Three More Horrors

 

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019): Based on a popular series of children's books compiled by Alvin Schwartz, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark often shows its origins in an unconnected compilation of traditional ghost stories, anecdotes, Hallowe'en games, and the occasional plot synopsis of a work of fiction. 

Things drag occasionally over the first hour but pick up over the last 40 minutes with a terrific sequence in a hospital and another running from the police station to the haunted mansion to close the film. Produced by Guillermo del Toro, who also  co-wrote the screen story. Nixon's 1968 presidential victory and the Viet Nam war run as real-world horrors in counterpoint to the supernatural ones plaguing the teenagers in the movie. Lightly recommended.

Host (2020): In this Shudder original, several socially distancing friends decide to hold a seance over Zoom. Hilarity ensues. One of the first Covid-19 horror movies released, Host is short (less than an hour) and to the point. 15 years ago, it was difficult to believe that people would continue to hold cameras on themselves and others while crazy shit went on. Now, it's entirely plausible, thanks in part to the smartphone and to a general uptick in our camera-obsessed culture. A very enjoyable horror movie. Recommended.

Constantine (2005): Very, very loosely based on the DC Comics supernatural investigator/mage created by Steve Bissette, John Totleben, Alan Moore, and Rick Veitch and developed by Jamie Delano and John Ridgway. 

Constantine is now an American based in LA rather than a Liverpudlian based mainly in London. A few character names remain. The supernatural stuff is almost entirely reworked. Somehow it's still enjoyable for all that, with some surprisingly weird CGI used to depict the world of demons, angels, and the supernatural. Because the Matrix series had already been a big hit, Constantine now uses supernatural shotguns and flamethrowers when he battles demons as well as the more traditional spells and sigils. 

Keanu Reeves is fine as John Constantine, as written, and Rachel Weisz manages an OK American accent as a somewhat improbable LA cop. The real showstoppers are Tilda Swinton as the Archangel Gabriel and Peter Stormare as Satan. But they could have just called this movie pretty much anything -- well, except for the fact that Time Warner owned the rights to the characters. At one point, Nicolas Cage was attached to play Constantine, which would have been a whole other level of weird. Recommended.

Fever Dream

A Scanner Darkly: adapted by Richard Linklater from the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name; directed by Richard Linklater; starring Keanu Reeves (Bob Arctor); Robert Downey Jr. (James Barris); Rory Cochrane (Charles Freck); Winona Ryder (Donna Hawthorne) and Woody Harrelson (Ernie Luckman) (2006): Adapter/director Richard Linklater achieved at least three remarkable things with A Scanner Darkly: he created the most faithful movie adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel or short story ever; he created an outstanding science-fiction film; and he maximized the limited acting ability of Keanu Reeves by casting Reeves as a burnt-out case in the midst of a drug-fueled mental breakdown.

Reeves plays Bob Arctor, a near-future California undercover government narc charged by his superiors with helping win the war against Substance D, a highly addictive illegal substance that rapidly causes irreversible brain damage in those addicted to it, partially by severing the connection between an addict's left and right brain hemispheres.

Arctor is deep undercover, sharing a house with two other addicts and buying Substance D from a third in increasingly difficult-to-supply mass quantities in the hopes of moving up the supply chain. The government knows what the main ingredient of Substance D derives from -- a small, blue-flowered plant -- but it doesn't know who is growing it, refining it, and putting it on the street.

Dick based much of A Scanner Darkly on his own drug experiences of the 1960's and 1970's, experiences which saw him committed to a mental asylum for a time, and experiences which caused him to interact with a large number of doomed and mostly doomed addicts. Indeed, the movie appends a portion of the novel's afterword to the end of the movie -- a roll call of the dead and damaged.

The hyper-colourful, rotoscoped animation Linklater uses here (he first used it in Waking Life) suits the material and the tone of that material -- the movie looks like a fever dream, a pulsating nightmare in which nothing is stable. All the principals deliver outstanding performances, including Reeves, and perhaps most notably Robert Downey Jr., who presents us with a jittery speed freak (Substance D appears to be at least partially an amphetamine) over-bursting with his own paranoid delusions and fantasies.

The title is a play on the Biblical phrase 'Through a glass, darkly': there are scanners in this movie, but they aren't the Cronenberg variety. Highly recommended.