So, remember when that one movie about training dragons came out? And then 15 years later, they did a live action remake?
Look, I don’t want to say this How to Train Your Dragon is a shot for shot remake of the animated feature, just with human actors in place of the animated voice actors. For one thing, the new one is longer.
But… yeah, the truth is, it’s the same movie. And I already reviewed it once, so.
My giant list of Shudder movies to watch has gotten to where the new movies were coming out in 2021. Nice.
That said, man I’ve made a hash of this review. The problem is, I watched the movie over a week ago, then kind of forgot I had watched it, then watched another movie, then let more days pass because that review is going to be pretty easy, then glanced at my Shudder queue and realized my mistake.
So there’s this pregnant lady on the run, played by Laurie Strode’s granddaughter, and after she resentfully gives birth to the child during the prologue, we jump forward multiple years to her moderately free-wheeling single motherhood. That is, until she finds a horde of creepy people in her Son‘s bedroom, Rosemary’s Baby-style, and then he gets very sick. Downside is, there’s no evidence of the people and basically nobody believes her, except for this one Good Cop trope guy who keeps showing up whenever she has yet another evidence-free freakout, and before long, you can feel the chemistry between them starting to build.
That is, until her son finds a more successful cure than the doctors had as yet provided for his affliction, at the expense of the neighbor babysitter, and now they are forced to go on the run from both the law and her past, still unbelieved. But also, we slowly begin to realize… what if it really is all in her head? If that’s the case, just who is it leaving a string of bodies across flyover America? It’s like if You Might Be the Killer weren’t a comedy. I’m not saying I did not have a number of pretty shrewd guesses as to what was going on, but I am saying it was a fantastic slow burn of a movie that kept me guessing right up until the final scene, and you cannot ask for much more than that.
A difference between the movies of the 1980s and the movies of the 2020s is that, for the most part, we have a more enlightened view of the way people ought to behave. For example, if you were a judgmental nerd with a crazy hot roommate in 1983, the arc of your story would be to win the roommate as a prize for your many inappropriate behaviours, such as berating her for wanting to watch Falcon Crest with her friends, or tailing her (admittedly scuzzball) date to a Chinese restaurant on the edge of town and inserting yourself into his life.
Whereas in the 2020s when you are that same loser character in 1983 under the same circumstances, and you take all of the same actions… you know, ultimately what I did not like about this movie is that he was still the protagonist at all. So be prepared for that, even if his end state isn’t quite as thoroughly rewarded as it once would have been.
The plot twist is that, after getting way too sorry for himself drunk and passing out in a supply closet of said Chinese restaurant, he wakes up to a small motivational self-help group in the main room of the now closed location. Before very long at all, he deduces that they’re not alcoholics so much as they are serial killers, and he’d better hope he can blend in if he wants to survive the night, much less get back to winning the heart of his roommate.
The other thing that would have made me like the movie more [aside from the aforementioned more sympathetic protagonist] is if I had not just seen the same overall plot play out across season one of the Dexter revival. Which is in no way their fault, since the movie predates the TV season by five years. Anyway, Vicious Fun was maybe sufficiently vicious, but definitely not sufficiently fun. I wanted more comedy out of my horror comedy than I actually received. Alas.
Horror podcast time. The scare was society, and the style was sexy / erotic. So naturally, they landed on David Cronenberg. I… if I’m being honest, I ought to rewatch the last 20 minutes of Videodrome, because everything happened so fast after he was given the gun that I don’t think I actually know what transpired. But also, I kind of don’t want to watch it again? So…
The Onion once wrote a man on the street interview piece during the 2000 election in which one of the interviewees indicated that Bush vs Gore was choice he made every weekend on Cinemax. That guy would have felt very comfortable watching Toronto’s CivicTV, the channel you take to bed with you. Channel 83 is programmed by a shockingly young James Woods, who is always on the hunt for the newest way to keep his audience satisfied. (Mostly with, you guessed it, either bush or gore.)
In addition to scouring the earth for the latest and lowest brow, he also advocates for his programming on local talk shows, explaining that he is not causing society to worsen, but rather giving people an outlet for their pre-existing base desires so they don’t enact them in reality. Which is honestly not far afield of the discussions that were happening a few years earlier in Eyes of Laura Mars, nor for that matter discussions that continue to happen today. At least, he briefly advocates that position before pivoting to hitting on fellow panelist and radio call-in show host Blondie[1]. Before you know it, he’s showing her the pirate broadcast out of Pittsburgh that he recently acquired, of people being plotlessly tortured and killed, but, you know, fake. Really. Definitely not a broadcast of actual harm and murders. Who could do something like that?
Anyway, she’s so into it that she wants to be a contestant[2], and heads off to Pennsylvania in search of Romero or whoever is putting the thing out into the world. When she never returns, James Woods goes down a rabbit hole trying to find out who is responsible for Videodrome (the name of the pirate broadcast his hacker intercepted, you see), what its purpose is, where Blondie ended up, really all of that. And suddenly shit gets weird. I’m talking pulsing videocassettes, involuntary body mods, and a climax so hallucinatory that I legitimately have no idea what happened.
No, that’s not true. Cronenberg is what happened.
[1] The band, not the comic strip
[2] It is unclear to me where the idea that this was open casting came from
It has recently come to my attention that Amazon Prime Video is home to a treasure trove of exploitation cinema, ancient and modern alike. So, that will be an occasional thing.
One thing I will always miss about the ’70s is how straightforward everything is. If someone tells you a movie title and a one sentence thumbnail description of that movie, you will know exactly what you are going to get. This time out, The Vampire Lovers, which started in media res, except really more like in endia res[1], so much so that I quickly researched if it was a sequel before I got past the first 3 minutes. It is not, but it apparently is the first in a trilogy, to my surprise. Maybe I’ll watch the others sometime, who knows!
Anyway, this guy a lot of years ago relative to the main setting of the film (1700s or 1800s, maybe?) is narrating a diary in which he set out to avenge his sister by defeating a nest of vampires, which he accomplished by stealing their shrouds to drive them out of whatever and then staking them or cutting off their heads, since nothing else can kill a vampire. (It is important to lay out the rules early, since they are so variable between vampire continuities.) Despite an early attempt at death via seduction, he is largely successful, only he missed one because he got tired or something.
Fast forward a generation or two, and we are watching people dance at Peter Cushing’s house, including some lady’s newly arrived niece, who only has eyes for Peter Cushing’s daughter. Before you know it, she’s going full Dracula seduction on the daughter, and before you know much more the daughter is dead of two puncture wounds in her left breast. The movie proceeds from there about as you’d expect, with the caveat that I did not expect there to be so many scream queens. I don’t know why, I just didn’t.
In conclusion: vampires! Who are also lesbians! That’s it. That’s the whole movie.
[1] Or insert your own Latin for “at the end of things”
Sometimes a movie is a lot more interesting than it is good.
This is not to say that An Unquiet Grave is bad, precisely. It’s short, especially by modern standards, and it clicks right along at a prodigious speed, but it still, in retrospect, feels a little too long somehow. The character beats and the acting were good, and I liked the plot, but I also think the plot was the problem. There just wasn’t really enough of it to fill 80ish minutes, even if you account for all the long shots of people looking sad.
See, it’s like this. There’s a guy whose wife died, and he has a plan to bring her back, with her twin sister’s help. That right there? It’s the whole movie. There are two actors, a lot of back and forth dialogue, a handful of events, and then the credits roll. I think I liked it, even despite the too long thing, but I also think what I liked about it was the interestingness of the premise and the tiny cast more than, you know, the movie itself. But also, the acting is staying with me. There’s a little bit of special effects, mostly make-up related, but the true horror of the movie is all conveyed in the acting choices, and I’m here for it.
I feel like I may be talking myself into liking it better than it deserves? Because it really isn’t anywhere near great, and I maintain that it’s more interesting than good. I guess I mean the parts that are good may actually be great, but they do not outweigh maintaining such a somber mood for such a long time relative to what actually occurs.
Speaking of interesting: I just learned that the female lead was also one of the writers. This makes me feel better about the brief nudity in the film, which felt otherwise more exploitative than I’m usually comfortable with. Well, wait, let me explain. Exploitative nudity in film is the bread and butter of what I am comfortable with, it’s practically a horror film food group. But this was emotionally exploitative, and while I fully understood the artistic choice behind it, it was uncomfortable all the same. But her also being a writer on the film really does smooth that over a bit, so hooray!
But also, the ending? Like, literally the last second of the movie? That part was brilliant.
I remember seeing The Running Man when I was a kid, because of course I did. Sci-fi action movies with Schwarzenegger were a no brainer. I remember, years later, reading The Running Man, by Richard Bachman[1], and recognizing enough of the plot elements (and, okay, the title) to know it was where the movie came from. And I remember being astonished by just how much better the book was than the movie.[2] Ironically, I remember almost nothing about the plot of the movie itself; what I’m envisioning is Arnold running around a laser tag arena in a shiny lycra jumpsuit and then eventually beating up Family Feud’s own Richard Dawson, but surely, surely there was more to it than that. Counterpoint, of course, is how readily I gave up on that movie once I read the book.
Fast forward 30-odd years, and it seems someone who actually liked the book has made a new version of the movie in which things are a little more… serious-minded. The Running Man is the primetime jewel in the Network’s crown of 24×7 reality TV game shows in which downtrodden losers try to earn enough money to escape from the slums, which of course they never will, but in the meantime the Network rakes it in from an enthralled America. (This Bachman guy was prescient, I tell you.)
One such loser, Ben Richards, has been blackballed from pretty much any available job because he keeps trying to help his coworkers instead of letting them fail and die, and there’s no room for woke chumps in the new America. But he has a sick daughter and a wife who’s about one night away from becoming a prostitute to makes ends meet[3], and before you know it he’s signed up for the show. Which is a 30 day game of hide and seek between the Runners and… pretty much everyone else. Anyone who reports a Runner’s location gets a wad of dough, and then the Goons (ie, corporate police) and the Hunters (ie, the recurring characters who America is rooting for, most seasons) swoop down and kill the Runner who got reported.
Hiding from literally everyone, as you may be able to conceive of, is a tricky matter, and doing it for 30 days is nearly impossible, especially under the cameras everywhere panopticon we call modernity. (Plus, you can’t just hide in the deep woods and wait it out, because you have to mail in a 10 minute tape every day or you get disqualified.) Anyway, that’s it. That’s the whole movie. Will he succeed where everyone else has failed?
Okay, that’s not the whole movie. There’s also the thread, woven throughout, in which a mirror is held up to us as an audience Tarantino-style, and we get to think about just how complicit we may or may not be in the coming dystopia.
[1] Or someone else, who can remember
[2] This was in my callow youth when I didn’t know just how readily Hollywood will scrap a book’s plot entirely in favor of their own idea.
[3] As opposed to doing it because it’s her chosen career path, which would be a whole different story.
Another podcast movie, this time with a scare that is not really technology, but a style that is most definitely New York City. Eyes of Laura Mars is not a giallo. For one thing, it is zero percent Italian. But it’s not not a giallo either, if you take my drift. There is definitely shared and/or stolen DNA.
Laura Mars[1] is a fashion photographer who has entered her “coffee table book of staged murder photos” artistic phase, but since it’s 1978 that’s not entirely a thing yet, and therefore she is drumming up a lot of controversy around how she’s causing people to be desensitized to violence, and okay, sure, there really is nothing new under the sun is there?
Anyhow, the twist is that she suddenly starts observing the murders of people who are professionally close to her, through the eyes of the murderer. Soon the cops are involved, albeit more because of the murders than because of her weird psychic connection to the killer. And before you know it there are more dead half-naked models (among other victims) than you can shake an icepick at. Is the killer her loser ex-husband? Her creepy limo driver? Her gay but the movie never openly admits it agent?
Actually, that was the weirdest thing about the flick. Because as soon as you know Brad Dourif is in the movie, you also know he’s the killer. To be clear, this is not a spoiler, I’m not saying if he actually is or not. I’m just saying that, as a savvy viewer of horror films over the past five decades, there’s no question in your mind about whether he’s the killer, which makes for a very strange viewing experience of what is nominally meant to be a mystery in which nearly any of the still living characters should be a suspect.
Am I making sense here? I’m pretty sure I’m making sense.
In conclusion: it’s not bad! It’s definitely not good, it is I daresay pretty damned silly. But it’s not bad. Well, except for one piece of unnecessary prejudice that would be a pretty big spoiler to reveal, but alas for the way certain mental health issues are treated as low hanging fruit. And, oh, one other thing: this was written by John Carpenter, which is notable in that I’ve never seen him write for a different director or probably a different composer than himself before. Weird.
[1] To the best of my knowledge, not Veronica’s mother
Because I have not been hiding under a rock, I’ve known about Hereditary since 2018, maybe 2017. But it always seemed a little bit too much, so I held off, and held off, and kept holding off, and finally it took on a life of its own I guess? But, because I sort of have been hiding under a rock, I also managed to avoid virtually all information about the movie, and thus came into it essentially unspoiled, excepting only genre, really.
I would recommend this, as a great deal of the fun was in trying to unravel just what precisely was going on, with really only the title as a potential clue. On the downside, this means I kind of shouldn’t say much. So, the first thing that happens is grandma dies. Then we learn about the difficult dynamics in the family surrounding grandma. Then, one of the more shocking and disturbing <spoilers> I personally have ever seen occurs. Then, shit gets weird.
In addition to being compelling from beginning to end, I need to give a shout out to the sound design people, who did a masterful job. Also, the special effects surrounding zooming in on a miniature and it seamlessly becoming a real life room? Top notch. And, okay, going to put the spoiler behind a cut, because I really need to talk about this and, after all, most people in the world have seen it by now.
This week’s podcast movie was a) vampires and b) a bitchin’ soundtrack. I think I will agree that Night Watch hits both of these marks, even if the soundtrack isn’t quite what I expected it to be. The movie is based on a series of six books, which I almost want to read. The premise is that there’s been a precarious balance between the forces of good and evil, portrayed as the Night Watch (the good guys who guard against evil) and the Day Watch (bad guys who guard against good). Because maintaining the balance is important, since all out war was going to just destroy everything, as per the prologue to the movie.
So now everyone who isn’t human and eventually discovers this about themselves gets to choose if they will join light or darkness, and the movie is about one such dude, who got caught up in the Night Watch during a sting operation when he hired a witch to make his wife stop cheating on him; he was the bait for the bad guy witch, you see. And now he’s trying to save a kid from a vampire but also save the world from ending because it turns out there’s a prophecy about a cursed virgin, and… you know what, I could go on for another two paragraphs and never once have to make a lick of sense. The point is, it’s a dark fantasy movie in an extremely Russian way, and I think most of what I liked about it is that it’s something that would never have been made in America.
It’s not that it’s exactly good, and me saying it that way should not be construed as it being exactly bad either. But it’s 100% Grade A different, and in these fallen days, that’s not nothing, you know?