most basic aspects of film making down. On an imaginably tight budget and minimal number of contributors, the Winters did a great little horror flick.

31 Days of Halloween: Psycho Goreman

2020, Steven Kostanski (The Void) -- download

The tropes of 31 Days of Halloween include monsters and gore. So, whether this movie be more a scifi comedy is of no matter, we got silly, inventive monsters and gore in buckets, sometimes literally. I like that Kostanski is playing to form, having first seen his work in The Void (which Kent seemed to like more than me) telling me he likes practical effects monsters and working in small Canadian cities. Where the first movie was devoid (ba dump bump) of humour, this is basically a comedy. And it worked.

OMG main character Mimi! Again with the precocious child that I am not (too) annoyed by. But how can I be annoyed by Mimi, she's just absolutely, undeniably HORRIBLE ! She bullies her brother and her parents equally, constantly spouting dismissive catch phrases and utterly convinced she is the centre of the world. But she makes me laugh, constantly. Kudos on Nita-Josee Hanna (Buckets of Blood); she's going to evolve into something to watch.

So, sociopath Mimi and her brother are playing their own version of Calvin Ball (google it) in their backyard with culminates with her brother having to dig his own 6 foot deep grave. Yup, she was going to bury him alive as part of the game. Oh Mimi! But instead, she finds some sort of purple glowing stone thingamajig and claims it as her own. 

Purple Thing turns out to be the control stone to an Evil Alien Overlord brought up in a forgettable, but on brand, opening text scrawl, exposition dump. Eventually said Evil Alien Overlord crawls out of the brother grave (parents interrupted before he was actually buried in it) and kills some local Bad Guys in a most ludicrous over the top way. Evil Alien Overlord looks like a rejected villain from The Power Rangers which just adds to the scene. Without his Purple Thing (snicker) his powers are minimized so he follows it to its current location -- Mimi, who instantly realizes she has control over him. Her first act is to name her nasty Evil Alien Overlord, and after some banter, they come up with Psycho Goreman or PeeGee for short.

The rest of the movie is mostly from Mimi's vantage point, as she uses PeeGee for whatever insane whim comes into her head, while doing her barest effort to stop him from causing chaos and mayhem wherever they go. But every so often we get a reminder that Evil Alien Overlord was buried in the ground with a Purple Thing for a reason, and the Galactic Federation (or whatever) of weird, fucked up aliens (one is a robot with a fleshless head) still needs him captured or dead.

There is some backstory, in oh so glorious over the top 80s/90s throwback style. The movie seems to be set in another of those weird 90s amalgam time periods -- the cars are all current but they only use VHS. Eventually some of PeeGee's minions come to Earth not to reconcile with him but kill him, and we get a hilarious battle that looks like an R-rated version of before mentioned Power Rangers but instead of giant monsters, we get weird fucking aliens like the walking bucket filled with blood and guts, or the baby headed shaman. Its all such cheesy, wonderful practical effects and makeup.

Eventually there is a grand battle between Evil and Evil and Mimi (who really, is also Evil) which ... resolves things? Kind of? PeeGee is left on his own, destroying the rest of the world, but at least Mimi and family are reconciled and she won't be bullying her brother as much. That's a good thing, right?

Oh, Mimi!

31 Days of Halloween: VFW

 2019, Joe Begos (Almost Human) -- download

"Fangoria presents."

That should be a pretty decent indicator of a horror movie, if somewhat gory, right? Nah, let's just go with gory and be satisfied. And yet I got myself a somewhat satisfactory experience; not quite the creative indie movie of the 90s calibre, but at least a fun romp with realized characters.

I considered the movie being set in the early days of the same world as Dredd. Its a dark near future where the world is getting worse, and the narcotics are getting more evil. Fred (Stephen Lang, Avatar) runs a bar for his VFW (veterans of foreign wars) buddies, and pretty much nobody else. They happen to be across the parking lot of a structure controlled by a drug dealer and the multitude of addicts, people lost to the drug in almost a zombie or mutant level addiction. When Lizard, the sister of a murdered addict, absconds with a bag full of the drug, hiding in the bar, things go full on Assault on Precinct 13.

Fred and his buddies are old, grotty soldiers from various 20th century wars. You get the feel this is an alternate early 21st century, maybe now, but things are much much worse than even 2020 can dish out. When the addicts begin attacking, its brutal, gory and utterly nasty -- blood, body parts and heads chopped galore. The film makers had a ball making this movie, and Fangoria must have been gleeful to be a part of it.

Is it horror? No. Is it Halloween? Of course, because one of the traditions is doing buckets of blood, and this would have felt right at home on VHS. All the aging B actors (William Sadler, Fred Williamson, Martin Kove, David Patrick Kelly, George Wendt) are a bunch of fun to watch, all familiar faces who do their darndest to defend their buddies, and celebrate Fred's birthday. And, of course, fight another deadly battle before they go to that VFW in the sky. Is it good? Hell no. Is it fun? Hell yes!