Milk & Serial: J/K Bro, It’s Just A Prank

I don’t think this is any kind of huge revelation or anything, but some of the best horror films being made right now are not coming out of the studio system. Which makes sense – studios are in the business of making profitable films, and when you’re in the business of making profitable films, you aren’t going to want to take chances. You want product that’s going to bring in an audience. Has this lead to a glut of remakes, reboots, sequels, prequels and (ugh) franchises? Yes. A lot of slick, glossy exercises in jump scares. And there’s an audience for that, but I’m not it. So in an environment where there are actual alternatives to the studio system and consumer-grade cameras and editing software are getting better, you get people willing to take chances and pursue their vision and actually getting it out there in front of eyeballs like mine, and it’s refreshing.

Milk & Serial is a great example of this. It’s a sharp, nasty, unnerving bit of short horror that does a really good job of working within its limitations and making its apparent amateurishness an asset.. And it’s on YouTube, of all places!

The whole thing picks up in medias res, as a dude nicknamed Seven is setting up some kind of a prank as part of his buddy Milk’s birthday party. Milk and Seven have a YouTube channel called “Prank Bros,” where they are…well, two bros, pulling pranks. It’s a pretty involved stunt, using bullet squibs and an actual handgun firing blanks. Seven’s invited some rando to Milk’s birthday party, someone he knows from, well, somewhere else, and Milk isn’t happy about it. While they’re arguing about it, there’s commotion from the living room and they run in just in time to see this rando holding a gun on their friend Naomi. He fires and Naomi goes down. And then, once the initial shock has passed, she pops back up and they all start singing “Happy Birthday.” Those kinds of pranks.

The party is brought down a little when someone knocks on the door to complain about the noise. Nobody recognizes him, and after they placate him he goes away, only to be discovered hanging around outside.

The next day they find him sitting in their living room.

It’s a little more than an hour long, clearly shot on a shoestring budget, and it ends up being really impressive – it doesn’t have much to work with, but it tells a story that doesn’t need much to work well. It’s a story told through the cameras that Milk and Seven use to film their pranks, which are consumer-grade camcorders, there are phone cameras, there are even spy glasses at once point – it creates the feeling that everything these two guys do is recorded to be turned into content. At the same time, it’s pretty clear pretty quick that this isn’t strictly raw footage. So calling it a found-footage film (which is how it’s marketed) sort of does it a disservice. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem too bound to the conceit, and the ways it breaks plausibility are fairly easy to overlook in favor of what it does well. It looks like jittery cinema verite, shot by the kind of frat-bro assholes you’d expect to do a prank show on YouTube, giving it a nastiness and immediacy that fits the narrative perfectly. It really does feel like you’re watching something that’s going to end up being evidence in a manslaughter trial or something similar, and still manages to fit in some nice camerawork, using focus to dramatic effect in a couple of places and benefitting from an abrupt, clipped editing style that jumps between perspectives with a suddenness that communicates tension and unease even at relatively mundane moments.

On top of that, the type of story it is, told the way it is gives it some thematic heft. It is nominally a film about a prank that goes wrong, and it does a good job of keeping the audience on its toes. It’s almost a nesting doll of a story, and setting things up that way means that it’s very much a story about the line between truth and fiction. Where do the pranks stop and real events begin? What even is real in this context? It’s true for both the audience and for characters in the story as well – we’re watching a story that looks just like something you might find on some random YouTube channel, and we’re watching it on YouTube, so there’s a lot of reflexivity to it. Meanwhile, the longer the story goes on, the harder it is for the characters in the film to tell what’s actually happening and what’s a setup for yet another prank until it’s too late. It ends up going some very dark places, and it works in that regard because the performances are strong and naturalistic - which they really need to be for a found-footage movie -  and in at least one case, sincerely unnerving. So you get what looks at least initially like something you might actually find on YouTube (and you’re…watching it on YouTube), you get a sense of how it’s going to unwind…until it doesn’t unwind that way and you realize that something really, really bad is going on.

Some time back, I wrote about a film called I’m Just Fucking With You, which largely squandered the opportunity to be a horror film that digs into the inherent viciousness and cruelty of pranks. This film doesn’t squander it, instead it faces it head-on and then blows right past it in something that reminds me of nothing so much as Creep and the segment “Amateur Night” from V/H/S – it’s persistently uncomfortable in the best way and is a great example of how budget doesn’t dictate quality.

Between the Adams family, analog horror like Local 58, Kane Parsons’ work on The Backrooms, and people like Kyle Edward Ball and the Phillipou brothers getting feature-length films distributed off the back of their own work on YouTube, this is a really good moment for indie horror, and I’m excited to see what comes next.

IMDB entry
Available on YouTube 

Splinter: Mostly Killer, No Filler

I have a hard time with monster movies, because suspension of disbelief is really important for me to get into a horror film, and believable monsters (like, creature-monsters) are tough to pull off on the sort of budget most horror movies get. Cheap effects look cheap, and the cheaper they look the harder it is to suspend disbelief. There are, of course, exceptions - The Thing still gets to me today even though the effects work is dated, and the mediocre prequel - which used reasonably good digital effects - seems bloodless by comparison.

Splinter, then, is very much an exception to the rule. It’s not especially rich thematically, but it IS a crisp, tense siege film with some really smart effects work.

We begin in the expanse of Texas, all scrubland, oil wells and long lonely roads. A gas station attendant tries to stave off the boredom by investigating some noises he hears behind the building. What he finds appears to be a dead dog covered in some kind of spiny growth.

Elsewhere, we get introduced to two couples. Seth, a biology grad student, and his girlfriend Polly are planning to do some camping as a romantic getaway. Except Seth is absolutely the stereotypical brainiac and manages to bungle setting up the tent badly enough that it becomes unusable. There’s some bickering before they agree to get back on the road and find a place to sleep for the night. Dennis and Lacey are on the run from…something, it’s not clear, though it’s probably the cops. Lacey doesn’t look too good. She’s fidgety and strung-out. They’re trying to get to Mexico, but their car (well, the car they’re driving) breaks down and Lacey starts to panic. And along come Seth and Polly. One hitchhiking ruse and armed takeover of the car later, Dennis and Lacey and Seth and Polly are Mexico-bound. Lacey’s mad that Seth isn’t the kind of doctor that can write prescriptions, and Seth and Polly are mad that they’ve been hijacked by armed fugitives.

I don’t know what makes characters in horror movies so prone to hitting animals in the middle of the road, but that’s sure enough what happens and when Dennis gets out to inspect the damage, he notices that the roadkill has some weird spiny growth coming out of it. The car’s undamaged, but they need to gas up, so they stop at the next gas station they find. Oddly, it seems unattended.

And then they find the attendant. Well, what’s left of him, covered in that same spiny growth.

And, as it turns out, there’s something outside as well. So our four protagonists end up barricading themselves in the gas station, while god-knows-what roams around outside, It’s a fairly straightforward setup - there’s the tension of the threat outside, and the tension between the four characters. They can’t leave the gas station, they can’t call for help because Dennis doesn’t want the cops involved, and they can’t stay there forever. So, like any good siege movie, the prime mover here is the need to escape without getting killed. It’s a pretty lean film  - the performances are economic, with each character largely defined by a single characteristic. Seth is nerdy and ineffectual (until the third act), Polly is feisty, Dennis is a criminal, and Lacey is dopesick. That’s sort of it. The dialogue is fine, nothing too caricatured, but none of it is especially nuanced either.

But it doesn’t really pull you out of it either, because the filmmakers handle the classic problem of the monster movie well. Monster movies are tough because you have to show the monster eventually, and when you do, it’s going to be pretty difficult to make it plausible unless you’ve got the best effects houses in the business on the job, and they’re generally not doing horror films. So it’s a balancing act – show it enough to make it a threat, but not so much that the seams show. On that front, this film works admirably, with a mix of makeup, practical effects, sound design, quick cuts, blurry close-ups and tight shots working to both create a plausible, unsettling monster and keep the pace quick and sharp. It’s aware of the limitations but also not especially constrained by them, and the actor(s) playing the monster move with a twitching, jerking physicality that really captures a feeling of a host hijacked by an organism. And just as the makeup alone isn’t doing all the work, to make the creature convincing, the camera tells the story as least as much as the performances and script do. There are a lot of tight and close shots, creating a sense of confinement inside the gas station, and the filmmakers know when to linger on a shot and when to cut away quickly. It’s a very bloody film - splashes and streaks and pools of the stuff - but not an especially gory one. The worst violence happens offscreen and reactions tell us what we need to know. There is the gas station, lit by cold, sickly fluorescents and outside, nothing but yawning dark. To its further credit, it makes very little attempt to explain the threat - there’s a nod to some kind of petrochemical research shenanigans, but just a nod. It’s less important to know how it got here than it is to deal with it being here, and I appreciate that.

There are some pacing issues - it doesn’t waste time (it’s not even an hour and a half long), but even so, the first act feels a little slack compared to the third, when everything comes to a head. It feels like once the four protagonists are brought together, there’s too much time spent on them in the car. That could work, if we were being lead to think this was a hostage film and have the horror elements sprung on us in the second act. That wouldn’t be a bad way to go, but we know right off the bat that there’s a monster out there, so when the other shoe drops in the second act, it feels a little like a foregone conclusion. But it’s a pretty minor quibble.

On balance, this is a really good example of a low-budget horror film that not only doesn’t overstep its limits, but actually makes sort of a strength out of them. It uses its single location well, it’s lean and efficient and has some interesting turns, and the threat never feels implausible or silly. It’s a little slight, but I would really like to see what the filmmakers could so with a richer, more expansive story, because this film convinces me they’ve got the chops for it.

IMDB entry
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From Beyond: Pushing Boundaries

As a teenager, one of my favorite horror movies was Stuart Gordon’s adaptation (if you can call it that) of H.P. Lovecraft’s story “Herbert West: Reanimator.” It was the first in a series of Lovecraft adaptations he would do, and he had a very definite style. You could rely on them to be full of melodramatic acting, effects that were probably about as good as he could manage on the budgets he had, and a weirdly sexual undercurrent that was more unsettling than titillating.

In this respect, From Beyond is sort of the platonic Stuart Gordon Lovecraft adaptation. It doesn’t have the black humor of Re-Animator but it also doesn’t have the pervasive nastiness of Castle Freak. It’s a film about appetites and a hunger for stimulation and experience that gets increasingly more deranged, and the film getting more deranged right along with it.

It is late at night, and Crawford Tillinghast is working in the attic of a large, old house with what appears to be an array of very sophisticated computer equipment. He is assisting Dr. Edward Pretorius with experiments that would allow them to, upon attuning to exactly the right resonant frequency, view things normally invisible to human beings. Generate a magnetic field that vibrates large tuning forks, throw open the doors of perception. That’s the idea at least, and as Tillinghast runs the equipment through its paces, the room begins to fill with a queasy purple light, and suddenly the air is filled with swimming and floating…things. It’s working. He calls out to Dr. Pretorius, who comes into the room, sees their success and promptly turns everything up to 11 against Tillinghast’s protests.

There’s something out there in the ether. Something big. And now it can see them.

Needless to say, it does not go well for Pretorius or Tillinghast, and by the time a neighbor has called the cops to report more weird lights and noises, they arrive to find a distraught Tillinghast trying to flee the house, and Pretorius’ body upstairs in the attic, his head…twisted off. So, of course, Tillinghast ends up locked up in a mental hospital while awaiting trial for Pretorius’ murder, explanations for how he managed to twist another person’s head clean off be damned. Dr. Katherine McMichaels is assigned to evaluate him to determine whether or not he’s competent to stand trial. But McMichaels has a reputation for a degree of brilliance matched only by her disregard for ethics. She’s compelled by Tillinghast’s account of what happened, and want to take him back to the house to see this equipment for herself. She wants to know how it works. So Tillinghast and McMichaels return to the scene of the crime, accompanied by police officer and hearty skeptic “Bubba” Brownlee. It doesn’t go well for them either.

This film is contemporary to the original Hellraiser, and both films are very much about the hunger for sensation and experience. About wanting to feel more, the lengths people will go to accomplish that, and the often terrible costs. Hellraiser explores it through the supernatural, this film uses weird science instead, but BDSM figures prominently in both as a signifier for exploring the outer realms of feeling. As it turns out, Dr. Pretorius had some pretty serious kinks, and it even seems to be the case that this was the whole reason he was pursuing this line of research in the first place. And the more McMichaels works with the resonator, the more she develops the same urges. So this is a film that is very much about appetite. We witness McMichaels develop something almost like an addict’s dependence on the resonator device, one that produces dramatic shifts in her behavior. Brownlee is constantly talking about food, cooking hearty dinners for the three of them. The resonator ultimately produces radical physical change, and radical hungers to accompany them. In one particular scene, these hungers are sated while an alcoholic in the throes of delirium tremens looks on in horror. All examples of the wreckage caused by appetites.

There’s also some examination of the ethical concerns of research and patient care in the margins. Parallels are drawn between the strange science that drives the film and the state of mental health care at the time, in the form of a psychiatrist who holds McMichaels in contempt for her disregard for the well-being of the people upon whom she experiments, but also does not hesitate to dismiss the idea that Tillinghast isn’t culpable for Pretorius’ death, and is more than happy to use equally injurious methods in the name of “treatment.” The real difference between Pretorius’ resonator and ECT, for example, is that one is legally sanctioned and the other isn’t, but they’re both technology that gets into the brain and stirs things up.

Which is a lot for a film that is best described as “lurid.” The resonator paints everything in purples and magentas (the color out of space), one character’s perspective is depicted in smeary thermal-camera vision, the dialogue is as purple as the resonator’s glow, and the acting is done in the broadest of strokes. The effects are reminiscent of those in John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing on a somewhat lower budget, but with a couple of exceptions work pretty well even to modern eyes. It’s all slimy and goopy and full of things that look somewhat human until they erupt into something that isn’t human at all, and even if it’s clear that they’re effects, they still have a grungy power to them. I don’t think any of this is a problem – I actually find it kind of endearing. That might be nostalgia talking, but it’s exactly the intersection of melodramatic, violent and bizarre to which such loving homage was paid in Malignant. It’s bonkers and still has the ability to startle all these years later. There’s more than a little uncomfortably nonconsensual behavior, and the way mental health is discussed hasn’t aged especially well either, but that was pretty par for the course in 1986.

The first time I saw this, I was 17 or so, and expected another Re-Animator, but wasn’t really prepared for what I got. It’s a much more straight-faced affair, with a suitably bleak ending, and there are some moments that are still pretty startling and transgressive today. It’s sort of equal parts Hellraiser, The Thing, and early Cronenberg, which makes it much better than I thought at the time.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
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Be My Cat: Only Make-Believe

I’ve written (at length, possibly exhausting length) about the problems I have with most found-footage films. Long story short, it’s a style of filmmaking that aspires to mimic reality, so when it works it really works, because there’s something viscerally upsetting about watching terrible things happen without the comfort of the distance that conventional moviemaking affords. But a lot of the time, the filmmakers don’t go far enough to make what they’re doing realistic, instead falling back on the usual filmmaking toolkit or lazy workarounds. And those take me out of it immediately. Nothing sucks me in like making it easy to forget I’m watching a movie, and nothing loses me faster than reminding me that no, I’m just watching a movie.

Be My Cat (subtitled A Film For Anne) does a pretty nice job of playing to the strengths of the style, and the result is mounting dread, a story of obsession and the blurring of performance and reality.

The film opens with a title card indicating that the footage was assembled from 25 hours’ worth of raw footage found at the “Be My Cat” crime scene. Understated, straight to the point. The little detail about there being 25 hours of raw footage is never elaborated upon, it just sort of hangs there, an unsettling little detail. I like that. It immediately cuts to Adrian. He’s a filmmaker in Romania, and he appears to be recording a pitch, directed at actual real-life actress Anne Hathaway. He wants to make a film with Anne.

A film about a Romanian filmmaker who is obsessed with an American actress.

We know from the title card that this isn’t going to end well, but it isn’t immediately apparent how. At first Adrian just seems kind of goofy and awkward, the kind of person whose dreams so far outstrip the possibilities available to them that you sort of want to laugh at him, but that doesn’t last very long. He engages in constant, almost insistent monologuing, punctuated by the nervous, reflexive giggle of an adolescent boy seeing porn for the first time. It’s easy to imagine getting stuck talking to him at a party and being unable to extricate yourself as he prattles on and on with no interest in letting you get a word in. And the more he talks, the more the cracks start to show. We learn that he was bullied in childhood to the point of agoraphobia, and that he developed a fixation on Anne Hathaway as Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises, a fixation that calcifies into seeing both girls and cats as innocent and sweet and cute, not like nasty, aggressive boys and dogs. He still lives with his mother because it’s difficult for him to leave the house for any amount of time, let alone leave town. He’s troubled, seriously troubled, and it isn’t too long before it becomes apparent that his grip on reality is tenuous. 

So this isn’t a film with any dramatic twists or anything - you pretty much know what you’re getting right off the bat, it’s just a matter of how long it’s going to take Adrian to crack and how bad the damage is going to be when it does. It works as well as it does because it’s presented as found-footage, and as found-footage goes, the execution is solid. It looks like it really was all shot on the same camera (and might very well have been), the sound isn’t perfect, the editing is choppy and the performances all emerge from improvisation so there’s a real naturalism to it. There’s background noise and passers-by, not everything is always captured neatly in frame, there are plenty of shots of the camera pointed at the sidewalk, forgotten in the midst of an argument. It feels homemade and the locations are all grubby hostels and apartment buildings in Eastern Europe. It is easy to forget, moment to moment, that you’re just watching a movie.

Even when you’re aware that you’re watching a movie, it’ s likely because a large part of this film is examining the blurred line between image and reality. Everyone uses their real names or variations on them, so we’re watching a Romanian filmmaker named Adrian make a film about a Romanian filmmaker named Adrian who is obsessed with an American actress who is himself making a film about a filmmaker who is obsessed with an American actress. And throughout the film, the character of Adrian displays a confusion between fiction and reality fueled, it seems, by the idea that fiction is much more comforting. There’s a line in The Blair Witch Project about how things don’t seem so bad when you’re looking at it through the viewfinder of a camera, and that’s a big part of the text here. The camera is a distancing tool, and it seems like that’s what Adrian is doing, at least initially. He’s making a film to convince Anne Hathaway to come to Romania to star in a film that he wants to make about a filmmaker who is obsessed with an actress, and he’s definitely working out his obsessions through the filmmaking process, using the fiction that this is a fiction, that it’s all make-believe, in order to put some distance between himself and the violence that results from his obsessions and his tangled, thorny past. It’s clear to the audience from early in that the actresses he hires to play the role of Anne are not in safe hands, beginning with impossible acting demands, moving on to an insistence that things not look fake, which becomes a need for the actresses to be “transformed” when they are not perfect enough. It’s my understanding that part of the progression that serial killers often go through is rehearsal of their fantasies, as a midpoint between fantasizing and acting on those fantasies. They’re working up the courage to do it. And that’s what it feels like we’re watching - we’re watching someone taking the first steps toward acting on their fantasy, and justifying it by telling themselves that it’s not them, it’s a character. Not that it matters to his victims.

In some ways, it’s sort of a less-cartoony Sorgoi Prakov, and though it doesn’t reach the heights of feral lunacy that film does, I think it’s the better film, because it is more believable. Adrian doesn’t really go full maniac at any point, he’s the same giggly, oddly insistent nobody throughout, evoking pity and irritation and horror in equal measure. It drags a little at the very end, but I think it comes good with an ambiguous ending that denies us anything neat and tidy, leaving us with the feeling that the film didn’t so much end as we were shut out of anything that came next, and that what seemed like a breakthrough for Adrian could be anything but. It’s an intelligent film that works well within the limits that found-footage prescribes.

IMDB entry

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The Last Broadcast: Who Wore It Better?

I’m going to start talking about this movie by talking about a different movie. When The Blair Witch Project came out in 1999, it was something different. The use of the Internet to create a myth ahead of the movie and suggest that three people had actually gone missing was a big part of this, but ultimately it was the film’s conceit - that what the audience was seeing was the recovered raw footage shot by three film students in the days leading up to their disappearance. This was not what horror in the 1990s looked like, and it blew up big.

And, as is often the case, the success of The Blair Witch Project was attended by controversy, as people came out of the woodwork to claim that it plagiarized The Last Broadcast, which was, these critics would say, the real first found-footage horror film. So, as picky as I am about found-footage horror, I figured I should watch this at the very least as a historical artifact. And you know what? The claims are baseless. The Last Broadcast is barely a found-footage film. And even if it were first, The Blair Witch Project is significantly better. More to the point, The Last Broadcast is incoherent, amateurish to the point of ineptitude, and not so much poorly paced as not paced at all. 

On December 15th,1995, four men - Steven Avkast and Locus Wheeler, hosts of the cable-access show Fact or Fiction, Rein Clackin, expert in paranormal sound recording, and Jim Suerd, their guide, went into the Pine Barrens of New Jersey to investigate the legend of the Jersey Devil. Then, on December 19th, Jim Suerd comes staggering out of the woods, miles away from where they started, and calls 911 because the rest of them are missing. 

Two days later, the bodies of Wheeler and Clackin are found. Avkast is never seen again.

In the wake of these deaths, a documentary filmmaker named David Leigh has decided to make a film about the case and Suerd’s subsequent murder trial. The film is presented as that documentary, complete with talking-head interviews and examination of both archival footage and footage shot by the group in the Pine Barrens. Before getting into the film itself, I want to look at the idea that the filmmakers who made The Blair Witch Project plagiarized this film. It’s important to note that neither group of filmmakers ever dignified the idea - this seems, in retrospect, like a collective eruption of know-it-alls attempting to maybe gatekeep low-budget horror, I guess? Regardless of motivation, it’s a groundless assertion. The Blair Witch Project was already in pre-production by the time The Last Broadcast was released, The Last Broadcast isn’t really a found-footage film (arguably the first found-footage horror film is Cannibal Holocaust, made years earlier), and the only thing the two films have in common is “group of people who have no business being in the woods go into the woods and meet a bad end.” By that criterion, both films ripped off Deliverance. 

But again, the whole thing is irrelevant because as it stands, even if it were true, the people who made The Blair Witch Project made a far superior film by pretty much every metric. Or, to be less gentle about it, this is not a well-made film. It’s let down by its production design, its writing, and its pacing.

It's pretty clear that the entire production is a homebrew affair. That’s not an indictment in and of itself, I’ve seen any number of really good horror films made on a shoestring budget, and this was filmed for, like $900. That is, even by mid-90s standards, insanely cheap. But…it looks it, at every step. Part of doing something well on a small budget is knowing and working around your limitations. A film that is ostensibly the last footage of a bunch of dudes who go into the Pine Barrens to look for the Jersey Devil? That’s doable for not a lot of money. So it’s baffling as to why the filmmakers chose to make the film a mockumentary with only a smattering of found-footage set in the woods. None of the mockumentary stuff is believable. It works for the protagonists’ cable-access show, which is just as cheap and amateur hour as you’d expect, but when the whole film exists at that level, it looks like you’re just watching someone’s attempt to approximate something outside their grasp. Maybe two of the interior sets (that aren’t explicitly someone’s residence) are believable. A woman tasked with restoring some highly-damaged videotape has a “studio” in what appears to be a gutted or under-construction building, complete with plastic tarps everywhere. Jim Suerd’s “child psychologist” (who, against all ethical guidelines, is happy to talk about client sessions to a documentary film crew) is introduced…examining a dog in what appears to be a veterinarian’s office. Which suggests to me that he is, in fact, a veterinarian, not a child psychologist. This entire production is being directed by a former soap opera director (whose existence in the story is never really justified), and he appears to live in a single room with random post-it notes studding the wall behind him. Maybe he’s seriously down on his luck, but it kind of screams “wellness check.” A law enforcement officer from the county sheriff’s department wears an ATF shirt. Which is, well, a federal agency, and not a country sheriff’s department. Although he does have a hat with “Baroake County Sheriff’s Department” on it in what appear to be iron-on letters.

It’s not just that it looks cheap, it’s also that the filmmakers didn’t do the most basic due diligence on the elements of their story either. Forensic evidence is described as circumstantial evidence. IRC messages are apparently impossible to trace despite IP addresses being something even the most bottom-feeding script kiddie could access back then. On the other hand, their broadcast is described as being a “live Internet cable broadcast” in an era before livestreaming existed at all and video compression was still extremely primitive. All kinds of wireless Internet access tech that’s easily accessible today is handwaved into existence before the existence of commercial broadband or wireless Internet access. They’ve just got a bunch of desktop computers and video and audio gear set up in the middle of the woods under a plastic tarp without even a generator. Believability and realism are paramount for mockumentaries and found-footage films to work and nothing about this is believable or realistic in the slightest.

As poor as the attention to production detail is, the writing is even worse. Human beings simply do not talk like this. Some example dialogue:

“The magnifying glass of the prosecution’s microscope.” 

“We have found bodies. We don’t know who they are or how many we have found.” 

“I had heard of the Fact or Fiction murders. They were big news for a period of one year, and then like so many things in today’s fast-paced world, were forgotten.” 

“Our job is to eliminate suspects based on the evidence that we sift through and that we gather. And as we sifted through and gathered this evidence there was only one suspect left at the end.” 

“The tapes show a group of men going through a wide range of emotions.” 

This isn’t just stagey, artificially expository language. This is some Ed Wood shit. It makes sense for some of the characters to be inarticulate, but everyone talks this way. 

On top of all of this, the story and packing are clumsy and incoherent. The most violent thing that happens on screen (for most of the film) is a shove and someone half-yelling “I’ll see you at camp, man!” and this is treated as evidence that someone is a homicidal maniac. It’s barely a found-footage film, spending its entire first act in documentary mode setting up the whole situation and making a big deal about the footage they shot, only for us to be shown a few snatches of footage shot in the Pine Barrens, all of it too noisy and degraded to really be understandable (we get two people stumbling on a patch of blood, and some awkward conversation between the four of them, that’s about it) which is a fair amount of buildup for nothing. The third act bounces between the ostensible restoration of the rest of the footage (which even restored is too garbled to make sense of) and a rambling tangent about the nature of truth and how the real Jersey Devil is the media or something, climaxing in an utterly ridiculous non-sequitur of an ending that goes on far too long. There’s a reason this is consigned to historical curiosity.

IMDB entry

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The Black Phone: Escape Room

Maybe it makes me kind of a film snob (okay, it definitely makes me kind of a film snob), but I have general aversion to big-budget, mass-marketed horror films. Which isn’t to say that all indie horror is good (far from it) or that films with large budgets are all bad, but films with a certain level of star power, coming from certain directors or distributors, getting a certain amount of publicity push, tend to get my hackles up. In general, I don’t like franchising and I don’t like films that insult their audience’s intelligence. And since I think of horror as a valuable way to tell stories that can push buttons, take us places we wouldn’t otherwise go, I like those things even less in horror film. 

So I gotta say, I went into The Black Phone with reservations. It was produced by Blumhouse, who have, to my mind, a mixed track record - they’ve put out some reasonably good (or at least non-mainstream) stuff, but also a lot of the slick, glossy dreck that gets franchised and spun off to death. Multiplex thrill rides. The director made Sinister, a film that had a lot going for it right up to the point that it totally derailed in the name of franchisability. So it didn’t really look promising. The premise didn’t help either, though we’ll get to that.

But on top of my film snobbery, I have a perverse streak. And so the more I saw ads for this thing come up, the more I simultaneously though “ugh, no thanks” and “you know, I really should check this out to see if it’s bad as I think it’s going to be.” Like, I don’t especially like to shit on films, even though I recognize that’s some of my most animated writing, but sometimes I feel the urge to see if my prejudices bear out, or if they’re just prejudices.

And in this case, well, it’s a little of column A and a little of column B. There are things about it which I deeply dislike and I think drag it down, but there are also some real strengths that kept me from dismissing it entirely.

It’s 1978, and we’re in Denver, Colorado. We meet Finney, and his sister Gwen. They’re trying very hard not to make any noise around their dad. He works the night shift, and when he’s not working the night shift, he’s deep into his vodka and orange juice. So every day is walking on eggshells, and coordinating whose turn it is to take care of him. On top of that, Finney gets bullied a lot. Things aren’t easy for them, and haven’t been since their mother passed away. Things are tense at home, and things are tense at school, especially since kids started disappearing. Police have no leads, just black balloons at the site of some of the disappearances. And then one day, walking home, Finney stops to help a man who drops some groceries outside his van. 

One flourish of black balloons, and Finney wakes up in a soundproof basement.

So, the premise here is, well, kind of high-concept. There are a number of moving parts here. You’ve got this mysterious masked figure who’s been abducting adolescent boys from around north Denver, boys who vanish without a trace, never to be seen again. You’ve also got an old rotary phone in Finney’s basement prison, one that isn’t connected to anything, but rings anyway (and there are…voices…on the other end). And Gwen is…maybe psychic? That sort of feels like a lot to buy into all at once. This was another big part of my skepticism going in. But honestly, it ends up being less of a problem than I thought it would be. Oh, sure, when I stop to think closely about it, it all threatens to fall apart (police are not getting a warrant based on a little girl’s dreams), but in the moment it was only slightly distracting. 

I think, overall, the film’s biggest problem is probably the writing, especially with the kids, of which there are a number. As someone who was actually a kid in the period this movie takes place, I don’t remember anyone actually talking like this. It all sounds very much like dialogue,, and the actors playing the kids have trouble selling it, so it all feels very artificial. This is less of an issue with the adult dialogue, and it becomes less of a problem overall once Finney’s been abducted, but it’s still there and makes it harder to really get into the film. You’re being constantly reminded that this is just a movie. The performances range from adequate to excellent, and if they suffer it’s mostly from the aforementioned dialogue. But even apart from its artificiality, there’s also a tendency to cram in exposition or overexplain. Which is odd, because there are some places where it uses flashback effectively, so a scene where a character just says a whole bunch of stuff to another character that is clearly meant for the audience (because the person they’re talking to already knows all of it), it stands out even more. 

Again, it’s just a movie. If anything, it suggests that the filmmakers thought the audience wouldn’t be able to piece it together on their own. Oh, was that too hard to follow? Here, I’ll tell you what you just saw, and I’ll speak slowly and use small words. Fuck that. It’s also hard to get invested because in some ways, you have a pretty good idea of what the broad strokes are going to be (of course Finney’s going to get abducted, of course he’ll spend most of the movie trying to escape and failing) and the problem is that there aren’t really any surprises in that regard. There’s no attempt to twist or subvert our expectations, so at its worst, it sort of becomes an exercise in waiting for the climax (which itself throws in an unnecessarily convoluted twist that stops the momentum short). I kept waiting for the story to surprise me, and it didn’t, at least not until the climax. But it wasn’t really a jaw-dropper, more of a “oh, that’s kind of a cool way to handle it.”

So yes, it had a lot of weaknesses. But like I said at the start, I can’t dismiss it outright because it does some things very well. It gets the period details pretty right in ways that feel realistic and unfussy. It doesn’t go out of its way to call attention to it taking place in the 1970s. It looks right and feels right in that regard. I’d have to say that generally, the visuals are a real strength of this film. It takes place in a world that feels sort of brown and overcast (the 70s did have a lot of wood paneling), and there are some really nice moments of visual flair - abductions told in rapid fadeouts, well-placed flashbacks that sometimes turn into dream-logic insights, not dissimilar to moments in Audition, which is not a comparison I thought I’d be making. Lighting (especially in Finney’s interactions with the abductor) is on point, and Finney’s conversations on the titular phone are staged almost theatrically in a way that embodies the disembodied voices to good effect.  So it looks good and even if the writing and performance is obvious, the cinematic storytelling isn’t. And however ridiculous the things people say to each other, the characters don’t themselves feel ridiculous. This is especially important concerning the abductor, who doesn’t play like a monster or a villain so much as a deeply troubled, stunted man who is constantly reliving some awful psychodrama. And the climax has sort of a puzzle or escape room feel to it that wasn’t obvious to me at all ahead of time, so when it all came together it felt nice to see how all of these disparate things had a purpose that wasn’t obvious from jump. But then the end ran too long because the filmmakers threw in a totally superfluous twist right at the end, one that I suspect created the need for the scene that followed it, where a character literally explains what we just saw. 

And this is the problem with mass-market horror, I think. On the one hand, you want to make a good film, but  on the other hand, you need to make a film that’s going to put enough butts in seats to generate a profit, and that can mean making a film for people who don’t really appreciate nuance, or even pay attention. So everything becomes kind of loud, kind of obvious. I had the same problem with the director’s previous film - it started strong and then crashed in the third act with the introduction of elements that were clearly meant to make it into a franchise. And here, as then, we have what could have been a really good horror film undone by the need to make it justify its budget. I wish I were wrong sometimes, and this is one of those times.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

We’re All Going To The World’s Fair: Whoever’s Watching

Scary movies about malevolent technology can be a risky proposition. Something that seems absolutely contemporary when it comes out can feel hilariously dated maybe a year or two later, and this is especially true of anything having to do with the Internet. If the writer or director isn’t familiar with Internet culture, it becomes very apparent very quickly and then you’re just watching it for the irony because it’s almost impossible to take seriously.

So I think that We’re All Going To The World’s Fair works as well as it does because it’s not a film that posits the Internet as some kind of malevolent entity as much as it is just a fact of everyday life, but one with very specific consequences. It’s not a film about technology, it’s a film about the effect of technology on people. It’s a film about loneliness and the difficulties of connection in an age of social media, draped in the trappings of a horror film.

It opens on a teenage girl’s bedroom. Not an especially unusual one - it’s cozy, decorated with fairy lights, tidy but not overly so. And very quickly, we realize our point of view is this girl’s webcam. Her name is Casey, and she’s making a video, possibly to share on YouTube. She’s looking at us, and we’re looking back at her, except she’s not really looking at us, she’s looking at an audience, the audience she assumes will be watching this. She tells us (or rather, whoever will be watching) that she’s going to take “the World’s Fair Challenge.” This involves drawing a small amount of blood and repeating over and over “I want to go to the world’s fair, I want to go to the world’s fair.” See, when you do this, you become part of a community centered around all of the people who have taken this challenge, and begin experiencing strange transformations shortly afterward. They share videos documenting their transformations and experiences. But it’s okay, she’s got her stuffed lemur Poe to keep her safe through whatever happens next.

And soon enough, she begins to feel alienated, separated from her body. Like something else is beginning to inhabit it, and all she can do is watch.

The specifics are a little murky here, it’s described as “an online horror game,” but it isn’t really presented as such - it’s closer to something between a TikTok challenge, an ARG, and urban legends as old as Bloody Mary and as relatively recent as Ben Drowned. Possibly it’s a collective form of storytelling. But this is really nitpicking, because it’s really just the pretext for everything that comes after. This film takes place in a world that seems profoundly empty. It’s a world of houses separated by wide swaths of land, highways passing through stretches of strip malls and the shells of abandoned big-box stores, cars speeding by on their way to someplace else, anyplace else. Casey wanders this bleak landscape, apparently unburdened by school or friends. Her father exists only as a voice shouting angrily from offscreen and as a set of headlights pulling up into the driveway as Casey finishes the dinner she made for herself, seated alone at a dining-room table. Her life is on her computer, where she makes videos that she uploads for people to respond to, as she responds to their videos. It’s easy to imagine this being a world of people inside, alone, staring into glowing screens, looking for some kind of contact. In the very rare instance that there’s more than one person in a frame, the other is inevitably obscured - a shadowy figure walking by in the background, or a crowd of people seen only as a faceless blur. In this world, Casey is an island, unmoored and adrift.

Really, it’s a story about lonely people broadcasting their experiences to whoever’s watching, a careful look at the dissonant confluence of intimacy and performance that is social media. Casey’s videos catch the attention of someone who runs a channel about the challenge, what he refers to as “endgame-level content,” and their conversations are the only instances we have of Casey actually talking to another human being. In lesser hands, this would be a simple Internet-predator story, the challenge being some kind of snare for unwitting minors. But, thank goodness, it’s nothing that obvious or cliched. It really does seem like Casey is experiencing some kind of transformation, something like possession. But it also seems like she’s struggling with feelings that maybe she can’t even really articulate, a sense of loss for something she doesn’t know she’s missing. So the question becomes whether we’re watching her being slowly consumed by some kind of supernatural force, or if she’s an isolated, unstable girl experiencing some kind of catharsis. Is this really happening to her? I mean, something is definitely happening to her, but what? How much of this is real, and how much is performance? How much of Casey is Casey, and how much of it is the game? How much of any of us is real, and how much is performance?

I know that I’m describing in a way that makes it sound pretty cerebral, and that’s because it is. And maybe that’s the kiss of death to a certain kind of horror fan who’d sum it up as “dumb” and “boring” and “slow.” But if they can’t give themselves over to a story, can’t empathize with the characters, and just sit there like a baby bird, waiting to have jump-scares and “brutal kills” regurgitated into their waiting eye-mouths, that’s their fucking problem. There are definitely some very tense, uncomfortable moments of psychological horror, even some body horror, and there’s a real undercurrent of dread throughout. Whatever the reason, it’s clear Casey isn’t safe. But more than anything else it inhabits the world we live in, locates the uneasiness in the way anyone can share themselves with anyone else who’s tuning in without any guarantee of reciprocity or actual connection. You cast these bottles with messages in them out into the dark, and you have no idea who’s reading them, or if anyone is. There’s horror in that.

In some ways it feels like a film that’s going to hit hardest for a particular age range, one of which I am a part - people old enough to remember a time before the Internet, especially as it is today, but young enough to have been an active participant in its earliest years, familiar with those liminal forms of intimacy that could define so much of early Internet culture in a way that feels like just another part of the landscape today. It’s not as harrowing or bleak as, say, Downloading Nancy, but it occupies some of the same space - how much do we really know about each other, what is the difference between knowing someone online and knowing them in real life, what is performance and what is identity when the line between them is so blurred. It’s not scary in the jump-out-and-yell-“boo” sense, but it’s certainly unsettling at points and deeply haunting and melancholy in its end.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon 

It, Chapter Two: Second Verse, Same As The First, A Little Bit Louder And A Little Bit Worse

Two-part horror movies are a rarity. I don’t mean a movie and its sequel, in horror those are a dime a dozen, not including prequels, reboots, remakes, “re-imaginings,” and every other dead horse you could beat into the ground, well-assured it would rise from the grave in a fortnight. No, I mean a story so big that it gets told across two movies as an ongoing narrative. That’s far more common in science fiction or superhero films.

And that really is a big part of the problem with It, Chapter Two. It’s got more of the characteristics of those sorts of films than it does horror. I talked about this in my write-up of It, Chapter One, the way that blockbuster elements work against horror’s strengths. But Chapter One had its moments, and Chapter Two is just a mess. It manages to take all of the weaknesses of the first film and turn them up, magnifying them in every direction. And I think a lot of it is due to the requirements of big-budget, major-studio blockbuster films and a need to adhere to the source text even when it doesn’t really serve the film.

Picking up 27 years after the end of It, Chapter One, we return to a Derry that hasn’t changed much in all this time. Same picturesque park in the town center, same annual fair, and the same lurking rot and seething undercurrent of violence that’s been there since the town’s inception. In short order, we’re introduced to a young couple, the intolerant bullies who harass them, and then beatings, and a death. There is still something dark at Derry’s heart, and it’s waking up again. Of the seven kids who stopped its (or Its) predations back in 1989, only one stayed in Derry. Mike Hanlon works at the Derry library, lives upstairs from the library, and has spent the last 27 years researching the town’s history and looking for a way to stop the cycle for good. And when his police radio scanner goes off, reporting the horrible, senseless death that’ s just taken place, Mike goes to check out the scene…

…where he finds a traumatized young man muttering about a clown, and COME HOME scrawled on an underpass in blood.

So yes, the other six people responsible for shutting It down back in the summer of 1989 have to return to Derry to finish things once and for all. All the ones who’ve left Derry have done quite well for themselves. Richie Tozier’s a high-profile stand-up comedian, Eddie Kapsbrak does well for himself as a risk analyst, Bill Dembrough is an author whose books get made into films, Beverly Marsh is a well-known fashion designer, Ben Hanscom is a successful architect, and Stan Uris…well, Stan doesn’t take the news that It’s back up and around very well. He doesn’t make it back to Derry. Their time away has made them forgetful, has put the events of that summer in the rear-view mirror, to the point that Mike has to remind all of them who he is and what happened back then. Mike never left, so Mike never forgot. It’s sort of how adulthood gives us a chance to leave the horrors of our childhood behind. But Mike, as one of the few Black children in Derry, never had that luxury.

But the longer they’re in Derry, the more things come back to them, The things that happened, the terrors they faced, the friendship forged in shared adversity. They wonder how they could have ever forgotten each other. And soon enough there are reminders - dark, terrible reminders - of what brought them back, and so Mike tells them that his research has uncovered a ritual that might end the threat for good. So after establishing the adult versions of all of the characters and getting them all back to Derry, the film sort of shifts into sort of a fetch-quest mode where each of them has to retrieve something for the ritual, along with flashbacks to the rest of that summer throughout. The interposition of the present and past is mostly pulled off skillfully, and there’s potential for some interesting stuff about the things we remember and the things we wished we could forget, especially relevant to people whose childhoods were marked by bullying, trauma and abuse. They pretty much have to go home again and to varyingly literal degrees go right back into those places that held such horror for them then. But it’s just potential because you only get glimpses of it, fitfully, around all of the other stuff the film is trying to do.

And that’s a big problem with the film - it’s trying to do so much in the time it has that none of it gets the attention it needs. Like Chapter One, it’s really long (just shy of three fucking hours) but it still manages to feel cursory. There’s a lot that could be explored here - the idea that Derry was a corrupted place from its very start, something black and rotten at its heart, visible between the lines in the town’s history, the way that many of the protagonists sort of brought their trauma and dysfunction with them into adulthood. Eddie’s wife is just as smothering and encouraging of his hypochondriasis as his mother was, Beverly has an abusive, controlling husband, and Richie has pretty much just turned the humor he used as a defense mechanism into a career. There’s definitely the idea that no matter where you go, there you are, but all of it is just briefly alluded to before moving on to the next set piece. Secondary characters turn up and then are sort of gone with little fanfare in either direction, there’s little character development (except for Richie, who was always the most opaque of the group and here we get some hints at why that might be the case) and there are moments of real dread, but they’re few and far between. The film needs restraint, and there’s certainly evidence dotted throughout that the filmmakers are capable of it, but instead we get lots of slam-bang moments with frenetic scoring and lots of yelling. The climax is especially guilty of this, a drawn-out barrage of special effects and running around and screaming that takes entirely too long to get where it’s going, without any real tension. It’s just loud.

Like the first film, there’s still a good horror story in here somewhere. This film also has its surprisingly vicious moments (the damn film opens with a hate crime, for pity’s sake), but the comic elements are also ratcheted up considerably - the adult Richie wisecracks just as much as he did as a kid (though now it’s more funny than grating) even at what are supposed to be tense moments, and it tends to kill the mood. And again, there’s some nice attention to detail and willingness to let creepy things sort of happen in the background, but even more than the first film these moments ae drowned out by thick layers of CG creature effects which are often more cartoony than anything else, draining any ounce of subtlety out of it. So it’s not just loud, it’s also even more tonally jarring than the first film, and the whole thing isn’t so much paced as it is just one thing after another. It feels much less like a story and much more like an assemblage of scenes.

I think another part of the problem is that with any popular adaptation, there’s going to be the sense that certain things “need” to be included, and so instead of an organically developing story you just get a bunch of “that part where” moments chained together, whether they make sense or not, whether they make for a good narrative flow or not. And on top of that, there are things that work absolutely well in the novel that just look silly on screen, though this and the previous film don’t suffer so much from King’s very specific authorial voice making everything sound stilted. It’s very much a matter of, “you can write this stuff, but I sure can’t say it.” It happens a little here and there, but the much larger problem is that everything that would make this good horror is sacrificed for everything that the film is expected to be, and by the big-budget major-studio tendency to turn horror films into action films played in a different key. 

The director has talked about doing a massive supercut of both chapters, and if it were handled episodically, that would be a good start, but then there’s all the ropy CG and the possibility that no, the interesting, personal stuff wouldn’t actually get explore much, so at this point I think all I can be is disappointed. So far, adaptations of King’s longer epic works have suffered in translation, and this is no exception, unfortunately.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

It, Chapter One: One Crazy Summer

There’s something about the term “blockbuster horror” that rankles me. I try not to be a film snob and I have enjoyed my share of blockbuster movies, but I just don’t know if multiplex bombast really plays all that well with horror. Mass-appeal horror films tend to play it safe, rely on easy scares and well-worn cliches. It’s less about horror than just startling people.

But here’s the thing - it’s really difficult to adapt the work of Stephen King, perhaps the most monolithic writer in the genre over the last several decades, and not bring blockbuster expectations to the table. He’s easily the most prolific writer in the genre and easily the most successful. He’s pretty much an institution at this point. People who don’t like horror like his stuff. So an adaptation of one of his most popular books is going to be a big production. And on top of that, King is one of those rare writers in horror who writes absolute epics - sprawling stories that cover miles and years. So an adaptation of one of his most popular epic novels is going to be an even bigger production. And honestly, when it comes to film, I think “big” works against horror in a way that it doesn’t for other types of film.

And so this is the primary problem with It, Chapter One. It is a big story, and it covers a lot of ground, and although it definitely is less compromising than I would have expected, it’s also sort of three movies at once, and it suffers in places as a result.

It’s a rainy day in the Maine town of Derry, and Bill Dembrough, laid up in bed sick, is making a paper boat for his little brother George to take out and sail in the streams made by the rainstorm. He writes “SS Georgie” on it, waterproofs it with wax. George goes out into the rain to try out his new boat, and no sooner does it set sail than it gets washed into a storm drain. Despondent, George kneels down to see if he can get it back, but there’s something there in the storm drain. Something that has his boat. And then there is blood, and screaming, and that is the last we see of George Dembrough alive.

There is, and always has been, something very wrong with Derry.

The film really is kind of a mixed bag - like the King adaptation Doctor Sleep, it really falls somewhere between horror and dark fantasy, and where that film had some genuinely unnerving moments early on before ultimately settling into something more of a fantasy adventure story (albeit one set around the location from The Shining, which does add its own undercurrent for fans of that adaptation), this one suffers more from tonal shifts that don’t quite reach jarring, but make it difficult for the film to really settle into a groove. At some points, it’s a coming-of-age story similar to something like Stand By Me, following a group of friends old and new as they try to navigate the perils of pre-adolescence. At others, it’s a reasonably understated examination of the real-life fears that accompany childhood, especially among kids doomed to be outsiders, and then at others it’s a more straightforward supernatural horror film. It doesn’t have the same kind of sprawl that Doctor Sleep did, being set in one place over the course of a single summer, but it does feel like it would have worked better as a more personal, intimate story. It’s not that it does anything really badly, but there’s so much that even with a running time well over two hours, nothing really gets explored in depth. It’s sort of one thing, then on to the next.

At its heart, it’s a story about what it’s like to be a kid in a world where there are dangers of one sort or another all around you. All of the protagonists are outsiders in one way or another. Bill has a stutter, Ben Hanscom is overweight and the new kid in town, Mike Hanlon appears to be one of the only Black people in Derry, Stan Uris is one of the few Jewish kids in Derry. Eddie Kapsbrak has asthma and an extremely overprotective mother, Richie Tozier is scrawny and spectacularly nearsighted, and he compensates for his insecurity by using humor as a defense, and Beverly Marsh is being abused by her father and has somehow garnered a reputation for being “easy.” These are kids with all the usual kid worries, but also all the worries of any kid who’s ever been singled out as a target, or victim, or just as Other. And on top of that, they are witnessing horrors all around them in their hometown, horrors to which the town’s adults seem almost willfully blind. The moments where we see what they have to deal with, how few places they have where they really feel safe, work. The occasional idyllic moments they have, just hanging out and shooting the shit or swimming at the quarry., really do feel like a momentary respite from the dread that follows them around all the time in the form of bullies and the dread facing them at home. 

And they’re all depicted pretty realistically, for better or worse. It’s easy to make child characters into cartoons, but for the most part they feel like regular kids. That said, it does mean that Eddie, with his finely honed hypochondriasis, is kind of defined almost entirely by that at the start of the film, and Richie, easily the most insecure of the bunch, is a nonstop fountain of wisecracks and mom jokes and the kind of desperate overcompensation that you only get when you’re aware of just how awkward you really are. And honestly, he’s pretty grating all the way through. But I also knew kids like this. Fuck, I was a kid like this. It doesn’t make it any easier to sit through (fun drinking game: take a shot anytime someone says “shut up, Richie,” and then die of alcohol poisoning), but it does ring true to life. These are kids who walk through their days like they are minefields, and that comes across very well.

The supernatural stuff is more of a mixed bag, though, mostly in the execution. There are lots of great little details and bits of business happening in the background, content to let you notice them without calling attention to themselves, and there are moments that are genuinely nasty, like Stranger Things with the gloves taken off. For a film that could easily turn into some kind of wistful nostalgia trip with some ghosts, it does not fuck around. But over time it leans a little too much into creature effects and as is often the case, the more the creature is on screen, the less frightening it becomes and the more it just feels like you’re looking at special effects. I think this is endemic to pretty much any big-budget major-studio horror film - it ends up being kind of as much of a spectacle film as something like Jurassic Park or one of the eighteen million Marvel Universe film-type products coming out in any given week. And those aren’t really scary, they’re ultimately just action films using a different vocabulary and the film finally sort of gives in to this in the third act, all hectic yelling and action when a defter touch is needed.

Again, a lot rides on the kids at the center of the film and fortunately, they aren’t saints. They get angry at each other and don’t want to do the right thing and that helps give the film some gravity, but the further away it gets from the very specific, personal horrors of this cursed town, the effects it has on the adults, and the nightmares lurking behind any doorway and the closer it gets to CG effects pieces and big showdowns, the less effective it is. I didn’t feel like my time was wasted by any means, but I do feel like the popularity of the story (and of King as an author) gets in the way - it’s not enough to make a solid scary movie, it has to please the fans (and the author, who has been critical of adaptation in the past the further they stray from his text) and bring in big enough crowds to justify the budget needed to bring the story to life. And that’s not where horror does its best work, in big flashy hero moments. It does its best work in dark corners and behind the door nobody opens and in the house that has been abandoned for decades and the things in the between the lines of a house’s history. There’s still Chapter 2 to go, but honestly, I think this would have probably worked better as a limited-run series.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

Tourist Trap: Uncanny

The “uncanny valley” refers to the idea that after a certain point, an approximation of human features begins to elicit uneasiness and revulsion - things below this point don’t have this effect because they’re recognizably non-human, and things above this point are effectively indistinguishable from human, but there’s a point where something looks human enough that you want to process it as human, but it’s non-human enough that you recognize that you shouldn’t, and this is perceptually queasy. The word “uncanny” itself can be defined as “mysterious, arousing superstitious dread, uncomfortably strange.”

And Tourist Trap, at its best, works both of these angles. It’s an oddity from the days before the rules of slasher films were really codified, and though it’s not especially nuanced, fits a few different ideas together awkwardly and only works in fits and starts, it’s an interesting take on the genre and not really like anything else I’ve seen.

We start off with a guy rolling a tire down a dirt road (like you do), arriving at a gas station. He goes inside, but there’s no attendant, and it’s clearly been deserted for some time. He goes poking around the back, looking for someone to assist him, but only finds a small room with a bed and what appears to be someone sleeping. When he tries to wake them, it becomes clear that it’s a mannequin that’s been posed in the bed. And, well, that’s not weird at all. And then the mannequin starts to move, things get lethally weird, and the young man dies before we can even learn his name.

His name, as it turns out, is (or was) Woody, and he was trying to get air for a spare tire because he and his friends Jerry, Molly, Eileen and Becky got a flat tire while they were driving through a remote stretch of what appears to be southern California. The rest of the gang wonders what’s taking Woody so long, and slap the temporary tire on their care in an effort to get to a phone. They see a sign for “Slausen’s Lost Oasis” and follow it, expecting the usual underwhelming natural feature and tacky gift shop, but instead find this legitimately nice green spot in the desert, complete with waterfall and swimming hole. Soon enough they meet Mr. Slausen himself, who explains that the “oasis” is closed, has been closed ever since the new highway came through and business dried up. But he’s amicable enough, albeit a little odd, and invites them back up to his house for a beverage while he helps Jerry work on the car. As it turns out, Mr. Slausen lives in what used to be the main attraction of the oasis - a wax museum - while his brother Davey lives in the nearby house. He tells them not to bother Davey.

He also has a lot of mannequins.

The basic story is nothing especially complicated. You’ve got your requisite teens who aren’t aware that they’ve stumbled into big trouble, and they get picked off one by one. This isn’t really spoiling anything, it’s clear right away what kind of movie it is. But that’s in the broad strokes, and what I think makes this movie interesting is in the details it uses to paint those strokes. This film came out after early proto-slasher films like Halloween and Black Christmas, but before things started getting really formulaic. And so this film pulls from things like Carrie, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Psycho in equal measure without necessarily ripping any of them off outright - or, for that matter, being as good. The end result is something that in some ways is very much your stereotypical slasher movie (teens in trouble) and in some ways something very different, and that difference makes for an intermittently unsettling viewing experience. A big part of this is down to the use of mannequins and waxworks - figures that are human in their features but clearly not alive, and so when they do come alive (as they do in the opening scene, which also uses sound and silence in a surprisingly effective manner), it’s disconcerting. There’s a mechanical, gape-jawed clumsiness to some of them, and others seem like regular mannequins…until their eyes start to move. The intersection of life and lifelessness on display is exactly the uncanny valley, before the term entered regular usage.

And this extends from the story into the way the film itself is constructed. The whole thing feels…fractured, somehow. It sort of jumps one from scene to another without a lot of narrative transition. But sometimes that works for it - you’ve got a group of people who stumble onto this weird little out-of-the-way setting, isolated from everything else, filled with mannequins and the choppiness of the film evokes a half-glimpsed, half-remembered feeling, like the sort of movie we might conjure up in our dreams, or remember waking up in the middle of after dozing off, as our still-asleep brain struggles to make sense of what it’s seeing on screen and not quite putting the pieces together correctly. The score, especially during the opening credits, bounces between your standard ominous minor-key strings and something jauntier, more playful. It’s kind of the musical equivalent of a haunted toy, or a funny clown hiding a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth, and given that we’re dealing with sinister inanimate figures, that seems entirely appropriate. And there is a decent amount of atmosphere - the locations are believably shabby and decaying like you’d expect a long-neglected tourist attraction to be, and though the performances are largely unremarkable, there are a number of moments that range from low-key uneasy to downright creepy.

But that’s when it works. There are more than a few places where it doesn’t. The off-kilter feeling extends to the pacing, as if the filmmakers realized too late that picking off all of these characters was the entire deal and so they have to spread them out so the movie isn’t just 45 minutes long. There are stretches of the antagonist monologuing that have an effectively off-putting strangeness to them but seem largely devoid of tension, and the third act drags out way too long with a minimum of actual action. And though the protagonists aren’t actively obnoxious, they are people who cannot leave well enough alone. Someone tells them not to do something, it becomes the first thing they do. And in this way it’s very much like the template for slasher films to follow -  a bunch of young people on vacation getting picked off one by one because they consistently make the worst decisions they can, going beyond suspension of disbelief into naked contrivance, with a killer who seems to be able to be everywhere at once.

It does end pretty strongly though, getting back to the half-awake nightmare vibe and finishing on an extremely creepy freeze-frame (a technique I wouldn’t mind seeing come back) that feels like the hook to a good ghost story. But for as much that’s here that you don’t see every day, there’s also a lot that we will come to see way too much in all of the films that came afterward, That place between the unfamiliar and too familiar is, itself, an uncanny valley.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi

Rent-A-Pal: Parasocial

A big part of being human is a need for community and belonging. Friendship, romantic relationships, family ties (however you define family), it’s all essential to our happiness and well-being. It’s not a life-or-death thing like food or air or water, but a life without connection is a really hard one. And I think it’s something we don’t really realize the importance of until it’s missing - the inchoate discomfort that attended two years of interacting with pretty much everybody via a screen attests to that, I think. And horror examines this really well sometimes - in films I’ve written about recently, like Saint Maud, Censor, My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To and May, you have protagonists whose isolation from the people around them and their struggle to connect has a serious impact on their mental health, and as often as not their attempts to reach out have terrible consequences. It may not be the flashiest of our fears, but it’s a powerful one.

And Rent-A-Pal, despite a premise that could have easily gone in a very silly direction, ends up being a creepy, restrained story of the psychological costs of loneliness and lack of connection. It’s a thoughtful, sensitive film, ultimately marred by some puzzling narrative choices.

It’s Denver, Colorado during the 1980s, and we’re introduced to David while he’s watching a videotape of a series of women, sitting in front of a plain backdrop, describing themselves and what they’re looking for in a relationship. It’s part of a video dating service that he’s signed up for. See, David’s in kind of a tough spot in his life right now - he lives at home with his mother Lucille, who is suffering from advanced dementia and needs constant supervision. His father’s been dead for some years, so David is all she has left. They get by okay on her Social Security, but it doesn’t leave him a whole lot of time to socialize. If he leaves the house for more than an hour or so, he needs to take her to the local senior citizen’s center, and that costs money.

But David has needs like anyone else. He gets lonely. And, as is so often the case, folks who are lonely and having trouble making connections on their own turn to services to help match them with people. And it’s the 1980s, at a point when VCRs have become common, commercially available technology and video cameras aren’t far behind. So video is revolutionizing what might have once been called the “lonely hearts” industry. David watches the interviews, makes notes in a little form that came with the tape. He uses one of his valuable hours out of the house to go to the video dating service, hopeful that he’s matched with someone this time. It’s been about six weeks without a single bite. No such luck this time either, though the receptionist is as optimistic and encouraging as any sales person would be.

As he’s just about to leave, he notices a tape in a large bargain-bin of miscellaneous videotapes. It’s called “Rent-A-Pal,” and it’s basically advertised as a virtual friend. Think something like a more interactive version of a recording of a Yule log. It’s a recording of someone named Andy. He’s smiling, attentive, sitting in a chair facing you. You can tell him your embarrassing stories, confess your deepest hopes and fears, and Andy will never, ever judge you.

Andy will always be there for you.

And this is what David is reduced to at this point, and what the film explores is the steadily mounting cost of his loneliness and the way a prerecorded friend may not be the healthiest solution to his predicament. The film is set, importantly, in a period when the idea of virtual connection was in its infancy. It’s not the modern day, with pervasive social media and instant communication across multiple channels. It’s analog, not digital, and the film makes much of the thump and clunk of VCRs, the way gears and capstans whir, spooling out tape, the way CRT television signals become noise, then red, green, and blue abstraction, the ratcheting of old credit card impression devices. There are lonely people in the world, trying to make connections, but the technology is as clumsy and fumbling as the people who have recourse to it to relieve their sense of isolation. It’s less conversation and more sort of hurling your attempt at connection out into the void and waiting days or weeks to hear back. It’s a conversation played back on a screen, the same way every time. You could talk to the screen, but it doesn’t actually hear you. Technology in this film is something tactile, big and clunky and ungainly without being self-conscious about it, and it describes a world where the potential for connection through technology is not nonexistent, but certainly very primitive.

And it’s a very believable world. The film does a very good job (for the most part) of painting relatable, sympathetic characters who are doing the best they can with what they have. David is fundamentally decent, trying to do right by his mother while still able to acknowledge the costs to his own life. He knows what he’s missing out on, but he isn’t going to abandon his mother. Lucille, almost totally helpless, is his entire life. She has her good days and bad days, but as David observes, they’re starting to tip more toward the bad more often. He’s all she has left, so his only real connection is with someone completely dependent on him and who as often as not isn’t even really aware of who he is or where she is. He’s 40, he lives in his mother’s basement, and any opportunity to get away for more than an hour or so costs some of the money he has to keep strictly budgeted. His comforts are few - a bottle of whiskey, a box of candy bars, some grainy old 8mm stag films when he’s sure Lucille is asleep. He spends a lot of time in front of the television.

And it would have been easy to make Lucille a caricature, a harridan abusing her henpecked son, but she isn’t. It’s clear that she’s aware on some level that she’s losing her faculties and it makes her angry and sad. She insists on trying to feed herself and breaks down when she can’t. She just wants to go for a walk and can’t. She’s in a lot of pain, and she keeps mistaking David for her late husband. Sometimes he corrects her, sometimes he plays along. Sometimes she gets angry with him, sometimes there’s real affection. It’s a demanding job, David’s not a healthcare professional and he’s doing the best he can, whether that’s enough or not. There’s resignation there, resentment, but he keeps it under wraps. For her sake. Of course, this also makes it difficult for him to really have a life or pursue relationships, and from the outside looking in, a bland, soft, middle-aged man who still lives with his mother isn’t anyone’s idea of a catch. There’s an especially painful sequence at the video dating service where you see David in all his depth and decency, but his interview segment runs too long, and what it shortens down to reduces him to something pathetic. The cards are stacked against him and you get the sense that he knows it, and it’s starting to get to him.

So you have real, sympathetic people located in a drab, workday vision of 80s suburbia. It’s a restrained, low-key setting, and the idea of a videotaped “friend” who becomes increasingly sinister could have been really jarring. It could easily be played for camp or cheated into something else, like a Freddy Krueger who springs from the television set, but the film largely plays fair with the idea just as it does with the flesh and blood characters. Andy is blandly friendly (at least to start), and the film gets a lot of mileage out of using the same footage repeatedly (since it’s a tape, committed to a specific routine)  in changing contexts to turn what was at first a little awkward into something more menacing. Early on, there’s a nice push and pull between moments where David’s interactions with Andy fall into the rhythms of an actual conversation with another person, and moments where the artificiality is laid bare, where it becomes plainly evident that Andy’s responses are canned, scripted, and will always be the same no matter how many times you rewind the tape. It’s nicely illustrative of the limitations of virtual relationships, of parasocial contact, without being too didactic about it. And as the film goes on, something starts peering through the cracks in Andy’s amiable façade - little hints at troublesome things in his past, then emotional cruelty, then obsessive, emotionally abusive behavior. It’s never clear how much of this is actually the tape and how much of it is David’s disintegrating mental state, and the film doesn’t seem especially interested in committing to one interpretation over the other, but it also never tips too far into unbelievability, so it doesn’t especially matter. There are hints and feints at Andy creeping into David’s personality and waking life, and David’s perception of the world becoming increasingly skewed. It’s underplayed enough that it isn’t over-obvious, but also maybe a little too underplayed at points. There are a couple of moments that aren’t as shocking as I think they’re meant to be because they’re so blink-and-you-miss-it.

But the biggest problem far and away with the film is its pacing and narrative flow. This is basically the story of a desperately lonely man and how his desperate, last-ditch approximation of human contact ends up going terribly awry. That’s not a new story (nor does it need to be), but it’s typically one with a specific progression, and the sequence of events here gets muddled. The first half or so of the film works very well and takes its time to build up a sense of wrongness gradually, alongside a sensitive depiction of David’s life. It’s easy to root for him, to hope that maybe just this once the horror film won’t turn into a horror film. But then at about the halfway mark, there’s a sequence - an extended montage - that you’d expect to come in the third act of the film, when the protagonist’s attempts to reach out have all been rebuffed and the final downward spiral begins. But here, it happens and then…things start to look up for David, and continue to do so. The end result is that when the bottom does drop out, it doesn’t feel earned - David’s responses don’t feel authentic or natural because they aren’t coming as the culmination of one disappointment and rejection after another. That moment happens, but then things turn around, but then it ends as if things never turned around for him. As long as the focus is on obsolete technology, it feels like a film where one of the reels got shown out of order, or a DVD where two or more chapters got played in the wrong sequence, and so the second half of the film is a more confused affair than the first and doesn’t stick the landing nearly so well as a result. I think it ends well, and in a way that makes sense for the kind of film it is, but it doesn’t feel like the logical conclusion to what we’d just seen beforehand. It should be a tragedy, where for someone like David, any rejection is world-shattering and likely to send him over the brink, but instead it’s sort of baffling - as if everything good that had happened to him didn’t matter because he was committed to his downward spiral ahead of time, and it doesn’t feel like self-sabotage or self-destructive behavior, it doesn’t emerge organically.

But on yet another hand, it’s very well-shot and edited. The director got their start as a cinematographer and editor (this is their directorial debut) and it absolutely shows. This film gets the 1980s right without being too showy about it - the interiors of David’s home are slightly dim, lit by lamps and flickering television light like any modest home of the time would be, modest period appliances and furnishings and a basement living space that combines bedroom, living room, and hastily retrofitted bathroom with a drop ceiling and exposed pipes to create an environment exactly as sad as it needs to be. The video dating service is as brightly colored and plastic as you’d expect, all primary colors, bold geometric designs, and glossily enthusiastic customer service people. There’s a wonderful moment at a skating rink that’s shot as equal parts pastel reverie and suburban Edward Hopper, and in his lowest moments, David’s world is stark and fragmented, nighttime becoming dawn in an instant, all jump cuts and harsh, unflattering light, his moments with Andy crashing down into reality in the worst possible ways. The film is full of closeups on old technology, the first glimpses into technological isolation all clunky and mechanical and covered in artificial wood grain and video signals range from clear to glitchy and noisy, eventually breaking down into pure light and color, all meaning lost. In some ways, it reminds me of how One Hour Photo mixed image and reality, though it never really commits to the conceit to the extent that film did. But its visual sense is excellent, evocative lighting and shot angles, expressive editing - the story’s beautifully told, it’s just the way it orders things that lets it down.

The performances are all solid, pitched at a relatable, human level, the dialogue is largely naturalistic, and until the very end, even Andy is a restrained menace, his wide-eyed friendliness maybe just a little too wide-eyed and the little hints that all is not right coming subtly at first and then less so. Unfortunately, apart from the confusing sequence of events, some of this subtlety is lost in the very end, things become a little too artificial, and the end drags out maybe a little too long. Which is too bad, because there’s a lot here to like, but it’s one of those cases where the shortcomings stand out even more as a result. Much like David, there’s a lot of good here, but the way the video is cut, it doesn’t come through.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon