Day 2 of Popcorn Frights' "Wicked Weekend" brings a gritty crime thriller, followed by a bloody and violent horror-comedy, followed by a supernatural romantic comedy that's only tangentially connected to the horror genre, followed by a voodoo flick that's clearly more than a little inspired by Jordan Peele, and finally, a backwoods slasher. How's that for mood whiplash?
To start...
The Oak Room (2020)
Not rated
Score: 4 out of 5
The Oak Room is one of the few token non-horror films being screened for the Wicked Weekend, an anthology-style crime thriller in which two men in a bar that's closing up for the night tell each other stories. An extremely small-scale film that takes place almost entirely within the confines of two separate bars, one of them the titular Oak Room, it feels like it could've been filmed during the pandemic with its lack of big-budget flash and reliance on its two lead actors' performances. And fortunately for us, that's all this movie needed to tell a gripping story, one filled with twists and turns as we grow increasingly uncertain about the kinds of men these two are. It told a simple story in a very simple manner, but as its secrets unfolded, it hooked me in a manner that far more elaborate films in this vein failed to.
The plot starts out simply enough. During a blizzard, a young man named Steve enters a bar in the small Canadian town where he grew up as it's getting ready to close for the night. He has history in the town, especially concerning his dead father Gord, and the bartender Paul is not happy to see him return, especially since Steve's life didn't really turn out the way he wanted to after he headed off to college. Most of the story comes in the form of flashbacks to events in Steve and Paul's lives both recent and going way back as they tell their stories to one another, revealing a troubled past within the town, with Steve's father, and with their day-to-day lives that witnessed encounters with some very dangerous people. In between, the two of them analyze and interrogate each other, neither of them trusting one another.
This is mostly a two-man show for RJ Mitte as Steve and Peter Outerbridge as Paul, who spend most of the movie telling each other their stories, and they play very well off of one another. From the moment Steve walks into Pete's bar, you immediately get the sense that these two know each other and are not fond of one another in the slightest. Paul is an older man who utterly resents the younger Steve, seeing him as having wasted his life and ultimately ruined his father's life, while Steve in turn believes that his father had only himself to blame for his alcoholism and does not take kindly to Paul's words -- all while having a hidden past of his own that Paul only kind of knows about, indicated simply through his mannerisms that let you know that he has something to hide. There is tension in the air throughout their interactions, thick enough to cut with a knife; you get the sense, especially as their dark secrets unspool, that the film is going to end with one of them killing the other. Against the desolate backdrop of an otherwise empty bar late at night in the middle of a raging snowstorm cutting them off from the outside world, the spotlight is placed squarely on them, and Mitte and Outerbridge carried the film with flying colors.
The production was intensely minimalistic, with few locations and characters, and it did a great job in selling a remote, small town atmosphere where, once the sun goes down, everybody is inside and the streets are dead -- save for those with trouble on their minds. Between the lack of light, the wind blowing outside, and the implication that Paul's bar is located underground, the film gives off a feeling of isolation for the main characters, that if one of them tries to screw over the other, nobody is coming to save them. The atmosphere felt foreboding enough that I could buy that one of these people was not quite all right, and the game was in waiting for the other shoe to drop -- is Paul lying to Steve about what happened to his father, or is Steve lying to Paul about his criminal record?
The Bottom Line
The Oak Room is a stripped-down thriller that pulls off a lot with a little, thanks to two excellent lead actors and a great atmosphere. If you like your crime movies dark and frigid, check it out.
----------
After that, we switch tacks entirely and jump into a British horror-comedy about a killer stuffed bear. Yes, it is exactly as ridiculous as it sounds.
Benny Loves You (2019)
Not rated
Score: 3 out of 5
Benny Loves You is a movie made under a principle that I like to call "high awesomeness". Basically, it involves the filmmakers putting every crazy, badass, or otherwise cool idea they could possibly think of into their goofy horror-comedy, caring less about plot and more about a particular tone, like you're watching a spoof video by Funny or Die, Rocket Jump, or Saturday Night Live that's been made into a feature film. The plot is a broad farce interested more in going for the big laughs than anything, knowing immediately that its premise is batshit and kicking off with a bratty young girl getting her eyes gouged out by her stuffed animal, as if to tell us right away that we're in for something vicious. By the time it turns into an R-rated version of Small Soldiers in the third act, it's just fully rolling with its main joke and hoping that you're along for the ride as well. It's not a great film, and it has only one real joke and some real faults, but I was just having too much damn fun to care.
The protagonist Jack is a 35-year-old man who works a thankless office job at a toy company and still lives with his parents, who, on his birthday, both die in a freak accident, leaving him living alone for the first time in his life. He decides that he needs to finally move on and become a grown man, and starts by getting rid of all of his childhood belongings. Unfortunately, one of those items, a talking stuffed bear named Benny, is not exactly enthused to part with his owner under such conditions, and starts a campaign to ruin Benny's life any way he can, including murdering the people around him so that the two of them can still be together forever.
It's basically Ted, done as a horror-comedy with Ted as the villain. Benny, like Ted, is a metaphorical representation of the protagonist's immaturity, a literal walking, talking stuffed animal who he can't bring himself to get rid of. When we see Jack at work, we get all the evidence we need of why he can't advance through life, namely a pitch for a new product that contains an embarrassing AIDS joke that everybody rolls their eyes at. The person he bonds with, his co-worker Dawn, herself has trouble letting go of childhood things. This is a guy whose inability to grow up is holding him back in life at a pivotal moment when he should be heading out on his own, and Benny is keeping him in that holding pattern. Whenever it seems as though Jack is starting to pull his life together and move on with his life, oops, there's Benny waiting with a knife to keep Jack in a permanent state of arrested development, often by murdering whatever person is pulling the two of them apart. It's a conceit that the film could have taken much further, especially with the ending, which seems to undercut the film's message somewhat. However, it is still an interesting one that gives a lot of depth to Jack, played by writer/director Karl Holt doing his best 2000s Simon Pegg impression as a guy who's slowly burning out as he spins his wheels.
As for Benny himself, the film is surprisingly effects-heavy given its low budget, and it is not shy about showing off the goods. Benny is done through a mix of practical puppetry and CGI, the latter often being quite noticeable, but the tone of the film and the unreal nature of Benny often papered over the seams. This felt a lot like those online sketch comedy shows I mentioned earlier, especially when the truly copious amounts of blood and gore started flying about, and when Benny recruits other toys into his murder spree. By the third act, a lot of the story has been lost in favor of Jack, Dawn, and his co-worker Richard fighting for survival in Jack's house against a bunch of killer toys, but at the same time, Holt was doing his level best to impress on a technical level with some very fun and over-the-top effects wizardry, complete with numerous shout-outs to various sci-fi, action, and horror films. As part of the whole, the ending didn't really do much to bring the film's various story threads to a satisfying conclusion, but taken on its own, it was a great series of riotous action scenes and effects showcases as toys fight the human characters and each other.
The Bottom Line
I definitely enjoyed myself watching Benny Loves You. It ain't smart comedy, but it's dumb comedy made by people smart enough to get some good laughs out of it. Check it out.
----------
For number three, we get a modern-day indie take on Beetlejuice...
A Ghost Waits (2020)
Not rated
Score: 4 out of 5
Well, this movie was sweet! A Ghost Waits is a supernatural romantic comedy that impressed me immediately with its charm, and kept me hooked with a genuinely moving romantic story and two great lead performances. Popcorn Frights sold it as a mix of Beetlejuice and the 1990 Demi Moore/Patrick Swayze movie Ghost, and while this film had a lot more indie affectations than either of them (especially it being shot in black and white), the comparison is definitely one that fits. It takes a timeworn supernatural horror premise, a man moves into a house and finds out that it's haunted, and runs in a very interesting direction with it that has a lot of fun with the genre's cliches, all while telling a legitimately engaging romantic story between its two leads. This is definitely one to keep your eye on.
Jack, our protagonist, has a job cleaning out houses after their previous occupants leave. Today, he's got a hell of a job: a house that a whole family fled from in fear because they believed that it was haunted. Sure enough, he soon finds out that ghosts -- or "spectral agents" -- are real, in the form of a very ornery one named Muriel who very much wants Jack to leave. Jack doesn't scare easily, though, much to Muriel's frustration, and what's more, as the two of them interact and argue, it becomes clear that they have a lot in common -- enough that they start to see things from each other's perspective. Muriel's "employers", however, are not keen to see her slacking off on the job and falling in love with her target, and there are consequences for her sort of defiance.
At the center of the story is a meditation on the relationship we have with our jobs. In their own ways, Jack and Muriel are both working to stay alive, Jack by collecting his paycheck and Muriel because her continued consciousness and humanity is dependent on her fulfilling her contract with her employers. Their respective jobs put them at odds, and yet they still find themselves falling for one another in no small part because they can recognize their respective life situations in one another. At the center of the film is their effort to find a way to overcome their baked-in conflict, and the two leads, MacLeod Andrews (who also co-wrote the film with director Adam Stovall) and Natalie Walker, do a great job conveying their relationship. Andrews' Jack is a guy who's jaded thanks to his working-class job and his life not being what it's cracked up to be, proving decidedly nonplussed and more annoyed than anything as Muriel attempts to scare him out of the house. Muriel, meanwhile, is comically serious in her ferocious dedication to her job, but her porcelain exterior turns out to have some deep cracks running through it related to both her long-forgotten past and her own frustrations with work, especially the fear that the job she loves might soon be taken by the younger, cruder, more aggressive, modern-style ghost Rosie. While they start the film on opposite sides, their chemistry is undeniable as Jack brings Rosie up to date on decades' worth of pop culture and the two of them spill their guts to one another, and before long you're rooting for a way for the two of them to finally be together -- even if it might not be pretty.
The comedy, too, brought plenty of laughs. Muriel's job as a spectral agent is a deeply bureaucratic one, complete with a boss that she has to report to regularly. Rosie, Muriel's rival at "work", acts the part of the younger, more attractive asshole who serves as an obstacle to true love. But the meat of the humor comes from Jack and Muriel, whether it's his growing frustration with the supernatural events in his house running counter to Muriel's goals, the epic dressing-down he gives to Rosie, Muriel's cluelessness about how much the world has changed since she died, or simply the two of them softening each other's shells and learning to live with one another. Thanks to this movie's great sense of humor, I fell in love with its leads almost as easily as they fell for each other, and when your movie is a romantic comedy, that's kind of important. If I had any complaints, it's that the bureaucracy of Muriel's job is never really explained or explored in much depth. To go back to Beetlejuice, this could've been a great avenue for some more jokes and fleshing out Muriel's character a bit more, but instead, the scenes where she's talking with her boss Ms. Henry are some of the driest in the film.
The Bottom Line
A Ghost Waits was a very impressive film, and one of my favorites of Popcorn Frights' Wicked Weekend so far. A romantic comedy that puts some fun twists on supernatural horror cliches, I definitely enjoyed myself, and I suspect that a lot of couples will too.
----------
The fourth movie is the kind of film that I was honestly expecting to see get made ever since Get Out became a hit.
Spell (2020)
Rated R for violence, disturbing/bloody images, and language
Score: 2 out of 5
If there's one truism in the horror genre, it's that it follows trends. Within the last fifty years, The Exorcist made the Devil into a go-to horror movie villain, Halloween brought us the slasher boom, The Silence of the Lambs led to a wave of psychological detective thrillers, Scream produced a boom in self-aware "meta" teen horror, 28 Days Later brought the zombie movie back from the grave, The Ring got Hollywood interested in remakes of Japanese horror movies, the remake of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre got them interested in remakes of classic American horror movies, the success of Saw led to the multiplex getting soaked in blood and guts extracted through vicious torture, and Paranormal Activity both made found footage into a horror staple and revived ghost movies for a new generation. And so it is again with Get Out, a fable about race relations that wowed both critics and audiences and pulled off the seemingly impossible feat of winning the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for a straightforward, unapologetic horror flick. Thanks to Jordan Peele's modern classic, the big trend now has been horror movies about Black people, such as Ma, Antebellum, Bad Hair, the upcoming Candyman sequel and Spiral: From the Book of Saw (no relation to Spiral, which was itself heavily influenced by Get Out), Peele's own follow-up Us...
...and this film, Spell. There are always gonna be a few lesser movies to come out of any horror trend, often from filmmakers trying to cash in on what's hot, and this is one of them. Buried somewhere within the film is a message of some kind about the relationship and friction between modern, urbanized Black people and their more traditional rural counterparts, but what the film's mainly about is recycling any number of old voodoo tropes and cliches from over the years, with Loretta Devine as the villain being the main force holding it together. Unfortunately, it doesn't do much beyond that, occasionally wandering into some very troubling tropes regarding its portrayal of voodoo, the South, and rural Black people while retreading ground that other films have done better before. Unless you like the cast, I'd skip it.
Our protagonist Marquis is a wealthy, self-made Black lawyer and family man whose father has just passed away, causing him to take his wife and kids to his old home in the hollers of Appalachia for the funeral. On the way there, Marquis' private plane crashes in a storm, and he wakes up injured, with his family nowhere in sight, and in the care of an elderly matriarch named Eloise who leads a community of Black folk in the holler. Eloise, you see, knows voodoo, and is using her magic to both nurse Marquis back to health and extend her control over him, bringing him back to his roots in the soil... no matter what Marquis might think of that.
I'm gonna leave aside for a second the fact that voodoo and similar Afro-American religions are not exactly associated with Appalachia, but with Louisiana and the lowcountry Gullah people of South Carolina and Georgia. Cultural authenticity is not exactly this film's strong suit, and it didn't surprise me in the slightest to learn that the film was written by a white guy, Kurt Wimmer (of Equilibrium fame). Its main strength, rather, comes in its lead performances from Omari Hardwick and especially Loretta Devine. Hardwick is a charismatic hero, albeit one who has been hobbled by his captors, and manages to be compelling even as he spends large stretches bedridden and struggling to walk properly. His character gets put through hell as he seeks to find his family and escape, and he remains a solid presence throughout. Devine, meanwhile, steals the show as Eloise, a character who walks the line of stereotype but manages to overcome it and make for a compelling backwoods cult leader. At her most congenial, she feels like family, but it soon becomes clear that she has far more sinister intentions in mind.
Where the film fails is in its rote plot that did little with its conceit, and attempts at social commentary that largely whiffed. Had this been just a B-movie that happened to star Black people, like any number of low-budget horror flicks to come out from Screen Gems in the last ten to fifteen years, I would have had no problem, but the film has bigger ideas on its mind. It seeks to satirize the relationship between urban Black people, and especially those who succeed in life, with their poorer, more rural counterparts, and it slides into some very ugly stereotypes in the process. Eloise's main deal in her interactions with Marquis is that she sees him as having lost touch with his roots, with her voodoo being her means of helping him reconnect with such. In blunt terms, it's a movie in which the villains are Black people who see modernity, education, pop culture, and other such things as "not their place", and seek to drag down members of their community who question their submissive, agrarian lifestyle, and it's not handled with a whole lot of grace. Most of the cultists feel like one-dimensional caricatures, including Eloise, who doesn't get much development and is mainly interesting due to Devine's performance more than anything. For that matter, Marquis' pursuit of his family is also fairly lacking in stakes, as after the plane crash, they are gone from the film for a very long stretch while Marquis is focused mainly on his own immediate survival. There is plenty of gruesome imagery, from a scene where goats' eyes are used in a voodoo ritual to a grisly shot of a long nail being pulled out of someone's foot (and later shoved back in), but beyond that and the two lead performances, there wasn't a lot to keep me invested in the story and characters.
The Bottom Line
There are worse movies than Spell, but it still has pretty rote scares and storytelling and an overreliance on a lot of questionable stereotypes to draw its villains with. I'd call it a pass.
----------
Finally, the second day ended with a Texas Chain Saw Massacre-style backwoods slasher that, honestly, just dragged.
Butchers (2020)
Not rated
Score: 2 out of 5
There's no beating around the bush here: Butchers was a snore. A retread of any number of backwoods cannibal movies, it had a few interesting ideas in how it explored the tensions within that clan and among its otherwise vanilla protagonists, but it wasn't enough to overcome a lack of grit, forgettable characters, attempts to shock that didn't really do anything, and a general feeling that I've seen much better versions of this movie before. It wasn't the worst kind of movie like this that I've ever seen, not even at Popcorn Frights (Artik last year was hot garbage), but it had very little to recommend about it otherwise.
Stop me if you've heard this before: a young couple traveling through the woods gets kidnapped by some local yokels, the smart one Owen Watson and the dumb one Oswald. Their brother Oxford, you see, is a mutated freak who craves only human flesh to eat. They kill the man, and keep the woman for breeding purposes for an unspecified reason. (Maybe the cannibal brother likes veal?) Several months later, another group of friends travels through the same area, and meets the same fate, getting hunted down by Owen and Oswald to feed Oxford. There was potential here for a story that took the basic plot of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and turned it around, telling the story from the Sawyers' point of view as we explore what makes a family like that tick. (And no, I don't mean Texas Chainsaw 3D.) Rob Zombie did something like this with The Devil's Rejects, which I think is why it still holds up as his best movie, and the film does often lean in that direction by showing Owen and Oswald feuding with one another over how to treat both Oxford and their prey. On the other hand, it spends too little time with them, and too much time with their victims, a bunch of fairly generic and forgettable young adults who the film doesn't even place into recognizable stereotypes. The only development they get is that one guy is cheating on his girlfriend with the other girl, which Owen and Oswald try to exploit, but beyond that, they exist almost entirely to die brutal deaths.
And it was on that front where the movie really lost me. It's about as bloody as you might expect from a film like this, but without any investment in the characters, it all felt toothless. Rape and the threat thereof are bandied about by the villains more for shock value than anything, and while it did provoke a reaction once, it didn't truly stick with me the way it did in Don't Breathe, which used a very similar idea but managed to pull it off by having it happen to someone I cared about. The requisite "twenty minutes with jerks" dragged on for way too long. The gray, rural Canadian forest setting lent a bleak atmosphere all by itself, but the film never really exploited it the way that the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre did with its scorching hot Texas landscape. It tried to end on a downbeat note, but again, I didn't care about these people, so it just felt like nihilism for its own sake to give the movie a "dark" ending. Every other complaint I have on offer about this film comes down to those eight deadly words: I don't care what happens to these people. I didn't care when they were hacked up, I didn't care when they were imperiled, I didn't care when they were fed to Oxford. The only people who seemed to have any measure of development were the villains, and they weren't even the focus of the story.
The Bottom Line
It's hard to keep going when the film in question is just so insubstantial. Cool poster, a few nifty ideas, and basic technical competence, but otherwise, completely forgettable and boilerplate. Skip it.
No comments:
Post a Comment