Truth or Dare (2018): written by Michael Reisz, Jillian Jacobs, Christopher Roach, and Jeff Wadlow; directed by Jeff Wadlow; starring Lucy Hale (Olivia), Tyler Posey (Lucas), Violett Beane (Markie), Hayden Szeto (Brad), Sophia Ali (Penelope), Nolan Funk (Tyson), and Landon Liboiron (Carter):
So-so horror flick from the ubiquitous Blumhouse. Most of the cast is way older than the early 20's college students they play, a sometimes-distracting fact. A game of Truth or Dare turns supernaturally deadly because of a mysterious supernatural force.
I think the message of the film is 'Don't vacation in Mexico,' or maybe 'Don't play stupid teen-aged games in a sinister, abandoned church in Mexico.' Certainly an adequate time-waster, though even at a bare 90 minutes it feels about 15 minutes too long. Lightly recommended.
From Dusk Till Dawn (1996): written by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino; directed by Robert Rodriguez; starring George Clooney (Seth Gecko), Quentin Tarantino (Richard Gecko), Harvey Keitel (Jacob Fuller), Juliette Lewis (Kate Fuller), Ernest Liu (Scott Fuller), and Cheech Marin (Three characters): From Dusk Till Dawn still seems like two movies bolted together in the middle. The first movie is a gritty, amoral Tarantino crime drama about the bank-robbing Gecko brothers (George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino as Superego and Id, respectively). The second movie is a gore-soaked horror-comedy in the vein of Evil Dead 2.
They're both good movies, but I'll be damned if I know how they got stuck together like this. Robert Rodriguez directs with a lot of gusto, and Tarantino's script is solid, pulpy fun in the second half. There's some poorly modulated sexual violence towards women in the first half, a problem magnified by the jokey, one-note performance by Tarantino as the sexually predatious Gecko brother whom Clooney's more upright criminal is stuck with. Jesus, Tarantino was (and is) a terrible actor.
The second half goes on about ten minutes too long and bafflingly loses its antagonist about five minutes in. I enjoyed the movie, but I also felt a bit dirty afterwards. Harvey Keitel, George Clooney, and Juliette Lewis seem to be acting in (and reacting to) a completely different movie than anyone else. Their naturalistic performances accentuate the artificial grue and spew of the second half. Recommended.
The Dark by James Herbert (1980): Herbert gives us an apocalyptic struggle between Good and Evil, though this time expressed in pseudo-scientific rather than religious terms. A somewhat Satanic cult leader commits mass suicide with his followers in a London (England) suburb. A year later, what appears to be a sentient cloud of pure evil begins to sally forth from the site of the suicide, corrupting many of those it meets to act on their worst impulses. And it's pretty much up to three paranormal investigators and a medium to stop the rising tide, as conventional methods prove insufficient.
Herbert seems to have a good time destroying large portions of London, with a cloud-fueled soccer riot probably the best set-piece. Herbert's protagonists have an astonishing ability to survive physical punishment (the oldest and wisest paranormal investigator seems to get strangled every ten pages), which is good, because they must endure a lot of it.
This is an enjoyable horror novel in which evil operates more like a plague than the sort of thing one normally sees in horror novels. The protagonists are sympathetic if somewhat broadly drawn, and the stakes convincingly high. While this is horror, the depiction of the civil authorities pitching in to fight a supernatural menace also contains echoes of an awful lot of the British science-fiction-disaster tradition seen in the Quatermass series, Doctor Who, and the novels of John Wyndham. The sudden ending is quite loopy. Recommended.
Tomb Seven by Gene Snyder (1985): Labelled a horror novel by its publishers, Tomb Seven contains almost no horror. It's really a pseudo-scientific, ancient astronauts archaeology thriller about a dig in Mexico that unearths a seemingly impossible array of artifacts...and one weird 8-foot-tall skeleton. There's an awful lot of telepathic woo-woo stuff, much of it in need of less woo and more plausibility (cited for the millionth time in a piece of fiction about archaeology is the [in truth non-existent] Curse of King Tut's Tomb).
The protagonists -- a handsome Welsh archaeologist and a sexy Hispanic-American telepath -- have sex because that's how these things happen. And she is the most beautiful woman in the world, because that's also how these things happen. The telepath promises the reader that something terrible is coming. It never actually does. Sort of a wet firecracker. Not recommended.
