BEFORE: Emma Roberts carries over from "The Hunt". She should do well in my year-end countdown, because actors who appear in both specialty months, February/Romance and October/Horror usually do. A couple of other actors here will also make the countdown, one was in two horror movies that I moved from October to August to make "Black Widow" and "Hellboy" happen, she'll get a year-end nod too. I don't move horror films out of October lightly, only when absolutely necessary to maintain the chain - and then I have to make sure that the October linking will still work without those films. Fortunately that was the case this year, and all roads seemed to be leading to my final Halloween film, and then of course this one was a highly favored lead-in to that.
But still, there was much debate over "Is this a HORROR film?" IMDB just called it a "Thriller" in the keywords, and that maybe didn't feel like enough. I don't want to just go ahead and read the whole plot summary on Wiki, because then that removes the need to, you know, watch it. But I think I learned just enough to justify keeping it here in October, as the intro to my final film, and not the outro. Sometimes I just have to follow my instincts, though - I went through the same thing with the "Fantasy Island" movie, which also got moved from October, but to March. Once again, it's a very strange year.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Fantasy Island" (Movie #3,787)
THE PLOT: Uma is a young woman who wakes up in an apparently idyllic reform school for young ladies. But a dark secret lies within its walls.
AFTER: It's another slow burn tonight, this one plays pretty straight for a good long time - about an hour in, I was screaming at the computer screen, asking, "But WHERE is the dark secret I was promised?" I just had to keep telling myself it was on the way - such as it was with "Fantasy Island" and also "A Cure for Wellness". Bottom line, these vacation resorts are sometimes just not all they're cracked up to be, I think this goes all the way back to Camp Crystal Lake, right?
All you really need to know is that this takes place in the near-future, when society has been split into two classes, the "uppers" and the "lowers", and the uppers have tried very hard to bring the fashions of European royalty back into style. It's not a good look, though. The time shift seems to be necessary to justify the use of holograms and other technologies in the plot that, well, we just don't have yet IRL. Some screenwriters thus made things very easy for themselves my moving everything a couple decades ahead, then any tech needed to make the plot happen is thus readily available.
But in the future, it seems that women's rights maybe haven't advanced as much as one might think - so still, we're dealing with a bit of "The Handmaid's Tale" here, perhaps. Imagine "The Handmaid's Tale" mixed with "A Cure for Wellness" and maybe a bit of "Fantasy Island" mixed in, and you're certainly in the ballpark. Or maybe that's just me, because those are three films that I've watched this year, so for me it's a lot like tying some common threads together from different films that all were (or could have been) part of the October chain. Jeez, here I thought that the future would be female, but it turns out that any "difficult" teen girls who don't want to do what their parents want, or marry who their parents want, get sent away to an island resort for two months, and when they come back, they tend to be a lot more agreeable. Hmmm....
Uma is one of the more difficult guests on the island, she insists on thinking for herself - how DARE she, what kind of world would that be, if women didn't marry the right man to advance her family back into the uppers class. Chloe is a teen girl who's not as skinny as her sisters, and Yu is Asian, so even though we never really learn WHY she's there, we can assume she's got helicopter parents and she's disappointing them in some way. (My guess is she's a closeted lesbian, you'd expect to see at least one of those in a film like this, but I wonder why they couldn't just come out and say that.). Amarna's a famous pop star who's been labeled "difficult" by her management, does that sound like any (every?) famous pop star we know?
Escape from the island is impossible, or so the girls are told - better to just give up and change their ways, accept the future that their family wants and then they can return to their life. But that doesn't stop Uma and Amarna from planning an escape, also the Lower boy that Uma likes (not the Upper one her parents want her to marry) manages to get a job on the island as a gardener, so he's got an escape plan of his own in the works. But all these plans fail to come to fruition, because the girls get so tired every night, shortly after drinking their milk. Hmmm....
It's not terribly difficult to figure out what's really going on here, when you put their situation against the framework of that class system, you should be able to put the pieces together before the characters do. And yeah, in that sense it's exactly what you think. OK, it's exactly that plus a little more, I got the gist of it pretty early, but then, I had the advantage of watching "A Cure for Wellness" and those other films not too long ago. Other people might view this as some bizarre combination of "Alice in Wonderland" and "Labyrinth", but that's not what I saw. As always, your mileage may vary, and it's up to you to decide if the payoff is worth the effort. Making the point that women don't NEED to marry powerful men to advance themselves and should live their own lives for themselves, well, shouldn't that go without saying by now?
I usually can't stand this actress, Awkwafina - for a while they were constantly running those commercials for "Nora from Queens" or whatever her show is called, and she's just a bad actress, she over-emotes EVERYTHING and I don't dig it. I learned she was in "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Whatevers" and that took away most of my incentive to watch it - I'll probably get to it next year, but just like with "The Eternals", it's based on a Marvel comic I never read, so I don't care. (There are still many, many Marvel comics I do read that aren't movies yet, like "Moon Knight" and "Champions" and "Alpha Flight", why do they have to adapt the sucky ones first?). The best thing I can say about Awkwafina in "Paradise Hills" is that her character is unconscious for almost the whole second half, and I think that's a smart way to go with her.
Also starring Danielle Macdonald (last seen in "Bird Box"), Awkwafina (last seen in "Jumanji: The Next Level"), Eiza Gonzalez (last seen in "Bloodshot"), Milla Jovovich (last seen in "Monster Hunter"), Jeremy Irvine (last seen in "The Professor and the Madman"), Arnaud Valois, Daniel Horvath, Joey Sordyl, Julius Cotter, Edward J. Bentley, Johnny Melville, Nick Dutton.
RATING: 5 out of 10 yoga classes
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