Here’s a movie you’ve seen at least a hundred times before: pregnant lady, around whom strange things are happening. (Most obviously, the accidental(?) death of her toddler child in the new Brooklyn apartment they just moved into.) The two possibilities presented are a) she’s paranoid or b) Satanism!

The only real question is whether Lyle is finally the movie where she’s paranoid[1].

Snarky as I sound, it was pretty good. Maybe a few too many arty camera angles, but the questions of what actually is going on and, if so, who is in on it were kept coyly unanswered until the last ten minutes of the movie. …then again, it’s less than 70 minutes long, so perhaps I should be less impressed.

[1] There’s maybe a paper to be written on how this trope always goes in the direction I imply, while the trope where either spooky things are happening around a man or he’s snapped and started murdering people always goes in the “not spooky” column.

I almost wish Devil’s Mile had been bad, because that would be easier to take. But (except for the effects, which were cheap and looked it) instead it was consistently nearly really good, and I don’t even know exactly what I would have done to fix it, which is somehow even worse than all the rest.

So there are these kidnappers, driving to somewhere to deliver their victims to a mysterious figure in the shadows that they might as well have named Mr. Big, because he’s definitely a trope instead of a person. And they get lost on the way, somehow? And they slip from crime drama into teen slasher long enough to be warned away from a road that they take anyway, driving long enough to drift into Tarantino meets J-Horror and/or Lovecraft, which is where the movie uneasily remains until the credits roll.

But the thing is, it’s not clever enough to borrow so much premise from Tarantino, and it’s not haunting enough to borrow so much horror inspiration from Japanese cinema, and it’s not creepy enough to borrow so much mood from Lovecraft. So I mostly just sat there wishing that either the sum of the parts had merged into something amazing instead of congealing into, well, the thing I was watching on TV, or else that at least the characters would die faster.

I would watch something else by this creative team, though, because the concepts were solid, or at least had potential. It’s just that the execution, in nearly every sense of the word you can imagine, was lacking.

Shudder served me up a more bog standard traditional horror this time, and I’m maybe a little disappointed by it? It’s not that I’m itching to become a giallo aficionado or anything. It’s just that horror in the ’70s is so good. If I were the kind of person who got paid for this, I might call it raw so that I could proceed to call it visceral as well, and be proud of myself for the pun. But what I really mean is, that was when the genre first spread its wings. You had a little blood and a lot of screaming and maybe some goofy eastern European accents, or maybe you had rubber-suited “monsters” or perspective shots and miniatures to make every day critters giant-sized. But the ’70s is where the technology improved and at the same time the censorship limits were removed, and the field just exploded in every direction. By 2019, horror movies are often a lot more polished, but they’re also more prudish and maybe a little dead inside, from that sweet sweet studio money.

Which is not to say Z was a bad movie. I was interested in where things were going. Lonely boy makes imaginary friend, only, just how imaginary is he? And that’s an okay premise, even if we’ve for certain sure seen it before. Will the boy turn out to be a bad seed type? Is it a ghost story? Demonic possession? Weird invisible monster?

The climax was pretty goofy, but the acting was fine and it had a jump scare from what I think may be a unique source in the annals of blah blah. Which ain’t nothing!