The Witches (2020)

Year 14, Day 287 - 10/14/22 - Movie #4,267

BEFORE: Octavia Spencer carries over one more time from "Ma", and now you can sort of tell how behind I'm running, this film came out in time for Halloween 2020, and it made a big splash on HBO Max, but now here we are, two years later, and I finally found a way to link to it.  One big problem, though, it's not on HBO Max any more, which is weird because it was pitched as a "Max Original", and I know Netflix keeps their original movies on their service long past the typical two-year window, I finally watched "Mudbound" on Netflix after three or four years of trying to link to it. So why did this disappear from HBO Max so quickly?  That suggests to me that the film is terrible, and/or nobody was watching it.  But if it's a horror movie, or even a horror-ish movie (it's for kids, umm, I think) you might expect that people would want to watch it during October, and then maybe sort of forget about it during the other eleven months.  It's not the movie's fault...or is it?  

THE PLOT: A young boy and his grandmother have a run-in with a coven of witches and their leader. 

AFTER: Yeah, this one's pretty hard to get a read on - I know it's based on a children's story written by Roald Dahl, but he was an odd bird, right?  Like "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" is really about a reclusive, madman chocolate maker who employs slave labor Oompa-Loompas from some fictional African country, and for fun he allows children to compete amongst themselves for tickets to enter his chocolate factory, where most of them get tortured or injured in the name of teaching them life lessons on how to be better people.  And yet somehow that's one of the most beloved stories for kids?  What's wrong with THAT picture?  Don't even get me started on "James and the Giant Peach", we all know what THAT's a metaphor for...

Now they're making a new version of "Matilda", and that one's all about bullying a girl with telekinetic powers, but rumor has it that the new version's very problematic because they're really dyking up Miss Trunchbull. But there was already a film version of "Matilda", and many people like it, so why do we need another one?  Similarly, this 2020 HBO film is the second version of "The Witches", there was one released in 1990 with Anjelica Huston as the lead witch, here in the 2020 version it seems they changed the lead boy character and his grandmother into African-American characters, and I suppose that's fine, they're the heroic characters and the lead witch is still white.  Though, to be fair, they added some Black witch characters here, too.

Really, none of this should matter, but of course it does, on some level. 

I do want to watch the earlier film version of "The Witches", but there was no way to link to it from here, or to make it part of my October chain this year. Of course, the version I don't need to see right now is still available on HBO Max, but the one I can link to is gone - sure, it's on iTunes for a $3.99 rental, but I found a weird foreign version of YouTube that had it available for FREE. (Shhh...don't tell anyone...). This week's loose theme is sort of about families, from weird ones ("The Addams Family 2") to surrogate ones ("Ma") to even psychotic and demon-possessed ones ("The Amityville Horror") and tonight's film is about a young boy who loses his parents in a car accident, and goes to live with his grandmother, who tries her best to help him learn to enjoy life again.  

Part of that involves telling him stories about witches and how they navigate the world - Grandma is some kind of faith healer or herbalist or something, and when she was very young she watched as another girl, Alice, fell under the spell of a witch and got turned into a chicken.  The girl's family didn't believe that their daughter had become a chicken, or perhaps they knew and didn't care, because they needed the eggs. (Sorry, old joke.). Back in the present, Grandma runs afoul of another witch who curses her with a recurring cough, or perhaps a more serious disease, and the coughing is just a symptom.  But the movie sort of glosses over all of that, because our young Hero Boy encounters a witch himself in the grocery store, and she offers him candy.  Our parents always warned us about strangers with candy, but yet somehow they still sent us out on Halloween to get exactly that.  

PROGRAMMING NOTE: Halloween is just a little over two weeks away, and let me remind all parents out there that if you take your kids to the drugstore and give them $10 each to spend on candy, they can buy EXACTLY what they want, which is much better than them getting all the random candy that they DON'T want from strangers.  Then you won't have to worry about them eating tainted candy, or candy with drugs in it, or apples with razor blades in them.  AND you'll save money because then they won't need a costume, so this plan is cheaper and safer - and any kid of mine would take this offer, if I'd trained them right. I know I'm a total buzzkill, but also, hey, you're welcome. Think about it for a bit and you may realize the benefits of my plan.

SO, once Grandma realizes that there's a witch cursing her and trying to tempt her grandson with candy, she packs their bags and they head off to stay in a hotel on the Gulf of Mexico.  But damn, wouldn't you know it, this fantastic hotel is also scheduled to play host to the witches coven, like they're having a convention or their annual meeting there.  The coven is pretending to be an organization established to prevent cruelty to children, but really they're gathering together to discuss their plan to use a potion to turn all children into mice.  As Grandma pointed out, witches in this story can't stand the smell of children, but this kind of goes against what we were told in "Hansel & Gretel", also "Tales from the Darkside", where witches are shown EATING children. Well, which is it?  If they can't stand the way children smell, then they probably wouldn't want to eat them, right?  A big part of the taste of your food comes to you through smell. 

We also learn that all witches are bald, they have claws for hands and clubbed feet, and they wear special shoes and long gloves to blend in.  Umm, OK, sure, but aren't they usuall depicted in drawings with long hair?  Next you'll tell me they don't ride flying brooms or wear pointy hats...

Anyway, they're going to spread their mission around the world, tempting kiddies with tainted chocolate bars that have enough drops of the potion in them to turn them all into mice.  On the other hand, hey, free chocolate!

By coincidence, Hero Boy also has a pet mouse that his Grandma gave him, he's been training it to do tricks - but he accidentally gets stuck in the room where the witches are having their meeting, and he watches as another boy staying at the hotel - an Augustus Gloop sort of kid, who loves his chocolate - gets turned into a mouse, and then the witches eventually smell the main character in the room, and they pour potion down his throat, too, and transform him as well.

This is about when this film starts to get very clunky - like when the hotel manager confirms very blatantly to the head witch that the meeting room only has one entrance, there's no other way out of the room.  This was a very unnecessary bit of dialogue, the film essentially explains to the audience why the main character couldn't sneak out the back, but we didn't really care.  As long as the boy didn't know there was a back exit, or how to find one, it really wouldn't matter.  But the film insists on solving this problem for us, before it ever becomes a problem, and that's very clunky. It's like if a character pointed out in a line of dialogue that the curtains in the room are very flammable, and they must take care not to light a match or smoke near the curtains.  The only reason any character would have this conversation would be to set up the plot point that somebody's going to light a match, and those curtains are going to catch on fire quickly, because that's what the story needs to have happen.  It's a verbal fungo.

Another example of this is when our heroes decide to turn the tables, and Grandma and the mice decide to spike the pea soup that the witches are going to eat with the potion, thus turning all the witches into mice themselves.  But adding the potion to the hotel's soup in the kitchen could mean turning some innocent bystanders who order the same soup into mice, so they have to add this line of dialogue about how the witches are all allergic to garlic, so the head witch has to request from the hotel manager that they be served pea soup WITHOUT garlic.  And this would make the soup very bland, meaning that nobody else in the hotel dining room would want to order it, or they wouldn't be allowed to order it, which is even weirder, and now that I think about it, I don't think that garlic is a key ingredient in pea soup in the first place, so this is also a very, very clunky plot point.  It has to happen so that ONLY the witches will drink the soup with the potion, but man, there just HAD to be a better way to get there.  Why couldn't the mice just add the potion right before the kitchen served that table?  Why do we need all this nonsense with the garlic / no garlic at all?  It's just bizarre. 

If you walked up to a deli counter and ordered some salami, and the deli guy said to you, "I can't serve this salami to you because it's a special order for one of my customers, and it's unique, and it's not poisoned in any way....anyway, you wouldn't like it." that would be very suspicious, wouldn't it? 

Another example is the numbering of the hotel rooms, Hero Boy and Grandma are given the key to Room 766, which is on the fourth floor.  Huh?  Every hotel in the world numbers their rooms by floor, so therefore Room 766 should be on the seventh floor, right?  Later on, the story dictates that their room needs to be right above the head witch's room, which is of course Room 666.  So, room 666 is therefore on the third floor?  Why did we need the line of dialogue telling us that 766 is on the fourth floor, what does that even get us?  Why does it matter?  Was the exterior shot of the hotel one of a building that wasn't seven stories high?  WE DON'T EVEN CARE.  Why couldn't their room be on the 7th floor, and why was the screenwriter trying to solve a problem that doesn't even seem to exist? 

OH, there are so many more weird contradictions.  Like if the head witch hates money so much, then why does she have a whole steamer trunk full of it?  Makes no sense.  Why doesn't anybody try to turn the mice back into children, since they know that mice have much shorter life expectancies than people?  Couldn't they have blackmailed the head witch to cast a reversal spell, or provide an antidote, while they had her on the ropes?  Nope, I guess the kids just like being mice?  Clunky, clunky, clunky. 

The final act, where they face off against the head witch, is similarly clunky, it reminds me of the ending of "Back to the Future III" where they have to put the Delorean in front of a train to go 88 mph and travel back to the present, but the train can't go fast enough, so they add special power sticks or something, then someone has to go back and save Doc Brown's girlfriend, hang off the side of the train, use the hoverboard, and it becomes a nearly never-ending chain of tiny little problems that all need to be solved just to bring about the required result.  But I'm left thinking that there could have been an easier way to do it all.  That film's from the same director as this one, Bob Zemeckis, so I wonder if he's got a think for Rube Goldberg-type devices. Now I'm going to go read the Trivia and Goofs sections on IMDB to see if I'm the only one bothered by these issues.  

AH, now maybe I see why the film is no longer on HBO Max. There was some kind of controversy after depicting the witches as not having regular hands, instead they have only three fingers on each hand, and they're like elongated claws.  This apparently was offensive to parents of children with limb differences or hand deformities, because it implies that anyone with differently shaped hands is a witch or inherently evil. Right. And nobody complained about the other things, the ways in which witches are shown trying to kill children, isn't this biased against people who practice the Wiccan religion?  No issues there? 

NITPICK POINT: Another one, of many - early on, according to Grandma's stories, witches are not humans, they're demons who have taken the shape of people.  So, then, what's the guarantee that the potion's going to work on them, and turn them into mice?  What if the potion only works on human physiology, and demons have some kind of different system, or a chemical or magical defense against such potions?  Just saying. 

Oh, and then I'm going to shut the blog down for a week. I'm going on vacation tomorrow, we're traveling down South ourselves, on the long-awaited and very delayed Birthday BBQ Crawl #3.  Crawl #1 was in 2017, Crawl #2 was in 2018, and then in 2019 we changed it up and did a Casino Crawl across Las Vegas. Then came COVID, and we haven't had a decent vacation in three years, unless you count the week in Chicago last year, but then we were visiting my wife's brother, who moved there.  Finally, we're back on the BBQ trail of our own design, and we'll be hitting Atlanta, Columbia SC and Raleigh NC.  I know, I know, the horror film chain just really got rolling, and now it's on hold for a week.  But this is why I started the scary movies early, with "Muppets Haunted Mansion" and "Morbius" in September, so I could take a week off now and still make it to Halloween on time.  So just hang tight and I'll be back here on October 24. 

Also starring Anne Hathaway (last seen in "Locked Down"), Stanley Tucci (last seen in "The King's Man"), Jahzir Bruno, Codie-Lei Eastick (last seen in "Holmes & Watson"), Charles Edwards (last seen in "An Ideal Husband"), Morgana Robinson, Josette Simon (last seen in "Cry Freedom"), Eugenia Caruso, Ana-Maria Maskell, Orla O'Rourke, Eurydice El-Etr, Penny Lisle, Simon Manyonda (last seen in "The Current War: Director's Cut"), Philippe Spall (last seen in "Judy"), Brian Bovell (last seen in "Tom & Jerry"), Jonathan Livingstone, Miranda Sarfo Peprah, Ashanti Prince-Asafo, Vivienne Acheampong, Sobowale Antonio Bamgbose, Angus Wright (last seen in "The Courier"), Dempsey Bovell, Paul Leonard (last seen in "Darkest Hour"), with the voices of Chris Rock (last seen in "Summer of Soul"), Kristin Chenoweth (last seen in "You Again")

RATING: 3 out of 10 galvanized nails (another bit of unnecessary dialogue that goes nowhere...)

Ma

Year 14, Day 286 - 10/13/22 - Movie #4,266

BEFORE: Octavia Spencer carries over from "The Nines", and this is another case where I'm really hoping this turns out to be a horror movie of some kind.  I can't be sure, as I haven't seen it yet, and I don't want to just look up the plot on Wiki to find out, I'd prefer for this to happen naturally, either it counts as horror or it doesn't, the chain is good either way, and I've learned to give that preference over being strict with the rules about what counts as what.  After I've seen it, it counts as whatever it is, even if that isn't much.  So, umm, maybe this is a horror film?

The film studio (Blumhouse) certainly pitched it that way, mentioning that this comes from the same producer as "Get Out" and "Happy Death Day".  It's funny, you never hear anybody say, "Oh, yeah, I want to see THAT movie, I hear that the producer is very, very good...."  Yet the studio persists in its thinking that you'll want to go see a film if they can say that a producer on a very popular film was also the producer on THIS one.  Sorry, that doesn't work that way...but I suppose if they said "From the director of "The Help" and "Breaking News in Yuba County" then you wouldn't get a horror-movie vibe from it, and then since you were really looking for a horror movie, you'd skip this one and move on.  It's very silly. 

THE PLOT: A lonely woman befriends a group of teenagers and decides to let them drink at her house. Just when the kids think their luck can't get any better, things start happening that make them question the intention of their host. 

AFTER: This film is about a divorced mother and daughter who move back to where the mother grew up, so she can get a job in the local casino.  (This could be set in AnyTown, USA, but it was filmed in Natchez, Mississippi.). Maggie, the daughter, has a tough time fitting in, until she meets a few other teenagers in school who like to hang out, get drunk and smoke weed. All normal teenage behavior I suppose (unless you care about high school, like I did...) but the teens find it hard to buy alcohol, the drinking age being what it is and all that.  So, they hang out near the liquor store and ask passersby to help them out by buying them beer and various spirits. (Teens are the only ones who drink Fireball, the movie gets that right, at least.)

They luck out when Sue Ann, a worker at a veterinarian's clinic, helps them out by buying the booze, and then after they get busted for drinking by the rock pile, she helps them out even more by letting them drink in her basement.  Sure, it seems a little weird, but if they're going to drink anyway, why not do it in a safe place, where an adult can at least make sure they're sober before they drive home?  NITPICK POINT: If they've got the money for buying alcohol, why don't they also have the money to take Ubers home?  Or why don't they just drink in their own basements, or in the back of the van?  Because then I guess we wouldn't have a movie...

They start calling Sue Ann "Ma" because she's looking out for them - but is she?  She's also checking out the teens' social media feeds and finding out their last names.  Then she's FaceTiming them and sending a bunch of text messages encouraging them to come over and party.  But Maggie and her friends find that the alcohol starts hitting them harder than usual, and then they realize that some of their jewelry is missing, so what's Ma really up to?  Well, it turns out that Ma's got more issues than a newsstand, and seeing the kids interact with each other triggers some flashbacks of emotional trauma that happened to her in high school.  Also, why doesn't Ma want the kids to leave the basement and see the rest of her house, what's going on THERE? 

It turns out that Maggie's boyfriend, Andy Hawkins, is the son of Ben Hawkins, who pulled a prank on Sue Ann back in high school, and now, years later, she's decided she wants some form of revenge.  Ben lets his son drive one of the company vans, and they have tracking devices, so Ben starts to wonder why his son is spending so much time at Sue Ann's place.  Ben confronts Sue Ann, but it only sets her off more, because he's not at all apologetic for the prank he played on her in high school. OK, so it wasn't a bucket of pig's blood at the prom, but it was still traumatic and not cool. 

With the help of drugs from the vet clinic, Sue Ann holds Ben and the teens hostage, and she's got some pretty weird ideas about what to do with them when they can't fight back.  Finally, we get to something close to a horror film, so my including this one here is justified, in the end. Some might say this is reminiscent of the "Saw" films, but I wouldn't know, I didn't see "Saw". Maybe if I saw "Saw", I might say that I've seen this in "Saw".  Maybe one day I'll see "Saw", but I don't know, we'll have to see. 

The flashback story was added to the original script, and I think that was a smart idea.  Without it Ma would be a totally unsympathetic character, but knowing that she was bullied and traumatized in high school explains a lot, not to the point where her actions against the teens are justified, but at least you can understand how she got broken inside, and how the actions of one generation can be felt by the next. I have to admit that this is pretty clever in the end, pertaining to how some things can come full circle, but with unintended results. But maybe I'm overthinking it, maybe it's just about a person in a small town who's very messed up. 

Also starring Diana Silvers (last seen in "Ava"), Juliette Lewis (last seen in "Breaking News in Yuba County"), McKaley Miller (last seen in "Wish I Was Here"), Corey Fogelmanis, Gianni Paolo, Dante Brown, Tanyell Waivers, Dominic Burgess (also last seen in "Breaking News in Yuba County"), Allison Janney (ditto), Tate Taylor (ditto), Heather Marie Pate, Luke Evans (last seen in "Message from the King"), Margaret Fegan, Missi Pyle (last seen in "Feast of Love"), Kyanna Simone Simpson (last seen in "The Immortaly Life of Henrietta Lacks"), Andrew Matthew Welch, Skyler Joy, Nicole Carpenter, Victor Turpin (last seen in "Killing Hasselhoff"). 

RATING: 6 out of 10 photos cut out from the yearbook

The Nines

Year 14, Day 285 - 10/12/22 - Movie #4,265

BEFORE: After tonight, just two more films before I go on vacation - we're flying down to Atlanta and we're going to drive to Columbia, SC and Raleigh, NC, on BBQ Crawl #3, with additional stops at state fairs in both Carolinas, plus whatever else we find fun to do.  My wife and I prepare to go on vacation in very different ways, she's setting up the cat-sitter, doing laundry, figuring out what to pack three days in advance, while I'm busy getting my COVID Omicron booster shot and trying to clear episodes of "Jeopardy!" and "Law & Order" off my DVR so it doesn't fill up while we're gone.  I'm checking the dates of the World Series to see if maybe my favorite TV shows will be off that week. Nope, no such luck.

Ryan Reynolds carries over from "The Amityville Horror" (2005). I'm not sure this qualifies as a horror movie, it's listed as some kind of psychological thriller.  There may be some potential there, but I'm really just using this film to connect two horror chains that I had planned, connecting them together this way gave me 19 films for October, which I'm counting as a full month, once I removed days for vacation and NY Comic Con.  I didn't come up with a better plan, so it is what it is at this point. 

THE PLOT: A troubled actor, a television show runner and an acclaimed videogame designer find their lives intertwining in mysterious and unsettling ways. 

AFTER: OK, so this is not a horror movie.  I'm still not sure what it IS, but I know it's not a horror movie. I'm not even sure how much of a "thriller" it is, because it didn't thrill me, I kept falling asleep. Of course, I was watching it after another late night working at the movie theater, but I'm going to ahead and blame the movie. 

The film is in three sections, titled "The Prisoner", "Reality Television" and "Knowing".  Ryan Reynolds appears in all three sections, but playing different characters, who of course look very much the same.  And they sort of appear to be in each other's orbits, or so it seems over time, but they don't ever meet each other directly.  Hope Davis and Melissa McCarthy also appear in all three segments, also playing different characters in each one.  So, umm, what's going on here?  Well, that's the big question, isn't it? 

Reynolds plays a TV actor at first, someone who appears on a crime procedural show, but who gets confined to house arrest after setting fire to some of his girlfriend's possessions, then doing drugs with a prostitute and totaling his car.  OK, maybe he's going through some stuff, or maybe he's just an addict.  Someone who works for his agent bails him out of jail and finds a house that belongs to another client for him to serve his time.  She takes away his phone, all the alcohol in the house, and also anything that could start a fire - this lady seems like she's on top of things. While under lockdown, the actor seems to go a little crazy, he keeps seeing the number 9 everywhere, every dice roll adds up to 9, he sees more 9's in the newspaper than logically should be there, and there's a cryptic note in his handwriting that says, "Look for the nines" - only he didn't write it.  After befriending the single (?) mother next door, who seems to be flirting with him, he can't quite get a read on her, because she says she's going to come over, but then leaves him hanging.  Finally a talk with his handler convinces him to step outside the range of the ankle bracelet, and it seems at this point that the entire reality dissolves. 

Next, we see Reynolds as a TV writer, and I think he's the guy that owns the house which the actor was staying in after getting arrested.  Not sure. He's away working on his show, "Knowing", which stars Melissa McCarthy.  The same actress who played the single mom before now appears as a TV executive trying to convince him to dump Melissa McCarthy from the show in favor of a more well-known actress, who turns out to be unavailable.  But this ruins the relationship between the writer and McCarthy, so what was the point of that?  Near the end of this, we learn that the writer is also the subject of a reality TV show, currently being filmed.  Did he NOT notice the camera-person following him around everywhere?  This is where things got just a bit too confusing for me.  

In the third segment, Reynolds plays a video-game designer who's on a long drive with his wife (played by Melissa McCarthy) and daughter, but their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, and he leaves them alone to try to get a signal on his phone.  He meets a woman who looks just like the neighbor and TV executive from before, and he tries to get a lift from her to the next town or gas station. Meanwhile, his daughter, back in the car, watches clips from segments 1 and 2 on a digital camera, which sort of ties everything together, except that it also fails to do that.  

There is an answer for everything, how it all fits together, I suppose - but I wasn't that happy with the answer.  At one time Reynolds' character runs through the various possibilities to explain the unexplainable events and connections taking place.  Perhaps this is a dream, perhaps he is dead, perhaps he's in a coma.  Nope, it's none of those, and it's not time travel or multiverse travel either.  I won't say what it is, just to point out that I'm unsatisfied with the explanation given.  At such a late point in the film, a revelation should clear up everything that's gone before, instead it just makes everything we've seen so far even more confusing. 

This film played at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007, which is something that DOES make some sense - the programmers there often love arty, challenging films that defy explanation. But the film bombed at the box office, and it's easy to see why.  This would be very confusing to any movie-goer who wasn't on that indie, intellectual, vibe and seeking out a thought-piece of a film. I really wasn't in that mood tonight, I came here for another horror film, but at least if this film didn't deliver, I can fall back on the fact that it's made a connection to the next batch of horror films, so I'm essentially calling a mulligan tonight, this one's just going to move me on to the next, after the reveal there's really no reason for me to care about this one, or ever think about it again. Sorry. 

Also starring Melissa McCarthy (last seen in "Thor: Love and Thunder"), Hope Davis (last seen in "Greenland"), David Denman (ditto), Elle Fanning (last seen in "Reservation Road"), Octavia Spencer (last seen in "Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde"), Ben Falcone (also last seen in "Thor: Love and Thunder"), Dahlia Salem, John Gatins, Andy Fielder, Greg Baine, Ellen Treanor, Sean Andrews, with a cameo from Jim Rash (last seen in "The Onion Movie")

RATING: 3 out of 10 focus group participants

The Amityville Horror (2005)

Year 14, Day 284 - 10/11/22 - Movie #4,264

BEFORE: Chloe Grace Moretz carries over one more time from "The Addams Family 2". Anybody who can cross genres, and appear in different genres can do well in my end-of-year list.  She's been in 2 animated (or half-animated) films this year and now two horror films.  And I'm back on Ryan Reynolds, who's having an even better year, with four action movies, one animated film, and appearances in two documentaries - so I'm not surprised that now he's showing up again in the horror chain.  He can't beat out Nic Cage this year, but maybe he can tie Bruce Willis. 

The horror linking is a tricky thing sometimes - I've been second-guessing myself all month by passing up on links to "Freaky" and "Old" and "Hocus Pocus", which makes me want to say, "Geez, maybe there was a better way to do this?"  Like what if next October rolls around and I find that I can't put a solid chain together, and I've left all these horror films stranded and unlinkable?  That's negative thinking, and not only do I not want to go there, I have to keep my eyes on the prize because the end of the year is in sight, and if I leave the path I'm on, who knows, the whole chain could fall apart and I won't be able to get to my Christmas movies as planned. Sure, now I realize I could follow the Philip Baker Hall link and get to "Coma" which would lead me to "Creepshow" and/or "Dead Ringers", but honestly, I don't have time to even consider an alternate path.  I'm working every day this week and then on Saturday I'm supposed to get on a plane - so even if there WERE a better path, I don't have time to chart that course.  At this point, the chain is what it is until December 25.  

There are a lot of movies to watch between now and next October - I can't predict what else could also get added to the list before that.  I'll just do what I do every year, put together the best possible chain I can from what got left behind. 

THE PLOT: Newlyweds are terrorized by demonic forces after moving into a large house that was the site of a grisly mass murder a year before. 

AFTER: This is my first film from the "Amityville Horror" franchise - and like any other franchise, it started with one movie, and then when it did well, somebody in Hollywood said, "Well, why can't it be TWO movies?"  And then three, then a remake/reboot, and maybe a Netflix series a decade or so after that.  Because if you just make one movie and call it a day, well, you're leaving money on the table.  There are like a dozen horror movie franchises that I haven't even started on yet, like the "Halloween" films (shout out to Jamie Lee Curtis, who I saw in person at the New Yorker Festival this past weekend) and then "Friday the 13th" and "Nightmare on Elm St." 

But cable's running the original "Amityville Horror" film from 1979, with James Brolin and Margot Kidder, and I'm thinking I should record it for possible future inclusion, and then there's "Amityville II: The Possession" with a less stellar cast.  But then, where do I draw the line, do I add "Amityville 3-D" and "Amityville: the Awakening" or just call it a day?  Honestly, I have no idea. When should I put the "Halloween" and other missing franchises on my to-do list?  I guess I'll work them in when I have time, or if I get an inkling that they're going to help me make my future connections.  

I've tended to avoid the "haunted house" genre ever since I got roped into watching "Poltergeist" way back in 1983, and got the bejeebus scared out of me at the age of 14. After seeing the "produced by Steven Spielberg" credit, I was expecting something akin to "E.T.", and well, it just wasn't that at all. I found it very difficult to sleep for about a week, and now 40 years later, well, not that much has changed, except I don't take the scary movies quite as seriously.  The Amityville franchise wears that "based on a true story" line like a badge of honor, but once you start reading about the real-life DeFeo murders that took place in 1974, you realize that probably there's no supernatural connection at all.  It was just a guy with a broken brain who shot and killed his whole family. Case closed. There's just no reason to think that the spirits of his dead family had any influence over the house's future residents, or that the house was built on a Native American burial ground, or torture prison, this film kind of throws all that in for good measure, by way of explanation.  

Something funny (unusual funny, not "ha ha" funny) happened during the recent pandemic, with the crime statistics.  Most violent crimes - carjackings, muggings, bank robberies - were way down, which makes sense, nobody was going anywhere during lockdown.  But the exception was the murder rate, which went up in 2020 and 2021. What gives?  If everybody was at home, under lockdown or quarantine, the inevitable conclusion is that more people were killing their roommates or family members. Logically, this makes some sense, if people found that their relationships just couldn't survive close contact in small spaces for an extended period of time. All those little petty annoyances between spouses or parents and children, well, they build up, and if there's no school or work to go to, the effect is somewhat cumulative.  And then in some cases, things boil over and you just want to KILL that person, metaphorically at first, but then...

In the end, what's more believable, that the spirits of the murdered children reached out from beyond the afterlife into the here and now to convince more people to kill, or a supernatural force that feeds off of human misery took up residence in one house's ventilation system, or that one imperfect human, who regularly used heroin and LSD, and had been diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, was under a lot of pressure and somehow thought that killing family members would stop the imaginary voices in his head?  I know what I believe, and it's the most likely answer. The direct motive for the killings might still be unclear, but Ronald DeFeo Jr. had a volatile relationship with his parents, and it was most likely added by the author of the original book, and then Hollywood compounded things with the movie.  Obviously it benefited someone financially to do this, because there have been TWENTY-EIGHT films with "Amityville" in the title throughout the Amityville multiverse. 

That being said, as we learned in "Last Night in Soho", nearly every house or flat in London has a checkered history, somebody probably died or was murdered in every room at some point, that's just statistics.  When a real-estate agent sells a house on Long Island, or anywhere else, there's probably a little voice in their head repeating, "Don't mention the murder, don't mention the murder..."  But then if they do, they might as well lean into it, because there is a contingent out there that might be MORE interested in living in a place where a violent crime happened.  They say that lightning can't strike twice in the same place, but of course, it can.  The top spire of any skyscraper has probably been hit by lightning thousands of times.  So it's NOT the house, it's the people who live there next, but of course in the back of their minds, they may be looking for some excuse as to why they find themselves having dark thoughts, just like the previous residents. 

George and Kathleen Lutz divorced in the 1990's, and both died in the mid-aughts. And Ronnie DeFeo died just last year, he'd been in prison ever since 1974, and the stories about the house have now taken on an (after-)life of their own, but let's get real, I say.  I know, I know, I'm really no fun, but that's what I've done since I was a kid, try to separate fantasy from reality.  The real house in question, on Ocean Avenue in Amityville, doesn't even have those two giant curving windows that look like demon (or pumpkin) eyes.  The house used for the first two "Amityville Horror" films is in Toms River, NJ, sorry to burst everyone's bubble, and the one seen in this film is really in Wisconsin. 

You can't have it both ways, in my opinion - you can't say this is "based on actual events" and then acknowledge that all the names and some of the facts had to be changed for legal reasons. Bottom line - if ghosts were real, and if a house could be haunted by one event enough to drive a second family to the brink of madness and murder, then there wouldn't be so many lawsuits after the fact about what the books and movies got right and got wrong. Just every little single detail about the Lutz's time in the notorious house is wrong here, right down to the fact that their dog actually survived the experience.  Nice try, Hollywood, but I'm on to your tricks. 

Also starring Ryan Reynolds (last seen in "Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed"), Melissa George (last seen in "Mulholland Drive"), Jesse James (last seen in "Jumper"), Jimmy Bennett (last seen in "Shorts"), Rachel Nichols (last seen in "Alex Cross"), Philip Baker Hall (last seen in "Eye for an Eye"), Isabel Conner, Brendan Donaldson (last seen in "The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them"), Annabel Armour (last seen in "Contagion"), Danny McCarthy (last seen in "Elvis & Nixon"), José Taitano. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 Alice Cooper and KISS posters

The Addams Family 2

Year 14, Day 283 - 10/10/22 - Movie #4,263

BEFORE: OK, I'm back on horror movies, well, sort of.  This is a cartoon one, so how scary could it possibly be?  It's a hybrid of animation, comedy and spooky stuff, but I did say I wanted to get all these silly ones out of the way, so here goes.  I think things kind of get progressively scarier from here, which is how it should be - the scariest movie should be saved for the big day on October 31, right?  

I found a new band that does a lot of mash-ups, not spooky songs, but just mash-ups of popular songs, like not TRUE mash-ups that use the sound samples from several songs, these are more ones that they record themselves in a studio, incorporating elements and riffs from two or more songs.  I found their mix of "Take on Me" and "99 Red Balloons" over the weekend on a long shift at the theater, like a 17 hour shift.  The band is called Pomplamoose, I think their name is a riff on the French word for "grapefruit", which is "pamplemousse".  They also mashed up "Sweet Dreams" by Eurhythmics with "Seven Nation Army" by White Stripes, and "I Will Survive" from Gloria Gaynor with "This Love" by Maroon 5, and "Every Breath You Take" by the Police with "500 Miles" by the Proclaimers.  Now those are my kind of mash-ups, check them out on YouTube or Spotify if you get a chance - I'll be downloading all their covers and mash-ups as soon as I figure out how. 

Yeah, I survived New York Comic-Con once again, two and a half days at a table in Artist Alley, with some time at the end of each day to walk around a bit and take some pics of the costumed crowd.  Comic-Con is itself a mash-up, mixing comic books with movies, TV shows, panels, costuming, collecting, t-shirts, and now they're starting to add interesting food, too.  I saw booths serving ramen, okonomiyaki, a bunch of different food trucks with too-huge lines, and so on. But I managed to survive on Egg McMuffins for breakfast and empanadas for lunch, because I didn't have time to wait in line for unique and interesting food.  I miss the days of having a booth on the main show floor and catching some bulgogi hot dogs being served a few aisles away.  And then once I made it through Friday and Saturday at Comic-Con, I had to work at the New Yorker Festival at the theater, and that was that LONG 17-hour shift, which ended at midnight. Got home at about 1 am this morning and still had to watch this movie before crashing.  Tuesday I can sleep in and catch up on some sleep.  

But really, I'm toggling between the silly-scary and the very scary, the horror chain makes for some strange neighbors sometimes, but Chloe Grace Moretz carries over from "Carrie" and she'll be here tomorrow when I get back to scary-scary.  

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Addams Family" (Movie #3,683)

THE PLOT: The Addams get tangled up in more wacky adventures and find themselves involved in hilarious run-ins with all sorts of unsuspecting characters. 

AFTER: Well, now I'm thinking I should have dropped this one, or saved it for next year, where it could have helped me link to "Hocus Pocus" and "Hocus Pocus 2" via Bette Midler.  Yeah, that might have been the smart move, because then I also wouldn't have to figure out another film to drop from this year's schedule, I'm still running one film over.  I watched the first animated "Addams Family" feature just two years ago, I probably could have waited another year for the sequel.  But I didn't, so it's too late to turn back now.  

This film is just eighteen different kinds of dumb, that's all.  It's corny dumb, it's makes-no-sense dumb, it's boring dumb and it's also just random-things-happening dumb.  I don't see how a film studio just thinks they can throw a bunch of wacky happenstances into a random order and call that a movie.  Sure, stuff HAPPENS in this film, but it felt like those things had zero chance of coming together and adding up to any kind of coherent storyline.  So Wednesday feels disconnected from her family, SO WHAT?  Who the hell cares?  She's told that she's not really the child of Gomez and Morticia, and may have been switched at birth, which is doubtful because the animators designed her to look JUST like a tiny Morticia, so why wouldn't she be her daughter?  Just like Pugsley is chubby and big-eyed and resembles his father - so come on, I knew from the start that Wednesday was mistaken or get bad intel on her parentage, because it's right there in the character design.  

So her being told this makes no sense, her believing this falsehood makes no sense, and then of course once the reason for someone telling her this in the first place is revealed, that makes no sense.  But that's just the main thing of like a hundred things that don't make sense - take Wednesday's science experiment, for example, where she demonstrates that she can make Uncle Fester smart by giving him a potion derived from the DNA of an octopus that can solve a Rubik's cube.  But you just can't change someone's DNA by giving them something to drink, the digestive system does not lead to any system in the body that controls DNA.  I drink a lot of Mountain Dew, but that doesn't get from my stomach to my cell nuclei, so I can't become part soda, that's just not how things work.  It's done for laughs, of course, so that we can watch throughout the movie as Fester slowly turns into some kind of human-octopus hybrid, but that's not even all that funny, and furthermore, there's no pay-off.  It's like a big set-up for a joke that somebody forgot to finish, where's the punch line? OK, so he does become a giant octopus monster for a bit - again, not funny, and it only tangentially counts for moving the plot, such as it is, forward. 

But there are so many NITPICK POINTS to be made with the premise - like if Wednesday is some kind of child prodigy, a scientific genius, how come she doesn't do a DNA test like right away once her parentage is in doubt.  Eventually she gets there, but why wasn't that the first stop?  And then the reason for the DNA test failing doesn't make sense either, like she'd have to be really stupid to not have factored that in.  So, which is she, smart or stupid?  And I don't even think this is how DNA tests work, anyway.  Would it kill some screenwriter to do a half-hour's research into how DNA testing functions?  Because that's kind of important to the whole premise.  

Instead there's this "noted scientist", Cyrus Strange, who has his belief that Wednesday is his real daughter, as the daughter he does have shows no interest in science.  But not every kid develops the same interests as their parents, or goes into the same line of work.  As a parent, he should know this, and as a scientist, he should be able to prove it, but damn, as a human he's not doing very well.  What kind of message does this film send out to the kids, by depicting a character who can't love a child that isn't biologically his?  So it's clear from the start that he's a heartless bastard, and evil scientist can't be too far behind that.  Saw it coming a mile away, and the kids in the audience probably did too.  

It's all some weird flimsy excuse to show the Addams Family traveling across the country, which I'll admit is a little clever if their final destination is Death Valley, that's a good one, but then stops in Miami and Niagara Falls feel very off-brand and unmotivated by the plot.  Salem, MA would have been a good stop, but then the story decides they shouldn't go there.  Huh?  Why the heck not?  Sleepy Hollow, NY - excellent choice.  But Miami?  There's nothing scary about Miami, except the fact that you have to drive through the garbage state of Florida to get there.  San Antonio and the Grand Canyon feel like throwaway destinations, too - so in terms of having an interesting travel itinerary, the movie succeeds only with two of the six visited cities.  New Orleans, with its connection to voodoo and ghost stories, would have been a better fit than Miami, for sure. 

More NITPICK POINTS - who drags their kids on a family vacation because their kids are spending less time with them?  Oh, right, every American parent, never mind.  But who drives in a camper van that's shaped like their house, and only slightly smaller than that house?  There could have been so many comedic opportunities with the family cramped into a tiny RV, or worse, a van or a station wagon.  Then the trip would REALLY have been a nightmare.  But a house-sized vehicle?  Not funny.  You might as well just put wheels on their spooky mansion and move that around from one travel destination to another.  Anyway, they stole the "summer vacation" idea from "Hotel Transylvania 3", so, umm, it's been done. 

I will note that there is a BIT of an attempted takedown of American culture - the Addams Family ends up in places like a kiddie teen pageant and a biker bar, and those are PRIME opportunities to make fun of a certain sort of Americans - the whole pageant culture deserves to be made fun of, with Moms turning their pre-teen daughters into overly made-up little sexpots with bouffant hairdos, and then of course the bikers with their denim outfits, tough attitudes and tricked-out cycles, it would be very easy to take the wind out of their sails, too, just make a couple of them look weak or effeminate and you're on to something.  But the movie just doesn't GO THERE in either case, either because somebody didn't want to offend middle America, or because maybe it was just too easy?  Either way, huge missed opportunities to poke fun at the culture. 

One point, however, for Wednesday dropping buckets of blood, "Carrie"-style, on to her fellow pageant competitors.  But the film should have gone even farther.  The science fair pointed out how stupid it is to give out "participation trophies" and declare everyone winners, and of course the film gets this right, but then it should have kept up that tone and really become a satire on the stupidest parts of American culture. 

Also starring the voices of Oscar Isaac (last seen in "Dune" (2021)). Charlize Theron (last seen in "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness"), Nick Kroll (last heard in "Sing 2"), Javon Walton, Bette Midler (last seen in "Wolfgang"), Conrad Vernon (last heard in "The Addams Family"), Snoop Dogg (last seen in "Jagged"), Bill Hader (last heard in "Lightyear"), Wallace Shawn (last seen in "Atlantic City"), Brian Sommer, Griffin Burns, Courtenay Taylor, Ted Evans, Cherami Leigh, Mary Faber,.

RATING: 4 out of 10 juggled babies (yeah, that's not a thing.)