Lord of Illusions

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Another podcast movie, because there have been so many in a row I have not seen. The scare was witch, and the style was LA, and so here we are with a noir about male witches and real magic vs illusion “magic” and also good vs evil, by Clive Barker: Lord of Illusions.

It’s time I think to admit I don’t really get Clive Barker. There’s nothing wrong with this movie. It’s great to get to see Scott Bakula in his prime, and I like noirs that have modern[1] settings and sensibilities. But I feel like people get excited when they see Clive Barker’s name attached to something, and meanwhile, I have no clear idea what it is I expect when I see his name. I saw Hellraiser[2], and it was a weird family mystery that had far fewer Cenobites than were advertised to me by pop culture, and then this is a weird almost-family mystery that’s also an almost takedown of pop culture magicians like David Copperfield, plus the whole noir with the maybe but maybe not treacherous femme fatale, and a dude with his head in a spiky box who is the bad guy. I think I even liked it, but I definitely didn’t get it.

The surface level plot made sense from moment to moment, but if there’s an essential Clive Barker-ness, I am just out of the loop, that’s all. Anyway, cool magic show, somewhat incomprehensible final battle, hyper-young Famke Janssen, and best use of the Ten of Swords I’ve ever witnessed. (Plus it was awesome that the mysteriously unrevealed tarot card wasn’t just Death like always.)

Whatever else it was, I’ve talked myself into remembering that it was very stylish, and that’s not nothing.

[1] Look, I get it, the ’90s aren’t modern, I’m just old. But still!
[2] Not reviewed because I saw it on The Last Drive-In, and Joe Bob says so much about a movie that I don’t know where my opinions end and his begin.

Send Help

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During the previous date night, we saw previews for the new Sam Raimi film. Lo and behold, new date night happened soon enough that we actually got to go see said film, after sushi dinner. Yay, date night!

So, Rachel McAdams is a frumpy[1] single lady with a pet bird, a Survivor audition tape, and dreams of corporate promotion. Unfortunately, her old boss[2] has recently died, and his inheriting son has no real interest in her qualifications for the new Vice President position, because his frat bro is available, and also as I may have mentioned, she’s frumpy. But, because she’s actually talented at her job and they might lose some business, she’s invited along to Bangkok to close the big deal. Which is why she is available to wash up on an island down the beach from her boss when the plane unexpectedly crashes into the ocean on the way there.

Bam! Premise of Send Help achieved.

The boss guy is, as previously hinted at, kind of a dick. Maybe a lot of a dick, even. And Rachel McAdams is a little bit over the top with her intensity, even though she is certainly the aggrieved party. If this were on the Hallmark Channel, she’d soften his rough edges and he’d get her to let her hair down and they’d build a cozy island paradise for themselves. But it’s a Sam Raimi movie, so instead this is all psychological cat and mouse as we wait to see just how real that intensity is, and/or just how ingrained the dickishness is. Can they survive the elements and the circumstances and each other? It sure is fun (and hilarious and disturbing and disgusting) finding out!

Plus, get her away from the makeup artists for a few weeks, and she doesn’t look very frumpy at all. Funny how that works.

[1] If she was ten years older, I think they might have even gone for dowdy
[2] Portrayed via somewhat subtle implication by Bruce Campbell

The Bad Seed

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Podcast movie, as I try to blow through some of them and reduce my enormous queue of podcasts to listen to. Scare was creepy children, and style was 1950s, and they claim (I think accurately) that The Bad Seed is literally the only movie that fits this intersection. Not least because I think about someone making a movie about a remorseless sociopath child in the 1950s, and honestly I’m stunned that even one such movie was made. It just doesn’t hit the same when you see it made in the ’70s, America had a much lower opinion of itself by then.

Imagine a 1950s family. You know the type. Father is a colonel in the army (probably) and went off to fight the Nazis, but that was a while ago, and now it’s all white picket fences. Mother has just the loveliest drink service that she rolls around the house to entertain people. Daughter is blonde-with-pigtails and practicing the piano on the regular, when she isn’t winning every prize at her private school.

Well. Almost every prize.

Before you know it, the little boy who won the penmanship medal is drowned off the dock at the town’s lake, the medal is missing, and wasn’t Rhoda acting ever so peculiarly toward him earlier that day? Alas, father is off to Washington for work for a month, and mother is left to deal with her simmering suspicions, her psychology-obsessed landlady, just the creepiest handyman ever, and the increasingly inebriated mother of the dead boy, by herself.

The acting initially came off as “1950s”, which, fair enough, but after a while it was stranger than that, with so many random monologues, but then I remembered this was based on a play, and I’m sure with the script lifted directly from the play. Aside from the question of what actually happened on the dock, the movie mostly concerns itself with examining the question of nature vs nurture, with every character coming down firmly on the side of nurture, and the title taking the opposite position.

Honestly, it’s pretty good, if you can tolerate 1950s acting. As with when I started this review, I really am quite surprised it ever got made, though. I know the ’50s were not the rose garden of American perfection that certain political parties would have me believe they were, but I really didn’t know 1950s America was aware of this fact.

But also: stay after the credits for actress on actress spanking. That is to say: not the characters, definitely the actors. 70 years ago certainly was A Time!

Noroi

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Podcast movie! The scare was demons, and the style was found footage, and the movie was Noroi: The Curse.

Found footage can be silly. Why are these people recording everything? Why, having seen the things they are recording, do they not make different choices instead of just continuing to record? How did they get so good at filming things? This latter clearly doesn’t always apply. Sometimes, they lean into the “bad camera operator” angle. Sometimes, and thankfully this is one of those, they lean into the professional angle. Sometimes, both.[1]

So anyway, there’s this documentary filmmaker in Japan, and he catches wind of some strange goings on at a local apartment complex. I forget the instigating incident. But something weird happens with a little boy staring out of a window, and some inexplicable sounds on his footage, and he starts pulling on threads. A psychic girl here, a tinfoil clad conspiracy theorist there, dead pigeons everywhere you look, and before you know it there’s a mysterious name, a drowned village, and everyone involved in the documentary are dropping like flies.

Ah, you are saying, why didn’t he just quit? I don’t disagree, but I never felt like he made an inexplicable choice until the last ten minutes of the film, so, not too bad as such things go. Anyway, I’m surprised I missed this one. It was 2005, right around the time the whole J-horror thing got so big that their movies were being remade in Hollywood constantly for a year or two. And yet, not a clue it existed[2]. Which is a pity, as it hangs together very well and is pretty scary. Recommended.

[1] I’m looking at you, Blair Witch Project.
[2] haha oops. 2005 is when the documentary was made. This came out in 2017. No wonder I never heard of it, it’s new!

Wake Up Dead Man

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Did you know they made a third Knives Out movie? Of course you did, it was like two months ago and you’ve already seen it. …and now I have too!

Wake Up Dead Man is a locked room mystery in which a fire and brimstone priest with a small but dedicated congregation is murdered, apparently by the new assistant priest (who has some specific Catholic title, and I will not be able to help you more than that) with a motive of “stop ruining the church”. But once Benoit Blanc gets involved, well, you know there’s going to be more to it than that.

The movie did a thing I’ve never seen before. Well, first it did something I’ve seen lots of times, which is dole out information in a way that recontextualizes what you thought you knew. And it does this several times. I could tell I was in for a treat when I had the idea it was basically all over but the “gather everyone in a room and tell them what really happened” scene, only to realize there was more than an hour left. Which brings me to what it did that I had never seen. The consulting detective, having been called in to solve the case, actually shows up in the middle of things and well before the events of the case are even over.[1]

Anyway, it’s a mystery, so I don’t really want to go crazy with detail, but I felt that the subject matter was treated with surprising kindness, even though it was ripe for lampooning or even axe-grinding. The typically star-studded cast was as good as you expect them to be, I could not stop chuckling, and every time I thought I had a handle on what was going on and felt very clever, I was 25-50% right at best, but never in a way that felt cheap or like I was actually writing the smarter story in my head. Good stuff.

[1] I know. Christie had Poirot onsite for murders all the time. The difference is, he just happened to be there when the events were set into motion. This was a different thing where you would expect the police and famous detective to only show up once the crime is over, but in fact the crime still had days left to go. Look, it’s unusual, okay!

City of Dragons

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I’ll start off by saying for the record that there will be spoilers for earlier books in here. Couldn’t be helped. So if you’re just here to know whether I like Robin Hobb’s third Rain Wilds book so you can decide via my oh so timely intervention whether you ought to read it for yourself, the answer is I do.

As of Dragon Haven, all of the stunted, deformed dragons were successfully relocated. Also, the nice bird keepers really like each other, the musical elderling is having a rough time, the regular dragons remain completely self-absorbed, and that one guy from Bingtown who is a total dick is still a total dick. Thusly opens the second half of the series.

City of Dragons is about two things, more or less. The first thing it is about is exploring Kelsingra. Why do the dragons ancestrally remember this city so fondly? Does the fact that Fitz came here once have any bearing on the plot? Too bad none of them can fly and get here, due to the implausible geography of a vastly wide river that is also constantly in flood, innit? (It’s to a lesser extent also about Thymara’s continued inability to come to grips with her sexuality. She’s still less annoying than Katniss, to be clear.)

The second thing it’s about is the plot’s slow but inexorable progression towards… comeuppance? consequence? confluence? simple climax? Honestly, given the characters involved, I think all of these things apply. In short and with no important specifics, there are a lot of characters heading to Kelsingra. Tarman the liveship barge with supplies, for example, or Hest the trader’s son with perceived privilege.[1] And I think that of the many characters headed in that direction, very few of them have the slightest idea what they’re sailing into. And I think it’s going to be pretty explosive. (Mostly figuratively.)

Of course, this kind of thing can be problematic, cf some of The Wheel of Time. So knowing the next book is the last one helps a lot towards not being extremely disappointed by a book that is more than half “moving pieces around the board”, as does my confidence that this is again the first half of a long book instead of actually two books, even if (happily!) the ending is a lot less abrupt than the first time it happened.

[1] For reasons that make no sense if you have somehow read the previous books but not this one, his scenes were among my favorites.

Don’t Fuck in the Woods 2

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I know what you’re thinking. Who gave those people more money?

I’ll do you one better. This was enough more money to improve everything about the premise. Better filmstock, better camera work, an actual plot, longer sex scenes of sufficiently improved quality that I think this has to fall into a heretofore unexplored genre, erotic horror[1]. It’s even feature length, albeit only like 75 minutes not counting the credits and slightly less damning blooper reel. (I’m pretty sure this one didn’t have an intimacy coordinator either, though.)

Don’t Fuck in the Woods 2 picks up the very next day. Apparently, the woods in which the original fuckery occured butt up against a summer camp, which is just opening for the season. And you know what that means: horned up counselors who are at least a couple of days away from having any serious responsibilities. (Also, a folksy nurse trying to be an adult to the teens and a handyman with a dark and mysterious past, because why not?)

So before you can say “fuck me in the, heehee, woods“, you’ve got a blood-soaked final girl warning all of them about what is about to happen, nobody listening, and a swarm of penis-shaped slugs penetrating anything that moves. Anybody can die at any moment, and since I know you’re going to ask: yes, they left things wide open for number three.

If there’s anything disappointing about this franchise, it’s that the premise is not quite as straightforward as it could be. There are at least a few people who not only don’t fuck in the woods, but even one or two who never actually try to. And yet, this does not grant them any form of immunity to the coming bloodbath. So I guess you might as well just do it, right?

[1] Erotic thrillers? The ’90s are littered with them. Softcore porn pretending to be light horror? Sure, Misty Mundae will always be the queen of that barely explored subgenre from the Oughts. But actually a horror movie with enough sex scenes to be erotic yet not so many or so explicit to move into being porn instead? I’ve never seen it happen until today.

Don’t Fuck in the Woods

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The last time I saw a movie that was this refreshingly straightforward about how things would go, it was Stay out of the Fucking Attic.

So the deal is, some young adult types (the couple who arrived early only to mysteriously vanish, the sister of the girl in that couple and her girlfriend, a preppy couple, a stoner, and a video store chick) go camping in the woods. In many cases, these people engage in some form of sex, in direct contravention of the film’s title.

Don’t Fuck in the Woods is director Shawn Burkett’s distillation of every ’80s slasher movie in a rural setting. Skip all the backstory about the tortured summer camp cook or twin survivor of a boating accident or rabid grizzly bear and just go straight to a creature who hunts by sex pheromone or something, and don’t even explain that part, just film some people fucking so later you can film them being eviscerated. There’s no foreplay here, just a lean hour[1] of badly filmed sex and violence.

But you know what? Expectations were solidly met.

[1] It says 73 minutes, but don’t be fooled. That’s three minutes of showing the cast at their nudest and most bloody under the name cards of the actors, followed by a ten minute blooper reel in which they make it abundantly clear that this is not the kind of production that hires an intimacy coordinator.

Roll for Initiative

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Third[1] entry in the ongoing annual series of books what I read to my son over several weeks: Roll for Initiative. It’s a big standard coming of age story in which the girl who has never in her life done anything for herself has to come to grips with the idea of doing everything for herself, and just maybe solving everyone else’s problems around her at the same time, all as part of the middle school growth and maturity experience. I doubt there’s a former middle schooler reading this who hasn’t had exactly the same lived experience as Riley.

The twist is, this book is told through the lens of her wanting to play Dungeons and Dragons and not having anyone to play with now that her brother has gone off to college. Until she meets some girls on the bus that she never had to ride before now, and they form a little group, and before you know it, poof, everyone’s life is fixed. Even the people who we didn’t know had anything they needed fixed at the beginning of the book.

Thanks D&D!

No but seriously, I wanted to read him a book where the characters liked role-playing games, since he himself is currently in a kid RPG. He liked it, and I did not hate it, and that’s mostly what I’m looking for out of stories to read at bedtime, so, hooray.

[1] I read another, longer, book to him right before this, and have a niggling feeling I did not review it. This seems problematic. …no, wait, it was the library one and I totally did. Whew. …messes up the count a bit, though, doesn’t it?

Kandisha (2020)

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Based on a very narrow sample size of this movie from five years ago, I have to say that I am shocked by how casually racist French kids are with each other. This has nothing to do with the plot of the movie, nor particularly with the character development for that matter. It was just an adjustment I had to make. (Really, it’s probably like how mean girls in like Heathers or Mean Girls call each other bitch, and mean to be endearing. Of course, that doesn’t really sell itself as a solution either, if you give it more than a second’s thought.)

Again, not the point of the movie. So there are these French girls who I think all live in the same apartment building? They for sure go to the same school, or maybe more like used to go to and are now too old for that, but maybe not. Either way, not much schooling happening. And they’re surrounded by their boyfriends and baby daddies and exes and brothers and so on, and they are also spray paint taggers for some reason, with a secret gang tag all their own and everything. It’s very bonding.

Having established all that, two inciting incidents occur in close proximity. In the first, the white girl finds the name Kandisha tagged [by people not them] under some wallpaper, and the Muslim girl recognizes her as a Moroccan legendary figure who takes revenge on behalf of wronged women. Then they jokingly try to summon her, with no results. In the second incident, later that same night, the white girl is brutally attacked and attempted-raped by an ex-. Later still that same night while showering off the blood and detritus of the evening’s events, she tries to summon Kandisha again, with rather stronger results.

The catch is: you can’t really control a vengeance demon, and without almost any pause at all, the innocent[1] men in their lives are dropping like flies. If only there were some way to call her off altogether! Welp, good luck with that.

[1] At the least, more innocent.