BEFORE: 15 down, 10 to go. Well, 9 after today. But just three more until I go on break, remember the blog will be DARK from October 20-25 and I hope to post something late on the 26th to stay on track, otherwise I'll be running late. I can still get it all done, everything is still possible. This is another film that screened at the theater where I work, just like "Nosferatu" and "The Pope's Exorcist" did, but I can't remember now which guilds they were screened for, a lot of these were probably for the visual effects society. Ah, yes, I found it on my calendar - May 5 was the screening for the V.E.S., so that's not bad, that I was able to watch it just 5 months later on cable.
Gralen Bryant Banks carries over from "Haunted Mansion". I know that I've watched a LOT of movies set in New Orleans this year, because this is Mr. Banks' NINTH appearance this Movie Year. Pretty amazing, this ties him with Samuel L. Jackson, and he's not exactly an A-list actor.
THE PLOT: Trying to leave their troubled lives behind, twin brothers return to their hometown to start again, only to discover that an even greater evil is waiting to welcome them back.
AFTER: Well, there's a lot to like here, it's a very different take on vampire movies. The very fact that somebody re-made "Nosferatu", which was just a rip-off of "Dracula" with the names all changed, but otherwise identical, AGAIN, proves that the genre really needed, well, some new blood. New ideas, new plot-points, this is how you should update something, not just by making the same film somebody else did 100 years ago and just repeating everything THEY did.
This is a vampire story set against the backdrop of Louisiana in the 1930's, so you've got Depression-era economics, racial problems involving Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan, and also the burgeoning black Blues music scene. That's a lot already, there was probably enough material for a whole drama before the vampires even got involved, and then that just kicked everything else into high gear when people at the juke joint started coming under attack. Well, I guess if Count Orlok can develop a taste for German food, other vampires might seek out Southern food, soul food if you follow me. As I mentioned last night, I'm not a big fan of Louisiana cuisine, but there are actual Louisianans on the vampires' menu, that's a whole different thing.
It's a long film already before the vampires even show up, I'm guessing it's an hour of build-up as we watch twin brothers Smoke and Stack come back to their home-town from Chicago and purchase an old sawmill to turn it into a concert venue and bar just for colored people, and they enlist their cousin, Sammie, to play guitar there to entertain people, after learning that he's good at playing the blues. They also hire harmonica player Delta Slim away from his regular Saturday gig by promising him all the beer he can drink (and he can drink a lot of beer) and they also get Cornbread to work the door as a bouncer. The local Chinese shopkeeper couple agrees to supply the food, and Smoke's ex-wife Annie enlists as a cook. They're all good to go, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?
What they don't know is that an Irish immigrant who is also a vampire has escaped from the Native American vampire hunters who were on his trail, and he hides out with a nice married white couple after offering them gold. But of course the gold is just to get himself in the door so he can turn them into vampires like himself, and they can start a little vampire folk band that sings in perfect three-part harmony. I don't know what they'd call their band, but I'll think of something. Just as things are starting to get hopping at the juke joint, the three (Caucasian) vampires show up, and say they want to come in and enjoy the music. But vampires need to be INVITED into a building, there's a long-standing rule, so that's why they pretend to be charming and/or innocent, they can't just go everywhere, they have to resort to trickery.
(Look, if there is a devil, do you think he's going to show up to seduce you and look like a cartoon devil, with horns and a forked tail and colored all red? That would be so obvious, wouldn't it? Nah, he's going to look like your best friend that you haven't met yet, or he's going to look like a Playboy model, or Playgirl model if that's your thing, no judgements. Or he's going to offer you a job, or some money, or a super-expensive car, or all of the above. End of aside.)
There's something suspicious about these folk-singing, wide-smiling, fine and upstanding citizens who just want to party in a Negro establishment. There are plenty of white nightclubs in town, why do they want to come and dance and party at the edge of town, in a place that plays black music? There's something quite interesting here about the comparison of "white" music to "black" music, we often hear about blues guitarists like Robert Johnson, who (allegedly) sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in order to be able to play guitar like he did. So there's a connotation perhaps that the blues (and by extension, rock and roll) is the "devil's music", but this movies spins that around, and here the evil creatures play Irish folk music while the fine upstanding and "innocent" local descendants of slaves play the Blues.
However (and you just knew there would be a "however", right?) the twins realize that their new venue isn't going to be profitable, because there's a Depression on, and many people are trying to pay for their drinks using actual wooden nickels, they don't want to turn away any business, but all that food and all that alcohol cost money, and so Stack's ex-girlfriend Mary offers to go get those white folk musicians back, they figure that they'll bleed those white people dry, but ironically they're setting themselves up for the exact opposite to happen. So the vampires get Mary and Cornbread over to their side, and they keep trying to get into the juke joint - if they can't they'll just pick off the employees one by one as they step outside.
This felt a lot like a Tarantino film to me, there are elements of "The Hateful Eight" (one location, with people trapped inside) and also "Inglourious Basterds" (wish fulfillment, defeating an evil power like Nazis or the Klan), and I realize Tarantino probably would never make a horror movie, but just maybe if he did, it might turn out something like this. Maybe throw in the futility of life exemplified by "Pulp Fiction" and you realize this film is a mash-up of so many different things at once. Wait, Tarantino wrote "From Dusk Till Dawn", didn't he? OK so that changes everything, this is VERY Tarantino-like - if you just re-made that film but put it back into the past of the American South instead of Mexico, and race-swapped everybody, you'd have something like this. It's still "us" vs. "them" and the vampires are "them", that's the important thing.
The turn-around time here for vampirism is accelerated, it doesn't take long between a vampire drinking someone's blood and them becoming a vampire themselves, in some stories it takes like three days but here it's more like three minutes, which really keeps the story moving and allows for everything to fail horribly in a single night. Also brother eventually fights brother, which is kind of the whole point of having an actor play a dual role in the first place. I would like to know whether they filmed every scene twice or just used a double and deep-faked it, but it hardly matters. As long as Michael B. Jordan got paid twice according to SAG rules.
The most controversial scene will probably end up being the musical number - and yes, there is a prominent musical number. Sammie's guitar playing is supposedly SO GOOD that it somehow crosses the barriers of time, and by listening to it you can hear echoes of both the past and the future. To illustrate this, seen dancing in the crowd at the juke joint are ancient tribal warriors, and also modern hip-hop dancers, a Bootsy Collins-like guitarist, a DJ and a few rappers, among others. This breaks the reality of the film being set in the 1930's, of course, and it's quite impossible, but then, so are vampires, so really, all bets are off. You can choose for yourself whether this scene is meant to be symbolic or if Sammie's guitar skills somehow opened up a time portal and allowed people from other eras to visit the event space.
Directed by Ryan Coogler (director of "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever")
Also starring Michael B. Jordan (last seen in "That Awkward Moment"), Hailee Steinfeld (last seen in "3 Days to Kill"), Miles Caton, Jack O'Connell (last seen in "Trial by Fire"), Wunmi Mosaku (last seen in "Alice, Darling"), Jayme Lawson (last seen in "Till"), Omar Benson Miller (last seen in "Things We Lost in the Fire"), Delroy Lindo (last seen in "Domino"), Peter Dreimanis, Lola Kirke (last seen in "American Made"), Li Jun Li (last seen in "Babylon"), Saul Williams, Yao, Dave Maldonado (last seen in "The Burial"), Helena Hu, Andrene Ward-Hammond (last seen in "The Lovebirds"), Nathaniel Arcand (last seen in 'Killers of the Flower Moon"), Emonie Ellison (last seen in "A Man Called Otto"), Tenaj L. Jackson (last seen in "Lay the Favorite"), Aadyn Encalarde (last seen in "Girls Trip"), Sam Malone (last seen in "Nickel Boys"), Ja'Quan Monroe-Henderson (last seen in "Kinds of Kindness"), Percy Bell, Mark L. Patrick, Nicoye Banks (last seen in "Focus"), Christian Robinson (last seen in "The First Purge"), Justin William Davis (last seen in "Quiz Lady"), Deneen Tyler (last seen in "Big George Foreman"), Buddy Guy (last seen in "Buddy Guy: The Blues Chase the Blues Away"), Michael A. Newcomer (last seen in "Where the Crawdads Sing"), Theodus Crane (last seen in "Five Nights at Freddy's"), Calvin Williams (last seen in "Queen & Slim")
RATING: 7 out of 10 cloves of pickled garlic (how convenient that they were there!)
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