Dark Places

Year 11, Day 291 - 10/18/19 - Movie #3,387

BEFORE: I'm totally stressed out because I'm getting on a plane to Las Vegas in under 24 hours, I haven't packed a thing yet, I still have to finish out one more work-day, and since our older cat is sick and shows little interest in eating, we don't know if he'll eat when the cat-sitter comes to feed him, so really, we don't know what condition he'll be in when we get back.  Hopefully he'll eat enough to sustain himself, but there are no guarantees in life.

Tye Sheridan carries over from "Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse", and you may notice something about that film, this one, and the next three or four - they all feature actors from the "X-Men" franchise.  This is why I moved my review of "Dark Phoenix" from June to October, because I noticed that I had so many horror films on my list with those actors, which turned "Dark Phoenix" into something of a hub, like "Avengers: Endgame" was.  I had about 47 different ways to link to "Endgame", I just had to choose the ones that worked out best for my chain, because in the end I can only have two maximum, one intro and one outro.  Same goes for "Dark Phoenix", which I'll review next week, but I was able to up-end the chain and re-shuffle the films at the last minute, largely because I knew I could use that film as a nexus point.  I had five horror films that could connect to it, again, I just had to pick the best two.

THE PLOT: Libby Day was only eight years old when her family was brutally murdered in their rural Kansas farmhouse.  Almost thirty years later, she reluctantly agrees to revisit the crime and uncovers the wrenching truths that led up to that tragic night.

AFTER: While this isn't exactly a horror film per se, it is a murder mystery - I'll admit that including this film in the October chain made a lot more sense while I had a few other films about serial killers in the planned line-up, like "The Killer Inside Me" and "The House that Jack Built" - plus I just dubbed "Frailty" to DVD, I've never seen that one either.  But I do have a Netflix film about Ted Bundy scheduled for early November, so let's just think of this as a precursor to that one.  After two films that were full of jump-scares every couple of minutes or so, honestly this is kind of what I needed right now, just a simple, quiet film about a man who might have murdered his whole family when he was a teenager.

His lone surviving sister is convinced he's guilty - after all, he's never filed for an appeal, and isn't that what innocent people do?  But the donation fund that was established shortly after the tragedy is nearly used up, and she gets contacted by a group of murder fans/crime solvers that wants to pay her for an appearance, and then her time for the next two weeks as they review her brother's case.  This is a hot new trend, with recent podcasts focusing on incarcerated people who might be innocent, bringing their cases to public attention in hopes of uncovering the truth and/or securing parole for inmates whose convictions might be in need of overturning.

Unfortunately, this is another one of those films that toggles between the present and the past, as ever-so-slowly more information is divulged about what went down back in 1985.  The initial questions from the "True Crime" club are quite important, they ask her about key figures in the case, which of course she doesn't really remember, because she was EIGHT at the time.  When you're 8 years old, you probably don't pay much attention to the trouble that your older teen brother is getting into, or who he's hanging out with, what drugs he might be taking, or what Satanic death-metal music he may be listening to.  At the time, the prosecution drew a portrait of her Brother Ben, and if you can recall the zeitgeist of the mid-1980's, a certain group of people in the U.S. were focused on the link between heavy metal music and Satan worship, then tying that to drugs, violence and even a predilection for murder.  It's not too hard to imagine someone at that time getting convicted based on their musical preferences.  Bands like Slayer, Judas Priest and Twisted Sister were scaring the crap out of the norms.

As Libby digs into the case, there's no shortage of available suspects - their wayward father, who owed a lot of money to a bookie, or Ben's pregnant girlfriend, who hated his sisters for spreading true rumors about her, or even the parents of several young girls who accused Ben of molesting them.  Yeah, we're gonna have to find a way to narrow down this field...  It's just a damn shame that the film couldn't do a better job of avoiding the telegraphing of the twist and reveal.  There's an art to the building up of suspense, but you wouldn't know it from watching this.  Bear in mind this came from the same author as "Gone Girl", and if you've seen that film, then you may know why I'm bringing that up at this point in time.

It's too bad that, as often happens with this sort of film, when you look back on what you knew at the beginning with the knowledge that you get at the end, the beginning wasn't really explained all that well, and in fact makes even less sense than it did when you knew nothing about it.  Ya follow?

And with that, I'm off to Vegas tomorrow morning, so no reviews for over a week, not until next Sunday at least.  If I'm bored late at night and I need to watch something, there are plenty of comedy specials in my Netflix queue - just gotta keep that phone charged.

Also starring Charlize Theron (last seen in "Tully"), Christina Hendricks (last heard in "Toy Story 4"), Nicholas Hoult (last seen in "The Favourite"), Andrea Roth, Chloe Grace Moretz (last seen in "Movie 43"), Corey Stoll (last seen in "First Man"), Sean Bridgers (last seen in "The Magnificent Seven"), Drea De Matteo (last seen in "New York, I Love You"), Addy Miller, Shannon Kook, Sterling Jerins (last seen in "Paterson"), Richard Gunn, Dan Hewitt Owens (last seen in "Our Brand Is Crisis"), Glenn Morshower (last seen in "The Core"), Jennifer Pierce Mathus, Natalie Precht, Madison McGuire, Lori Z. Cordova, Denise Williamson (last seen in "The D Train"), Jeff Chase (last seen in "The Rundown").

RATING: 4 out of 10 prison visits

Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse

Year 11, Day 290 - 10/17/19 - Movie 3,386

BEFORE: I'm already 2/3 of the way through October, that's 14 films down and just 7 to go. I'm losing a week's worth of movie-watching by going on vacation, but that's OK, it's always been part of the plan.  Pretty great the way it worked out, because I don't think I could have linked together more than 21 films (OK, 19 really) on the horror theme at this point.

David Koechner carries over from "Krampus".  Another case where I found an actor who's probably only been in two horror films, and I'm going to exploit that little fact.

THE PLOT: Three scouts, on the eve of their last camp-out, discover the true meaning of friendship when they attempt to save their town from a zombie outbreak.

AFTER: I'm guessing this is a pretty standard sort of zombie movie - naturally, I don't watch a lot of these, and the last one I watched also had a lot of British people having tea parties and fancy balls, so really, there's not much of a frame of reference. But can we come to some agreement on how zombies work, please?  One film says that people bitten by zombies won't become full zombies themselves until they eat human brains, and the next film says that the process is nearly instantaneous.  One film says people lose their human speech and memories when they turn to zombies, but in this film a zombie ends up singing along with a Britney Spears song - so those memories are still in there somewhere, WTF?

Of course, probably none of this is meant to be taken seriously.  And the threats in this film are barely even scary, I mean, sure, the zombies will kill and eat you, but (with a couple of exceptions) most of them move so slowly, that means with enough ammo you could just stand your ground and take all of the head-shots you need.  But of course, every gun is bound to run out of ammo at SOME point, so that's when you've got to head for the hills - or at least to the nearest True Value store (nice product placement!) where you can pick up some nail-guns, a weed-whacker, some jerry-rigged flamethrowers, etc.

I'm sorry, but this film just seems so basic, compared to what I've seen lately, both within my horror chain and outside of it.  I've seen a giant wolf battling a giant silverback gorilla, I've seen a giant horned Santa Claus monster jumping from house to house to deliver demonic toys, and before that, I watched an octopus puppet milking a cow puppet in a porn video.  You want to talk about scary?  Jesus, plain old zombies barely even move the needle any more on the weird-o-meter.  Once the scouts finally figure out what's going on and arm themselves, it's just a simple takedown montage, really.

Now, if they wanted to make zombies REALLY scary, someone should make a movie about zombie hipsters - "They're here to eat your brain...and gentrify your neighborhood!  Roaming the streets with their guitar cases, wandering aimlessly looking for their next gig.  They'll cover you with flyers and then spread your brain on their avocado toast!  These hipster zombies are all on the paleo diet - which means they'll eat you alive!"  Ooof, I just got the chills.  That's a movie that would keep me up nights.

Instead, this film just went for really cheap jokes, like having one scout attacked while he's on the toilet, or making fun of the scout master, who's really into Dolly Parton for some reason.  Those are just two of a few dozen jokes that don't land, or asides that don't really GO anywhere.  Ha, ha, the local strip club is called "Lawrence of A-labia", that's barely funny, it's like a half a joke.  Give me a break.

Some of the actors also look too old to be in high-school, I checked, a couple of the stars were 22 or  23 when this was released - one of the high-school girls looked at least 35.  (Not the one who played the stripper, I mean the brunette in the car near the beginning).

Sorry, I already realized I didn't like the rom-zom, but it turns out that the zom-com this week was even worse.

Also starring Tye Sheridan (last seen in "The Stanford Prison Experiment"), Logan Miller (ditto), Joey Morgan, Sarah Dumont (last seen in "Don Jon"), Halston Sage (last seen in "Goosebumps"), Cloris Leachman (last seen in "Music of the Heart"), Niki Koss, Hiram A. Murray, Lukas Gage, Drew Droege, Patrick Schwarzenegger (last seen in "Grown Ups 2"), Blake Anderson (last seen in "Game Over, Man!"), Elle Evans, Missy Martinez, Dillon Francis, Cameron Elmore, Sara Malakul Lane.

RATING: 3 out of 10 burnt marshmallows

Krampus

Year 11, Day 289 - 10/16/19 - Movie #3,385

BEFORE: This is a film that I've just had ZERO luck linking to, for at least the last two years.  The problem always seems that it doesn't really fit in at Halloween time because it's a Christmas movie, and then at Christmas time it doesn't really fit in because it's a horror movie.  So I end up passing on it twice a year - plus it's been VERY hard to link to it, since it doesn't have a lot of stars in it, just two or three, and then a bunch of people who don't have many credits.  BUT, with the recent last-minute reshuffling I did in early October, and a sudden notion to separate out "Velvet Buzzsaw" from the other John Malkovich films, that created something of an opportunity, with Toni Collette carrying over from "Velvet Buzzsaw".

I remembered that Collette was also in THIS film, so it was a happy surprise that I could finally find a slot for this film, this year, NOW, god damn it.  Let's clear off some of the movies that have been on my watch list the longest, and make some room for new ones!  And as you'll see tomorrow, this SO CONVENIENTLY connects back to my planned horror chain, that I'm practically kicking myself for not realizing sooner to make this film part of this year's chain, right now, no more delays.  So what if it's also a Christmas film - after Halloween, it's time to start getting ready for Christmas!  OK, first I have to go to Vegas for a week, then I have to hand out candy on Oct. 31, then there's the whole Thanksgiving thing, but after that, CHRISTMAS!

This year is getting so close to being over - I know I'm going to be on break for most of November and December, but my real Christmas movie is just 15 films away - that's, like, just over two weeks of movies!  And the chain is still solid, that's 285 connected films this year, with just 15 to go!

THE PLOT: A boy who has a bad Christmas ends up accidentally summoning a festive demon to his family home.

AFTER: I kind of forgot, right up until I saw the first on-screen credit, that this film was directed by Michael Dougherty, who I used to work with, and also the director of "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" and "Trick 'R Treat" before that.  So I'm getting to TWO of his movies in the course of one week, that's something...  (If I had realized that those two films share an actor, I could have linked between them, that could have made my life easier - nope, I'll all for doing things the hard way, it seems...)

The film opens with a montage of Christmas shoppers tearing apart a department store, and a bunch of holiday workers barely paying attention, parents trying to get their kids to smile for holiday photos, etc.  Depending on who you are and how you feel about the Christmas season coming up soon, this could be the scariest part of the whole film...

If you're not familiar with Krampus, it's apparently an old German folk tale about a Christmas beast that comes around - like the opposite of Santa Claus, who visits your house and eats cookies but leaves you presents.  Krampus will come around if children have been bad, to punish them - oh, he'll eat your cookies, but possibly also your children, and he'll leave behind no gifts, just pain and misery.  I guess if your kids won't behave when you dangle the promise of toys from Santa, it's good to have a back-up for the holdouts.  Think of it as a one-two punch to get kids to toe the line.  I was raised by a German grandmother and she never mentioned the Krampus story, so maybe I was pretty well-behaved - but she did tell us the story of Struwwelpeter, and that was pretty horrific, it's along the same lines.

(Years later, I also found out about Zwarte Piet, which is a character in Holland - like Santa Claus, but in blackface (yep) and he arrives by boat on December 5, from his summer home in Spain, to march in the Sinterklass (St. Nicholas) parade and throw cookies (hard) at good children and also thrash the naughty ones.  In some accounts, he's a former slave that was freed by Santa and became his lifelong servant/companion, others say he was an Italian chimney sweep and has a permanent layer of soot on his body, hence the black make-up.  Either way, it all seems VERY racist...look it up if you don't believe me...but let's get back to Krampus)

Leave it to the Germans to turn Christmas into a scary occasion - the kid in this movie has a German grandmother (been there, done that...) and I found it interesting that she speaks mostly German, which he understands, and he talks to her in English, which she apparently understands.  (This reminded me a bit of the Han Solo/Chewbacca relationship, where neither character feels the need to speak the other's language, yet they communicate perfectly.)  Something apparently happened to Grandma back in the old country, seems like Krampus took out her whole family, but left her alive to tell the tale.  And now, for some reason, possibly Max's rejection of Santa Claus, Krampus is back with a band of dark elves to finish the job...

The first half-hour of the film is set-up, of course - and with a couple of Republicans/rural folk/gun nuts coming over to visit the more suburban/Democratic/peacenik side of the family (I'm assuming the two wives are sisters, but other answers are possible) you might think this is going to be a typical culture-clash kind of movie, maybe a comedy like "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" or worse, an insipid holiday drama.  Nay nay, any stereotypes, political views espoused in the first act are just there to induce holiday-related stress in the audience, so that we'll HATE some or all of the characters, then we might not  mind so much when they start to get killed.  "Velvet Buzzsaw" used almost the exact same technique last night, with all those pretentious a-holes in the L.A. art industry acting all self-entitled, so we just can't WAIT to take some odd delight in their demises.

There's really a lot going on here - Krampus is definitely out in the neighborhood, leaping from one rooftop to the other, though it's unclear if he's torturing families in every house on the block, of if most of the neighbors are away for the holidays.  But when the blizzard hits, the family we hate/care about the most is snowed in for the duration, and they're sitting ducks.  Inside their own house, they're attacked by gingerbread men with a nail-gun, a demonic angel ornament, a twisted jack-in-the-box, an evil robot and a fierce teddy bear in the attic.  It's also a bit unclear whether these creatures are elves in disguise, or if they're all aspects of Krampus in different forms - in fact some reminded me of the way that Pennywise can appear in so many different forms in "It".

There's also something weird about the architecture in the house - like when Krampus is on the roof, and they can all hear it and feel it when they're in the living room.  But later on, they go to the attic - wouldn't the attic be somewhere between the living room and the roof?  Or were they hearing the creatures in the attic, and not the ones on the roof?  Either way, it was pretty confusing, even if you allow for demonic forces somehow changing the house's dimensions when they crawl through the ductwork.

Meanwhile, what's the objective of Krampus?  If you're not in the holiday spirit, keeping the spirit of Christmas in your heart, he'll come to your house and kill your loved ones?  Oh, sure, I bet you'll learn your lesson then, you're going to LOVE Christmas once you remember it's the day that a giant horned creature ate your family.  Can't we just go back to Santa Claus?  Admittedly, I think the kid shown here seems a bit old to still believe in Santa Claus - I think today's kids, with their internets and their post-millennial skepticism, should be able to figure out the Santa thing by age 8, at the very least.  I'd like to think that if I had a kid, he or she wouldn't go for the ruse in the first place - I would have trained them to see right through the B.S. of that little fairy-tale.

Also starring Emjay Anthony (last seen in "Chef"), Adam Scott (last seen in "The Most Hated Woman in America"), David Koechner (last seen in "Snakes on a Plane"), Allison Tolman (last seen in "The Sisters Brothers"), Krista Stadler, Conchata Ferrell (last seen in "Mystic Pizza"), Stefania LaVie Owen (last seen in "The Lovely Bones"), Lolo Owen, Queenie Samuel, Maverick Flack, Mark Atkin, Sage Hunefeld, Leith Towers, Curtis Vowell, Luke Hawker, Brett Beattie, and the voices of Gideon Emery (last heard in "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World"), Seth Green (last heard in "Godzilla: King of the Monsters"), Breehn Burns, Justin Roiland (last heard in "Smallfoot"), Ivy George (last seen in "13 Hours")

RATING: 5 out of 10 Yule goats

Velvet Buzzsaw

Year 11, Day 288 - 10/15/19 - Movie #3,384

BEFORE: This film was always part of the plan for this year - originally I had it in July, with the other Jake Gyllenhaal films, "Spider-Man: Far From Home", "Rocket Boys" and "Enemy".  But before I could watch it then, I worked out my path to the end of the year, and I realized that it ALSO fit in a place in early November, coming out of the month of scary films.  The latest re-shuffle (the one that removed a couple of animated kids films and a film about golf from the horror chain) put it smack in the middle of October, to make a necessary connection.  This separates it from the three other films with John Malkovich, but that turns out to be a very GOOD thing, I think, because the IMDB is telling me that this IS a horror film, so rightfully, it belongs exactly here.  See, I told you these things have a funny way of working out, if I just keep making my chain stronger as I go.

Tom Sturridge carries over from "Mary Shelley", which turned out to be extremely helpful - this actor has not made a lot of films, like under 20, so I just HAVE to take those links when they come along.

THE PLOT: A satire set in the contemporary art world scene of Los Angeles, where big money artists and mega-collectors pay a high price when art collides with commerce.

AFTER: This film took a bit of time to really reveal itself as a horror film, but if you can stick with it, that genre is totally represented here - but I think it's tough to discern whether this is a satire of the horror genre, or a film that's a satire of the art world and chooses the tropes of horror films to tell its story, or perhaps something else entirely.  I think that's because there's such a big build-up to get to the horror parts - like usually with a slasher film there will be a killing very early on, so we all will know what we're getting into, what kind of story we're about to get.  So in essence here you've got to sit through half of a film about the comings and goings in the art scene, the dealers and the art critics and the promoters and the museum representatives, all circling around the galleries trying to discover the next bit thing, while staying current on what (and whom) the previous next big thing is currently doing.

Naturally, it's a cutthroat world, and one with constantly shifting sands as THIS artist leaves THAT agent for THIS one so his work can be displayed in THAT gallery or have a show in THAT museum. Meanwhile everyone's trying to look fashionable as they make the scene, or constantly re-inventing their own images so they can stay on top of the latest trends and ahead of some imaginary curve.  And that all seems fairly exhausting - a gallery worker named Josephina has a difficult boss and is struggling to keep her job, when an old man with no family dies in her building, and she discovers that he's been making art in his apartment for years, and had requested that it all be destroyed upon his death.  But it's "outsider" art, which means it's all very disturbing, super-trendy, and best of all, free and available.

The name of the deceased artist is Vertil Dease, which seems like an odd one - I do so many puzzles, like cryptic crosswords and such when I'm on the subway, that immediately this seemed like it must be an anagram of something.  I've never heard the first name "Vertil" before, and remember back in the movie "Angel Heart" when De Niro played a character named "Louis Cyphre"?  OK, that wasn't an anagram, that was more of a sound-alike, but still, in the middle of "Velvet Buzzsaw" I stopped to see if I could anagram the artist's name and get a clue about what might happen.  Right off, I could see the letters of "evil" in the first name, and that led me to considering "devil", so the best I could do was "Devil see art" or maybe "Evil art seed".  Looking now at the Trivia section on IMDB, it seems that the director borrowed the name of a real man that lived in the 1800's, though he probably wasn't an artist.  OK, so not an anagram, but I felt like I was really close to something.

The artist had a strange back-story, with an abusive childhood, spent time in asylum, possibly killed his father, though this is sort of left open and questionable, what everyone who views the art feels is that he really put his heart and soul into his work - perhaps even a bit too literally.  Certainly there are some artists out there who have tried to capture the essence of evil in their work - or perhaps as with Van Gogh, some small portion of their mental illness manifests itself in the art in some way.  Think about Edvard Munch, or Hieronymus Bosch, painters who have tried to depict psychological torture or the biblical Hell in art - Google "depiction of hell in art" and you may get some idea where this film is going, just mix that with the creepy feeling that the eyes in a painting are somehow following you across the room...  This painter's work belongs in MOMA - by which I mean the Museum of Morbid Art.

One interpretation (and I admit, there may be several) is that the artist is somehow reaching out from beyond the grave to punish the people who are selling and buying his paintings.  Sure, why not?  What's one more weird premise, after you've seen a world where zombies live side-by-side with proper English society, or puppets live side-by-side with humans?  (Also, animals are being injected with mutating growth hormones, and aliens are here to either hunt us, or take over our bodies and live among us...)  But then again, maybe something else is happening here - note that there's one assistant who keeps moving from one gallery job to another, and people keep hiring her, in order to get the dirt on their competition.  Sure, she LOOKS innocent, but she's the one who keeps discovering the bodies, that's pretty suspicious.  I'm just sayin'.

(I have to call a NITPICK POINT on the part of the story where the male lead character hires this assistant, gives her the key to his storage locker to put some of the "evil" artwork there, and then in the next scene, he's going to the storage locker himself.  OK, so why did he give HER the key, if he was already on his way there?  Obviously the plot demands that he go there, then she has to arrive there later, but this key exchange thing was clunky and made zero sense.)

Nah, who am I kidding, let's go with option #1, because it leads to people in the art world being injured or killed in a variety of ways, and I guarantee there are a few that you haven't seen before in a movie.  But hey, I don't know what kind of movies YOU watch, so maybe I'm wrong.  All I know it's been a long time since I've seen anyone killed BY ART in a movie, and that happens here, again and again. There's a point where that concept is just borderline ridiculous, and then of course it goes over that border and becomes very ridiculous indeed - but perhaps none of this is meant to be taken seriously.  However, the problem with that becomes, if the film can't take itself seriously, how the hell am I supposed to do that?

What I found confusing was that the film started in Miami, and then suddenly shifted to Los Angeles, with all the same characters.  Suddenly every character in the cast is bi-coastal?  OK, I get that both cities probably have thriving art scenes, but it seems likely that some people would be part of the scene in Miami, and others would be L.A.-based.  This sudden shift is treated like it's not even a thing, we're just in one city and then the next, with the same players.  It's a bit odd, and there was no reason why the story couldn't just take place in one city's art scene.  (If you've seen this film, you're probably thinking right now, "THAT'S what he had a problem with?")

I'm getting closer to my vacation, I can't believe that in just four days, I'm going to be in Las Vegas - I think I can fit in three more films before I go, but probably not four, because I have to save Friday night for packing and pre-trip anxiety.  When I get back, I should have just enough time for 5 more films before Halloween, which thankfully is at the end of the month - my thanks to whoever put that holiday on the last day of October, because that gives me time to finish this horror chain, right on schedule.  Watching "Velvet Buzzsaw" cleared one film from my Netflix list, and while I'm in Vegas maybe I can make a dent on clearing all the comedy specials I've got in my queue.

Also starring Jake Gyllenhaal (last seen in "The Sisters Brothers"), Rene Russo (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Toni Collette (last seen in "In Her Shoes"), Zawe Ashton (last seen in "Nocturnal Animals"), Natalia Dyer, Daveed Diggs, Billy Magnussen (last seen in "The Meddler"), John Malkovich (last seen in "Deepwater Horizon"), Alan Mandell, Mig Macario (last seen in "The Final Cut"), Nitya Vidyasagar (last seen in "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps"), Sedale Threatt Jr. (last seen in "Roman J. Israel, Esq."), Pat Healy (last seen in "The Post"), Marco Rodriguez (last seen in "House of Sand and Fog"), Keith Bogart, Sofia Toufa.

RATING: 6 out of 10 recordings of whale songs

Mary Shelley

Year 11, Day 287 - 10/14/19 - Movie #3,383

BEFORE: Every year we seem to get one big-ass spider hanging around our house - outside, thank God.  Last year we had one about the size of a hermit crab on our front porch, and it would spin a big web that prevented my wife from going out there to smoke.  So I had to take action and catch it in a jar, and bring it to the cemetery three blocks away.  This year we've had a slightly smaller one out in the backyard, and for a while it had a web over our back window to catch moths that were attracted to our dining-room light.  But then just as I got my mind set on trimming back the overgrown weeds in the backyard, it spun a web on the stairs, completely blocking my route down from the back porch.  Sure, I could bust right through it, but who wants a big spider mad at them?  Instead I took it as a sign that it wasn't a good time to do yard work, and I was happy to put it off another couple of weeks.

Today I had a little bit of time before my wife's birthday dinner, and I figured I hadn't seen the spider in a while, so maybe it had moved on.  But as I was cutting down weeds under the grape vines, I saw it, ascending a line right in the middle of the trellis - I must have cut down one of its web anchors, and so it retreated up to the biggest vine to figure out its next move.  I was very careful not to walk right under it, and spent two hours clearing the backyard, with one eye on the spider the whole time.  I'm willing to let this one be, and maybe I've realized that while it's a bit scary to see a big spider in a web in your yard, it's even scarier to know it's still out there somewhere, but not know exactly where.

Sticking on a bit of a literary theme tonight, from a parody of Jane Austen we move to the origins of the novel "Frankenstein".  That's enough of a pre-Halloween tie-in, right?  Douglas Booth carries over from "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies".

THE PLOT: The life of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who at 16 met 21-year-old poet Percy Shelley, resulting in her writing the novel "Frankenstein".

AFTER: We can't help but to look back on the past through the lens of the present, so with that in mind we're re-visiting the life of Mary Shelley tonight - and to really do that, you have to go into her background as the child of a feminist author, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died shortly after giving birth, and William Godwin, a novelist known for his views on utilitarianism and anarchism - they must have been a fun couple at dinner parties!  But after a swing in the U.K. back to conservatism, Godwin worked largely in publishing (and ran a struggling bookshop, according to this film) after his first wife's death and marrying his second wife.  (Wollstonecraft's first daughter, Fanny Imlay, is conveniently not mentioned in this film, though she would have been alive at the time, committing suicide a few years later...)

It's tough to say, though, when we look back on these people's bios, whether we sometimes see what we want to see.  Wollstonecraft was a feminist who wrote about "romantic friendships" with both men and women - but that may have meant something very different back in the late 1700's than it would today.  But there are times when 16-year old Mary Godwin (later Shelley) makes references to her mother living in some kind of three-way relationship with a man and a woman - most likely some people did this back then, but didn't feel comfortable talking or writing about it, because it would have blown some people's minds, or ended up with them on trial for either debauchery or witchcraft.  But while watching the film, this was very confusing, because I didn't know if the three-way was between Wollstonecraft, Godwin and the woman we see as Godwin's 2nd wife - which would explain the tension between Mary and her stepmother.  Only that wasn't the case at all - the thrupple relationship, if it happened, happened before Wollstonecraft met Godwin.

Mary Godwin, however, apparently didn't learn much about feminism from her mother's writing, because when she falls in love with Percy Bysshe Shelley (god, what a pretentious middle name, and it seems like he used it like ALL the time...) that's it for her, she wants to run off with him and live together.  OK, so they didn't get married at first, that was pretty progressive, but it feels like Percy believed in an open relationship, and she didn't.  For another long time during the film, I was willing to bet that Percy was shagging both Mary and her younger half-sister Claire, but maybe they just liked hanging out.  Shelley's friends would come over and think that they could also fool around with Mary, but she didn't go for that - she seems like she was a real party-pooper, everyone around her was practicing a 1700's version of "free love", and she wanted no part of it.  Nobody told her that when your partner gives you a "free pass", that usually means they want one for themselves - or they're already sleeping with everyone in sight.  (It's worth noting that Wikipedia supports my theory that Percy and Claire were almost certainly fooling around, and also that Shelley's legal wife gave birth to his son while Mary Godwin was pregnant with his daughter...the film makes no mention of his son, though.)

This is pretty much confirmed when Mary, Percy and Clare are invited to the home of Lord Byron for an extended stay - and Byron kisses Percy Shelley square on the lips when he arrives.  (Yeah, they were SO doing it...)  But again, perhaps that's just what we want to believe, projecting our modern complicated LGBTQ entanglements on to a past situation.  But what we've all been told about the creation of the novel "Frankenstein" is that the genesis came from this summer-long holiday at Lord Byron's manor, when it was very rainy and they couldn't go outside, so they all pursued more indoor activities.  Naturally, over the years, the stories surrouding this week-long party have ranged from intellectual pursuits, like challenging each other to a ghost-story writing contest, to a full-on drunken orgy.  We may never know which is closer to the truth.

This same 3-day writing contest was also depicted on an episode of "Drunk History", with Evan Rachel Wood as Mary Shelley, Jack McBrayer as Lord Byron, and Elijah Wood as Percy Shelley.  (And in the story-within-the-story, Seth Rogen played Victor Frankenstein and Will Ferrell played the monster!)  Ken Russell also depicted the Shelley's stay at Lord Byron's manor in the 1986 film "Gothic", and that definitely leaned more toward the depiction of a drunken, drug-fueled orgy...

But either way, what everyone wants to know is, where did the story COME from?  Obviously, Mary Godwin had read many ghost stories and tales of gothic horror as a young girl, even though her father wanted her to read the classics, and not horror stories - but that just probably made her want to read them even MORE.  The film also shows her fascinated by a demonstration of "galvanism", which involved running an electric current into a frog's body to simulate real-life movements - so perhaps in her mind science in the early 1800's was very close to re-animating dead tissue.  But clearly she also had an interest and a DESIRE to see dead people resurrected - it's not a large leap to imagine that she yearned to bring back her dead mother, or her young daughter who died in infancy.

The film doesn't divulge too greatly into the story of "Frankenstein", which I think is a mistake - OK, you can assume that everyone out there watching this movie knows the story, but do they?  This world is full of people who see someone dressed as a tall green monster with bolts in his neck and they say, "Oh, look it's FRANKENSTEIN!" forgetting that the book is named after the DOCTOR, and not his MONSTER.  For God's sake, people, let's get this right.  You can call the character "Frankenstein's Monster", but not just by "Frankenstein", please!  We do see William Godwin running some sort of "book club" where the book is being discussed, but that's about it - at first, everyone assumed that Percy Shelley wrote the book because it was published with no author credit, and he wrote the book's introduction.  This was to get the story published, because publishers in 1818 didn't believe that a woman could write such a graphic horror story, or they didn't think anyone would buy such a book written by a woman.

Let's also reflect that many people believe the MONSTER to be the villain of the book, and it seems those people have missed the point of the book entirely.  The title character, yes, the DOCTOR the book is named after, is more properly thought of as the villain - he robbed graves for body parts, he practiced un-natural science, he essentially played God to create/re-animated a new life-form.  Any evil committed by the monster is really on his head, see?  I believe that Dr. Frankenstein eventually comes to realize this over the course of the story, that he's not a good person.  Meanwhile, every time the monster tries to act decently, or create a better life for himself, he's met with scorn and violence from that angry mob with torches and pitchforks, all because of his appearance and nature.  He can't help who he is or how he was made, he had no control over that - so the mob really should have been chasing after the doctor, for messing with the natural order in the first place.

The real revelation here is not that Mary Shelley was capable of writing the story in the first place, it's the theory that she identified more with the monster than the doctor.  The feeling of being betrayed and abandoned by her lover, that's what got channeled into the emotions of the "monster".  I mean, on a certain level an author can be seen in all of his or her characters, but perhaps on some level, Mary saw herself as the monster and Percy as the doctor, the architect of her situation.  It seems like maybe it's a bit of stretch, but who's to say?  It's not blatant and we don't have anything more specific to point to, to say, "Oh, THERE'S where she got the idea..." so it's a working theory.  And back then, if you felt betrayed by your live-in boyfriend because he was screwing around, you couldn't just write a bunch of songs for your next album, like Taylor Swift does.

But I'm not sure why Hollywood has become so obsessed with these "making of" movies about famous books and movies - certainly depicting the story itself is always going to be more exciting than the story about how the story was made, right?  To this movie's credit, there wasn't a lot of screen time spent on watching a writer write (or worse, having writer's block) which is always extremely boring and never visually interesting.  I'm not sure the alternative is much better - here Mary Shelley writes a few sentences in a notebook, and a few minutes later, she's got a 300-page manuscript in cursive longhand.  Umm, OK, that was fast, she must have been working on this story for years in her head, to bang it out so quickly!

But the question remains, do we need a "Saving Mr. Banks", or "The Rebel in the Rye", or "Tolkien", and I suppose this goes back to "Shakespeare in Love" - do we really all need to see how the sausage is made?  Are we obsessed with trying to discover whether the great authors are just as messed up as the rest of us?  (Short answer: You bet!)  Or does Hollywood just see this as another tangential revenue stream, after they make all of the "Lord of the Rings" and "Hobbit" movies they can, why not something about the author himself?  The problem usually becomes that there's the temptation to pepper in little fictional bits about the author's experiences to show us where all the little inspirations came from for each little element of their novel, and that's idle speculation, plus it removes all the mystery, assuming it's all true, which it probably isn't.

Here's the sad truth, though - your favorite author probably stole little bits of his or her story from many other stories.  A little bit from here, a little bit from there, not enough so you'd notice, a bit of Greek mythology and then maybe unconsciously a bit from their favorite fairy tale, mix it up in a new way and nobody's the wiser.  So while it's easy and tempting to think that "Frankenstein" is a thinly-veiled dig at Mary Shelley's philandering husband, the truth is that she read a lot of horror stories - who's to say what bits seeped in from where?  I'm thinking now of that parody short, "George Lucas in Love", that (comically) suggested that he had a college girlfriend that looked like Princess Leia - and of course it's all too easy to point to his strained relationship with his father when you're looking for the inspiration for Darth Vader.  But in all fairness, he mixed together bits of Flash Gordon, old westerns, and bits of Kurosawa films with a soupçon of classic mythology when he made the story cocktail that became "Star Wars", it didn't all just come to him one day in a dream, and I'm betting the same held true for Mary Shelley and "Frankenstein".

Also starring Elle Fanning (last seen in "20th Century Women"), Tom Sturridge (last seen in "On the Road"), Bel Powley (last seen in "White Boy Rick"), Stephen Dillane (last seen in "Darkest Hour"), Ben Hardy (last seen in "Only the Brave"), Maisie Williams (last heard in "Early Man"), Joanne Froggatt, Derek Riddell (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald"), Hugh O'Conor, Owen Richards (last seen in "The Three Musketeers" (1993)), Ciara Charteris, Jack Hickey, Sarah Lamesch.

RATING: 5 out of 10 angry creditors

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Year 11, Day 286 - 10/13/19 - Movie #3,382

BEFORE: OK, I reviewed one of the two October movies that I really watched in advance, because those movies were in theaters, and I had no idea if they'd be available on iTunes or On Demand or streaming when October rolled around.  It turns out the time period from big screen to small screen has gotten much shorter lately, but you can't be too careful - so I spent $20 (OK, $30 with snacks) to see "Godzilla" in the theater, but if I'd only waited, I could have watched it on iTunes yesterday for just $5.99.  My plan was great for ensuring my chain would continue, but not so great for my wallet. As for the second film I watched this summer but saved for October, that will have to wait until I get back from vacation.

Now, I could have used my free day yesterday to double-up, post the previously-written review of "Godzilla", then watch a second film - but that gets me to the end of my horror chain too quickly, plus I needed a full day just to clear my DVRs.  I can't have either one (the movie one or the TV one) filling up while I'm away in Vegas.  So I powered through a week of Jeopardy! and the late-night talk shows, plus a couple episodes of "The Orville" (I'm halfway through Season 2), and a couple episodes of "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives" and "Carnival Eats" to get my TV DVR down from 75% full to a little over 50% full.  I'm going to have to keep at it all week before our trip.  And I dubbed 4 movies to DVD today, so that gets me a little more room on the movie DVR, holding at 68% full.  Yes, for me the prep work for a vacation begins about a week before.

Charles Dance carries over from "Godzilla: King of the Monsters"

THE PLOT: Five sisters in 19th century England must cope with the pressures to marry while protecting themselves from a growing population of zombies.

AFTER: And a weird chain of films gets even weirder.  This is an example of a "mash-up" of two styles, most often we're used to dramedies (drama + comedy) and then there's sci-fi combined with horror, in films like "Alien" and "Predator". Less successful mash-ups have occured when writers have put together sci-fi and Westerns, like "Cowboys & Aliens", but other people like Mel Brooks had great success putting comedy together with Western ("Blazing Saddles") or horror ("Young Frankenstein") or mystery thriller ("High Anxiety") or sci-fi ("Spaceballs").  Comedy can go with anything - even a zombie story, like in "Shaun of the Dead" or "Zombieland".

But a few years back, someone made a parody novel that mashed up Jane Austen's "Pride & Prejudice" with a zombie story, and it was a big hit in bookstores, along with a follow-up novel, "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters".  But this film version was apparently a box-office bomb, so it doesn't look like they'll be filming that sequel.  In the end I think it comes down to a film's tone, and maintaining the style and tone of both a romance movie AND a zombie movie at the same time was just too difficult.  So while there's an audience for rom-coms, the world wasn't ready for a rom-zom film (zom-rom?).  I feel their pain, because back in 2004 I was a producer on an animated film called "Hair High", which was pitched as a comic romance film set at a high-school prom, where the lead couple died and came back to life.  Yep, it was a prom-zom-rom-com.  (And believe it or not, it's finally coming to streaming on October 15.  End of plug.)

But I think the problem I have with today's film is this - once you introduce the zombies into the story, it STOPS being "Pride & Prejudice", and once that happens, you just can't go back to it.  Some strange hybrid animal was created here that is neither this NOR that, just a genetic aberration that never should have been born in the first place.  It serves no purpose, it does not enhance either story to mix them together, unless you have a weird fetish for corseted women dispatching zombies, and that would probably lead me to ask why.  You know what, never mind, I don't want to know.  I don't understand steampunk, like why it amuses or entertains someone to mix modern technology with the Victorian era, and likewise I don't grok why it's entertaining to schedule a zombie attack in-between high tea and the ball at the Featherstone manor.

Besides, the traditional zombie story had to be bent over backwards to accommodate the storyline, like there had to be zombies that could "pass" for normal humans, just to have the shock of exposing the one trying to fit in at the card game or the croquet match.  That's NOT how zombies work, they're supposed to shuffle towards you (not run, only they do that here, too) mindlessly seeking brains to eat, and they're supposed to be incapable of speaking, let alone passing for a live human.

Likewise, I didn't understand the way Elizabeth defended her sister Jane, who got attacked by a zombie and then developed a fever.  Mr. Darcy wanted to determine if she'd caught the zombie virus, but Elizabeth wouldn't let him examine her.  Why not?  Look, either she's been turned to a zombie or not, and if she has, what's the plan, keep protecting her and not tell anyone she's a zombie?  Let her continue to live with the family, alongside four sisters who have been specifically trained to kill zombies?  How is THAT going to work?  And if she hasn't caught the zombie virus, then what's the big deal, why not let her get examined and find out for sure?  This was very confusing.

There's also a sect of zombies that goes to church, which seems weird, and they refuse to eat human brains, because then they'd go "full zombie", and they live on pig brains instead.  There's some weird suggestion that maybe these zombies can co-exist with humans, since they're not trying to kill the humans and eat their brains.  That's the English for you, they can't commit to being zombies, just like they can't commit to the E.U. OR the full Brexit plan.  Always worried about being proper and polite, even when they're undead.  "Oh, no, we simply couldn't eat human brains, what would the neighbors think of us?  Pass me another cucumber sandwich, won't you, Beryl?"

I wish I cared more about Jane Austen - I did watch the 2005 movie version of "Pride and Prejudice" a couple of years ago, but the plot details just didn't stick in my brain, so as a result it was sometimes hard for me to tell when this movie deviated from the original source material.  I mean, any time there were zombies on screen, sure, but I mean with regards to Mr. Bingley's interest in Jane and why there was a falling-out between Mr. Wickham and Mr. Darcy.  Maybe I'll go review the plot again on Wikipedia, but it scarcely matters, since I'm pretty sure the original novel didn't involve destroying the bridge into London to keep the zombies out.

NITPICK POINT: What the heck is a "zombie graveyard"?  You kill zombies, you don't bury them.  Unless this is something done to keep the zombie virus from spreading, but back in the 19th century they didn't know what viruses were or how diseases spread, they still thought you got a cold from being out in the cold.  And anyway, the zombies buried were still moving around, their arms were reaching up from the ground, so they were still alive, or undead/alive.  So what's the point of burying them, then, if they're only going to climb out of the dirt again later on?

Also starring Lily James (last heard in "Sorry to Bother You"), Sam Riley (last seen in "On the Road"), Jack Huston (last seen in "Ben-Hur"), Bella Heathcote (last seen in "The Rewrite"), Douglas Booth (last seen in "Loving Vincent"), Matt Smith (last seen in "Terminator Genisys"), Lena Headey (last seen in "Twice Upon a Yesterday"), Suki Waterhouse (last seen in "Billionaire Boys Club"), Emma Greenwell, Ellie Bamber (last seen in "Nocturnal Animals"), Millie Brady (last seen in "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword"), Hermione Corfield (ditto), Sally Phillips (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Baby"), Dolly Wells (ditto), Aisling Loftus, Tom Lorcan, Jess Radomska, Morfydd Clark.

RATING: 4 out of 10 topiaries damaged during sword practice