Son (2021)

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My giant list of Shudder movies to watch has gotten to where the new movies were coming out in 2021. Nice.

That said, man I’ve made a hash of this review. The problem is, I watched the movie over a week ago, then kind of forgot I had watched it, then watched another movie, then let more days pass because that review is going to be pretty easy, then glanced at my Shudder queue and realized my mistake.

So there’s this pregnant lady on the run, played by Laurie Strode’s granddaughter, and after she resentfully gives birth to the child during the prologue, we jump forward multiple years to her moderately free-wheeling single motherhood. That is, until she finds a horde of creepy people in her Son‘s bedroom, Rosemary’s Baby-style, and then he gets very sick. Downside is, there’s no evidence of the people and basically nobody believes her, except for this one Good Cop trope guy who keeps showing up whenever she has yet another evidence-free freakout, and before long, you can feel the chemistry between them starting to build.

That is, until her son finds a more successful cure than the doctors had as yet provided for his affliction, at the expense of the neighbor babysitter, and now they are forced to go on the run from both the law and her past, still unbelieved. But also, we slowly begin to realize… what if it really is all in her head? If that’s the case, just who is it leaving a string of bodies across flyover America? It’s like if You Might Be the Killer weren’t a comedy. I’m not saying I did not have a number of pretty shrewd guesses as to what was going on, but I am saying it was a fantastic slow burn of a movie that kept me guessing right up until the final scene, and you cannot ask for much more than that.

Vicious Fun

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A difference between the movies of the 1980s and the movies of the 2020s is that, for the most part, we have a more enlightened view of the way people ought to behave. For example, if you were a judgmental nerd with a crazy hot roommate in 1983, the arc of your story would be to win the roommate as a prize for your many inappropriate behaviours, such as berating her for wanting to watch Falcon Crest with her friends, or tailing her (admittedly scuzzball) date to a Chinese restaurant on the edge of town and inserting yourself into his life.

Whereas in the 2020s when you are that same loser character in 1983 under the same circumstances, and you take all of the same actions… you know, ultimately what I did not like about this movie is that he was still the protagonist at all. So be prepared for that, even if his end state isn’t quite as thoroughly rewarded as it once would have been.

The plot twist is that, after getting way too sorry for himself drunk and passing out in a supply closet of said Chinese restaurant, he wakes up to a small motivational self-help group in the main room of the now closed location. Before very long at all, he deduces that they’re not alcoholics so much as they are serial killers, and he’d better hope he can blend in if he wants to survive the night, much less get back to winning the heart of his roommate.

The other thing that would have made me like the movie more [aside from the aforementioned more sympathetic protagonist] is if I had not just seen the same overall plot play out across season one of the Dexter revival. Which is in no way their fault, since the movie predates the TV season by five years. Anyway, Vicious Fun was maybe sufficiently vicious, but definitely not sufficiently fun. I wanted more comedy out of my horror comedy than I actually received. Alas.

Wake Me after the Apocalypse

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Some books have hooks that just get me, or maybe Amazon is good at advertising. Whatever. Anyway, this book‘s hook is that Joanna the protagonist wakes up from cryosleep after 200 years only to find that there’s been a cave-in, and she alone has survived out of her group of a thousand people. The backstory, doled out in alternating chapters, is that a comet was about to hit the earth, but with enough warning that lots of bunkers of 1,000 people each were set up throughout America to allow humanity to survive the darkness and the desolation, via centuries of sleep thanks to recently successful cryonics technology.

I mean, Joanna’s personal backstory is also doled out through those alternating chapters, but that’s the gist of it. Cryosleep to avoid disaster, wake up to completely different disaster. So… obviously she’s going to meet other survivors. For one thing, there’s no reason to believe all the bunkers were destroyed just because hers was. But, insofar as this is the first book in a series, I was looking for less exposition and relationships and stuff, more raw survival and maybe mystery solving.[1]

What I got was… about half a book of those alternating backstory chapters, enough to get me well and truly tired of them. Then, just as the book I was looking for got started, the back 40% of it was instead chock full of people again, already. Ugh. It’s not that the story Rivet wrote was bad, it just was not at all what I wanted. Put a different way [that overstates the case of what this book actually is], I’d like to read these YA books and have them be less about Team Jacob versus Team Edward and more about Team Bella.

Anyway, if the second book is available at the Kindle lending library, I’ll borrow it eventually as I did this one. If it is not, I’m pretty sure I will neither buy nor download it. So… yeah.

[1] After all, just because the scientists believed it would be an extinction level event doesn’t mean it definitely would be. 99.999% death rate, we’d still bounce back[2].
[2] …well, maybe not bounce.

The Forbidden Library

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I randomly found a Django Wexler book in the kid section of the library, which was a bit of a surprise. Turns out he wrote a YA series ten years ago, and since my son has a heck of an attention span for books, I took a chance. At usually a chapter a night, it took close to a month including one auto-renewal, but then again how fast do I read to myself?[1]

Important ingredients for a young adult fantasy series are a) an orphan b) who was orphaned deliberately by an external force who will later drive the plot, and also c) the orphan later discovers an unanticipated talent for a magical world that they previously had no awareness of. Also, if you’re a girl orphan, probably d) you’ll meet someone your age in similar but not necessarily identical circumstances, who you most likely cannot trust, and yet you really want to. I’d say I’m not sure why this is less common with boy orphans, but the truth is, I’m pretty sure of why.

Alice Creighton is an intelligent 12 year old girl living her best life (good at school, science, math, all of that) in Manhattan (I think) with her father at the height of the Great Depression (which does not really affect anyone in the story, they’re all rich here especially by the standards of the day), up until she learns fairies are real. A week later, her father is lost at sea and his estates are sold off to pay his debts, and she is the ward of her uncle Geryon, a man she had not previously known existed but who seems to be doing even better financially than her father had been (debts notwithstanding), what with his massive estate outside, I don’t know, Philadelphia maybe?[2]

There’s only one rule: don’t go into Geryon’s personal library at the edge of the forest without permission. But when you’re surrounded by vague maids who do only what they’re told and literal-mindedly at that, and then just kind of wind down waiting for their next instruction, and with talking cats and evil wasp fairies and distant uncles who have no real interest in you, and above all when you are the protagonist of a YA novel who has been given one rule to follow, plus also you like to read?

Well, I think we all know where this is going. (In case you do not: it’s going into The Forbidden Library.)

[1] It’s the comics, is what it is. Well, and the parenting. The storytimes, just for example, most of which are regarding books that are unreviewable, such as Geronimo Stilton and Dragon Masters. And the Three Investigators, which I should have continued to review, but failed. (I’m not sure what happened there.)
[2] If you’re wondering why I don’t know where anything happened, it’s because the cities are mentioned like once each at the beginning of the book and then never matter again. If everything happens at your massive country estate, who cares what state it’s in? Or nation, honestly.

A Game about Digging a Hole

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Well, I don’t know what I was expecting.

No, it was acceptable fare, I just like the line. A Game about Digging a Hole is, I would argue, a self-contained and self-evident description of what to expect, but there are (technically) more details than that. See, you find a bulletin board advertising a house for sale, $10,000 as is, but it comes with an electric shovel and a treasure in the backyard, to which the new owner is welcome.

So now you’re digging a hole.

In the hole there are various bits of detritus aside from loose soil. Rocks, coal, that sort of thing. Happily, the various ores can be sold for money, and money can be used to recharge batteries, buy equipment upgrades, that sort of thing. Eventually, one presumes, there is a treasure.

Aside from a victory-locked access to most of the achievements, that’s it. That’s the whole entire game. I’m glad I played it, but having finished, I… am not interested in starting over, just to get the 8 or so achievements I did not get already. It was fun for a few hours, but it wasn’t that fun.

Videodrome

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Horror podcast time. The scare was society, and the style was sexy / erotic. So naturally, they landed on David Cronenberg. I… if I’m being honest, I ought to rewatch the last 20 minutes of Videodrome, because everything happened so fast after he was given the gun that I don’t think I actually know what transpired. But also, I kind of don’t want to watch it again? So…

The Onion once wrote a man on the street interview piece during the 2000 election in which one of the interviewees indicated that Bush vs Gore was choice he made every weekend on Cinemax. That guy would have felt very comfortable watching Toronto’s CivicTV, the channel you take to bed with you. Channel 83 is programmed by a shockingly young James Woods, who is always on the hunt for the newest way to keep his audience satisfied. (Mostly with, you guessed it, either bush or gore.)

In addition to scouring the earth for the latest and lowest brow, he also advocates for his programming on local talk shows, explaining that he is not causing society to worsen, but rather giving people an outlet for their pre-existing base desires so they don’t enact them in reality. Which is honestly not far afield of the discussions that were happening a few years earlier in Eyes of Laura Mars, nor for that matter discussions that continue to happen today. At least, he briefly advocates that position before pivoting to hitting on fellow panelist and radio call-in show host Blondie[1]. Before you know it, he’s showing her the pirate broadcast out of Pittsburgh that he recently acquired, of people being plotlessly tortured and killed, but, you know, fake. Really. Definitely not a broadcast of actual harm and murders. Who could do such a thing?

Anyway, she’s so into it that she wants to be a contestant[2], and heads off to Pennsylvania in search of Romero or whoever is putting the thing out into the world. When she never returns, James Woods goes down a rabbit hole trying to find out who is responsible for Videodrome (the name of the pirate broadcast his hacker intercepted, you see), what its purpose is, where Blondie ended up, really all of that. And suddenly shit gets weird. I’m talking pulsing videocassettes, involuntary body mods, and a climax so hallucinatory that I legitimately have no idea what happened.

No, that’s not true. Cronenberg is what happened.

[1] The band, not the comic strip
[2] It is unclear to me where the idea that this was open casting came from

The Vampire Lovers

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It has recently come to my attention that Amazon Prime Video is home to a treasure trove of exploitation cinema, ancient and modern alike. So, that will be an occasional thing.

One thing I will always miss about the ’70s is how straightforward everything is. If someone tells you a movie title and a one sentence thumbnail description of that movie, you will know exactly what you are going to get. This time out, The Vampire Lovers, which started in media res, except really more like in endia res[1], so much so that I quickly researched if it was a sequel before I got past the first 3 minutes. It is not, but it apparently is the first in a trilogy, to my surprise. Maybe I’ll watch the others sometime, who knows!

Anyway, this guy a lot of years ago relative to the main setting of the film (1700s or 1800s, maybe?) is narrating a diary in which he set out to avenge his is sister by defeating a nest of vampires, by stealing their shrouds to drive them out of whatever and then staking them or cutting off their heads, since nothing else can kill a vampire. (It is important to lay out the rules early, since they are so variable between vampire continuities.) Despite an early attempt at death via seduction, he is largely successful, only he missed one because he got tired or something.

Fast forward a generation or two, and we are watching people dance at Peter Cushing’s house, including some lady’s newly arrived niece, who only has eyes for Peter Cushing’s daughter. Before you know it, she’s going full Dracula seduction on the daughter, and before you know much more the daughter is dead of two puncture wounds in her left breast. The movie proceeds from there about as you’d expect, with the caveat that I did not expect there to be so many scream queens. I don’t know why, I just didn’t.

In conclusion: vampires! Who are also lesbians! That’s it. That’s the whole movie.

[1] Or insert your own Latin for “at the end of things”

An Unquiet Grave

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Sometimes a movie is a lot more interesting than it is good.

This is not to say that An Unquiet Grave is bad, precisely. It’s short, especially by modern standards, and it clicks right along at a prodigious speed, but it still, in retrospect, feels a little too long somehow. The character beats and the acting were good, and I liked the plot, but I also think the plot was the problem. There just wasn’t really enough of it to fill 80ish minutes, even if you account for all the long shots of people looking sad.

See, it’s like this. There’s a guy whose wife died, and he has a plan to bring her back, with her twin sister’s help. That right there? It’s the whole movie. There are two actors, a lot of back and forth dialogue, a handful of events, and then the credits roll. I think I liked it, even despite the too long thing, but I also think what I liked about it was the interestingness of the premise and the tiny cast more than, you know, the movie itself. But also, the acting is staying with me. There’s a little bit of special effects, mostly make-up related, but the true horror of the movie is all conveyed in the acting choices, and I’m here for it.

I feel like I may be talking myself into liking it better than it deserves? Because it really isn’t anywhere near great, and I maintain that it’s more interesting than good. I guess I mean the parts that are good may actually be great, but they do not outweigh maintaining such a somber mood for such a long time relative to what actually occurs.

Speaking of interesting: I just learned that the female lead was also one of the writers. This makes me feel better about the brief nudity in the film, which felt otherwise more exploitative than I’m usually comfortable with. Well, wait, let me explain. Exploitative nudity in film is the bread and butter of what I am comfortable with, it’s practically a horror film food group. But this was emotionally exploitative, and while I fully understood the artistic choice behind it, it was uncomfortable all the same. But her also being a writer on the film really does smooth that over a bit, so hooray!

But also, the ending? Like, literally the last second of the movie? That part was brilliant.

The Running Man (2025)

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I remember seeing The Running Man when I was a kid, because of course I did. Sci-fi action movies with Schwarzenegger were a no brainer. I remember, years later, reading The Running Man, by Richard Bachman[1], and recognizing enough of the plot elements (and, okay, the title) to know it was where the movie came from. And I remember being astonished by just how much better the book was than the movie.[2] Ironically, I remember almost nothing about the plot of the movie itself; what I’m envisioning is Arnold running around a laser tag arena in a shiny lycra jumpsuit and then eventually beating up Family Feud’s own Richard Dawson, but surely, surely there was more to it than that. Counterpoint, of course, is how readily I gave up on that movie once I read the book.

Fast forward 30-odd years, and it seems someone who actually liked the book has made a new version of the movie in which things are a little more… serious-minded. The Running Man is the primetime jewel in the Network’s crown of 24×7 reality TV game shows in which downtrodden losers try to earn enough money to escape from the slums, which of course they never will, but in the meantime the Network rakes it in from an enthralled America. (This Bachman guy was prescient, I tell you.)

One such loser, Ben Richards, has been blackballed from pretty much any available job because he keeps trying to help his coworkers instead of letting them fail and die, and there’s no room for woke chumps in the new America. But he has a sick daughter and a wife who’s about one night away from becoming a prostitute to makes ends meet[3], and before you know it he’s signed up for the show. Which is a 30 day game of hide and seek between the Runners and… pretty much everyone else. Anyone who reports a Runner’s location gets a wad of dough, and then the Goons (ie, corporate police) and the Hunters (ie, the recurring characters who America is rooting for, most seasons) swoop down and kill the Runner who got reported.

Hiding from literally everyone, as you may be able to conceive of, is a tricky matter, and doing it for 30 days is nearly impossible, especially under the cameras everywhere panopticon we call modernity. (Plus, you can’t just hide in the deep woods and wait it out, because you have to mail in a 10 minute tape every day or you get disqualified.) Anyway, that’s it. That’s the whole movie. Will he succeed where everyone else has failed?

Okay, that’s not the whole movie. There’s also the thread, woven throughout, in which a mirror is held up to us as an audience and we get to think about just how complicit we may or may not be in the coming dystopia, Tarantino-style.

[1] Or someone else, who can remember
[2] This was in my callow youth when I didn’t know just how readily Hollywood will scrap a book’s plot entirely in favor of their own idea.
[3] As opposed to doing it because it’s her chosen career path, which would be a whole different story.

Fairest Vol. 3: The Return of the Maharaja

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I don’t even know the last time I read a Fables-adjacent book, nor what it was[1]. And I’m not even sure how many books are left. I think not many? I should probably zerg rush the ending, but that would make it still months away. Just not years.

In any event, this book was way way off in the periphery of the series. The land of Indus (think The Jungle Book) is no longer threatened by that one woodcutter’s evil empire, since it doesn’t really exist anymore. But all the villages and palaces and suchlike have been basically emptied of able-bodied men who went off to lose the war, leaving only the elderly, the infirm, the very young, the harems[2], and of course the [other] women.

Which brings us to the main character, Nalayani, protector of her village from roving packs of dhole, which are wolf-adjacent animals from the Indian subcontinent. (I had heard of them before, but not with any commonality.) Anyway, she must now quest to the new maharaja I mentioned to ask for help with the problem, only to find herself embroiled in a civil war and with a pretty unlikely ally, at least if you remember previous events in the series, which I must admit I did not very well.

I have no idea if I should know who Nalayani is as a fabled character? I definitely do not, which did not negatively impact my enjoyment of the story, and anyway there were other characters I did recognize. If the series wasn’t nearly over, I’d think big things were afoot in the main sequence as a result of this one. As it is… maybe this was a happy ending?

[1] I mean, now that I’ve searched it and linked it, I maybe know. But I did not before.
[2] If you happen to live in the maharaja’s palace, at least, and this I suppose explains the presence of the new maharaja, Shah Ah Ming.