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This past weekend the Irish-set horror film Hokum, which I had been looking forward to, opened to its theatrical run, but after pinching a nerve or something in my neck by doing the idiotic thing of turning my head, and with the pain forcing me to abandon my plan to go see the film, I stayed home, nursing the protesting area.

20th Century Studios

I got my weekend horror fix by rewatching The First Omen, a 2024 prequel to the wildly successful Richard Donner film The Omen which, like The Exorcist, inspired a franchise of mediocre to terrible sequels. (Yes, I am aware that The Exorcist III possesses a vocal fan base, but that movie is the best of the lot and for me it rises only to mediocre.)

I ventured forth a little more than a year ago to catch The First Omen in theaters and gave the film a middling review here on my blog. So, why revisit something that hadn’t been all that inspiring the first time around? Sometimes the headspace I am in when I see a movie can cause me to come away with an impression that the movie did not earn or is unjust to the feature. The first time I watched The Godfatherit did not make that great of an impression on me. perhaps I was distracted, perhaps I didn’t quite allow the film in, or perhaps it was simply the wrong movie for my emotional state. However, when I rewatched it a few years later suddenly I ‘got it.’ The film is brilliant, and I adore it.

Did the same thing happen with the unloved The First Omen?

No.

The movie remains middling. A competently crafted piece of cinema that is not terrible but failed to reach the potential that had been possible with a stronger script and a bit more attention to the story it was attempting to integrate with.  The performances remain strong, and Ralph Ineson stepping into the role originated by Patrick Troughton is inspired casting. Ineson, while physically very different from Troughton pulls in the sense of the character so powerfully and so perfectly that it is wholly credible that this is the same man who tried, in vain, to warn Ambassador Thorne that his child was in fact the antichrist. Nell Tiger Free as Margaret, a young American woman on a voyage to become a nun and who is pulled into the conspiracy to birth the antichrist, is quite good in her role and none of the failures of the feature can be laid at her feet.

No, the script is the trouble.

In addition to not melding seamlessly with the film it is a prequel to, ignoring such things as that it was very clear that the child Damien, the future antichrist, did not have a human mother but had been birthed from a jackal, or ignoring that Father Brennan had been riddled with cancer, The First Omentried too hard to reset the franchise and set itself up for sequels that could never mesh with the established continuity.

Some years ago, there had been released a remake of the original The Omen, a film I have never been able to watch in its entirety. It is proof that casting and direction are essential elements and put a step wrong there and you’ve critically damaged your production. In my opinion the best course of action as a horror fan is to consider that there is only one Omen film, the first, and ignore the existence of all the rest.

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Last week I published a list of the summer movies I anticipated going out to the theaters to enjoy and here is my review of the first film on that list, the black comedy, Over Your Dead Body.

Independent Film Compan

Married couple Lisa (Samara Weaving) and Dan (Jason Segel) Burton have retreated to their isolated wooded cabin for the weekend, ignorant of the fact that each has plotted to murder the other as a solution to their marital troubles. Wholly inept as would-be killers their plans are exposed to one another but before either party can fulfill their rather simple and highly unlikely to succeed plots, the couple is confronted by a trio of strangers,  Pete (Timothy Olyphant), Allegra (Juliette Lewis), and Todd (Andre Eriksen), that present a far more credible, if not equally comedic, threat to them both, resulting in the film climaxing with over-the-top, farcical, Sam Raimi-like gore.

Over Your Dead Body, adapted from the Norwegian film, I Onde Dager, (Streaming on Netflix with the English language title The Trip) works as broad comedy with a strong sense of the absurd. All of the actors involved play their characters well, walking that fine line between believable, credible persons and exaggerated caricatures, never straying so far on either side as to damage the entirety of the story or the project. The director and the screenwriters, Jorma Taccone and Nick Kocher & Brian McElhaney respectively, played an expert level of set-up and payoff through the film, with several moments that are first presented seem minor color details later revealed to be clever and subtle foreshadowing.

Perhaps the most elegant and deft piece of screenwriting centers around the possibility of a sexual assault that threatens one of the characters. (It is not the character that you would expect that is threatened, providing an inversion of the trope, sliding away from the terrible titillation that often accompanies such sequences in lesser movies.) Once this element arose, I became seriously concerned about the rest of the film. It looked as if the writers had maneuvered themselves into a nasty, ugly little corner. If they took the scene to its conclusion the tone of the movie would irreparably rupture never to return to its comedic color and yet once begun it looked as if there was no way but to play the scene out as it threatened. Their solution displayed the genius of the scribes and saved the movie. I salute such brave and inventive writing.

The film’s final act escalated into cartoonish, wildly impossible, and, for my tastes, hilarious gory violence. I suspect for some it may be a bridge too far which shatters their suspension of disbelief but for those who had correctly calibrated their engagement and understand the movie’s attitude, it should play perfectly.

Over Your Dead Body is a movie that is best seen in a theater, with few distractions and preferably an engaged and laughing audience.

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 You may have noticed that I did not use the numeral ‘2’ in the title of the film as all the advertising has done. I was unimpressed with the addition of the numeral as I thought the title worked perfectly without and when the film’s title card appeared on the screen it pleased me that the filmmakers agreed with my sentiment over the marketers.

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Ready or Not, Here I Come is a direct sequel to 2019’s Ready or Not. The previous film Grace MacGaullay (Samara Weaving) marries into the insanely wealthy Le Domas family, only to discover that her new in-laws obtained their wealth and power by way of a dark pact with Satan and only by sacrificing her life to their dark god could they not only retain their privilege but their very lives. Ready or Not ends with Grace surviving her ordeal and her in-laws facing the wrath of their benefactor. The sequel, despite 6 years passing between the two movies’ production, starts precisely where the previous entry ended, with Grace sitting on the steps of the burning mansion as first responders arrive.

Grace’s escape from the torments of the satanic cult is quickly ended when she and her estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton) are abducted by the wider cult that the La Domas’ were only one facet of. As explained the organization’s Lawyer (Elijah Wood) control of the global cult, which until their destruction, rested with the La Domas, is now up for grabs. Determination of the family to take control is by yet another game of hide and seek with Grace and Faith as the targets of the murderous representatives.

While the sequel is much the same as the original film, the basic plot remaining unchanged, and the retcon creation of a sister for the orphaned Grace of the first film could have been ham-handed Ready or Not, Here I Come works surprisingly well. Weaving and Newton have a great sibling chemistry which acts as tonal counterbalance to the principal antagonists the fraternal twins  Ursula and Chester Danforth (Sarah Michelle Gellar and Shawn Hatosy.) Like the previous movie Ready or Not, Here I Come is more comedy than horror with few sequences of intense dread and more of exaggerated cartoonish violence. In some ways this compares favorably with Alien and Aliens. Where Ridley Scott crafted a slow burn horror film which James Cameron did not try to replicate but instead focused on an action driven film that share the same beats as its predecessor with this pair of movies, the first is more of a horror film, albeit interspersed with absurdist comedy, the sequel never tries to duplicate the horror of the first, understanding its mission to plow new ground.

Running a mere 108 minutes, this movie doesn’t waste time before diving into its central plot and troubles for its protagonists. The sequence of events is laid out in such a manner that the newly introduced Faith does not suffer an extended period of ‘disbelief’ that would only frustrate an audience that had already been exposed to the supernatural reality of this film’s world. Economical with time and exposition Ready or Not Here I Come knows just why the audience has come to the theater and it delivers. This is a not a horror film that is meditating on grief, or obsession, or the nature of good and evil in a complex world, it is here to show you a good time as two morally decent women are faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges.

If you were a fan of the first one then there is no reason to avoid its sequel, this is a movie best seen in a theater with few distractions and a loud engaged audience.

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After taking a few days off from serious work and the day job I am back posting on my blog and I will return with a review of a film I had been anxiously awaiting The Bride!

With trailers making the movie appear to be a mashup of 30s gangster flicks and the classic Frankenstein tale the very oddness of it compelled me to see this unique vision in the theater. After pushing back my attendance by a week so I could see Blood on the Moon, where I was warned that the 40s noir western was superior to The Bride! yesterday after a nice lunch my sweetie-wife and I caught an early afternoon screening.

Warner Brothers Studios

There is a triumvirate of positions that greatly affect the look, feel, and tone of a motion picture, The Producer, The Director, and The Writer, and when all three posts are occupied by the same person, as with Maggie Gyllenhaal for The Bride! it comes as close as possible for a major studio release to fulfill the concept of the auteur theory and the final product for good or bad rests on that person.

I wish I could say I loved The Bride! but that is not the case. The film feels terribly unfocused and scattershot, with each sequence interesting and executed with tremendous vision but never coalescing into a coherent whole. I can see what Gyllenhaal was trying to achieve and I can see the thesis of her work, she was shooting for something proudly feminist and while she for the most part avoided pulling out a soapbox from which to lecture her audience the final product, in my opinion, never scaled the summit she set out for herself. The script feels like something that was written by the seat of the author’s pants and never revised afterwards. Major story elements are introduced late, earlier plotlines are wrapped with a sensation that feel forced and pressured as though someone had suddenly discovered that they were running out of pages, and references to other films proved distracting. I think, outside of comedy, it is a very risky proposition to refer to other films in your movie as you rarely come off as anything other than inferior. If I am watching your adaptation of Frankenstein you rarely want me to be thinking of Whale’s version or worse yet Young Frankenstein.

The film had far too little of the 30s gangster and I felt it did not deliver as promised on either the mad scientist or organized crime elements.

The cast is uniformly good and the production design and cinematography are striking, everything that doesn’t work in this film comes from the script and vision behind it and as such if you love or hate this movie the person responsible is Maggie Gyllenhaal.

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Dracula, written by Bram Stoker and published in 1897, is one of the most adapted pieces of fiction in the English canon rivaled, perhaps, only by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The number of

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adaptations and the various media are almost beyond count. The famed vampire has been in London’s swinging 70s scenes, hunted the darkened streets and bayous of Louisiana, stalked victims aboard starships in deep space, and even blackmailed into hunting down criminals like a superhero (Dracula Returns, Robert Lory.) But after waves and truly out-there reimaginings filmmakers returned time and time again to the Stoker original novel, its 19th turning into the 20th century setting, and adapting once again that primal source material.

Filmmaker Luc Besson (The Fifth Element, The Professional, and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, to cite a few) has released his own take on literature’s most famous vampire. Written, produced, and directed by Besson, Dracula, released in other markets as Dracula: A Love Story, is so loosely bound by the source material as to stretch to breaking the very definition of adaptation. (It causes me to remember that there was once a screen adaptation of a Shakespearean play with credit Additional Dialog by William Shakespeare.) People familiar with the novel Dracula will recognize a fragment of a scene here and there that echoes something of what Stoker penned, but nothing more than a faint and nearly imperceptible shadow of that original text. Gone is Doctor Abraham Van Helsing, replaced by Christoph Waltz (the principal reason I ventured to see this feature) as a priest, part of a Vatican-ordained order of vampire hunters. Following in the recent canon alterations (or desecrations depending upon your point of view) Dracula (Caleb Landry Jones) once again is portrayed as a man so tormented by the loss of his true love at the hands of his enemy that he has forsaken the Church and God, that he is cursed with the terrible affliction of vampirism, leaving him to haunt the centuries searching for the reincarnation of his lost love. Much of the film’s runtime, 2 hours and 9 minutes, is dedicated to Dracula’s backstory, following him through four centuries of searching and loss. Given that the film’s main action takes place after all of that backstory, this creates in the film a powerful sense that the movie is mostly exposition. This Dracula shares a thematic element with del Toro’s Frankenstein, a deep sympathy for the monster at the center of the tale. While it can be argued that Shelley imbued her text with such feelings for the creation, no such sentiment is in Stoker’s novel. This is the inevitable consequence once you introduce any hint of a tragic origin for the famed vampire. By the end of the film Besson abandons any considerations for the Count’s numerous and slaughtered victims, keeping his sympathy entirely for a vampire with whom Besson has crafted a nobility absent from the source material. This rendition, in addition to transplanting the story from England to Paris, contains mind-control perfumes, elaborate choreographed dances with scores of performers, and culminates with the Austro-Hungarian Empire assaulting Castle Dracula with troops and cannon.

On the plus side, Caleb Landry Jones turns in a performance that sold me, for the most part, on his portrayal as an Eastern European nobleman. To my untrained ear I detected no flaw in his accent and his bearing and delivery all contributed positively to the air of a man for whom power was a birthright. I do wish that hair and make-up had dyed his hair black, a blonde Transylvanian nobleman did stretch my credulity as much as the count being a master chemist whipping up mind-control perfumes.

Besson’s Dracula does strike me as the most thematically Christian rendition of the material. Most vampire movies and television programs will use the cross warding as a gimmick, a way for the characters to save themselves when confronted by a thing that vastly overpowers them, but here the story and its resolution actually turns on Christian theology.

And that made the final resolution unacceptable to me for what is yet another rendition of the ‘red shirt’ problem. In my final section I will spoil the ending of the film so you can bail out here, knowing that I cannot recommend this movie at theatrical prices, at best wait for it to come a streaming service you already subscribe to.

After the army and assorted characters have successfully assaulted and gained entrance to the castle, and after Dracula had slaughtered literally scores of men, Waltz’s priest confronts the vampire and implores him to renounce his heresy. For Dracula to accept God’s love and forgiveness, which Dracula does and then allows the priest to destroy him with a silver stake.

So, Dracula, a vile and evil creature who for hundreds of years has visited terror and death on the people of Europe, is in the end forgiven and granted absolution even as he stands in a hallway littered with the corpses of men he killed. These nameless characters died not to end a great evil, and in the end their sacrifices achieved nothing. It was not by their blood and lives that the Priest walked into the castle. They were mere spectacle, giving the conclusion some action.

It is Christian to believe that honest and true repentance will grant you God’s absolution, but it makes for a terrible movie ending and it is particularly rankling when once again we are being asked to accept a monster as subject of our sympathy and empathy.

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After the box office failure of Exorcist: Believer, which Universal, who had acquired the rights from Warner Brothers had hoped to revitalize the franchise and launch a new horror trilogy, the project was taken away from its director, David Gordon Green.

A new film currently known simply as The Exorcist has been handed to the reigning prince of cinematic horror, Mike Flanagan.

While there are some Flanagan projects that I have found to be inspired and masterfully crafted, in particular Doctor Sleep a sequel to The Shining that manages to honor both the original source material and the cinematic legacy, I have serious doubts about yet another Exorcist project. The Exorcist, in my opinion, should have never had any sequels and the concept of a ‘franchise’ is utterly repellant.

 First off, a horror franchise is a deeply difficult thing. Oh, there are tons and tons of them about and every studio dreams of having a run that is like Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, or Scream, but what horror existed in those movies quickly vanished with the sequels. To me those movies ceased to horrify and only titillated with more and more elaborate methods of murders combined with advancing practical effects. I can’t remember ever being disturbed by these sequels and horror should disturb you emotionally not inspire cheers from gore as spectacle.

The second reason I am highly skeptical of an Exorcist franchise is that this story, this tale, was never constructed for that sort of open-ended treatment. The Exorcist, both novel and screenplay, was William Peter Blatty’s method of dealing with his own crisis of faith.  It was not a cash grab, but a work produced by a devoted Catholic who found his own way thorny and used fiction to explore answers to his deep theological questions. While the rest of the world considered The Exorcist a horror novel and film, Blatty and director William Friedkin, did not, treating the material as a theological mystery. With the exception of Blatty’s work with the novel Legion adapted into The Exorcist III, none of the sequels possessed the deep questioning nature of the original source material, they pursued effects and shock value, making them ultimately forgettable. yet another sequel to The Exorcist is the last thing cinema requires.

Little is actually known about Flanagan’s project and rumor has suggested that instead of a sequel he may be remaking the original film, a new adaptation of the novel.

This too would be a mistake.

Since its publication I have read the novel the Exorcist three or four times. I do not count it among my favorite books, but it is fascinating and an interesting glimpse into the time it was written. The script and motion picture are excellent adaptations, some of the best. Nearly all of the novel’s core story and more importantly questions are there, particularly with the final revisions later released. If this is a re-adaptation of the novel I fail to see what they can include that wasn’t in the original film’s take. What was left out deserved to be left out. Audiences, even in the 70s and more so today, would laugh at Father Karras’ quest to prove that it was telekinesis that moved the objects and not demonic possession. (Really, in the 70s psychic powers were all the rage in fiction and in the culture.)

The 1973 film was a miracle of adaptation, in script, in direction, and in casting. It was lightning in a bottle that I doubt even Flanagan can recreate.

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The newest installment in the 28 Days Later, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, directed by Nia DeCosta, opened this weekend, and my sweetie-wife and I attended a Sunday matinee.

Bone Temple picks up just a very short time after the ending of the previous franchise entry with that film’s protagonist, 12-year-old Spike, a captive of the ‘Jimmies,’ a tiny, deranged band of sadistic marauders led by Jimmy, a man who survived the outbreak since childhood and now believes himself to be the embodiment of Satan’s will on Earth.

Sony Pictures

In a parallel plotline the movie follows Dr. Ian Kelson, also a character carried over from the previous movie, as he continues his isolated life amid the grand ossuary of towering bone that he constructed to honor the dead. Kelson’s experiments with the infected lead him to a sort of friendship with a massive, infected man. When a member of the Jimmies spies Kelson, dancing with an infected, they mistake him for Satan himself setting the two forces into conflict for the film’s final act.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a fine and perfectly serviceable follow-up to 28 Years Later. It is competently directed by Nia DeCosta and with a script by Alex Garland, the originator of the franchise, that has no serious plot holes, consistent believable characters, along with moments of action, horrific violence, and humor. And yet, for all that the best praise I can give this production is that it is ‘fine.’ Garland, who so often explores large ideas and questions with his writing, think 2024’s Civil War,Ex Machina, or the mind twisting Men, does very little of that with this movie. The deepest theme I can pull out of The Bone Temple is that some people are good and try to be of service to others, some are bad and seek pleasure in the pain that they can inflict on others, and many, if not most, are simply trying to survive a cruel and indifferent world. This is hardly the sort of statement one would expect from the scriptwriter of Annihilation.

As a horror film, whatever that phrase might mean to you, The Bone Temple, for me, does not deliver. I enjoyed the film, but more as a drama and character study than a genre film. Mind you, a genre film can be a great drama and character study while delivering the terror, unease, and apprehension that makes for a great horror film. Midsommar is a terrific example of the film that does that, as does The Haunting (the original not the action movie remake.) The real horror that is presented in The Bone Temple is the horror that people do to each other, that people are the real monsters, but that has been a subtext of the zombie movie since its inception with Night of the Living Dead and this movie breaks no real ground in that regard.

The performances in the film are competent. Alfie Williams (Spike) is given far less to do this time around than in the last movie where his character and his choices drove the narrative. Jack O’Connell (Jimmy) delivers a perfectly by the book portrayal of the sadistic psychopath, but Garland’s script aside from a minor trait of actually believing he is the son of Satan gives Jimmy nothing that steps outside of the well-trod path of the cinematic psychopath. It is in Ralph Fiennes’ (Kelson) portrayal of the kind doctor lost in a mad world that gives the film its depth. It is from Kelson that we see humanity and humor and a truly unforgettable musical video performance.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is worth seeing, particularly if you are a fan of Ralph Fiennes, but I doubt that the film will linger long in your memory.