A small but visible number of movies I’ve watched in the past few years are premised as “what if a haunted house attraction, but bad things are actually happening?” Which makes me wonder, mainly, if these extreme haunts are a thing that really exist. Like, I don’t want to do the thing in this movie where the goal is to probe your psyche and bring you the very worst experiences, because that will… help, somehow? I don’t even know. But someone is actually menacing you with a butcher knife or whatever, and they chase you and things, or… look, I can’t actually imagine any way these could work in real life, which ultimately is my point. But if I’m wrong, someone needs to tell me what is the deal with them, is what I’m saying.

But in the case of Extremity, the deal is that this chick who has meds to be off of and is arguably suicidal and who definitely has a concerned girlfriend and an uncooperative therapist and has a lot of flashbacks to a dark and troubled past has decided that the best thing she could do for herself is sign a bunch of waivers and give herself over to the fine people at Perdition, which as you may have guessed is an extreme haunt, for the purposes of confronting her fears or herself or something[1], and before you know it we’re off to the races.

On the whole, I liked everything except for the unnecessary subplot where a Japanese TV show’s camera crew is onsite today doing interviews with the owner of and b-roll footage of the haunt. It added nearly nothing, definitely nothing that couldn’t have been revealed elsewhere, and had as far as I could tell no payoff. Otherwise, there were twists I saw coming a mile away and twists that caught me entirely by surprise and at least one moment late in the movie that I’m still not sure whether I’m supposed to believe actually happened or not. It would make a lot more sense as a partial hallucination, but they seemed to play it inextricably straight.

Nevertheless, it’s a solid movie on the strength of the psychological studies of the two main characters and has very little to disrecommend it, if you can get through the first 15 minutes or so that are too busy being shocking for the sake of it to remember there should be a plot.

[1] She actually said what all at one point, I just don’t remember, probably because I was too busy being skeptical of the whole concept at the time.[2]
[2] This is not to say that the concept is meritless. It is to say that I imagined telling people for whom I had just signed an absolving waiver that I wanted their untrained asses to help me overcome my fear of spiders, and my brain basically shut down for a while, followed by acknowledging that no, I would never do that, nor can I imagine any sane person doing so.

A proposition: if we accept that gothic horror must include a lonely countryside castle, then it (necessarily?) follows that American gothic horror must include a lonely farmhouse in the country. There is even, I believe, pre-photographic evidence of this.

We Are What We Are is a modern (well, set in the past 50 years, anyway) American gothic horror in which days of torrential downpour first kill the mother of an extremely religious and reclusive family, and then begin to unearth certain family secrets.

Honestly, the horror bits are less interesting as plot than as exaggerated backdrop for the coming of age story of the two daughters suddenly thrust into being in charge of the remaining household of their brother (who is too young to take care of himself) and their father (who is too really a lot of things, none of them complimentary, to take care of himself), even though they’ve been unhappy with their family traditions for some time. Just one more thing to come to a head during the week or so of heavy rains that kicked everything off.

Here’s the thing: if you made a movie about having to declare someone legally dead because they’d been missing for so long that you have to accept that they won’t come back, but you also have to go through all the emotional trauma that you’ve been holding out against for so long, and so you’re packing up to move, you’re filing this paperwork that makes it real but will also allow you to get out from underneath years of crushing debt, and you have to deal with the trauma of that being a main driver of accepting it, because now you can finally get insurance payouts, but still you don’t even know if he’s dead, and you keep having visions of him, evil-ghostly-pissed as you bridge each milestone on the path to it’s finally over, he is now according to the county-issued certificate of death in Absentia in your hand no longer a living person?

That would already be a horror movie, just all the real and imagined things happening as you process the enormity of what has happened, of what you’ve done.

But what if your sister is hanging out to help you, and she sees a weird dude in a jogging tunnel between your neighborhood and the park (because, overpass) and creepy things start happening, and maybe it turns out that a lot of people have gone missing in this area, and what if sometimes they come back?

I don’t think it quite stuck the landing, but I reckon this movie will stay with me for a while. It goes places that you do not want to go in your life, and not in the “machete at summer camp” kind of way; it goes there in ways you can imagine actually happening, in your worst daydreams.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if Peter Cushing is in a Hammer film, he must be in want of vampires. But I admit I was thrown off by the initial presentation, in which Viennese twins are hanging out in what I first mistook for the colonial countryside, what with all the British accents and Puritans burning witches.

But eventually it is made clear that there’s a devil worshipping count who lives in a castle and is protected(?) by the Emperor(??), and Peter Cushing is approximately as much of a bad guy as the count is[1], and really the only thing left is to determine why it’s called Twins of Evil when a) one of the twins is pure as the driven snow and the other one is basically just bored with exile to the sticks, and b) it takes almost 90% of the movie for the count’s seductive new protégé to unleash her twins of evil, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

[1] In retrospect this must have been practice for the Grand Moff Tarkin role

I have not seen many German movies, so I do not know how commonly they are weird and existential. But I am predisposed to believe the answer is “always”, you know?

Ever After is apparently based on a graphic novel in which the zombie apocalypse has wiped out everyone on earth except two cities in eastern Germany[1]; city number one with a German name survives by ruthlessly slaughtering anyone who has come into contact with the virus, while city number two with a German name is working on a cure, at least according to rumor in German city number one.

Later, two girls wrestling with the demons of the past set out on a trek to GC#2 for reasons of their own[2], but encounter… well, things, people, and events that are weird and existential, was my original point. Predictably, this mostly takes place in the Black Forest, home of German horror stories for longer than the US has had access to horror stories.

I really kind of want to talk about the existential weirdness of it all, but spoilers, but who is going to watch this to care about spoilers? Man.

[1] I’m not one to shit on a premise, but… how would they know? I’m willing to sign on for “the only two cities in central Europe”, but once you range much farther than that, man, I just don’t know that it’s a supportable claim.
[2] I think this will never be unseated as my favorite line from a comic. Random Marvel C-tier supervillain monologues to himself, “And now, I will go to Greenwich Village, for reasons of my own.” I can just see the moustache-twirling villainy of it, and at the same time see anyone who happened to be listening be befuddled by how not-ominous that intent was, to be accompanied by such highly ominous phrasing.