Monday, August 23, 2021

Popcorn Frights 2021, Day 3: Cryptozoo (2021), Ditched (2021), Superhost (2021), Offseason (2021), Take Back the Night (2021)

The third day of Popcorn Frights turned out to be an excellent one. Five movies all lined up back to back, and every one of them was at least pretty good, with some real standouts among them.

First up, the token non-horror entry that they usually have each year...

Cryptozoo (2021)

Not rated

Score: 4 out of 5

Cryptozoo, a surreal animated feature by Dash Shaw, is Jurassic Park with fantasy creatures, set in the '60s, and absolutely tripping balls. It's a visual treat owing to its unique art style that's unlike anything I've seen before, such that I found myself wondering if I should've maybe tried acid before I watched. The surrealism, however, is largely aesthetic, a garnish on a film with a fairly conventional globe-trotting adventure story of the sort that would likely have cost way more money even in a more traditionally animated feature, let alone in live action. That's not really a knock against the film, though, rooted as it is in a celebration and exploration of '60s idealism that's still reflected today, for better and for worse. (One line in the prologue in which a hippie waxes lyrical about a dream of flower children storming the Capitol and creating an egalitarian utopia made me do a double-take, even knowing that this movie was made before... certain events gave a whole different meaning to that vision.) It's got a cast of great and interesting characters, some extremely creative creature designs, and some thoughtful takes on the limits of how far we're willing to go to bring our dreams to life. It's a definite trip that's not for everyone, but I'm glad I watched it.

Set in 1967, our protagonist is Lauren Gray, who makes a living searching for cryptids, mythological creatures that are the subject of urban legends. She has been fascinated with them ever since her encounter as a little girl growing up on an Okinawan army base with a baku, a Japanese bear-like creature that eats people's nightmares, and now works for an old woman named Joan who is building a preserve outside San Francisco called the Cryptozoo to store these creatures and protect them from those who would do them harm. You see, the criminal underworld also knows about cryptids, and they and their parts fetch a pretty penny on the black market. After a trip to the USSR to meet Gustav, a cryptid who Lauren saved and who has himself gotten involved in the cryptid trade, to rescue a bird-like humanoid from the trafficker Nicholas, Lauren finds out that the baku she encountered as a child is still out there -- and that the US Army has taken an interest in it and cryptids in general, seeing in them a way to win their wars and crush the peace movement. Teaming up with Gustav, Joan, and a gorgon named Phoebe, Lauren journeys across America to find the baku before the military does.

The animation here just barely tries to hew to realism, favoring distorted shapes and impressionism for its characters, creatures, and locales. Lauren is almost comically broad-shouldered, human faces are heavily distorted, colors can go from washed-out to hypersaturated, and the film makes use of all manner of visual editing tricks that would never work in live-action -- and all that's just the real-world humans and objects in the film, which takes things that much further with the cryptids. It reminded me of a mix of sketchbooks, van art, and the protest art of its Vietnam-era setting, all animated in the cutout style of South Park. You will know immediately from the moment you get to the prologue with a pair of hippies in the woods whether this movie's look is for you. It looks like a film that was sketched out by people under the influence of certain psychostimulants, but it all maintains a coherent style and offbeat tone that reflects its values, in which, without spoiling anything, garden-variety distrust of "The Man" that has been so common to countercultural cinema gets turned back around against the heroes as their own mission, while clearly less terrible than that of the villains, also has its own blind spots. Joan may truly believe that she's acting out of genuine compassion for the cryptids under her care, saving them from a modern world that will never stop its advance, but questions can certainly be asked about her benevolence.

Once the film proper picked up after the prologue and revealed that it was a proper three-act adventure film, and not the ninety-minute psychedelic acid trip that one might guess from the visuals, I fully embraced its story. The voice cast is surprisingly strong for a movie like this, led by Lake Bell as Lauren, a classic adventure movie hero motivated by compassion for all life that eventually leads her to chart her own course. Peter Stormare played Gustav as somebody who straddles the divide between humans and cryptids, selling many of his own into slavery or worse, and casting a guy like Stormare is always a great way to make you wonder just whose side he's really on. The aesthetic allowed for a number of action sequences that, once you've embraced the unusual look of the film, are as thrilling as any number of CGI extravaganzas, especially the third act at the Cryptozoo itself that takes heavy inspiration from Jurassic Park but manages to be its own (pardon the pun) beast.

The Bottom Line

Don't know if I'll ever watch it again, but I had a great time watching it once, and if you're a fan of offbeat animation or adventure movies, I highly recommend doing the same.

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Second movie of the day was easily one of my favorites.

Ditched (2021)

Not rated

Score: 4 out of 5

Ditched started out seeming to be one thing, but gradually revealed itself to be something else entirely, and I did not mind one bit. A violent survival thriller set in the Canadian wilderness, this movie is brutal, dark, twisted, and makes for a great exploration of the morality of vigilante justice once it becomes clear what's going on, especially with a standout ending that left me with a lot to think about with regards to certain characters' judgment and sanity. There were some plot holes concerning how the villains were portrayed, but they were something I only really stopped to think about after the movie, and when I was watching, I was too gripped by the film to really notice. It's a spectacular entry in the canon of survival horror.

Our film opens on a prison medical transfer that crashed in the woods at night. The survivors include the paramedics Melina and Aiden, the ambulance driver Jake, the police officers Revesz and Kerr, and two prisoners, Franson and a man credited only as Sideburns. The cops and paramedics quickly realize that their convoy was run off the road, and soon after, they realize who, or what, did so, as a group of big, hairy figures emerge from the woods and start murdering them one by one. With no help for miles, they must hold out and survive the night... but that may not be so easy, especially once it becomes clear that their stalkers are not only human, but have been waiting a very long time to do this.

The reveal that the villains are human comes early enough that it's not really a spoiler, and at any rate it's something that I was able to figure out early enough once I saw that the sasquatch-looking "monsters" on the prowl were wearing hiking boots, which it turned out wasn't just a special effects oversight. The reveal doesn't reduce their menace any less, especially once we learn why they're there. The killers are a group of off-duty cops hired as vigilantes by people who have been victims of crime, angry that the criminal justice system either let off the perpetrators or couldn't give them sufficient punishment (Canada, you see, doesn't have the death penalty). Franson is a serial killer and rapist, and Sideburns raped a pregnant woman and caused her to suffer a miscarriage, but as it turns out, even the people on the side of the law have some dirty secrets in their past that they walked away from. As the situation turns into a standoff, while the villains are clearly presented as having gone way too far, each new revelation about the heroes makes you wonder if you should really be rooting for them as opposed to the stalkers and their aged yet authoritative leader Caine. The conundrum only ratchets up towards the end of the film, when it confronts head-on one of the most unsettling questions in any vigilante fantasy: what happens if you accidentally kill the wrong guy? This is not a movie that leaves you with any easy answers after watching it, its bleak final moments stripping any sense of righteousness out of the villains and leaving a whole lot to think about afterwards.

The road to that destination, of course, is paved in blood. For a low-budget movie filmed during lockdown, this one is brutal, especially in what it can only imply rather than show -- and it shows a lot. The villains are terrifying figures both before and after the reveal that they're human, starting out looking like Bigfoot and ending the film feeling like men on a mission in what are more clearly ghillie suits. I did have questions after the reveal about how, beforehand, the film tried to imply that these men were in fact monsters, particularly with how they are shown to shrug off gunfire in such a way that implied that they were supernaturally tough. Unless they were all wearing bulletproof vests (which is never stated or implied), some of them should've died, especially given that they are presented as more vulnerable to attack later in the film. That said, they still made for a compelling presence, especially once Caine started listing off the heroes' sins, and in some of the kills, you could feel their anger at the people they blamed for destroying their lives. The protagonists, too, were also very well-acted, most notably Melina, played by Marika Sila as somebody who, by the end, is either an unfortunate victim caught in the crossfire of self-righteous "tough on crime" fanatics, or somebody who has so completely given into her own dark side that she doesn't realize she's done anything wrong. (I personally think it's the former, but that's just me.)

Also, the plot description for this film said that Melina is supposed to be indigenous, much like Sila is. If so... whoosh! It completely flew over my head.

The Bottom Line

I do have questions about certain details, but overall, this was a standout survival thriller. Check it out when it hits video.

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Third film of the day ventured into the difficult territory of horror-comedy...

Superhost (2021)

Not rated

Score: 3 out of 5

Superhost was a great example of how a great ending can elevate a movie. Until the end, I was unsure of what felt like a very uneven tone that didn't really know how to balance horror and comedy, with the over-the-top, flamboyantly crazy villain and the film's satire of clickbait-y YouTubers clashing with its attempts at serious horror and suspense. But when that final shot hit the screen and left me with an enormous shit-eating grin on my face, my rating for this shot up a full half-point in one moment, taking this from a tepid recommendation to a wholehearted one. It may wobble in places, but this is still a movie with a lot on its mind, making great use of a minimalist cast and a beautiful setting to tell its story.

Claire and Teddy are the creators of a travel vlog called Superhost in which they review Airbnbs and other rental properties and give their thoughts. With their channel struggling to retain subscribers, they head to a beautiful cabin in rural Colorado owned by a very quirky young woman named Rebecca who is clearly not entirely well in the head. Seeing ratings gold, Claire immediately decides that "crazy Rebecca" is going to be another ratings smash, just like the scathing review they left in the past of a rental that they hated, and goes all-in on the clickbait much to Teddy's chagrin. Teddy may have a point here, because, as that poster up there suggests, Rebecca is not merely the harmlessly offbeat kind of whacko personality. She's spying on them with security cameras in every room, she acts really cagey about various things in the house from the alarm system to the clogged toilet, and she has a habit of showing up at inopportune moments.

The big thing that grated on me when watching Superhost was the tone. Rebecca often felt like a character out of a YouTube comedy sketch, so broadly was she played at either the insistence of her actress Gracie Gilliam or director Brandon Christensen. The film does not wait to suggest to us that Rebecca is crazy and possibly going to kill the protagonists, if the poster above wasn't enough of an indication, and it's at its best when it's fully leaning into her antics and how much she's leaving Teddy and Claire alternatively frustrated and fascinated with her. It's through these interactions that we get the real meat of the film, which isn't so much the actual mayhem going on as it is the satire of influencer culture. Teddy and especially Claire have spent so long putting on an act for the camera that they've started to "become the mask", so to speak, such that genuine emotional interactions are becoming difficult. Teddy's plan to propose to Claire, for instance, almost goes off the rails because of how shallow and image-focused Claire has become, treating the proposal as a way to boost the channel's subscriber count. She acts the same about Rebecca, seeing only a motherlode of views and subscribers instead of an obviously disturbed young woman who is a serious danger to her and Teddy's lives. I would've liked the film to focus more on the comedy of the situation, because when it goes for serious suspense, it slows down and feels like it's going through the motions, derivative of other, better films and standing out more for its sleek HGTV-ready setting than anything. Having seen Christensen's previous film Z at Popcorn Frights two years ago, I was ready to once again say that his horror movies are watchable, but not particular standouts.

And then came the ending. Hoo boy, the ending. The note that this film ended on left a beautiful taste of smug satisfaction in my mouth as all of Teddy and Claire's sins caught up with them, a hilarious "fuck you" to the artificiality of the YouTube culture it's mocking that, without spoiling anything, makes for a hell of a "boy who cried wolf" moment. Just as a ray of hope peeked out to suggest that Rebecca would lose after all, the film follows it up by letting the other shoe drop in such a manner that I started smiling like I normally do only after watching an exceptionally twisted Black Mirror episode. Hot damn, movie. I almost considered bumping my score up to a 4 out of 5 just for that ending, and while ultimately the rest of the film was too bumpy for me to go that far, it still put an enormous shit-eating grin on my face.

The Bottom Line

A pretty good movie that turns great in the last ten minutes, Superhost has a few too many problems nailing the balance between horror and comedy, but the ending alone wins my recommendation.

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Next, we get a little Florida gothic...

Offseason (2021)

Not rated

Score: 3 out of 5

Mickey Keating is the J. J. Abrams of indie horror. From what I've seen of his films from the trailers, they are very well-made, nice to look at, and have solid casts, but feel as though all of the energy went into the production values rather than plot or characters. The trailer for Darling, for instance, went over the top to the point of pretension in how much it was trying to feel like an Alfred Hitchcock movie, while the trailer for Carnage Park, his attempt at a retro-'70s crime/exploitation film, immediately lost me when it became clear, in what was supposed to be a suspenseful scene, that he did not understand how the sound of a gunshot worked. I was never convinced to check out any of his films until now, when this film, a Florida gothic tale called Offseason, was on the bill at Popcorn Frights.

As the credits rolled, my assessment of him as somebody who's great at remixing old horror movie tropes into a nice-looking package wasn't really challenged, because this movie does a better job of capturing the mood of the Silent Hill games than even that film's own rather watchable film adaptation does -- at least, on a purely aesthetic level. The plot is largely an excuse to get to the action, which takes place in a foggy resort town in Florida rather than New England but is otherwise a damn fine recreation of its use of abandoned streets, liminal space, crackling radios, isolation, and shifting geography, all the way up to its heroine having to solve a puzzle to escape towards the end. Keating made great use of the Florida setting at a time when all the tourists have gone home, and Jocelin Donahue felt like she'd walked right out of one of the games as the heroine Marie. She and her husband George came to the remote barrier island the film takes place on because somebody vandalized the grave of her dead mother, a former actress who died insisting that her body never be returned to the island she grew up on but whose final wishes went ignored by the executors of her will. Save for a flashback part of the way in, Marie's relationships with both George (who's mostly gone halfway in) and her mother are not readily built upon, the focus being mainly on her fight for survival on an island where it grows increasingly clear that someone, or something, wants her dead, and it has the townsfolk on its side.

It's best not to think too hard about the story here. Like the gunshot in the trailer for Carnage Park, I rolled my eyes when I heard it said, multiple times, that the end of summer marks the end of the tourist season. This may be true up north where they have seasons, but in Florida, summer's end is when the tourists and snowbirds start pouring south to one of the few places in America where it's warm twelve months a year. Given how much of this film's tone and atmosphere rests on its Florida beach town setting, one would think that the most basic research would have caught this, especially given that Keating grew up in Florida and should've known better. The setting could've easily been changed to "the end of winter" without affecting the rest of the movie in any way. This speaks to the broader problem of a film that's thematically empty despite everything going on around it. While Donahue gives a capable performance, Marie is a cipher of a character whose backstory never really impacted the plot all that much. The Silent Hill games whose influence is apparent here usually had a lot more going on behind the scares, whether it was the apocalyptic machinations of a religious cult in the series' overarching storyline or more personal demons that the characters were confronting, and while there is something demonic going on here, it felt more like set dressing than anything. Beneath the surface, it felt like there was a message here about both the allure of small towns and how people struggle to escape them, but it's never handled with much real depth.

The Bottom Line

While I liked it less the more I had time to process it, if you're interested in a movie that captures the feel of Silent Hill in live-action, you can do a lot worse than this. (For instance, Silent Hill: Revelation.)

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And to close off the night, we get a bit of righteous fire.

Take Back the Night (2021)

Not rated

Score: 3 out of 5

From its very title on down, Take Back the Night ain't subtle. It's a monster movie in which the monster is a metaphor for rape as plain as day, the fact that it assaults the main character in a dark alley at night and leaves her clothes in tatters being just the start. As the film progresses, the horror comes not so much from the actual monster, but from the heroine's despair at a system that isn't designed to take threats like this seriously, one where the police are as much an obstacle to justice as anything else despite all the evidence that our heroine isn't the only victim, or even the first. It's a film that's designed not just to get you scared, but to get you mad, and while it ultimately ends on a bit too much of an anticlimax for my taste and a key supporting character with a lot of issues in the writing department, it still did the job it set out to do thanks to both creative use of its low budget and a standout lead performance from Emma Fitzpatrick.

Our protagonist Jane is an artist and Instagram influencer who is, by all appearances, far from the "perfect victim". She gets drunk and high at a party while wearing a short dress, she has sex in the bathroom with a guy who turns out to be married, her career isn't the kind of thing that "respectable" people take seriously to begin with, and she has a history of mental health problems. So when she gets attacked by a shadow monster while trying to get home, she finds herself without much in the way of help. The detective handling her case is sympathetic to her plight but skeptical of her claims, her social media following is deeply polarized and wondering if she made it up for attention, and an interview on TV about her assault turns out to be an ambush where the host ruthlessly grills her. Jane finds herself isolated and alone without even her closest friends to call on. And with the monster still out there and regularly stalking her, Jane has no choice but to take action into her own hands.

The lore for the monster was unique, as was the creature design, a vaguely humanoid figure covered in eyes, flies, and icky black smoke that looked unmistakably, well, monstrous. It was a monster that the film couldn't readily use and often showed only in quick cuts, the reasons for why becoming apparent with the moments of obvious CGI in the third act when the action really gets going, but when the film did show it, it was not a monster to take lightly. I understood immediately why it terrified Jane, thanks to director Gia Elliot using all the classic monster movie tricks to build up its presence even in the many instances where it's just out of frame. That, however, was not the true source of the horror here. That is the all-too-human resistance that Jane faces as she tries to tell her story. Getting the authorities to investigate sexual assault is already like pulling teeth, as evidenced by the backlog of thousands of rape kits at police departments across the country that are only recently being cleared thanks to public pressure, and Jane's story adds the classic horror trope of skepticism of the supernatural to the affair, compounding the issue. Slowly but surely, Jane's support network of her sister, the police, the media, and her fanbase all turn against her as the system fails her, leaving her with nobody to turn to except an online community of women who claim to have experienced similar attacks -- many of whom are now either on the run or disappeared. The horror in this film isn't just that a monster is coming to kill you, it's that nobody is coming to save you because they don't take you seriously. Emma Fitzpatrick (who also co-wrote the film with Elliot) does a fantastic job bringing Jane to life, a rather flawed but still sympathetic young woman who is slowly pushed to the boiling point as she grows increasingly resigned to defeat in the face of a monster.

The third act was where the film started to lose me plot-wise, even as it picked up in terms of monster movie thrills. Without spoiling anything, the characterization of the detective left me scratching my head, largely due to a twist in her backstory that made her skepticism of Jane for most of the movie seem nonsensical. It felt like a twist for its own sake that should've been introduced early on and then used to lend texture to her actions, while at the same time making her seem more supportive of Jane and frustrated with a police department that doesn't really seem to care, putting on a show of being a jerk for the sake of her superiors. Watching the film, I got the feeling that the detective was just being an asshole to Jane, an attitude that made little sense given what we later learn about her. Likewise, the film ended on an ambiguous note that left me wanting more -- as in, I was wishing that the film kept going afterwards and wrapped up the many loose ends it left hanging, not least of all the fact that Jane's ordeal isn't over yet. While it does end on a hopeful note that suggests a #MeToo-meets-Buffy movement of female monster hunters rising up to take back the night, it felt like the production's eyes were bigger than its belly budget-wise, forcing them to end on a hook for a sequel. Given how much I enjoyed the monster action here, I'd imagine that it'd be a hell of a sequel, but overall, it felt like it was building up to something bigger than it ultimately delivered.

The Bottom Line

While it couldn't quite outrun its budget limitations, Take Back the Night is still a little gem of a movie filled with fire in its belly. Check it out.

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