Dark Skies

Year 15, Day 290 - 10/17/23 - Movie #4,571

BEFORE: To make it through New York Comic-Con and only fall ONE day behind on my schedule, I think that's an accomplishment.  Sure, I'd love to get two more movies crossed off the list before vacation, but I'll settle for one. 

Keri Russell carries over again from "Antlers".  Again, who knew Keri Russell was in three horror movies?  I sure didn't.  Then again, who remembers that Keri Russell was in a "Star Wars" movie?  I'm a huge Star Wars fan, and I keep forgetting that.  Maybe because we never saw her face, she had a blast helmet on the whole time, which is an odd choice perhaps - most actors just want to be seen, but I guess not always.

THE PLOT: As a family's peaceful suburban life is rocked by an escalating series of disturbing events, they come to learn that a terrifying and deadly force is after them, one which may have arrived from beyond the stars. 

AFTER: This worked out well, in the weirdest of ways - watching two scary movies before I have to get up at 5 am and leave for the airport at 6 am to catch an 8:45 plane - who the heck can sleep after watching "Antlers" an "Dark Skies"?  My dreams are only going to be about cannibalistic Native American spirits or aliens trying to suck my brains out - so, really, it's better if I stay up all night and sleep on the plane.  Sure, it's a short trip to North Carolina, but sleeping on a plane is better than being awake on a plane, because then you can't think about the fact that you're miles up in the air, god knows what could happen, and does anybody really understand the principles of physics that allow a plane to stay in the air?  No, I don't think they really do, I think they only work because nobody is really thinking about it, like how Wile E. Coyote can run off of a cliff in a cartoon, but he doesn't fall because he doesn't yet KNOW that he's suspended in mid-air over the canyon.  Only when he LOOKS DOWN, and thinks about gravity does he fall to the ground far below.  So, therefore, it's better to not think about it, and if I'm asleep, I can't think about it.  Right? 

So I just worked a shift at the movie theater, and I've got a few hours before the flight, so let's get into some aliens stuff.  Many years ago, I remember going to a classmate's birthday party, I think, and they took everybody to the movies to watch "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", which came out shortly after the first "Star Wars" film, which took place in a galaxy far, far away - but "Close Encounters" had aliens coming to Earth, which was an exciting concept!  And the aliens not only wanted to play music for us, but they also brought back some American pilots that they took away years ago, I guess they were finished with them or something.  Anyway, it's nice that they returned them, their families died years ago but it's the thought that counts.  These were GOOD aliens, they wanted to make contact, exchange ideas and also take Richard Dreyfuss off our hands and put him in the earthling exhibit in the intergalactic zoo or something.  

Yeah, the aliens in "Dark Skies" are not that kind of alien.  These "greys" want to short out all of our household security cameras so they can stand over us and watch us while we sleep, which just can't be good.  Then when they've chosen their favorite member of the family - based on what, I don't know - they abduct one, usually a teenager, and then they examine them or probe them or maybe even eat them, while the teen's parents become the chief suspects in their son or daughter's disappearance. Well, it's not very comforting, but it could explain what happened to at least SOME of those missing kids seen on all those milk cartons over the years. 

During the aliens' surveillance of this typical American family, the Barretts, a lot of strange things happen - waves of birds crash into their windows one day, leading to a massive disgusting clean-up the next day.  Also, there's some kind of radiation or frequency that makes the family members act in strange ways - their younger son Sammy starts screaming and can't stop, and then later sleepwalks out of the house at night.  They all have these sort of catatonic episodes, the mother walks repeatedly into a glass door while working as a real estate agent, then later wakes up in her own bed with a big bruise on her head.  Also strange geometric shapes are discovered on the bodies of both sons, Sammy and Jesse, and the doctors can't explain them, but are also obligated to alert Child Protective Services because they suspect child abuse. 

Mr. Barrett's response is to get their house's security system repaired and also to install cameras in every room - then as he obsessively scans through the footage, he notices that there are patterns of lapsed coverage, and a frame-by-frame analysis reveals the shadowy figures standing over each family member as they sleep.  The logical thing to do would be to, I don't know, just leave town and start fresh somewhere the aliens don't know about, like Montana or something, but instead the family takes illogical actions, like staying in place and getting a guard dog and a shotgun.  Because that always ends well. 

They spend the Fourth of July holiday boarding up the house and then watching fireworks on TV and reminiscing about happier times - I approve this message because I never leave the house either on July 4, there are just too many illegal fireworks out there in NYC and if it sounds like downtown Fallujah in my neighborhood, I think I'll stay indoors, thank you so much.  The aliens decide to double down on the holiday weekend, though, and move forward with the abduction plans. Oh, but how to choose which human to probe?  Take the cutest one, of course - but isn't that subjective?  I guess it all depends on what they're planning to do, study the human through dissection or put them in the intergalactic zoo, or just eat them.  Nah, better not eat the Americans, most of them are way too fatty.  Hey, if we can't kill the aliens with guns or knives, at least we can kill them by giving them heart disease and high cholesterol. 

NITPICK POINT: I know they needed to set up a moment late in the film, but does it make sense for brothers Sammy and Jesse to communicate via walkie-talkie, when they live in the same house?  Are their bedrooms on different floors or something?  If they want to talk to each other late at night, why can't they just text each other, or one could just go into the other's bedroom and they could talk in person?  Or they could share a room, just a thought.

"Dark Skies" was produced by Blumhouse Productions and I think I have to give some kind of shout-out here to Jason Blum, who was interviewed on one of the late-night talk shows last week. Over the last 20 years, I don't think there's been a more prolific producer in the horror genre - and beyond, but really, this guy built his career on horror films.  The ones I've seen include the "Purge" films, "Get Out", "Glass" and "Split", "Us", "Ma", "Don't Let Go", "The Invisible Man", "The Hunt", "Fantasy Island", "The Gift" and the non-horror films "Whiplash", "Vengeance" and "BlacKkKlansman".  And the ones I'm planning to see are "Freaky", "Black Christmas", the more recent "Halloween" movies, "The Black Phone", "Mr. Harrigan's Phone", "M3GAN", "Prey" and "They/Them".  And then there are the franchises "Paranormal Activity", "Insidious" and "Happy Death Day" and the upcoming films "Exorcist: The Believer" and "Five Nights at Freddy's".  Even if you ignore that last one because it seems to be a remake of "Willy's Wonderland", this guy sure knows how to keep cranking out the movies!  When does this guy sleep - DOES this guy even sleep?  I could probably devote an entire October to horror films produced by Jason Blum and not even come CLOSE to watching all of the films he's produced.

But that's a problem for another day - I don't even want to THINK about next year's horror chain if I'm not even done with this year's scary movies, OK?  In the meantime I don't want to sleep tonight, or the aliens might abduct me just before my vacation, and that would really suck.  The Movie Year will be on hold for the next five days, I'll be back to re-open in about a week and begin the final push toward Halloween, which I think is on October 31st this year. 

Also starring Josh Hamilton (last seen in "Eighth Grade"), Dakota Goyo (last seen in "Noah"), Kadan Rockett, J.K. Simmons (last heard in "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse"), L.J. Benet (last seen in "You Again"), Rich Hutchman (last seen in "The Island"), Myndy Crist (last seen in "Gun Shy"), Annie Thurman (last seen in "The Hunger Games"), Jake Washburn, Ron Ostrow (last seen in "Being the Ricardos"), Tom Costello, Marion Kerr,  Alyvia Alyn Lind (last seen in "Blended"), Josh Stamberg (last seen in "Home Again"), Tiffany Jeneen, Brian Stepanek (last seen in "Green Book"), Judith Moreland, Adam Schneider, Jessica Borden, Kenneth Meseroll, Trevor St. John (last seen in "Higher Learning"), Andy Umberger (last seen in "The Rum Diary"), Michael Patrick McGill (last seen in "Message from the King"), Josh Wingate. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 newspaper clippings

Antlers

Year 15, Day 289 - 10/16/23 - Movie #4,570

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

Cocaine Bear

Year 15, Day 288 - 10/15/23 - Movie #4,569

BEFORE: Well, this was supposed to be my Saturday movie, but my body had other ideas.  I have to sleep sometimes, you see, and when you combine my work schedule with my movie-watching schedule... I'm convinced that this pace would kill a normal man, that's what I tell myself anyway.  But I'm getting older, with a birthday coming up next week, and something's got to give at some point.  I worked three straight days at New York Comic-Con, and that's from 9 am (OK, more like 9:30) to 8 pm (OK, more like 7:30) - still, that's 10 or 11 hours each day, and I'm just not a young man.

So you can't blame me if I come home on the third day and I just want to microwave some corn dogs - hot dogs at the Con were $6 minimum, and bulgogi dogs were $9, which is highway robbery - and have a couple beers and watch a stupid movie that I'm going to fall asleep in the middle of.  One bear - sorry - one beer was a little powerful, a chocolate peanut butter porter called Sweet Baby Jesus! - and yeah, OK, I slept - but I slept WELL knowing I survived another Con and made it out the other side. Now a few shifts at the theater for NewFest, and then vacation. 

But first, "Cocaine Bear" and two more movies.  I worked a screening of "Cocaine Bear" back in February, which meant I couldn't WATCH it, of course - and I had no idea THEN that I'd be able to work it into my chain NOW, of course I wasn't even sure if it qualified as horror, or comedy, or nature documentary for that matter.  I guess it's "comedy/horror", so sure, why not, this past week I've also covered "medical horror" and "Y/A fantasy horror", but "Creepshow" was like comic-book horror, and most of the stories had some kind of ironic, nearly comic twist to them.  I think you can look at the past week and say that nobody, absolutely nobody besides me, would watch THOSE films in THAT order, because well, why would they?  The uniting element, beyond the linking actors, is me, the fact that I have not seen these movies yet and also I have access to them.  "Cocaine Bear" was on Peacock for a while, it may still be, but it's also on AmazonPrime now, so that's where I'll watch it, though our PlayStation which puts it on the big TV and not my tiny phone screen.

Alden Ehrenreich carries over from "Beautiful Creatures", and so does Margo Martindale, but that should come as no surprise, Ms. Martindale turns up in a lot of movies.  Good for her!

THE PLOT: An oddball group of cops, criminals, tourists and teens converge on a Georgia forest where a huge black bear goes on a murderous rampage after unintentionally ingesting cocaine. 

AFTER: Do I even need to say it today?  This is a WEIRD movie.  This is also an effed-up movie, or a WTF? movie.  Like, why does this exist? How did this come to pass, and why did it choose to manifest itself in THIS form, specifically?  I have no answers, except cocaine was maybe involved, Hollywood LOVES cocaine and cocaine probably fueled a number of other bad ideas over the years, some of which turned out to be incredibly profitable, and then there were films like "Showgirls" which became "cult classics" over the years, and that's code for "this movie is just plain terrible, and yet somehow I can't stop watching it." 

There was (allegedly) a real incident in 1985 where a real bear in Georgia died of an overdose, and then in order to figure out how and why, somebody pieced it together after the fact that a drug trafficker flying from Colombia dropped his cargo and then jumped out of his plane, D.B. Cooper-style, only his parachute didn't open and his body was found in somebody's driveway in Knoxville, TN.  The bear ATE the cocaine, which is not the most efficient way to get drugs into your bloodstream, only how would a bear even know that, and the autopsy showed its stomach was filled with coke, although they estimated that only about 3 or 4 grams would have been absorbed into its blood at the time of death, so a murderous rampage is probably NOT what happened.  Let's be real for a second, OK?  But yet the bear came to be known as "Cokey the Bear" (only YOU can prevent drug overdoses, kids...) or alternately "Pablo Escobear". 

The body of the bear was preserved via taxidermy and given to the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area, but it disappeared and turned up in a pawn shop, then supposedly turned up in a mall in Lexington, Kentucky - although some people say that's not the real cocaine bear because it's in pristine condition, and the original Cokey was in a state of decomposition.  And some say that the Cocaine Bear has the authority to officiate weddings thanks to the loose Kentucky laws on this point, only if you're interested in getting a dead bear to marry you, can you even really call that a wedding?  Side burn - Kentucky.

But let's focus on the movie, which is, OK, a grain of truth wrapped in a nonsensical comedy with all of the jump-scares of a horror movie.  But the difference is that most horror movies have a logic to them - teens who have sex in the woods are fated to die, for example, that's a staple. In "Creepshow" people who do terrible things - kill their wife's lover, ruin other people financially - they deserve to die, and they do.  Here in "Cocaine Bear", bad people die, but good people also die, and what, for our amusement?  I'm not comfortable with that.  But then again, death comes for us all, eventually, no matter what kind of life we left, whether or not we followed the cardinal rule to "be excellent to each other".  

So maybe the Cocaine Bear represents not just nature's fury or the dead-end lifestyle of doing drugs, but death itself.  The Cocaine Bear comes for all of us, one day, no matter what we do to try to stave off the inevitable.  Is that the lesson?  So OK, eating right, exercising, nothing really matters unless you follow a few other simple rules, like don't go camping, don't go to the beach, don't drive drunk or distracted, don't cheat on your spouse - valuable lessons from this week's films.  Stay home. All the time. Then you can focus more on watching movies and TV shows, and you'll live a longer, happier life, trust me on this point.  And for god's sake, if you find a mysterious crate under the stairway, maybe call somebody about it and don't open it?  I mean, REALLY?

But I'm probably reading too much into "Cocaine Bear", and thus giving it too much credence - overall it just feels like it was slapped together, the different stories do eventually come together, but late, late in the film.  So for the majority of the time we're toggling between three separate stories - the one about the mother looking for her daughter, the one about the drug dealers looking for the cocaine (and the cops looking for the dealers), and the one about the park ranger and bear expert and the EMTs - oh, and the opening one about the foreign couple hiking up the mountain.  The Cocaine Bear weaves the stories together, I'll admit, but the Cocaine Bear thus appears to be everywhere at once, it goes wherever is needed, as long as its appearance is unexpected and ironic.  There are plenty of those "it's right behind me, isn't it?" moments. 

Yeah, I get it, death is often quick and frequently messy, but I'm not sure that's it's always ironic and bordering on comic.  We hear so many stories that qualify for the "Darwin Awards", however, that we may come to think that those deaths are the norm, and they're just not, except in the movies.  A lot of people die in bed, surrounded by friends and family, having made their peace with the world, but I guess that just isn't very cinematic, is it?  Sometimes death is a tender moment, after a long illness or a very long life that was well-lived, but again, you can't really make a movie out of that, so by all means, let's focus on people who are strapped to gurneys and fall out of ambulances face first and become long red stains on the pavement. 

I just wish it looked like a real bear AT ANY POINT - maybe it's just me, because I know too much about movies and how they're made, so, like obviously this was a CGI bear or a puppet bear or some combination of the two, and no bears were harmed in the production of this movie. Also no bears were given cocaine at any point, but you know, it's Hollywood so cocaine was probably in the mix, at least during the writing of the screenplay - assuming there WAS a screenplay. Feels like 50/50 odds that there wasn't.  OK, maybe the final shot of the bear was a bit believable, but for the rest of the movie, no, I was always aware that it wasn't a real bear, where if you watched a movie like "The Revenant", you could allow yourself to believe in the bear. Here, not so much.

NITPICK POINT: The film opens with the song "Jane" by Jefferson Starship, which personally, I love - the song totally rocks. And sure, it might be chronologically appropriate - but not thematically.  Was "Cocaine" from Eric Clapton too expensive?  Surely there must have been another song written during the 1980's that might be about drugs - they run "White Lines" over the closing credits, which makes perfect sense.  But "Jane" was used in the opening sequence of another comedy, "Wet Hot American Summer", which director Elizabeth Banks should have known, because she was IN that movie.  Or did she just get lazy and fall back on what she was familiar with?  "Find Your Way Back" and "No Way Out" are other great songs by the same band that could have worked, without being repetitive. Just saying.  "Snowblind" by Styx, "Cocaine" by Jackson Browne, there were other options. 

Almost a Nitpick Point - I realize that the casting of Ray Liotta as the mid-level drug kingpin was an inspired choice, as a reference to "Goodfellas" if nothing else.  Hey, if you can get Ray Liotta, you get Ray Liotta, sure.  But then watching his character die in the film now, given that he died IRL nine months before this movie came out, well now that's just looking like a bit of bad taste. Was it worth it to have him in the film now that his scenes just make us a bit sad?  What was a good idea became also very ironic.  Seeing a PSA in the beginning of the movie with Pee-Wee Herman in it, telling kids to not do drugs, is also now a bit sad.  It's just too soon, it still stings that we lost these actors this year, and it will for a while.  

Sure, I realize this movie was not meant to be taken seriously, not on any level.  It's beyond ridiculous, but many comedies are that, and also many horror films are that, too.  BEAR in mind that nobody ever really saw the real Cokey the Bear after it had eaten cocaine, so we don't really know if it would have gone on a murderous rampage - it might have just gone to the club and partied all night, or it might have stayed up for three days straight and worked on its screenplay.  Which again, calls into question that somebody manifested THIS exact storyline into the world for some reason, and I'm scratching my head trying to figure out what that reason was.  Blood and circuses still dominate the market, I guess, and it's been that way at least since the height of the Roman Empire. 

Grasping for some kind of moral lesson here, I guess it's got to suffice that not everybody dies from the bear's actions, and those that live maybe learn how precious life is, and to maybe be better people in the future?  This seems like something of a stretch, however.  This movie was profitable, and got a LOT of attention in February this year, but of course, by the time I get to watch it, simply nobody is talking about it any more.  I guess that's the thing about good buzz, it wears off and next time, you're going to need a stronger dose to get the same reaction.

Also starring Keri Russell (last seen in "Adrienne"), O'Shea Jackson Jr. (last seen in "Ingrid Goes West"), Ray Liotta (last seen in "Better Living Through Chemistry"), Isiah Whitlock Jr. (last seen in "Person to Person"), Brooklynn Prince (last heard in "The One and Only Ivan"), Christian Convery (last seen in "Beautiful Boy"), Margo Martindale (also carrying over from "Beautiful Creatures"), Jesse Tyler Ferguson (last seen in "Untraceable"), Kristofer Hivju (last seen in "Downhill"), Hannah Hoekstra (last seen in "Charlie's Angels" (2019)), Ayoola Smart (last seen in "Juliet, Naked"), Aaron Holliday (last seen in "Moxie"), J.B. Moore, Leo Hanna, Kahyun Kim (last seen in "Playing It Cool"), Scott Seiss, Matthew Rhys (last seen in "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood"), Shane Connellan, Conor Lambert (last seen in "My Left Foot"), George Kerslake, Oisin Nolan. with archive footage of Nancy Reagan (last seen in "Air"), Paul Reubens (last seen in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 red duffel bags