Some Halloween leftovers: a couple of weeks ago, I got the opportunity to travel to Telluride, Colorado and take in the last day of the Telluride Horror Show, a horror film festival held every year in October. What, just because I couldn't make Popcorn Frights doesn't mean I'm totally bereft of local horror festivals!
First up, a movie that grabbed my attention from the premise alone...
The Offering (2022)
Not rated
I’m a sucker
for Jewish horror movies. I’m not Jewish, but a good chunk of my extended
family is through adoption and marriage, as were many of my neighbors and
classmates, and so I grew up in close contact with the faith throughout my
childhood, the kid who celebrated both Christmas and Hanukkah. As such,
my interest is automatically piqued when I see a supernatural horror film base
its scares in the mythology and lore of Judaism, especially its more esoteric
side, instead of ripping off The Exorcist for the thousandth time. Such
films are rare, but when they do show up, there’s usually just something so
bleak in how they portray their demons and spirits. Also, working with a
different set of folklore seems to give filmmakers license to get a bit more
original with their scares. And while The Vigil is still, for me, the
gold standard for this little subgenre of supernatural horror flicks, I did
still enjoy The Offering. It was flabby in the middle, but it had a
great cast and atmosphere to spare, and the final act ended it on a high note.
Set in the
ultra-Orthodox community of Borough Park, Brooklyn, the main characters Arthur
and Claire are a young couple, the former a man who was raised in the faith but
grew up to be disillusioned with it and the latter his pregnant non-Jewish
wife. Arthur is specifically returning to his father’s funeral home because, as
it turns out, he and his wife are hard up for cash, and are planning on
convincing him to sign it over so that Arthur can sell it – not that he’d ever
let his father know up front, of course. Recently, however, the funeral home
has taken in the body of a professor who, late in his life, became a recluse
after his wife passed away, and turned to the occult in his search for a way to
bring her back, which succeeded only in inviting a demon into his life that he
was only able to seal away through a ritual that killed him. Said demon,
trapped but not completely powerless, scares Arthur into accidentally breaking
the seal holding it back. What’s more, it turns out that this demon is an eater
of children, and guess what Claire’s got cooking in the oven...
Perhaps my
biggest problem with this film, one that was most pronounced in the second act,
was that it didn’t do a really good job tying Arthur’s personal drama to the
main supernatural horror story. Looking over the film, there was a story
waiting to be told about how Arthur’s disrespect for the traditions of his
family and culture become the source of so many of his problems with the demon
that’s after his wife and their unborn child, yet while his drama did flesh
him, his father, and his wife out as characters and was fairly compelling on
its own, there wasn’t much connective tissue between it and the demon. It
seemed to exist mainly for the sake of plot contrivance, to provide a reason
why Arthur and his father don’t trust each other and thus leaving them and the
other characters isolated in their battle against the demon. As a result, the
middle of the film tended to drag, with both the horror and the drama
compelling on their own but not really going together well, leaving the end
product feeling like it was spinning its wheels.
(During the
Q&A session with director Oliver Park afterwards, Park stated that multiple
scenes were cut for time, with him explicitly citing one that sets up the
gut-punch twist at the end. I wonder if some character development in the
middle of the film, more clearly establishing Arthur as being handed a karmic
beatdown for his dismissal of Jewish tradition, was also cut here.)
Fortunately,
when it came to the horror, this film was in full form. The demon itself was a
mean bastard with a freaky goat’s head, done largely with practical effects,
and some of the backstory behind it and the occult ritual that summoned it was
pretty messed up. While the scares aren’t anything you haven’t seen before,
Park still handled them with flair and panache. The cast was excellent all
around, and the funeral home where most of the film takes place was rich with
atmosphere, a setting that made me feel like I was back at my relatives’ places
on East 63rd Street or Rockaway Beach. And while I stated my
problems with the film’s story earlier, I still thought that Arthur made for a
great protagonist, a flawed hero with ulterior motives who nonetheless doesn’t
deserve what he’s being subjected to.
The Bottom Line
The Offering is a solid supernatural horror film
with a unique hook and great production values, even if the story lets it down
and it feels like it took a few too many cuts in the editing room. Check it out
when it hits home video and VOD.
V/H/S/99 (2022)
Not rated
Score: 4 out of 5
Of the four
(out of five) entries in the V/H/S series of found-footage anthology
films that I’ve seen, this is probably my second-favorite. While it doesn’t hit
the heights of the second film, the series’ finest hour in my book, it avoids
the lows of the first and the flaws that held the fourth back from greatness.
(Of course, I haven’t seen the third, V/H/S: Viral, but by all accounts,
I’m not missing much.) It treats the wraparound (always the weakest part of
these films) as an afterthought, its segments are either genuinely good or at
least fun trash, it has a running theme of complete assholes getting what they
deserve courtesy of various nightmare creatures, and it serves up plenty of
nostalgic late ‘90s period goodness in everything from its numerous pop culture
references to various segments being built around riot grrrl punk rock, CKY/Jackass
stunt videos, Nickelodeon kids’ game shows, late ‘90s sex comedies, and Y2K.
It’s an outrageous and extremely watchable piece of pop horror that’s pretty
shallow, but has no pretensions about being anything more than what it is.
The film
gets going immediately with its first segment, "Shredding" by Maggie Levin, which falls squarely into the
“fun trash” category. It follows a skatepunk crew called R.A.C.K. after its
four members Rachel, Anker, Chris, and Kaleb, who decide to go explore the
ruins of a local artist colony where an all-female punk band called Bitchcat
died after a fire broke out at a concert and they got trampled by their
panicking fans. Needless to say, they learn a hard lesson in disrespecting the
dead. I had a blast watching this segment, dripping as it was in punk style and
atmosphere that felt authentic rather than like a pose, a style that extended
beyond just the protagonists once the ghost of Bitchcat’s lead singer made her
presence known in a wonderfully bratty manner that felt like a line lifted
straight off a Bikini Kill album. This one was jam-packed with blood, guts, and
in-your-face attitude, and it got the party started on the right foot. It’s shallow and it's not
gonna win any awards, but I can't help but admit that I was entertained.
The film
slowed down a bit with the second segment, "Suicide Bid" by Johannes Roberts, in which a sorority pledge at Texas
Christian University is hazed by sorority sisters who invoke the legend of a
pledge who died years ago – a legend that turns out to have more than a grain
of truth to it. This was probably the simplest and most conventional story in
the film, and also probably the best segment in the film. It was a well-told
urban legend ghost story with some good actors, a freaky setup of being buried
alive that evoked a lot of classic urban legends, and a creepy finale that
nonetheless managed to make me smile once the victim got the last laugh. The
segment that followed, "Ozzy's Dungeon" by the musician Flying Lotus, is about a young contestant on the titular program, a kids’ game show in the
vein of Double Dare or Legends of the Hidden Temple. She gets
badly injured on set and left crippled for life, causing her family takes revenge on the show’s callous
host years later. For most of its length, it was a very fun mix of torture porn, ‘90s Nickelodeon nostalgia, and
Steven Ogg (the voice of Trevor from Grand Theft Auto V) playing a
sleazy-as-hell version of Mark Summers, and overall, it was good until it
wasn’t. The big problem I had with it was the ending, which suddenly took a
turn into a completely different genre of horror and left me wondering “what
the hell just happened?”, even if it did close on some very cool special effects.
(It’s implied that the daughter was finally taking her revenge on everyone for
the shit they put her through, but it took a while to really figure that out.)
The fourth
segment, Tyler MacIntyre's "The Gawkers", was a mix of American Pie and, without spoiling anything, an
ancient Greek legend (let’s just say, I can see a lot of “Percy Jackson
all grown up” jokes being made once the twist comes around) in which a group of
horny teenagers trying to catch a glimpse of the girl next door naked get more
than they bargained for. The kids in this were all total assholes, I spent the
entire segment waiting for them to get their comeuppance, and the end result
did not disappoint, especially once it became clear what the creature in this one actually was. Throw on a whole lot of on-the-nose late ‘90s teen culture
references, right down to the plot about setting up a webcam, and you have another
piece of fun trash. Finally, the movie ends with Vanessa and Joseph Winter's “To Hell and Back”, the big
Y2K segment and the one that the poster promised. Here, a ritual to imbue a
woman with a demon at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve 1999 goes wrong,
causing the cameraman and his buddy to get sent to Hell. Between the great
special effects, the horror-comedy tone that reminded me of This Is the End
as two very Seth Rogen-esque guys journey through the fires of Hell, and the
presence of Mabel, a creepy but generally friendly witch played by Melanie Stone who serves as one of
the best characters this series has ever produced, this was probably my
favorite segment of the movie even if I wouldn’t quite call it the best,
and it ended things on a high note, especially with the end-credits stinger.
The Bottom Line
V/H/S/99 was all killer, no filler. Five
segments that ranged from pretty good to outright great, with no terrible
wraparound to hold it back like the other films, this was both a dumb but fun
blast of ‘90s nostalgia and a crowd-pleasing horror anthology. It’s almost a
shame that most people are gonna be streaming this on Shudder, because the
crowd I saw it with, myself included, had a blast.
MABEL! MABEL! MABEL!
Christmas Bloody Christmas (2022)
Not rated
Score: 3 out of 5
Christmas
Bloody Christmas is
an action/horror flick from Joe Begos, the maker of Bliss and VFW,
about a robotic department store Santa that goes haywire and starts killing
people in a holiday riff on The Terminator.
I could end
this review right here and say that what you think of that plot summary will
determine your opinion on this movie, and I’d probably be 90% correct. There’s
not a lot to this movie beyond the things that I’ve come to expect from Begos’
movies: a lot of gleefully gratuitous violence, heroes who are way more
interesting, fleshed-out, and lived-in than they should be, a distinctly
punk-rock atmosphere that goes deeper than just set dressing, and lots of love
for the genre. He makes the kinds of movies that I’d imagine my brother
directing if he decided to get into filmmaking. Unfortunately, it also has
Begos’ shaky grasp on shooting action scenes, using copious bloodshed and
explosions to cover for a lack of finesse behind the camera, and despite its
short length, it can get repetitive towards the end, feeling as though it had
bigger ideas than its budget was able to meet. Regardless, in the pantheon of
Christmas horror, this is one of the better ones, and it’s a hell of a ride for
most of its length.
The main
characters are what consistently held my attention here. The protagonists are the record store owner Tori and her employee Robbie, a close friend and
on-and-off boyfriend of hers, and right from the get-go, I wanted to see them
succeed. The conversations they and their friends have felt authentic, the kind
of shooting the shit about movies and music that people tend to do when they’re
hanging out at work or at home. It was meta, but it didn’t feel like it was
just for the sake of being meta, as most of it happens before it becomes
apparent to them that there’s a killer robot Santa on the loose. Once the chips
are down, the characters cut the snark and start focusing mainly on fighting
for their lives.
It did a lot
to get me to like these people, especially the heroine, whose actress Riley Dandy reminded
me of Samara Weaving not just through her appearance but also in her acting
chops. When it’s down to her vs. RoboSanta in the third act, her mounting
frustration, despair, and anger that this thing just won’t die and that
nobody will listen to her felt authentic, like how you’d imagine an ordinary
person put in her position would react. The Santa itself was also gnarly, a
killing machine clearly inspired by the T-800 brought to life by both a great
performance from its actor/stuntman Abraham Benrubi and some cool special effects as it takes a
growing amount of damage from everything the characters throw at it. The fact
that it’s in a Santa suit and the classic white beard may look cute at first,
but once it gets down to business, you will learn that Santa can fuck you up,
especially with some of the brutal kills it inflicts with everything from an
axe to a shotgun.
That
brutality was really the thing that propelled this film’s action scenes,
because unfortunately, the action here was otherwise unimpressive. There was a
lot of gore and explosions once the movie got rolling, but the effects did more
to impress than the camerawork, which was mostly unspectacular at best and
unfortunately reminded me of a lot of bad recent action flicks. Between this
and VFW, this has been a recurring problem with Begos’ movies, that he’s
great at establishing mood but isn’t that great at shooting action scenes. I’d
love to see him go back to the style of Bliss. Also, the last ten
minutes simply dragged. I get that this whole movie was one big homage to The
Terminator, and the climactic battle where the villain has to have
everything and the kitchen sink thrown at it before it finally goes down is
part of that, but after a certain point, it simply got repetitive. Given that,
before then, a major sequence where RoboSanta kills a bunch of police officers
and paramedics happens entirely off-screen, I suspect that this scene was done
this way due to budget limitations, padding the length after they had to cut a
major action set piece because they didn’t have the money to film it.
The Bottom Line
Christmas Bloody Christmas is exactly the kind of gritty,
grisly low-budget action/horror flick that the title, the director, and the
marketing suggest, for better and for worse. I can certainly do worse when it
comes to Christmas horror, and overall, I recommend it.
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