Barbarian

Year 15, Day 276 - 10/3/23 - Movie #4,558

BEFORE: Richard Brake carries over from "R.I.P.D. 2: Rise of the Damned".  This is about the time of year when I'm reminded that there are two kinds of actors - the kind who dabble in horror movies, like Jeffrey Donovan did a LOT of work in between "Blair Witch 2" and this one, including the "Law & Order" reboot - and then there are those who make it the focus of their filmography, like Richard Brake.  

Those actors with a focus on horror have a greater chance of making it to my year-end honor roll, for those with three or more appearances for the year.  Just being used as a link once is NOT enough, because that only counts for two, and it takes three to make the cut.  Those actors who are well rounded have a better chance, every year there are some people who appear in both romances AND horror, and they really have the inside track.  At the moment there is still a former U.S. President in the lead, thanks to my documentaries - ah, but which one?  And another ex-Pres is tied for second, but an actor tied with him for second will most likely surpass him.  There could be a photo finish....

Suddenly, I am reminded that THIS would have been the slot for the film "Villains" if I had not moved it to mid-March to help me with a linking emergency, I needed it to connect "Endings, Beginnings" via Kyra Sedgwick to "The Bling Ring" via Maika Monroe.  But it also starred Jeffrey Donovan AND Bill Skarsgard, so it could just as easily have connected "R.I.P.D. 2: Rise of the Damned" with "Barbarian".  Thankfully, when I removed it from this part of the chain, the two films on either end shared an actor, so the chain could continue. Why, it's almost like I knew what I was doing.

THE PLOT: A woman staying at an AirBnB discovers that the house she has rented is not what it seems. 

AFTER: You might not expect to see Justin Long in a horror movie, because he's spent so much time in light comedies and a few romance-films.  But you would be wrong, because he's also in at least two other horror films which I will watch after this one.  He'll make the year-end list for sure now with four appearances, and so will Bill Skarsgard, and so will Richard Brake and Jeffrey Donovan.  Everybody wins!  Umm, OK, not Kate Bosworth if she's only been in 1 romance and 1 horror film this Movie Year.  I mention this because I believe Mr. Long and Ms. Bosworth are married to each other now.  

I met Justin Long once, way back in 2003 after he had appeared in "Galaxy Quest" and the TV show "Ed" and I cast him in an animated feature, where he played the voice of a tough, motorcycle-riding 1950's greaser teen.  My boss was unfamiliar with his career playing nerdy high-school students, but then asked if he would also do a couple pick-up lines for some minor characters in a geekier voice, and Justin said, "Sure, that's kinda of my thing..."

Of course, he was also in the infamous Kevin Smith film "Tusk", and if you really need to see a man turned into a walrus-like creature, fine, go ahead, but don't say I didn't warn you away.  But having been in another horror movie (or at least a horrific movie) it really made me wonder in this film why he wasn't more aware of the dangers of going into a strange house and spending the night...

Let me also point out that this film has almost EXACTLY the same plot points as a romance film I watched in February, called "Alone Together" - namely, two people end up renting the same AirBnB for the same time period, which SHOULD be impossible, but hey, it's happened in at least two movies.  I was talking to a co-worker about "Alone Together" and they said, "Wait do you mean "Barbarian"?"  Umm, no, this movie was not called that.  "But THAT'S the plot of "Barbarian"!" they insisted, so I was forced to check it out.  Please let me confirm that although the two movies start out the same, they have VERY different endings.  I was tempted to put them together on a DVD, but sensibility won out.  Nobody ever gets the references in my "What do these two films have in common?" filing system for my DVD collection...

But I really don't want to say too much here, except that if you want to get nuts this Halloween season, you could do a lot worse than this.  As Batman said once (or twice), "Let's get nuts!"  A woman shows up at her AirBnB in a very shady area of Detroit, and there is already a man staying there, who rented it through a different agency - which itself is weird, can a house be listed on two sites?  Maybe?  I don't know.  Then the guessing game starts for the audience, because duh, it's a horror film, so where's the horror?  The man is played by Bill Skarsgard, who also played Pennywise in "It", so it is him?  No, no, too obvious, so then, is it her?  Does she have some deep, dark secret like she's really a vampire or a serial killer or a cannibal.  Come on, come on, get on with it?  When is something going to, you know, like HAPPEN?

Tess and Keith reluctantly agree to share the house, they drink a bottle of wine together, they both have ties to the modern jazz scene, things seem to be going well, except the man talks in his sleep and seems to be having disturbing dreams.  Wait, is that it?  Is he really a ghost or a werewolf or a serial killer?  Wait, is one of them dead or haunting the house or not really there?  Do I see dead people?  Morning comes and she goes to her job interview, her prospective boss is concerned that she's staying in a really sketchy part of town, and as she views it during the daytime, yeah, a lot of the houses seem to be uninhabited or falling apart or have suffered fires or something.  We drive pass some houses in rural Connecticut or Long Island sometimes and talk about how they look like "murder shacks" to us, this seems to be a whole neighborhood of them...

The rest of the film is about Tess trying to contact AirBnB to get a refund, and if you've ever tried to deal with their customer service, you may realize why one reviewer called this movie "The scariest film in years."  First she tries to call the company, but she's on hold for, like, forever.  Then she finally gets through on the phone, but JUST as a representative picks up, she reaches for her phone to turn off the speaker, and she accidentally disconnects the call.  Don't you HATE when you do that?  So she calls back, but she gets a recording that says her wait time is about 53 minutes, but her call is VERY important to the company.  Sure, she can navigate the phone menu and request a call back, so she doesn't have to stay on hold, but come on, seriously?  So she tries their web-site, but now her phone is low on battery power, AND she doesn't know the wi-fi password at the AirBnB so she has to use her data minutes?  Forget that, those things are expensive.  So OK, she logs on with a laptop but then their web-site has a chat function, and the chatbot can't quite seem to understand the problem, so it's back to the phone.  This is everybody's darkest nightmare, right?  

I'm just kidding, that isn't what happens at all.  But I had you going, right? 

A homeless man chases Tess inside, and then she accidentally gets locked in the basement, luckily she bangs on the window to get his attention, as she's got the house-key with her, therefore he can't get in to open the basement door.  They work it out, but while she was down there she discovered a secret room with a bed and a bucket in it.  Yeah, there's no really good reason to have a secret room in a house, is there?  She wants to immediately leave the house, which, yeah, sure, would have been a good idea, only then the movie is over.  Keith convinces her to stay while HE checks it out, and then he's down there for a good long time...

And that's about as far as I'm going to go with the first story, there's a second and maybe even a third story that may all connect together, or hey, maybe they don't.  A lot of crazy shit happens, but I'm not going to spoil it, you all deserve to watch the film yourself and have just as much trouble getting to sleep this month as I will. Ah, well, there's always November to catch up on my sleepy time, I only need to watch 13 movies that month.  

In the second story, Justin Long plays an actor who has recently been caught up in a sex scandal, allegations of rape by his co-star - so that TV pilot is moving ahead without him, and the legal cases ahead of him - defending the rape charge and also suing his accuser for defamation - are going to be costly.  SO he decides to check into selling some of those properties he owns in the Detroit area, because for some reason people don't seem to be very interested in renting them through AirBnB.  Gee, I wonder why.  That wouldn't be the...yep, it's the same house.  OK, this time we're REALLY on edge, waiting for the something to happen. Again.

And then there's a flashback that may explain the secret room - or hey, maybe it doesn't, you be the judge.  Eventually we can piece the whole thing together, and yeah, it's freaking nuts and very scary, but hey, that's what horror films are for.  Not everybody's going to make it to the last reel, and then we have to decide if the wrong things happened to the right people, and if we're OK with that. Or did they happen to the people who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and if so, are we OK with that?  Really, there's so much we can't control, so what's the point of even trying?  

So I'm not going to give anything else away here, I just have some random musings, and you can make of them what you will: 

It's nice to see someone else still using VHS tapes.  Glad that I'm not the only one. 

AJ finds the extra room in the basement and immediately wonders if he can also rent THAT out on AirBnB.  Nice idea, but that's not going to solve all of your money problems, dude. 

There was a contestant on the new season of "Survivor" who quit the game at the end of the first episode, because she realized she did not enjoy sleeping outside on the beach and going for more than six hours without food.  I really admire this woman for her honesty - and I think that's the kind of game I would also play.  We toured a cave in Aruba while on a cruise, and the moment the door was closed (yes, the cave had a door) I immediately felt a sense of dread, as if the cave that had been standing for thousands of years and explored for hundreds would suddenly choose the day I visited to collapse in on itself. Then they said that some passages of the cave may get really tight, and for a few moments later on the tour, they would turn the lights off so we could appreciate the darkness. Nope, not for me. A man raised his hand and said his wife wanted to leave the tour, and I said I would gladly join her and escort her down the mountain.  I wasn't proud, but it's good to know your limitations - I went back down to the beach and had a soda, assuring myself that it's good to be alive and to not let anyone see you freak out or have a panic attack. And the cave did NOT collapse that day, but that could be because I took my bad paranoid juju out of the cave, so, really, I'm a hero, I saved the life of everyone on that cave tour.  By the same token, if you're in a horror movie and you feel you should leave the house, make sure that you then leave the house. 

I don't know how that "Survivor" contestant who quit is going to come back and win the game, of course, but I'm rooting for her. Got a good feeling about it. 

You also never really feel alive until you come close to dying.  Wait, is that right?  Umm, OK, I'll stick with that. I've never been sick enough to stay in a hospital, but I've been treated in the E.R. for kidney stones and for putting my head through a lightbulb (or a lightbulb through my head, depending on how you look at it.). Man, head wounds bleed A LOT, and getting the glass out of my skull took some time, but it was on the day of my 40th birthday party, and people were waiting to start celebrating - the only thing missing was ME because I was in the E.R.  But that sort of thing can change your outlook, I suppose - I got busy watching movies a couple months after that.  Get busy living or get busy dying, as that other movie said. Wait, why are those my only two options?

It's also good to know the history of your house, maybe even who owned it before you. Just saying. If I had realized that our block in Queens NY is slightly on a slope, and that all of the rain water goes from that yard to that yard to our neighbor's yard to OUR yard and then makes a beeline for our basement, I might have been more careful when selecting this house as a place to put down roots.  We had four inches of water in our basement after Hurricane Ida, and I bailed for hours, but I know I didn't bail it all, so, umm, where did it GO?  This past weekend we narrowly averted another flood in the basement, only because we cleared the backyard drain at JUST the right time.  Water still came in the house around the upstairs windows, though, so now we've got to deal with that.  I store some of my comic books upstairs, and a lot of water coming in is "no bueno" for the condition of the collection.  

Paul Simon had a song called "One Man's Ceiling is Another Man's Floor."  I heard somebody quote that in a movie once, and I'm honestly not sure if it's meant as a comment on modern urban society, a metaphor for success and failure or just a reflection on how architecture works.  

Last thing before I go - the IMDB tells me that the title "Barbarian" can be made from only the letters found in "AirBnB".  I guess that was intentional?  Who knows? 

Also starring Georgina Campbell (last seen in "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword"), Bill Skarsgard (last seen in "Assassination Nation"), Justin Long (last seen in "Clerks III"), Matthew Patrick Davis, Kurt Braunohler (last seen in "An American Pickle"), Jaymes Butler (last seen in "Escape Room: Tournament of Champions"), Sophie Sorensen, Rachel Fowler, J.R. Esposito, Kate Nichols (last seen in "Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard"), Kate Bosworth (last seen in "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!"), Brooke Dillman (last heard in "The Bob's Burgers Movie"), Sara Paxton (last seen in "Blonde"), Will Greenberg, Derek Morse, Trevor Van Uden, Zach Cregger (last seen in "Opening Night"), Devina Vassileva, Kalina Stancheva, Julian Stanishkov

RATING: 5 out of 10 cars abandoned on the street