Tag Archives: horror

Scream (2022)

Once upon a time, the horror movie flourished across the land. It was a magical decade called the 1970s. Chainsaws, flamethrowers, butcher knives, axes, gas masks… anything you wanted, as long as it resulted in dead teenagers, it was fair game. But then: disaster! The drive-ins closed, for some reason, and there was no longer a place for the horror movie to exist. Or was there?!

And then, in one of nature’s cruelest ironies, the horror movie discovered the VCR. Because, what you’d think is: hey, a way to survive! But what actually happened was, there were millions of VCRs, instead of thousands of drive-ins, and everyone knows that capitalists abhor a vacuum. Which meant, so many horror movies got made. And they were…. not good. I mean, of course some of them were, but by and large, they weren’t.

By the mid ’90s, the horror movie tottered on the edge of extinction. But then, something incredible happened. Scream was a post-modern, snarky, thoroughly Gen-X deconstruction of the past two decades of horror movies. But not only did it make fun of everything around, including itself, it simultaneously brought back the mystery part, and it did it extremely well. Who was the killer? Was it even possible to figure it out? It wasn’t, but best of all, not because the movie cheated. It was impossible because it was playing by a new set of rules that nobody had ever heard of. And suddenly, it was okay to like horror again. Which meant it was okay to make horror again. Mostly not big budget multiplex horror, as the studios were still feeling burned by the crash, but small screen, curated, indie horror? Easy to find, and even better, easy to find stuff that was well made[1] and that was penned by people who understood the way the genre was supposed to work.

None of this is a review of Scream, which somehow managed to have the same title as its 25 years earlier predecessor (and, in true Scream fashion, made fun of itself for doing so). But it also put a name to something I was just discussing here, about the trend of bringing horror movies back to their original roots, even after multiple sequels or remakes have been made: this was a requel, which is to say, a reboot that is also a sequel. You have the original characters, but you also have a bunch of new characters, and you have the same title, and you’re basically making the same movie you made 25, or 40, or 45 years ago.

And that’s the deal. As Koz put it: if you liked the original movie for its metacommentary on the horror movie, and if you are okay with requels, this thing is pretty much A+ primo. Even though Wes Craven has shuffled off, and was well memorialized here, the people who are still around still know what a Scream movie is and what it should be doing.

Also: this is the first and probably only movie I’ve seen that went out of its way to make fun of the people who hated Star Wars Episode 8. (I don’t mean the people who quibbled with its runaway sharp divergences from the previous movie even though it was nominally part of a trilogy, I mean the people who hated it. You know, because all their heroes were no longer perfect and they maybe should have been listening to the ladies instead of being dumb luck Star Wars heroes. Those people.) The fun-making was well-deserved, and will probably not be noticed by anyone who should, and would not be listened to if they did. But I quietly snickered to myself.

[1] I’m being unfair to the ’70s, here. Because plenty of horror in the ’70s was shoddily made at best. But it always had heart, it was made by people who were living out their dreams. What came later was a nonstop cash-in, and it showed.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Somebody[1] watched Halloween (the recent one, not the first one) and thought to themselves, hey, if they can bring back Laurie Strode and Michael Myers, I can bring back Sally and Leatherface.

You know, I could nearly have stopped the review right there?

So there are these Austin[2] hipsters with far more money than anyone should have at the age when they could be aptly described as hipsters, who have decided to buy up all the main street property in a tiny town that happens to be where a certain massacre occurred in the early ’70s, a massacre with one survivor, a massacre that has never been solved, a massacre that at least tangentially included a chainsaw.

You know the one.

Since Austin hipsters are the new Austin college kids, you can of course imagine that this is going to be very triggering for that one fellow who never got caught, and him being triggered is going to be very triggering for the survivor I mentioned. And from there, well, I think the script to Texas Chainsaw Massacre writes itself, you know?

I guess the main thing is, all these psycho killers are getting way too old to a) still be psycho killers and especially b) shrug off that many gunshot wounds. Your Jasons and your Freddies are explicitly supernatural, so they get a pass, but these guys? I’m not sure I buy it. Plus, there was something a little bit wrong about bringing back Sally, but not as Marilyn Burns, may she rest in peace.

I wonder if Tobe Hooper would have signed off on this.

[1] and by “somebody”, I mean Kim Henkel
[2] Or maybe somewhere else? It’s weird to have someone talk about it being a 7 hour drive to somewhere near Austin, but also they are big city folks with their big city ways, because Austin is either much closer to or much farther from anywhere that could be described as a big city. But if they meant 7 hours from Austin, I simultaneously salute their understanding of Texas while rolling my eyes at their conception of where the original Chainsaw happened. No matter how I look at it, you can tell I’m overthinking things.

Nightmare Cinema

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Framing device for a horror movie compilation: people walking by a Bijou-style single screen theater see that the movie showing on the marquee stars themselves, so they wander in and watch it. Also, Mickey Rourke is there running the projection booth and being super judgy to the people who have come in. Later, they individually watch their movies (inverted teen slasher, I see dead people, demonic possession, another one I can’t really describe well[1], and one I forgot entirely except I had more time to think during the footnote, and it was body horror I guess?) while Mickey Rourke gets more judgy, and then at the end, he’s not judgy about someone, for reasons that eluded me.

Nightmare Cinema was a mixed-results but mostly entertaining compilation, though as you can see the framing device was basically terrible. Oh, well.

[1] Also, perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the best of the bunch.

Host (2020)

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I wonder if there’s a useful distinction to be made between found footage movies and webcam movies. The latter is clearly a subset of the former, but in the age of Covid, there has been an explosion of the webcam footage type. The benefits are obvious: actor separation, no camera man presence, no director presence, set dressing can be done by the actors or at least prior to their presence. I’ll admit, I’m not perfectly clear on how ghostly cabinet slams and other movement based special effects are handled. Maybe by radio control?

Although, to be honest, I wasn’t even entirely sure whether I should review Host. Weighing in at under an hour, is it really distinct from some Sunday evening special TV episode? But then the choice was made at least somewhat for me by my having fought with maybe a thousand spams over the past two weeks, all in the older sections of my site where long overdue updates were needed to modernize the reviews. Since I haven’t watched any other new movies in that span, here we are.

A bunch of British friends (mostly ladies) are on a Zoom call to hold a seance with their hired guide. One or two of the characters seem regularly and visibly upset, which makes me think there was a recent death? But if this was made clear, I do not recall. What quickly[1] is made clear is that something spooky has shown up, and between the seance leader dramatically falling offline and the others not being as good at remotely performing the “nevermind, go home” ritual as they were at performing the “welcome, spirits” ritual in the first place, you know back when they also had leadership, it is only a matter of time[1] before things start to go fubar, supernaturally speaking.

Arguably, I’ve now spoiled the whole movie, but the other option, which would have been mandatory, is to spoil it in the other direction when the webcam seance resulted in nothing interesting happening at all, because that would have been some real bullshit.

[1] It’s like 56 minutes long. “Quickly” was the only option.

Ruin Me

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I’ve reviewed at least one or two “extreme” haunted house horror movies lately, and they mostly leave me to conclude that, nah, I don’t want to go to one of those whether it’s a front for a shadowy serial killer ring or not, because I have no interest in taking a chance that they might use the spider shower ploy.

But then Ruin Me comes along, and it actually works on me. The idea is, you signed up for a horror movie weekend. That is, the small group of you thrown together by ticket purchase timing have signed your waivers and been given your safewords, and now you’re dumped off in the woods to survive the weekend. Since that’s clearly not enough to go on, there’s also a gamified escape room aspect to it, where you have to follow clues that lead you into the horror movie proper. Just sitting against a tree waiting for a killer to show up would be pretty boring to film, you know?

Here’s what makes it work, as both a viewer and as a prospective client of the real life version of the concept: there’s a real and to an extent insurmountable tension between the “is this so real because, oh shit, it’s real?!” and “man, they are doing an exceptional job here, which, honestly: if they weren’t, why did I pay so much?” scenarios.

The execution here was not quite perfect, but I’ll forgive a lot when you can keep me guessing for this long and it’s not because you just cheated to get me there.

Nina Forever

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I have seen a lot of kinds of movies, and I have especially seen a lot of kinds of horror movies. This is probably a thing you’re aware of, but I feel the need to state it baldly just so my next pronouncement has the proper impact.

I have never seen a movie like Nina Forever.

It starts off as an earnest in-your-twenties romance movie, with a lot of back and forth cuts between the present and the future, even though those are like ten minutes apart, to demonstrate how artistic and sensitive it all is I think. Then it veers sharply into a horror sex comedy mashup that has to be seen to be believed. And then the sex comedy part gradually erodes, leaving an uncomfortable mix of the original earnest romance movie and an increasingly dark psychological horror movie, of the type you would not have believed possible when that insane mashup part started. And the throughline is constant gore, but with essentially no violence.

Like I said, I’ve never seen its like. At heart, it’s a movie about the stress that prior relationships have on current relationships, and about the difference between 20 and 30. It is sexy, and it is hilarious, and it is dark and foreboding and grim, and I think I recommend it with basically no reservation. (Well, except maybe be old enough for “the difference between 20 and 30” to mean anything at all to you.)

 

What the Hell Did I Just Read: A Novel of Cosmic Horror

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To my surprise, a third John Dies at the End book has existed for nearly five years. So… oops, I guess? I almost want to reread these, because of how long it’s been, and particularly because of how accurate the current title is, but then I remember I’d probably get spiders everywhere, so maybe not just yet.

David Wong and John Cheese are at it again, and by “it”, I mean being forced into solving weird problems that nobody else understands, because everyone else is either too annoyed to deal with said problems, or else too dead. In this case, they’re trying to figure out who is kidnapping local children, and why nobody’s memories on the topic quite match up with anybody else’s, or for that matter, with reality, and also why… well, they’re trying to figure out a lot of things, and following that rabbit hole too deep would lead to me just typing out the book, more or less.

What the Hell Did I Just Read is for the most part as weird and inexplicably funny as you’d expect based on the prior books, while also being darker than I remember those being, and also also being at least moderately authorial therapy. (Or maybe not! I don’t know the man who wrote the book, but it feels that way all the same.) I’m only inclined to say it’s weirder than the other books because I haven’t read them in a very long time. Nevertheless, this feels true. Even if you leave out the big obvious reason why I’m saying that, what about the snowman?

Jigsaw (2017)

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I just got extremely lucky[3].

See, in doing my research for Jigsaw, a movie that I didn’t even know existed until like a year ago, I came to realize that I never[1] saw Saw: The Final Chapter aka Saw 3D not aka Saw VII[2] like it should have been. But now I’ve already seen number eight! Which is where the lucky comes in, because this one is set ten years after the original several movies, all of which spanned a relatively short series of months, and thus the Jigsaw killer has been dead for like ten years, and this plot is something completely new. ….or is it?? More appropriately, …or is he [dead]??

Which is where I run into my main complaint about what was otherwise a pretty straightforward entry in the franchise. One of the best things about the movies, aside from inspiring me to coin “rube goreberg device”, is that Jigsaw has a code. And the code is, if you follow the rules, you get to live. Which meant that when following the rules seemed only moderately tangential to living in this particularly movie, I had to spend most of it trying to figure out if it was a crappy Saw movie or if something else was going on.

Normally, it would be a spoiler to indicate whether I will continue to seek out additional movies in the franchise, but, well, it’s me. So at least I’ve got “no spoilers” going for me, which is nice.

[1] here we go again
[2] In retrospect, I sort of knew this one existed. I just forgot to watch… it… oh hell, no, I did see it. That’s embarrassing.
[3] No, it turns out I’m less lucky and more forgetful. Blame me, not the movie.

Hack/Slash vs. Vampirella

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I know very little about Vampirella as a character, save that she exists and dresses… provocatively, let’s say. However, I know a great deal about Cassandra Hack, so I am qualified to speak on two thirds of the factors that went into this book.

Well, three fourths if you count the name, which is a little odd. Hack/Slash Vs. Vampirella implies that the titles are fighting, rather than the characters. And that’s just weird, right? (I mean, obviously if the characters are all good guys in a crossover, their fighting will be resolved amicably before they deal with the real threat, I’m not talking about that; ‘sjust the way things are done. But who ever heard of books fighting? Get it together, title bro!)

Okay, I’ve lost the thread. Anyway, thing one I can address is the plot, and it was, y’know, fine. Cassie and her road trip buddy / fighting companion Vlad do the thing they do, dealing with a threat that could range anywhere from “might kill some teens at  summer camp. again.” to “extinction-level event in the offing”, and they do so the way they usually do: messily.

To reiterate, I cannot address thing two, which is how was Vampirella’s characterization? Because I have no idea. Maybe Shawn Aldridge has written for her before, and maybe not. Her artistic rendering matched my vague memories of book covers past, so there’s that.

Thing three is Cassie’s characterization, and, um… it wasn’t actively terrible. I know it can be hard for some authors to correctly capture some voices. Honestly, it’s a testament to Marvel’s editorial staff over the first 25 years, that characters come across poorly so infrequently. But speaking, as we were, of Cassie’s voice… she had one mode the whole book, and it was vulgar bluster. Which is a thing she does sometimes, but honestly, the blood-spattered cheesecake in these books has never been good enough for me to tolerate a one note character, not for nearly this long. I really hope that whoever authors the next of these books has a better handle on what makes them tick. Or else, maybe this was simply a Vampirella book, and the target audience doesn’t care about my concerns at all?

Beats me!

The Pool (2018)

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So, what I knew about The Pool going in is that it was a Thai movie about a dude trapped in a really deep, empty pool with a crocogator. Which, yeah, that’s enough by itself to fill like 75 minutes I reckon?

So I was pleasantly surprised to learn that this is in fact a pressure cooker of a plot, where every few minutes brings another new twist that ratchets up the tension another notch, until… well, that would be telling, obviously, but what I will say is that by the end of the movie, I believed the writers were willing to go to any lengths, which is ultimately what you want out of a horror movie but so rarely get. Nobody is safe, no line is uncrossable.