It's almost February 2020, so of course we're all talking about the best
movies of 2019. For many that includes movies that only came to the U.S. for the first time in 2019. Naturally I'll
disagree with some of the Oscar winners. More naturally, I don't understand
what some of the categories mean. But nothing shall dissuade me from
telling a democratic body of people who devote swaths of their
lives to film that their mass conclusions were wrong. So here we go!
The Robbed Award
Going to the movie that got no play last year
and is just as good as whatever won Best Picture
It's almost March 2019, so of course we're all talking about the best
movies of 2018. Naturally I'll
disagree with some of the Oscar winners. More naturally, I don't understand
what some of the categories mean. But nothing shall dissuade me from
telling a democratic body of people who devote swaths of their
lives to film that their mass conclusions were wrong. So here we go!
My first memories of The Mummy are parody. It feels like every syndicated cartoon had an episode with a pyramid and an angry zombie in bandages shambling after the heroes. It's one of the aesthetics up there with Dracula's fangs and cape, or Jason's machete and hockey mask, that you know some store will try to sell you every October.
But I'd never actually seen the movies that popularized the concept. To end my Halloween List this year, I visited the four big Mummy movies: the 1932 original, Christopher Lee's 1959 remake, the Branden Fraser 1999 action film, and Tom Cruise's most recent mistake.
Yeah, somehow a Horror movie got a doppleganger. They caused a SEO nightmare for any of us
not in their home countries. One came out in Spain and the other in Mexico, and both were extremely difficult to import to the U.S. until Netflix added them. The thing is that these two movies are utterly excellent and nothing alike.
And Netflix added them both in the same month, just to further the doppleganger curse.
Today I offer you two movies, separated by nearly fifty years, with two very different approaches to paralysis. One is a suspenseful Giallo about being mistaken for a cadaver. The other is an action movie that would love to forget disability even exists.
Short Night of Glass
Dolls (1971)
Gregory Moore isn’t dead, but the morticians don’t know
that. His body is discovered in a garden one morning in Prague by a gardener
who only cares about not getting blamed for a homicide. Moore is actually
totally paralyzed, unable to speak or so much as blink or move an eye. He’s
mistaken for an unusually warm dead body, and morticians study him trying to
figure out what’s wrong with the cadaver. If they don’t figure it out, he could
be buried alive, or accidentally killed on an autopsy table.
He struggles to think of how to alert someone for help, and
tries to comb his memories for what caused all of this. Because of his
condition, he can’t act on the immediate conflict. The movie punts, using his
memories to flashback and tell the story of what happened before this morning.
Moore had a girlfriend who abruptly disappeared, and with police refusing to
help, he infiltrated the seedier parts of Prague’s society for answers. It
brought him into the proximity of some grim murders, although he didn’t notice
them at first and didn’t realize what peril he was in.
Every October I devote at least one blog post to Giallo films, but I have to deviate this year.
Giallo is a fascinating genre, and I owe Ryan Boyd for helping me jump into it. These are Horror movies about people who are guilty of something, or who got too close to the orbit of crime to wash the dirt off of them. Giallo lets its protagonists be wrong in ways no other sub-genre of Horror does.
But they are also sleazy, eager to sexualize young women and assault them in ways that can be even more off-putting than American Slashers. Some of the most lauded Giallo have problematic art to how they like to destroy girls. This month, after a year of #MeToo and yet another suspect of sexual violence being voted onto the U.S. Supreme Court, I have to interrupt the Giallo vibes a bit. Horror has too few ladies who get to be the killer and be proud in the way it lets Freddy, Jigsaw, and Pennywise.
So today we're going to look at two Giallo films and how they treat women - but only after we look at The Tragedy Girls, a Horror Comedy about a pair of BFFs who are tired of waiting around to be filler victims. These girls are going to become the killers, and get famous off of it.
Tragedy Girls (2017)
Tragedy Girls doesn't care that the bar for women in modern Horror is to be strong heroines who fight against cruelty. It happily picks two teen girls, who are petty and sometimes hilariously short-sighted, and makes them both the lead characters and the killers. The opening of the movie is one of them pretending to neck with a local boy in the efforts to fish out a serial killer.
Oh, they don't want to stop they killer. They want to catch him and study under him. This business is hard and they want professional advice.
We're taking a brief break from movies today to spotlight two Horror miniseries. One is from India, about terrors occult and governmental. The other is an anime that brings terror into Time Travel. Need something to binge this Saturday?
Ghoul (2018)
In a dystopic future, India has divided into multiple
states, some secular, and some religious, cracking down with strict censorship
rules. It’s all intended to reduce terrorism and general violence. It has all
failed, and the fascistic government continues burning children’s books and
searching random civilians to send to black site prisons. Ghoul takes place at one of those black site prisons, where the
latest prisoner and interrogation subject has more than knowledge. He’s
possessed by a demon that wanted to get in.
It feels like an overdue topic for Horror, which prides
itself on grasping reality’s sharp edges. Black sites are real nightmares,
scarier than any serial killer. The prospect of the torture crew that runs such
a place being mentally toyed with and haunted by an invasive presence could
carry its own movie. The tensest scenes are brilliantly constructed, like a
power outage during which one worker tries to see around a torture chamber with
the minuscule illumination of a blow torch. The show has ample tricks to fill
up its few episodes, building to an ending that had my little group cheering.
Today I have three winners for you. Helping get the taste of Hold the Dark out of my mouth are three masterfully made movies, and two of the best Cosmic Horror films ever made. After years of people wishing for anything close to In the Mouth of Madness, we got both Annihilation and The Endless in the same year. And yet I'll come across as ungrateful and say that as much as I enjoyed them, it's Thelma that stuck with me the longest.
Thelma (2017)
Somewhere between Carrie
and The Omen lies Thelma. This Scandinavian movie follows a young woman who’s
going off to university for the first time and discovering herself – and
discovering that something is wrong with her. Over the course of a superb slow
burn we learn about strange events that happened during her childhood, and how
her parents insisted on quietly doing nothing about them. It seemed to work at
the time; those events seemed to stop.
Those events aren’t repeating, and with them seemingly
safely in her past, Thelma has a chance at a life. She goes out to party, meets
a girl she immediately crushes on, and starts to become an independent person.
There are hours of class, and she has to deal with jackasses for the first
time, but she’s adapting. It’s the beginning of a promising life, one
interrupted by sudden seizures and nightmarish delusions. These things are
starkly different than what we learn happened in her childhood.
Talk about three intensely different movies. Today I've got a demon summoner, a giant shark, and a veteran-turned-Slasher. And surprisingly, The Meg is not the worst movie I watched for today.
Let's dive in, starting with the overlooked gem that is Pyewacket.
Pyewacket (2018)
I’ve been giving more IFC films a look since they released Devil’s Candy. Pyewacket had a very
quiet premiere in March – so quiet that I only heard about it in a random
thread on Dreadit.
It follows a single mother and daughter handling the trauma
of the father’s death. The two are driven far apart by their pain, and the
daughter seeks comfort in cheesy occultism. After a particularly horrible fight
with her mother, she performs a ritual asking for her something to happen to
her mother, but no lightning strikes. It’s a bit of runtime later when she
starts hearing strange noises around the house. Whatever listened to her prayer
seems to have followed her home.
The atmosphere of Pyewacket approaches A24 levels of tense
authenticity. It’s shot in a real house bordering real woodland in Autumn, and
the shots feel cold enough to make you put a jacket on. It’s edited with enough
quiet, and a strong balance of soft, eerie sounds against sharp and abrupt
ones. The actors couldn’t ask for a better indie production to walk into. These
surrounding details earns confidence much faster than the plot.
Happy October, everyone! This is my favorite month of the year. The leaves are turning, the air is fresh, and pop culture is overrun by spooky things. Today I'm hanging a ghost named Gus on my front door, and revealing this year's Halloween List.
The Halloween List is my annual blogathon reviewing scary movies. The rule is that every movie has to be a first-time viewing for me. I spend most of the year saving these films up. Each year is packed with interesting scary movies between Hollywood, domestic indies, and international film, but I'll also try to cover some things from Horror's past, like Kwaidan and the original Haunting. It all kicks off on Wednesday with some titles you probably recognize.
Wednesday, October 3: A Quiet Place & Emelie & Hereditary
Friday, October 5: Mandy & Slice & Summer of '84
Monday, October 8: The Meg & Pyewacket & Hold the Dark
Wednesday the 10th: Thelma & Annihilation & The Endless
Friday the 12th: A break from movies for two special miniseries: Ghoul & Erased
Monday the 15th: Unfriended: Dark Web & Office & Calibre
Wednesday the 17th: The Lobster & The Killing of the Sacred Deer
Friday the 19th: The Evil Eye & What Have You Done to Solange? & Tragedy Girls
Monday the 22nd: Upgrade & Suicide Club & Short Night of Glass Dolls
Tuesday the 23d: Blumhouse's brand new Halloween (2018)
Wednesday the 24th: Prom Night
Thursday the 25th: My Friend Dahmer & Suicide Club
Friday the 26th: Kwaidan & The Haunting
Monday the 29th: Veronica & Veronica, the strange case of two movies from the same year with the same title and nothing in common.
October 31st, Halloween itself: The Mummy (1932), The Mummy (1959), The Mummy (1999), and The Mummy (2017). A special four-part feature on all four iterations of the classic Mummy franchise.
What looks good to you? What are you watching this October?
It's my honor to have a piece in the Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction issue of Uncanny Magazine. Between Lightspeed and Uncanny Magazine, Disabled People Destroy has allowed voices from multiple marginalized communities to speak openly about the stories that matter most to us and the fandom community. The issue is packed with excellent stories and essays by the likes of Fran Wilde, Merc Rustad, and Nisi Shawl. I've been waiting for this issue for years.
My essay is about the representation of disability in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, particularly as it appears in Infinity War. Infinity War is the biggest nexus for MCU characters to date, and has a number of disabled characters in its cast: War Machine, Nebula, Bucky Barnes, and Thor are a few. Yet they're handled carelessly, either marginalizing them based on their disabilities, or seeking to erase those disabilities from view. It speaks to how few disabled people work on the Marvel films, how few write them and act in them, and it's time for that to change.
Marvel is celebrating their biggest box office hit and ten years of blockbusters. It's time for Rocket Raccoon to stop stealing disabled people's prosthetics.
It's almost March 2018, so of course we're all talking about the best
movies of 2017. Naturally I
disagree with some of the Oscar winners. More naturally, I don't understand
what some of the categories mean. But nothing shall dissuade me from
telling a democratic body of people who devote swaths of their
lives to film that their mass conclusions were wrong. So here we go!
I tire of people slagging this character. Superman is a dated concept, and yet one that's quite appealing with how
preposterously cynical our culture has gotten. I'm exhausted with all
the claims that there's nothing left to do with him except kill him. If hope is boring, then you're telling the story wrong.
This led to me joke around on Twitter last night about a Superman movie that wasn't so gloomy. Something truer to the vision of Superman a lot of us hold. Things got out of hand.
Back in 2013 I played a little game: I was given thirty minutes to write as much of a Wonder Woman movie as I could. People liked it. Allan Heinberg and Patty Jenkins certainly nailed their vision this year, and if there is a good Wonder Woman movie in existence now, then why not move onto the world's most famous and least popular hero?
Here comes a Superman movie written in thirty minutes. Because these stories are *so impossible* to write.
It's been fifteen months, but Netflix's most popular show is back. It sounds
like we may not get another season until 2019, so savor this while you can. If
you've watched the first season a dozen times, I recommend going into this one
with moderate expectations. The second season cannot match the surprises of the
first because we all love it now. Stranger Things 2 is more Stranger Things:
more creepy crawlies preying on the small town, more lore of the Upside Down,
and more character development for one of TV's most lovable ensembles. It's
another order of that fun meal you had last time.
The season puts its weakest foot forward, taking about four
episodes to really get in motion. It’s a hard contrast to the first season,
which in one episode set up everyone’s motivations and half of the major plot
threads. The difference is that now the Duffer Brothers know exactly how much
pop culture loves their kids, and so they don’t mind having them hang out,
slowly get into needless conflicts with each other, and lather up in 80s
references. The slower early episodes are thickly decorated in Punky Brewster
and “vintage” and KFC product placement.
In both seasons, Stranger Things is at its best when it uses
its influences quietly. The first season was highly influenced by Spielberg’s E.T.
and Stephen King’s Firestarter. It honored its influences by doing things like
the bicycle escape scene where Eleven used her powers to save them – flipping a
van rather than making the bicycles fly.
At its best, this season handles its influences in the same
way. One particular episode dives deeply into visual queues from Alien and
Aliens, but no one brings it up, and the outcomes are very different. In another plot thread, Dustin tries to adopt a
little monster of his own, promptly feeds it after midnight, and the synth-heavy
soundtrack echoes notes from the theme to Gremlins. These are homages embedded in
the plot without derailing it. It’s much defter, say, than when the kids scream
at a Dragon’s Lair arcade cabinet, or watch a vintage commercial for Oreos and The
Terminator.
After the shocking hit of Gerald’s Game, I had to watch
Netflix’s other big King adaptation. I am a huge King fan. A decade ago I began
limiting myself to reading one King book per year so I wouldn’t run out. Yet I
honestly don’t remember this novella from Full
Dark, No Stars. Even by the end of the movie, nothing shook loose.
It is certainly a King story. A loveless farm marriage threatens
to break up when the wife wants to sell a large chunk of the land that’s
legally hers. The husband (Thomas Jane) bides his time, then kills her and dumps
the body in a nearby well, covering his tracks and manipulating their son into
being an accomplice. The law wants to know where she was, and while the father
keeps them away, rats have started climbing out of the well and following him.
These movies have been my first exposure to Italian Giallo, a
sub-genre that feels like an evolutionary link between Murder Mysteries and
Slasher Films. The Bird With The Crystal Plumage follows Sam Dalmas, an
American writer living abroad in Italy, who one night stumbles across an
attempted murder inside a museum. Although he’s trapped in the antechamber, he
manages to call the police, and then has to wait, just feet away from a woman he
can’t help further.
Shockingly, the victim survives passing out from her
injuries. More shockingly: she isn’t the only assault victim to live through
the movie. The Bird With The Crystal Plumage doesn’t view death like a contemporary
film. People survive reasonable injuries, and people like the writer are
haunted by what they see. Death isn’t easy to achieve, and it’s also too
weighty to shrug off. Sam can’t forget the horrible imagery, and spends the
rest of his time in Italy trying to track down the attacker where the police have
failed.
A family of Metal Heads move to a remote farm house and run
into the same demon that killed the previous tenants. It’s a demon that loves
the arts; it manipulated the love of music of the previous tenants’ son, and now
works its way into the new tenants’ father.
My favorite facet of the movie is that the Metal Heads
aren’t hard-drinking freaks; they’re misfits, sure, but they love each other,
drive a cheap station wagon, and screw up in relatable ways. As they move into
their idyllic little house, our soundtrack is screaming Metal. What they do is
make their aesthetic feel mundane and human. It’s delightful to see the music
culture applied to different life styles.
Metal Heads are people, too. And like all people, they
occasionally have to repel the assault of a serial killer who hears the same
voices as their father.
The movie ramps up well after they family sets down their
roots. The father, a painter of morbid art, starts feeling “the inspiration” –
but an inspiration all too close to what led the previous tenant to go
murderous. As the father paints disturbing scenes that even his family thinks
are weird, the old killer reappears, confused how anyone else could live there.
There’s high tension as both the killer and father stir up, like two kettles on
one stove, and you just hope for the sake of the family that they don’t both
boil over.
I’ve been harsh on most of the IFC releases that I’ve seen,
but between this and Apartment 143, I’m going to have to give their catalog
another look.
Julia Ducournau’s gift to us from French-Belgian cinema, a
riveting and intimate portrait of a vegetarian who has her first bite of meat
and suddenly can’t stop craving more. It’s an abrupt addiction, not a satire mocking
vegetarians, but a pathological Horror story about her descent.
Justine is just starting at a veterinary school with harsh
hazing rituals. Her bed is tossed out her window, and she has to crawl on her
knees through the courtyard, and her seniors force her to swallow a rabbit
kidney. Ever afterward she finds herself ravenous, and biting into meat on a shish
kabob makes her forget the rest of the world exists. Those cravings quickly
darken as she watches boys around campus. As a vegetarian, she argued human
life wasn’t any more sacred than that of animals. If anything, she’s
consistent.
No movie in 2017 more understands what film doesn’t have to
do than It Comes at Night. It opens on a family putting down their terminally
ill grandfather and burning his body in the wilderness. We don’t know what his
disease is, but he is in awful shape and they are terrified of touching him.
Then we follow the family back to their boarded up house in
the woods, seemingly with no one else around. They only go outside in pairs.
They have strict protocols for locking and unlocking their doors. When a
stranger shows up at their house in the middle of the night, they treat it with
a terrified coolness, both clearly rattled that someone is out there, and
forcing themselves to focus.
That Steven Spielberg sure earned his career. This was the
movie that earned him Jaws, but rather than the tale of a shark, it’s one long
car chase that’s truly harrowing. A salesman is out trying to make a meeting in
another state when he tries to pass a slow moving truck; the truck responds by
pulling ahead of him, then slowing down again. It’s a moment of impatience and
tension a lot of us have driven through, but it begins a game of cat and mouse,
out in the middle of nowhere, where no one can help him.
Especially for a 1970s made-for-TV movie, Duel is masterful.
How do you keep such a simple film from getting visually boring? He films the
cars from all angles, and ___ gives a riveting performance as a man falling
behind the wheel. The use of music is sparing, often subtle, elevate the rumble
of engines and the wind of the wilderness. The movie always knows when to take
you in closer to our driver, or when to focus on the enigma of the truck. We
never see the man that’s chasing us. There’s only his titanic vehicle.
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