BEFORE: Well, it took a couple days to get rolling, but I think some scary things are looming here, nothing's given me nightmares yet, which is good, but this would be the season for it. I got my one bag of Halloween candy which should suffice, if we get no trick-or-treaters and we have to eat the candy ourselves, well, I made sure to get only fun-size candy bars that we like. There's Halloween decorations in the Dollar Store, but also Thanksgiving table decorations and Christmas stuff. Why not buy all three and just decorate the house once, for All Hallows' Thanks Christmas Eve? OK, I'm still workshopping the name. HalloThanksMas?
I'm on Movie 250 for the year, this is really the last numerical stop-over before the end, so this Movie Year will be over in just 50 movies, we're much closer to the end than to the beginning, and it will be over before you know it. Just like life at my age. E. Roger Mitchell carries over from "The Crazies". This one's been sitting on the watchlist for a couple years, so I'm going to take the opportunity to get to it, as it's already got a sequel on the Netflix.
THE PLOT: After being abducted and locked in a basement, a boy starts receiving calls on a disconnected phone from the killer's previous victims.
AFTER: All right, we're finally on a horror movie that's ABOUT something, not just a bad vacation or a town full of chaos. We've got a child predator on the loose in Denver in the 1970's, his name is the Grabber, and he seems to be inspired by that Child Catcher character in "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", or maybe that's just me. When I was a kid and saw that happy little Dick van Dyke movie about the flying car, I was pretty darn scared of the Child Catcher. You mean there's are people out there who dress in black and walk around with giant nets and catch kids? What the hell? I mean, I guess there are people like that out there, just not sponsored by the government, and where they put those kids and what they do to them, well, you're probably better off not knowing.
But the timeline is right, the 1970's is about when there started to be a lot of kids going missing, starting in 1984 they were putting their pictures and names on milk cartons, because that's what you want to read about in the morning while you're eating your Froot Loops, that some kid from your class has gone missing and is currently in someone's basement, if they're lucky. More likely they're already buried somewhere and their body will never be found. (The milk carton thing lasted until the mid 1990s when somebody invented AMBER alerts.). How many "Grabbers" were there in real life that were never caught? I guess we'll never know.
Back then, there was nothing you could really DO when somebody disappeared, sure the police were working on it, but gone is gone. You couldn't search every house, and if there wasn't any evidence to go on, what next? So there was probably a feeling of helplessness and disappointment in addition to the loss. Finney Blake here has lost both a close friend and a rival on a Little League team, but he's also got an abusive father who's drunk most of the time, and no way to track down The Grabber - oh, don't worry, he'll come and find YOU. Finney's sister, Gwen, has had a dream about a black van and black balloons, and suddenly the police want to talk to her, because they did find evidence of black balloons, and that information was not released to the press. This leads to the police questioning their father, who then beats Gwen for apparently having psychic dreams, an ability her mother had, and those dreams drove her to suicide.
One day Finney encounters an amateur magician with a black van and black balloons (uh-oh) and I'm not sure if he fell for the Grabber's diversions, or if he went willingly to find out what happened to his friend. Either way, he wakes up in a basement room and the masked Grabber brings him food on a tray, informing him that the basement is soundproofed and there's no way out. But he MIGHT let Finney out if he follows the rules...yeah, I kind of don't think this guy is very trustworthy, call me crazy. There is, for some reason, a black rotary phone on the wall, which is disconnected and useless. So, umm, why is it there, then?
Ah, at some point the phone DOES ring, which is confusing at first. But the call is from another victim, somehow, only that caller is confused about who they are and also where they are. Finney knows enough about the missing boys to determine that this is one of the Grabber's previous victims, and he's got some information about what's to come, and possibly a way to escape. A second call from Bruce, the baseball player, has advice to dig a tunnel, which turns out not to work, however the advice was still helpful in the long run for another reason. There's a pattern here, which is quite clever, because individually each previous victim was unable to escape, so it makes sense that their advice is insufficient, but perhaps with enough phone calls Finney could try different things, and put together something that can work.
Meanwhile, Gwen is trying harder than ever to have one of those psychic dreams, so she can determine the location of her missing brother and relay that information to the police. Eventually the psychic energy in town (or whatever) allows her into the backstory of one of the victims, and there are enough clues within that kid's story for her to ride around the town and look for a house with a certain look and a certain house number. But, can she figure it out in time, and will the police believe her?
This feels like "Stephen King Lite", it's a little bit of "It" and a little bit of "The Shining" and maybe a whole lot of "Stranger Things" mixed together. Well, the Duffer Brothers probably stole a bunch of things from Stephen King, too. Aha, this is based on a short story written by Joe Hill, who happens to be Stephen King's son, really that explains a LOT about it. The director apparently added a bunch of things from his own childhood, growing up in Denver in the 1970's, so that gives it a particular focus and a certain feel. It's fine, I mean I'm not quite sure how they managed to justify a sequel, but I guess I'll find out in a couple days. That's right, I've got to work another film in first, sorry. Not sorry.
Directed by Scott Derrickson (director of "Doctor Strange" and "The Day the Earth Stood Still")
Also starring Mason Thames (last seen in "Incoming"), Madeleine McGraw (last heard in "The Mitchells vs. the Machines"), Ethan Hawke (last seen in "Maudie"), Jeremy Davies (last seen in "The House that Jack Built"), Troy Rudeseal, James Ransone (last seen in "Empire State"), Miguel Cazarez Mora, Rebecca Clarke, J. Gaven Wilde, Spencer Fitzgerald, Jordan Isaiah White, Brady Ryan, Tristan Pravong, Jacob Moran, Brady Hepner (last seen in "The Holdovers"), Banks Repeta (last seen in "Armageddon Time"), Parrish Stikeleather, Kristina Arjona, Sheila O'Rear (last seen in "Iron Man 3"), Rocco Poveromo, Kellen Rhude (last seen in "The Killer"), Nina Repeta (last seen in "Radioland Murders"), Lukas Colagross, Mark Riccardi, Megan Petersen, Robert Fortunato, Gina Jun (last seen in "The Good Nurse")
RATING: 6 out of 10 issues of Starlog magazine
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