Tag Archives: Shudder

Psycho Goreman

You learn basically everything you need to know about Psycho Goreman[1] in the opening text crawl, when we learn that he comes from the planet Gigax. These are people who are definitely in a joking mood, and want you to be in on it. …for certain values of “you”.

There are these two siblings, and the younger sister is abusive to the nebbish older brother. (10 and 7, maybe?) For example, in their regular game of crazy ball[2], if he wins he gets something pretty regular, I forget what because it was reasonable, while if she wins, he has to dig a hole and then bury himself in it. And of course he never wins.

Anyway, in the course of digging the hole, they uncover the hidden burial site of an immortal dark power bent on galactic domination, and wacky hijinx ensue. It’s astonishing how close this comes to being a family-friendly movie[3]. You would have to change almost none of the plot, but man would you have to change a lot of the special effects.

My point is, you shouldn’t watch it with your kids. Even if it does have a little bit of a lesson right at the end. You should watch it if you like gross-out horror comedy or were ever kind of a dweeb, and if you’re not allergic to children in movies.

[1] PG for short, but since the movie is unrated, I guess they did not compromise on their artistic vision.
[2] Dodgeball but with a Calvinball-influenced ruleset
[3] There’s even a musical interlude in the middle, almost more of a music video, entitled Frig You. Which is a perfect encapsulation of how it’s almost family-friendly.

The Reckoning (2020)

It’s easy to forget, living in the country that spawned the Salem Witch Trials, that other places were equally terrible to women in (especially but certainly not exclusively) the 17th century. Take England. Imagine you’re a squire, which is apparently a term for a landholder, not just someone who carries things for a knight. People all over are dying of the plague, and for some reason you want back a parcel of land you’re renting out. The only thing standing in the way is the family you’ve rented it to. Now imagine the husband gets the plague and dies, and now it’s only the wife and infant daughter, but the wife has paid for the next six months of rent up front. And yet you still want the land. If only there were some way to… oh, wait, no, she’s probably a witch, right? Problem solved!

The Reckoning is about what happens after Grace stands accused of witchcraft. There’s a witchfinder, and there are implements of torture, and there are public hearings, and there are family schisms, just really all the things you would expect out of obviously false accusations of this type, you know? I at first was afraid we were headed towards Hostel: The History of Europe, but none of the torture scenes (well, after the initial public flogging) are lingering and visceral, they are there solely to make sure you know they happened.

The heart of the movie is the face-off between Grace (the witch [let’s say]) and the witchfinder with whom she shares a past. Each is certain of their facts, and each is certain of the strength of their will. And the drama of that, er, reckoning is enough to carry the movie. Honestly, at almost two hours, the movie overstays its welcome any time it strays from that central conflict and the secondary conflicts surrounding it to explore the stuff in Grace’s head.

Her… visions? delusions? hallucinations? temptations? serve only to confuse the question of whether she might in fact be a witch after all, which I think strongly undercuts the story’s entire purpose. Also, they are aggressively sexualized in a way that simply doesn’t fit the surrounding events. I am never opposed to sexualization and also nudity in the service of the plot, and rarely for that matter does the gratuitous type bother me either. I think what failed here is that it was not meant to be gratuitous, and yet there was no way for me to take the scenes with the gravity they were portrayed without, like I said, completely fracturing the movie’s central thesis.

The fact that I still think it’s a good film, despite that previous paragraph, should be taken as a pretty solid endorsement. I have only one caveat, but it would completely spoil the ending, and so I bite my tongue and still mostly say, yeah, check it out.

Boys from County Hell

Imagine a small town. The kind everyone of a certain age who lives there wants to escape from, and within a rounding error of nobody ever actually does. Imagine the young men and women of that certain age, yearning for freedom. Imagine they’re in Ireland, and their town’s claim to fame is Bram Stoker tourism.

Now imagine there’s a cairn in the middle of a field, and legend says someone, or something, is buried under it. Something you wouldn’t want to run into at night, if you take my meaning. Also, the land is being sold for development, and one of our Boys from County Hell sees helping on the construction of that development as his ticket out, even if it means knocking over a few old stones, you know?

Once all the setup was finished and the main action commenced, I simply could not stop feeling the influence of Shaun of the Dead. Yes, vampires instead of zombies, but between the exotic UK accents and the slapstick absurdity and the occasional gore… yeah, there’s no way it wasn’t an inspiration. I daresay this is… well, it’s not a successor at all. I liked it, but come on. Shaun is just one of the best. And I don’t think they were going for homage. But I daresay the movies are having the same conversation with the audience, and this one is worthy of being in that conversation.

Violation (2020)

It is difficult to talk about, and in fact difficult to want to talk about, Violation. This is not only, and perhaps not primarily, due to the subject matter. It is not only because I don’t want to accidentally reveal virtually any spoilers, although that may be the primary reason. It’s not only because I’m still not entirely certain what happened, although I’m not.

See, the movie is presented completely out of order of events. There are two sisters, one in the final death throes of her marriage, one moved to off the grid and learning how to be a survivalist. Over the course of events, which were legitimately difficult for me to piece together not because they were out of order so much as because they were fragmented so badly that it was difficult to tell where any given moment might fit even in retrospect, and not only that, whether any given moment had actually happened; over the course of those events, I was saying, a violation of trust occurs, with the result being the slowest burning, most intimately shot revenge story I’ve ever seen. I mean intimate in almost every sense of that word, but I will focus on the facts of how small the cast is and of how nearly every scene is shot in close frame, suffocatingly close. It’s almost impossible to separate the act of viewing the events from the events themselves. I’m used to a comfortable distance, as an audience member, and it was absolutely impossible to achieve that distance.

I am impressed by this movie, and I should probably watch it again, only I find that I don’t want to. It’s just too raw.

Slaxx

On paper[1] (and to be 100% fair, influenced by my experience with Rubber), Slaxx is nearly the perfect movie for me, and I’ve been waiting for it to come up in my Shudder queue for years, while also being halfway afraid that whole time it would leave the service and I wouldn’t notice the doom approaching. So maybe that is just too much pressure?

The barebones plot is, there’s a new hire at a clothing store (like, the Gap but higher end / bigger name), and she’s extremely excited to be joining the company family. They have all natural, fair trade, non-exploitation branding, and a Steve Jobs type at the helm, and she’s exactly the kind of idealistic final girl type who wants to be all in on that. So naturally on her first day, she is exposed to that store’s staff, and they are all pretentiously adversarial, with a manager who is far too focused on his own career to worry about doing anything for his employees, and by the time the situation is firmly established, you’re already rooting for the killer jeans to arrive.

But the thing is… it just never lands. Despite, or possibly because of, the underlying cause of the bloody spree, I never felt what the movie wanted me to feel. Like, perhaps if the retail peon level people had not mostly been despicable in the first place, I could have latched onto the “real” story, but since I already wanted to see a comeuppance, the one that was offered just didn’t fit. It’s like in Friday the 13th. Pamela Voorhees hits differently if this batch of counselors actually deserves her wrath, versus if they’re just playing out roles in the play in her head that has no bearing on reality.

Despite all of that, the murder jeans were pretty cool. Which is not nothing.

I guess what I’m saying is, if you’re going to indict an entire industry, you murder the people who created it and the people who support it, instead of spending most of your time murdering the people who just work there for minimum wage. And if you’re going to make your targets a bunch of jerks that you root for dying, then don’t pivot into indicting an industry. The puzzle pieces just don’t fit.

[1] I mean this metaphorically, yes, since there’s no literal paper on which the plot and details of Slaxx are written down for me, but I also mean it literally, insofar as see the poster.

Stay Out of the F**king Attic

I want to say that the best thing about Stay Out of the F**king Attic is its title, but I feel like I can’t say that. It’s true, but it’s very prejudicial. What you need to understand is just how perfect the title is. With the inclusion of an advertising budget and Samuel L. Jackson, this could have been the Snakes on a Plane of its generation.

Still, to be clear, it was not that, and the movie is as it happens only okay. But good god that title.

An old German man living in an old and run down Victorian house has hired Fresh Start Moving Company to empty out his house, and that by morning. Which is nearly impossible for the three person outfit, all of them recently from prison, and so you see how the company name is a double meaning, right? So he sweetens the deal with loads of cash, plus the instruction to stay out of the basement and the attic, he’ll deal with those.

And that right there is the whole movie, minus one or two twists. At 80 minutes, it feels propulsively fast as soon as the obligatory packing and lifting montage is set aside in favor of, you know, the attic. It even maybe has something to say about the possibility or impossibility of redemption. Like I said, it’s not a bad movie. It’s also not a great movie, but if you miss the days when Nazis were the bad guys in movies instead of history recycled before your very eyes, this might be the very last gasp of that genre.

Lucky (2020)

I don’t know that I exactly liked Lucky, but I respect the amount of catharsis it must have provided for the writer / star, Brea Grant, and probably for a non-trivial number of people who have watched it.

So there’s this self-help author whose premise is Go It Alone, ie how to fix yourself instead of relying on someone else to fix you, and that premise was a best selling big hit with multiple printings, but now the publisher is not sure if they even want her next book, plus she doesn’t especially have one. Okay, fine, but then at night in bed with her husband, she sees someone outside, and he’s very blasé about how it’s the guy who comes to kill them every night. She is understandably confused about this, so he calls her a drama queen and leaves.

And then the dude comes back. And keeps coming back. Unraveling what the actual hell is going on constitutes the remainder of the movie. We learn more about May, more about her husband, a little more about her career, and a lot more about how capable she is at self-defense / how incapable the dude is of killing her. It’s sometimes pretty funny, usually mind-bending, eventually over the top in a way that was probably not necessary to get the point across, and ultimately a little opaque right at the end, post- the Message Received part.

I think the best chance this has to be a good movie instead of a useful one is if it was a critique of her self-help premise, in addition to the rest of what it was, which was a metaphor about the lived experience of American women. But I’m not 100% sure if it actually was both, since, like I said, it’s a little opaque. Probably it lost its way making sure we got the metaphor part.

All in all, I preferred Promising Young Woman.

Shook (2021)

Is it low-hanging fruit to go after a social media influencer type as the victim of a “let’s play a game” horror movie? I mean, nobody likes them[1], it’s easy to play around with the idea that they’re self-involved and deserve whatever they get, and you can either go with a redemption arc or a just desserts arc, with equal facility.

Mia is just such an influencer. And one of her influencer… friends? co-workers? was just murdered by the dog killer that has been stalking town for the last few weeks. So instead of going out to party, she has decided to stay in and watch her sister’s dog while the sister is out of town getting medical tests. Which brings in a whole subplot about how her family has a genetic disease that results in full incapacity followed by death, and it has no treatment, and their mother has already died of this, but the sister was fully in charge of the parental care while Mia went to college to become an influencer[2]. And unless the medical tests go well, Mia will be in charge of sororal care before very much more time goes by. And who knows who might eventually care for Mia?

So there Mia is, watching the dog while her influencer friends nag her about coming to their party, which is just the three of them sitting in a living room broadcasting themselves hanging out. (The friends consist of her bestie, her boyfriend, and her frenemy who is clearly trying to win her boyfriend away.) And then she loses the dog, and a creepy dude friends her on the social media account, and calls her, and apparently lives across the street, and it quickly becomes clear that she is being taunted and stalked, which has her well and truly Shook. And then before you know it her friends and her dog and her sister are all in danger, and she alone can save them. Or at least some of them, since she mostly has to choose one or the other.

And this is the meat of the flick. Can she save any of her friends? Can she save her sister? Can she save herself?

Can she save the dog?

[1] Other than the countless thousands of followers who result in them having influence in the first place, sure. Be all technical, why don’t you?
[2] I have no idea what classes you take for this (other than marketing of course)

The Dark and the Wicked

So imagine your mom and dad live on a secluded farm, and also your dad is wasting away of some kind of unspecified illness that has him bedbound, on oxygen, and never particularly awake, while also not apparently being in a coma or whatever. So you and your sibling show up, over your mother’s objections, to help.

The Dark and the Wicked is that movie, and it is split up as follows: 10% day to day logistics, 50% long lingering shots of people in the midst of misery, and 40% absolute mindfuckery where it is never possible to tell what is real or unreal. I do not believe I ever knew why anything was happening, but boy howdy did things keep happening. From vegetable chopping mishaps to livestock mishaps to constant prank phone calls to uncomfortable parental sexuality, and honestly that’s barely scratching the surface.

In conclusion, the movie never made a lick of sense, but boy does it know how to set a mood.

Shards of Delirium

Fragments of Delight