What We Do in the Shadows

Year 12, Day 305 - 10/31/20 - Movie #3,688

BEFORE: OK, here it is, the last movie of October.  24 films (12 originals and 12 sequels) and while it might have been a short month, it's still some solid linking work.  Rhys Darby carries over from "Jumanji: The Next Level".  Also just 12 films left to come in 2020, and I've got the great benefit of having THREE slightly different paths to the end, all of them will result in another "perfect year" (in this year that's been anything but perfect) so I can choose my favorite, that's a great feeling.  

Here are my viewing platform stats for October, and I'll total everything up in December, most likely cable still comes out on top.  

OCTOBER -

8 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): The Cabin in the Woods, The Dark Tower, Zombieland: Double Tap, Only Lovers Left Alive, The Addams Family (2019), Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween, The House with a Clock in its Walls, What We Do in the Shadows
6 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn, Doctor Sleep, Replicas, The Dead Don't Die, It: Chapter Two, Jumanji: The Next Level
2 watched on Netflix: Horns, Swiss Army Man
1 watched on iTunes: The Woman in Black
1 watched on Amazon Prime: Suspiria
5 watched on Hulu: Twilight, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2
1 watched on Disney+: Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
24 TOTAL

I also took my first stab at making a rough plan for January, and an attempt to clarify February a bit, because locking down February's start will tell me where January needs to end.  I've got a solid plan for the first two weeks of January, but right around January 15 comes a problem known as "too many choices" - there are about 13 different places I could be on January 16-18.  I build these little "decision trees" with a lot of arrows showing all the different directions I could go in, and at that point it just grows ridiculously large.  Which is good in a way, because it shows through probability how vast my choices are, but then how do I narrow them down?  I tried going backwards from February 1, also, but that decision tree got too large too, and so far I haven't found the film chain that unites both sets of choices, at best there's a four or five day gap in between.  More scrap paper is required at this point...

THE PLOT: Vlago, Deacon and Vladislav are vampires who are finding that modern life has them struggling with the mundane - like paying rent, keeping up with the chore wheel, trying to get into nightclubs and overcoming roommate conflicts. 

AFTER: As you can imagine, with just 12 film slots left this year, I have to make my choices carefully.  Sure, I've got a couple more films with Jemaine Clement in them, but that's not going to get me to some Christmas movies.  So, I'm going the other way tomorrow, which gets me to "Jojo Rabbit" this week, and I've really been looking forward to that one.  Everything else is essentially being re-scheduled for 2021 or beyond, and it's also been the year of the Constant Re-schedule, hasn't it?  Between COVID-19 and the cold weather, most of Halloween is cancelled - no parade, no parties, no sexy costumes, no kids trick-or-treating.  I didn't even buy candy because there's half a bag of last year's candy left on my shelf, just in case a few hardy souls come by tonight begging.  But if our doorbell doesn't ring tonight at all, I wouldn't be a bit surprised. OK, so I bought one package of Reese's pumpkins, but those are all for me.  

"Hellboy" is put off until next year, as are eight films about mummies, 10 films about time travel, "Salem's Lot", "The Babadook", "Devil", "Pet Sematary", last year's "The Invisible Man", "The Witch", "The Witches" (1990 and 2020 versions), "Gretel & Hansel", all remaining films about serial killers, and quite a few others.  There just wasn't time this October to get to everything.  Other notable re-schedules include "New Mutants", "The Lion King" (2019), "Dumbo", "The Trip to Greece", "The King of Staten Island", "The Call of the Wild", 4 films with Shia Labeouf, "Warrior" and three other films with Tom Hardy, 3 films with Johnny Depp, "Bohemian Rhapsody" and countless others.  (If I keep listing, I'll be here all day...)  I'm running out of time, across the board.  Then there's "Bill and Ted Face the Music", "Tenet", "Wonder Woman 1984", "Black Widow", "No Time to Die" and everything else Hollywood has chosen to not release until movie theaters re-open in the two biggest markets, NYC and L.A. Even though great progress was made this year on some long-standing fronts, I still feel like I'm never going to be able to schedule it all.  Maybe I need to wait a bit to see when the vaccine gets released, when Hollywood gets back on track, then firm up my January plans.  

In the meantime, I'm going to work with what I have available to me.  This 2014 film out of New Zealand was bound to happen, I suppose, with someone taking the mockumentary format made popular by "This is Spinal Tap" and "The Office" and applying it to vampires.  I guess it also hearkens back to "The Real World", which basically started the reality TV genre, and asks, "What happens when four vampires live together in a house, stop being polite and start getting real?"  Which of course doesn't make any sense, because why would said vampires allow a documentary crew to follow them around, while they're trying to avoid detection?  Why wouldn't they just pretend to go along with the project, and then drink the blood of the camera crew and field producers?  Ah, right, the lure of reality TV and becoming famous, and all those sweet, sweet endorsement deals.  Vampire influencers cashing in on Instagram would probably follow.  

For the purposes of this film, it turns out that New Zealand has a very lively monster nightlife scene - there are clubs, of course, and in addition to the vampires there's a roving group of werewolves that our subjects encounter a few times.  (There's that "Twilight" rivalry again, between the vamps and the wolves...)  And the big social event of the year is the Unholy Masquerade, which happens not on Halloween but on June 6 at 6 pm (think about it).  Vampires, zombies and witches all come together for a big masked ball, and absolutely no humans are allowed, it's a chance for all the undead to relax and unwind and interact, putting their differences aside.  In New Zealand it seems things are very well organized, each group has its own society with boards and elected leaders, and rules and such.  It seems like a very civilized way of doing things, of course it only works until some idiots bring a human to the party as their "plus one".  

Much like "The Dead Don't Die" and "Only Lovers Left Alive", this film is interesting because someone sat down for a bit and really thought about the classic horror film stereotypes, and what they might mean in the modern world.  Being a vampire surely has its down-side, right?  If a vampire should happen to make human friends, then he's either got to watch them grow old and die, or turn them into a vampire at some point, or just plain drain the blood of a friend.  Tough choices, all.  A vampire also needs a human "familiar", like Renfield from the "Dracula" novel, to get certain household tasks done during the day, get his coffin shipped from place to place, and clean up the blood from the bathroom floor.  How complicated is that relationship, like does hypnosis only get them so far, at some point it seems they need to promise to make their familiars immortal, just to keep them interested in doing the job.  It's like a promised promotion that never seems to come.  

Speaking of things that never happen, there's a chore wheel in the vampire flat that most people choose to ignore - Deacon hasn't washed the dishes in at least five years.  And whose job is it to get the blood stains out of the couch?  There's something of a generation gap here, because Deacon's only 183 years old, so he's clearly the "young rebel" of the group.  Viago is 379 years old, he's a former German count who ended up in New Zealand in the 1910's searching for the former love of his life (who's now in a senior home), and Vladislav is 862, he's been around since the early Transylvanian days, it seems, haunted by memories of his old nemesis "The Beast".  Petyr, meanwhile, is over 8,000 years old, and he's more of the "Nosferatu" type of vampire, doesn't say much but just lives down in the basement behind a stone slab and does whatever he wants.  They bring him a chicken every few days and that keeps him from getting out and killing the locals.  

There are probably good reasons why most vampires live alone - put a few of them together and they're bound to argue about who to eat, when to eat, who to turn into a vampire when they need a new roomate, and who to banish from the house for not following the rules.  There are just a few special-effects heavy battles here, but mostly this feels like a low-rent indie production, either by design or just by the nature of making an indie film and trying to do a lot with very little resources.  Thankfully, they succeeded in getting a lot done, and even though (as "Spinal Tap" pointed out) there's a very fine line between clever and stupid, I'm going to give this one the benefit of the doubt.  

I know there's an FX series that spun off from this film, and even though I'm only halfway through "Luke Cage" on Netflix, I might have to check that series out on Hulu, before the third season starts.  It's only 20 20-minute episodes, I could probably knock that out in under a week, before I start watching "Iron Fist".  If that series is half as funny as this film, I'll probably enjoy it. 

Happy Halloween, everyone!  We've got a rare full moon tonight (2nd of the month, so it's a "blue moon" too) so that means both the werewolves AND the vampires will be out tonight, unless it's too cold, or unless they're afraid of the plague.  Stay safe, buy your own candy, and wear a mask - you know what, wear two masks just to be on the safe side.

Also starring Taika Waititi (last heard in "Avengers: Endgame"), Jemaine Clement (last heard in "The Lego Batman Movie"), Jonathan Brugh, Ben Fransham, Cori Gonzalez-Macuer, Stu Rutherford, Jackie Van Beek, Ethel Robinson, Elena Stejko, Jason Hoyte, Karen O'Leary, Mike Minogue.

RATING: 7 out of 10 hard-to-find virgins

Jumanji: The Next Level

Year 12, Day 303 - 10/29/20 - Movie #3,687

BEFORE: So here's what's going to happen, after today's film I've got just one more scheduled for October, then I've only got 6 scheduled for November, so I've got to go into a different mode, a near shut-down for a while.  Maybe if I stretch out those 6 films I can keep watching movies until mid-November, but that still means skip days - one film every two or three days.  There's downtime coming, no matter how I work it.  But then I can come back in December and watch the last six, which now (thanks to one last tweaking) can feature three Christmas-themed films instead of two.  I like the way this year's going to end, but the tougher part is having to wait for it.  Still, knowing that through all the re-scheduling and re-workings, and theaters being shut down so ZERO films were seen by me in movie theaters this year, I'm still going to have an unbroken chain, from January 1 to Christmas.  

Jack Black carries over from "The House with a Clock in its Walls", and I'm feeling sort of like it's 2018 all over again. I'm in the closing days of my year, with 12 films left and I'm starting to think about planning my January chain.  Back in 2018 when I watched the first (OK, second) "Jumanji" film it was Jack Black who carried over from "Goosebumps", I had five films left to watch for the year, and I was starting to think about planning the chain for January 2019.  History does sort of repeat itself sometimes. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle" (Movie #3,095)

THE PLOT: The gang is back but the game has changed.  As they return to rescue one of their own, the players have to brave parts unknown, from arid deserts to snowy mountains, to escape the world's most dangerous game.  

AFTER: Yes, I realize this isn't a straight horror film, either - that's why I watched the previous "Jumanji" film in November, outside of the scope of October.  But in 2018 that meant I had to watch "Goosebumps" in November, too, and that's quite clearly an appropriate film for Halloween.  Thanks to my OCD that enforces the linking, I can't really make everything perfect, so the next best thing is to strive for close to perfect.  I can get there by labelling this as a "dark fantasy" instead of a special-effects driven comedy film, because when you think about it, there's some dark force at work inside that video-game that sucks people's souls into the VR world and then makes sure that things don't go well for them at first.  It allows them to "die" over and over, and it's strongly implied that if any of them should die three times, as per video-game common convention, they'll be for-reals dead in real life.  The story never gets there, so we don't know for sure, and the characters sure don't want to test that theory.  (Perhaps this will be explored in the probably-forthcoming sequel, "Jumanji: Game Over". But first they've got to figure out how to get Hollywood films released again, and Dwayne Johnson's got "Jungle Cruise", "Black Adam" and "San Andreas 2" coming out somewhen.)

I think I'm going to be very kind to "Jumanji: The Next Level", because it really ramped up the action, plus it gave me quite a few laughs today (and don't we all need that, right about now?) and then they added some really sentimental stuff near the end about friendship and old people being old, and I found myself tearing up a bit.  So this one has all the feels, as the kids say, plus it's an entertaining thrill ride.  There's a bit of a lag because it takes the new players a little while to come up to speed, because a couple of senior citizens (Spencer's grandfather and his old friend/business partner get sucked into the video-game in a new twist.)

This is a great change in the storyline, because if the same four teens (now college students) got sucked back into the same game and played as the same characters, that would be boring, right?  And the one thing this franchise is now, it's the opposite of boring.  They played around a bit in "Welcome to the Jungle" by saying, "What if the teens had to play against their types, the jock had to play the nerd, the nerd had to be the jock, the shy girl had to play the action girl, and the popular girl had to play as the fat, smart guy?"  And therefore when everyone has to step outside of their comfort zones, and see things from another angle, maybe they can all gain further understanding and acceptance?  Oh, if only it were this way in real life.   

Now "The Next Level" comes along and says, "What if everybody has to play as a different character, and nothing really goes as planned?" leading to new comic possibilities, like Dwayne Johnson being forced to act like Danny DeVito (old guy in a strong body), Kevin Hart gets to bust out a Danny Glover impression (he makes this look easy), and Jack Black gets to talk like a black teen (umm, let's just gloss over that this seems just a bit racist) but in some ways, it's even better than Jack Black acting like a teen girl.  The video-game itself got trashed at the end of the last film, but it got re-assembled and it's JUST a bit glitchy now - not so glitchy that it can't be played, but nobody gets to select their character now, and a couple things maybe don't work the way they're supposed to.  (Did they try blowing on the cartridge?)  

It's all part of a great attitude, which seems to be "If we have the special effects ability to make anything happen in a movie now, why not take advantage of that?"  So even with all the terrible news of 2020, it's still in one small way a great time to be alive, because whatever the Hollywood dreammakers can dream up, more or less it can be done on film in some way.  Take any big-budget special effects masterpiece, like this one or "Avengers: Endgame", let's say, and realize that these simply could not have been made ten years ago, not as well, anyway.  Twenty years ago?  Forget about it.  The big-budget special effects movies of 2000 included "X-Men", "Mission to Mars" and "How the Grinch Stole Christmas", and they look almost ancient now by today's standards. 

Of course, this film is not realistic at all - an old video-game cartridge wouldn't have two different full playable scenarios on it, there's just not enough space, let alone anything close to VR-level graphics.  But who really cares when a movie is this much fun?  And it starts out with very specific rules, the team has to solve THIS riddle, which directs them to go to THAT location and talk to THAT character in a specific way - but the rules get thrown out about halfway through, and it just turns into a special-effects free-for-all.  It's more about what an old man would do in a young man's body (flex his muscles and punch everybody out) or what an in-shape person would do if they were out of shape, or vice versa.  The world of video-games can be a great uniter - everybody playing the same game has to work under specific limitations, but it also can reward players who think outside the box and come up with work-arounds.  And even though this is too fantastic to be believed, there are some underlying truths about how people need to work together to solve seemingly impossible challenges.  It's not meant to be a think-piece, but in a way it sort of is.  

There's one character that links this film back to the original 1995 "Jumanji" film, the woman who now owns the diner, Nora, was the mother of the two kids who freed Robin Williams' character from the board game, so the three "Jumanji" films are now part of a shared universe, along with "Zathura", it seems.  Whether this will be explored further in future films is unknown.  And it's a bit odd, but it seems that the street scenes were filmed in the same small Georgia town as the ones I saw last night in "The House with a Clock in its Walls" - which might have more to do with Jack Black's schedule than anything else, I'm not sure.  

Also starring Dwayne Johnson (last seen in "Faster"), Kevin Hart (last seen in "Fool's Gold"), Karen Gillan (last seen in "The Circle"), Awkwafina (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie"), Nick Jonas (last seen in "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle"), Ser'Darius Blain (ditto), Marin Hinkle (ditto), Rory McCann (last seen in "xXx: Return of Xander Cage"), Danny DeVito (last heard in "Smallfoot"), Danny Glover (last seen in "The Dead Don't Die"), Alex Wolff (last seen in "Bad Education"), Morgan Turner (last seen in "Wonderstruck"), Madison Iseman (last seen in "Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween"), Colin Hanks (last seen in "Elvis & Nixon"), Rhys Darby (last seen in "Killing Hasselhoff"), Bebe Neuwirth (last seen in "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days"), Dania Ramirez (last heard in "Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay"), Massi Furlan (last seen in "Bad Boys for Life"), John Ross Bowie (last seen in "The Heat"), Lamorne Morris (last seen in "Game Night"), Lucy DeVito (last seen in "Can You Ever Forgive Me?"), Jennifer Patino, Madison Johnson, Vince Pisani (last seen in "Stuber"), Derek Russo (last seen in "The Mule"). 

RATING: 8 out of 10 stampeding ostriches

The House with a Clock in its Walls

Year 12, Day 302 - 10/28/20 - Movie #3,686

BEFORE: The month of October is winding down, just two films (and one skip day) after today.  I've reached the Jack Black portion of the year, with him carrying over from "Goosebumps 2" and it's probably pretty easy to see where I'll be tomorrow.  (Hmm, what other film was Jack Black that was released in 2019?). Another hint, it's a sequel - in fact, exactly half of my October films are sequels (or follow-ups or re-boots in some way).  12 original films, like today's, and 12 sequels - yes, I'm counting four of the five "Twilight" films in that math, because 4 out of 5 were sequels, even though I binge-watched the whole series this month, as God (?) intended - but only because I put that series off for SO long.  

Really, that shouldn't matter, sequel or no, because it's all grist for the mill at this point - just as HOW I watch each film shouldn't matter, but I track all that anyway.  I'd love to find out that cable isn't worth the money any more, and that I could, possibly, watch whatever movie I want whenever I want with the right combination of streaming services.  I'd dump Spectrum cable in a heartbeat if that were true, but I don't think as a movie-watching society that we're quite there yet.  Maybe I'm just old school, but I like making DVDs.  I like having a file on my DVR that will stay there until I'm ready to watch it, and it's not going to disappear until I say so.  (Umm, unless the drive crashes or I accidentally push the wrong button when I'm nodding off.  Could happen.)

Which leads to an interesting question, what is the streaming universe going to look like in 2 years, or 5 or even 10?  Nobody in 2010 could have imagined that Netflix and Disney and Amazon would be the big players (and to a lesser extent, Hulu and the new HBO Max and soon, Paramount/CBS).  Who's in charge of what's appearing where, if anyone?  Who's keeping track of it all?  I've often Googled a movie's title to find out where it's available and found that the information provided is wrong or incomplete, so how do we get a proper channel guide for the streaming universe, similar to the ones we have for cable?  Just wondering out loud.  

THE PLOT: A young orphan aids his magical uncle in locating a clock with the power to bring about the end of the world.  

AFTER: I'm back on spooky real estate tonight, which is kind of where I started, with the semi-haunted "Cabin in the Woods".  There were also haunted houses seen in "The Woman in Black", "The Addams Family" and "It: Chapter Two".  Let's not forget the haunted Overlook Hotel in "The Shining", and maybe if I expand the field a little bit we can count the dance studio with secrets in "Suspiria" and even "The Dark Tower".  But last night in "Goosebumps 2", there was a house that was decrepit and contained the magic book, but that's not really haunted, per se.  Still, it's definitely a running theme for this month. 

I think this film kind of proves my point about screenwriters not being in touch with the activities of modern school children, because this is set back in the year 1955, and that just seems a lot more in-line with Hollywood's vision of the average American school system.  Kids today are learning on laptops and tablets and taking classes on how to code web-sites, but if you watch current movies, you might think it's all still about book reports (like, what's a BOOK) and building stupid dioramas and science projects where they pour baking soda into a mock volcano.  The junior high science fairs these days are probably more likely to feature gene-splicing and tracking virus mutations, and if a science teacher sees another fake volcano, he'd probably shoot himself.  But moving the setting back to the 1950's seems to nearly take care of any problems there.  Though there's notable integration in the classrooms seen here, and I'm not sure Michigan was that liberal back in 1955.  

Lewis is a young boy who moves to Michigan after his parents die in a car crash, and his uncle Jonathan offers to take him in.  This means cookies for dinner are fine, Lewis can stay up as late as he wants, and oh, yeah, his uncle's a crazy warlock.  But he's being driven crazy by a ticking sound coming from the house's walls - allegedly, I didn't even hear it, but maybe I missed it.  Anyway, there's an odd plot point here where Jonathan has like a ton of clocks in the house, and the reason is so that he WON'T hear the clock that's hidden that's driving him crazy.  But then, umm, doesn't the sound of all the other clocks drive him crazy?  The more I think about this, the less sense it appears to make.  Like, if you WANT to find the clock that's ticking, then you WANT TO HEAR IT, and not the sound of the hundred other clocks you bought to have around. RIGHT?

Somehow, the whole house is a giant clock, or contains a giant clock, or there's a clock hidden in it.  Again, this is extremely unclear and confusing.  Some nights uncle Jonathan will roam around with an ax, and make holes in the wall in random places, trying to find the clock that he can no longer hear, or something.  Eventually we learn that the clock was placed in the house by Jonathan's old magician partner, Isaac Izard, who was also a warlock, but is now deceased, and the clock is counting down to something, nobody knows what, but it just can't be anything good.  Clearly there's a time limit for finding the clock, but nobody knows how much time is left, because they can't find the clock!  Ooh, a paradox!  

Meanwhile, Lewis has trouble fitting in at school, because bullies, except one of the bullies has a broken wrist and can't play football, so he needs Lewis to pitch baseballs to him.  Lewis might make more friends at school if only he's stop wearing those stupid aviator goggles, but really, what's the chance of that happening?  (I also wish screenwriters would stop confusing "being nerdy" with "not dressing well" or "not having a clue how to fit in")  The fact that Lewis has memorized the dictionary is probably also holding him back in the socializing department.  Hang in there, Lewis, it gets better for nerds, but probably not until the early 2000's. 

Lewis, while becoming a young practitioner of magic spells (what's the matter, he wasn't geeky enough BEFORE, with the goggles and the dictionary stuff and the Magic 8-Ball that he asks all his questions?) tries to impress his school friend by casting a forbidden necromancy spell, and that's where things really go wrong.  What a contrivance, though, that he manages to bring back the WORST possible person to life, the one who knows where the clock is and how to access it, and make it do what it's supposed to do.  Actually, this is all a bit unclear, too, because was the clock going to do THAT anyway when it finished it countdown, or did it always need a little help?  This raises a bunch of questions about fate and coincidence and whether everything happens for a reason, but unfortunately the film doesn't seem interested in providing any answers here, I'm not even sure it's aware of the questions.  A lot of stuff seems to get glossed over, that's all I'm saying.  

Plus, and big NITPICK POINT here, how do you have a hidden room like that in a house?  I can see if a hidden room is deep on the inside, maybe surrounded on all four sides by different rooms, and accessible by a secret door, but if that room has windows, how hidden could it possibly be?  If you're a homeowner, I don't care how big your house is, or how many rooms it has, but you make it your business to know how many rooms it has.  I have dreams sometimes where I'm exploring a new house and I keep finding room after room that I didn't know was already there, but that just can't happen in reality, especially, again, if those rooms have windows, and you can look into them as you walk around the outside of the house.  Saying something like, "Wait, there's an observatory in my house?  Where is it?" is patently ridiculous, if you think about it.  

But it's really more like a fun haunted house here, the chairs move around and the stained-glass windows change to predict the future, and then there's that whole clock thing.  It's a bit more like "Pee-Wee's Haunted Playhouse", which I suppose is what you get when you let Eli Roth direct a family film.  Yeah, that happened. 

Also starring Cate Blanchett (last seen in "Where'd You Go, Bernadette"), Owen Vaccaro (last seen in "Daddy's Home 2"), Kyle MacLachlan (last seen in "Peace, Love & Misunderstanding"), Renée Elise Goldsberry (last seen in "Sisters"), Sunny Suljic (last seen in "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot"), Colleen Camp (last seen in "In Good Company"), Lorenza Izzo (last seen in "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"), Vanessa Anne Williams, Braxton Bjerken (last seen in "The 15:17 to Paris"), Christian Calloway, Alli Beckman, with a cameo from Eli Roth (last seen in "Godzilla: King of the Monsters"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 kids in line at the drinking fountain (umm, how unsanitary...)

Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween

Year 12, Day 301 - 10/27/20 - Movie #3,685

BEFORE: Just few days left in October, and I'm hitting a Halloween-based film (you know, one where we see a lot of kids go out trick-or-treating and stuff) just a couple days early, but it is what it is.  It's Halloween Week, that's all that's important.  This should all make sense by the weekend, I hope.  Although it never really makes sense, does it?  I'm left with the feeling that I'm probably the only person in the world who would follow "Suspiria" (dark European horror) with "The Addams Family" (an animated movie aimed at...kids?) and then pivot back to "It: Chapter Two" (really scary stuff) and now I'm back on another kids movie.  I'm unique, I know it, so why am I not flooded with offers to have a movie review column somewhere (is there a magazine for people with OCD?) or my own TV show.  Guess I'll just muddle through without being famous.  

Jeremy Ray Taylor carries over from "It: Chapter Two". 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Goosebumps" (Movie #3,094)

THE PLOT: Two young friends find a magic book that brings a ventriloquist's dummy, then all of Halloween, to life. 

AFTER: Wow, what can I say about a sequel that just borrows elements from the previous film and regurgitates them back at you, without even trying to be original?  I haven't seen that happen since, well, "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot".  The only thing I can say about this as a horror film is that it really ISN'T a horror film, there's very little that's even remotely scary about it - other than the fact that ventriloquist dummies are creepy.  Sure, there are witches, a werewolf or two, maybe a mummy, and that yeti is back from the first film (again, nearly everything from the first film is back in some fashion).  One guy gets turned into a troll (?) and basically everybody's Halloween decorations come to life, but it never feels like anybody is in any REAL danger, because it's a movie for kids.  

The theory, I guess, is that kids love Halloween and want to see all the plastic and inflatable lawn decorations come to life - but do they?  Really?  Do I want my candy to be walking around like it's alive?  I don't even want to see chickens walking around like they're alive, because then I might feel bad when I eat them, so I certainly don't want to see delicious gummy bears walking around, they'd be too cute to eat.  

With the scare factor turned way down, there's little point in having all these beasties come to life, besides, we've SEEN that happen before, it was called "Goosebumps".  The makers of the first film were not involved here, and so with an almost completely new cast (Jack Black's the only actor in both films, playing a fictional version of kiddie horror writer R.L. Stine) I guess somebody figured, "Well, let's just keep the same story elements as the last film, so everybody will know it's a sequel."  And so therefore no screenwriters had to work hard (or at all) to make this sequel.  New setting, new actors, but the same old crap.  

Only they felt the need to bring it in under 90 minutes long, and speed through every plot point in the hopes that nobody would notice that it doesn't make any sense, even when you consider that it's a film about fictional monsters coming to life, and jumping out of, then being sucked back into a book.  And I find that I can't accuse the film of not following its own internal logic, since it hasn't got any to begin with.  Every little story element, from the two teen boys running a junk collection business, to finding the magic book in the creepy house, to the mother flirting with the guy who works at the pharmacy, none of it makes any sense or seems even close to being realistic.  Film writers and directors prove once again here that they have NO IDEA what it means to be a kid who goes to school - all filmmakers just seem to fall back on tropes and memes from OTHER movies about bullying, science projects, and gym class.  Characters in a movie released in 2018 are still attending classes set in the 1980's, it seems.  

Still, it could have been worse - the original drafts for this screenplay were set at a theme-park called "Horrorland", and the only thing I've seen more often than terrible high-school set scripts are terrible amusement park-scripts, like ones where it's clear that a screenwriter doesn't know the difference between a theme park, a circus and a county fair.  There are definite differences, only a movie theme park usually ends up being a weird combination of all three.  Yes, I'm talking about "Toy Story 4", but it's one of many.

I'm going to focus on just ONE bad script decision here, let's assume it's the worst of many - giant NITPICK POINT occurs when every Halloween decoration comes to life, and the evil ventriloquist doll has had the main characters' mother kidnapped by a giant spider creature made of balloons.  Suddenly it's very, very urgent that our heroes go and rescue their mother, but instead they then spend several HOURS disguising themselves in elaborate costumes (because the neighbor character is obsessed with decorating, and has a whole design studio in his house) so they can cross the town safely while it's crawling with monsters.  WHAT?  If their mother had been kidnapped by ravenous flesh-eating zombies, and they had to rush to save her, would it make sense to bring in a Hollywood make-up artist to make them look like zombies, spending three hours (minimum) in a make-up chair, just so they could go and save her?  It might be a clever plan, but by the time they finish disguising themselves, Mom's already been eaten.   

There is, however, one thing that's CLOSE to an interesting idea, and maybe if someone had invested a little more time and effort, it could have amounted to something - this is set in a New York town called Wardenclyffe, and features an abandoned factory and tower with a statue of Nikola Tesla in front of it.  The lead teen, Sonny, does his science project on Tesla by building a diorama of the factory and tower, and making the tower electrically powered for some reason. (Again, the director made a conscious decision to not get bogged down in any details, because he was on a tight schedule, apparently.). 

Now, there WAS a real Wardenclyffe Tower, built at the laboratory of the real Nikola Tesla (only in the real town of Shoreham, NY) and the real story about this tower is more fascinating than anything seen in "Goosebumps 2".  It looked a bit like the Coney Island parachute drop, but this was essentially the first cel tower ever built, sort of.  Tesla wanted to use it to send electronic messages, even faxes, to England and also to ships at sea.  His work was financed by J.P. Morgan and he was on a course to show that Marconi fellow a thing or two.  Tesla was planning to inject electric current into the Earth at just the right frequency, to harness the planet's own electrical charge and thus amplify his waves to send signals across the globe, umm, or something like that.  It's all very technical.  I guess we're all lucky he didn't blow up the world in 1902 with this. 

At any rate, he had the tower built as an eventual replacement for the telegraph, so essentially, Tesla was just a man ahead of his time.  The facility that once held all of his generators, transformers, Tesla coils and a whole bunch of tubes and wires is still there, but the tower was dismantled in 1917 and sold for scrap.  Tesla had suffered a nervous breakdown in 1906 after financial problems.  Many of his patents had expired, and plans to commercialize his inventions came to naught.  For several decades (1970's and 80's) the building was home to AGFA, the photography giant.  It's now on the Registry of Historic Places, and funds have been raised to turn it into a science museum.  This is all the sort of thing I find fascinating, and perhaps I'll gain more insight when I watch the 2020 film "Tesla", starring Ethan Hawke, and also there's a film running on cable now called "The Current War", with Benedict Cumberbatch as Edison and Nicholas Hoult as Tesla.  But that's something to think about for next year. 

"Goosebumps 2" really glosses over the Tesla sub-plot, even when Sonny delivers his science report on the famous man, it's noticeably void of any details.  That's a mistake, they had ONE chance to drop a tiny bit of knowledge on today's kids, and they blew it.  The rest of the film has no nutritional value, it's even worse than Halloween candy in that regard.  It's more like orange cotton candy, with a quick buzz, but it dissolves so fast that you're left with a too-sweet aftertaste, and nothing more.  

Also starring Madison Iseman (last seen in "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle"), Caleel Harris, Wendi McLenon-Covey (last seen in "Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House"), Chris Parnell (last seen in "The Laundromat"), Ken Jeong (last seen in "Killing Hasselhoff"), Jack Black (last seen in "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot"), Bryce Cass (last seen in "Battle Los Angeles"), Peyton Wich, Kendrick Cross (last seen in "Father Figures"), Shari Headley, Courtney Lauren Cummings (last seen in "Fist Fight"), Jessi Goei, the voice of Mick Wingert (last heard in "Kung Fu Panda 3"), with a cameo from R.L. Stine (last seen in "Goosebumps"). 

RATING: 3 out of 10 poorly-carved pumpkins

It: Chapter Two

Year 12, Day 300 - 10/26/20 - Movie #3,684 -- VIEWED on 4/12/20.    

BEFORE: A message penned to my future self - as you write this, you're still in quarantine, out of work and you have to wear a facemask to go out and get groceries.  Remember back in April when this film premiered on HBO on a Saturday night, and you and your wife sat down to watch it, because it was another thing that would help pass the time on a weekend that didn't feel all that special, because with everything closed and everyone basically under quarantine, what does a weekend even mean?  And remember how you could stay up late, until the morning, really, which was very convenient because after watching "It: Chapter Two" and allowing Stephen King and Pennywise to scare the bejeebus out of you, there was little chance of falling asleep anyway, until the sun came up and you knew you were safe?          
           
I hope that by the time you post this review, in October, that the coronavirus pandemic is over somehow, like maybe somebody found a cure or they started plasma transfusions from recovered people with antibodies, or somebody developed a viral cure that worked and didn't kill even more people.  I hope that a time when everyone was afraid to walk outside or hug a friend or even shake hands is a distant memory for you, that they cured all the people in the Javits Center field hospital in time for New York Comic-Con, and hell, while I'm at it, I hope that the final death toll for the pandemic wasn't the 240,000 Americans that some models were projecting, maybe it turned out to be a lot less.  That would be nice.  I hope you don't lose too many friends, and I hope you get to return to weekend trips, hell, I just hope you get out to go to restaurants again, or be able to go back to work and back to the movie theaters.  If so, good for you, if you come out the other side with your health and your sanity (relatively) intact.

I passed on watching "It: Chapter Two" last year, though it shared two actors with "Dark Phoenix", so I probably could have worked it in somehow.  And an Academy screener of this one just never arrived, I guess the filmmakers learned from the first "It" film that it probably wasn't going to get nominated for any Oscars.  Anyway, how was I supposed to know that movie theaters would all close down in 2020 Thankfully it didn't take too long for this one to premiere on HBO, and since my wife's such a fan of the book, and I sure didn't want to watch this one ALONE, we made time to watch it together as soon as it became available on premium cable.

It's probably too early to be exactly sure how I'm going to link to this one, but I've got some idea - it all depends on whether Disney/Marvel is going to release "The New Mutants" anytime soon, since its release date was pushed back three times even BEFORE the pandemic, and then a fourth time because all the theaters were closed.  Perhaps by October they will have given up and just released it to Disney Plus, which would allow me to watch it.  If that happened, then I'm guessing my link will be James McAvoy carrying over from "Filth", but if not, then the back-up is for Finn Wolfhard to carry over from the animated film "The Addams Family".  It's one or the other...

FOLLOW-UP TO: "It" (2017) (Movie #3,069)

THE PLOT: Twenty-seven years after their first encounter with the terrifying Pennywise, the Losers Club members have all grown up and moved away, until a devastating phone call brings them back.

AFTER: Sure, I could have easily saved this film for October, but since my wife likes so few of the same movies as me, I felt I had to jump on that chance to watch it with her in April, as soon as it aired on HBO. Besides, I didn't know what life would be like in October.  Assuming the pandemic ends at some point (remember, I'm still writing this in the past, please, no spoilers) that could mean that maybe they'll stop using the Javits Convention Center as a field hospital, maybe New York Comic-Con will take place as planned in October, and I'll need to work there for a few days.  That means fewer slots for horror movies, and watching one now would allow me to slip an extra one in there somewhere.

I watched this between "The Blind Side" and "Ford v Ferrari", and though it shared no DNA with those two films, it called to mind a couple of films I watched earlier that week, like "Midsommar" (both horror films, duh) and "Little Women", which also used the split-timeline editing technique to toggle between two different years, though that Oscar-winning drama jumped back and forth over a 7-year span, and this for-some-reason-not-Oscar-nominated horror story used the same technique to cover a 27-year span.  For that, they used two sets of actors, a group of teens for the 1989 scenes and adults for the 2016 scenes.  Now THAT reminds me of "The Debt" and "The Tree of Life", which both pulled something similar, and I watched both of those films ALSO in the week leading up to "It: Chapter Two".

I'll say this, on all fronts, "It: Chapter Two" beat all those other films I'd seen recently that used the same techniques.  I had a terrible time watching "Little Women" because it just wasn't clear when it was jumping back seven years, and then not clear again when it jumped forward again, and they had to stick in all these little clues like the length of Jo's hair and whether Amy was in France just so that we'd know which year each scene was in, when if they had JUST told the story the way the book did, none of that would have been necessary.  Plus, none of the characters looked seven years younger in the past scenes or any older in the more-present scenes.  So anyone not familiar with the story and the editing technique would probably have to watch it twice to figure it all out.  Using different actors to play the same characters at different stages of life is a much clearer technique, only "The Debt" found a way to screw that up, too, because the actor who played the younger David looked more like the older Stefan, and vice versa, so I just couldn't believe that those people in 1965 grew up to look like THOSE people in 1995.  (Oddly, both "The Debt" and "It: Chapter Two" had Jessica Chastain in a starring role, and both films featured her as one of two actresses playing the same role, though in one she played the younger version and in the other, she played the older.)

There are three reasons why the time-toggling works in "It: Chapter Two", and didn't bother me at all - first off, the casting is SPOT-ON.  In every instance, I can believe that THAT kid grows up to look like THAT adult.  Give that casting director a raise and a bonus, please, this is just how it's supposed to be done.  Teen Finn Wolfhard grows up to look like Bill Hader?  Just perfect.  Of course, they make sure the two actors have the same hair, glasses, etc. but a lot of it just goes back to having similarly-shaped faces and facial features, and that's great casting.  I have no doubt they got all the hair and eye colors corresponding correctly, but those are things you can fix with wigs, hair dye, contact lenses or post FX.  If the kid playing the older Ben Hanscom or Eddie Kaspbrak doesn't have similar eyes or a smile that calls the younger actor to mind, then it's just not going to work.  Secondly, they do a lot of artful transitions here, like a character will remember an incident from when they were a kid, and it will be a cross-fade, or coming out of it, the younger actor will walk forward until his face is super-imposed on the fact of the older actor.  So I never had any problem discerning who was who at any time during the flashbacks. Kudos.    

Third reason, and I know I rail against flashbacks in this space several times a month, I make an exception for them when it seems like the director has a reason, and knows how to use them.  Here the grown-up Losers don't remember their first battle with Pennywise, but being back in Derry, Maine and walking around the city streets and visiting the stores, their encounters with the evil clown come rushing back to them.  So each character has at least one flashback, in which they're played by the younger actor.  But this is EXACTLY what flashbacks should be used for, to gradually reveal information from the past that wasn't important yet, the audience didn't need to know about every mental torture that Pennywise gave the kids in the first movie, but we get to learn about them at the same time that each character gets to re-remember them, and that's a brilliant bit of story structure.

However, it's also a little formulaic, and after a while it starts to feel like maybe the movie is stalling for time, or more correctly, trying to beef up the last half of the book so it will fill a whole second movie. "Chapter Two" clocks in at 2 hours and 49 minutes, but the 1990 TV miniseries told this same story in just over an hour and a half.  OK, so this is a deeper dive, and I don't remember any extended get-together dinner out at a Chinese restaurant, for example - so I'm guessing that a fair amount of filler has been added.  Then, after the Losers band together, and stress the importance of maintaining a united front against It, what's the next thing they do?  Split up, of course, because each one needs to find a "token" that means something to them, but it also means that each one is going to have a solo scene where they're tortured by Pennywise, either in the past or the present.

I know, I know, I talked after "Midsommar" about how a horror movie is fueled by dumb people doing dumb things.  If they didn't split up, they wouldn't get scared again, and they wouldn't have to overcome their fear to defeat the evil power.  But maybe they should have struck while the iron was hot, gone to face the evil clown just after hitting town, before they could get frightened and have second thoughts.  Nah, let's take a break and go grab some Chinese food, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?

I was intrigued by one of the characters calling It a "virus", especially since the release of this sequel predated the pandemic by at least three months, and obviously it takes two or three years for a film to go through production and post-production.  But it's a very good explanation for how It scares so many people in this small town, I mean we all know that the evil entity could be some kind of alien life form that's millions of years old, but how else does It know to appear to people like a clown, or a hobo, or a kindly grandma?  There could be some kind of airborne infectious agent, like a virus, that gets into people's systems and makes them hallucinate, so first It's victims see or hear something harmless they're familiar with, like a friend, their mother's voice or a kindly clown, and then in stage 2 of the infection that turns into a manifestation of their darkest fears, and they're paralyzed long enough for the beast to feed.  We saw in the first film how Pennywise could access the sewer system from that old house, and every single house in town had modern plumbing, so this infectious agent could get everywhere that way.

This also explains how It knows enough about each person to taunt them with very personal insults - once somebody breathes in the virus, it somehow accesses the victim's brain and either reads the memories directly, or just triggers an all-purpose fear response and the victim enters a dream-state, where they see whatever they're most afraid of, or who they most love turning against them, and it's just not real.  By then, It has opened its giant mouth and turned on the "deadlights", so they're paralyzed by visions of the future and their fears, then it's game over.

The kids defeated It in 1989, but they were also aware that Derry had a history of disasters and serial killings, about once every 27 years.  So the monster must have had a sleep-cycle or hibernation, and only woke up to feed for a short time, then returned to that dormant stage.  The Losers grew up and forgot all about what happened in Derry, however they left one member, Mike, behind in Derry to remember, just in case.  When Mike calls the adult Losers to come back to Derry, they feel scared or sick and don't want to come back, only they made a solemn oath to come back and take It down again.  One adult can't handle the responsibility, and chooses to commit suicide rather than go back to Derry - look, I get it, sometimes I don't want to go back and see my parents either, but I have to - however, suicide should never be portrayed as an answer to one's problems, not even in a movie.  The note that Stanley sends to the adult Losers, which they read at the end, contains his reasons, but I don't think that's enough of a justification.

Another thing that shouldn't be a solution is bullying a bully.  If bullying someone is wrong wrong wrong, then meeting bullying with bigger bullying is not a creative enough solution to the problem.  Yes, of course It/Pennywise is evil and eats children, but in the flashbacks he's basically seen bullying the Losers when they turn out to be paralyzed with fear.  He knows their darkest secrets and teases them, threatens to expose them, he knows that Beverly was abused (raped?) by her father and how Richie feels about Eddie. So at the very end, after the strange Native American ritual doesn't take It down, the Losers are forced to act brave, stand up to It, and bully and berate It by saying that he's nothing but a clown.  I'm all for taking back one's power, but I wish they could be strong and do that without tearing their enemy down like that.  I guess it's for the best, but are we saying the end justifies the means?  I wish a more creative solution could have been found that won't give teens bad ideas about dealing with bullies in the schoolyard.  Be best, kids.

The opening sequence of the film, showing a gang of toughs harassing two gay men at the Derry carnival, kind of proves my point.  The gay men react to the gang's intolerance by starting a fight, and that's just not productive.  Violence is NOT the answer, everybody knows that a better tactic is to call in a hate crime, get these homophobes behind bars or get some financial compensation out of them, maybe they'll learn something that way.  Instead the violence escalates, the gang kicks the hell out of the two men and dumps one off a bridge, then things get worse.  So I believe this proves my point.

I want to go back to "Little Women" and "The Tree of Life" for another moment, because something that I've learned from those two films (and countless others before them) is an ability to pick out which character in the film is a probable analog for the writer (or director).  Hint: It's the one who's also a writer (or screenwriter, or director).  Remember when Woody Allen got too old (or too tired) to star in his own movies, so he started getting other people, like Jason Biggs or Larry David, to play the central characters? Before that, when Woody starred in "Annie Hall" or "Hannah and Her Sisters", he always played a writer or a filmmaker, essentially because he was playing a version of himself.  I cracked the code on "Little Women" when I noticed how closely Jo March's life seemed to parallel Louisa May Alcott's, and then I noticed how many things director Terence Malick had in common with the Jack O'Brien character in "The Tree of Life".    

So, if I apply the same technique here, I'm confident in suggesting that Bill Denbrough is the obvious analog for Stephen King himself.  Now I don't think that Mr. King had a younger brother who got lured into the sewers, and to a certain extent a writer inhabits all of his or her characters, just as you are, on some level, every character in one of your dreams, or nightmares.  But Bill is a mystery writer who seems to struggle with the endings of his novels, and then fights with movie directors (and his actress wife) who tell him that his endings are no good.  I'm betting this is Mr. King's secret fear or personal struggle, am I right?  This point is reinforced by the scene where Bill notices his old bicycle for sale in an antique shop, and when he goes in to buy the bike, who's playing the shop proprietor?  Why, it's Stephen King himself, known for making cameos in adaptations of his work, much like Alfred Hitchcock or Stan Lee.  

But a big BOO to the fact that at the end of "It: Chapter Two", Bill is seen writing a novel about his experiences in Derry, defeating It with his friends, and that's a very, very tired trope.  The writer character ends up writing a story based on the story we just saw?  Come on, enough already.  Anyway, that creates a logical paradox, that within the "It" story in our universe, there's an author who is not named Stephen King, writing a novel called "It"?  And is there another character in THAT story who's a writer, and if so, what's his name?
   
Way too many jump-scares, but that's a common enough problem in horror films these days.

Also starring Jessica Chastain (last seen in "The Tree of Life"), James McAvoy (last seen in "Glass"), Bill Hader (last seen in "Hot Rod"), Isaiah Mustafa, Jay Ryan, James Ransone (last seen in "Captive State"), Andy Bean, Jaeden Martell (last seen in "Knives Out"), Jack Dylan Grazer (last seen in "Beautiful Boy"), Bill Skarsgard (last seen in "It"), Sophia Lillis (ditto), Chosen Jacobs (ditto), Jeremy Ray Taylor (ditto), Wyatt Oleff (ditto), Jackson Robert Scott (ditto), Owen Teague (ditto), Molly Atkinson (ditto), Stephen Bogaert (ditto), Jake Sim (ditto), Logan Thompson (ditto), Joe Bostick (ditto), Megan Charpentier (ditto), Katie Lunman (ditto), Neil Crone (ditto), Teach Grant, Nicholas Hamilton (last seen in "The Dark Tower"), Joan Gregson, Javier Botet (last seen in "Alien: Covenant"), Xavier Dolan (last seen in "Bad Times at the El Royale"), Taylor Frey, Jake Weary, Luke Roessler (last seen in "Deadpool 2"), Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Jess Weixler (last seen in "The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them"), Will Beinbrink (last seen in "I Saw the Light"), Martha Girvin, Juno Rinaldi (last seen in "Life" (2015)), Brandon Crane (last seen in "It" (1990)), Jason Fuchs (last seen in "La La Land"), with cameos from Stephen King (last seen in "Pet Sematary"), Andy Muschietti, Peter Bogdanovich (last seen in "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead")

RATING: 7 out of 10 shower caps

The Addams Family (2019)

Year 12, Day 299 - 10/25/20 - Movie #3,683

BEFORE: We accomplished two things today, my wife and I took a bunch of old electronics (one computer, several keyboards, 4 or 5 old cell phones and three broken DVD/VCR combo recorders) to an e-cycling event.  There haven't been many of those in NYC since the pandemic hit, but we found one not too far away in Queens, and they were happy to unload our car for us while we stayed inside, in masks.  We figured our good deed earned us breakfast at a nearby diner, and then we set our sights on voting.  It was the first day of early voting in New York - and I forgot to mention this yesterday, as a tie-in with the election of the leader of the Markos Dance Academy in "Suspiria".  I know, that was set in Germany, not America so there's only a loose connection.  We spent maybe 90 minutes in line at the polling center, there were so many people eager to vote, I wonder why.  In previous elections there's been so much effort trying to get people to vote, and still the largest voting block of all was the people who stayed home.  It turns out all you have to do to increase voter turnout is elect the worst President in history, allow him to ignore science to create a raging pandemic, and also allow him (and other politicians) to polarize every single issue.  Now everyone on BOTH sides is in a desperate rush to cast their vote, and even though I know the polling numbers are on the side of truth and justice (and not lies and corruption) right now, the fact that both sides are incredibly fanatical means I won't relax until all the results are in.  Just because I agree with one side, I shouldn't get comfortable and think that means that side will win, because there are more than enough simpletons in this country who elected him in the first place, and right now they're just as charged up and desperate and one-sided in their thinking as the smarter people are. 

It's going to be a long ten days - but I'm starting the final week of my horror chain, and thankfully I'm back to films that don't seem to be taking themselves too seriously.  An animated film for kids just can't be straight horror, so I'm expecting pure silliness and nonsense today - which may only seem weird because I've programmed this between (probably) the two scariest films in my line-up.  So I'm just going to bounce back and forth between extremes, it seems.  Stylistic whiplash is often a concern here at the Movie Year.

Chloe Grace Moretz carries over from "Suspiria", and I'm realizing a bit too late that she's also been in a number of other horror movies, most notably the 2005 remake of "The Amityville Horror" and the 2013 remake of "Carrie".  OK, my bad, because I don't have room for either of those this year, my October dance card is full, and I don't have access to those films at the moment (though "Carrie" is available on demand right now for just 99 cents, but I've got nothing to pair it with...).  Oh, well, there's always next October, right?  I'll add these films to the list as "maybes" and sometime next year I'll try to determine if these films will help complete a chain or something.  

THE PLOT: The eccentrically macabre family moves to a bland suburb where Wednesday Addams' friendship with the daughter of a hostile and conformist reality design show host exacerbates conflict with the local population. 

AFTER: Perhaps things were always very polarized in our nation, but I was too young to fully understand this back in the 1970's.  Back then there were still liberals and conservatives, the hippies and the establishment, rock fans and jazz fans, so there were areas where people just didn't see eye to eye.  I didn't watch "The Addams Family" when it first aired in 1964, because I was busy not being born yet.  Anyway, I was a "Munsters" kid, because that show was syndicated in reruns in the Boston area, and I had no idea how to watch "The Addams Family".  This was back before streaming, before cable, before there was a channel that told you what was on all the other channels.  Primitive times, right?  You couldn't buy a whole season of a classic TV show on DVD, and you couldn't binge anything, you had to wait a whole week for the next installment of something, we only had three network channels and maybe two or three local ones, so our whole entertainment supply came in limited quantities, and we had no control over the WHEN of it all.  

So, invariably, when I think about "The Addams Family", I also think about "The Munsters", a similar franchise that has thankfully not been re-booted in decades, though some poor sap is probably being forced to work on that right now, after the success of the "Hotel Transylvania" movies.  "The Munsters" was at least a one-for-one analog of classic monster movie characters, father Herman was a Frankenstein monster, his wife and father-in-law were vampires, and then somehow his son was a werewolf and his daughter was a normal human, so clearly TV writers back then had no idea how either monsters or genetics work.  They had a dragon that lived under the stairs and drove a weird coffin-car hot-rod hearse, and then I think most of the comedy came from the townspeople around them dealing with the fact that their neighbors were monsters who considered themselves a normal family.  Goofy monsters, but still monsters.  If there was anything resembling plotlines, I sure don't remember it - each episode had close to zero nutritional value, in other words.  

"The Addams Family" series ran on TV during the same era (both beginning in 1964), but was different, in that "The Munsters" aired on CBS and "The Addams Family" was on ABC.  And in "The Addams Family", it wasn't so clear which classic movie monster each character was based on, because "The Munsters" had the rights to adapt the classic Universal characters, and the other show didn't. Ah, so that's why we don't really know WHAT Gomez is, he's just a guy, a very weird creepy guy.  Grandmama is a witch (right?) and Morticia is some kind of vampiress, only not really?  Of course they all go back to the designs from cartoons drawn by Charles Addams for The New Yorker (starting in 1937), and many people pointed out a similarity between Morticia and Addams' first and second wives (Barbara Jean Day and Estelle Barb).  He felt no need at the time to say, "This character's a vampire, and this one's a werewolf" because he was more focused on their creepy macabre actions, like trying to kill each other, or Wednesday chopping the heads off of her dolls.  The characters developed from their actions in the story - but with "The Munsters", it was the other way around, the story developed from the characters placed in a fish-out-of-water situation. 

Despite the live-action TV show, and a couple of live-action movies in the early 1990's (more on those in a bit), one could say that animation is the most appropriate medium for these characters - after all, anything can happen in animation, if you can think of it, you can draw it.  And the Addams Family started out in illustrated print cartoons, where again, anything can happen - plus there WAS an animated version of them on TV, which came a few years after the live-action show.  Then when you juxtapose the macabre aspect of something gruesome or horrible with the innocence and nonsense of a cartoon, somehow that balances out.  A drawing of somebody with their head in a guillotine is very different from a photograph of the same subject - the latter's just a little bit too real, and is scary, but the other one's a cartoon, possibly a joke in progress.  This is what led us to "Scooby-Doo" cartoons, which started airing in 1969, and that just never would have worked in a live-action show, a couple of squares and a stoner with a talking dog, driving around the country de-bunking ghosts and zombies as (typically) just handymen in masks trying to get people to stay off the property they were trying to steal.  

(But eventually after several years, the "Scooby-Doo" franchise devolved into even further nonsense - the addition of guest stars like Don Knotts, Phyllis Diller, Batman and Robin, The Harlem Globetrotters and the Three Stooges just led to a lot of questions.  I can understand Hanna-Barbera practicing corporate synergy by doing a crossover with Josie and the Pussycats or even Speed Buggy, but a young kid shouldn't be made to stay up nights, wondering how Batman, Yogi Bear and Don Knotts can all be part of the same fictional universe.)

Thankfully, The Addams Family and The Munsters could never, ever meet - it would be too much like what we saw in "Zombieland: Double Tap" when the heroes met another zombie-fighting team, and the two teams were so alike that they could never see eye to eye.  They'd cancel each other out, always be trying to one-up each other, and focus on those minuscule differences in their dogma that would become sticking points, then argue and never speak again.  But while "The Munsters" tried very hard to be normal and fit in, the Addams Family was akin to Bizarro, Superman's foe who would just do everything in an opposite fashion.  If Bizarro says, "Goodbye, Superman, I'm there to help you!" we all have to pause a second and realize he means, "Hello, Superman, I'm here to kill you!"  Everything the Addamses do, it's based on something normal, only they do it in a twisted way, and that just becomes tiresome after a while.  We have to be reminded of this at every turn, it seems.

Now, a word or two about the 1991 live-action movie, famous for the appearances of Anjelica Huston as Morticia, Raul Julia as Gomez, Christopher Lloyd as Fester and Christina Ricci as Wednesday.  Spot-on casting, to be sure.  And I suppose every reboot reflects the time during which it was made, but the plot was really threadbare, with someone impersonating the long-lost Uncle Fester in order to get at the money stored in the family's safe.  Everything got bogged down in con games, legal battles and a school play, and it went around in circles only to end up back where it (should have) started.  The sequel film, "Addams Family Values", was a little better, with a serial-killer nanny hired to watch the family's new baby, and Wednesday and Pugsley disrupting the status quo at a summer camp.  The title was a poke at the Republican "family values" of the Reagan years.  Oh, I forgot to mention the unfortunate involvement of MC Hammer in the soundtrack for the first film.  Again, those were different times.  

The best thing I can say about the 2019 reboot movie is that it starts with something akin to an origin story, as Gomez and Morticia's wedding is seen for the first time (I think), complete with angry villagers who disrupt the ceremony, even though at this point the characters have not been portrayed as doing anything close to evil, or even all that weird.  The downside here is that the franchise is coasting on its history, relying on the fact that we've seen these characters before and we know what they're capable of.  Or else someone's hoping that the story will define the characters, which is the same problem that occurred in their TV show.  Within five minutes, the couple is married, settling down in New Jersey (because it's the most horrible place they can imagine) and they've taken over an abandoned haunted asylum as their home and taken in Lurch, a former mental patient, as their butler.  (Again, character inconsistency, I always assumed Lurch was another Frankenstein monster, but I guess that's a copyrighted Universal character, so they had to come up with a new backstory.). It all feels very rushed, before the story fast-forwards to when they have two pre-teen kids.)

NITPICK POINT: It's fine to want to make the house something akin to a character, and give it a back-story, but most lunatic asylums don't resemble Gothic mansions, they wouldn't have a ballroom or a drawing room, they'd have cells and such.  We see ONE padded cell, which is where Lurch resides, but in a true asylum, nearly EVERY room would look like that.  What's wrong with a good, old-fashioned haunted house?   This asylum thing feels very shoehorned-in.  

The characters here suffer from very strange design choices - everyone's either roly-poly like Gomez, Fester or Pugsley, or impossibly thin like Morticia, Wednesday and the new friend character, Parker.  But they all have giant heads - simply, every character's head is much too big, and most of the eyes are too round.  I get that the characters need to all look odd, and be distinguishable from the normal townspeople, but I'd venture this process just was consistently taken too far.  With Parker I couldn't even tell if the character was male or female, or designed to be non-binary perhaps, I had to look up who did the voice to finally land on "female", but were they trying to make a point about gender, or did they just forget to add a story detail?  I know, I should get past this because of the current zeitgeist, but I think in the end it is important to the story - if Wednesday makes a female friend, that has different implications than if she has a male friend.  Or not, whatever, but I'm still old school on this.  Just draw the character better. 

Parker's mother is the host of a design/renovation show who's also the villain of the piece, she's remodeled an entire town called Assimilation which is right below the mountain that the Addams home is on, and apparently they didn't hear ANY of the construction work going on (NITPICK POINT: This would have taken MONTHS to build an entire town...) or seen it being built, because the fog from the marsh has been clouded over the Addams' mansion for years, which was the way they liked it.  But they can't live in a bubble forever, at some point they need to interact with normal humans to get that whole "fish out of water" story rolling.  They could have done this story any of a hundred ways, however, and I'm wondering how and why they landed on "evil design show reality TV host builds a town".  Somehow it's both by-the-numbers and completely unbelievable at the same time - but again, it seems that the story was meant to reflect the times we live in.  The worst thing we can imagine is to be assimilated, and live in a town where everyone is expected to act all "normal" and "perfect" and not be different or freakish in any way?  

So I'll allow that there's SORT OF a good message here, we have to stand up to Margaux and her army of Karens who want to use social media to make the world the way they want it to be, where everybody is cookie-cutter and mows their lawn to the right length and has the right skin tone that doesn't scare her in any way, and certainly there are no weird monster-like people living next door who are up to who-knows-what at night.  It's better (?) to allow that we're all slightly freakish in our own way even if that means we put our underwear in the freezer before a hot summer day or sit backwards on the toilet just so we have a place to put the book we're reading.  (These were actual examples mentioned in the film, just think about the ones they DIDN'T use...)

But then it sends the WRONG message (beyond the suggestion that pre-teen girls should be so thin that they're anorexic and their necks aren't strong enough to hold up their heads) in that when your family home is threatened by angry neighbors, the appropriate response is to allow your kids access to explosives so they can save the house (which gets destroyed anyway) and the side with the bigger, badder weapons always wins.  

The rest of the storyline doesn't amount to anything - Pugsley has problems learning a sabre mazurka,  a rite of passage that consists of a complex ceremony when he turns 13, and which feels like a very contrived take on a Bar Mitzvah, he has to read screams from a "Terror" (not a Torah) and then he bungles the sword dance - who even cares?  It was all just an excuse to get the extended family back together and introduce even weirder relatives.  

A few more NITPICK POINTS: the character's name is Cousin ITT.  With TWO "T's", not one.  If you just call him "It" then there's confusion with the Stephen King story of the same name, which also got referenced here in a gag.  You also shouldn't change a character's name, just for a reboot.  Plus, we've seen the "Wednesday goes to public school" storyline done before, although I will allow that having her go above and beyond in the dissecting frogs lesson in biology class was a nice touch.  Other references to "Titanic", "Watchmen" and "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" are hit-or-miss at best.  

In-jokes are fine, too, but most of the ones here are either aimed at either the young kids or the old senior fans, very rarely both.  As a result, depending on who you are, half of the gags probably won't even land.  Thing teaching Lurch to play the classic TV theme on the pipe organ serves no real purpose UNLESS you were a fan of the old 1960's show.  And even then, I've got issues with the lyrics, which were horrible then and are still horrible.  "Ooky" is not a legit word, just some lyricist's creation to have a third rhyme to go with "kooky" and "spooky".  Similarly, the word is "scream", not "screa-um", just admit you couldn't think of a third rhyme for "museum" and "see 'em".  (The word you couldn't find was "mausoleum", by the way.). 

Oh, well, at least they finally established whose mother Grandma is - she's the mother of both Gomez and Fester, by default as Morticia is seen here speaking to her dead parents via a seance.  (It's the equivalent of a phone call in the Addams Family world).  And this film did really well at the box office, so there's a sequel planned for 2021, or at least it was planned for that date before the whole pandemic shut-down - now, who knows?  Just pray that the "Munsters" animated reboot gets postponed indefinitely.  

Also starring the voices of Oscar Isaac (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Charlize Theron (last seen in "Bombshell"), Finn Wolfhard (last seen in "It"), Nick Kroll (last heard in "The Secret Life of Pets 2"), Bette Midler (last seen in "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story), Snoop Dogg (last seen in "The Beach Bum"), Allison Janney (last seen in "Tallulah"), Conrad Vernon (last heard in "The Emoji Movie"), Martin Short (last heard in "The Willoughbys"), Catherine O'Hara (last seen in "Killers"), Tituss Burgess (last seen in "Dolemite Is My Name"), Jenifer Lewis (last seen in "Fahrenheit 11/9"), Elsie Fisher (last heard in "Despicable Me 2"), Aimee Garcia (last heard in "Spanglish"), Scott Underwood (last heard in "Sausage Party"), Mikey Madison (last seen in "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"), Pom Klementieff (last seen in "Uncut Gems"), Chelsea Frei, Deven Green, Maggie Wheeler, Harland Williams (last seen in "Superstar"). 

RATING: 3 out of 10 hidden cameras