Film Freak Central

Rosemary's Baby (1968) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Ralph Bellamy
based on the novel by Ira Levin
written for the screen and directed by Roman Polanski

by Walter Chaw Rosemary is everything. He's just Guy. It's that tension--between a woman fully actualized and a man forever frustrated, the Grail vs. the Knights of the Round Table--that serves as the tightrope in Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby. As portrayed by Mia Farrow, Rosemary is precious and flawed, full of life and surrounded by death. She is the venerated object, the cathedral she imagines the night she's drugged and violated; the most precious thing, the sanctified earth planted with the pestilential corruption of masculine ambition. Rosemary's Baby opens with a lengthy consideration of the buildings that surround Central Park like vultures in their priestly black, voracious and solemn, gathered around a carcass that is, in this configuration, the sole hint of life in a metal savannah. Polanski is a genius of architecture and the consideration of it. His spaces are predatory, or at least become so: "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown" and the apartment that sprouts hands from its walls and, here in Rosemary's Baby, the "Black Bramford." He puts pretty blondes into the maw of his constructions--sacrifices to the Minotaur wandering through his Labyrinth--and watches them get swallowed by the Stygian black. He is the Minotaur. The pitch is his, along with the appetites. Rosemary's Baby is his masterpiece, as well as one of the greatest films about what women endure in a world that sees them as seed incubators, nesting fowl, and finally trophies: meek and pretty. But Rosemary isn't meek, simply outmatched, surrounded, flanked by the men she's supposed to be able to trust.

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (2023)

Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant
**/****
starring Sara Montpetit, Félix-Antoine Bénard, Steve Laplante, Sophie Cadieux
screenplay by Ariane Louis-Seize, Christine Doyon
directed by Ariane Louis-Seize

by Angelo Muredda Puberty is a vampire in Ariane Louis-Seize's Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, a stylish but flimsy debut that has little to say on the subject of either depression or vampires in spite of its title. A likeable, low-stakes coming-of-age allegory about the growing pains of being an outsider (among other barely scratched subjects), the film slots in nicely next to spooky-adjacent young adult romances like "Wednesday" and "Chilling Adventures of Sabrina", for whatever that's worth. It also makes a nice calling card for Louis-Seize's likely future in franchise television, her comic world-building better suited for a sitcom with genre notes than a feature, where her characters are reduced to the sort of easily summarized traits that would make them stand out in a pilot.

Breaking the Rules: FFC Interviews Demián Rugna

Walter Chaw interviews Demián Rugna,
co-writer/director of WHEN EVIL LURKS

At the risk of being premature in my assessment, I think Demián Rugna is the real deal. His Terrified from 2017 was confident and brilliant: a strange, alchemical product of the unimaginable and the familiar; a "fun" extreme gore/horror exercise that crossed the line so often it rewrote it. Now, six years later, here's Rugna's follow-up: When Evil Lurks, which is more--and amplified--innovative obscenity. The large gap between Terrified and When Evil Lurks and the failure of announced projects to materialize have, if anything, only sharpened the cruelty of his images and the atrocity of his ideas. I wondered if Terrified was an anomaly, given that it seemed to come from nowhere, fully formed with its payload of "what the fuck?" lawlessness, but When Evil Lurks confirms the arrival of a major talent.

When Evil Lurks (2023)

Cuando acecha la maldad
****/****
starring Ezequiel Rodríguez, Demián Salomón, Luis Ziembrowski, Federico Liss
written and directed by Demián Rugna

by Walter Chaw I felt like there was a hand pressing down on my chest during Demián Rugna's When Evil Lurks, a horror film so vicious and uncompromising I wasn't always sure I could finish it. I've seen it three times now, not because I've become desensitized to its lawlessness, but because it's so well-constructed that I'm drawn back to it despite the anxiety it inspires. There's comfort in the thrall of an artist who's in complete control of his medium. When Evil Lurks is Rugna's fifth film, and I don't think it's too soon to declare him an important filmmaker and a true innovator. I've never seen what he does in the horror genre before; I'd call it experimentation, except that it works on a more than theoretical level. Between this and his previous picture, Terrified (2017), he has deconstructed the familiar, reconstituting it into a beast that feels new and dangerous. When I take a shower now, it's not Psycho or The Seventh Victim that comes to mind, it's the long opening sequence of Terrified in which a man traces the source of a strange thumping in the middle of the night to something unspeakable happening to his wife in the bathroom for what must have been hours. There's nothing new about locating terror in intensely personal private spaces, but there's a revolution in having the idea to mate Martyrs with Poltergeist.

That Old Witchcraft: FFC Interviews Tereza Nvotová

Walter Chaw interviews Tereza Nvotová,
co-writer/director of NIGHT SIREN

Tereza Nvotová's Nightsiren (Svetlonoc) was among the handful of titles that blew me away at this year's long-ago-feeling Boston Underground Film Festival. It's smart, beautiful, savage, and from a part of the world, Slovakia, with whose cinema I'm unfamiliar. (Ditto the filmmaking team of Nvotová and her co-writer, Barbora Namerova.) Part folk-horror and part female-empowerment/coming-of-age melodrama, Nightsiren demonstrates an ease with archetype and the courage to use funding provided by the Slovakian government to create a piece that questions the country's systems and traditions uncompromisingly. It's righteous.

TIFF '23: Sleep + Smugglers

SLEEP
Jam
**/****
starring Jung Yu-mi, Lee Sun-kyun
written and directed by Jason Yu

SMUGGLERS
Milsu
***/****
starring Kim Hye-soo, Yum Jung-ah, Park Jeong-min, Zo In-sung
screenplay by Ryoo Seung-wan, Kim Jeong-yeon
directed by Ryoo Seung-wan

by Bill Chambers Jason Yu's Sleep had me at hello. Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) and Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun) are a young couple expecting their first child. One night, out of the blue, Hyun-Su starts talking in his sleep. "Someone's inside," he says. Soo-jin wonders if he's trying to tell her something. It's the opening scene of Poltergeist with considerably less grandeur, but horror, like punk, thrives in lo-fi. (The movie's biggest formal swing is to instantaneously alter the mood of a scene through jump cuts or abrupt lighting changes.) Though Hyun-Su has no memory of the incident, he thinks he knows why he said what he said: because he's an actor and one of the lines he has in his current project is, "Someone's inside the building." It's enough to placate Soo-jin until the following night, when he dozes off and...well, you'll have to see for yourself. Soon, bedtime becomes a jack-in-the-box full of nasty surprises that have Soo-jin sleeping with one eye open. A doctor gives Hyun-su what would be very practical and hopeful advice for someone suffering from an actual sleep disorder, but is that what's going on? Or is something supernatural waiting until he lies down at night to use him as a marionette? And what, if anything, do the new downstairs neighbours, a single mother and her adolescent son, have to do with his condition?

Telluride '23: El Conde

***½/****
starring Alfredo Castro, Catalina Guerra, Paula Luchsinger, Diego Muñoz
written by Guillermo Calderón & Pablo Larraín
directed by Pablo Larrain

by Walter Chaw El Conde is the bitterest of farces: a satire of excess and great evil that uses vampirism as a blunt metaphor for the forces that sap places and entire peoples of their share of a nation's fortunes. Always timely, Chilean director Pablo Larraín turns his attention to his country's last bogey, Augusto Pinochet, who, with the support of the United States government, staged a brutal coup in 1973 and consequently ruled Chile with an iron hand until 1990. Among the disastrous programs initiated by his regime? Abolition of all trade unions--an act that seems specifically pointed, given the millions poured into this project by Netflix. The country's wealth tanked as Pinochet's exploded. At the time of his death in 2006, over 300 criminal charges were left pending against him. Larraín speculates that Pinochet staged his death to avoid continued persecution and is, in fact, a centuries-old vampire who once fed on the blood of Marie Antoinette. The image of a young Frenchman licking her blue blood fresh from the guillotine's blade is, in a tidy nutshell, critique of thaumaturgical contagion: hereditary wealth and power, distilled into the tastes of a vampire so smitten by the tang of royal blood that he steals the Queen's head and keeps it in a jar as a fetish object. When he seduces a young nun in the present day of the film, he first makes her dress up like Antoinette and is dismayed when she shows not just disinterest in the onanistic trophy he uses as a reference for her costume, but actual disgust.

Telluride '23: The Royal Hotel

**½/****
starring Julia Garner, Jessica Henwick, James Frecheville, Hugo Weaving
written by Kitty Green & Oscar Redding
directed by Kitty Green

by Walter Chaw Aussie hyphenate Kitty Green's follow-up to her superlative office horror The Assistant is The Royal Hotel, a lighter, distaff version of Wake in Fright in which two college girls looking for a little adventure but out of money find themselves in the Outback tending bar to a bunch of despicable degenerates. Hanna (Julia Garner) is the cautious one and Liv (Jessica Henwick) is the broken one, leading to a few uncomfortable scenes where Liv gets fall-down drunk while surrounded by a bunch of men who would most assuredly like to rape and murder her. Maybe not in the bright light of day, but a few dozen pints later all's fair in love and the poor decisions most of us somehow survive. For the record, I liked Hanna very much and loathed Liv, which is evidence of not only a profound empathy gap in me that stops me from caring about people who, by their damage, end up damaging those who've made themselves responsible for them, but also a script (by Green and Oscar Redding) that leans perhaps too heavily on the horror-movie dichotomy of good girl/party girl. What works so well about Wake in Fright is how its hero is both a respectable doctor and a drunken gambling addict with a sadistic streak. You hate him, but you hate everyone else a tiny bit more. Still, when he puts a gun to his temple, you hope he doesn't miss. Imagine the film now with a friend for the hero who is fully equipped with a working human warning system that no one will heed. It's distracting; it becomes a different movie when there's someone in it making sense.

Feed My Frankenstein: FFC Interviews Laura Moss

Walter Chaw interviews Laura Moss, co-writer/director of BIRTH/REBIRTH

Laura Moss's Birth/Rebirth is the second of three distaff takes on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein set for release in 2023. As the United States reckons with a series of strikes, the loudest calls for labour reform in recent memory, these new reads of the novel, notable also for seizing on the social progressiveness of the text, seem of a piece with a cultural zeitgeist pointing towards the disruption of our ingrained systems. Grateful for the opportunities the festival success of Birth/Rebirth has afforded them, Moss is as intelligent and energetic in person as their work suggests, and insightful about their creative process. The film itself is fresh, ferocious, and uses David Cronenberg correctly in a sentence, too, so when I was given the opportunity to talk with Moss, I started by asking them about the horror of the flesh:

Fantasia Festival '23: Birth/Rebirth

****/****
starring Judy Reyes, Marin Ireland, AJ Lister, Breeda Wool
written by Laura Moss & Brendan O'Brien
directed by Laura Moss

by Walter Chaw In this year of the distaff Frankenstein riff, sandwiched between Bomani Story's exceptional The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster and Yorgos Lanthimos's upcoming Poor Things, find Laura Moss's fucking awesome Birth/Rebirth, which, like Story's film, manages to smuggle in a sharp, eloquently deployed payload of social and philosophical issues alongside just enough satisfying gore and a gratifying amount of real terror. I wonder if the key to the success of these films, Story's and Moss's, has to do with filmmakers who aren't white men taking their shot at interpreting what is and always has been an essentially, perhaps the essentially, progressive genre text--one authored by a woman, no less, the daughter of one of the most important figures in the early women's-rights movement, Mary Wollstonecraft (who published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman), and political philosopher/anarchist William Godwin. First-time readers of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein might be surprised by its political sensitivities--its critique of a carceral state in which there is no forgiveness, only the presumption of guilt based mainly on appearance and social status. By how the Monster's fate is predetermined as he's cast off to educate himself with pilfered books and shelter amongst others whom polite society has labelled "misfit" and "outcast." Frankenstein is a story of class war. Mary and her husband didn't even eat sugar because of its role in the Caribbean slave trade. The Monster says, "I heard of the division of property of immense wealth and squalid poverty of ranked dissent and noble blood." He was woke as fuck, and this was 1818.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)

**½/****
starring Dracula, Corey Hawkins, Aisling Franciosi, Liam Cunningham
screenplay by Bragi F. Schut and Zak Olkewicz
directed by André Øvredal

by Walter Chaw I like André Øvredal movies. I liked Trollhunter, and I loved Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, along with most of The Autopsy of Jane Doe. They deliver exactly what they promise and do so with an at times striking sense of how to convey the poetry of the beginning of things. His movies feel like mythology, in a few cases are mythology. And like mythologies, they're earnest, direct, and deceptively simple in narrative but rich with subtext. He makes sense for a Dracula prequel--not a Vlad the Impaler creation story, but a picture extrapolated from the "Captain's Log" portion of the Bram Stoker novel that details, in just under 2000 words of the seventh chapter, the fate of the doomed freighter tasked with bringing Dracula's stuff over from Transylvania to England, whose crew became provisions for the grand fiend en route. Murnau's Nosferatu covered the voyage in a few swift, expressionistic strokes (coffin play, hilariously), allowing Øvredal's The Last Voyage of the Demeter to expand on the circumstances while paying homage to that film's character design. As played by Javier Botet, Øvredal's Dracula is barely humanoid at all.

Fantasia Festival '23: Pandemonium

***/****
starring Hugo Dillon, Arben Bajraktaraj, Manon Maindivide, Ophelia Kolb
written and directed by Quarxx

by Walter Chaw French multidisciplinary artist Quarxx's sophomore feature Pandemonium is relentless miserablism presented handsomely and with neither of the usual pressure valves of archness or irony. It's punishing. Although it doesn't share much in terms of approach or narrative with Park Chan-wook's Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, they have a similarly slick surface, and it did make me feel uncomfortable in the same way. And, ultimately, almost as unhappy. Films like this--such as most of Lars von Trier's and Michael Haneke's respective filmographies--are generally provocations without much more on their mind than to upset expectation and a perceived general apathy, but Pandemonium did get me thinking about how I'm raising my kids, so there's that at least. I wonder if the function of the film-as-endurance-test isn't ultimately as a lens with which to focus one's empathy. That is, to say that for as lousy as your life feels at any given moment, it can and almost certainly will get worse. How consistently I enjoy movies that make me feel awful (and now I'm thinking of Brandon Cronenberg's Possessor, which made me feel bad for months--and topped my best-of list of that year) says something about our desire for confirmation bias, I suppose. I want to be reassured that my Hobbesian outlook is rational. I'm addicted to that reassurance.

Fantasia Festival '23: New Life

**½/****
starring Tony Amendola, Hayley Erin, Sonya Walger, Nick George
written and directed by John Rosman

by Walter Chaw I respect the directness and simplicity of John Rosman's New Life, the way it addresses a double-edged problem through two women in separate storylines who represent the point and counterpoint of a debate without an easy answer. How does one balance the individual good versus the interests of the collective? Easy enough to say that any individual must be sacrificed for the sake of society until one humanizes the individual. Plenty of films tackle this question: John Frankenheimer's The Train measures the value of a man's life against a priceless work of art; Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's extraordinary 28 Weeks Later and Breck Eisner's remake of The Crazies wonder how many people must be sacrificed for the greater good, no matter how heroic the lengths they've gone to survive. New Life's stakes are similarly big, although its focus is smaller--the "Trolley Problem" where one of the hero's choices is to kill a person she likes in order to save a planet full of strangers. Complicating it all is that the hero herself, Elsa (Sonya Walger), is afflicted with a progressive neurological disorder, meaning her time is limited regardless of what she chooses. If she does the difficult thing, in other words, she's not even doing it for herself.

Fantasia Festival '23: Raging Grace

***½/****
starring Leanne Best, Jaeden Paige Boadilla, Max Eigenmann, David Hayman
written and directed by Paris Zarcilla

by Walter Chaw What sets something like Paris Zarcilla's Raging Grace apart from similar servant/master, immigrant/colonizer stuff like Lorcan Finnegan's Nocebo is how it offers glimpses of joy amid the suffering. We see a community at play and worship, united in song, celebrating one another, exultant and safe--at odds with how their oppression is generally centred in otherwise sympathetic texts. Jubilation, it turns out, is a useful tool to ratchet up the tension in a film about isolation and domestic enslavement. When you grasp what can be lost, the stakes become unbearably high. Raging Grace isn't a happy film, but there's happiness in it, starting with the hopefulness of its hero's name, Joy (Maxene Eigenmann). Joy's a homeless Filipino house cleaner on an expired visa to the UK struggling to care for her impetuous daughter, Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla), on very little money and under the constant threat of discovery and deportation. The two survive by squatting in clients' homes while they're away, and Zarcilla has a lovely touch with the stolen days where mother and daughter pretend to have a place of their own. The rest of Joy's life is a hustle: to get more work, to hold onto existing work, to keep her kid entertained and hidden, and to try to leave the panic out of her voice when she talks to family she's left behind in the Philippines. Before Raging Grace becomes a horror film, it's already a horror film.

Fantasia Festival '23: Vincent Must Die + Blackout

Vincent doit mourir
***½/****
starring Karim Leklou, Vimala Pons, François Chattot, Karoline Rose Sun
written by Mathieu Naert
directed by Stéphan Castang

BLACKOUT
***½/****
starring Alex Hurt, Addison Timlin, Motell Gyn Foster, Barbara Crampton
written and directed by Larry Fessenden

by Walter Chaw I've been angrier lately, angrier than I ever remember feeling in my life--and I was a teenage boy once. I am either more keenly aware of how broken the world always was, or the world is more broken than it's ever been. Likely a little of both is true. I am frustration unrelieved. I am catharsis in eternal, trembling abeyance. The bad win and escape consequences; the good lose and lack the commitment to fight. The Earth is on fire, and only a handful of Scandinavian teens gluing themselves to paintings seem to have the will to do anything about it. I feel like I'm going to crack at every provocation, however minor or unintended. I wonder if I've lost my mind. It's the old man's fate to lament the growing incivility of every generation, but I didn't expect to have so much rage going into my sixth decade. I didn't expect to be the source of the incivility. I think the fallout from the cascading traumas of the last several years will continue to expose fault lines in our society for decades to come. Fallout is inevitable after an apocalypse, after all, and fault lines cause earthquakes. There's nothing special about us.

Renfield (2023) + Sisu (2023)

RENFIELD
*½/****
starring Nicholas Hoult, Nicolas Cage, Awkwafina, Benjamin Schwartz
screenplay by Ryan Ridley
directed by Chris McKay

SISU
**½/****
starring Jorma Tommila, Aksel Hennie, Jack Doolan, Mimosa Willamo
written and directed by Jalmari Helander

by Walter Chaw Chris McKay is an able director still looking for a project that isn't an embarrassing high concept. His years on "Robot Chicken" and "Moral Orel" demonstrate a strong sense of timing and a willingness to offend the status quo, but so far--between The Lego Batman Movie, The Tomorrow War, and now Renfield--McKay has only been tasked with shepherding a few expensive (if laboured and overburdened) cows to pasture. Renfield is both a workplace comedy and a Raimi-esque slap-stick splatter ("splat-stick?") flick in which bug-eating vampire familiar Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) attends codependency support groups to listen to other people complain about toxic relationships. It seems his boss, Dracula (Nicolas Cage), is a raging narcissist, and Renfield, after centuries of servitude, has finally had enough. There's a parallel plot, too, involving a crime family led by imperious Bellafrancesca Lobo (a slumming Shohreh Aghdashloo) and her asshole son, Tedward (a not-slumming Ben Schwartz), running amuck while dedicated cop Rebecca (Awkwafina) and her FBI agent sister Kate (Camille Chen) try to bring them down.

Evil Dead Rise (2023)

***/****
starring Lily Sullivan, Alyssa Sutherland, Gabrielle Echols, Morgan Davies
written and directed by Lee Cronin

by Walter Chaw Lee Cronin's Evil Dead Rise is mean. It's that scene from The Exorcist (1973) where little Regan McNeil masturbates with a crucifix and then shoves her mom's face into her crotch mean. Vicious. But it's not Ari Aster mean, where you infer it hates its characters and/or its genre. Rather, it's mean in the sense that demons are mean, and it makes people we like do terrible things to other people we like. Evil Dead Rise is the line separating a horror film from a horrible film. It's closer in tenor to its immediate predecessor, Fede Alvarez's similarly vicious--brutal, really--Evil Dead (2013), than to Sam Raimi's original trilogy, though more to the point, it's exactly as mean as the first two entries in that trilogy but without Raimi's sillier visual affectations and Bruce Campbell's beloved caricature of a hambone persona. Indeed, most of the "fun" of those Campbell/Raimi pictures is the amount of humiliation and abuse heaped upon Campbell, with Campbell's physical resemblance to a cartoon character becoming the central gag of the third film, Army of Darkness, as his features are stretched and multiplied, shrunken and deformed to fit whatever comic-strip setup is required of him in that moment.

The Pope's Exorcist (2023)

½*/****
starring Russell Crowe, Daniel Zovatto, Alex Essoe, Franco Nero
screenplay by Michael Petroni and Evan Spiliotopoulos
directed by Julius Avery

by Walter Chaw Right off the bat, I feel I must warn you that no popes are exorcised in this film. The prospect of Russell Crowe reading the rites over a levitating, pea-soup spewing Franco Nero, shuttled in to play the Pope in Julius Avery's The Pope's Exorcist, is incredibly juicy, so I get why they would attempt to mislead audiences in this way, but it's terribly dishonest. The cruellest blow, however, is that in place of Franco Nero in his dotage doing a spider-walk downstairs and pissing himself in his papal robes before a drunken astronaut (which, let's face it, once I hit 82, I can't promise that won't just be a Tuesday), we get Crowe, as real-life exorcist Father Gabriel Amorth, riding a Vespa through the streets of Rome, no doubt in search of an espresso, a gelato, spaghetti, and his portly, Vespa-riding twin for the Guinness Book photo shoot. It bears mentioning, too, how Crowe straps on the world's most offensive Mario Bros. accent to free poor little Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) from demonic possession. Why is Henry in Rome? Because his mom, Julia (Alex Essoe), is renovating a building, which happens to be the primary reason anyone moves to Italy. (See also: Donald Sutherland's character in Don't Look Now and Genevieve Bujold's character in Obsession and Diane Lane's character in Under the Tuscan Sun.) There's probably a piece to be written about how our perception of Italy is of a beautiful place the Italians have neglected, but now that P.J. O'Rourke, who once wrote, "Italy is not a third world country but nobody told the Italians," is dead, I don't know who'll write it.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) [2-Disc Ultimate Edition] - DVD|4K Ultra HD

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

****/****
DVD - Image A Sound A Extras A+
4K UHD - Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow
screenplay by Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Walter Chaw If we start from the position that Sally (Marilyn Burns) is burdened from the get-go by two misfit monsters, then we can look at Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as not only a keen autopsy of a particular moment in our country's history (circa 1974), but also a profoundly sensitive look at social prejudices and the toll said prejudices take on the human social organism. More than the typical rise-of-the-bumpkins horror conceit, it is, along with John Boorman's Deliverance from two years earlier, the classic example of a film that isn't about what it's ostensibly about. Look at the assiduous reduction of wheelchair-bound outcast Franklin (Paul A. Partain), a character who remains for the efforts of Hooper and Partain (apparently so irritating in real life that his cohorts were relieved by his on-screen demise) one of the most unapologetically irritating and pathetic figures in film and find noteworthy not that a handicapped person is allowed to be a self-pitying asshole, but that we're not let off the hook (as it were) for our own prejudices. Franklin is an anchor--and we're glad that he's dead, too.

Boston Underground Film Festival '23: Smoking Causes Coughing

Fumer fait tousser
***/****
starring Anaïs Demoustier, Gilles Lellouche, Jean-Pascal Zadi, Oulaya Amamra
written and directed by Quentin Dupieux

by Walter Chaw French provocateur Quentin Dupieux's eleventh film Smoking Causes Coughing is an anthology picture organized around a framing device in which five costumed idiots forced to go on a team-building retreat tell each other horrifying tales around a campfire. I've been decidedly lukewarm on Dupieux's films. They're the very definition of an acquired taste, and I suspect they're hit-or-miss even if you're dialled into their frequency. His best-known film is probably Rubber (2010), a creature-feature about a car tire that causes folks' heads to explode using "telepathy." That's the punchline to the long setup of a tire rolling around to tense music, which Dupieux punctuates with dialogue that's knowingly campy, dedicatedly stupid, and ramped up with vein-bulging sincerity. It's the kind of conceit that attracts viewers who like to laugh at movies. I think Dupieux's sense of humour relies a lot on exaggeration and repetition, with the former landing like grossly performative sarcasm and the latter like the most irritating person you know milking a joke until the doggedness itself becomes the joke. For the most part, Dupieux's movies don't think much of the genres they're mocking and, by extension, they don't think much of the audiences for them, either.

Boston Underground Film Festival '23: The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster

****/****
starring Laya DeLeon Hayes, Chad L. Coleman, Denzel Whitaker
written and directed by Bomani J. Story

The Boston Underground Film Festival runs from March 22-March 26, 2023. Click here for more info.

by Walter Chaw Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes) is a 17-year-old STEM wunderkind who has a theory--one she shares with the mad oncologist of Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain--that death is a disease and, as such, can be cured. It's her favourite topic, and she tries to expound upon it during chemistry class, but her teacher, Mrs. Kempe (Beth Felice), doesn't want to listen. Mrs. Kempe expresses her distaste through microaggressions like mispronouncing Vicaria's name, then offering to call her "Vicky" because it's easier to remember. When that fails to intimidate Vicaria, she summons the school's security officer to forcibly remove Vicaria from the classroom. It's dangerous when white folks call the cops on Black folks, and Vicaria, sure enough, is thrown from her desk--breaking her glasses--and cuffed for the crime of, essentially, being smarter than expected in a situation where her white teacher feels threatened. The first thing Bomani J. Story's The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster is about is the chips and how they're stacked against women and minorities, especially in the sciences. In just this one scene, he addresses different types of racism (internalized, subtle, overt, systemic), builds a character in the outspoken and unbowed Vicaria, and sets up a confrontation in which Vicaria's dad, Donald (Chad L. Coleman), demonstrates what it looks like when a father has his daughter's back. In five minutes, we know everything we need to know. This is exceptional storytelling.

Boston Underground Film Festival '23: Sick of Myself

Syk pike
***½/****
starring Kristine Kujath Thorp, Eirik Sæther, Fanny Vaager
written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli

The Boston Underground Film Festival runs from March 22-March 26, 2023. Click here for more info.

by Walter Chaw Effectively the Ruben Östlund film that got away, Kristoffer Borgli's acerbic Sick of Myself (and I can't say the title without singing it to the tune of the Matthew Sweet anthem of self-loathing) skewers the cult of victimhood that runs parallel to any progressive social awakening, muddying the waters to such an extent that the language of tolerance becomes weaponized, and true gains come clouded with apologies and equivocations. One step forward, 80 years' worth of steps back. A scene late in Sick of Myself between a poisonous narcissist and the friend and journalist trying to make sense of it all has the malignant party saying they're the real victim of their own absurd machinations, because, given a choice, no one would ask to be a psychopath. It's funny because it's familiar: how self-pity is the easier sensation to bear over shame. And it's familiar because there isn't even anything like the illusion of accountability left in this world. The worst of us, given an unprecedented platform to do harm, will never admit to anything like fault or suffer anything like consequences.

Boston Underground Film Festival '23: The Unheard

***/****
starring Lachlan Watson, Michele Hicks, Nick Sandow, Brendan Meyer
screenplay by Michael Rasmussen & Shawn Rasmussen
directed by Jeffrey A. Brown

The Boston Underground Film Festival runs from March 22-March 26, 2023. Click here for more info.

by Walter Chaw I consider myself a fairly boring, credulous person who nevertheless, based on a couple of experiences I can't explain, believes in ghosts and is disturbed by stuff like the Electronic Voice Phenomenon, not to mention the tenuous wisdom of playing with Ouija Boards. Jeffrey A. Brown's The Unheard catches me right in my irrational fears with its story of Chloe (non-binary actor Lachlan Watson, playing the role of a young woman here), who returns to the isolated Cape Cod of her youth a decade after losing her hearing there from a case of meningitis. Her mother vanished around the same time. She was once thought to be a runaway, but it's looking more likely that she was the victim of an active serial killer. At least, that's what Chloe's hallucinations, for lack of a better word, intimate in the flashes of clarity they offer between the white-noise blatting from the closed-circuit television at her house in Cape Cod. She's come back to clean up the old place, make peace with her ghosts, and recover from an experimental treatment for her hearing loss from earnest, hopeful Dr. Lynch (Shunori Ramanathan). She hasn't, I don't think, thought things all the way through.

M3GAN (2023) [Unrated Edition] - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Code

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Amie Donald, Jenna Davis
screenplay by Akela Cooper
directed by Gerard Johnstone

by Walter Chaw That the Internet works the way it does and evolved as quickly as it did likely had everything to do with it being the finest distributor of pornography the world had ever seen. If a band of apes created something like the Internet, for instance, they would use it primarily to inflict violent dominance over others--and for sex, if possible. No "ifs" about it: we are, and we did. When an artificial intelligence was tasked with machine learning via the Internet, it became a misanthropic, misogynistic racist almost instantly. The Internet is also the single greatest anthropological bellwether ever created, diagnosing who we are when we're not obsessively adjusting our mask of civility; 100% pure id. I love Alex Garland's Ex Machina because it understands that if a robot that looked like Alicia Vikander were invented, men would try to fuck it, and no expense would be too great in that pursuit. It doesn't even have to resemble Alicia Vikander--it can just be a flashlight with a rubber hole in it. Which brings us to the question M3GAN refuses to confront. If you make a little blonde doll that looks like a 12-year-old Fiona Gubelmann, you're opening an entire hornet's nest of uncomfortable issues that would be fascinating to address. What happens when unfettered tech capitalism collides with pedophilia? I mean, the Replicants in Blade Runner are soldiers, teachers...and prostitutes. Even Spielberg's A.I. recognizes that great leaps in technology are historically tied to warfare and rutting.

Scream VI (2023)

**/****
starring Melissa Barrera, Courteney Cox, Jenna Ortega, Hayden Panettiere
written by James Vanderbilt & Guy Busick
directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett

by Walter Chaw There's a fine line between satire and simulacrum, between an ironic commentary on a thing and the thing itself. It's a tone more than anything, and context, of course. Timing most of all. Fall too far on the one side and the sarcasm is so strident it becomes sour. Overcorrect to the other and it becomes precisely the thing you wish to lampoon. I liked last year's Scream, Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin's "requel," for taking on toxic fandom and the expectations it imposes on franchise filmmaking--almost certainly the lingering topic of fascination for future cultural archaeologists excavating this period in our popular history. I thought it was a smart way to continue the series' penchant for metatextual self-evaluation while upping the visceral stakes with stalking and kills that levelled up the intimacy and brutality. The movie was self-conscious without being mired in self-admiration, a neat trick--and one, it turns out, difficult to replicate.

A-Maize-ing Grace: The Children of the Corn Saga

DISCIPLES OF THE CROW (1983) ***½/**** starring Eleese Lester, Gabriel Folse, Steven Young, Martin Boozer based on the story "Children of the Corn" by Stephen King adapted for the screen and directed by John Woodward	CHILDREN OF THE CORN (1984) Stephen King's Children of the Corn **½/**** starring Peter Horton, Linda Hamilton, R.G. Armstrong, John Franklin screenplay by George Goldsmith, based upon the story by Stephen King directed by Fritz Kiersch
CHILDREN OF THE CORN II: THE FINAL SACRIFICE (1993) ***/**** starring Terence Knox, Paul Scherrier, Ryan Bollman, Ned Romero written by A.L. Katz and Gilbert Adler directed by David F. Price	CHILDREN OF THE CORN III: URBAN HARVEST (1995) ***/**** starring Daniel Cerny, Ron Melendez, Mari Morrow, Jim Metzler written by Dode Levenson directed by James D.R. Hickox
CHILDREN OF THE CORN IV: THE GATHERING (1996) */**** starring Naomi Watts, Brent Jennings, Samaria Graham, William Windom written by Stephen Berger and Greg Spence directed by Greg Spence	CHILDREN OF THE CORN V: FIELDS OF TERROR (1998) ½*/**** starring Stacy Galina, Alexis Arquette, Ahmet Zappa, David Carradine written and directed by Ethan Wiley
CHILDREN OF THE CORN 666: ISAAC'S RETURN (1999) */**** starring Nancy Allen, Natalie Ramsey, Paul Popowich, Stacy Keach screenplay by Tim Sulka & John Franklin directed by Kari Skogland	CHILDREN OF THE CORN: REVELATION (2001) */**** starring Claudette Mink, Kyle Cassie, Michael Ironside written by S.J. Smith directed by Guy Magar
CHILDREN OF THE CORN (2009) **/**** starring David Anders, Kandyse McClure screenplay by Donald P. Borchers and Stephen King, based on the short story by King directed by Donald P. Borchers	CHILDREN OF THE CORN: GENESIS (2011) ***/**** starring Kelen Coleman, Tim Rock, Billy Drago written and directed by Joel Soisson
CHILDREN OF THE CORN: RUNAWAY (2018) ½*/**** starring Marci Miller, Jake Ryan Scott, Mary Kathryn Bryant, Lynn Andrews screenplay by Joel Soisson directed by John Gulage	CHILDREN OF THE CORN (2023) */**** starring Elena Kampouris, Kate Moyer, Callan Mulvey, Bruce Spence based upon the short story by Stephen King written and directed by Kurt Wimmer

by Walter Chaw Kurt Wimmer's Children of the Corn prequel/reboot is drab, uninspired, witless I.P.-sploitation. I first read Stephen King's same-named short story in the movie tie-in edition of Night Shift (the one with the red cover) in sixth grade and loved the Lovecraft of it, how it begins in the middle with a car-tripping couple hitting a kid running out of a cornfield in bumblefuck, Nebraska and leads said couple through a forensic reconstruction of the doom that came to Gatlin. I see in its setup and execution both the tendrils leading backwards and the ones nourishing stories like Clive Barker's "In the Hills, the Cities." It has a feeling of the inevitable uncanny that is underestimated in King's best work: a sense that what is happening has almost finished happening, and it's too late to do anything but bear witness to our collective ruin. Of the dozen films in the eclectic Children of the Corn franchise, only the third feature, subtitled Urban Harvest, hints at that feeling of Elder Gods infecting the innocent to act against the innocent and the generational end times attending that. None of the rest deal with the horror of good kids from loving families falling into an apocalyptic blood cult and suddenly murdering all of the grown-ups, choosing instead to paint the victims as abusive or absentee so that they kind of deserve whatever's coming to them. That's a revenge fantasy, not horror.

Swallowed (2023) - VOD

**½/****
starring Cooper Koch, Jose Colon, Jena Malone, Mark Patton
written and directed by Carter Smith

by Walter Chaw Carter Smith's Swallowed is a bitter pill. It's cruel and sardonic, positing as its Emerald City the California porn industry and the lead role in a movie where "strangers cum on" the face of our hero, Benjamin (Cooper Koch). "But you look so sexy doing it," says Benjamin's cis but bi-curious friend, Dom (Jose Colon), and all the tender moments like this play as angry and insincere. I'm not saying the characters don't mean it, I'm saying the whole tenor of the film is punishingly nihilistic. When Benjamin later gives Dom a gentle kiss at a moment of crisis, it feels more cynical than romantic: one friend condescending to the performative allyship of another. Indeed, though Dom gushes that Benjamin means more to him than an entire parade of ex-girlfriends he lists off as proof, he also refuses to go to L.A. with Benjamin and doesn't, in any case, think he'll ever see him again. It's easy to say you love someone when every string attached is about to be cut. When Benjamin subsequently plants one on Dom, it's undercut by the film's overriding message that the world is dangerous for pretty boys like him; professions of love are more often self-serving than earnest. I confess I love Smith's The Ruins for that same uncompromising, nails-and-broken-glass nature, but here the chilliness makes Swallowed feel like an Ari Aster movie. It is, in other words, an asshole. Your tolerance for time spent in the company of a sentient sneer, one that either despises or patronizes its characters, will determine the extent to which you're able to find value in its depiction of interpersonal and systemic trauma focused in on the LGBTQ community.

Knock at the Cabin (2023)

*/****
starring Dave Bautista, Jonathan Groff, Rupert Grint, Ben Aldridge
screenplay by M. Night Shyamalan and Steve Desmond & Michael Sherman, based on the book The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay
directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT FOR BOTH THE FILM AND THE BOOK ON WHICH IT'S BASED. M. Night Shyamalan's Knock at the Cabin is an accurate and appropriately vile portrait of Evangelical Christianity and a conservative mindset based on a sense of righteous indignation that their ignorance and bile are not well-received by people whom they despise for receiving the gifts they themselves have not received. The maxim of the meek inheriting the Earth is not, after all, a promise of something good, but rather the herald of small, terrified people emboldened by their shared ignorance and repulsive mythologies to exterminate everything that is not as morally bankrupt and spiritually unmoored as them. They imagine they're the good guys, the ones magnanimous in their mercy and forgiveness, when in fact they are the reason mercy and forgiveness are necessary in the world. If it were not so, the Sermon on the Mount--the keynote address by their ostensible human godhead--would be the document they're pushing to be posted in every classroom instead of the Ten Commandments and the Pledge of Allegiance to precisely the type of golden calf their fairytales warn against. The world is ending, not because of gay marriage, abortion, or immigration, but because of the prosperity gospel. In many ways, Knock at the Cabin shares an ideological space with Scorsese's Silence, yet only one of them reckons with the Christian god's promised, and thorny, non-intervention in the affairs of its creation. Only one of them, in other words, isn't a piece of ecstatic, ecclesiastical hoohah.

Invaders from Mars (1953) - 4K Ultra HD

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Helena Carter, Arthur Franz, Jimmy Hunt, Leif Erickson
screenplay by Richard Blake
production designed and directed by William Cameron Menzies

by Bill Chambers Predating Jack Finney's novel The Body Snatchers by two years and Don Siegel's seminal film adaptation, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, by three, William Cameron Menzies's Invaders from Mars makes for an apt precursor in featuring a child protagonist and beginning at the dawn of an invasion instead of the usual in media res. When his alarm clock reminds him in the middle of the night to check out "Orion in its zenith," little David MacLean (Jimmy Hunt) accidentally rouses his father, George (Leif Erickson), who is careful not to discourage the curiosity of a fellow "scientist" while tucking his son back into bed. David is awakened again by a commotion outside, and from his bedroom window sees a flying saucer disappear below the horizon. Dad agrees to check it out, which is of course not the wisest idea, yet his respect for his son's intelligence is touching. While a twist ending recontextualizes this moment, suggesting it may have been wishful thinking on David's part, that's touching, too: Here's a movie where the child's fantasy of saving the world isn't about demonstrating feats of heroism beyond his years, but about adults giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Infinity Pool (2023)

**½/****
starring Alexander Skarsgård, Mia Goth, Cleopatra Coleman, Jalil Lespert
written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg

by Angelo Muredda Brandon Cronenberg delivers his own visceral riff on the resort satire trend with Infinity Pool, a high-concept thriller that shares obvious genetic material with its precursor, Possessor (2021), but feels more like the runty kid brother in terms of its ideas. With his third feature, Cronenberg hones his skillsets in grounded sci-fi storytelling and kaleidoscopic montage while continuing to make a meal of the charge that he's merely following in his father's footsteps as a new purveyor of brainy body horror, boldly playing once more with the motifs of inheritance and imitation where less confident nepotism babies might dodge the comparison outright. Yet in the absence of stronger material, these predilections don't ripen into rich artistic fruits so much as they rot, leaving Infinity Pool's success riding largely on the back of its occasionally startling images and self-effacing cast, who, like Cronenberg, are riffing on the roles we expect from them.

Blood (2023)

***/****
starring Michelle Monaghan, Skeet Ulrich, Finlay Wojtak-Hissong, Skylar Morgan Jones
written by Will Honley
directed by Brad Anderson

by Walter Chaw Of the films Brad Anderson's made over the course of a long and varied career, the ones I remember best are his slow-burn haunted-asylum movie Session 9 and his portrait of progressive madness, The Machinist. Both are focused on how a person can get fixated on obsessive thoughts, and how elastic reality might become to conform itself around those fixations. He's the perfect chronicler of this fraught moment where belief has come to be as valued as fact--and more powerful, too, in the defense and inspiration of division and atrocity. His Blood is a queasy folk horror, its title referring to the thickness of it in relation to water as well as the only sustenance, the human variety, a little boy named Owen (Finlay Wojtak-Hissong) can tolerate after encountering something that lives in the hole of the dead tree in the woods behind his house. The two, family and its enervating qualities, are inextricable. In one way, Blood is about the evolutionarily proscribed madness of becoming a parent to a parasitic lifeform you love, whether or not it loves you back--that it would devastate you to lose, even as it's born with no ability to survive on its own.

There's Something Wrong with the Children (2023) - VOD

*/****
starring Alisha Wainwright, Zach Gilford, Amanda Crew, Carlo Santos
written by T.J. Cimfel & Dave White
directed by Roxanne Benjamin

by Walter Chaw Roxanne Benjamin's There's Something Wrong with the Children is a tired retread in the folk-horror category of evil children that doesn't break any new ground and certainly doesn't tread any old ground with anything resembling energy or invention. It's just lugubriously competent, cozy in the way of a broken-in boot or a well-loved terrycloth robe--an "I'll be right back, you don't need to pause it" movie. Indeed, one doesn't need to pause it. For what it's worth, the best evil-kid movie is probably Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's Who Can Kill a Child?, although my favourite is the repugnant, deeply wrong 1981 Lew Lehman freakout The Pit. In that one, unhinged 10-year-old creeper Jamie (Sammy Snyders) discovers a pit in the middle of the forest behind his house that's swarming with carnivorous troglodytes he thinks are communicating with him through his teddy bear. Between feeding bullies and football players to the pit, Jamie spends his time making passes at his teen cheesecake babysitter and peeping on her while she's in the shower. Yes, that movie has it all. Alas, There's Something Wrong with the Children is aggressively forgettable, even freed of comparisons to films it's so obviously aping: a pair of evil kids, check; a pit in the forest full of evil? Check. Parents too wrapped up in their bougie bullshit to notice their offspring are breaking supernatural bad? Check. You've seen it. We've all seen it. Better versions.

M3GAN (2023)

***/****
starring Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Amie Donald, Jenna Davis
screenplay by Akela Cooper
directed by Gerard Johnstone

by Walter Chaw That the Internet works the way it does and evolved as quickly as it did likely had everything to do with it being the finest distributor of pornography the world had ever seen. If a band of apes created something like the Internet, for instance, they would use it primarily to inflict violent dominance over others--and for sex, if possible. No "ifs" about it: we are, and we did. When an artificial intelligence was tasked with machine learning via the Internet, it became a misanthropic, misogynistic racist almost instantly. The Internet is also the single greatest anthropological bellwether ever created, diagnosing who we are when we're not obsessively adjusting our mask of civility; 100% pure id. I love Alex Garland's Ex Machina because it understands that if a robot that looked like Alicia Vikander were invented, men would try to fuck it, and no expense would be too great in that pursuit. It doesn't even have to resemble Alicia Vikander--it can just be a flashlight with a rubber hole in it. Which brings us to the question M3GAN refuses to confront. If you make a little blonde doll that looks like a 12-year-old Fiona Gubelmann, you're opening an entire hornet's nest of uncomfortable issues that would be fascinating to address. What happens when unfettered tech capitalism collides with pedophilia? I mean, the Replicants in Blade Runner are soldiers, teachers...and prostitutes. Even Spielberg's A.I. recognizes that great leaps in technology are historically tied to warfare and rutting.

White Noise (2022)

*½/****
starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy
written by Noah Baumbach, based on the book by Don DeLillo
directed by Noah Baumbach

by Angelo Muredda "Everything was fine, everything would continue to be fine, would eventually get better, so long as the supermarket did not slip," says professor Jack Gladney midway through White Noise, Don DeLillo's satire of contemporary middle-class American family life tested by catastrophe. DeLillo's protagonist is marvelling at the grocery store's capacity to endure unaffected in the face of a transient disaster that's hit his charming town, impressed by how the so-called "airborne toxic event" that's blown through (and now over) his community has, if anything, only enhanced the store's unnaturally perfect wares, which always seem in-season no matter the time of year. He could just as well be marvelling at the elasticity of DeLillo's novel, which holds up in the face of the ongoing global catastrophe it prefigures in many ways, a pandemic that briefly forced westerners to interrogate their insulation from the kind of suffering they normally watch on television.

To Speak!: FFC Interviews Luca Guadagnino

Walter Chaw interviews Luca Guadagnino, director of
BONES AND ALL

Sicilian-born Luca Guadagnino is a chronicler of the sensual, of the sublime and occasionally ridiculous. He's a sensationalist in the best sense of the term, a cartographer of the more embarrassing, least examined borders of human experience. His closest analogue, to my mind, is Nagisa Ōshima, another artist unafraid of digging into our most intimate, most carnal aspects and somehow mining high-minded art from all that primate muck. At his best, I would slot Guadagnino's pictures in with the likes of Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes or Derek Jarman's The Last of England: erotic rather than titillating; taboo rather than polite. His movies are about the freedom of becoming lost.

The Conjuring 3: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Ruairi O'Connor, Sarah Catherine Hook
screenplay by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick
directed by Michael Chaves

by Walter Chaw I like the Conjuring movies--or, rather, I've come to appreciate them independent of their actual quality. I like them not because of their supernatural stuff or sometimes-expert jump scares, but because they're a popular mainstream film series--one that has suspiciously little to do with any conjuring--about a corny, middle-aged, 1960s married couple who are hot for each other. They own a small business together and respect the unique skill sets the other one brings to the table. Their marriage is as solid as American steel. Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) thinks Ed (Patrick Wilson) is the manliest man that ever manned; Ed thinks Lorraine is the most spiritual spiritualist to ever spiritual. In each other's eyes, they are the utmost. I bet the sex is incredible. Ed and Lorraine are based on real-life couple the Warrens, who earned a living as the kind of sideshow hucksters James Randi made it his holy mission to expose. Yet as immortalized in this flourishing billion-dollar franchise, they are golden and perfect. They are Ozzie & Harriet: Demonologist Exorcists, and these movies are vehicles for their vintage, good ol' middle-American can-do spirit. They're what Republicans used to be before devolving into domestic terrorists and Christo-fascist cultists, and so they carry with them a trace of nostalgia for a time before this country seemed irrevocably divided. In this cinematic universe, the threat isn't only from within.

SDAFF '22: Millie Lies Low

***½/****
starring Ana Scotney, Chris Alosio, Jillian Nguyen, Sam Cotton
written by Eli Kent, Michelle Savill
directed by Michelle Savill

by Walter Chaw Michelle Savill's hyphenate debut Millie Lies Low is a deeply uncomfortable update of Laurent Cantet's Time Out that deals with issues of diasporic disaffection, the pressures of satisfying social expectations in the age of panic, and the navigation of identity when identity has become branding for institutions both personal and corporate. It's an everything burger of existential dread, in other words, an extraordinarily competent horror film about a lie meant to hide vulnerability that becomes many lies that leave our hero, ironically, increasingly vulnerable. She's Millie (Ana Scotney), a Kiwi architectural student who has won an internship at a prestigious firm in New York but has a panic attack while the plane's on the tarmac and learns, once demanding to be let off, that she can't get back on without a new ticket she can't afford. Unable to accept that she's made a shambles of her opportunity, she leans into the deception that she's made it to the Big Apple with Photoshopped social-media posts and Zooms, where she manufactures big-city backgrounds from Wellington alleyways. In disguise, she stalks the classmates she's left behind, like Tom Sawyer haunting his own funeral--all while slinking around hiding from her best friend, Carolyn (Jillian Nguyen), her bro boyfriend (Chris Alosio), and her housekeeper mom (Rachel House).

Nope (2022) [Collector's Edition] - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version.

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott
written and directed by Jordan Peele

by Walter Chaw I don't think you ever see the heroes getting hurt, but they limp around a lot, and I couldn't stop wondering why. Just because it's more dramatic to be out of breath and limpy? There's a rule about not looking something in the eye, but I don't know how the horses can obey it, or if horses look up and behind them when they run. I've never seen them do that, in any case. If there's a rule about eyes, is the plan, in the end, to put eyes on the hood of that hoodie, and if it isn't, why did he? I understand there's a point being made here about how Hollywood doesn't care about the people who work in it--especially minorities and child actors--once their usefulness has been used up, yet I worry if by equating their trauma with a television chimp who goes insane and starts eating faces that the analogy, assuming there is one, has gotten as out of control as the chimp. There's a reveal that's less a reveal of an important plot point than a reveal that the reveal of an important plot point was left out somewhere. There's a powerful opening scene where something happens involving a nickel that is very effective up until the moment it's explained, at which point it no longer makes sense; why did it do what it did and not what it does for the rest of the film? Is it attracted to movement? Noise? It seems like both--but if so, how are folks constantly escaping it by moving around and making noise? That picture she takes? It looks ridiculous and will be convincing to no one. Wouldn't the camera and the film the famous cinematographer is shooting still be in one piece, like a black box, when the thing happens with the balloon? How is that the first balloon it's ever seen or eaten? If I ate a balloon (and could, for instance, withstand multiple gravities of speed and possibly interstellar travel), would I explode?

Poltergeist (1982) + The Lost Boys (1987) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

POLTERGEIST
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring JoBeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson, Beatrice Straight, Heather O'Rourke
screenplay by Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais & Mark Victor
directed by Tobe Hooper

THE LOST BOYS
***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Corey Feldman, Jami Gertz, Corey Haim, Dianne Wiest
screenplay by Janice Fischer & James Jeremias and Jeffrey Boam
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Bill Chambers Although Walter Chaw's already written definitive reviews of Poltergeist and The Lost Boys for this site, so much time has passed since they were published that I feel obliged to say something original about these films before moving on to the Blu-ray portion of this review. Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist and Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys, each celebrating milestone anniversaries this year (fortieth and thirty-fifth, respectively), have aged unusually gracefully. Partly this is due to the Star Wars-festooned bedroom of Poltergeist and the comics-store hub of The Lost Boys being evergreen--though what was once indicated by Robbie's C-3PO lightswitch cover (his middle-class privilege) and Sam's pedantic knowledge of Superman lore (his lack of social life) may not come across as clearly to a generation of viewers that has grown up with Jedis and superheroes as the inescapable sum of pop culture. Moreover, these are not naïve films that invite condescension, and any doubts about their sophistication (aesthetic and otherwise) are laid to rest by the instantly dated attempts to drag them into the 21^st century: Gil Kenan's remake of Poltergeist and the dtv sequel Lost Boys: The Tribe.

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival '22: Mother, May I? + Old Flame

MOTHER, MAY I?
*/****
starring Kyle Gallner, Holland Roden, Michael Giannone, Chris Mulkey
written and directed by Laurence Vannicelli

OLD FLAME
**½/****
starring Rebeca Robles, Andy Gershenzon
written and directed by Christopher Denham

by Walter Chaw Laurence Vannicelli's sophomore hyphenate feature, the two-hander Mother, May I?, feels timid given the richness of its premise and, for the places it's not willing to go, really has only enough going for it for a short--a proof of concept, maybe, a long trailer that hints at dark psychosexual undercurrents. At its current length, it all comes to nothing, a gothic horror about possession and maternal/filial relationships that has all the elements but not the will to put them together. I heard a description once of serious cognitive decline as having a slice of bread in one hand, a toaster in the other, a bottle of jam and a butter knife on the counter, and having no idea how any of it comes together. That's Mother, May I?, which finds Emmett (Kyle Gallner) and his fiance Anya (Holland Roden) tasked with cleaning out his recently-departed mother's expansive manse in the woods, complete with a reedy lake and an overly friendly neighbour, Bill (Chris Mulkey). It's rich, made richer by a mindfuck game Emmett and Anya play in which they set a timer and then force each other to speak truthfully about past traumas before it runs out. Emmett has a few: his mother abandoned him at some point in the past, orphaning him in her affections, and her death has left him nothing but a windfall in the eventual sale of the family reserve. During one of their ersatz therapy sessions, Anya playacts as Emmett's dead mom, and Emmett starts wondering if his mother hasn't actually taken over Anya's body when she doesn't snap out of it after the timer goes off.

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival '22: Megalomaniac

***½/****
starring Eline Schumacher, Wim Willaert, Benjamin Ramon, Pierre Nisse
written and directed by Karim Ouelhaj

by Walter Chaw Belgian filmmaker Karim Ouelhaj's Megalomaniac joins Danish filmmaker Christian Taldrup's Speak No Evil as fresh additions to what feels like a new iteration of the "French New Extremity" subgenre coined by ARTFORUM's James Quandt, which flowered briefly at the turn of the 21^st century. Films of the loosely-defined movement dealt with the ugliest parts of France's social history, treating atrocities long thought better hidden with a frankness as unusual as the explicitness of the images. I love many of these films--Pascal Laugier's Martyrs and Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day, in fact, rank high among my all-time favourites, even though I almost never recommend them in polite company. Their violence is extreme and intimate. In place of catharsis, find only despair and self-loathing. I have felt this existential howl watching certain films of Bergman's--Tobe Hooper's, too. But I would say the French New Extremity caught the attention of the mainstream for the craft of its presentation and the care and intelligence with which the characters made to suffer were drawn. They're difficult to dismiss as exploitation or "foreign" in a pejorative sense. They're gruelling but artistically rigorous, making them difficult to diminish. I think of many of the genre pictures of South Korea like this, too: devastation exploitation flicks made by Steven Spielberg. And though credit is due the birthplace of the Marquis de Sade and Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol for finding another meat-spigot to turn at the dawn of our last fin de siècle, works by Lars von Trier (The House That Jack Built certainly and even Antichrist) and Fatih Akin's The Golden Glove suggest whatever was in the water is spreading.

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival '22: All Jacked Up and Full of Worms

*/****
starring Phillip Andre Botello, Sammy Arechar, Betsey Brown, Trevor Dawkins
written and directed by Alex Phillips

by Walter Chaw A sub-, sub-, sub-genre of exploitation flicks--stuff like Jim Hosking's The Greasy Strangler--has cropped up seemingly out of nowhere in mainstream-adjacent spaces where it appears the only aim, or goal, is provocation. I watched The Greasy Strangler with irritation and impatience until a scene in which two characters shrieked "potato chips" at each other in incomprehensible accents broke me into helpless hysterics. I don't know if it's funny or its full-throated dedication to battering all defenses finally just worked. For what it's worth, the movie went back to being irritating and trying for me almost immediately. I have a different response to Jackass, a chaos agent provocateur that ultimately strikes at the heart of some real and touching truths about not necessarily healthy male relationships, but possibly the healthiest most male relationships are allowed to be. Nevertheless, there are similarities between stuff like it and The Greasy Strangler. Both proceed because there must be something that is next, not because there is a narrative that demands it or characters with motivations leading organically to another sequence. In that way, these films are not unlike life in all its arbitrary bullshit and oft-times malignant-seeming causes and potentially tragicomic effects. Exaggerating random vicissitudes as filtered through sentient existence could conceivably be considered satire at best or, you know, knowledge of some kind that might prove useful in providing perspective to those looking for meaning and structure in the universe. What I have trouble with is how often this stuff feels like the parts of Kevin Smith films--which is all of Kevin Smith's films now--that are puerile and embarrassing. Feature-length shit-monsters from Dogma.

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival '22: Influencer

***/****
starring Sara Canning, Emily Tennant, Cassandra Naud, Rory J. Saper
written by Tesh Guttikonda & Kurtis David Harder
directed by Kurtis David Harder

by Walter Chaw Much like the higher-profile Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, Kurtis David Harder's Influencer takes aim at Zoomers with a sharp eye for critical detail and an even sharper ear for cutting dialogue. It's plotted with machine-like precision and delivers a series of switches--and switch-backs--that aren't just amusing: they speak ironically to the very interchangeability of Influencer's stars that the film seeks to satirize. I don't know if this is intentional, but it's appreciated. I especially loved the subtle shots at both a culture that would "other" someone with a physical deformity and that same culture that would still "other" but "other for profit" the same deformity. That's some dour shit about the state of things, providing the film a bracing jolt of topical venom. It's not the murder and identity theft getting under your skin in Influencer, it's the full-frontal assault of the new beauty myth as it transitions from makeup conglomerates to social-media stars turning a side-hustle of self-objectification and narcissism into a six-digit lifestyle. There's a lot going on in this movie, in other words, though on its surface it's a fleet thriller with charismatic leads who manage to give their objectionable rakes a legible undercurrent of depth and humanity. Squint a little and Influencer is a sly update of de Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses, only one of the partners in this classist love triangle is eternally missing: a ghost in the worldwide machine.

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival '22: Mother Superior

*½/****
starring Isabella Händler, Inge Maux, Jochen Nickel, Tim Werths
written and directed by Marie Alice Wolfszahn

by Walter Chaw Marie Alice Wolfszahn's Mother Superior is an overly familiar period piece about a young woman engaged as a caretaker for a mysterious and ailing older woman in a rambling country house--a plot most recently explored in the superlative Saint Maud and Sebastián Lelio's pretty good The Wonder, due out soon. It's possible to mine interest and value from a template so threadbare, but there's a built-in danger of playing with a premise the audience has likely already started to unravel as soon as the particulars are established. In Mother Superior, the young nurse is Sigrun (Isabella Händler), whom, we gather from the opening-credits sequence, is maybe the offspring of a Nazi breeding program. She goes to work as a nurse for creepy Baroness Heidenreich (Inge Maux), who is suffering from Parkinson's disease--though it only really manifests in some trembling when she tries to drink tea. Why would an aspiring anesthesiologist agree to be the hospice nurse for the Baroness? also-creepy caretaker Otto (Jochen Nickel) would like to know. Unfortunately, five minutes in, most everyone who's seen another movie would be able to tell him.

Halloween Ends (2022)

***½/****
starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Andi Matichak, Rohan Campbell, Will Patton
written by Paul Brad Logan & Chris Bernier & Danny McBride & David Gordon Green
directed by David Gordon Green

by Walter Chaw I think the point, if not the pleasure principle, of franchise entertainments is the illusion of ownership over them, the obsessive knob-polishing of arcane knowledge not so very different, in many cases, from the pursuit of doctorate degrees in the liberal arts. You dedicate your life to learning so much about an exceptionally narrow field of study that you eventually come to a place where you know a lot about a little and not much about the rest. This monocultural--and, in most cases, monotextual--training tutors one in identifying deviations from the mean, so that what was joy in discovery becomes jealous taxonomy in defense of the tiny corner you've painted yourself into. The point of it all, ultimately, is to complain. When a totem such as John Carpenter's Halloween arrives, it carries with it the inspiration for epistemological/maniacal cults: entire fields of worship in which the limited revelations provided by a singular text serve as the foundation for religion. Hungry for more tablets, new installments are met with jeweller's glasses and tests of fidelity to the one true Word. The complaining, in other words, starts immediately. Is this new version of the Golden Calf walking the right way? Is it behaving as it should? Slow, not fast, or fast, never slow? Is it savage enough? Is the hero worthy? Is the lamb worthy of the blade? Each new film in any long-running series that earns enough each time out to warrant a continuation receives the scrutiny attending the unearthing of a new book of the Bible. Sources are vetted, false prophets are suspected, bloody debates are had in the town square, and finally, it's either the grudging acceptance into a growing canon or a casting off into the wilderness. The complaining is the point. It solidifies a community like the negging built into Evangelical outreach missions, and it's instant. The only thing verboten is if the franchise threatens the fragile identities of the high priests of its insular cult of personality.

The 'Old Man' and McKee: FFC Interviews Lucky McKee

Walter Chaw interviews Lucky McKee,
director of OLD MAN

I met Lucky McKee and the brilliant artist Vanessa McKee, his wife, when I had them out to screen McKee's feature debut May via his personal 35mm answer print about a decade ago. Like many filmmakers showing their work retrospectively, they didn't want to watch their movie again, so I sat with them in the green room between the introduction and Q&A, and we started talking about film in a broad-ranging chat that went deeper and farther than these things ever do--a product of their warmth, on the one hand, the depth of their knowledge and passion on the other. As they were leaving for their hotel, Lucky shook my hand warmly and thanked me for "talking good movie." A great night--and I thought that was that, but Lucky texted me a couple of weeks later to ask after me and follow up on a few family things we'd touched on. Considerate, smart, and, above all else, authentic.

The Munsters (2022) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Sheri Moon Zombie, Jeff Daniel Phillips, Daniel Roebuck, Richard Brake
written and directed by Rob Zombie

by Walter Chaw Rob Zombie only makes movies about families, and he does it with a wife he loves. It's the kind of relationship John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands shared: the iconoclastic, combative director and his muse, living examples of a creative partnership built on mutual respect, come hell or high water. I call Rowlands Cassavetes's "muse," though I think closer to the truth is that their movies feel like watching great jazz musicians play off each other. Without exactly equating one of the greatest independent filmmakers of all time with Rob Zombie, I think Zombie and Sheri Moon Zombie go to some interesting places together they couldn't get to on their own. I can't claim Zombie's for everyone--hell, Cassavetes ain't for everyone, either--but he works on a specific wavelength where if you're hip to it, if you fall into his groove, for his part he never loses the beat. I didn't get it when I first saw House of 1000 Corpses, but from a second viewing of The Devil's Rejects on, I've been ride or die with Zombie. Unlike most, when it was announced he was tabbed to do a reboot of "The Munsters" (which has turned out to be a prequel to the TV series), I was not only not surprised, given his penchant for family stories--I was excited. I wish it were better.

TIFF '22: Sick

***/****
starring Gideon Adlon, Dylan Sprayberry, Beth Million, Jane Adams
written by Kevin Williamson
directed by John Hyams

by Angelo Muredda The Spring 2020 lockdown gets pulled out of the cultural memory hole in Sick, where vulgar auteurism favourite John Hyams proves himself a capable new aesthetic partner for screenwriter Kevin Williamson's aging Gen-X insights. A satisfyingly nasty and well-executed cold open sets the scene, updating Scream's terrorism-by-home phone set-piece with a killer who's a passive-aggressive texter and summarily dispatching a reluctant young mask-wearer who comes home empty-handed during the great toilet paper drought of April 2020. From there, it's off to a remote country house with actual protagonists Parker (Gideon Adlon) and Miri (Beth Million), the latter more COVID-conscious than her reluctantly isolated social-butterfly friend. Their plan to ride out quarantine in relative seclusion soon falters when Parker's sometimes-boyfriend shows up, paving the way for a worse door-crasher: the athletic, text-happy, black-clad killer from the opening sequence.

Telluride '22: Bones & All

Bones and All
****/****
starring Taylor Russell, Timothée Chalamet, Mark Rylance, Michael Stuhlbarg
screenplay by David Kajganich, based on the novel by Camille DeAngelis
directed by Luca Guadagnino

by Walter Chaw Luca Guadagnino's Bones and All is every single thing I like packed into one film: a swooning gothic romance; a gory and uncompromising cannibal movie; an American Honey middle-American travelogue; and a vision of first love as a consumptive, Romanticist fire. Shot in dirty sepia tones by DP Arseni Khachaturan (if you've not seen Dea Kulumbegashvili's Beginning, Khachaturan's lensing is one of the dozens of reasons you should remedy that), it has about it an atmosphere at once nostalgic for the 1980s, during which it's set, and aware of how the passage of time memorializes everything into unreliable emotional histories. I have no intellectual mechanism for retrieving memories--it's all about the feel. I realized during one scene that a girl, Kayla (Anna Cobb), was wearing a Cyndi Lauper T-shirt, and the impossible tangle of reactions I had made what might happen to her unbearable to contemplate. She became precious to me in an instant. She is somehow part of my history. (A disgusting person will later wear a Dokken tee, and I had a visceral reaction to that, too.)  The picture's needle drops, from Duran Duran's "Save a Prayer" to Joy Division's "Atmosphere" and New Order's propulsive/mesmerizing "Your Silent Face," offer evidence of a creative team who listened to the whole album instead of cherry-picked singles; the music is used as a mnemonic device for oldsters and a gateway drug for their kids. I still remember one doomed summer day in high school that started with my friend picking me up for us to go record shopping, Love and Rockets' fourth album whirring away in his cassette deck, my hand porpoising through the air of my open window--that feeling of being completely alive. So alive. Kate Bush just enjoyed a renaissance--I can only hope the same for Ian Curtis and Bernard Sumner after the Timothée Chalamet hive assimilates this film into their holy doctrine. It's worth appreciating how "Atmosphere" and "Your Silent Face" are both anthems about finding your voice or making a statement through silence (ditto "Lick it Up," off the first KIϟϟ album where they take off their makeup), and so these aren't merely nostalgia triggers. Every element of Bones and All helps to amplify Guadagnino's themes of discovering who you are in the midst of the whirlwind.

Orphan: First Kill (2022)

*½/****
starring Isabelle Fuhrman, Rossif Sutherland, Hiro Kanagawa, Julia Stiles
screenplay by David Coggeshall
directed by William Brent Bell

by Angelo Muredda "Esther's terrifying saga continues," promises the confusing promotional copy for William Brent Bell's Orphan: First Kill, a listless prequel to Jaume Collet-Serra's impressively nasty thriller Orphan. It says something about the project's existential inertia that even the pitch is muddled about whether the film's diminutive protagonist, played again with an appropriate mix of madame prudishness and girlish optimism by Isabelle Fuhrman, is coming or going. Arriving a whole 13-year-old's lifespan after the original, which famously culminated in the reveal that Esther was not a helpless urchin from St. Mariana's Home for Girls but a short, thirty-something serial killer from Estonia, Orphan: First Kill dilutes rather than develops the deliberately thin mythos of its predecessor, stretching its punchy 30-second exposition dump about her past into 100 minutes of deadweight.