Continuing my theme of things you can rent for streaming while cooped up at home and not spreading the gad damn virus last weekend a couple of friends and me watched Richard Stanley’s The Color Out of Space.

Based upon the short story by H.P. Lovecraft, Stanley, whose last feature directorial credit was Hardware in 1990 and perhaps best known for his involvement with the disastrous production of 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreauwith this feature has turned in a haunting, luminous, and hallucinogenic horror film.

When a meteor crashing onto the alpaca farm of the Gardner family it brings trouble and other-worldly horrors to a family always dealing with the intense person horror of cancer. Utilizing Lovecraft’s technique of having the story told by a narrator, Stanley as director and screenwriter adds a more personal and emotional through line to the story that was lacking in the source material. Starring Nicholas Cage as Nathan Gardner, a man desperately not wanting to be his father and struggling to keep his family afloat with the farm, The Color Out of Space is a film about dissolution, but emotionally and, though ample body horror segments, physically. While the practical effects are not gory, they are disturbing and well suited for a horror film that derives itself from more conceptual material.

Stanley and his cinematographer Steve Annis make excellent use of fog and misty not to obscure and hide horror but to refract and diffuse light giving the frame a luminous quality enhancing the concept of an unknow color. The film’s  color pallet is excellent, restricting magenta and reds to the unearthly force making that color stand out as alien among the greens and earth tones of the farm.

The Color out of Space a perhaps the best adaptation of any of Lovecraft’s work and well worth watching. Stanley has been signed to make a trilogy of movies inspired from Lovecraft’s stories with the next being The Dunwich Horror.

Taking a break from discussing the pandemic and inept responses to it I’m going to talk about a film you can rent streaming right now The Final Girls.

A ‘final girl’ is the remaining character in a slasher film that defeats the slasher during the movies climax and the film The Final Girls is a horror/comedy directly parodying the tropes and clichés of the mass-produced movies of the 80s slasher craze.

Horror and comedy are difficult genres to combine and honestly most of the time this is attempted it fails for me. In my opinion it tends to work best in one of two modes.

• If you front load the comedy and drop it out nearly entirely once the threats turn lethal then you have a horror film with strong comedic overtones and that can work.
• Exaggerated comedy throughout the piece but then the threats must remain low or be negated by the final resolution.

The Final Girls is an example of the second approach and the filmmakers manage to pull it off.

Max (Taissa Farmiga) is the daughter of an actress who made a particularly bad slasher film in the mid-80s, Camp Bloodbath, but her mother has passed away and Max has been unable to cope with her loss. Pressured by a friend she and her friend attend a revival screening of her mother’s horror film but during a theater fire they flee through the screen and end up inside Camp Bloodbath. Using their knowledge of slasher clichés and dealing with character limited by their stereotypes Max and her friends must survive to the end when the ‘final girl’ can dispatch the slasher and they can return home all while Max learns to deal with her mother’s death.

Written by M.A. Fortin and Joshua Miller and directed by Todd Strauss-Schulson The Final Girls is a fast, funny comedy with a sentimental heart. The parody aspect speaks filmmakers that have a deep affection for the genre and plays with the clichés and tropes without ever ‘punching down’ at the fans of slasher movies. Using a structure much like The Wizard of Oz, the movies turns on a central character and her journey to a fantastic realm while giving just enough character growth and change to keep the entire movie from feeling pointless. It possesses some of the best modest budget CGI I have seen and it light enough on the violence to keep it campy and over the top rather than graphic and gory.

Overall this is a nice piece of entertainment that is worth watching and may help keep your mind of more realistic horrors

Saturday evening after the customary board and card games a friend and I settled in and watched The Babysitter on Netflix. I had seen the preview but my friends went in cold know only that it was a horror/comedy. Horror/Comedy is a tough gig to get correct, but I think The Babysitter landed pretty much on target.

The Babysitter stars Samara Weaving, (Ready or Night, Picnic at Hanging Rockthe Series) as the titular character babysitter Bee but the protagonist of the piece is 12-year-old Cole. A young geeky boy fearful of nearly everything and foundering in the turbulent seas of adolescence. Bee and Cole have a terrific relationship with Bee giving Cole many important life lessons. However, on a weekend when his parent have left for him for a few days in Bee’s care and encouraged by a friend, Cole stays up past his bedtimes to discover just what it is that Bee does when he is asleep. The answer turns out to be leading a Satanic Cult complete with human sacrifices. Cole is thrust in a life and death conflict with the cult while coming to terms with his own fears and his shattered relationship with Bee.

The Babysitter is absurdist comedy with director McG taking liberal advantage of the screen format to play with expectations. Despite the over the top nature of the premise and the comedy McG and the screenwriters Brian Duffield take the time to ensure that every payoff is well established before its on screen arrival, delivering an enjoyable romp about growing up and learning to face and conquer your fears.

While there is a fair amount of fake blood used in this production the violence is more cartoonish than slasher and this is a movie well worth streaming.

 

So recently I discovered the Shockwaves Podcast, a weekly shows about horror and things going on in the world of media horror with a principle focus on film. Near the end of last month they did a show looking back on what they felt were the 10 best horror movies of the 2010s. Now since there were 4 hosts and each had their own top ten list that was a potential 40 films. Given that they did not coordinate their lists there were duplicates so I think the total come sin closed to the top 26 horror film in their opinions. They did not publish the listings in the show notes and so I had to compile it myself so I cannot attribute the listing to the host that gave them, but here’s their opinion.

10. It Follows

10. Bone Tomahawk

10. Dream Home

10. Detention (2011)

 

9. I Saw the Devil

9.Starry Eyes

9. Train to Busan  

9. Annihilation

 

8. Sinister

8. Demon

8. The Final Girls

8. What we do in the Shadows

 

7.  Train to Busan      

7.  A Dark Song

7. The Witch        

7. Attack the Block

 

6. Insidious

6.  Evil Dead

6. Sinister

6. Green Room

 

5. What we do in the Shadows

5. Autopsy of Jane Doe   

5. It Follows

5. Train to Busan

 

4. Mandy

4. Get Out   

4. Hereditary     

4. Autopsy of Jane Doe

 

3.  Cabin in the Woods 

3. Blackcoats Daughter

3. Get Out          

3. Kill List

 

2. Get Out    

2. Kill List

2. Cabin in the Woods

2. The  Babadook

 

1. The Conjuring

1. It Follows   

1. Evil Dead (remake)

1. Black Swan

 

 

The only list I can positively identify is the 4^th and final entry in each column which are the selections by Dr Rebekah McKendry. As the only woman on the podcast her voice was easy to track. I have seen several of these films and agree with some of the listings. Entries in bold I have seen both Bold and Italics I own. The rest I have more to track down and watch.

Saturday night after the close of the current session of the Space Opera game I run for friends, yes, Space Opera the RPG system from Fantasy Games Unlimited we’re doing throwback to the 80’s for our RPG’s this time around, I watched the horror movie The Vault.

The film came up on Netflix as a recommendation and I was intrigued enough to add it to my growing queue. The premise is that a gang of bank robbers having taken customers and employees hostage during a robbery are suddenly faced with a supernatural threat from the bank’s haunted vault. Starring Francesca Eastwood and James Franco The Vault is a modest to low budget movie that tries the make the most of it limited setting. Overall, I wasn’t bored during the film’s brief 90-minute run time, which fit perfectly with my tired and ready to do nothing mindset after an evening of gamemastering. Ms. Eastwood was perfectly fine as the leader of the small gang who have been driven by desperation, circumstance, and greed into that crime. Mr. Franco plays the bank’s assistance manager who, in a bid to keep the robbers who are edgy and not fully in control of themselves, assists the robbers with vital codes and information about a large score in the bank’s old secret vault.

Haunted is the right word because The Vault is a ghost story and as with most ghost stories there is a secret that must be unraveled before the circumstances of the plot can be fully understood. There was one set-up involving a robbery from 1982 and a masked killer that was never captured or unmasked that caused me to guess wrong about one of the twists and I actually liked that. The twist that was revealed worked and played fair. The greatest fault in the movie is that the director or editor showed too much too soon. There’s a sequence where some of the robbers have been separated and one is confronted by spectral figures while others watch on the bank’s security monitors. The characters watching on the monitors do not see the ghosts and I think the film would have had great tension if the audience had not seen them yet either. If like the witnessing characters, we couldn’t understand of fully hear the attack but frequent cuts to the action and the supernatural violence stripped the sequence of all tension.

Still for a late-night brain mostly off evening The Vault was perfectly serviceable. It is not overly graphic but there is blood and effect work that may disturb some.

Robert Eggers, the writer and director of 2015’s Puritan nightmare The Witch,  is back with another historic tale of terror.  The Lighthouse set in the 1890’s, is a film about two men on a desolate and distance rock of an island stationed as lighthouse keepers. Willem Defoe plays Thomas Wake, the senior lighthouse keep, a sea dog retired by injury but for whom the love of the sea has never subsided. Robert Patterson plays Ephraim Winslow, the young and junior man learning the trade and subject to Wake’s order and whim.

Filmed in stark black-and-white, it’s been reported that the film stock had to be manufactured in order for the camera to roll on this production, and with a tight compressed aspect ratio  The Lighthouse  is a confined claustrophobic movie with a stark spare setting contrasted with expansive performances by both Defoe and Patterson the threaten to shatter the frame. The photography is deliberately disorienting as sea, fog, and land blend in endless greys heightening the sense that the rest of the world as vanished over the horizon and that for these men there is nothing but the grueling work, their own clashes of personality, and the ever encroaching madness. The combination of Egger’s passion for historical detail, the bleak black and white cinematography, along with the ever present fog horn create a verisimilitude that absorbs the audience into the film’s reality.

Hallucinatory and with an unreliable narrator The Lighthouse  is not standard mass-market movie making. People who are expecting kills, jump scares, and a spot of violence every ten minutes are sailing for disappointment with this film. Closer in kin to David Lynch or Cronenberg’s Videodrome, The Lighthouse is a tale of madness and isolation that is powered by the stellar performances trapped with its close quarters. Much like Egger’s previous film The Witch  this movie is not easily accessible and is likely to spark a sharp divide between its critical reception and general audience reactions. Though not as symbolic as Lynch, Egger’s film requires active interpretation by the audience with scene after scene that depicts the tenuous grasp of sanity and its loss as the isolation breaks each man in his own manner. Personally I was more thrilled with The Witch on my first viewing but now even eight hours later I find the sounds and images of The Lighthouseto be haunting my thoughts and provoking deeper contemplation. It is a film that cannot be fully assessed with a single viewing and mark’s Eggers as a talent of bold cinema that is willing to color well outside of the lines.