The Dead Don't Die (2019): Writer-director Jim Jarmusch's bleak, hilarious homage to the zombie movies of George Romero is an occasionally meta-fictional delight, though the wall-breaking is generally left up to Bill Murray and Adam Driver's small-town cops. Don't get too attached to any of the characters, and don't expect anything all that normal to transpire in the small Pennsylvania town of Centerville (the Pennsylvania setting is another nod to Romero's Dead movies).
Driver, Murray, Tom Waits as a prophetic hermit, Chloe Sevigny as another cop, Tilda Swinton as a Scottish undertaker, and what seems like a cast of thousands all gamely walk and occasionally stumble into the apocalyptic night. Perhaps a perfectly cathartic movie for these COVID-19 times. Highly recommended.
Hellboy (2019): Savaged by critics and mostly ignored by audiences last summer, this soft reboot of the Hellboy movie 'franchise' is really pretty enjoyable and at least as faithful to creator Mike Mignola's epic comic series as Guillermo del Toro's first two Hellboy movies.
David Harbour makes a perfectly good Hellboy under all that make-up and prosthetics. Ian McShane plays it crusty as Hellboy's adoptive father and head of the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, one of a handful of organizations that protects Earth from supernatural disaster. But what price vigilance?
Hellboy doesn't play much like a movie, though, but rather a serial -- the creators cherry-pick characters and situations from what feels like 50 different issues of the comic. Hellboy in Mexico! Baba Yaga! Nimue (semi-hilariously pronounced as in 'Leonard Nimoy' by pretty much everyone)! King Arthur! The Wild Hunt! The boar-headed monster! To accentuate the serialesque nature of this movie, call it THE ADVENTURES OF HELLBOY and watch it in ten-minute segments. Recommended.
The Lighthouse (2019): Written by Max and Robert Eggers; directed by Robert Eggers: Is The Lighthouse Lovecraftian tentacle horror or a psychological study of men and madness? It's both! You know, like H.P. Lovecraft's sea-themed tale "Dagon"!!!
From the writer-director of The Witch, which also occupied both the supernatural and psychological portions of the supernatural spectrum comes this superior horror film starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson and really no one else as lighthouse keepers with a few too many secrets for a one-month tour on an island off the New England coast.
Pattinson is very, very good as an the 'kid' learning the ropes of lighthouse-keeping from suspiciously salty sea-dog, peg-legged Willem Dafoe. Reality seems to fall apart for both men in different ways as the stay lengthens and the weather worsens.
Why won't Dafoe let Pattinson into the light-room, much less teach him how to run the light? What is up with the fresh-water supply? Why is that seagull so angry at Pattinson? What's up with the mermaid figurine in the bunk room? And will these guys EVER STOP MASTURBATING? Or is Dafoe, ulp, masturbating?
Eggers juxtaposes the wide open skies and seas of the island with the claustrophobia of the living quarters -- and of the outside closing in on Pattinson when the rain comes down. There are points at which Eggers seems to have learned some valuable lessons from David Lynch, perhaps never moreso than when he lightens the tone with the increasingly loopy arguments of Pattinson and Dafoe, during one of which Dafoe is almost reduced to tears by the possibility that Pattinson doesn't enjoy his cooking.
Eggers is already a major directorial talent and a welcome addition to the ranks of serious, seriously creepy horror writer-directors. Highly recommended.
The Reddening (2019) by Adam L.G. Nevill: Gripping, grueling, visionary work of cosmic folk horror from the author of The Ritual and Last Days. Archaeological discoveries in modern-day Devon draw a grieving sister and a depressed Lifestyle reporter into an ancient mystery and an ancient horror.
Mysterious underground sounds, a long line of disappearances and unexpected suicides, and the run-down farm of a minor rock-folk star of the 1960's figure in the narrative. So, too, people high and low lacking all empathy.
The mysteries of the ancient cult and its supernatural progenitors are vividly imagined and described, as are the psychologies of protagonists and antagonists alike. While not for the squeamish, the violence is modulated and necessary to the depiction of the cult and to the larger questions about humanity's love for ultra-violence.
Nevill weaves social commentary into the horrible imaginings, with the worst instincts of humanity being linked to Brexit and austerity measures and the overall rise of xenophobia and fascism throughout the world. It's the sort of novel that justifies my recent blurby observation that Nevill's two clearest forerunners in British horror are James Herbert and Ramsey Campbell. Highly recommended.
Midsommar (2019): [Credits Here] Writer-director Ari Aster follows up the superior Hereditary with another smart horror film, this one in the vein of The Wicker Man or Children of the Corn.
A grieving Florence Pugh tags along with her boyfriend -- an annoying sociology grad student -- and other annoying American grad students to visit the communal village of a Swedish grad student just in time for the special, every-90-years Midsummer festival, aka Lammas, aka, per a surprisingly recent Farmer's Almanac, "sabbats possible." Whee!
Makes a weird trilogy from unconnected film-makers (the other films would be Let the Right One In and The Ritual) about how no location in Sweden is safe from horror. Florence Pugh stands out as the only really sympathetic major character. Highly recommended.
The Influence (La Influencia) (2019): adapted from the Ramsey Campbell novel by Michel Gaztambide, Daniel Rissech, and Denis Rovira van Boekholt; directed by Denis Rovira van Boekholt; starring Manuela Velles (Alicia), Alain Hernandez (Mikel), Emma Suarez (Victoria), and Claudia Placer (Nora):
Available on Netflix, The Influence (made in Spain and thus really 'La Influencia') very loosely adapts Ramsey Campbell's superior late 1980's horror novel to decent effect. Some changes make sense either because there's a need for compression in a 100-minute adaptation of a 350-page novel or because certain things in the novel aren't 'cinematic.' Some of those changes may make one view The Influence as being derivative of Hereditary, though Campbell's novel predates that movie by 30 years.
Chief among these later 'cinematic' changes is the decision to have the malign, elderly Victoria on life support for the duration of the film. In the novel, she dies at the beginning. But I can understand the film-makers wanting to leave the door open for a physical battle between 'Good' and 'Evil' at the climax of the film and not simply a spiritual one.
There are other weird lapses that make me wonder about a longer cut of the movie. The disappearance of a major character goes almost unremarked-upon. The coda seems a bit rushed and implausible as one would imagine SOME further police investigation of the events of the movie.
A few moments of implausibility do jar one out of the horror narrative from time to time. I mean, can you really start a massive fire in your urban backyard in Spain and not arouse the attentions of the police and fire department? Because that is one seriously big fire that gets started about halfway through the movie.
The direction is mostly assured, though, and The Influence has a lot of scares both intellectual and visceral. The actors are all competent, especially the child actor playing Nora. And there's a really nice design for a demonic figure, made more effective by the decision not to linger too long on it. Recommended.
Joker (2019): based on characters and situations created by Bob Kane, Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson, Alan Moore, Brian Bolland, and others; written by Todd Phillips and Scott Silver; directed by Todd Phillips; starring Joaquin Phoenix (Arthur Fleck/ Joker), Robert De Niro (Murray Franklin), Zazie Beetz (Sophie), Frances Conroy (Penny Fleck), and Brett Cullen (Thomas Wayne):
Downbeat, revisionist take on Batman villain The Joker's origin story from the guy who directed The Hangover. Somehow, it mostly works. Director/co-writer Todd Phillips lifts much of the movie's written and visual aesthetic from 1970's and early 1980's Martin Scorsese. Hey, if you're going to steal, you can do a whole lot worse.
The result is a super-villain origin story that plays like the offspring of Scorsese's Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, with just a little After Hours mixed in. It's 1981, and Arthur Fleck, who will become The Joker, is a sad-sack, deeply mentally ill man caught in a family and bureaucratic nightmare of an existence. What larks, Pip!
Films derived from superhero properties don't usually deal with the truly down-trodden and desperate. Why should they? That's not the stuff of CGI! That Joker can be read as a small-scale power fantasy seems to have freaked out all the people who let the truly pernicious large-scale power fantasies slide right by without comment. There's certainly nothing attractive about Arthur Fleck's plight or his apotheosis. It seems to me that Iron Man, aka America's Giant Metal Penis, is a far more dangerous movie than this.
And Joaquin Phoenix is indeed a revelation. There's nothing 'funny' about this Joker, nothing crowd-pleasing or attemptedly crowd-pleasing about him in the manner of all previous big-screen Jokers. He's a man who becomes a monster in part because of forces beyond his control. This Joker is, among other things, physically brain-damaged. Yikes. Highly recommended.
The Institute (2019) by Stephen King: Novel: Stephen King returns to the world of psychic children in his new novel with mostly positive results.
The eponymous Institute kidnaps children and puts them to work doing... what? Well, if I told you, I'd spoil the novel. Suffice to say that the people behind the Institute believe that the ends justify the means and that they're the good guys.
They really must think they're the good guys because they've been killing a whole lot of children for decades. And their families. King remains fairly ruthless throughout the novel, making things seem more plausible. There's a heck of a death toll, both depicted and implied, and the vast majority of those deaths are children between the ages of about 8 and 14.
But soon after the novel begins, the Institute makes one mistake -- they kidnap a boy genius. They didn't kidnap him because he's a boy genius. Human intelligence is irrelevant to their aims. Well, until it interferes with them.
King plays a bit with structure in the novel, beginning with a secondary protagonist -- a former police officer who goes walkabout and ends up as the Night Knocker in a small Southern town. After about 50 pages, we jump to our primary protagonist. A beginning writer would probably be told not to do this shift. But King can do what he wants -- and the structure does cause suspense insofar as we wonder how events in demon-haunted Maine (where the Institute is located) and the Southern whistle-stop will dovetail.
In all, it's enjoyable and fairly tight. The characterization of the children is typically astute. And the characterization of the assorted antagonists, while occasionally one-note, makes sense when one considers that they're people doing terrible things for what they believe is a noble cause. That's going to disconnect one from empathy -- or require people with low empathy from the get-go. It's also the only King novel I can think of in which probability calculations play a major role. Recommended.
Us (2019): written and directed by Jordan Peele; starring Lupita Nyong'o (Adelaide Wilson), Winston Duke (Gabe Wilson), Shahadi Wright Joseph (Zora Wilson), Evan Alex (Jason Wilson), Elizabeth Moss (Kitty Tyler), and Tim Heidecker (Josh Tyler):
Jordan Peele again demonstrates an impressive ability to rework genre tropes for shock and social commentary. Here, we start with the doppelganger and end with... well, that would be telling. Peele's first two movies, this and Get Out (2017), have melded genre and social commentary, and been critically and financially successful. It seems to me that Peele is still developing, though, that his best work lies ahead if he stays the course.
The childhood trauma of Lupita Nyong'o's character bleeds into the present when she and her family (the charming Winston Duke, Shahadi Wright Joseph, and Evan Alex) visit her grandparents' cottage in coastal California for the first time in decades. Something happened in a creepy house of mirrors at the local amusement park long ago. Now it's about to happen again.
Nyong'o is terrific as a dominating mother and wife. Winston Duke makes an affable Everydad forced to summon reserves of courage and ass-kicking to protect his family. And daughter Shahadi and son Alex are no slouches when it comes to monster-fighting. If the things they face really are monsters.
With about 25 minutes to go, Us veers into the territory of the totally loopy. To be fair, so did many Twilight Zone episodes in the final Act. There's maybe a bit too much evident straining to make the social commentary explicit and concrete here. But at least there is social commentary. And rabbits! Keep an eye on the videos on that shelf at the beginning -- they are relevant! Recommended.
The Silence (2019): adapted from the Tim Lebbon novel by Carey and Shane Van Dyke; directed by John R. Leonetti; starring Stanley Tucci (Hugh Andrews), Kiernan Shipka (Ally Andrews), Miranda Otto (Kelly Andrews), Kyle Breitkopf (Jude Andrews), Kate Trotter (Lynn), and John Corbett (Glenn):
Competent horror-thriller just as long as you don't think too hard about its central presence. Like A Quiet Place, it pits a small family group against monsters that hunt by sound.
In this case, the monsters come from a recently opened cave system "1000 feet below the Earth" rather than space. They look like the offspring of Gremlins and medieval gargoyles. They breed so fast that they rapidly threaten the Earth. What were they eating in that cave system during their millions of years of imprisonment? One another, I guess.
It's all solid and occasionally squirmy. Don't think too hard about the creatures' sensitivity to sound and the way they swarm it. Or what they ate. Stanley Tucci and Miranda Otto are solid pros. As in A Quiet Place, a deaf daughter plays a key role, along with American sign language. Certainly an adequate time-waster with something of an abrupt ending. Lightly recommended.
