Tag Archives: thriller

Eyes of Laura Mars

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Another podcast movie, this time with a scare that is not really technology, but a style that is most definitely New York City. Eyes of Laura Mars is not a giallo. For one thing, it is zero percent Italian. But it’s not not a giallo either, if you take my drift. There is definitely shared and/or stolen DNA.

Laura Mars[1] is a fashion photographer who has entered her “coffee table book of staged murder photos” artistic phase, but since it’s 1978 that’s not entirely a thing yet, and therefore she is drumming up a lot of controversy around how she’s causing people to be desensitized to violence, and okay, sure, there really is nothing new under the sun is there?

Anyhow, the twist is that she suddenly starts observing the murders of people who are professionally close to her, through the eyes of the murderer. Soon the cops are involved, albeit more because of the murders than because of her weird psychic connection to the killer. And before you know it there are more dead half-naked models (among other victims) than you can shake an icepick at. Is the killer her loser ex-husband? Her creepy limo driver? Her gay but the movie never openly admits it agent?

Actually, that was the weirdest thing about the flick. Because as soon as you know Brad Dourif is in the movie, you also know he’s the killer. To be clear, this is not a spoiler, I’m not saying if he actually is or not. I’m just saying that, as a savvy viewer of horror films over the past five decades, there’s no question in your mind about whether he’s the killer, which makes for a very strange viewing experience of what is nominally meant to be a mystery in which nearly any of the still living characters should be a suspect.

Am I making sense here? I’m pretty sure I’m making sense.

In conclusion: it’s not bad! It’s definitely not good, it is I daresay pretty damned silly. But it’s not bad. Well, except for one piece of unnecessary prejudice that would be a pretty big spoiler to reveal, but alas for the way certain mental health issues are treated as low hanging fruit. And, oh, one other thing: this was written by John Carpenter, which is notable in that I’ve never seen him write for a different director or probably a different composer than himself before. Weird.

[1] To the best of my knowledge, not Veronica’s mother

La polizia brancola nel buio

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Gialli!

The Police Are Blundering in the Dark was the absolutely perfect title of one of the movies in a box set categorized for forgotten giallos, which you may note was not indicated to be forgotten gems or anything, just, forgotten. But that’s okay, when you’re in the right company and already like the genre and especially, my lord, that title.

A bunch of fashion models have been disappearing over the last few months, including one nice lady who clearly should have worn a bra if she was going to be running away that much, and a second nice lady who had abysmal taste in boyfriends. But now that she’s dead, the boyfriend has decided he cares enough about her to at least find out what happened, even if he couldn’t be bothered to show up the night before and help fix her car, since he was cheating on her at the time.

He quickly finds himself at the center of an inexplicable and poorly explained family drama involving a local erotic photographer, his unhappy wife, their niece, and the local doctor who likes to hang around and prescribe drugs for the wheelchair-bound photographer, who to be fair is in poor health. Also, the photographer can take pictures of thoughts. For some reason.

Who among them is the killer, though? Or could it be the newly hired stone-faced butler and nymphomaniac maid who are objectively pulling some kind of con? Or the mentally simple son of the innkeeper and his estranged wife? Or for that matter someone I’ve forgotten? But I don’t think I have. Like the police, you’ll blunder in the dark wondering what is going on, why so many plot points have been dropped, and how the mystery got solved other than timing and dumb luck.

The thing is, this makes it sound like I didn’t like the movie, when, oh no, it was hilarious and inexplicable in exactly the ways bad exploitation movies should be. Great with friends and drinks, and probably still pretty great just by yourself.

Incident at Raven’s Gate

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Now, here’s a movie where even talking about the random rolls used to get to it would be a spoiler. Well, okay. the style die was “Australasian”, it’s only the monster die that would be a spoiler. Still, though, it would be, and Incident at Raven’s Gate was good enough that I don’t want to spoil it, so.

The movie starts with a burned out shell of a house being investigated, and then dumps back to five days earlier, where we meet the players: a super uptight sheep farmer (maybe?), his bored younger plant-growing wife, his fuck-up younger brother on parole, some annoying twerp barflies, the hot lady bartender, and the local cop who is obsessed with her. Add the drought-stricken central Australian landscape as a pressure cooker, and a mysterious outside force to push the button I guess?, and then watch the players progress from point A to the burned out farmhouse point B, with occasional flashforward interludes to the investigators.

There are twists and turns, some predictable, some not, but it’s mostly a study of characters in crisis, and I very much dug it.

Jurassic World: Rebirth

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Probably at some previous point, I understood that Jurassic World referred not just to the park, but to the fact of the dinosaurs having gotten loose and now they live here too, like it was the Jurassic all over again[1]. Anyway, they made a trilogy on that theme, and now that Chris Pratt has made enough money, they decided it was time for more Marvel alums to get in on that sweet, sweet dinosaur cash.

Here, therefore, are the things you should know about Jurassic World: Rebirth.

  1. There’s nothing “rebirth” about it. It’s still the same dinosaurs from the same consistent series of movies at the same consistent starting point as it was for every prior sequel. Furthermore, it doesn’t even feel like it’s meant to be a franchisal rebirth. This told a complete story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and no real hooks for sequels starring the same characters.
  2. It’s a little bit of a rip-off of a loving homage to several movies. I can see Jurassic Park 3 in there (with the sailboat family shoehorned into an otherwise straightforward snatch and grab plot), a decent chunk of Aliens (if Newt’s family had survived along with her, and to be fair that may cancel out JP3), and a whole lot of those old GI Joe 5-episode miniserieses they’d put out every year where the Joes and the Cobras are chasing parts of, for example, a weather control machine.
  3. There was no compelling reason to make this movie. Other than “give me some cash”, it doesn’t have a story that needed to be told. That sounds worse than it actually is, the story was fine, extraneous things can often be fine. But it was extraneous more than it was fine, you know?
  4. With that caveat: it was also fun. Possibly because I cannot accept what the writers posited the world to be like 30 years after the rise and fall of InGen, the dinosaur-cloning company. Those character inhabiting that world are all, “meh, I’ve seen dinosaurs, and mostly they’re boring murder machines, so who cares if they go extinct again, or that they ever existed in the first place?” Whereas I will probably never lose my childlike wonder for them, and they keep on looking pretty great in these movies. Thanks Steven Spielberg.
  5. The less said about the pointless “what if we make mutant dinosaurs?” subplot, the better, Pretend it never happened, and you have a better movie. Because wow, it adds nothing and is probably the thing that most made me consider whether the movie was necessary, a la point 3. If you have a subplot that would have been your main plot except you flubbed it entirely? That’s a bad sign.
  6. …but it was still fun, and I do not regret having seen it. The movie was not ruined for me, I just selectively edit a handful of the dinosaur characters to be something just as useful for the service needed in the plot during those scenes, but not pointless and dumb at the same time.
  7. I do a little bit regret not seeing Superman instead. But only a little bit.

[1] But mainly the Cretaceous, not I suppose that this is important to their larger point.

G20

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Having watched the film, here is what I know about the plot of G20.

President Viola Davis is trying to solve world hunger and feed farmers in Africa, or something like that, at the expense of American voters (her opponents say) or to keep the dollar from collapsing (her other opponents say). It was never clear to me how these facts interact, nor how switching to a new worldwide currency[1] would fix hunger. Or necessarily how it would destroy America, for that matter.

Anyway, what’s important is her plan is somewhat unpopular, her teenage daughter is extremely rebellious and tech savvy, and the whole family is headed off to South Africa for a G20 summit where she will try to convince the other major nations of the world to sign off on her plan, whatever it actually is. Unfortunately for her and other world leaders[2], Homelander (but without his powers and with a non-specific accent that is later claimed to be Australian, but I dunno about that) has a plan to kidnap all of them and destroy the world economy so he can make some money off crypto.

Premise established, now it’s time for the explosions and gunfire. The only thing that separates this from any other political action movie is that Viola Davis is the action star. Gonna be honest, that’s what won me over here, and now that I’m out the other side? No regrets. (But I doubt I would have gone to a theater for it, so nicely done, Amazon, for going straight to streaming.)

[1] If that’s even what was being proposed? I am forced to admit that I must have missed some of the early film exposition, or else this never even tried to make sense. One of the two.
[2] Including Russia, China, Turkey, Britain, South Korea, implied Saudi Arabia, and 13 unspecified others, though one supposes the actual Group of 20 is fairly static and it would be easy to learn who would be expected present.
[3] Depending on how you count, there were either a lot more than 19 captives, or there were 18. But that doesn’t flow as well I suppose.

Lucky (2020)

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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.

Blind Rage

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Since October, I have been buying cheap (or often free) Kindle books. Like, 99c for seven books kind of thing. I’ve spent maybe $30, and increased my digital library by hundreds of titles. Are most of them garbage? Okay, probably. But it gives me something to read when I don’t have anything but my phone handy.

The first of these books that I’ve actually read is Blind Rage, the first volume of an eight book series called Under the Breaking Sky. It steals heavily from Cell, and is otherwise about what you’d expect out of a not quite zombified airport thriller. Set in Denmark and with maybe five or so main characters, it tells the story of the day a weird hole appeared in the sky that causes anyone who looks at it to go blind and enraged, such that they hunt down anyone they can hear, to rip them apart or bash them to pieces. (But not each other.) Then the thing in the sky goes away, until it comes back again 12 hours later. And again. And again.

So, I lied earlier though. A small percentage of the population is unaffected. Most of the main characters are this type, and the book (and probably the series) is entirely about them trying to stay alive, and maybe eventually trying to figure out how this is even happening? Beats me, and I’m not holding my breath. It’s an apocalypse, I’m just a long for the ride.

Creep 2

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Because of an intriguing series on Shudder, I believe I mentioned that I watched Creep a few months ago. In addition to that show, there was also a sequel, and now I watched it too! Please note that this review will include spoilers for the first movie, although I think not any for Creep 2, which wears its premise on its sleeve with no coyness of any kind.

There’s this lady Sara with a youtube series called Encounters, where she trolls weird lonely people posts on Craigslist so she can film it, and gain a viewership via awkward art. And she comes across the eponymous creep from the first movie, now going by the name Aaron, who wants to tell her his story about being the most prolific unsuspected serial killer in history. We as the audience know this is almost certainly true, but she as the unwitting subject of her own film does not, and that is the tension of the movie.

It’s hard to judge the effectiveness of the first movie’s “is he or isn’t he” premise, since I already knew. So take it with a grain of salt when I say I liked this one better. But the character in the first movie was definitely going against his own instincts way past the point of believability, even if (and this is key), the creep had just been an awkward dude who wasn’t going to murder anyone. Whereas Sara definitely knows he’s hinky and troubling right out of the gate, but she keeps staying because this is the fulfillment of her dream, and she deems the payoff worth the risk.

And so they dance back and forth, and I can honestly say that at no point did I know how the movie would turn out. When you consider that this film came between a prior movie and a six episode TV series, that’s kind of impressive?

Cam

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It’s been so long since I last heard my podcast that I no longer remember exactly what the category was that led them to choose Cam. At a guess, modern and doppelganger? But I’m not sure that’s right. (It would really help if I could remember other movies they discussed watching instead, but, here we are. Or I could write most of this review, then listen to the beginning of the podcast episode about this movie to get the answer, but I have another review yet to write, so that seems like a bad idea. So I’ll just shrug and move on.)

So there’s this camgirl, Lola. (Or Alice.) She’s trying to move upward in the ranking on her site, which I think is determined by donations rather than views? Though it’s hard to tell since they correlate. Anyway, her character thumbnail sketch is “cambitious[1], not out to her mom, out to her kid brother, has a devoted following and a few industry friends”. What sets her apart from anyone else is she knows enough about practical effects to do pretty extreme shows that go in directions you would maybe not expect of a porn biography but maybe would expect of a horror flick.

Anyway, that would be the whole movie, except one day she wakes up to find herself on cam, by which I mean the stream is running and she’s onscreen, but she’s also in bed watching it, because whoever is on the stream isn’t actually her. And then the rest of the movie is a genre I like very much, wherein it’s impossible to prove to anyone that you’re really you, because if the system is rigged, the system always wins. Even the people who know you, they’re not inclined to doubt the evidence of their eyes, especially if you’ve been keeping secrets.

Naturally, therefore, I loved the rest of the movie[2]. …right up until the end, where it kind of just sputtered out. Alas.

[1] This is a word I made up, not a term of art. But I can believe it could be, you know?
[2] Except for the scene with the whale, which was more than a bit disturbing.

Creep (2014)

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Shudder just started a new series called (I want to say) The Creep Tapes, that I decided to take a look at, because why not. And then I learned it was based on a movie from ten years ago, called Creep. The show was good enough for me to say (again), why not, and here we are.

So this guy named Aaron has been hired via Craigslist by this guy named Josef, for the princely sum of one thousand dollars, to be his videographer for a day. Josef explains that he is dying of an inoperable brain tumor, and has an unborn or very young child[1] that he wants to leave a remembrance for. And that’s it, that’s the whole set up.

The only thing worth knowing from here forward is that Josef is incredibly awkward. His sense of humor is almost but not quite mean-spirited, his sense of boundaries is non-existent, he gets way too emotional with a complete stranger way too fast… it’s more or less one of those embarrassment / shame / The Office (British) style of scenarios.

….or is it?

I have a feeling this is more worth watching if you’re not spoiled, and I also have a feeling that the TV show might actually be better than the movie in some ways, mostly relating to improvement via shortened run time. All that to say: both are pretty good, if you’re okay with the premise.

[1] I forget, for the justifiable reason that these are the only two characters in the movie. Hmmm. I guess there are two and a half, but the half also isn’t the aforementioned child, so.