Category: Movies

I just learned tonight (from the Dead Meat channel on YouTube) that Ready or Not, along with Abigail and the new Scream installments, were made by a group called Radio Silence. I think that’s worth pointing out for a couple of reasons: first is because this movie is so similar to Abigail that I would’ve accused the latter of being derivative. Second, both movies feel like stubbornly independent original projects.

It’s possible that I’ve just stopped going to theaters except for big franchise installments, but it does seem increasingly rare to see standalone, self-contained movies get much popular attention. No doubt the production companies would like to be able to turn them into long-running, profitable series, but Ready or Not seems to reject any attempt whatsoever to continue the story.

There are a lot of aspects common to both Ready or Not and Abigail: A premise that could work as the “twist” that sells the movie, but it’s given away in the trailer. A protagonist trapped overnight in a huge gothic mansion. A combination of comedy and pretty extreme violence. And a few gory specifics that would be spoilers if I gave any more detail. It almost feels like Ready or Not was a kind of first draft for Abigail, because I think the latter is quite a bit better.

One sequence I liked — or I guess it’s more accurate to say admired — in particular: main character Grace has been found and gets wounded by a bullet. She ends up falling into a horrific pit (something that also happens in Abigail), and after being fully traumatized by what she sees down there, she has to climb back out, wound and all.

The reason it works so well is because it’s excruciatingly suspenseful, in the way the best horror movies are suspenseful. You’re not wondering what’s about to happen; you know exactly what’s going to happen, because there is a single shot of an exposed nail that the camera lingers on for just a second too long at the start. And after sticking that image in your mind, the movie makes you wait an eternity for it all to play out, as if it were a Final Destination sequence. When it finally ends, it’s made a hundred times worse, because we’ve had to imagine the pay-off for so long.

That pay-off is also a good example of my biggest problem with the movie, though: the tone is all over the place. The studio lists it as a “horror comedy,” but there aren’t enough scenes where it’s both at the same time. Once the action starts, it feels like it’s spending most of its time either putting its protagonist through horrible and not-particularly-funny situations, or trying to draw out too much drama from the characters who are supposed to be sympathetic. It seems to take itself too seriously for what the trailers and screenshots implied.

But I thought it all came together satisfyingly in the end, even if I wished more characters had gotten their comeuppance earlier on. (I haven’t seen You’re Next, but from what I know about it, the structure is more like what I’d been expecting from Ready or Not). And I liked that it felt almost old-fashioned, for telling a complete, original story from beginning to end, with no hint of a sequel.

The completely spoiler-free premise of Abigail is this: a group of mercenaries are hired to kidnap a 12-year-old ballerina and guard over her until the ransom can be delivered. But they quickly discover that the girl’s father is a legendarily powerful crime boss, and he’ll be sending his most ruthless hit man to kill them all.

If you’re completely spoiler-averse (and that seems like something you’d be into, of course), then I recommend watching it without knowing anything else about it. Including this post, of course. The larger premise is “spoiled” in every trailer and every description of the movie, so good luck avoiding that! But also, there’s enough going on that it’s still interesting and surprising even if you think you know what you’re getting into.

My overall take: it is the horror/action/black comedy mash-up that I’d been hoping it would be, in a similar spirit as Orphan: First Kill, Malignant, and M3GAN, although not quite as good as any of those. It’s comedically mean-spirited, full of violence and blood and gore and people being nasty to each other, but keeping all of it just enough over the top that it’s still fun.

In fact, I was enjoying it enough that I wondered why it seemed to just disappear with little mention; I suspect that’s because the third act is a mess. It goes on too long, stops doing anything interesting with its premise and just becomes one fight scene after another, tacks on at least two unnecessary endings plus a Teachable Moment, and overall just feels like the result of extensive rewrites and studio intervention.

Until that point, though, it had a great “they don’t make them like this anymore” energy to it. It had the feeling of independent filmmakers working with an original premise and a big studio budget, gathering a cast and crew who all seemed to understand exactly what they were making, and put out into the world as a standalone project with no concern over franchises or tie-ins or “lore.” Considering that it’s already being called a “flop,” it seems unlikely that Universal will try to turn it into anything that it’s not¹Except maybe a Horror Nights house? That could work., and that may be the best thing for it.

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  Except maybe a Horror Nights house? That could work.

I always like it when movies contain a line of dialogue that serves as a perfect review of the movie.¹My favorite is a review of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that called out its line: “Do not see me.” It Follows does exactly that, with “it’s slow, but it’s not dumb.”

The movie has had so much buzz around it for so long, with some people calling it one of the best horror movies of the past decade, that I knew I was going to see it eventually. But it’s hung out in my periphery ever since, with a kind of dreadful certainty, just waiting until the time that I’d be in the right mindset to watch a horror movie that didn’t seem particularly “fun” in the slightest.

As it turns out, it’s very good. It’s absolutely a horror movie, but it plays out more like a suspense thriller: relatively bloodless and honestly not all that scary, but full of relentless tension and a kind of numb despair. The performances are all natural and completely believable. The soundtrack is perfect. It feels very much like an independent horror movie: not in that it’s low-budget, or in that it’s overly pretentious, but in that it feels as if the filmmakers had the freedom and confidence to do exactly what they wanted.

One thing I like in particular about It Follows is that it’s confident the audience will be able to figure out what’s going on without a ton of hand-holding. Some significant plot details are left ambiguous, mostly because knowing the specifics aren’t important to understanding the story. And while there are a few scenes with poems or quotes that are on the nose, they’re delivered as punctuation to themes that the movie assumes the audience has already figured out by that point.

It feels like a perfect introduction to cinema studies, which normally would be a severe insult, but here I mean as a compliment. When I had to take cinema studies, the most influential movie in my classes was Rear Window. Its theme of audiences-as-voyeurs seems like an obvious interpretation now, but for me, it completely changed the way I watch movies. I’m not claiming that It Follows will be the classic that Rear Window is, but it is excellent at inviting you to figure out its themes, while neither being too obtuse nor too direct.

There’s one scene in particular in which Jay and her friends are sitting in a field, listening to more details about how the entity works, and what are her options for escaping it. It’s a scene of exposition, functionally leading into the next act, but it doesn’t really play as one. Instead, the camera focuses on Jay — who at this point seems numb to everything that’s happening to her — as she picks individual blades of grass and lays them on her bare leg in rows. It’s a perfectly child-like thing to be doing, suggesting that she’s coming to terms with the fact that she’ll never be care-free again.

Once you pick up on the theme of the loss of innocence, the metaphors start coming fast and furious. Jay runs to safety on a swing set. A young man has left a well-used stack of porn magazines, the kind that Jay and Paul had been laughing about earlier. Two times, the gang runs for safety to a place that had been important to them as kids with their parents. And while we see the enemy frequently, it’s rarely made the focus, instead hanging out in the frame in a way that makes it feel not so much terrifying as it is inevitable.

In fact, a lot of It Follows feels like a (slightly) more bleak version of a Charlie Brown holiday special. The kids more or less fend for themselves, trying to make sense of things while the adults are rarely shown at all. That’s emphasized in the climax, where they come up with a plan that’s based on a sketchy understanding of how things work.

I don’t want to make it sound as if It Follows had no room for subtlety; it does, and its confident sense of style is what makes it work so well. I liked that for their date, Hugh took Jay to a screening of Charade. And I really liked how there was a mix of modern and dated throughout, with teenagers hanging out watching black-and-white movies on a CRT television in a very 80s-feeling living room, while one of them used a compact e-reader that doesn’t yet exist. Old and new cars co-existed without comment. Even the porn magazines seemed like the platonic ideal of 1980s porn (not to mention that a teenager in 2015 was still using printed magazines). The sense of timelessness gives it a feeling of universal nostalgia, the sense that no matter when you grew up²As long as it was in the American suburbs after the 1970s, it looked and felt like this.

But mostly, It Follows invites you to interpret its meaning while staying just shy of spelling it out for you directly. I can understand audiences who were expecting something like Scream or, even more appropriate, Final Destination would be disappointed that it was so slow and relatively non-violent. But I liked that it told audiences how the monster works without (too) directly telling them what the monster means. It’s somehow not all that scary, and simultaneously full of dread about the most primal fear there is.

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  My favorite is a review of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that called out its line: “Do not see me.”
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  As long as it was in the American suburbs after the 1970s

The moment Late Night With the Devil clicked with me is when I stopped comparing it to the movie I’d been expecting, and started watching it for what it actually is.

The intriguing premise suggests a period piece found footage horror movie: a narrator¹Michael Ironside! sets us in the late 1970s, recounting the story of a late night talk show called Night Owls that can never seem to compete with Johnny Caron’s Tonight Show. Against the back drop of the political and cultural turmoil of the late 70s, and the satanic panic, the show’s host Jack Delroy spent years trying to build popularity for his show and get out from under Carson’s shadow. What we’re seeing is the “master tape” from the Halloween night broadcast, which featured a stage psychic; an Amazing Randi-style skeptic; and a parapsychologist with her troubled patient, a 13-year-old girl who survived a cult worshipping the demon Abraxas.

For a while, it does seem like they’re going for verisimilitude. The set direction feels spot-on, not just for a 1970s talk show, but specifically one made in New York. (It’s good that the money went into perfecting the set, since almost the entire movie takes place on one set). There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot in the opening montage showing a character who looks a lot like Orson Welles in his 1970s talk show era, and for those of us who watched those shows during our formative years, that one image establishes the setting perfectly.

But as the movie continues, it becomes apparent that Late Night With the Devil is more interested in telling its story than in being a pitch-perfect found-footage movie. The performances are pretty broad, always hovering in the zone between realism and camp. There are minor, nit-picking anachronisms; shots that wouldn’t have happened in a live broadcast; cross-fades that weren’t in style even if the technology to do them was available for live TV; “behind the scenes” shots that simply wouldn’t have been possible; and a bunch of other things that imply that whenever the filmmakers had to choose between reality and setting a mood, they always chose the latter.

In the end, the tone of the movie is much more like a Hollywood Horror Nights house than a modern found footage movie. It has a ton of ideas about theme, mood, character, and story, and it throws them out like an interconnected series of funhouse horror vignettes. The commercial breaks and behind-the-scene moments are more like transitions between broad story beats than like actual behind-the-scenes footage.

And when I say the performances are broad to the point of being camp, I don’t mean that disparagingly. David Dastmalchian as Jack Delroy has to be the most nuanced, managing a performance-within-a-performance that has to shift from corny to sincere to craven to haunted within the same scene. I was even more impressed by Ingrid Torelli as the young possessed girl Lilly, especially for perfectly playing the eeriness of someone who won’t stop staring directly at the camera. On the whole, though, the performances felt more like those of the scare actors inside a modern horror house, shouting out their lines every 60 seconds to make sure the audience gets the point of the current story beat.

Ultimately, that horror house feeling is what I liked²But didn’t ever quite love most about Late Night With the Devil. It feels like a fiercely independent movie³It feels odd calling it “low budget,” considering how aggressively it’s been marketed, and how there’s an almost comically long series of production company logos at the beginning, where the filmmakers had a very specific idea about the tone and the mood and what they believed was important, even if it didn’t fit into the modern Blumhouse mold. Even more than the sets and costumes, it feels like a throwback to the late 1970s. Especially the pre-1980s horror that valued creepy and scary moments over intense realism.

If on the other hand, you’re interested in an independent film that does commit completely to its premise, I’ve got to give another recommendation for Deadstream. It goes much more for horror-comedy than Late Night With the Devil, and in my opinion does more with its modest budget. The movies have very little in common apart from a single set and a nod to live broadcast (and both being on Shudder, I guess), but that shows how much room there is for creativity in horror movies without big studio intervention.

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  Michael Ironside!
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  But didn’t ever quite love
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  It feels odd calling it “low budget,” considering how aggressively it’s been marketed, and how there’s an almost comically long series of production company logos at the beginning

I went in hoping, and fully expecting, to love Poor Things, but it never really clicked for me. So it’s a good thing I’ve got a series called “One Thing I Like,” because there’s an awful lot to like about this movie.

The art direction is outstanding, delivering on the promise of the trailer and then some. It’s full of fantasy versions of cities (and a ship) that are beautiful and familiar, but just surreal enough to suggest that you’re seeing them for the very first time, and just sinister enough to suggest that there’s always danger lurking just outside of your field of view. The beginning calls back to The Bride of Frankenstein and Metropolis, just directly enough to make sure that we make the connection, but not so directly that it feels just like a reference.

And Emma Stone, obviously, gives herself so completely into this character that any trace that it’s a performance disappears within a few minutes. There’s no way the movie would’ve worked without her commitment. Mark Ruffalo is also excellent, acting as if he were a character borrowed from an entirely different movie, which is exactly what’s needed for the character. Willem Dafoe is at the stage in his career where yet another exceptional performance from him isn’t all that exceptional. And I think Ramy Youssef deserves credit for playing the straight man against so many showy performances; he has to function as the audience’s guide into a Victorian horror story, but one in which the story abandons its narrator a third of the way through.

Also, there are brief black-and-white interstitials when the story moves to a new location, each seeming like we’re getting a peek into Bella’s bizarre and beautiful dreams. But none lasts long enough to make any sense of them. Like a real dream, they seem to leave an after-image on the mind, even if we can’t reliably recall details.

When I first saw a link to a trailer for Wonka, a 2023 prequel to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory starring Timothée Chalamet, I was prepared for the worst. And I was pleasantly surprised when I could find nothing wrong with it; it looked perfectly charming.

After seeing it, I was happy to see that it is charming (albeit far from perfectly) from the start. It begins with the three repeated notes from “Pure Imagination” — which work so well because they are vaguely creepily discordant — before launching into an original opening song confidently introducing Chalamet as a young Willy Wonka.

I should admit from the start that I was almost hoping to find fault in Chalamet’s performance, and by the end of the first song, I gave up and just resigned to having to acknowledge that sometimes famous people are just good at stuff. I think he did an exceptional job creating a version of the character that is at the opposite end of Gene Wilder’s version — all of the optimism and kind-heartedness and almost-compulsive showmanship and eagerness to make people happy, but before decades of seeing people’s greed (and excessive gum-chewing and TV-watching) put a darker and more melancholy spin on it.

Which is, more or less, my most significant criticism of the movie: it delivers exactly what is promised on the poster, wonderfully, but no more than that. It’s an often-delightful and imaginative children’s movie about imagination and hope, with tons of people doing excellent work to sell every moment, but there’s little sense of a unique voice.