Some Kind of Hate opens with a scene of high school bullying[1] that culminates in actions that could be categorized as self-defense or as fairly extreme escalation. I know what I think, but ultimately that’s not important. What the people behind the scenes in the movie thought (school officials, parents, the legal system, whoever) is that the bullied kid needed to go out into the desert for one of those homes for troubled teens, we’ll straighten you out, you’d think military academy but not in this particular instance kind of programs. I’m not sure on what timetable they stay out in the desert, but the part where there were 10-20 kids total makes me think it’s not more than a few months.

…not that even a few weeks would have been short enough to save anyone.

See, the kid starts getting bullied again at the straighten you out in the desert place, because of course he does. And then the body count starts rising, because of course it does. But what makes the movie interesting is the number of switchbacks the plot takes on its way to the blood-soaked conclusion, with dark secrets and unexpected turns galore along the way.

As I’ve said elsewhere, there are several spots where the premise doesn’t entirely hold up to close scrutiny, but if you accept every aspect of the premise, the movie that follows from it does a good job of presenting multiple angles of what is at first glance a pretty one-sided issue. More angles than I would (at that initial glance) have thought plausible.

[1] that was being recorded on cellphone camera no less, and I can tell you I have a lot of thoughts about whether that did or could or should have made a difference to the premise of the film

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