BEFORE: OK, I've got time for just two more movies before I go on vacation. Wednesday morning EARLY we're flying to North Carolina for 5 days of BBQ, State Fair food and maybe an Oktoberfest thing, we'll have to see. Can't wait, I've been working every day for the past two weeks AND keeping up with my movies, so a lot of 12 hour, 15 hour, 18 hour days when you factor everything in. Hell, I can sleep on the plane...I hope they don't toss me out with the duffel bags full of drugs.
Keri Russell carries over from "Cocaine Bear". Let's keep the forest creature theme going, though this one sure does NOT look like another comedy.
THE PLOT: In an isolated Oregon town, a middle-school teacher and her sheriff brother become embroiled with her enigmatic student, whose dark secrets lead to terrifying encounters with an ancestral creature.
AFTER: Finally, a truly SCARY scary movie. Good luck getting to sleep after this one. OK, so "Barbarian" had some genuinely scary moments, too, and the "Jeepers Creepers" films were, well, very creepy. But then I think my chain got bogged down in medical horror and a lot of comedy horror, so I've maybe gotten off message just a bit. That's OK, all genres are welcome....ALL...ARE...WELCOME...
I didn't know Keri Russell made so many horror movies, either - I'm getting to three of them, did she make any more than that, or is three her limit? For that matter, who knew Justin Long made so many horror movies, besides "Tusk", which was just horrific in so many ways... Well, both of them are going to make my year-end countdown after starring in three separate films. Keri Russell will be here tomorrow, too - meaning I COULD have dropped tonight's film, it's the middle of a three-film chain. But since it's genuinely scary, and also a bit difficult to link to, why would I drop it? I still have to drop two films to make this year's chain FIT, but now I'm running out of options, and out of the next 32 films, there are now only really two good candidates to get the old heave-ho.
But let's get into "Antlers", which is set in the central Oregon woods, where Frank Weaver is doing something in an inactive mining facility - turns out he's got a meth lab, but I didn't pick up on that at first. Frank and his accomplice are attacked by a creature that apparently came up from the mines, so I wasn't sure if they were digging for something and breached the barrier to Hell, as in "R.I.P.D. 2: Rise of the Damned", or if this was just some kind of native American spirit that got released on a 23-year schedule, like the Creeper in "Jeepers Creepers". I guess let's put a pin in that one for now. Anyway, as you might conclude from the film's title, the creature has antlers, and in the brief moments that we see it, it looks a bit like a giant jackelope. Sort of.
But three weeks after the attack, we pick up with Frank's son, 12-year-old Lucas, who spends his time collecting roadkill and making some VERY creepy drawings in art class, also for his homework on myths and fables he tells a story that's a bit like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, only Papa Bear is very sick on the inside and angry on the outside, so his teacher suspects that Lucas is being abused. She bonds with him, but this also brings up bad memories for her, of her own abusive alcoholic father, who recently committed suicide, which is why she moved to Oregon to live with her brother, the town sheriff. (But that's important later on...)
Meanwhile, the retired sheriff finds the body of Frank's accomplice in the woods - well, half of it, anyway, along with an antler that he can't identify. The old sheriff happens to be Native American, so he knows something about the evil spirits that legends say exist in the woods, and he tells what he knows to the new sheriff, who of course is the teacher's brother, so they start to piece together what might be going on in the Weaver house. HINT: It's not good, and very bad.
The teacher gets the school principal to pay a visit to the house - what could POSSIBLY go wrong there? The police find a few bodies, including Frank, but Lucas says that Frank isn't dead, he's merely transformed into "new Dad". Yeah, new Dad might be some kind of monster, and if you're up on Native American mythology or even read X-Men or Wolverine comic books you might know exactly which type of cannibalistic creature this might be. Then you also might know that this creature is very difficult to kill, and even if you manage to do that, the curse and the spirit becomes free and just moves on to infect the next person, so really, there's no way to win here. So yeah, good luck getting to sleep tonight, all efforts are futile and we're all going to die.
Also starring Jesse Plemons (last seen in "Windfall"), Jeremy T. Thomas, Graham Greene (last seen in "Wind River"), Scott Haze (last seen in "Minari"), Rory Cochrane (last seen in "A Kiss Before Dying"), Amy Madigan (last seen in "The Hunt"), Sawyer Jones, Cody Davis (last seen in "Good Boys"), Lyla Marlow, Jesse Downs, Arlo Hadju, Dorian Kingi (last seen in "The Amityville Horror" (2006)), Ken Kramer (last seen in "The Professor"), Dendrie Taylor (last seen in "Paddleton"), Andy Thompson (last seen in "The BFG"), Jake T. Roberts (last seen in "Killing Gunther"), Glynis Davies (last seen in "Jurassic World Dominion"), Michael Eklund (last seen in "Smokin' Aces 2: Assassins' Ball"), Jay Brazeau (last seen in "Head Over Heels"), Katelyn Peterson, Emily Delahunty (last seen in "Wonder") and the voice of Lisa Cromarty (last seen in "It: Chapter Two".
RATING: 6 out of 10 missing bullies that nobody will miss
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