Halloween Kills

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From a plotting perspective, Halloween Kills is very obviously the middle chapter of a trilogy. That is to say, very little happens that is irrevocable (cliffhanger climax excluded), but everything is moved into position from the first episode, which was written to be a complete story just in case sequels weren’t greenlit (cf Back to the Future or Star Wars), to a place where not only was the story not over after all, but now we’re itching for a satisfying conclusion. This is simply the way these things are done, and except for how much you care or don’t care about specific characters and what happens to them, it’s functionally impossible to spoil, because it came that way, you know?

The commentary it was making was pretty compelling, though. Well, stay with me here. Lunatic mob in search of a killer is not new ground, I admit, nor is the “but what if they’re wrong?”motif, but I will say that there was good tension in my waiting every other scene for a good guy to shoot a different good guy, for example. And I very much like what was done with Tommy and Lindsey, the babysat kids from the original film. Anyway, my point about the A-side commentary the movie is making is that a well-worn message about the dangers of the mob, moderately well-presented and with characters you have some history with, it can be a good reminder instead of a used up cliche.

But the B-side commentary leading into the future third movie, man, that I’m excited about. Slasher movies work like this, you see: they are set in the real world, where supernatural occurrences do not exist. And so when you have your jasons out in the woods, and they get shot or stabbed or electrocuted or burned down in a house, over and over again, but they still keep getting up and implacably following their victims, it gets handwaved away as maybe they weren’t shot that well, or only the audience saw everything that happened and so the characters don’t know to question things. And in sequel after sequel, these deathless killing machines continue to seem like they maybe should have died by now, but it never happens, and that’s just how it is.

But in this movie, someone has finally given voice to the idea that, uh, why isn’t Michael Myers dead? Have you seen the shit we’ve done to him, collectively? Maybe something else is going on here. And my point is, I am really and truly excited for a sequel in which the real world rules slasher victims are finally willing to sit up and take notice that something supernatural has to be going on here, nothing else makes sense, and so, now what do we do??

Yummy

Since I saw Hack-O-Lantern last year, I’m pretty sure Yummy is / will be the weirdest[1] movie I see in 2021. It’s exactly the kind of movie I keep Shudder around for, because it’s so far outside the space of my expectations for any movie anywhere, yet in retrospect it was mandatory that someone finally make it.

Because, have you ever seen an indictment of the plastic surgery / beauty standard, of toxic masculinity, and of the male gaze, all bundled together into a zombie outbreak movie? Except also it’s not brave enough to truly shy away from nearly any of those things, insofar as they might shatter precious genre conventions. But to be honest, those failures are a big part of what makes it just so… noteworthy? I’m not sure what I mean, but it is extremely that thing.

A dutch(?) lady with breasts larger than she’d like, her hemophobic[2] boyfriend, and her slutty teen fifty-something mom go to what the write-ups describe as a sketchy plastic surgery hospital, but I’m not sure I see much of that?, in order to get (respectively) a breast reduction surgery, credit for being legitimately supportive, and an umpteenth facelift and/or lipo. Except: oops all zombies! (I maybe left out some twists and turns, but do you care? I think not.)

Topless zombies, flaming penises, explosive lipoinsertion, and horrific manhole covers are but a few of the treats in store for anyone with the distinguished tastes required to give this weird-ass movie a shot. Check it out!

[1] Weirdest is maybe the wrong word. I’ve definitely seen a far weirder movie, but it was basically someone’s coked out fever dream, and a little too weird. So I guess here I’m using weird with an upper limit of “can be described without first getting high myself”.
[2] Aside from being a great word, this is another standout aspect of the movie. How has nobody ever put someone afraid of blood into a zombie flick? And yet, here we are breaking new ground.

Amjeon

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Warning: Do Not Play is a movie about a student film called Warning, which the plot of the movie (not of the student film) exhorts you not to play. Well, okay, maybe not you, but it is exhorting everyone in the movie not to play it, and especially the not quite a student herself yet also not quite an auteur movie script writer / I’m pretty sure also director who has nevertheless become obsessed with it while trying to finish the script for her own horror movie.

Broadly, obsession is what the movie is about, and also the movie-within-the-movie probably? Mi-Jung’s life, what little of it there is in the first place, seems to quickly spiral out of control, at least any time she isn’t hunting clues to Warning‘s existence, or to its director’s identity, or to the filming locations. And anytime she is hunting for all of these things, she is surrounded by danger. Because Asian ghosty horror movie, y’know?

I liked it. It was either extremely dreamlike or playing with time loops, and I’m not sure which. Probably not both? Later events offer a third option, but that feels like a spoiler even by my semi-loose “look, we both know you’re not going to watch this” standards.

You will not like it if: a) you are allergic to not really knowing what just happened, for certain, or especially if b) you find yourself yelling at the writer lady every time she pulls out her phone during a dramatic confrontation and takes photos instead of hitting record. Come on, lady, you want to make movies! Remember?! (But I did appreciate the verisimilitude of how badly cracked her phone’s screen was.)

Devil’s Mile

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I almost wish Devil’s Mile had been bad, because that would be easier to take. But (except for the effects, which were cheap and looked it) instead it was consistently nearly really good, and I don’t even know exactly what I would have done to fix it, which is somehow even worse than all the rest.

So there are these kidnappers, driving to somewhere to deliver their victims to a mysterious figure in the shadows that they might as well have named Mr. Big, because he’s definitely a trope instead of a person. And they get lost on the way, somehow? And they slip from crime drama into teen slasher long enough to be warned away from a road that they take anyway, driving long enough to drift into Tarantino meets J-Horror and/or Lovecraft, which is where the movie uneasily remains until the credits roll.

But the thing is, it’s not clever enough to borrow so much premise from Tarantino, and it’s not haunting enough to borrow so much horror inspiration from Japanese cinema, and it’s not creepy enough to borrow so much mood from Lovecraft. So I mostly just sat there wishing that either the sum of the parts had merged into something amazing instead of congealing into, well, the thing I was watching on TV, or else that at least the characters would die faster.

I would watch something else by this creative team, though, because the concepts were solid, or at least had potential. It’s just that the execution, in nearly every sense of the word you can imagine, was lacking.

No Time to Die (2021)

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I’m still not entirely comfortable with the fact that all of the Daniel Craig Bond films have shared a continuity and an ongoing story arc. I mean, yes, it’s great from a storytelling perspective. But it’s not really how James Bond movies work, traditionally?

The main thing to know about No Time to Die, aside from that yes it is a part of the same continuity and same ongoing story, is that it’s the last of the Craig films. What that will mean for future storylines is at this time unclear to me, but this arc has come to a satisfying conclusion.

It’s extremely hard to want to say anything else at all, which is from my perspective a good sign about the depth and breath of storytelling at play. But okay, here goes: Bond has retired from service, an outcome that is not entirely shocking given the conclusion of Spectre. But an old friend pulls him back in, just in time to discover a plot involving some of the most dangerous near-future tech imaginable, wielded with surgical precision by a man with a bone to pick.

Later, lots of spy stuff happens, featuring chases, explosions, gun and fist fights, etc. It’s a James Bond movie, yo. Also, there’s an emotional arc, and all of the women have agency and intrinsic value outside of Bond’s sphere of awareness. So it’s perhaps not your father’s James Bond movie.

Hollow Knight: Voidheart Edition

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I still don’t understand why games that are roguelike are named after the original game of that style, Rogue, while games that are Metroid-like (ie, exploration-platformers with boss fights and power-ups) are named after more than a decade later when Castlevania did the same thing, and someone decided they were equivalent and everyone else agreed. It’s just not right.

All of that to say, Hollow Knight is a Metroidvania in which you play a silent[1] protagonist come to the dying city of Dirtmouth above the dead-but-treasured-filled kingdom of Hallownest, and also everyone is bugs. And that’s it, that’s the whole plot as presented. Everything else you learn on the way. Questions like “why do I have such a shitty weapon? why are some of the bugs cool and chill and want to sell me things or discuss philosophy, but some of the bugs just run at me to kill me, but some bugs do both? why is this referred to as a platformer when I can barely jump at all?”

There are three important things to know about this game. The first is that, if you are okay with the genre, with having to go back and forth and remember where you left things to do later and explore until you find places you can’t go but trust that you’ll be able to later and until you find fights that you cannot win but trust the same thing about that, if you’re okay with these things: this is a spectacular game. Arguably the best one of its kind ever made.

The second is that it’s incredibly long. I played for 83 hours to get the credits, and there are still a number of things that I know are left undone, not counting that there are probably things I don’t know also.

The third is a corollary to the second. It is 97% melancholy, with only the briefest of divergences from this theme, and those countered by moments of much stronger sadness to still balance out at 100% adjusted melancholies. And there’s nothing wrong with a melancholy game! Most walking sims are, and I play lots of those. But here’s the thing: 83 hours of melancholy is a lot to get through, even for a truly amazing game.

Oh, and also Voidheart Edition is because there were eventually several small expansions, and all of them are included in the Game Pass version. According to the meter, I got 106% completion out of an implied possible 112%. Almost all of what’s left are harder versions of things I’ve already done, which makes it hard to feel like I should practice my ass off to accomplish them. Plus the melancholy.

In the unlikely event that I do more, and that the more I’ve done changes my impressions significantly, I’ll report back.

[1] I mean, yes, most video game protagonists outside of dialogue-tree RPGs and shooter cutscenes are silent. But the other characters in this game make a point of noticing your silence.

I Spit on Your Grave 2

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The thing that made I Spit on Your Grave[1] more than torture porn [before that was even a subgenre] is the novelty. There aren’t many lady revenge stories, and fewer that are violent in the way that dude revenge stories are violent. As such, it has both the typically female strength storyline in which a woman who has faced, uh, let’s say adversity is able to rise up from circumstances that would destroy a man[2], and then it follows that up with the direct, bloody revenge that has, as I said, been a traditionally male-dominated arena.

Also, that direct, bloody revenge is earned, and earned well. “No jury would convict her” is what it said on the posters, as I recall.

I’ve discussed its remake elsewhere, with the verdict of “largely unnecessary”. And now we have I Spit on Your Grave 2, which dares to ask the question: what if Day of the Woman but crossed with Hostel? The answer being, of course, that formulaic torture porn, however bidirectional, misses the point entirely.

I am disappointed in you, makers of this movie. (I cannot even say “makers of this sequel”, because the only thing the movies have in common is the one sentence summary they share. My verdict here is downgraded from unnecessary to shameless.)

[1] aka Day of the Woman, and except for the fact that it’s less eye-catching and I would have been less likely to have seen it lo those many years ago, I wish that had stayed the title. Because it sells its theme better that way.
[2] Whether this stereotype is accurate is not in the scope of my point, although I’m not here to argue against it.

Confessional (2019)

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I hate it when research disproves a theory that superficially matches all available facts. See, the main thing that Confessional had going for it was its Covid-conscious style. Seven characters in a video confessional booth, telling (or refusing to tell) their stories and how those stories overlap with each other and with the two students who died on campus on the same night a few weeks ago. The upshot of this premise being, there was rarely more than one actor on screen at any given moment, and never more than two.

But then I find out it came out in April of 2019, and was therefore filmed earlier than that, and… ugh. I guess I could turn this around by saying it presaged film in the time of Covid, or that it was prescient, or some other Nostradamus-light analogy, but I’m just too disappointed to bother.

The thing is, aside from its not-apparently-of-the-moment-after-all style, it’s a pretty generic thriller. Seven suspects, some of whom are obviously innocent, some of whom are obviously guilty of something, whether it was this particular thing or not, and all of whom have something to hide, or else why did they show up to make their confessions in the first place?

It was, y’know, fine. Which is to say, sadly, that it’s neither good enough nor bad enough to be noteworthy.

Promising Young Woman

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Every movie I watched in early 2020, according to a memory that is at worst only slightly flawed in this regard, had a preview for Promising Young Woman. April could not get here fast enough! …and then all the theaters plus pretty much everything else shut down in late March, and when the movie received theatrical release last December instead, I was still not in a place where going to see it there seemed like a reasonable option. Because, you know, vaccines didn’t exist yet.

And so I’m basically a year and a half overdue on this movie. On the bright side, it delivered!

The thing is, oh man, I don’t want to say anything other than go watch it, on the off chance that that barrage of previews didn’t spoil the basic premise. There’s a lot more to see, but those first moments were a killer even in the preview, much less what it might be as a full scene with no idea what to expect.

What I can say is that there’s a little bit of a mystery here. We are presented with the portrait of a woman who was promising, past tense most definitely intended. She was a med school student, but now a few years later she’s a barista who lives with her parents and gets pass out drunk in dive bars. But why? What happened? Can she break the cycle of her existence?

How far will she go to do so?

Separately from the fact that it’s good, it’s something basically everyone should see. I just wish I believed that it would be as meaningful to, y’know, everyone.

Z (2019)

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Shudder served me up a more bog standard traditional horror this time, and I’m maybe a little disappointed by it? It’s not that I’m itching to become a giallo aficionado or anything. It’s just that horror in the ’70s is so good. If I were the kind of person who got paid for this, I might call it raw so that I could proceed to call it visceral as well, and be proud of myself for the pun. But what I really mean is, that was when the genre first spread its wings. You had a little blood and a lot of screaming and maybe some goofy eastern European accents, or maybe you had rubber-suited “monsters” or perspective shots and miniatures to make every day critters giant-sized. But the ’70s is where the technology improved and at the same time the censorship limits were removed, and the field just exploded in every direction. By 2019, horror movies are often a lot more polished, but they’re also more prudish and maybe a little dead inside, from that sweet sweet studio money.

Which is not to say Z was a bad movie. I was interested in where things were going. Lonely boy makes imaginary friend, only, just how imaginary is he? And that’s an okay premise, even if we’ve for certain sure seen it before. Will the boy turn out to be a bad seed type? Is it a ghost story? Demonic possession? Weird invisible monster?

The climax was pretty goofy, but the acting was fine and it had a jump scare from what I think may be a unique source in the annals of blah blah. Which ain’t nothing!