Finally finishing up these old reviews in time for Spooky Season. The last two movies of Popcorn Frights were a pretty good one (and another one of the occasional non-horror entries in the fest) and, unfortunately, a pretty bad one as well.
The Beta Test (2021)
Not rated
Score: 3 out of 5
A satire of how lecherous men have responded to the #MeToo movement, The Beta Test is, at its core, about the kind of service you'd logically expect to flourish in this day and age: no-strings-attached, truly anonymous adultery where privacy and secrecy are guaranteed, an Eyes Wide Shut fantasy designed to ensure that nobody finds out about your sexcapades. It started strong, and while it seemed to lose the plot by the end, I liked both the darkly comic tone of the film and the leading man Jim Cummings, who was just the right balance of douchey and humanized to make his character work. It was a film that constantly found ways to put a smug smile on my face as its protagonist fell into a growing web of paranoia that, having cheated on his fiancé as they were planning their wedding, is entirely of his own making, and yet you can't feel too bad for him personally, not when the camera frequently pulls back to reveal that the world he inhabits is even scummier than he is. I thought it was just pretty good as a sendup of popular male attitudes about sex, though I imagine others getting a lot more out of it than I did.
The film takes place in Hollywood a few years after the Harvey Weinstein scandal, in a world where it's clear nobody's learned a damn thing from his crimes and what happened to him, only that they need to learn how to cover their tracks better. Our protagonist Jordan is an agent very much in the Ari Gold from Entourage mold, a douche whose coworkers are also douches. He's a guy who wears teeth-whitening strips to get that perfect Hollywood smile, but only whitens the front teeth while his molars are filthy and probably full of cavities. One day, he gets a card in the mail inviting him to a totally private sexual encounter with an "admirer" in a hotel, and despite having a loving fiancé in Caroline, Jordan, being the kind of guy who thinks with his dick, goes there and does the dirty with a beautiful woman while they're both blindfolded. When he tells his friend about it, however, the reaction he gets of "dude, why the fuck would you do something like that in this cultural climate?" causes Jordan to grow paranoid about the whole affair: who invited him, who he slept with, who's running the whole thing, what their motives are, and whether the people behind it might be spying on his personal data to figure that he's the kind of guy who would do that. And as we see over the course of the film, the wives of powerful men, one of whom is among Jordan's clients, have a knack for finding out that their husbands were involved in this thing, and reacting violently.
The ultimate answer that the film provided for what was happening here felt rather anticlimactic, falling back on lazy hacker movie tropes while my mind was coming up with some more interesting ideas, but the journey to getting there was a key part of the fun. Cummings was central to the film as not only Jordan but also as its writer and director, and much of the film is a character study of an unlikable but not totally irredeemable asshole who gets in way over his head and lets his worst impulses consume him. Jordan is high-strung, the kind of guy who both gives rousing inspirational speeches to his coworkers and who you imagine would be easily swayed by them, the relentless go-getter who wants to provide for himself and his love but is more than happy to bulldoze others to achieve that dream of an upper-middle-class family in the Hills, and doesn't seem to realize until it's too late that he's driving that bulldozer headlong towards a cliff's edge. The film isn't so much about the mysterious figures behind Jordan's encounter as it is about him destroying himself in a way that only he can. What's more, he's a model for the kind of figure that men are constantly told represents the pinnacle of modern male success, a man who looks like he stepped right off the cover of a pickup artist's handbook to becoming an "alpha" and may well know that book front to back himself. Jordan is any number of successful men who manage to get their peers and society at large to turn a blind eye to their bad behavior, only to wake up in a world where the old tricks no longer seem to work like they used to, and start panicking.
The Bottom Line
A dark yet fun satire of bad male behavior, elevated by a great lead performance that outweighs its fairly forgettable mystery plot, The Beta Test is a timely sendup that I recommend.
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The final film of this year's Popcorn Frights was unfortunately one of the worst. It's a shame, because the filmmakers were local, they came out to the theater to support it, and they clearly had every intention of making a good movie, and yet...
The Welder (2021)
Not rated
Score: 2 out of 5
I can handle message movies that aren't perfect. I can handle movies with messages that feel tacked on, provided the rest of the movie measures up. I can tackle ham-fisted messages, provided that it feels like the filmmakers were sincere in delivering that message, don't feel like they're just pandering, and aren't saying something grotesquely offensive. It's why I enjoy the sequels to The Purge, and why I didn't hate the 2019 remake of Black Christmas as much as some other people did.
But I will draw the line at delivering a message so incompetently that the film accidentally tells viewers the opposite of what the filmmakers were trying to say. Which brings us to The Welder, the latest in a line of recent socially-conscious horror movies that Get Out popularized in 2017. Knowing the track record of both Hollywood and indie horror filmmakers when it came to chasing trends (having seen teen slashers, torture porn, zombie movies, found footage, and supernatural horror come and go within my lifetime), I knew that Get Out was going to produce at least one film that absolutely stepped in it as it tried to replicate Jordan Peele's blood-soaked satire of racism, and man, The Welder steps in it up to its knees. I'm dumbfounded as to how otherwise competent filmmakers, who did in fact turn in some pretty decent scares otherwise, managed to make a film like this and then try to market it as anti-racist. It was clear what they were trying to say here, but the way they said it was an absolute clusterfuck.
Our protagonists Roe and Eliza are an interracial couple, Roe being a Black man and Eliza being Latina, living in Miami who decide to take a weekend getaway at a rental out in the sticks. The owner of the rental, a white farmer and former doctor named William Godwin, may at first look like a redneck stereotype, but is in fact quite welcoming to Roe and Eliza, albeit in a manner that would raise red flags for anybody who's seen Get Out. He is aggressively, outspokenly anti-racist, owing to his own experience of having loved a Black woman who was murdered by police. He hates racism so much, in fact, that it has led him to engage in grisly experiments straight out of Frankenstein in the name of purging this great evil from the land. And Roe and Eliza both have a role to play in his plan -- namely, as his latest test subjects.
The nature of Godwin's plan got a gigantic "yikes" from me almost from the moment it was spelled out. Simply put, he wants to sew together the body parts of people from different races in order to create a being that will be above petty racial categories. There are some plot twists late in the game that flesh out his motives a bit more, but they do little to help with the fact that the character feels like he was created by a white supremacist as a diatribe against miscegenation, portraying the man who supports it as a villainous mad scientist and the products of his experiments in race-mixing as ghoulish, rotting, barely human monsters who would be better off being put down for their own good and the greater good as a whole. The goal of this film was clearly to criticize racism, what with the heroes being an interracial couple who are given a positive portrayal, and I can think of few worse ways to do that than to craft a villain whose deeds and words look like a segregationist's worst nightmare made flesh.
The awful writing didn't stop there. The protagonists are flat, lacking the texture of Chris and Rose from Get Out, their obvious inspirations. Eliza in particular is given a backstory as a veteran Army medic who was raped during her time in the military, a subplot that the film seems to think is a lot more important than it actually is, framing her fight for survival in the third act as her overcoming her past trauma in a way that did not feel earned given how tacked-on that story felt. In practical terms, the only impact it had on the film is that it created an excuse for Eliza to have a gun on her towards the end. The finale also had Eliza, for some reason, engaging in borderline-villainous behavior herself that didn't seem particularly well foreshadowed, and felt like it was thrown in just to give a "morally gray" twist ending to the film.
The fundamentals, fortunately, were good enough to keep me from really hating this. The acting was good all around, especially from Camila Rodríguez as Eliza (who, in the Q&A after the movie, said that she was a nurse as her day job, not exclusively an actress). Director David Liz made great use of a setting that's grown quite recognizable to me thanks to all the science classes I've taken that involved trips into the Everglades, the farm where most of the film takes place filled with decay and rust as nature slowly takes the land back. And for all the issue I took with the villain and his monsters, I will say that the actual monster makeup and effects were impressive for what was undoubtedly a very low-budget feature film, crafting an ugly-looking monster that felt like it was in as much pain as it looked like. The nature of Godwin's plan is set up well, if in a rather boilerplate fashion, such that I found myself fearing for Eliza and Roe as they searched the grounds, waiting for Godwin to find a way to ensnare them. I found myself wishing that David Liz's talents behind the camera weren't wasted on such questionable writing, because this film has a lot of good moments.
The Bottom Line
Unfortunately, when your film's central attempt at an anti-racist message is shot so through with holes and iffy writing that it starts to look like something Richard Spencer would unironically embrace, I'm just gonna shake my head and say "skip this".
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