And finally -- finally -- I get this last batch of Popcorn Frights reviews out. Consider this my New Year's resolution. The last day of Popcorn Frights' Wicked Weekend went international with trips to the Netherlands, France, and Iceland, along with one last movie I missed on the third night.
We start with...
Held (2020)
Not rated
Score: 3 out of 5
Held was a movie that had me worried from the moment I saw who was directing it. Travis Cluff and Cliff Lofing did not impress me in the slightest with the first film of theirs that I saw, The Gallows. One of the worst horror movies of the last decade and an exemplar of all the worst trends in 2000s/early '10s horror filmmaking well past their sell-by date, The Gallows was a movie I went to see for curiosity's sake after hearing about how bad it was, and I regretted it immediately. Somehow, not only did they get a sequel made that was by all accounts just as bad, they managed to get hired to direct another film, a psychological horror movie inspired by the feminist sci-fi horror classic The Stepford Wives. And somehow... it doesn't suck. In fact, it's pretty damn good, a fact that I attribute to the fact that they did not write the screenplay this time, because the story here is a lot tighter than it was in The Gallows. Updating its inspiration for decidedly more modern forms of misogyny, Held is a fairly predictable film once you figure out what's happening, but it's a story told well through solid performances and its directors' best tendencies being brought to the forefront.
We start with a married couple, Emma and Henry Barrett, who take a vacation to a remote, high-tech luxury rental house in the wine country to work out the issues in their marriage. No sooner do they arrive than they find themselves assailed by mysterious people who have hacked into the home's security system and, while they slept, inserted microchips into their necks that they can use to give them debilitating electrical shocks if they disobey their orders. And the Barretts' assailants have a particularly unique set of demands. Namely, they force the two to behave like an ultra-traditional, '50s-style married couple, with Henry as the patriarch and Emma as his submissive housewife. As the film goes on, both of them work to figure out a way to escape the torment they're in and exploit the blind spots in their assailants' surveillance... but of course, not everything is as it seems.
The two lead actors here, Jill Awbrey (who also wrote the screenplay) and Bart Johnson, do most of the heavy lifting, and they both give commendable performances. A major theme running through the film concerns how our gender roles hurt both men and women, and we get to see this plainly in how both Emma and Henry suffer under the watchful eye of their mysterious tormenters, neither of them naturally fitting into the roles assigned to them no matter how hard they try. By acting like fairly normal people, the two of them are deemed unworthy, their marriage seen as somehow impure. As noted earlier, this film does draw heavily on The Stepford Wives, and that includes one of the big twists. The messaging of the film post-reveal, about how far some men will go to preserve their privileged place in society, meshes well with that of the earlier parts of the film on a thematic level and taps into a lot of uncomfortable real-world beliefs, but on a storytelling level, the reveal that one character was not who they said they were was not only fairly predictable, but did in hindsight raise questions about their motivations and behavior before the reveal.
I can't really say more about the plot without getting into spoilers, but I will say this: Cluff and Lofing are much better directors than they are writers. Even with The Gallows, I noted that their use of the after-dark high school setting was one of the few bright spots in an otherwise dreadful movie, indicating that they did have some measure of talent, and this film indicates just what they could accomplish when they're leaving the screenwriting duties to somebody with a bit more finesse and grasp on story and character. Again, the high-tech vacation home is one of the most memorable things about this film, highlighting the distinctly tech-bro brand of misogyny that the villains believe in while lending a techno-dystopian atmosphere to the proceedings. The reveal got me hating the bad guys in just the right ways, Cluff and Lofing's direction and Awbrey's writing making me feel as pissed off and betrayed as Emma was. All in all, I really enjoyed myself watching this.
The Bottom Line
While a fairly derivate film and not much more than a "Black Mirror meets Lifetime" potboiler, Held still succeeded thanks to a pair of outstanding lead actors and a director team who seem to have learned a few tricks since last time.
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Next up, it's off to the Netherlands for a violent social media satire.
The Columnist (De kuthoer) (2019)
Not rated
Score: 4 out of 5
The Columnist is a Dutch Falling Down for the age of social media. It's a comedic thriller about somebody one day finally snapping as a result of a constant stream of online harassment, turning the internet against them to track them down and kill them, a plot that is likely to be incredibly cathartic to anybody who's spent more than an hour on Twitter. And just like Falling Down, it's a film that's not afraid to ask uncomfortable questions about both its antiheroine and, by extension, the viewers as they undoubtedly cheer her on, crafting a story tailor-made to appeal to the darkest fantasies of everybody who's ever used Twitter or Facebook only to weave in more than a few moments that make you go "hey, wait a minute..." as it builds up to a hell of an ending. And it's all propelled by Katja Herbers as somebody with whom you both understand full well where she's coming from and eventually just start telling her to stop. Don't worry about the language barrier, you'll understand what this movie has to say perfectly well.
Femke Boot is a controversial columnist for a major newspaper, and between that job description and the fact that she's also a woman, you can just guess what the internet has to say about her. People call her a whore, say that she should be raped and murdered, call her a pedophile over a dumb comment she made in an article years ago, you name it, she's probably read it in her social media feed. And it's driving her to the end of her rope, going on national TV to call social media a public menace before one day finally deciding that she's had enough. When she finds out that one of the people ranting about her online is her next-door neighbor, something just clicks in her, and she arranges for an "accident" while he's working on his house. It feels so good that she decides to keep doing it, trawling her harassers' social media profiles for incriminating info and using that to track them to their houses and murder them, all while keeping her double life a secret from her boyfriend Steven and her teenage daughter Anna who wants to follow in her footsteps as a journalist.
In short, Femke is what happens if somebody like Anita Sarkeesian one day decided to let her inner D-FENS fly. She may be a left-leaning professional woman instead of a conservative blue-collar man, but like him, she is very much wish fulfillment for this film's target audience, people fed up with the inanity of modern life who wish that they could land a punch in return (and portrayed rather more sympathetically, at that). We are shown in graphic detail what drove Femke over the edge; not only does her media career mean that, in this day and age, she has to interact with social media as a fundamental part of her job, but the police refuse to take her seriously when she complains to them about the non-stop harassment she receives, what with them being stuck in the past and still seeing the internet as some novelty that only weirdos can get so worked up about. Herbers does a great job making Femke a compelling figure to watch, somebody with whom you can trace exactly how unbalanced she got as a core component of the film's damning indictment of so much modern internet culture. Even if what she's doing is shown to be wrong, the real bad guy here is the culture that created her.
So far, so Death Wish. But just as Falling Down deconstructed a lot of those '80s vigilante movies about one man battling street crime and showcased the ugly attitudes underneath, so does this film with its fantasy of getting revenge on internet trolls. One thing becomes increasingly clear as the film goes on: for as much as Femke may be taking her vengeance on everybody who ever pissed her off, she's part of the problem. A scene where the young social crusader Anna reads a speech extolling the virtues of freedom of the press, juxtaposed with scenes of her mother terrorizing an old couple for, ultimately, the things that they said and published online, drives this home better than perhaps anything else in the film, and it's not even the climax. While the film pulls no punches in showing how toxic and destructive social media and internet culture can be, it also asks just where the line is when it comes to fighting back against it, and it spells out in no uncertain terms that Femke Boot crossed the event horizon on that front a long time ago. It's a question that raises a lot of troubling issues today: is it possible in the age of social media to maintain a society that's relatively free of censorship, be it top-down from the authorities or from the bottom up by internet mobs? It's a question that nobody seems to have an easy answer for, let alone a confident "yes", and this film is no exception, ending on an ambiguous note that leaves it uncertain if Femke will ever have to answer for her crimes -- or if we're seeing the last moments of her life as a free woman before she goes down in flames.
The Bottom Line
A film with a lot to say and a skill for saying it, The Columnist is a very fun satire of the hellhole of social media and our reactions to it, anchored by a great lead performance from Katja Herbers.
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The third film of the day is not just French, but about as French as it gets.
Anonymous Animals (Les Animaux Anonymes) (2020)
Not rated
Score: 2 out of 5
Anonymous Animals just wasn't my cup of tea. A film with no dialogue, it is more or less an experimental art piece about animals acting like humans and treating us the way we do them, with such imagery as a deer hunting people for sport (pictured above), cattle herding people into pens, and dogs staging brutal deathmatches. It's a film that feels as though it could've been a series of great horror shorts with an animal rights message, but as a feature-length anthology, it just didn't click, and it felt like it was repeating itself as it went on without really tying its various disparate threads together.
There was clearly at least a modicum of effort put into this film. The filmmakers came up with a variety of creative situations to put the characters, both human and animal, into. None of the human characters ever speak, and the animals' "dialogue" is all in the sounds that they make in the wild. Each of its various vignettes builds up interesting characters and a fair bit of tension, be it with an escape from the cattle pens or two men forced to fight to the death for the pleasure of a group of bloodthirsty dog-men, complete with scenes that homage the famous "Dogs Playing Poker" painting as they place their bets. As short films or a more conventional anthology with only a thematic connection between its stories, each of these could've been an interesting story in its own right. The problem is that it's strongly implied that all of these stories take place on the same farm, and the film attempts to connect them, something that it never pulls off particularly well. The result is a thematically empty film with only one real message -- "hey, look what it's like when humans are treated the way we treat animals!" -- that it drives into the ground. The people and animals in the film are never given a chance to grow or be fleshed out in any fashion, the film using them purely as vehicles with which to deliver its message. With no dialogue, there's only so much the film can do to get us invested in them, and the filmmakers lack the finesse to pull off more than a basic survival scenario. What you see is what you get here, and unfortunately, what you see here gets old about halfway through.
The Bottom Line
Anonymous Animals might have been interesting if it had more to say, but there's just not enough here to pad out a feature film without it quickly wearing out its welcome.
And finally, the Wicked Weekend ends in Iceland with a movie that's thirsty in more ways than one...
Thirst (Þorsti) (2019)
Not rated
Score: 3 out of 5
Thirst is the kind of movie where you know what you know what you're getting into right away. It is a flamboyant Icelandic vampire flick with pronounced gay subtext that revels in bloodshed, gore, sex, and style, and while it doesn't quite fire on all cylinders, it was still a very entertaining way to spend an hour and a half. The high points are mostly connected to how lewd and crude it can get as opposed to genuine scares, and while its themes are nothing new if you've seen a modern vampire movie (especially The Lost Boys), it still made its story and characters interesting enough that I wasn't bored. It's not a movie I think I'd go back to, but it offered a fun enough spin on its subject matter to earn my recommendation.
The plot follows Hulda, a young, drug-addicted woman in Reykjavik, Iceland who has been accused of murdering her brother. Needless to say, her life is going to hell in a handbasket... until she meets Hjortur, an old man being beaten in the streets by a pair of crooks, and distracts them long enough for him to take his revenge. As it turns out, Hjortur is no ordinary old man -- he is an ancient, and very gay, vampire who begins an unlikely friendship with her and takes her on a journey of self-discovery, all while remaining one step ahead of both the police investigating the murders and a religious cult that is convinced that evil has come to Iceland.
The first thing you notice with this movie is the bloodshed. Apparently, 200 liters -- over 500 gallons -- of fake blood were used in the production of this film, and if you're here for gore, this film delivers in both quality and quantity. Groin attacks are one of Hjortur's favorite maneuvers, the highlight being when he takes a hot dog and swaps out one type of weiner for another. It's an absurdly violent movie, one that builds up to some seriously entertaining mayhem. For what had to have been a very low-budget movie (checking IMDb, its budget of 10 million Icelandic krona comes out to less than $80,000), it was certainly very visually impressive, offering up a gorehound's delight.
This ultimately proved to make up for the fact that, while it never lost my attention, the rest of the movie ultimately never rose above average. The characters were all just pretty good; none of them were boring, but none of them really excelled. The villains felt like an afterthought, one that existed simply to give Hjortur some bad guys to violently murder, and for all that the advertising makes of Hjortur being specifically a gay vampire, it doesn't really affect the film's themes and subtext all that much outside of a scene where he preys on a leatherman who hits on him at a gay bar. Outside of the bloodshed, the film was at its best when it was focusing on Hjortur and Hulda, who had quite a bit of chemistry together as people brought together by their both living on the fringes of society, Hulda a drug addict and Hjortur a vampire.
The Bottom Line
Thirst isn't a movie I'll watch again, but I had a good time with it. If you catch it on streaming, you like your bloodshed a bit excessive, and you don't mind subtitles, you'll probably have a good time with it too.
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