Friday, November 1, 2024
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
Wednesday, October 30, 2024
Freaky
Year 16, Day 304 - 10/30/24 - Movie #4,885
BEFORE: OK, now we're getting down to it. After tonight there's just ONE horror movie left to watch this year, and what do you know, it's also ONE day until Halloween! Why, it's almost like I had a plan or something, like I figured out my schedule and counted the days I needed to be at Comic-Con and allowed for that, and somehow deep down I knew 27 was the magic number this month, not 31 and arranged a chain of exactly that many movies. But that's crazy talk, right, like who DOES that? It would take an insane person with a sick mind to figure all of that out, or, you know, somebody with too much free time, that's also possible.
But you can see the problem, right? Just do the math in that intro line above, I'll have just 15 slots left before the next century mark, and damn if there aren't 61 days left in this calendar year. Look, we don't know what's coming, after the election will there be another insurrection or Civil War, the sequel or maybe if it goes the other way they're just going to start rounding everyone up, starting with the Latino Democrat transgender people with criminal records and working down the list from there. If only there were some kind of historical precedent for that, what happens when a fascist takes over. Oh, right, Hitler had people rounded up, too, starting with his political rivals and then the Jews and the gypsies and the homosexuals and, yes, the immigrants and anyone he perceived as "impure" which was something of a sliding scale that led to a slippery slope. Since I won't be blogging on Election Day, I've got to speak now and remind everyone to vote with their hearts, but also maybe not for the person who's taking his campaign promises from 1938 Nazi Germany. Because we know where that leads, why would we want to be back there again? Until we get past Election Day, simply no horror movie could be scarier than the prospect of a fascist U.S. President, it's not a good look. We're supposed to be setting the example for free countries around the world, so you know, let's do that and not elect a neo-Nazi.
Celeste O'Connor carries over from "Madame Web".
THE PLOT: After swapping bodies with a deranged serial killer, a high-school senior discovers that she has fewer than 24 hours before the change becomes permanent.
AFTER: I've tried very hard to avoid a lot of the films in the "body-swap" genre, I think one year I snuck in "13 Going on 30" and of course "Big" is a classic, but the rest of them, I tend to steer clear. "18 Again", "Vice Versa", now there's a new one called "Family Switch", and I don't know, I just find them to be crass and vulgar, it's really low comedy to just say, "Hey, now Mom's in Dad's body, isn't that hilarious?" Well, no, it's probably not. But the only exception other than "Big" is probably the two (semi-)recent "Jumanji" movies, where four teens got stuck in a video-game and played as avatars that were nothing like them, like the football player ended up in the non-athletic sidekick body and the nerd ended up in the body of the big strong hero. Then in the next movie they switched them around again, it was pretty entertaining.
So I've been trying to get to "Freaky" for the last couple of Octobers, the film is now four years old and, well, it takes me as long as it takes me, I can only control so much of the linking, I can try to push it in the direction I want, but also I have to be willing to accept the directions that are available. That's why it could take me 10 years or more to get to specific movies, I have to believe that if I just keep the faith and keep moving forward that eventually I'll get to see everything that I want to see, if the linking will allow it. So yeah, finally the stars aligned and the cast lists worked together and now I'm here. It's bad news for "The Babadook" and "The Slender Man", though, because I'm not going to be able to get to them this year, and probably not next year either, if I keep sticking to this format. Do you have any idea how long "Cube 2" and "Cube Zero" have been on my list? Possibly right from the start, so that would mark 16 years of NOT getting to them.
But let me work with what I do have. As bad as body-swap movies can be, it's a clever idea to swap the souls of a Jason-like serial killer and the young high-school girl he tried to kill, because comedy comes from contrast, and you can't possibly have more contrast than the predator and his prey, the killer and the cheerleader, the insane adult and the spoiled Gen Z teen who simply have nothing in common. They wouldn't even encounter each other if he didn't have a thing for killing sexually active teens. I mean, they probably wouldn't' shop at the same stores or go to the same lunch hangouts, him being a serial killer and her eating (or not eating) at the school cafeteria most days.
In most of these body-swap films, like when the swap occurs between family members, they end up gaining more insight into the struggles of being a suburban mom, or the adult learns about the anxiety that comes with being a modern teenager, and then they figure out how to reverse the spell and they go on with their lives, each a little bit wiser for the experience. That standard, of course, comes from "Freaky Friday", either the original recipe or Extra Crispy with Lindsay Lohan (damn, am I going to have to watch THAT one at some point?)
But here the serial killer, the Blissfield Butcher, gets a chance to hide in plain sight, once he's in the body of a teenage girl (no, not like THAT, get your mind out of the gutter) he can get close to her family members, walk into the high school and kill any students, teachers, janitors he wants. He's got his pick, he can limit himself to people having sex, or just kill anyone without a hall pass - or not have any plan at all, and just see where the day takes him.
All of which made me wonder, why isn't this called "Freaky Friday the 13th"? That title was RIGHT THERE. A little research on Wikipedia tells me that WAS the working title for this film at one point, now I need to find out why they changed it. Did they get a "cease and desist" letter from whatever company owns the rights to the "Friday the 13th" franchise? Last I heard, nobody can copyright a movie title, so if you want to make your own film called "Nightmare on Elm St." or make a documentary about toys called "Child's Play", you can, I mean you could still get sued but the law says you can make a film with the same title as an existing film. Go nuts, aim high and let me know how that goes.
Meanwhile, Mille, the teenager who also plays the school's mascot at football games, finds she has a much tougher time, she wakes up in the serial killer's apartment and can't go home or get help from her friends, because she doesn't look like herself, and who would believe her? So she goes to school (where she's sure to stand out, so odd choice) and takes a shower in the gym while the killer starts his murder spree. It's probably a coincidence that the killer's first victims are the girl who's been bullying Millie and the teacher who's also been giving her a hard time. But eventually (after a panic fight) Millie finds her two best friends, Nyla and Josh, and is able to convince them of the body-swap by doing a complex dance routine.
The homecoming dance gets cancelled because of all the recent deaths, and the Butcher (as Millie) sets up a new location for the dance, at the Old Mill, you know, the spooky one down by the river that's all dark at night and has no dance floor or room for a band or any way to play music. Yeah, nothing suspicious about that at all. While the Butcher sets his sights on Millie's lab partner and crush target Booker, the three friends manage to knock the Butcher unconscious and bring him to Josh's house and tie him to a chair. Oh, great, there's no getting out of THAT elaborate containment plan. The friends then need to leave him there, guarded by Josh, while they go to the police station to try and get the magic knife (the one with body-swapping powers) out of the evidence locker, because with the help of the Spanish teacher, they've determined that if Millie (in the Butcher's body) can stab The Butcher (in Millie's body) with that knife, before 24 hours are up, then they can switch them back.
Wouldn't you know it, shocker, the killer manages to get free from the chair, once Josh's mom comes home unexpectedly and wonders why her gay teen son has a teen girl tied to a chair. Ha, ha, what an innovative twist on teens having complicated conversations with parents about being sexually active! "Mom, I have to tell you something...I'm straight and I like to tie up girls?" About the only thing more awkwardly politically correct here is the Butcher killing three teen jocks who wanted to gang-rape him in Millie's body. They deserved to die? Maybe?
I will admit that I have not seen the "Friday the 13th" movies, there are a few franchises way down at the bottom of my list that I may get to someday, or who knows, maybe I won't. The "Child's Play" series is a someday/maybe, same goes for the "Halloween" series, the "Nightmare on Elm Street" films, "Resident Evil", "Scary Movie" and "Paranormal Activity". All things in good time, or maybe some things not at all. It's more likely I'll try to watch the "Final Destination" films or the "Saw" movies before I get to those others, but really, who can predict it?
What we need in the meantime are more mash-up movies, like "Fever Pitch Perfect" or maybe "Justice League of Extraordinary Gentlemen". What about "Fifty Shades of Dorian Gray" or "Gone Baby Gone in 60 Seconds"? Why not "Rosemary's Baby Driver" or "The Sixth Sense and Sensibility"? "No Country for Old Men in Black" or "The Night of the Living Deadpool"? The possibilities are endless once you start playing with words, but if somebody came up with "Freaky Friday the 13th" and that ended up reinvigorating both slasher films AND body-swap films, why not play around with some new mash-up concepts?
There's a restaurant that opened up in Brooklyn a year ago, it's fusion cuisine that combines Asian food with Jewish deli fare, and it's called "Shalom Japan". I want to try it very badly, just to see what Ramen matzoh ball soup tastes like. And they used to have an item on the menu that combined Japanese savory pancakes,okonomiyaki, with Jewish potato pancakes, and it was called, of course, okonomi-latkes. This is the kind of out-of-the-box thinking and cuisine that I can get behind.
Also starring Vince Vaughn (last seen in "Unfinished Business"), Kathryn Newton (last seen in "Blockers"), Misha Osherovich (last seen in "The Goldfinch"), Emily Holder, Nicholas Stargel (last seen in "Love, Simon"), Kelly Lamor Wilson (last seen in "A Man Called Otto"), Mitchell Hoog (last seen in "Harriet"), Dana Drori (last seen in "Rebel in the Rye"), Katie Finneran (last seen in "Movie 43"), Alonzo Ward (last seen in "Strays"), Dustin Lewis (last seen in "The Contractor"), Jennifer Pierce Mathus (last seen in "Dark Places"), Uriah Shelton, Melissa Collazo, Zack Shires (last seen in "Breaking News in Yuba County"), Alan Ruck (last seen in "Sierra Burgess Is a Loser"), Magnus Diehl, Dane Davenport (last seen in "Selma"), Nick Arapoglou (last seen in "They Cloned Tyrone"), Charles Green (last heard in "Poms"), Don Stallings (last seen in "Jerry and Marge Go Large"), Brooke Jaye Taylor (last seen in "Jungle Cruise"), Tim Johnson, Carter Glade, Ezra Sexton, Maria Sager, Deja Dee (last seen in "Allegiant"), Emma Jonnz (last seen in "Ready or Not")
RATING: 6 out of 10 wood shop projects
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Madame Web
At the same time, paramedic Cassandra Webb, drowns but is brought back to life by her partner, Ben (last name not important yet, but just wait) and this somehow activates her clairvoyant powers, which exist because her mother was bitten by the same rare spider while she was pregnant with Cassie, she died giving birth but the venom transferred to her baby, according to the cult of the Arañas, the spider-people from the Amazon who can swing through the trees and do other spider-stuff. Cassandra gets the power to see what's happening in the near-future, but it takes her an enormously long time to figure out what her power is and what to do with it. I mean, a paramedic needs to be a pretty smart person, she's not dumb so why make her act dumb? Is this to make the audience feel smart, that we figured out her power before she can?
Monday, October 28, 2024
How It Ends (2018)
Sunday, October 27, 2024
Ready or Not
Saturday, October 26, 2024
Infinity Pool
Friday, October 25, 2024
Pearl
Year 16, Day 299 - 10/25/24 - Movie #4,880
BEFORE: Let's send a big Birthday SHOUT-out to Mia Goth, born October 25, 1993, who also seems to have the perfect last name for horror movies, right? She carries over from "X" and she WILL make the year-end countdown, I've seen to that. But also I wonder how many birthday SHOUT-outs I've shouted out this year, I don't think there have been many.
Now, regarding "Maxxxine", the new sequel to "X", I've looked for a way to shoehorn this film in at the last minute - I had no idea this film would be streaming so soon, it's already on HBO Max and it caught me off guard. I've checked with the ruling committee, and their hands are tied, I'd already filed the paperwork certifying my movie path to Christmas, so really, at this point, my hands are tied. I'll file an appeal, sure there's a process, but this film just came on the scene far too late. I can't drop anything from the remaining twenty films of the year - well, I could, but that would mean that something I was going to clear off my DVR is not going to get cleared, like I could delay "Speed Racer" again but I've already pushed it back twice, maybe three times. It's either "Maxxxine" or "Speed Racer", really. Most everything else will cause a break in the linking if I delete it.
Or "How It Ends" - if the committee were to approve the addition of "Maxxxine" at the last second, I could shift some things around in these last days of October, and cut from "Ready or Not" to "Freaky" in a switcheroo and drop "How It Ends", but again, that's a desperate play, and then THAT movie may never get watched. Bottom line, "Maxxine" links to a number of other horror films on the list, and I've got a good chance of circling back to it next October, because it's got some name actors in it, like Kevin Bacon and Giancarlo Esposito, who appear in other horror films too. So that's that, "Pearl" is in and "Maxxxine" is out, at least for not. The third film in this weird little trilogy just arrived too late for me to work it in.
Well, I could do it but then I'd be unhappy about what I'd have to cut to make that possible. Sorry, Ti West. Sorry, Mia Goth. If this were March or April I'd add another film and stay up late watching a double feature, but it's not, it's late October and both Halloween and Christmas are coming, I have a schedule to maintain. "Maxxxine" is going to be fine, fingers crossed that this choice may end up helping me connect a full month of horror films in 2025. Or 2026.
Meanwhile, this Halloween is UNDER a week away. It's time to start separating out the Reese's peanut butter cups from the Almond Joys, if you know what I mean. Nobody better lay a finger on my Butterfingers, either.
THE PLOT: In 1918, a young woman on the brink of madness pursues stardom in a desperate attempt to escape the drudgery, isolation and lovelessness of life on her parents' farm.
AFTER: Well, sure, I got what I wanted, this movie dug deeper into the back-story of Pearl, aka the farmer's wife, and she was pretty messed up in "X". But how did she get that way? And where did the car in the pond come from? And are there really alligators in Texas? More to the point, WTF? I mean, WT-actual-F was up with Pearl? It's worth pointing out that every old person you see was young once, and probably made a few mistakes, and those mistakes over the years made them who they are.
Well, this film comes very close to explaining that nothing was really Pearl's fault. Life was not kind to Pearl, the film starts out in 1918 when she just couldn't get a break. Her husband was off fighting in World War I and she had no idea if was going to come home or not. At some point he stopped writing letters home, and well, that's not a good sign. Also there was some kind of pandemic going on, that would be the Spanish flu - so people were dying both at home and abroad, about 50 million people worldwide died from the flu. Pearl was told repeatedly to cover her face, but she was young, carefree, and she just wanted to ride her bike and feel the wind. Relatable to today's audiences, some of whom refused to wear a mask during the COVID years despite all the medical evidence saying it was the proper thing to do. To be fair, even Dr. Fauci and W.H.O. got the mask thing wrong for a while, because in 2020 they were telling us to not go outside without a mask on, but once we were home, it was OK to take the mask off if we were home with our family. This was almost 100% backwards, because a year later people were dining outside without masks and being encouraged to go outside where they were LESS likely to get COVID, however it was possible for someone in your family to go to work or school, catch COVID and bring it home to infect their whole family. So the mask policy got reversed upon further reflection, or maybe it should have been like that all along. I guess maybe the rules had to change once people started going back to work, and the bottom line is, kids are nothing but germ factories that will infect you, so my advice is to stay away from your own kids, or better yet, don't have any in the first place.
Oh, right, back to Pearl. She lived on her parents' farm while her husband was off at war, and her father was paralyzed or brain-dead or something, perhaps from the flu or maybe it was polio or something else, there was a lot of bad diseases back then. And her mother was a mean taskmaster who made Pearl do chores on the farm AND also take care of her father, feeding him and bathing him and you know, changing his dirty drawers. The family was of German descent, and man, I found this all too familiar, having been raised by a German grandmother. I used to think my grandmother was demanding and negative and frugal because she'd lived through the Depression, but yeah, also part of that was because she was German. I feel your pain, Pearl, you just want to go out to the movies and have fun with your friends, and someday you're going to be working in the theater or making movies, but not if your German mother has anything to say about it. Been there.
Pearl finds comfort in the arms of the movie theater's projectionist, who lets her in for free so she won't get in trouble by spending her mother's change, and also wants to show her movies of nekkid people dancing around after the crowd goes home. Damn, Pearl was right there when porn got invented, only nobody back then was able to charge money for it. Don't worry, one day they'll figure it out. Pearl gets so worked up she has sex with a scarecrow on the way home, but then realizes having sex with the projectionist is a much better idea.
It's good that Pearl has an outlet for her hostility, it's just a little odd, though, that the outlet is killing farm animals and feeding them to her pet alligator Theda, named after Theda Bara. Normally farm life does involve slaughtering animals, but you kind of get the feeling that Pearl does it just for fun. Hollywood movies kind of glorified farm life, with little mention of the down-sides, namely the hard labor and all the killing. Don't get too attached to those animals, OK? Even in "The Wizard of Oz" there's not much about farm life, maybe a few minutes before Dorothy gets whisked off to the land of fairies and munchkins by a tornado, and so I doubt that she ever had to kill a pig or a cow. But what do you suppose the effect of farm life might be on a teenage girl? Maybe it's not such a large leap from killing chickens and geese to killing people.
Pearl gets the chance to audition for a dance troupe that's going to tour the state, and she sees this as her ticket off the boring family farm. But her mother refuses to allow her to attend the audition, so they argue about it, and meanwhile her mother's dress catches fire and well, let's just say that clothes were more flammable back then, and also nobody had invented "Stop, drop and roll" just yet. Sure, it's an accident but Pearl starts to realize that she'll be free to do whatever she wants with her life if she could just kill all of the people who are standing in her way - including her sister-in-law, Mitsy, who was selected for the dance troupe over Pearl just because she was blonde and the type they were looking for. No, it couldn't POSSIBLY be that Pearl was only an average dancer, could it? But you can see the reasoning here, if Pearl just kills Mitsy, well then there'll be an open spot on the dance troupe again, right?
Well, the good news is that Pearl's husband, Howard, eventually does come home from the War. Only he comes home to a very different Pearl from the one he left behind. She's been through some stuff, she's killed some animals and perhaps a few people, creating something of a dilemma, perhaps. I guess there's a lesson there, you let your daughter go to the movies by herself ONE TIME and before you know it, she's an unhinged serial killer. Sure, it could happen, films came along and changed everybody, suddenly boring old reality wasn't good enough for people who all wanted to be rich and famous, like the actors and the characters they portrayed.
Also starring David Corenswet, Tandi Wright (last seen in "Love and Monsters"), Matthew Sunderland (last seen in "The Lost City of Z"), Emma Jenkins-Purro, Alistair Sewell (last seen in "The Power of the Dog"), Amelia Reid, Lauren Stewart, Todd Rippon, Grace Acheson, Gabe McDonnell, Shaman Theron
RATING: 6 out of 10 bales of hay