We Are What We Are

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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.

Ancillary Mercy

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I finished Anne Leckie’s Ancillary trilogy yesterday, and it comes with a realization that I had completely failed to anticipate what the story was actually about.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. I’ve been sussing out the thematic ground all along, but the plot? I thought I was learning about the end of something[1], when I was actually learning about the beginning of something else entirely.

Which is to say, now that I know what story I was actually reading, the trilogy does in fact have three strong, reasonably divided acts that tell exactly the story they were always telling, even though it took me until the end of the series to correctly order things in my own head and be able to see it clearly. Also, it’s a good story that I’m happy to have read, even though I’m sad I’ll probably never get a clear look at either the millennia old beginnings of the story nor the equally distant ending of it.

Perhaps because of my inability to grasp the picture until so late, I’m particularly spoiler averse here, so I will say only that issues raised in each of the prior books are well-resolved in Ancillary Mercy, and with more room than you can shake a stick at for Leckie to return to this universe and tell other, completely different stories, were she of a mind to.

[1] It’s not impossible for it to be both, but I doubt I’ll ever know.

The Suicide Squad

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I remember liking Suicide Squad better than most people did, even if mostly by comparison to other DC movies on offer in the same continuity. And my just glanced-over review bears that memory out.

The Suicide Squad is kind of an oddly named sequel? It’s maybe slightly closer to reboot than sequel even though there is character continuity and it’s clearly still part of the DC Cinematic Universe. Basically, it feels like James Gunn came along while he was briefly persona non grata with Disney[1] and said hey, DC, you know what would make this movie better? Leaning into the comedy part and out of the grimdark part. And they listened!

There are a few things he did especially right. First: it is over the top. The plot is over the top, the violence is over the top, the character are all aware of these facts and embrace their ridiculous, hyper-violent, insane world for what it is. Second: it is funny. This is another thing the characters embrace. I don’t know how to explain exactly what I mean. It’s not like they’re trying to outfunny each other. But there’s an absurdity to everything that’s going on, and they lean into it instead of staying aloof from it[3]. Third: would be a giant spoiler to actually say, but trust me. Gunn understands the world in which he is operating, and I do not mean DC at large, I mean this series in particular, of which I hope to see more.

This is the new best DC movie, and their trendline has been so solid that I legitimately want to see whatever they make next. …I mean, as long as it’s not another Superman.

[1] For historical purposes: he got “canceled[2]” by right wing people who were tired of seeing their heroes be “canceled” for things they were doing in real time, so they dug up things Gunn had done years earlier, and Disney briefly listened to this and took it as the same kind of thing, instead of noticing that he had learned from the past and was no longer doing those sorts of things. Later, they got over it and there will be a third Guardians of the Galaxy movie after all. Still, I cannot hate the outcome of his personal digression.
[2] For additional historical purposes: canceled is when you did something wrong, and people called you out on it, and consequences ensued. Prior to a few years ago, the people calling you out part rarely happened, and consequences ensuing happened so rarely as to be basically never.
[3] Well, except for Amanda Waller as the orchestrator of the squad and its varied missions, who takes everything and herself just as seriously as she did last time. But even this is an important aspect of the story being told.

A Way Out

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I found it difficult to classify A Way Out. It’s nearly a walking simulator, but too interactive for that. (It does frequently occupy the same story-telling space, though.) It’s on occasion a shooter. It’s definitely a light puzzle solver, going back almost to the middle days of your Kings’ Quests. I guess the best way to describe it is as a two player split screen[1] interactive movie, about breaking out of prison.

It’s also about more than that, in much the way that the TV series Prison Break was. I think it is fair to say that between watching all five(?) seasons of that, consuming two versions of Shawshank, and playing this game to completion, I will have no problems if I ever find myself in, er, diminished circumstances.

Downsides: antihero types. You are, after all, playing one of two people who wants to escape from prison, seeking revenge. But it’s rarely a dark take; mostly, in fact, it is kind and humanizing of everyone involved. It’s like, some people in prison are a danger to society and need to never come back. But some people in prison just, y’know, do crimes sometimes, and that doesn’t automatically make them bad people, even though probably you don’t want to have a crime done to you.

I bet that doesn’t make sense.

[1] Even if you play it online[2]! I found this at first pretty annoying but ultimately it grew on me. Thanks to illness in the house, we weren’t going to play couch co-op anyway. But at least it affirmatively worked, so now we can play Borderlands not on the couch, which means I won’t hate everything while trying to play it.
[2] Which is why even though I finally got a Series X, I played this on the XBox One. Mary, on the other hand, got the fancy treatment.

Absentia

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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.

 

Seoulyeok

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According to the write-up, Seoul Station is a prequel to Train to Busan, which would actually have to be more of a sidequel since the first twenty minutes of the latter movie take place during the same day / overnight that all of the former movie occurs during. The zombies are the same style (controlling for live action vs animation at least), and I have no reason to disbelieve them, it just… doesn’t make sense as a prequel instead of its own standalone movie. Partly because they have nothing to do with each other save look at how many more views we’ll get with brand recognition, but mostly because the logistics fall apart. If the Seoul movie had happened as it did, people would have known by early AM not to be getting on trains to Busan.

Whatever, it’s the same writer and director, I guess I have to take his word for it.

Leaving all that aside, though, this is a dark, brutal, and above all angry movie that would definitely fit in any US metropolis as well as it fits in Seoul. See, the zombies are real and all, but they’re also a metaphor for the homeless problem. I say that in the sense that at every opportunity, the citizenry at large and especially anyone in a position of authority continuously portrays the crazy people who are running around biting folks as the homeless gone wild, to the extent that anyone who is still alive but also homeless is considered just as dangerous as the actual zombies are, and always to their detriment.

(There is an actual plot to this movie that I have not even slightly addressed, if the above sounds like spoilers. I mean, it probably still does, but you should know.)

I wonder if anyone in the target audience, such as people who can afford TVs or movie theater excursions, listened to the angry undercurrents. US audiences wouldn’t have, so I can’t really have a lot of faith that it was different somewhere else. But maybe!

The Green Inferno

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Eli Roth has a favorite type of movie to make, I think, and it is this: young people go somewhere that they should not have gone, and pay the price. Sometimes it’s a cabin, sometimes it’s Eastern Europe, sometimes it’s the beach[1], sometimes it’s the rainforest.

The Green Inferno is an homage to Italian cannibal cinema, and judging by when I saw Cannibal Holocaust last year on Joe Bob, it’s a pretty successful homage at that. I know I spent a lot of time wincing, and it’s hard to say how much was due to memories of the source material rather than this one. See, these college students have gone to Peru to stop some bulldozer-style exploitation of mother earth, with chains and cellphones and the internet, and that’s all fine and good, but what happens if circumstances arise and they find themselves hanging out with the very people they were ostensibly down there to save from encroaching modernity?

It’s hard to tell where the line between homage to past exploitation and actual exploitation lies, but focus on the characters kept me from thinking this was just done for the sake of a cheap buck at the expense of indigenous peoples. There was sequel bait, and I’m really torn between wanting to see the sequel and thinking that the genre has been capstoned and should stay safely dead and buried.

[1] Except Eli Roth wasn’t actually involved in Turistas. Well that’s weird.

Hell Night (1981)

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Do they have Hell Night outside Detroit? My understanding is that it is a) the night before Halloween (or maybe night of, or night after?) and b) restricted to Detroit and environs, and c) has mostly died out but was a big deal when years started with 19.

Anyway, they used to, not that this movie took much advantage of it. A few tracking shots of mansions and/or parking lots that had been toilet papered and a busy police precinct with an annoyed desk sergeant pretty much covered the nod to verisimilitude.

Otherwise, what you have is Linda Blair and three other aspiring Greeks spending the night at a potentially haunted and definitely abandoned mansion after a family murder/suicide took place there 12 years ago. If they make it til dawn, they can join! As hazing goes, this seems quite a bit better than homoerotic paddling. I mean, unless someone survived the murders and never left the house and for some reason wants to kill everyone even though this isn’t the first year the mansion has been used as a haunted hazing ritual… but that’s pretty implausible.

Honestly though, my biggest problem was the pacing. Non-stop exposition to set up the meat of the movie? Okay. Sex and drugs and whatever it takes to demonstrate that teens are gonna die? Inevitable staple. Confusion as the body count rises? Also pretty standard. Blond dude running around town trying to convince someone that Linda Blair is still in danger in that house? …yeah, that one doesn’t track. The whole point of putting the entire cast in one place with a killer is you don’t let anyone leave that place with the killer unless the credits are going to start rolling in the next fifteen seconds. So there’s this entire 20% chunk of the film that a) isn’t teens in peril and b) distracts you from remembering what teen is in what peril, because there’s a stupid blond kid running around what I still assume per above is suburban Detroit trying to find help. Or maybe Ann Arbor? I hear there’s a college there.

Twins of Evil

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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

Freaky

Horror movies are often funny. It’s a structural thing, I think. Movies with unrelieved dread are hard to watch. So you throw in some tension-relieving fake-outs or a stoner, to name a couple of common examples, and get the audience laughing, so they feel a little better when Kevin Bacon gets it through the box spring. …okay, bad example of a moment when the audience would need to feel better.

My point is, some horror parodies are straight comedies without an iota of actual horror to be found, and many horror movies (especially slashers) can be funny at times. And some horror movies are unintentionally hilarious, of course. But the idea of a horror comedy is a rare beast indeed. …and then try to imagine mashing that up with a family movie like, oh, I don’t know, The Parent Trap or, say, Freaky Friday.

A thing I know in my heart is that the pitch meeting had the movie named Freaky Friday the 13th, and I wish they had stuck to their guns. Trimming it down made me expect something a little more serious, and if I’d believed I was going to get to see Vince Vaughn hamming it up as a high school misfit with a tough past 17 year old girl turned fish out of water serial killer suspect, well, I might have tried harder to see it in… haha no, it was in theaters last fall right after everything opened up but way before anything was safe, didn’t it? But I mean, I would have had larger regrets about the zero percent chance of seeing it under those circumstances.

But I saw it last night, so that’s good too!