Tag Archives: Shudder

Hunted (2020)

Don’t hold me to this, but I think Hunted is a French movie. This is apropos of almost nothing, except that I will later use it to explain my problems with the movie, which are for the most part a little unfair.

So there’s this girl out for a night on the town, and she’s getting her flirt on, and before you know it she’s consentingly in the back seat of a dude’s car, when it suddenly turns out that he and his friend who climb into the front and starts driving, they do not have the noblest of intentions. And then she improbably escapes (not for the last time), and the hunt is on!

Anyway, French I said. One thing that I do not know is if the movie is dubbed. I think it maybe is not, but a lot of people in it, especially the primary antagonist, have incredibly annoying voices. Are their voices annoying because they do not match the person talking? I mean, that could be a sign of dubbing, but it could also just be a sign of someone with an unlikely voice. And since I already kind of hate my own voice, it feels crappy to rag on someone else’s, and yet… it was a distraction.

But the main problem is that it put me in mind of two other movies, both of which are substantially better. First, because of the woman’s ubiquitous red jacket, I thought constantly of Little Red Riding Hood, which in this context means I was thinking of Freeway[1]. And second, for pretty obvious reasons, I Spit on Your Grave[2]. And it is possible to make a mashup of two other movies stand up on its own, but this one, for whatever reason, just didn’t work for me.

Not to say Hunted did not have its charms. Here I am especially thinking of the survivalist bow-hunter mother and son, and the incredible uses of that one arrow. The pair of scenes to which I am alluding were very nearly enough to turn me around on the whole flick, so if you’re still curious, it might be worth your time after all.

[1] Unreviewed here because I saw it on The Last Drive-In, with Joe Bob’s full commentary supplanting my own, but I kind of loved it is the short version. Maybe the only dark, grimey for the sake of grime movie I’ve ever felt that way about. Starring Reese Witherspoon before she was anybody and Kiefer Sutherland before he became somebody the second time around.
[2] Which, as you know, I saw at the Alamo Drafthouse hosted by Joe Bob Briggs, back before his comeback was fully established.

The Pale Door

The Pale Door opens with a Poe quote containing the phrase, making it clear that it’s a metaphor for death. So I think you know what you’re getting into. Anyway, there’s this criminal gang in the Wild West, led by an older brother who doesn’t really want his younger brother to be a part of this life (although obviously he’s fine with the younger brother seeing all the benefits). But the younger brother is all, “we’re family, so I’mma help you on this train job.”

As you might expect, things go wrong along multiple axes, and they end up fleeing through the night to a lady-infested town in the middle of the woods. And here’s the thing. I am not opposed to movies about witches. Do they know magic? Do they consort with Satan? Are they good, or evil, or just misunderstood? Whatever it is, I’m here for it.

But these guys found one I’m not here for. Spoilers ahead, but you should probably read them anyway, and I’m sad for the guy who plays Rick on the new Magnum show that I cannot recommend this movie. But I cannot, and here’s why: if you are going to give your witch settlement[1] a backstory where they were originally from Salem, Massachusetts (and we all know how that turned out)? You are not allowed to make it so the people running the witch trials were right. Come on! It’s one of the blights of American history! What is wrong with you people?

[1] probably New Salem, Colorado? I can’t prove it, but it needs to be true.

Deliria (1987)

I cannot say that I know much about the history or evolution of gialli, so when I claim that StageFright is a late stage giallo, you should fully understand the credentials that I’m bringing to this claim. But it’s the first movie from a guy who previously assisted Dario Argento, and it is definitely on familiar terms with “stylish”. I call it late stage because the mystery trappings have been completely left behind; you know who the killer is before a single person has been butchered. Nevertheless, you can really see the historical underpinnings between there and here.

See, there’s this extremely off-Broadway musical about female empowerment against a serial killer? rapist? who wears a giant owl head as a mask. And via a series of improbable circumstances, a crazy actor breaks out of a mental facility and gets locked in with the cast and crew while they are finalizing their rehearsals in advance of opening night. So the introductory scenes are the musical, followed by improbable circumstances, and these are followed by some relatively by-the-numbers killings throughout act two. But then in the last 20 minutes, it just absolutely springs to life. Owlhead, the last survivor, the key, the cat, the fan blowing the feathers around… it’s as though without the weight of all the rational people caring about who is doing this or why or if they can survive, keeping things tethered in their own personal trauma, the true insanity of the situation is permitted to fly free.

I know not all of them can be hits, not even all of them from the ’80s, but I really was prepared to be disappointed here, and then, suddenly, I wasn’t. Bravo!

Hotel Leikeu

If you think it’s hard to watch a foreign film in a language you don’t know while working, well, it is, but what I was going to say was, imagine how much harder it is when you watch the two halves of the movie with a gap of probably two weeks in between. So if you think this is going to be a shitshow of a review: fair.

Lingering is a haunted hotel story, a la The Shining. A young Korean woman is called upon to care for a disruptive younger sister she never even knew existed, which is also how she learns that her mother has died by suicide. At a loss for how to take care of a little girl, she takes the sister to a hotel run by one of her mother’s friends, a place where she spent a lot of time as a child herself but which in latter days is seeing less and less business; now there are only a handful of employees and maybe one other guest?[1] Only, the little girl has visions of violence and death (to be fair, this was the disruption at school as well, so it predated the hotel), but then other people start dying in mysterious and/or suspicious ways, depending on whether you think you’re in a ghost story (as our hero does) or a crime story (as the investigating police do).

Sometimes, I think movies aren’t very good but wonder if I failed them instead of them failing me, by watching while working. This time, I’m quite sure the movie was good and I would have enjoyed it more watching it at night, but at minimum all in one sitting. (This was not a choice I made, just an oops.)

[1] The rundown, “nobody comes here” aspect put me in mind of an additional hotel movie, to be honest.

Prevenge

I’ve once again fallen to three years behind on my random horror movie podcast, but having watched Prevenge, maybe I’ll start to catch up again? Maybe!

So there’s this Australian widow, and she’s pregnant. And the voice of her baby is in her head, telling her to kill people. Is she[1] choosing them at random, just striking when opportunity knocks? Is she stalking anyone she happens to see who pisses her off? It’s really hard to tell what motivates these murders, which is part of the horror of it. When she’s not in the middle of the hunt or doing an actual murder (usually these interludes are prenatal appointments), she seems herself horrified by what she is doing. But whenever the baby smells [metaphorical] blood, it is most thoroughly on, by turns tragic, slapstick, or nearly demonic.

If I’m being real, this movie does not work on paper. Even after knowing how it ends, I don’t think I would buy it, except that Alice Lowe sells it so well. She’s the writer, director, and actually pregnant star, and she’s… it’s hard to say what I want to say without buying into the system, so let me say it from the system’s perspective: she would never make it as the star of a Hollywood adaptation of her film. She’s plain of face, did I mention actually rather than prosthetically pregnant, and she’s not conventionally funny. But the way she commits to the bit, both physically and emotionally… when it’s not funny trending toward hilarious, which it often is, it’s profoundly disturbing. The escalating desperation, the simmering anger, the bewildered horror, she portrays all of these and more, and in conclusion, I hope she writes more starring vehicles for herself. She definitely knows what she’s doing.

[1] The mother or the baby, take your pick

Lo Squartatore di New York

It might be time for me to watch a non-horror movie. Not apropos of The New York Ripper, or indeed especially of anything, just a random thought I had while gearing up to write this down.

Lucio Fulci is, with 93% certainty, not the only other director of Italian gialli films after Dario Argento. But I think it’s fair to say that if a random non-specialist in the field is making a list of giallo directors, they’d come up with Argento, and then probably, oh yeah, the other guy. Argento is certainly better, and generally more stylish. Fulci, on the other hand, is down and dirty.

Take this movie, which is nominally about a new entrant in the serial killer craze of the late 20th century, whose special power while murdering young (and young-adjacent) women is to talk in a Donald Duck voice, and eventually to taunt the police with said voice. But that’s not the actual point of the movie. The point of it is to cram in as many sex and masturbation and naked torture scenes as possible, justified by its allowance of the cop and the shrink to claim that the killer only goes after women with active sex lives.

Which, if you know how everything ends up, is incredibly fucked up in retrospect, although by then the script seems to have forgotten why this would be troublesome. In its nominal oeuvre, it’s mediocre at best. If you want to see some attractive, nude Italian women pretending to live in New York City and can ignore (or compartmentalize) high doses of misogyny, then have I got a deal for you!

[1] Not for nothing, but there are some seriously NSFW poster options for this movie. I showed… restraint.

Blood Vessel

Blood Vessel is, I think, one of those scripts that practically writes itself. It is one part Night of the Living Dead, by way of a group of disparate characters brought together by dire need. In this case, the dire need is that their WWII-era ship sank, and they are the survivors on the lifeboat who have almost lost hope. There’s, and forgive me if I don’t remember everyone, basically every character from a different country at first pass; the American, the Brit, the Australian, the Russian, and maybe one or two more. And then at second pass, there’s the black dude (American), the lady (British), and the Captain[1] (maybe also American?); the point is, everyone is different[2], so there’s no chance you’ll get anyone confused with anyone else. But also so there can be Conflict, and Drama.

And then mix that with two parts Dracula (or, if you prefer, Nosferatu), in that their lifeboat comes across a German military vessel, and they try to signal for help, since a) maritime law but mainly b) if they’re going to die of exposure or thirst, at least worst case the Germans will be quick. Unfortunately, there are no Germans on board, which means they got it wrong, what the worst case scenario might be.

And now they’re trapped on a boat with a bunch of strigoi, because Hitler sure does like to collect supernatural things. So, for the viewer, it’s just a game of “guess the survivor!”, with a side helping of gore and explosions. You know the type.

Was it good? I mean, no. Was it good within the constraints of its core concept? Still no, not as such. Was it worth the 93 minutes I spent on it? I don’t want to jump immediately to “no” again, but it’s worth noting pointing out that the movie is rated TV-MA, rather than R or even PG-13.

[1] If you’re asking, wait, why didn’t he go down with his ship? Don’t worry, he might as well have.
[2] Try not to think too hard about how people from that many backgrounds could have wound up on the same ship during a world war.

Malasaña 32

Today’s movie was chosen randomly[1] for fun, without any particular agenda such as keeping up with a podcast or seeing a movie of the week from November or wherever I left off, sigh. The sigh being about November, not about watching a movie purely just because.

32 Malasaña Street is an address in 1970s Madrid that houses a small apartment building of the type where you own the apartments. And after a spooky prequel scene from 1972 in which a couple of kids try to retrieve a marble and get scared by an old lady in a rocking chair that had, as far as I can tell, literally nothing other than geography to do with the rest of the movie[2], a family consisting of father, mother, older teenaged sister and brother, substantially younger brother, and declining grandfather buy the top floor apartment that has been vacant for some time, at a bit of a steal for the size of it, since there is not yet an elevator on premises.

They’re all bright-eyed for the big city, even mentioning multiple times how they left “the village”. (The teens have regrets, but not the adults.) And they start getting big city jobs and talking about big city opportunities, except that there are some, well, creepy big city noises and things shifting around and puppet shows on the big city TV channel when nobody else is around, and before you know it, it’s the Spanish Poltergeist / Rosemary’s Baby crossover you never knew you should have been asking for.

Other than the teen daughter being a little too open-minded for her “I grew up in a village and also it’s 1976 right now” backstory, this was pretty perfect. Good family tensions, good terrifying ghost, A+ haunting explanation, satisfying conclusion. Unless you hate subtitles, check it out.

[1] Well, it was deepest on my Shudder to-watch list
[2] Well, okay, maybe one thing

The Mortuary Collection

Sometimes movies are extremely basic, but in a good way, so you have fun, which in turn makes it almost a bad way after all, because at least if it weren’t fun you’d have something negative to say instead of practically nothing at all. Enter The Mortuary Collection, in which Clancy Brown runs a, you know, mortuary, while wearing what seemed to me to be an unnecessary amount of old guy makeup. He looked 60 when he was 20, and if he still only looks 60 now, how old does a mortician need to look?

Anyway, this blonde girl shows up in response to the help wanted sign right after a child’s funeral, and they discuss her qualifications for the job, which for some reason means he starts telling implausible morality plays about the ways denizens of the town of Raven’s Hollow (where the mortuary resides) have died. Which is to say: anthology movie! …if the title didn’t give that away already, I mean.

The stories themselves were decent if mostly predictable, and the wrapper story was pretty good as well, even if the ending was a bit inexplicable. Also, exploding penis, which is not a thing you see every day.

Children of the Corn (1984)

I’m not actually convinced I’ve never seen Children of the Corn before. But if I have, it made little enough impression on me that today’s viewing may as well have been the first. The funny thing is, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to watch it at all, but its sequel[1] wasn’t available on any streaming services, and the first one was, so, there you go.

What I think would have made this a much better movie is if there had been no prologue. Like, keep all the same footage and use it later in flashback. But if you start off with Linda Hamilton and some guy named Burt[3] driving down a country road in Nebraska, and they hit a kid who it turns out had his throat slit before they ever hit him, and there are menacing “watcher” camera angles, and the audience has to figure out what’s going on along with them? That’s a pressure cooker!

That small but major correction is almost everything the movie really needs. Okay, some of the final act special effects are terrible, but it’s basically 40 years old, so, forgiven. Creepy kids menacing you with farm implements in the middle of nowhere, that covers basically everything my suburban adulthood needs to be scared.

Well, one additional correction, maybe less small, is that outside of the flashback sequence, almost nobody dies, and I feel like this should have been a bloodbath. Probably if they had gone the “what is even happening?” pressure cooker route, this would bother me less. But, they didn’t, and it turns out this is just not a very good movie when over half of it is teenagers chasing Burt and/or Linda Hamilton around an empty small town downtown district, while the pacing of the plot makes it impossible to believe either of them is in any real danger, most of the time.

Still, though, it does make me wonder if it was possible, as late as the early ’80s, for a town to just disappear and nobody noticed. Now: zero percent chance. But then… like, I mostly still don’t buy it, especially when they threw in the shot of the 900-something population sign. But if it was less than 200, and basically everyone who cared about anyone who lived in the town currently lived in the town with them, I guess it’s a possibility?

In conclusion, small towns from my childhood are weird.

[1] which I plan to watch because a podcast I want to listen to will treat me as though I don’t care about spoilers[2]
[2] There’s a certain inherent irony to this explanation, I know.
[3] Now there’s a name that’s fallen out of favor.