BEFORE: Gotta keep on moving, because the more films I can get to this week, the more I can add to my watchlist, and I've got a lot new on cable that I want to add. Some of them are films that I may watch NEXT October, but this is when I've got to record them, and either dub them to DVD or keep them stored on my DVR until I need them in 2021. Yes, I plan that far ahead - some of the other films I want to add are romances that I may need in February, and maybe even a Christmas movie for 2021, I just never know what I'm going to need down the road.
Juno Temple carries over from "Maleficent: Mistress of Evil" - this one kind of worked out well, because Maleficent has prominent horns, and so does the main character tonight.
THE PLOT: In the aftermath of his girlfriend's mysterious death, a young man awakens to find strange horns sprouting from his forehead.
AFTER: Way back in 2006-2007, I was working on an animated feature called "Idiots & Angels", in which a regular guy suddenly grows a pair of angel's wings, and they made him do good deeds, but then everybody in town wanted the wings and tried to cut them off for themselves. This film in many ways feels like the opposite of that film, because here a regular guy grows devil-like horns, and the horns make everyone around him tell the truth and confess their sins, and then he can't get rid of them. There are many differences between the two films, of course, but I can't help but notice the similarities, or perhaps the polarized discrepancies.
The film starts shortly after Ig Parrish's girlfriend has been found dead, and most everyone thinks he's a murderer, though he hasn't officially been charged with any crime. There's a brief prelude with Ig and his girlfriend, Merrin, and for a while I thought my linked actress would only be in the first few minutes of the film! But there are plenty of flashbacks coming, we eventually learn what happened to her as Ig retraces her steps on the night in question, and then there are also flashbacks to when the characters were hanging out together as kids, setting off cherry bombs and blowing stuff up. If you feel like there's a narrative connection there to "It: Chapter Two" or a bit of "Stand By Me", you're not far-off - in fact, this film is based on a story written by Joe Hill, who's actually Stephen King's son, so it almost has that same feel to it, just one generation removed. (OK, so "The Dark Tower" was a real disappointment, but I've got two more Stephen King-based films coming up this month, so there's a chance for some redemption.)
There's also a bit of a "Twin Peaks" feel to this, maybe, because at the heart of it is a murder-mystery with mystical elements, set outside of Seattle in some Great Northwest forest town (also, kind of ties in with "Twilight" and that same forest setting. But no vampires, werewolves or rogue FBI agents here, though there are still plenty of roadside diners and bars. After one night in a bar, Ig spends the night with barmaid Glenna, another friend from childhood, and after that he wakes up with the horns starting to grow out of his forehead. Does this mean they come from guilt after a one night stand with a new woman, or are they some side effect of grieving for his dead girlfriend, or are they just some random mutation? It's all a bit unclear, I think. But he does notice that Glenna is acting weird after she sees the horns, because she suddenly wants to eat a whole box of donuts.
That scene was very weird - in fact, this whole film is very weird, which reminds me that it's still The Year of Weird Movies, and I should expect some movies to even be Super Extra-Weird during Halloween season. But eventually the logic of the horns starts to fall into a pattern of sorts, whenever horned Ig is around people, they feel compelled to confess their bad deeds and bad thoughts, or are more likely to "sin" as they personally define that, I guess. I didn't keep track of the deadly sins here, but Glenna certainly typified gluttony, and the two male cops were lust, I suppose, and the bar owner who wants to burn down his establishment for the insurance money clearly represents avarice, perhaps there are more examples.
But the main storyline is to figure out who killed Merrin, and Ig only knows that it wasn't him. (or, was it?). That's where the "Twin Peaks" type plot kicks in, because apparently young women in Washington state aren't well-known for their fidelity - Laura Palmer was getting it on with half the men in that town, and maybe some of the girls too. During one of the flashbacks we learn that on the night that Ig was planning to propose, Merrin told him she wanted to move to Los Angeles and date somebody else, though she felt confident that she needed to date someone else to prove that she really belonged with Ig. On one level, this makes no sense, but on another level, it sort of does - if you've only dated one person, you might realize that you have no basis for comparison, no proper frame of reference. But Ig gets upset, and breaks things off with Merrin, and storms out of the diner. So why do the local police have a witness who claims that Ig shoved Merrin into a car and they drove off together before she turned up dead?
As the film progresses, and Ig follows the clues and pieces together more of what happened, his horns keep growing larger, plus he realizes that he can somehow control snakes, and when he finds himself holding a pitchfork at one point, it becomes rather evident what he's turning into. But still there are no easy answers, is this change some kind of mass hallucination (one character notably claims that he can't see the horns), or some next step in human evolution caused by strong emotions, or is Ig somehow being possessed by Satan? It's also possible that this is a riff on Marvel's "Ghost Rider", where a character gets transformed to look like a demon, but uses the powers that come with it to do positive things and punish criminals. (It's a bit like Ghost Rider's penance stare, combined with the suggestive powers of the Purple Man, as seen in the "Jessica Jones" series.). That's Ig's goal here, if he can just figure out who that "other man" in Merrin's life was.
Unfortunately, what made the story very hard to follow was the casting - they didn't really invest much time in finding young teen actors who looked like the adults cast in the same roles, except maybe the teen playing the young Ig. I couldn't tell which kid was playing the same character as each adult, and that's very important. Whoever cast "It: Chapter Two" did an amazing job of matching the teen actors with their adult counterparts, but I'll cover that in a couple weeks. Here, it's a big NITPICK POINT for me.
Of course, we know that there's potentially a fine line between angels and demons, because the King of Hell used to be an angel at one point, but fell from heaven, or perhaps was pushed out, if you believe that sort of thing. It always seemed like maybe Lucifer got a raw deal, because if you don't have evil and Hell, how can you even recognize good and Heaven? You can't have one without the other, it seems, although I think maybe there are some cultures that do. Come on, how does all that afterlife stuff even WORK, anyway, isn't it just simpler to believe that it doesn't exist at all, and we're all here for a good time, but not a long time? Halloween isn't even what it used to be, it all came from a belief that there was a time of the year when the veil between life and afterlife was thinnest, but now it's just an excuse to get drunk and wear costumes like "Sexy Hand Sanitizer".
Also starring Daniel Radcliffe (last seen in "Now You See Me 2"), Max Minghella (last seen in "The Internship"), Joe Anderson (last seen in "The Twilight Saga; Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Kelli Garner (last seen in "Going the Distance"), James Remar (last seen in "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"), Kathleen Quinlan (last seen in "Breach"), Heather Graham (last heard in "Norm of the North"), David Morse (last seen in "Proof of Life"), Alex Zahara, Kendra Anderson, Michael Adamthwaite (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: New Moon"), Nels Lennarson (last seen in "The Cabin in the Woods"), Don Thompson, Jay Brazeau (last seen in "The Shack"), Christine Willes, Meredith McGeachie, Mitchell Kummen, Dylan Schmid (last seen in "1922"), Jared Ager-Foster, Sabrina Carpenter (last seen in "The Hate U Give"), Laine MacNeil (last seen in "The Edge of Seventeen"), Erik McNamee, Reese Alexander, Desiree Zurowski.
RATING: 5 out of 10 floating logs
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