Category Archives: Movies

Movie Review: Immaculate

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A little later than I had originally planned I finally got out and watched Immaculate.

Black Bear Pictures

A young American nun Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney) arrives in Italy to join a convent follow their recruitment invitation. The convent is dedicated to hospice care for aging and dying nuns and as Sister Cecilia is advised death is daily there. She is befriended Sister Gwen who religious devotion is suspect and seeming without provocation gains the enmity Sister Isabella who is harsh and demanding. Following disturbing nightmares Sister Cecilia is visited upon by a seeming minacious event.  As events turn darker Cecilia grows suspicious and becomes the convent’s venerated prisoners as their true nature and intent for her become clear.

Immaculate is a sharp, smart, atmospheric horror film that trusts its audience to understand without spoon feeding laborious exposition. The film opens with a pre-title prolog that discloses nothing of the plot or backstory but rather gives the audience the film’s tone, dark, suspenseful and with flashes of graphic blood violence.

Screenwriter Andrew Lobel and director Michael Mohan have crafted a horror film that relies on character, mystery, and insidious plans rather than an unstoppable killer and body counts. Cinematographer Elisha Christian’s photography is both lush and deeply disturbing. Fearless enough to play scenes in darkness as black, trapping the audience as helplessly as the characters as they stumble about the convent’s catacombs.

Immaculate also leaves the film’s ultimate interpretation up to the audience. It is possible to view all the events of the story as grounded reality without magic or mysticism. It is equally valid to see this as a film that has subtle supernatural elements. Which interpretation the viewer takes with them greatly effects Cecilia’s final actions and determines if they are horrendous, blasphemous, and heroic. Lobel and Mohan do not tell you which it is or how you should feel that they leave to you. I do not doubt that this ambiguity will sit poorly with some. This is a movie I quite enjoyed and left me, even as a non-believer, thinking deeply upon its character and potential meaning.

Immaculate is currently playing and theaters and well worth the time.

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Unreasonably Interested in The First Omen

20th Century Studios

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It is my contention that aside from The Omen released in 1976 there hasn’t been a good film in the franchise. Despite this I am interested in seeing the newest film in that continuing horror series the prequel The First Omen.

Despite not being any sort of believer in Christian theology The Omen, along with the Exorcistremains among some of my favorite horror films. Omen II almost was a good film but just missed the mark in the scripting stage, Omen III turned out so bland that even though I have seen it twice I can’t recall a single scene from that feature. I haven’t seen Omen IV, and 2006’s remake of the original proves how vital important the original stars and direct were to that film’s lasting quality.

So, with that sort of personal track record of responses why am I interested in a prequel that from the trailers looks to violate established canon?

I do not know.

I can say that I am fascinated by Ralph Ineson as Father Brennan. He strikes me as the perfect modern casting to follow Patrick Troughton, but one or two actors are not usually enough to pull me into a theater. neither the director nor the team of writers are familiar to me and as such created no draw and yet I am going to see this movie this weekend. It’s a gut feeling, a sense, that perhaps, just maybe, this one will work.

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A Giallo and Horror Weekend

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This weekend my sweetie-wife and I enjoyed a couple of Italian movies on Blu-ray disc that she had checked out of the library. Remember, your local library can be more than just great books to read.

First up is Mario Bava’s 1966 horror movie Kill Baby, Kill.

A doctor is summoned to a remote Carpathian to assist a detective investigating a series of bizarre deaths that the locals believe to be the result of a murderous ghost. With the aid of a local woman who has just return from college the doctor quickly find himself in a world of ghosts, mediums, and witchcraft, all swirling around a young girl’s mysterious death years earlier.

Bava, a director with flair even when his budgets are slashed, is in full form and glory with Kill Baby, Kill. His characteristic use of colored lighting that has no diegetic source adds depth to the frames and mood the scenes. Available on Blu-ray disc with its original Italian dialog track, this movie speeds along quickly wasting hardly a frame of its brief running time. I was most pleased that the resolution was not some hand-waving Scooby Doo gimmick but that this was rather an actual supernatural propelled piece of horror. While sedate and decidedly not explicit compared to modern movies Kill Baby, Kill remains an effective, atmospheric film worth seeking out.

We followed that up with a giallo. Gialli are Italian crime films of the 70s that feature particularly lurid sensationalized convoluted plots with often a saturated color pallet.

The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail is about a woman who collects on a million-dollar life insurance policy after her estranged husband dies in a mysterious air disaster. Suspicious of events the insurance firm dispatches an investigator to ferret out if the woman is responsible for the crash. When people associated with the incident are viciously murdered the press, the police, and even Interpol become involved. As with many classic giallo this story has lots of twits and reveals, both in plot and in female skin, until the resolution of the mystery with the final and largest twist. Some movies of this genre try too hard and create final solutions to the mystery that do not follow logically but The Case of The Scorpion’s Tail works out quite logical even if some of the information is withheld from the audience. After all, with giallo it is not about solving the mystery but experiencing it. Along with Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace this film would make an excellent introduction to giallo.

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Movie Review: Late Night with the Devil

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A clever concept that can’t quite connect.

IFC Films

Late Night talk show host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) desperate to reverse a slide in ratings night books a parapsychologist (Laura Gordon) and supposedly demon possessed subject (Ingrid Torelli) for a live television event on Halloween night 1977 and gets far more than he bargained for.

Utilizing the ‘found footage’ conceit Late Night with the Devil is comprised of broadcast footage and off-air recording captured by the studio cameras to recount the events of Delroy’s final program. This setting circumvents many of the issues with found footage films by giving a rational and reasonable answer as to why the cameras are not only there but why as horrific events unfold people continue to operate them. Sadly, while having a quite intriguing concept and a talented cast, LNwtD, is hampered by both budgetary constraints and a script that needed another couple of passes.

The film opens with effectively a prolog telling the audience the backstory for both the central character of Jack Delroy and the possessed girl Lilly. In my opinion, this prolog blunders in two aspects, the greater error is attempting to leaving Lilly’s nature mysterious. The audience will have almost certainly seen trailers for the film and even if they had not, they purchased their tickets expecting to see a horror film. Trying to leave the question of Lilly’s possession as an unknown doesn’t create any suspense as that is our expectation before we have even walked into the theater. The second lesser failing is that the prolog tries to tell us two different backstories, Lilly’s and Jack’s, and the best prolog are simple and direct. They inform us of the one thing we must know in order to appreciate the story from the start. Splitting the prolog dilutes it and starts the movie of in a flabby manner.

The budgetary constraints appear in the final act of the film. If you do not have the budget for a VFX spectacle then you shouldn’t try to have one. The real tragedy is that if the directors had forsworn the effects and gone for a more ground simpler approach the horror would have hit harder, felt more real, instead of what looked like VFX that could be done at home pulling the audience out of the reality of the film.

I can quibble with some of the decisions here and there. The used of hypnosis by the skeptic to attempt to disprove the possession but these are minor things more about taste than failings of the film. A more subtle approach to backstory and exposition is something that always appeals more to me than more direct expressions but again that is a matter of personal taste. I am disappointed that Late Night with the Devil did not live up to my personal expectations, but neither was it insultingly bad. The film lands in the dreaded mediocre middle of horror.

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Masters of the Air Rekindled my Annoyance with The Eternals

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(Minor Spoilers follow)

In the final episode of Masters of the Air Major ‘Rosie’ Rosenthal (Nate Mann) after being rescued by the Soviet Army following the crash of his B-17 sees with his own eyes a death camp that the Nazis had operated. This naturally has a massive impact on the pilot, but the scene also reawakened an irritation I had with the superhero film The Eternals.

The conceit of The Eternals is that a small group of immortal being and the source of many myths and legends have live with humanity from before history shaping and guiding our development. One of these beings is Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry) whose particular gift to humanity is teaching us technology.

Phastos’ faith in humanity is shattered with our use of technology and this is exemplified in the movie by having him break down crying amid the rubble of Hiroshima.

Yes, the nuclear bombs kill hundreds of thousands. Yes, they were the very cutting edge of science and technology at the time. But millions were murdered by the Nazis in Europe, millions. Their murders did not end the war, their murders were the point of the war. Murder on such a scale is impossible with the technology of industrialization. The vast incomprehensible scale of it is only achievable with the industrial revolution.

One can argue the terrible ‘trolley problem’ of ending the war in the Pacific with nuclear weapons. Would it have been more moral to forego the atomic attacks and launch a ground invasion that would have almost certainly cost far more lives? That’s a debate that cannot be resolved because it is a personal value judgement, but the slaughter of the innocent in camps built only for death? That is undebatable. That is a clear and perverse corruption of technology and that is what should have shattered Phastos belief in humanity.

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Django’s Cut Rate Corpses

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Before my sweetie-wife came into my life I had never seen any ‘Spaghetti’ westerns, not even the famous classics. She has introduced me to several and it is not unusual for us to find lesser known or forgotten ones on Ad-Supported Streams services such as Tubi. It’s no surprise that when we stumbled across Django’s Cut Price Corpses on Tubi that we would give it a spin.

With Luigi Batzella’s filmography in existence it is truly a slanderous crime that Ed Wood is often labeled the worst director. I have watched several Ed Woods movies, some even in a proper theater, and none are as clumsily constructed as Django’s Cut Rate Corpses, whose title honestly sounds like Django get his corpses factory direct and passes the saving on to you.

The plot, what little there is, is inconsistent. Django, a bounty hunter, is on the trail of the Cortez brother in Mexico, who have robbed a bank and kidnapped a woman. Along with large man seeking the brothers for the theft of a saddle and a laconic gambler, Django eventually faces the gang down in a chaotic shootout.

What makes this movie stand out is the utter incompetence of the filmmakers. Not once, not twice, even just three times, but several times I was distracted in scenes by the persistent and moving shadow of the camera operator. We were treated to the camera operator’s intrusion into the scene because Batzella insisted on hand-held, unsteady shots that were far too frequent and far too long. The editing was as terrible as the framing with the final battle’s geography an utter mess so that not only could you not decipher where anyone was in relation to each other, but it repeated appeared that characters fired upon their friends as often as the enemy.

Now was the writer immune from this level of incompetence. After our heroes are captured by the gang and suffer a whipping of such lackluster intensity that even a novice fetishist would be embarrassed the kidnapped woman sneaks up and cuts the heroes free. Django and the other man escape, but the kidnapped woman stays. It isn’t that she tries to follow and is recaptured, no, she just stays there, because the script insists upon it.

I have watched many a bad Italian/Spanish western that were far from good and even Ed Wood’s The Bride and The Beast with its suggestions of bestiality are quality films compared to this.

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A Weekend of Classic Genre Cinema

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This weekend, while still losing the damned cough that start almost two months ago, was one for enjoying some classic, that is old, genre cinema.

Columbia Pictures

Saturday Night my sweetie-wife and I streamed The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973.) After coming into possession of a fragment of a legendary table Sinbad, (John Phillip Law) is thrust into a race for power and riches against an evil wizard (Tom Baker) while saving a bewitching slave girl Margiana (Caroline Munro.)

With stop-motion effects by the legendary Ray Harryhausen, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad is a prime example of pre-Star Wars genre cinema. Simple, direct, and doing the best that they cane with limited budgets and resources. Still, it is fun little film not meant to tax the old grey matter.

Sunday was this months Film Geeks San Diego screening of another Showa era film of the Godzilla franchise, Mothra vs Godzilla as part of their year celebration of the big lizard’s 70th anniversary.

Toho Studios

After a monstrous egg washes up following a typhon and quickly grabbed by greedy capitalists twin tiny ‘fairies’ arrive pleading for the egg’s return. They are rebuffed despite the efforts of a noble reporter, scientist, and photographer. Awaked from his slumber in the sand by the typhon, Godzilla, in his final Showa era turn as a villainous monster, rampages through the area and the ‘fairies’ convince Mothra to come and battle the radioactive beast.

Despite a decidedly clear turn towards children’s entertainment Mothra vs Godzilla still retains enough ‘serious’ matter to have value for adults watching as well as the kiddies in the audience. It’s message of mutual respect and the abhorrence of Pacific island nuclear testing grounds the film in the period of its production without actually dealing with the tense geo-political realities of the mid 1960’s. Watching this for the first time on a big screen, even if the theaters is a micro one seating only about 50 people, was a joy for nostalgia.

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Movie Review: Dune Part 2

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This weekend the long-anticipated completion of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s landmark Science-Fiction novel, Dune, hit wide theatrical release with Dune Part 2.

Dune Part 1 released in 2021 after a delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic introduced audiences to the Atreides family, one of the Great Houses of a far future galactic Empire, an Empire riven with feuds and competing power-centers. Following betrayal and a surprise attack that destroys House Atreides that film’s protagonist, young Paul Atreides, and his mother flee into the deep desert of the planet Dune seeking sanctuary with the planet’s indigenous inhabitants, the Fremen.

This film, Dune Part 2, completes the adaptation as it follows Paul and his mother as they attempt to integrate themselves the Fremen’s culture and deliver justice or revenge upon their enemies while avoiding a cataclysmic galactic war that Paul’s precognitive powers foresee.

For those familiar with the source material this will be a fairly faithful adaptation of that story, though there are major elements that have been omitted, fans of Alia of the Knife are sure to be disappointed, and the timescale of the second half of the novel has been greatly compressed rather than sped through as with the earlier theatrical adaptation by iconoclast director David Lynch. The essential beats of the story are there, and the final resolution remains generally unchanged. Villeneuve and screenwriter Jon Spaihts have brought forward some of Herbert’s thematic elements that were made clear only in sequel novels, yet not so much as to spoil another entry in the franchise as Villeneuve has stated he would like to conclude this adaptation as a trilogy.

Hans Zimmer, himself a fan of the original novels, returns to score this film with a soundtrack that tonal matches his work in Dune Part 1. The cast is enhanced with Austin Butler, Christopher Walken, Florence Pugh, Lea Seydoux, and an uncredited Anya Taylor-Joy providing a glimpse of what a third film might include. Greig Fraser’s cinematography continues to the outstanding and he and Villeneuve’s experimental work with infrared photography adds an alien ‘otherness’ to some scenes.

All in all, those who consider themselves fans of Dune Part 1 are likely to be fans of this conclusion with anticipation for the next installment from this quite talented filmmaker.

Dune Part 2 is currently playing in theaters worldwide.

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Quick Review: Suitable Flesh

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Suitable Flesh is a 2023 adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s tale The Thing on the Doorstep of a body-swapping wizard and the pair of friends entangled in the madness.

Shudder Films

Scriptwriter Dennis Paoli has gender swapped the leads roles with Heather Graham playing Dr Elizabeth Derby, a psychiatrist who through a troubled patient, Asa Waite (Judah Lewis) comes to the wizard’s attentions and Barbara Crampton playing Elizbeth’s best friend and fellow psychiatrist Dr Daniella ‘Dani’ Upton. Directed by Joe Lynch in a manner to recall the bonkers insane cinema of Stuart Gordon Suitable Flesh ultimately fails both as a horror film in its own right and as a pastiche to Gordon’s movies of the 80’s.

The script’s greatest weakness, and it has more than one, is that the story is told from the wrong Point of View. Centered on Graham’s Dr Derby the story is flat because Elizabeth is a reactive character, responding to events around her and not driven the narrative forward. Dr. Upton would have been a far better choice for the film’s point of view as she would have had a mystery to solve, a fantastic truth to uncover, and a dear friend to save. The second largest mistake is telling the story though the device of a flashback. The framing of a film as a flashback can be a powerful tool see Double Indemnity as an example, but it required a skill beyond Paoli’s current talents, draining the movie of all tension and suspense.

In addition to the weakness of the script, and I did not list all the ways I thought the writing needed further works, the film is hampered by lackluster performances. With the exception of Barbara Crampton and Judah Lewis every actor feels as though they were simply sleepwalking through their parts, presently nothing that felt like real live-in characters. The flat performances ultimately undercut the attempt to pay homage to Stuart Gordon’s films such as Reanimator where the actor give grand expansive presentations of arch characters.

While I had looked forward to this movie arriving on streaming for months, Suitable Flesh, screening on Shudder proved to be a disappointment.

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An Interesting Barbie Theory

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This will be quick.

Warner Brothers Studios

Warner Brothers

A lot of ink, electrons, and noise has been spilled over the fact the fact that Barbie was nominated for ‘Best Picture’ by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences but its director Great Gerwig did not receive a nomination for Best Director. Some have suggested that this is misogyny which sorts of proves the theme of the film, some have advanced the idea that as a comedy the films struggles against a bias, but that doesn’t seem to explain no Best Director but still getting Best Picture. Yesterday I heard an interesting theory.

Best Director is a nomination that is determined by directors not the Academy at large and the suggestion is that directors really dislike it when actor come along and ‘usurp’ the director’s chair. The person advancing the idea presented as evidence that Ben Affleck was not nominated as director for Argo despite the film being nominated and winning Best Picture, nor was Bradley Cooper nominated for his direction even though A Star is Born was nominated for Best Picture.

Of course, with ten nominations open for Best Picture but only five for Best Director it is a given that each award cycle is going to have films nominated for the top prize without their directors being recognized. Was it bias against women, against comedy, against actors, or perhaps no bias at all that kept Greta Gerwig off the nomination list? We will never know, and people will believe the explanation that in all likelihood conforms to their already held beliefs.

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