To start, we have Jay Baruchel's mashup of a slasher movie and true crime...
Random Acts of Violence (2019)
Not rated
Score: 3 out of 5
Random Acts of Violence was a near-great movie that kind of lost me in the third act. A satire of the modern "true crime" genre in which the creator of a "based on a true story" horror comic gets way more than he bargained for, it's a nifty exploration that's at its best, oddly enough, when it's not focusing on the grotesque violence, but on its characters and how their exploitation of such is blowing up in their faces. This was, in fact, why I was as let down by the ending as I was, as it suddenly changes gears with a twist that wasn't as well fleshed-out as it could've been and honestly shouldn't have been treated as a twist, even if I think I know what writer/director Jay Baruchel was trying to get at. That said, even if I felt that the story faltered near the finish line, this was still a chilling modern slasher filled with brutally violent imagery, a scary killer, and atmosphere to spare.
Our protagonists are Todd Walkley, his girlfriend Kathy, his assistant Aurora, and his publisher Ezra, the owner of a comic book shop. Todd is the creator of Slasherman, one of the most popular independent comics, and it is about exactly what you think a comic book called Slasherman is about. Specifically, it's loosely based on a real-life unsolved serial murder case, that of the I-90 Killer who murdered several people along Interstate 90 in upstate New York. When Todd and his friends venture out from their home in Toronto to do a publicity tour across New York, they are followed by a series of grisly murders that seem pulled from the pages of Todd's comic -- because it turns out they are. The I-90 Killer -- or is it? -- has started up again, taking inspiration from Slasherman and seeming to be outright taunting Todd as he travels across the state, eventually pulling him into the mayhem and targeting his friends.
The film wastes no time making Todd out to be a pretty callous person, not an unlikable asshole but definitely someone whose interest in the I-90 Killer seems self-serving and less than respectful. Kathy, who is writing her own, more true-to-life book about the case, has to cover up her connection to Todd because the people whose loved ones were murdered regard his comic as exploitative, and we get to meet one of those people when Todd goes on a radio show only to find out, midway through talking about all the gory kills in his comic, that the host was a good friend of one of the victims and had actually invited him on to tear him a new asshole on the air. A stop at a small-town gas station, which even the characters realize is a common setup for a horror movie plot, turns into a sales pitch the moment that Todd and Ezra notice that they have an empty comic book rack, even though the place is smack-dab in the middle of the area where the I-90 Killer did his dirty work; the clerk is just trying to get them to move along. These were the parts of the film that I liked the most, creating some moral ambiguity around the protagonist and his friends and some interesting dilemmas that opened the door for some dark, nifty directions that the story could have gone in. There was some solid satire of the relationship between real and fictional violence, and the quest by creators of the latter to exploit the former that can reopen old wounds for people who have survived the tragedies that are being written about.
And with that in mind, I get what Baruchel was trying to do with the third-act twist, reframing Todd's relationship to the unfolding violence around him. The problem I had with it was that the film framed it as a twist, even though, in my opinion, it would have been much better off had it been up-front about how Todd was personally connected to the things going on around him. Had the film let the viewers in on this early, it would have completely changed how we saw him, adding another wrinkle to the fact that he's seemingly exploiting a real-life tragedy by connecting it to his own process of working through past trauma. The radio interview could've ended with Todd turning the tables on the host, telling him that he doesn't know what he's talking about and either utterly pantsing him on air or connecting with him over it, instead of getting pantsed with his sputtering response to the host's questions and anger. Instead, however, the twist undercuts everything we've been told and shown about Todd before then, telling us that he's not actually the casually exploitative hack he's been portrayed as even though we've spent an hour with him and his friends realizing what a mess of shit his writing has gotten them into. It's a messy twist that comes way too late in the film, derails the themes and message that it had been building before then, and doesn't really deliver a satisfying payoff.
As a good old-fashioned slasher, though, this film gets the job done. Todd is supposed to be a guy who's come up with creative kills that have made his comic book into a bestseller, and we get our fair share of that, the standouts being the "triptych" in which three victims are tied up into a rat-king-esque arrangement and a bit where the I-90 Killer guns down a family on the highway that does a lot to capture the horror of a shooting spree. The cast was all solid, with Jesse Williams a standout as our deeply flawed protagonist Todd, a guy who's cool to his friends but doesn't seem to realize what a dick he's being to everyone else, not least of all the families and friends of those who his comic book is based on. If pure, straightforward, bloody horror entertainment is what you're here for, you will not be disappointed.
The Bottom Line
While it's unfortunately let down by a mishandled third-act reveal that undercuts a lot of the messages it was trying to send, this is still an original and worthwhile, if flawed, twist on the timeworn slasher formula that avoids the "meta" trap of so many horror movies about horror movies. Give it a spin if you think it sounds interesting.
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The second film of the night won't be everyone's cup of tea, but I personally had a great time with it.
Ten Minutes to Midnight (2020)
Not rated
Score: 4 out of 5
While the marketing for Ten Minutes to Midnight has leaned heavily on retro-splatter flair, don't be fooled: this is a slower and more cerebral movie than the one being advertised. It's a vampire movie that uses the transformation into a vampire to capture the feeling of being trapped in a downward spiral, afraid of becoming obsolete and replaced by the newer model, the protagonist's mental state being such that, for a time, it's ambiguous if she's turning into a vampire or if she's just finally snapped after one bad day too many. Even in the third act when it starts getting truly out-there, it's all held together by an excellent performance by Caroline Williams. For me, it was the movie that The Lords of Salem wanted to be, a fusion of rock radio, retro influences, and bloody, atmospheric horror that doesn't over-explain itself or overstay its welcome.
Amy Marlowe is having a really bad night. A bat bit her on the way to her job at the radio station WLST, where she has hosted their late-night program for decades and is about to retire, a decision that wasn't entirely hers. Once she gets to the station, she meets Sienna, a young woman fresh out of college who is clearly being groomed to take her job. What's more, the area is being battered by a hurricane that's trapped them all inside and is playing merry hell with their broadcast signal. In other words, she's on edge. At the start of her show, she finally snaps on-air as she starts yelling at callers, Sienna, her producer Aaron, the station manager Robert, and the security guard Ernie. This proves to be just the beginning of a slow mental breakdown over the course of the night, as it turns out that the bite on her neck was carrying something a lot weirder than rabies, leading her to start hallucinating and growing increasingly paranoid about her co-workers.
Williams as Amy is the focal point of this film's small cast, and for good reason, as she is a standout. She plays Amy as the kind of older woman who's seen it all in her long career in radio and whose personality has been colored by her experiences; she quickly figures that Sienna is sleeping with Robert, because that's what she did to get ahead, and her fashion sense remains stuck in the '80s hair metal era almost out of defiance to both changing trends and her advancing age. She is not happy that she's being pushed out of her job, sensing that the station's corporate management regards her as an obsolete relic who's irrelevant to what they want to do with the station she helped build, and she lets everyone know it. It's obvious that, even before she got bit by that bat, her retirement earlier than she'd planned was weighing heavily on her. Whatever becoming a vampire did to her, it merely brought out anxieties that had been building up within her for a while. It's vampirism as a metaphor for the fear of growing old and being left behind by a changing world that one can no longer comprehend, as Amy's mind starts imagining conspiracies against her by all of her co-workers as her neuroses transform her into something they can no longer recognize.
For most of the film, we cannot be certain how much is real and how much is a product of Amy's ever-more-deranged mind, the vampire curse transforming it the same way it has her body. While the ending eventually makes things relatively clear (albeit leaving just enough open to keep some ambiguity), most of the film is a journey in the shoes of somebody who is losing touch with reality and feels increasingly alone in a hostile work environment, leaving viewers unsure as to what precisely is going on. The third act sees Amy completely slip into the realm of madness, imagining an alternate version of the studio and her retirement where everything has been turned upside down. This is where this movie succeeded and The Lords of Salem failed for me, doing its level best to capture the feeling of being in a world where you have no idea what's going on, leaving enough unexplained that the viewer is taken along for the ride rather than merely observing Amy's collapse from the sidelines. There is something clearly wrong with her retirement party during the climax, like a warped parody of the world she normally inhabited, her vampirism leaving her increasingly unable to recognize it as any kind of normal.
If you want blood, well, you've got that here too. This is, after all, a vampire movie, and with that comes all of the vampire mayhem one might expect from a modern-day take on the genre. Amy gets all the usual vampire strengths and weaknesses, and yes, people do get their throats torn open as she starts feeding. One character seems to visibly decay after getting bitten (though again, how much is real versus Amy's mind is left for the viewer to decide), and while Amy's physical transformation isn't as overt as her mental one, her newfound allergy to crosses and inability to take physical damage (even when trying to burn her face on the stove) can be just as unnerving. While Amy imagines her co-workers plotting against her, from a more detached perspective one can see that they are terrified of her and fear that she's lost her mind. At 72 minutes, it's also a film that gets right to the point and feels as though most of the fat has been trimmed. It never drags -- the film starts with Amy having already been bitten, and by the end of the first act she's already causing chaos around the studio, even if we're still in the phase where it isn't clear just what exactly is wrong with her.
The Bottom Line
A dark, moody, stripped-down vampire movie that combines retro flair, graphic kills, and commentary on growing old in an industry defined by youth, Ten Minutes to Midnight is highly recommended for anyone who loves vampire movies or classic rock.
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