The Menu, directed by Mark Mylod from a screenplay by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy, is a dark comedy/horror film set almost entirely within the confines of an exclusive restaurant The Hawthorne, ruled with a dictatorial air towards both staff and diner by Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes). The film unfolds during a single evening’s meal of several courses as the exclusive clientele discover that this night Slowik had a very special menu planned.

The story unfolds, slowly revealing the horrific nature of the very special evening, through viewpoint of Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), a last-minute replacement date for snobbish foodie Tyler (Nicholas Hoult). An outsider to the world of the extremely wealthy Margot is the audience surrogate and protagonist trapped in the bizarre conflict between the wealthy patrons and the working staff of the restaurant. As the night progresses Slowik’s true intent and hatred slowly emerges along with his staff’s fanatical and cultish devotion.

The Menu leans much further into satire and dark comedy than into horror, with social commentary, that is quite entertaining, giving the piece its principal thematic purpose. Beyond the already listed cast member the film includes John Leguizamo as an aging actor, and Janet McTeer as an influential critic but the movie rests solidly on the talents of Taylor-Joy and Fiennes as the central protagonist/antagonist and it is their conflicting world views and personalities that drive the plot.

While the film has lovely, warm, and cold cinematography by Peter Deming, whose credits include Twin Peaks, The Cabin in the Woods, and Mulholland Drive the real standout work here is the production design by Ethan Tobman. With very limited locations and more than three quarters of the scenes restricted to the dining room/kitchen of the Hawthorne, Tobman has crafted an environment that perfectly captures the cold sterile and lethal setting while never breaking the suspension of disbelief that this could be an actual exclusive restaurant.

Horror fans looking for elaborate kills, graphic violence, and exciting chases are going to be disappointed by The Menu, a film that reveals it horror more quietly but other may find this as delicious as I did.

Doctor Sleep adapted from Steven King’s novel of the same name is a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s classic film The Shinning. (Also adapted from a Steven King novel.) I have read the novel The Shinning a few times and found it to be one of King’s most effective horror stories and like King I was disappointed by Kubrick’s adaptation feeling that it missed the essential possession element of the work. I never got around to reading King’s sequel so I can’t speak to this film faithfulness as an adaptation.

With clever casting writer/Director Mike Flanagan picks up the story shortly after the events of The Shinning with Danny Torrance and his Mother Wendy living in Florida, both terribly scarred by the trauma that they have survived. The ghost of the hotel’s chief chef Hallorann visits Danny and helps him to master his psychic abilities.

Despite this when we catch up with Danny as an adult, he is a broken man and, like his father before him, suffering from bouts of rage and alcoholism.

Simultaneously A young girl, Abra Stone, is coming into her own as a psychic with her own special and power shine which brings her into the awareness of a cult of psychic vampires that feed of the essence released by tortured and murdered psychics lead by the sadistic Rose the Hat.

Very quickly Danny finds his path to sobriety and redemption runs straight through Abra and Rose, a path that leads all of them back to haunted Overlook Hotel.

Doctor Sleep is in fact my first experience with the work of Mike Flanagan, and I was quite impressed. The film has a simple yet deep production design that carries both a sense of real world reality while suggesting a deep unseen reality beyond just what is visible. Films about psychic abilities are always a tricky magic act to perform. By their very nature psychic talents are things of the mind and they do not generally lend themselves to effective visualizations. Flanagan manages to walk the narrow path of visual that are interesting and unreal while still not leaving the viewer lost or confused.

The cast is uniformly good, Ewan McGregor as Danny Torrance always carries the haunted look of a man barely functioning despite the pain that clearly tormenting him. Kyleigh Curran as Abra has real talent and will be a treat to hopefully watch her blossom into an adult actor. that said for me the real treat was Rebecca Ferguson as Rose the Hat. Having missed nearly all of the Mission Impossible franchise I was only recently introduced to her work in Dune Part 1as the Lady Jessica but her villainous turn as Rose is truly breathtaking. Playing a person of so little empathy is a very tough gig, overplay it and it ceases to be a character and dwindles into caricature underplay it and the threat begins to fade. Ferguson found the balance keeping her real, keeping Rose’s pain visible while maintaining the hardness that made her frightening.

Thew film’s climax at the Overlook was particularly satisfying especially for fans of the original novel.

Doctor Sleep is currently streaming on HBOMax and is available on VOD.

Released by Hammer Studios in 1971 Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb is an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Jewel of the Seven Stars.

An expedition lead by Professor Fuchs locates and robs the tomb of an Egyptian sorceress, Tera, condemned by the priests of her time for her evil and her magics. Fuchs, obsessed with Tera’s legend brings her well preserved corpse by to England while the rest of the expedition makes off with sacred artifacts from the tomb. Just before her birthday Fuchs’s gives his daughter Margaret one Tera’s artifacts instigating a chain of events that may lead to the evil sorcerer’s re-birth.

Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb had a quiet troubled production. It’s original star as Fuchs, Peter Cushing, completed only one day of shooting before his wife’s medical emergency forced him to quit the movie. Five weeks into the six weeks of principal photography the film’s director, Seth Holt, died of a sudden heart attack.

The movie has all the elements of a slow-burn horror film, the gradually escalating stakes, likeable characters caught in the morass of doom and destiny, hubris and pride pulling everyone towards what appears to be a grisly end, but ultimately the production failed to hit this target.

The cinematography is bright and clear, too clear, displaying the sets in such detail that their simple nature becomes evident. The acting overall is credible, but it appears that Valerie Leon in the dual role of Tera/Margaret had her voice replaced and the dubbing is quite terrible. Personally, I found the fake eyelashes that make applied to Valerie Leon quite distracting and spoiled every close-up of her and even hampered her performance. I really wish I could have heard her own performance rather than this crudely pasted voice-replacement.

The rest of the cast, including Andrew Keir replacing Cushing, are perfectly fine if sometimes a little on the nose casting wise. All of the expedition actors play both their younger tomb robbing selves and the same characters 18 years later with touches of old age make-up.

While this movie doesn’t lean heavily into the permissive nudity found in other 70s Hammer productions such as The Vampire Lovers and Twins of Evil it does play more towards the heaving bosoms, clearing teasing the male gaze, than earlier films.

Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb is fairly typical of late period Hammer. An interesting idea for a film hampered by budget and scheduling but not entirely a waste of your viewing time.

It is a time of great change, the hated production code has been slain, replaced with the MPAA ratings system and movies have gotten more daring and explicit which for Hammer Studios, facing falling enthusiasm for their gothic horror, means more salacious content, more bare flesh, and Playboy models leading their horror films. In this tumult they produce and release Doctor Jekyll and Sister Hyde.

Confession, this move never climbed high in my desire to see it because I fully expected it to be in the same vein as The Vampire Lovers where not only is lesbianism used to titillate the audience, but the vampire have moved their feeding from the neck to the ladies’ naked breasts. That is, I thought of this movie as purely exploitive.

Recently on the Pure Cinema podcast, filmmaker Edgar Wright recounts many of his favorite underrated British horror movies and this one was among them. S quick search located the movie on a commercial-support streaming service, Shout Factory!

Doctor Jekyll and Sister Hyde is a grand goulash of well-worn setting and themes. Of course, it’s principal ingredient is the adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic story The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, not content with one tale of Victorian madness and murder the film also folds into its plot the notorious murders in Whit Chapple, yes Jack the Ripper is part of this film.  Because unscrupulous doctors have to obtain corpses for their experimentations the historic case of Burke and Hare, though displace about 70 years from the 1820s to the 1890s, complete this dish adding in additional murder because old jack simply wasn’t enough for a film this colorful movie.

In this version Henry Jekyll, frustrated that his life span will be far too short to eradicate all disease from humanity, turns his research to find an elixir of life and naturally the source of such agelessness must be found in the hormones of women. However, testing the concoction on himself doesn’t produce youth but rather transforms Henry Jekyll into a woman whom he explains away to his neighbors as his sister Mrs. Hyde.

Mrs. Hyde has her own desires and will, complete with a powerful sexual attraction to one of the handsome neighbors. An attraction is blurs between the two identities, while Jekyll remains attracted to the neighbor’s comely sister. (There are a lot of sisters in this film.)

 The film is well cast, all of the actors credible and entertaining in their role but the outstanding achievement in the casting is Ralph Bates as Jekyll and Martine Beswick as Mrs. Hyde. Not only did both perform quite well but the similarity of their faces added an extra level of credibility to the transformation.

Digital ‘morphing’ lay decades off in the future from this film and rather than utilizing lapse-dissolves for the transformation the filmmakers used mirrors, cuts, and ingenious framing with distorting colored glass, creating an impression of in-camera changing.

Unlike many other versions of the classic story, Jekyll isn’t presented as purely noble and good. Neither is Hyde the epitome of evil. Both characters have blood, literally, on their hands, and both invoke a sense of sympathy.

Aside from some gratuitous nudity this film holds up rather well with more interesting characters and questions about identity than shock or scares.

After watching The Keep a film with a troubled production I followed up the next feature film with a movie that possessed and even more troubled history Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist.

1973 saw the release of The Exorcist adapted by William Peter Blatty from his own novel, directed by William Friedkin, and a massive box-office smash, launching a troubled franchise of horror movies. Four years after the original Exorcist II: The Heretic failed to reproduce the first film’s success and the franchise lay fallow for 13 years until Blatty, ignoring the sequel, write and directed one of his own, The Exorcist III. (While Blatty pretended the second one didn’t exist the studio pointedly did not.) This film also failed to find the level of success desired by the studio.

More than a decade passed before Paul Schrader was brought aboard to help a prequel for the backstory on the original films exorcist Father Lankester Merrin. Schrader’s film so disappointed the studio that he was fired from the production, twelve weeks of additional shooting and with an almost entirely new cast and a new director, Renny Harlin, a new film with more violence, gore, and jump scares was crafter and released as The Exorcist: The Beginning, which failed with both audiences and critics. Seeking to salvage something from the plane crash of a production, the studio brought Schrader back to the film and provided funds to allow him to complete his vision which was released and also failed as Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist.

Father Merrin, (Stellan Skarsgard) after witnessing and being forced to participate in Nazi atrocities in his native Holland in his post-war and devoid of faith, now focusing on archelogy, is excavating a buried 5th century church in Kenya, an important find as the first evidence that the early Christian Church had reached this part of the world so early. The Turkana locals, predominantly non-Christian, view the church as a source of evil. A British garrison is posted to protect the site from looters escalating tension with the locals. Merrin discovers the church, which anomalous architecture was built atop an older non-Christian site of worship where human sacrifices were performed. After unsealing the hidden site, the hostility between the British occupiers and the locals intensifies carrying echoes of the war crimes in Merrin’s past. The local missionary, Father Francis, believes an evil spirit has been released but Merrin’s lack faith forces him to find ‘rational’ explanations for the strange events. With war brewing and people torments by their haunted terrible pasts, Merrin is forced to confront the facts of his belief and find his faith again if the unearthed evil is to be vanquished.

What Works For Me:

There’s a lot in this film that is aimed at my particular tastes in horror movies. I am more partial to atmosphere and mood with a slow burn in horror than I am to a killer slashing their way through a bevy for generic and forgettable teens.

Dominion is a slow burn psychological horror film where for most of the movie’s run time the spreading evil is subtle and ambiguous. It is left to the audience to determine for themselves just how much of the cruelty and violence is a result of a demonic presence and how much is simply human nature.

Threats in the movie are more suggested than explicit with only occasional burst of shocking violence, including the slaughter of children at school. The acting is on point and credible and wisely, in my opinion, Skarsgard made no attempt to mimic Max Von Sydow’s distinctive voice and cadence but rather made his own interpretation of Merrin.

What Didn’t Work For Me:

Once the possession is fully revealed and though this is meant to be the same demonic force that nearly thirty years later will possess Reagan, that is no continuity in the possession, its manner, or effects. While there is a strong suggestion that the demon is using various characters’ guilt and shame against them, this is played for more subtly than when it taunted characters in the original film and having a strong continuity in the demon would have tied to two films together.

The digital effects are weak and often ejected me out of my willing suspension of disbelief. The threatening hyenas rarely were credible and instead of increasing tension the effect undercut the threat, lowering the emotional sense of the stake.

Overall while a flawed film and one that never fully recovered from its production woes Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist is an attempt at a thoughtful introspective horror film that dares to ask is evil a force from without or something within all of us.

Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist is currently streaming on Peacock.