Disturbia

Year 14, Day 308 - 11/4/22 - Movie #4,277

BEFORE: Carrie-Anne Moss carries over from "The Matrix Resurrections", and not to give anything away, but here are the actor links which will get me to Thanksgiving: Viola Davis, Rob Morgan, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Edi Patterson, Kevin Kline, Sarah Silverman, Cate Blanchett, Beau Bridges, and Ryan Hansen. Go nuts trying to figure out my line-up, I'll only say that there are two MUST-SEE movies for me in the mix, one of which is "The Bob's Burgers Movie". The rest is a mix of newish films on the Netflix and the Hulu, two films connected to Turkey Day, and two films that have been bouncing around on my list for a while, and one of those is today's film. 

A very bad linking crime, worse than not leaving a spot for "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever", is not leaving a spot for "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story", which premieres today on the Roku Channel.  What the hell is Roku, and how do I watch it?  I thought Roku was like the Firestick, I thought it was some kind of device that you attach to your TV to get more channels, or do I not understand either the Firestick or Roku?  It doesn't really matter right now, because even if I understood what or where Roku is, I don't have a slot for "Weird", but that's a damn shame.  My number one Priority for January is to watch this movie somehow.  

God damn it, Daniel Radcliffe plays Weird Al and Rainn Wilson plays Dr. Demento and the cast also has Patton Oswalt, Will Forte, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Conan O'Brien, Emo Philips, Thomas Lennon and Jack Black!  Calm down, take deep breaths...look, the bright side here is that this film could maybe get me out of a giant linking jam next year, like I might need it coming out of the documentary chain or something.  Maybe there's a reason I don't have a slot for it now, maybe it's all part of the great cosmic movie-linking plan - I don't want to watch it in January and then NEED it in August.  Maybe I'd better think this through, give myself a few months to figure out what Roku is. Yeah, that's the play here. 

THE PLOT: A teen living under house arrest becomes convinced his neighbor is a serial killer. 

AFTER: OK, so it's not an EXACT clone of "Rear Window", but the basics are the same - enough to generate a lawsuit against Dreamworks from the Alfred Hitchcock estate, however the court decided that the two films are only similar at a basic level, that there were enough added subplots in "Disturbia" for it to not infringe on the copyright of that classic film, or the 1942 short story "It Had to Be Murder", on which the Hitchcock film was based.  So there's the lesson, kids, if you're going to steal another movie's storyline, you've got to add in a bunch of other stuff or change enough details so that nobody recognizes the original any more.  BUT, it's somehow OK for two films to have the same framework, which I guess makes sense.  If I wanted to go make a movie about a love story set on the Titanic, I obviously wouldn't name the characters Jack and Rose and have them come from two different social classes, or maybe I'd make the male lead rich and the female lead poor, that might be enough for my new film "Love on the Titanic" to not get a cease-and-desist letter from James Cameron. I'm joking, anyway my goal is to do a remake of "Twister" and call it "Gone With the Wind". JK.

Anyway, thinking that your neighbor is really a serial killer is a universal occurence, at least in America, right?  If you see your neighbor digging a hole in his yard with a shovel, is your first thought going to be that he's installing a pool, or that he's burying a body.  The latter, right?  Or maybe you've got a neighbor that keeps an odd schedule, comes and goes at all hours of the night, will you just write him off as an insomniac, somebody who works as a security guard on the night shift, or does your mind immediately determine that something more sinister is going on?  The point here is that anybody with a pair of binoculars can figure out who on their block is cheating with whom, and what's going on behind closed doors.  And the film's poster points out that "Every killer lives next to someone" and perhaps truer or creepier words were never spoken. 

After his father dies in a car accident, teenager Kale gets in trouble at school, and punching his Spanish teacher gets him three months of house arrest, which at first doesn't seem all that bad of a punishment.  Kale can sleep late, play video games, eat whatever and whenever he wants, but eventually his mother cuts off his TV and gaming and makes him do CHORES, and then somewhere between the laundry he does and all the cleaning he doesn't do, Kale starts to go a little crazy.  Hey, we all had cabin fever during the pandemic, so this scenario should be very familiar to all of us by now - but then again, we weren't all wearing ankle bracelets and forbidden to get 100 feet from our house without alerting the Five-O.  

Kale turns to watching all of his neighbors with binoculars, and one in particular is Ashley, the new hot teenage girl next door, who enjoys daily swimming and tanning sessions, also getting undressed without pulling the shades down.  You know this film was written by a man, because later in the film, when she reveals that she knew Kale was spying on her, she took that as a compliment. Yeah, it's not cool to spy on women getting undressed, and I think the vast majority of women kind of feel that way about it.  Who, exactly was the last woman to say, "Hey, I know you've been spying on me every night, watching me undress. Want to come over?"  It's just never happened IRL.

For some reason, with the hottest and most messed-up attractive teen living within binocular range, Kale also turns his attention to another neighbor, Robert Turner.  (This is a huge NITPICK POINT for me, because any normal, horny teen boy would keep those binoculars on Ashley's house, 24/7.).  Kale suspects Turner of being a murdering murderer, because he drives a Ford Mustang that matches the description of the car of a serial killer mentioned on the news, somebody wanted in another state.  He watches Turner have a hot date with a young woman, who's later seen leaving the house in a panic.  

In another encounter, Turner is seen buying a shovel from a hardware store, and dragging a bloody bag into his garage, but there's always a semi-reasonable explanation for what he's doing, and even getting the police to search his house produces no evidence, meanwhile Turner seems to be trying to date Kale's mother, or maybe he just wants to get close enough to ask her how she could possibly name her son "Kale", ewww.  Finally the movie has to pick a lane and decide if Kale is just a teen with an overactive imagination, or if Mr. Turner really is a killer, and the main character was right all along.  If it helps you figure it out, bear in mind that the actor who plays Mr. Turner made his career playing very nice doctors and priests on TV, and then at some point he got sick of that and decided to play brutal villains in films like "The Green Mile" and "12 Monkeys".  I guess an actor can only stand being typecast for so long. 

I don't know, though, this film just kind of left me cold - maybe I just kept it on my list a bit too long - sometimes there's no way a film can possibly live up to the hype if I've put off watching it for years and then FINALLY get to it.  It's like this lunch place I'm eating at, I popped in one day to get a soda and saw this delicious meat loaf, but I'd already eaten lunch.  I made a mental note to come back the next Monday, but then meat loaf wasn't on the menu.  Checked in every day for 2 weeks, no meat loaf - at this point I was DYING for some meat loaf, because I've set this as a goal and with every day that goes by, I've built up the imagined meat loaf experience to be a bigger and bigger thing. Then today, without warning, it was back on their steam table.  So I bought it, and, eh, it was fine. Maybe I'll order it again someday, but it's still just meat loaf. Know what I mean? 

Also starring Shia LaBeouf (last seen in "The Greatest Game Ever Played"), David Morse (last seen in "Horns"), Sarah Roemer, Aaron Yoo (last seen in "Gamer"), Jose Pablo Cantillo (last seen in "Cleaner"), Matt Craven (last seen in "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her"), Viola Davis (last seen in "The Suicide Squad"), Luciano Rauso, Brando Caruso, Daniel Caruso, Kevin Quinn, Elyse Mirto (last seen in "The Rat Pack"), Suzanne Rico (last seen in "The Company Men"), Kent Shocknek (ditto), Rene Rivera (last seen in "It Can Happen to You"), Amanda Walsh (last seen in "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past"), Charles Carroll (last seen in "Nick of Time"), Gillian Shure, Dominic Daniel, Lisa Tobin, Cindy Lou Adkins

RATING: 5 out of 10 Twinkies glued together in a tower (umm, why not just EAT them?)

The Matrix Resurrections

Year 14, Day 306 - 11/2/22 - Movie #4,276

BEFORE: OK, now that October is over, on with November, back to any and all subject matter, whatever's going to get me to the topic of Thanksgiving and Christmas is fair game at this point. 

Yahya Abdul Mateen II carries over again from "Candyman". 

Also, here's the format breakdown for October's films: 

9 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Don't Let Go, Carrie (2013), The Addams Family 2, The Amityville Horror (2005), Ma, Swallow, Love and Monsters, Us, Candyman (2021)

5 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, The Nines, Colossal, Underwater, The Invisible Man (2020)

2 watched on Netflix: Identity, Hubie Halloween

1 watched on Amazon Prime: Hotel Transylvania 4: Transformania

1 watched on Tubi: Lizzie

1 watched on a random site: The Witches (2020)

19 TOTAL

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Matrix Revolutions" (Movie #156)

THE PLOT: Return to a world of two realities: one, everyday life, the other, what lies behind it. To find out if his reality is a construct, to truly know himself, Mr. Anderson will have to choose to follow the white rabbit once more. 

AFTER: Wow, so it's been a minute since the last "Matrix" film, which was released in November 2003.  But I watched it in June 2009, back in Year 1 - still, it's Year 14 of the project, so even though I caught up with installments #2 and #3 LATE, it's still been 13 whole years since then.  Do I even remember what happened in "The Matrix Revolutions"?  Does anyone?  

What the hell was the Merovingian? Or the Trainman?  The Architect?  Anybody?  I watched all three "Matrix" movies before this one, but I only remember what happened in the first one - that is NOT a good sign, especially if this new film is going to pick up on a few of those threads after a long period of down time and try to get something going again.  There's no momentum, like the series came to a dead stop and it's going to take a ton of energy to get it moving again, let alone moving in the proper direction.  Let me go read the plot summary from the previous 2003 film on Wikipedia before I talk about "Resurrections"...Wow, back then I labeled "Matrix Revolutions" as a "pointless waste", but why did I also rate it as a "6"?  What the hell?

Yeah, both Trinity and Neo were toast at the end of the last film, but we know that in the big movie (and comic-book) franchises, nobody dies forever, right?  They only stay dead until a new writer came come up with a new angle and a semi-believable way to bring them back.  A large sum of money is also frequently required to convince an actor to step back into a role, though apparently no amount of money was enough to get Laurence Fishburne to come back, he's been replaced with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Morpheus, or the entity that was Morpheus, or the digital avatar that's replacing Morpheus, whichever. 

It's years later, though - 60 years later - and there is a thing that looks like Neo, only he goes by Thomas Anderson and he works as a video-game designer, specifically a game called "The Matrix", which has the characters Neo and Trinity in it.  But Bugs, someone from the real world, spots this code-within-the-code somehow, and they investigate, only to find a thing that sort of looks like Morpheus, but instead is just some kind of digital simulation of him. (?) Neo/Anderson is stuck in a daily routine full of endless meetings when his company decides that a sequel to "The Matrix" is needed, after a long period of avoiding sequels. There's a HUGE inside joke here, I'm guessing, because the Wachowskis also declined all efforts to make another "Matrix" movie for a long time. (What changed?). Neo/Anderson takes the prescribed familiar "blue pills" every day so that he'll stay in the virtual reality world, presumably. 

But Morpheus and Bugs strive to free him from the Matrix, and drag him into the real world, which once again is populated by machines that feed off of human energy, keeping millions of people alive in those pods while their minds inhabit the simulation.  This is something that never really made sense to me about the "Matrix" films, these aliens came and took over Earth at some point, and they captured people one by one, or perhaps en masse, and transferred almost everyone over to the pods - but these machines feed off human energy?  Wouldn't solar power be a lot more efficient?  I mean, the sun is like RIGHT THERE.  But no, let's spend a TON of energy to keep the pods running, just to harvest a bit of energy from the humans?   

I know, I know, this is all about the effects, what can happen in what is essentially a virtual world where people can run up the walls and force-push a car or move faster than a bullet.  So expecting this world to make some kind of coherent sense is pointless, but I'm also talking about the world outside the virtual world, the one that's run by the alien machines.  Once some of the humans know that THAT one is the real world, why continue to spend so much time in the virtual one?  Why aren't all efforts being directed to (once again) defeat the evil power and take back control of the planet?  I'm not quite getting it, where's the sense of focus, it's like everybody's distracted by the minor details and they're not acknowledging the bigger picture.  So, am I missing something? Why are things this way?

Everything here seems to be about Neo and Trinity, even though these aren't really those characters, but some kind of recreated version of them?  (Another thing that's pretty unclear.) But why would the machines spend so much energy rebuilding them from the ground up? I think they NEED them somehow because the virtual world is so damn boring without them, it's all just staff meetings and brainstorming sessions and the occasional office birthday party.  OH, if only we had a couple of creatively trained fighters who could liven up our drab workdays!  Gimme a break...

I think perhaps they waited too long to make another "Matrix" movie?  The fans came out, of course, but the problem with making a movie that's THIS expensive is that the film can gross over $157 million and still be considered a box-office bomb, because they spent over $190 million making it.  I'll say again what I said after watching "The Matrix Revolutions", that's it's a damn shame so much money got spent on this and not eliminating a disease or world hunger or something more positive and useful.  It's a great deal of time and effort just to get Neo and Trinity back together.  Come on, was it really worth it, in the grand scheme of things? 

Oddly, this is the third film to directly reference "Alice In Wonderland" that I've seen in the last two weeks: "Underwater" and "Us" both had a bunch of this stuff - one had a stuffed rabbit and a bunch of dialogue lines about going down the "rabbit hole" and "Us" had real rabbits and an underworld situation, plus the doppelganger characters wore red outfits, and I guess "Red" was a take on the Queen of Hearts?  But really, the "Matrix" franchise has them all beat, one you factor in that Jefferson Airplane song, with those lyrics "One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small..."

Also starring Keanu Reeves (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Carrie-Anne Moss (last seen in "The Chumscrubber"), Jonathan Groff (last seen in "The Normal Heart"), Jessica Henwick (last seen in "Love and Monsters"), Neil Patrick Harris (last seen in "Downsizing"), Jada Pinkett Smith (last seen in "Scream 2"), Priyanka Chopra Jonas (last seen in "Isn't It Romantic"), Christina Ricci (last seen in "Mermaids"), Lambert Wilson (last heard in "Ernest & Celestine"), Andrew Lewis Caldwell (last seen in "Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny"), Toby Onwumere, Max Riemelt, Joshua Grothe (last seen in "Gunpowder Milkshake"), Brian J. Smith, Erendira Ibarra, Michael X. Sommers (last seen in "Playing It Cool"), L. Trey Wilson, Mumba Maina, Max Mauff (last seen in "The Reader"), Purab Kohli, Freema Agyeman, Sabrina Strehl, Andrew Rothney (last seen in "Mary Queen of Scots"), Cooper Rivers, Leo Sheng, Telma Hopkins, Chad Stahelski, Julian Grey (last seen in "Downhill"), Gaige Chat, Stephen Dunlevy (last seen in "Jungle Cruise"), Ellen Hollman (also last seen in "Love and Monsters"), Daniel Bernhardt (last seen in 'Term Life"), with a cameo from Tom Hardy (?) (last seen in "Stuart: A Life Backwards") and archive footage of Laurence Fishburne (last seen in "Running with the Devil"), Hugo Weaving (last seen in "Mortal Engines").

RATING: 4 out of 10 exomorphic particles

Candyman (2021)

Year 14, Day 304 - 10/31/22 - Movie #4,275

BEFORE: Today is Halloween, so it's the end of my Shocktober chain, which, because of my vacation, had to be cut short, only 19 horror films this month, this was by design.  BUT, if you allow me to count back to "Muppets Haunted Mansion", which I watched in mid-September, perhaps this is just a scheduling issue.  The "Purge" films were horror movies of a sort, and so were "Morbius" and "Last Night in Soho", and even "Sweet Girl" had a bit of the macabre to it. And "Charlie Says" was about the Manson family, so there you go.  Once I factor in the September films that might have qualified, I get 28 movies, that's nearly a full month, it's just one that started early - so, on some level, this year's mission was accomplished. 

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II carries over from "Us", and so does Jordan Peele, as a writer and producer. It took me so long to schedule his two follow-ups to "Get Out" that there's now a new Jordan Peele film, "Nope", which I won't be able to get to this time around.  I saw bits of "Candyman" while working at the AMC in the summer of 2021, and I saw bits of "Nope" earlier this year while working at my current job...I'm obligated to poke my head in on the screenings, just to monitor the sound level, and make sure that the theater-goers are keeping their masks on.  Sometimes I see bits of the film this way, and sometimes those bits make sense, and, well, sometimes they don't. 

But there's a whole lot of horror films I couldn't get to this year, about 50 that I have tangible copies of, either on DVD or my DVR, and then there's a whole list of both classic and new horror films available on streaming that I'm tracking, in hopes of putting together a solid chain for next year. That gives me a list of about 90 or 100 horror films, which theoretically should be more than enough, but right now, I've only got three small chains of 10 linked films each, another chain of 7 films, and then little bricks of two films here, three films there.  Can I work my magic on this list over the winter break and maybe put together a bigger horror chain for 2023?  It's tough to say. 

Here are some of the classic films left over: "Ben" and "Willard", "Evil Dead" and "Army of Darkness", "Species" and "Species II", "Blair Witch 2", "Jeepers Creepers", "The Relic", "Swamp Thing", "Dead Ringers", the "Creepshow" movies, "The Amityville Horror" (1979), "Q: The Winged Serpent", "A Return to Salem's Lot", "Children of the Corn" and "Hocus Pocus". 

Then there are the new horror films that MAYBE can help me link some of those classics together: "Antlers", "The Discovery", "Ghostbusters: Afterlife", "Nightmare Alley", "The Babadook", "Old", "Pet Sematary" (2019), "The Munsters" (2022), the latest "Scream" film, "Freaky", "Blair Witch" (2016), "Barbarian", "The Forever Purge", "Army of Thieves" and "Army of the Dead", "The Night House", "The Wolf of Snow Hollow", "Lamb", "The Black Phone" "They/Them" and "Wendell & Wild". 

And the franchises I haven't even touched yet, like "Child's Play", "Nightmare on Elm Street", "Halloween", "Friday the 13th", and the "Saw" films, where could they all fit into the mix?  I try to knock off at least one franchise, like "Twilight" or "Scream" each year, can I do that again?  I not only don't know, I don't even have time to start researching this. First I've got to get my romance chain for next February into some kind of shape, then add some new horror films over the winter and spring, and then MAYBE I can have some kind of solid answer by summertime.  Maybe. 

THE PLOT: A sequel to the 1992 horror film "Candyman" that returns to the now-gentrified Chicago neighborhood where the legend began.  

AFTER: You get it, right? Halloween, trick-or-treating, candy... Candyman!  I played "Candyman" myself this year, sitting on my porch with two bags full of drug-store, fun-sized candy, after removing all the Kit Kats for my wife and all of the Reese's peanut butter cups for myself, of course. Let the neighborhood kids have all the Jolly Ranchers, Twizzlers, and Dum-Dum lollipops they want.  This is a capitalist country, after all, and trick-or-treating is a socialist practice - they need to learn about trickle-down economics the hard way, I'm keeping the good candy for myself and donating only the stuff we don't need. I didn't seem to get many takers, I don't know if that's because we're still not fully out of the pandemic yet, or because a big man sitting alone on a porch with candy for kids just isn't a good look. Well, kids, nothing ventured, nothing gained - though maybe putting the candy bucket inside a giant cage was the wrong way to go. (I'M KIDDING!)

I'm new to the "Candyman" franchise, and it looks like this was some kind of remake or reboot, several of these actors were in the 1992 film, so I admit I'm sort of at a loss here. There are so many things I don't understand about the Candyman myth, even after watching this film, but my primary question is now, "Why does anybody say this guy's name five times in the mirror, anyway?"  I mean, the second part of the urban legend is that after you do this, he appears as if by magic AND KILLS YOU.  So, umm, why even take that chance?  Sure, you want to test out the legend, to see if it's real, but if it is, YOU DIE. Well, I guess you die with a sense of resolve, with that big question out of the way, at least. I hope it was worth it...

And I get that we're dealing with racism again, that place where African-American social issues intersect with horror.  But they really laid it on thick here, with issues concerning the projects (ghettos) in the Chicago area, also gentrification and the abysmal history of lynchings and race-based violence in the U.S., right up to an incident of cops shooting a homeless man in 1977, a man who was suspected of giving kids pieces of candy with razor blades in them. The man, Sherman Fields, was later proven innocent, but since he had a hook in place of one hand, he was believed to be evil. And then, the theory goes, he'd appear back in the land of the living any time someone said his name five times in the mirror....

But then there's another story, told with the aid of shadow puppets, of a painter named Daniel Robitaille, a black man born in the late 1800's who grew up to become a famous painter, but after he fell in love with a white woman and got her pregnant, he was tortured and killed by a mob of white men. So, wait, is HE the Candyman?  Damn, this was so confusing, now I'm wishing I had watched the original 1992 movie, some of the same actors were in that film, and it feels like this film picked up on some threads from that film and followed them forward.  The charater of Anthony McCoy was in that film as a young boy, and in this sequel/reboot he's a grown-up adult, a Chicago painter who's in a relationship with an art gallery owner.  

There's something suspicious right there - isn't it a conflict of interest for a gallery owner to be sleeping with one of her artists?  We see the other artists complain that Anthony's got an inside track toward getting his pieces shown in the gallery, and they may be right.  Anthony hasn't made a new artwork in two years, he's creatively blocked until he starts researching the legend of the Candyman, and even then, he doesn't make a painting or anything, he just hangs up a mirror in the gallery with a plaque daring people to say the Candyman's name.  WOW, is that lazy work by an artist or what?  He just went out and BOUGHT a bathroom mirror at the Home Depot and called it art?  Marcel Duchamp would be proud, I suppose, but we're not in the age of Dada any more, and I'm with Anthony's fellow artists on this one, if he weren't sleeping with the gallery owner, there's NO WAY that piece would make it into the show. 

What's worse is that Anthony is having visions of the Candyman, or at least Sherman's ghost.  Jeez-us, why don't you paint THAT?  Inspiration is where you find it, after all, paint the gruesome guy with the hook hand that you see when you close your eyes, DO THE WORK, instead of just coasting and hanging up that bathroom mirror on the gallery wall!  Anthony also gets stung by a bee at some point, and he keeps scratching the bite until it gets infected and pieces of his skin are falling off.  Umm, he may want to have that looked at.  Before long, his whole arm is going to...AHH, I see what you did there. 

For some reason, the word spreads, and people keep testing out the theory by saying "Candyman" in the mirror five times, and they KEEP DYING.  Does this make any sense?  Hey, I heard about these high-school kids who said "Candyman" in the mirror and they all died, I can't wait to try that?  Sure, and why not do the Cinnamon Challenge and eat some Tide Pods while you're at it, the world will be better off without you, or at least smarter.  And when Anthony finally goes to the hospital, he accidentally finds out that he was born in the projects, and this leads him to ask his mother about the events seen in the first film, when he was kidnapped by the Candyman as a small child, and a woman named Helen Lyle saved him, but died in the process.  Coincidentally, Anthony had been using her research on the legend to create his art, go figure!  

I still didn't really understand what was happening at the end, maybe there is a Candyman collective and it seemed that William, the guy in the laundromat, seemed to know a lot about this. After all, he was present when Sherman Fields was killed by the police. But even though I saw the ending several times while working at the AMC last summer, I just still didn't quite get how it related to the rest of the film.  Is it just me?  I had to read the whole plotline on Wikipedia just to grok what was taking place in the last 15 minutes or so. And honestly, it's still pretty unclear.  

It's not even really a NITPICK POINT, but the reports over the years of razor blades in Halloween candy have been blown completely out of proportion.  The simple fact is that razor blades are larger than you think (also pretty outdated, most people these days use disposables or electric razors, but that's neither here nor there) and most Halloween candy is what they call "Fun-Sized", aka smaller than usual.  So merely concealing a full-size razor blade in a fun-size treat would be quite a challenge, nearly impossible to do. Now, razor blades in APPLES is another story, however what kind of a sick, perverted person hands out FRUIT on Halloween instead of candy?  Most kids would boycott those houses in the first place. Yet, the simple truth is that when people do investigate reports of tainted candy, it's often determined that a family member was involved in placing the foreign object in the candy, which means that either the parents loved their kids enough to teach them a valuable lesson about stranger danger, or they hated their kids enough to try to kill them for reals. You make the call. Yet, the urban legend about strangers trying to kill kids with candy persists - the story is stronger than the reality, which also kind of explains the Q-Anon thing with the non-existent pizza parlor somewhere in the D.C. area. Well, you can't prove that it DOESN'T exist...

Speaking as someone who was working as a theater usher when this film was theatrically released, it's really a dirty trick to flip the screen image for the first few minutes of the film.  Do you know how many patrons just at the ONE theater I worked at ran out to complain that the film was being shown all backwards?  A lot, so much that the management had to put up a SIGN warning people that the first few minutes of the film were meant to be screened in an inverted fashion.  To make matters worse, the Sammy Davis song "Candyman" plays over the opening vanity logos, and it sounds all distorted and jittery.  So the first few minutes of this movie are a projectionist's nightmare, even when it's being screen perfectly, it looks and sounds all messed up...

Well, it all doesn't really matter now, because Halloween is over and that's a wrap on the Shocktober chain for another year.  Now I've got 25 movies left in 2022, but I have to watch 15 of them in the next 24 days if I'm going to make it to my Thanksgiving movies in time. It's still going to be tight, I've got a bunch of shifts coming up at the theater, but then the screenings sort of dry up a few days before the holiday. So, I like my chances.  

Also starring Teyonah Parris (last seen in "How Do You Know"), Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (last seen in "The Kid Who Would Be King"), Colman Domingo (last seen in "Freedomland"), Kyle Kaminsky, Vanessa E. Williams, Brian King (last seen in "Widows"), Miriam Moss, Rebecca Spence (last seen in "Man of Steel"), Carl Clemons-Hopkins, Christiana Clark, Michael Hargrove, Rodney L. Jones III, Heidi Grace Engerman, Ireon Roach, Breanna Lind, Malic White, Sarah Wisterman, Sarah Lo, Mark Montgomery, Torrey Hanson, Cassie Kramer, Cedric Mays, Hannah Love Jones, Genesis Denise Hale, J. Nicole Brooks (last seen in "The Weather Man"), Pamela Jones, Tien Tran, Katherine Purdy, Mike Geraghty (last seen in "The Trial of the Chicago 7"), Aaron Crippen, Dan Fierro, Nancy Pender, Johnny Westmoreland, Guy Spencer, Daejon Staeker, Tony Todd, Ben Marten, Fady Naguib (last seen in "Eternals") and the voice of Virginia Madsen (last seen in "Mr. North").

RATING: 5 out of 10 industrial-size clothes dryers

Us

Year 14, Day 303 - 10/30/22 - Movie #4,274

BEFORE: Well, damn it, because I'm locked into a chain that will get me to the end of the year, and the new "Black Panther" film comes out in 10 days.  With a little more foresight, I might have found a way to end my October chain with tonight's film, take a few days off, then go see "Wakanda Forever" as soon as it opens.  Well, then I'd have no outro for that, in addition to shaking up my chain at essentially the last minute, so I'm not going to do that. I'll just put the new Marvel film on my list and I WILL get to it ASAP in the New Year.  Considering that I caught up on Marvel this year, by watching "Shang-Chi", "The Eternals", "Doctor Strange 2", "Venom 2" and "Spider-Man: No Way Home", and even the "She-Hulk" series, I think I've done pretty well in 2022, no regrets. Tomorrow I'll list all the horror movies I didn't get to - but hey, I'll need some material for next October, too.

Elisabeth Moss carries over from "The Invisible Man". 

THE PLOT: A family's serene beach vacation turns to chaos when their doppelgangers appear and begin to terrorize them. 

AFTER: Well, here's the good news - if your whole family is stuck for Halloween costumes, or decides at the last minute that they all want to do something together, then all you need are some red jumpsuits and long pointy scissors, and you can all just go trick-or-treating as your own doppelganger family.  You just need to mess your hair up, open your eyes real wide and learn how to smile like a crazy person. Problem solved.  

This was the hot horror film of 2019, I think you can see from my choices this year that even if I put a horror film on my list and try to fast-track it, it still can take me two or three years to get to it.  I got very lucky this year and found slots for "Morbius", "Last Night in Soho" and "Hotel Transylvania 4", but the rest have been around for a couple cycles, at least.  And "Tales from the Darkside", how long has THAT one been on my list?  Possibly since the beginning, it's tough to say. But I'd been trying to get to the "Purge" franchise and "The Amityville Horror" for a while, thankfully it's the newer films that allow me to use the older ones as linking material, or perhaps vice versa.  

But if I think back, it was two years after "Get Out" was the hot movie, and literally everyone was waiting to see what Jordan Peele would do next.  The answer turned out to be "Us" and then "Nope", but neither one really struck gold in the way that "Get Out" did - then Peele became the latest filmmaker to fail at trying to revive "The Twilight Zone", and I think we all wished him well, but let it rest already, stop trying to make "The Twilight Zone" happen. It had its day in the 1950's, and a movie in the 1980's, I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I don't have time for another anthology TV series that I have to watch. I made it through all the Rod Serling episodes when I was a kid, learned a lot about dramatic irony, sure, but I committed them all to memory so that I'd never have to watch them again - because it turns out that when you play everything for shock value, there's not a great desire to watch that movie or TV show again.  Once you learn the "Big Twist", you'll see it coming the second time, and its lost its impact. 

And there is a "Big Twist" here, but it's buried in a very confusing, convoluted plotline - I still saw it coming a mile away, probably because I trained myself as a kid to figure out all those "Twilight Zone" episodes.  Don't get me wrong, there's a great set-up here in "Us", the opening half-hour is 100% solid - it's the last half-hour, the time during which everything is supposed to be revealed and explained, where things just kind of fall apart.  Oh, umm, how about a mid-review SPOILER ALERT here, if you don't want to learn the whole plotline of "Us" then please stop reading now, there's just no way to talk about this film without giving it all away.  Anyway, a family on vacation gets a visit from their creepy doppelgangers, which is a German word that means "I look just like you, and I'm here to replace you."  

The Wilson family is no match for their doppelgangers, who wear those red jumpsuits and carry those long pointy scissors and talk about "the Untethering" in a creepy way.  Actually, only one of them talks, the others are either silent or make creepy growling or bellowing noises.  Creepy, right, and what are they going to do with those scissors?  At the same time, we're shown flashbacks of a little girl at a California beachside amusement park, wandering away from her parents and finding some kind of hall-of-mirrors in a funhouse, as one does at an amusement park.  But within the hall of mirrors she meets her own reflection, that is to say, a little girl who looks and dresses just like her.  Also creepy.  So, umm, what's the connection between the stories?  Is the little girl from the hall of mirrors the grown-up doppelganger, and if so, how did she get a whole doppelganger family that looks just like the real Wilson family?  

Before we get any constructive answers, there's a drawn-out fight where the Wilson family has to defeat their doppelgangers, which isn't easy because they're suburbans, not really the killing type.  Put anybody's back up against the wall, however, and they could be made to defend themselves - and any parent might have it within them to defend their children if needed, so deep down, perhaps we're all killing machines, when push comes to shove.  Would you kill somebody to save your children, or your parents?  Who can say what can happen in the heat of the moment?  Would you kill a home intruder in the middle of the night, to protect your family?  

But then it turns out that what's happening to the Wilsons is happening all over the city, maybe even all over the country.  Crazed people in red jumpsuits are turning up all over the place, and if left unchecked, they're finding their human counterparts, presumably killing them, and then taking their place in a long, protest-like line of doppelgangers, what gives?  A reference early in the film to the failed 1986 public event "Hands Across America" gives another clue to what might be going on here.  The film also opens with the strange fact that there are miles and miles of tunnels under the United States, many of which don't have a known purpose.  

But the big problem here is that even after the big reveal, when you try to put all these little narrative pieces together, it doesn't really make any sense.  It's creepy, sure, but it still has to WORK as a story, and this just doesn't.  If you tell me there's a guy who lives in a shack in the woods and he's killing people with a machete, I can understand that.  If you tell me there's a vampire who lives in a castle and he sleeps in a coffin during the day and turns into a bat at night to drink human blood, it's a big ask, but I can still get behind it.  But then if you tell me that the government somehow cloned everyone and made the clones live in the underground tunnels, where they all constantly mimicked the actions of the citizens living above because they don't have complete souls of their own, and this was some failed program to try to control the population, well, sorry, I'm not coming along on that ride.  This seems even more far-fetched than saying that celebrities and politicians are drinking the blood of frightened babies in the basement of a Washington DC pizzeria. 

How does this even work, anyway, if the government is no longer in control of the project, then who's feeding the clones, who's getting them the jumpsuits, how do they learn English or take showers or get supplies on a regular basis, and why don't more of them come up the stairs or the giant escalator and escape through the amusement park on a regular basis?  And then who decided that completing the Hands Across America project was the ultimate goal, the thing they should be focused on?  If they're all about the Untethering, and replacing their counterparts, why isn't THAT the main goal?  Wouldn't it make sense for them to come up above ground one by one, initiate the take-over gradually, like the Skrulls in "Secret Invasion", rather than do it all at once, thereby revealing their presence to the world and tipping their hand?  

Sure, I get it, mirrors are creepy and amusement parks are creepy, empty beaches are creepy, and rabbits in cages are creepy, but the pieces of the puzzle just aren't coming together for me here.  And twins are creepy for sure.  People who look a bit like you are definitely creepy - if you let them be.  I've got photos of myself encountering my doppelgangers at comic-con - this happened when someone came to my booth who was also wearing a baseball cap and a similar Hawaiian shirt, and at that point what can you do but hug that other person and have your picture taken together?  To me that seems like a much better way of handling things than just killing them outright.

I suppose there's a big metaphor here for the class system in the U.S. - as there's one group of people who get to live above ground, have jobs and houses and cars, while another group of people lives "underground", and doesn't have all of those things.  That's fine, I get the race-based metaphor, but it's somewhat contradicted by depicting an upper middle-class African-American family, so the whole message gets kind of muddled.  Sure, we all expected Jordan Peele to make another horror film connected to the Black experience, but there were scarier alternatives out there - gerrymandering, for example. I can't think of many things more terrifying than a whole group of people losing their voting rights and representation, but I guess that would be a lot harder to translate into a horror-movie plot.  

Also starring Lupita Nyong'o (last heard in "Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker"), Winston Duke (last seen in "Spenser Confidential"), Shahadi Wright Joseph (last heard in "The Lion King" (2019), Evan Alex, Tim Heidecker (last seen in "Brigsby Bear"), Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (last seen in "The Trial of the Chicago 7"), Anna Diop (last seen in "Message from the King"), Cali Sheldon, Noelle Sheldon, Madison Curry, Ashley McKoy, Napiera Groves, Lon Gowan (last seen in "The Call of the Wild"), Alan Frazier, Duke Nicholson, Dustin Ybarra (last seen in "Ted 2"), Nathan Harrington, Kara Hayward (last seen in "Paterson") and the voice of Jordan Peele (last heard in "Toy Story 4")

RATING: 4 out of 10 whacked moles

The Invisible Man (2020)

Year 14, Day 302 - 10/29/22 - Movie #4,273

BEFORE: OK, now I'm officially late, and the prospects for catching up aren't great.  This was always going to be my Saturday film, but since I lost Friday night and I have to work ALL DAY Saturday, then I have to watch this Saturday night, after a 12 hour shift, and (presumably) some kind of nap.  I'm going to be wiped out, I don't know how I'll be able to stay awake.  Hopefully this one will be just scary ENOUGH to hold my attention and make me afraid to close my eyes, that might be the saving grace.  However, there's no way I can post a review until Sunday, so to me, that's late - even if I end up staying awake and watching it "on time", which for me, means late. 

Amali Golden carries over from "Love and Monsters", she's got an uncredited role in today's film, but that's OK, because according to IMDB, she's in here somewhere, as "Annie". 

THE PLOT: When Cecilia's abusive ex takes his own life and leaves her his fortune, she suspects his death was a hoax. As a series of coinciences turns deadly, Cecilia works to prove she is being hunted by someone nobody can see. 

AFTER: OK, so I survived the long Saturday shift, somehow I managed to get to the theater before 6 am and open up, and get it ready for the school's Open House.  As soon as we got all the tables and chairs in place, all of the teachers and volunteers showed up at the same time, and before I knew it, we were swamped with prospective students and parents, there to learn more about the college, I guess for next year?  Damn, it's been so long I kind of forgot how college selection and admissions works.  I guess colleges have to promote themselves to the parents so they can get that sweet, sweet tuition money and use it to pay the hourly wages of the worker drones like me, so, umm, thanks for considering art school, parents!  

I somehow got home before dinnertime, on a weekend night when most adults just want to get out there and party, I saw a lot of people in weird costumes on the subway - well, more than on the average Saturday night in NYC, anyway.  Coming home from the late shifts I can sometimes spot a drag queen or two, that's fairly normal now.  Then I figured I'd watch TV and take a nap, but I didn't - and a couple of bottles of pumpkin ale didn't knock me out, either.  Sometimes beer keeps me up rather than puts me to sleep - so 11 pm rolled around and I'd figure I'd start the movie, thinking I'd probably be asleep after 10 minutes, but I stayed awake!  That's a good sign for a horror movie, remember that "Underwater" kept making me doze off, again and again. 

All week, I've found my films at the intersection of horror and bad relationships, like "Colossal" and "Swallow" both riffed on women's relationships with toxic men, and this one fits right in with those.  (Let's file "Lizzie" and "Love and Monsters" under "It's Complicated", OK?). "The Invisible Man" is about a woman trying to escape from a controlling husband, somebody who's rich and a big tech executive in the optics market (hint, hint) but wants to keep his wife under wraps at his compound, and be in charge of everything she does, says and eats.  This guy could apparently be with any women he wanted, but then when she splits, his obsession goes into overdrive, and then he can't imagine himself with anyone else.  Perhaps no other woman would put up with his controlling ways, and in Cecilia he found the perfect submissive - and of course, he desperately wants back the person he can't have. It all kind of fits, psychologically speaking.  

However, not everyone would go to such extremes to get someone back, like faking their own death after crafting a will with such outrageous terms - Cecilia gets his entire optics fortune, but in monthly increments of six figures over four years, provided that she remains innocent of any criminal wrongdoing. (Now, why would THAT be in the terms of the will, hmmmm...). It seems her late husband is still controlling her, even after his "death", that's the easiest assumption to make, but for God's sake, why does she agree to these terms?  Can't she get her own lawyer, and negotiate a better deal, like how about she gets everything right away and doesn't have to jump through any hoops?  Or she gets to run his company as the majority shareholder?  And to get the money, of course she has to sign the contract, provide her bank account information and her current address, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?  That would only be bad if her husband was only MOSTLY dead, and wanted to stalk her...

I think this is the stupidest part of the film, perhaps, because with his invisibility power, Adrian Griffin can do so many things, he could rob jewelry stores or sneak into bank vaults, or if he's a total perv he could just walk into any women's dressing room or locker room, yet he instead devotes all of his efforts into winning back the ONE woman who is sick of him and can't stand him. Just move on, dude.

Before long, the film turns into a solid creep-fest, because, well, because we know it's called "The Invisible Man", and we know that sooner or later, there's going to be some hijinks caused by somebody we can't see on camera.  I admit I had a bit of an advantage here, because ever since I got my hearing aid, I've been watching films with the captions on, and any notable sound effects are mentioned in the captions for the benefit of the hearing-impaired.  Whatever technology the Invisible Man is using here apparently makes some kind of clicking noise, because whenever he was in the room, I got a heads-up about the clicking from the captions.  That's a big clue that I should be looking for curtains moving, doors appearing to open by themselves, or chair cushions that are indented as if somebody you can't see is sitting on them...

But what's really clever here is the uncertainty, even if Cecilia feels like there's somebody invisible in the room with her, how can she possibly prove it?  What if that noise she hears is just the wind, or the normal creaking noises that any house might make?  Is that bump on the ceiling from an invisible person in the attic, or maybe it's just a squirrel that got inside, or an acorn that fell on the roof?  Never mind that, what if she's going crazy?  Certainly everybody THINKS that when she says that her husband is stalking her from beyond the grave, how do we in the audience really know what's going on in any particular situation?  Is Adrian dead or not?  Is Cecilia crazy or not?  And where is all of this going to end up?  

They kind of keep you guessing here - Adrian's brother just happens to also be his estate lawyer, so maybe he's in on the conspiracy.  Is he evil or, you know, just a lawyer?  He claims that he also hated how controlling his brother was, and so he's a sympathetic figure, for a time.  But maybe he's a little TOO sympathetic, is that all an act?  Cecilia's sister is very helpful when she's trying to get her life back together, but then she starts acting cold to her, what's up with that?  By the time Cecilia is spreading dirt or flour around on all the floors, we have to consider that maybe she's just gone completely off the deep end.  

Between this and "The Handmaid's Tale", Elisabeth Moss really has become the go-to actress for the neurotic doormat, I realize that her character was in a bad relationship, but when we first meet her she's got not only the fear of relationships, but anxiety over going outside, fear of being watched, intimacy issues, control issues, somehow she found the strength to leave her controlling husband, but then immediately reverts to a state of weakness.  Where did that resolve suddenly go?  Maybe it does work this way, I don't know - maybe the mistakes of the previous relationship do follow you around for months or even years.  Sometimes literally.

But pity the actor who gets the news from his agent that he's got the starring role in that new big horror movie, only to find out that he's going to be playing the Invisible Man, and he won't be seen for about 95% of the film...

I'm trying lately to not overthink things, and just let things go when they don't make much sense.  BUT, if I were still that guy who called out the NITPICK POINTS I'd be inclined to mention that even if a person were wearing a special suit that was covered in a ton of tiny cameras that could somehow each take a picture of what you might see on the other side of a person, and transmit that to a tiny screen that was somehow not blocking another one of the cameras, and thus it would appear from all the tiny screens together that you were looking THROUGH the person instead of at him, that image, theoretically, would never look QUITE right, because the angle would be wrong.  You'd be across the room, so the image your eyes would expect to see, let's say of the wall behind the Invisible Man, wouldn't be completely matched by the one taken by the camera that was on his back, so I'd have to call B.S. on this technology, as depicted here.  At the very least, even if the suit was working perfectly, you'd see a kind of shimmer as he walked by, as the projected images wouldn't totally line up right. 

This project was originally going to be part of a shared universe for the old Universal Monsters, like Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolfman.  Remember how Dr. Jekyll turned up in that Tom Cruise re-boot of "The Mummy"?  After that movie tanked, the plans changed and so somebody decided to re-work the "Invisible Man" part of the franchise into a new stand-alone film, but one that really drew power from the #metoo movement, with a strong female character.  So Johnny Depp was out as the main character, which is probably a good idea, because who would believe that Johnny Depp would be involved in a bad relationship, with a husband and wife each trying to get control over the other?  Hey, wait a minute...

Then the film had the bad fortune of booking a release date in February 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was starting to hit, and people stopped going to movie theaters.  This was doubly ironic, since it featured a main character who for the first third of the film is under lockdown and afraid to leave the house.  Still, the film managed to turn a profit, grossing $144 million against a $7 million budget, partially because it was played a lot in drive-ins, which re-opened in some parts of the U.S. before regular theaters did. 

Also starring Elisabeth Moss (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Oliver Jackson-Cohen (last seen in "The Lost Daughter"), Harriet Dyer, Aldis Hodge (last seen in "One Night in MIami...."), Storm Reid (last seen in "Don't Let Go"), Michael Dorman (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"), Benedict Hardie (last seen in "The Light Between Oceans"), Renee Lim, Brian Meegan, Nick Kici, Nicholas Hope (last seen in "Scooby-Doo"), Sam Smith, Vivienne Greer, Cleave Williams, Cardwell Lynch, Zara Michales, Nash Edgerton (last seen in "Jane Got a Gun"), Xavier Fernandez (last seen in "Fool's Gold"). 

RATING: 7 out of 10 camera pans to "empty" spaces