Year 18, Day 284 - 10/11/26 - Movie #5,458
BEFORE: Well, I greatly enjoyed my extra day off today, courtesy of the WNBA. No Liberty game today because the Atlanta Dream swept the best-of-five playoff round, instead I got to go to Long Island with my wife where she bought cigarettes, then we did some shopping and had a nice lunch at Texas Roadhouse. I've still got three shifts at the theater before we go out of town for a week, and we've got her birthday this week, I'm hoping to do a focus group to raise a little extra cash, and tomorrow's one of those former holidays that's fallen out of favor.
I'm getting a little worried because the President is talking about doing away with daylight savings time, and I have said in the past that I would support any candidate who would take that position, so now I'm wondering if I have to become a Trump supporter to avoid being called a hypocrite. I think my only possible out here is the fact that he's not suggesting we do it for any logical reason, like the fact that it doesn't save energy or lives, he just wants to scrap it because it's too hard for him to change the clocks twice a year, or he's tired of paying people to do that for him and he's too dumb to figure it out. Another possible out is that he's talking about just keeping DST in place all year round, rather than switching back to Standard Time and staying there, which would make more sense.
I know what you're thinking, it doesn't matter, because he can't run for President again - I firmly believe that he WILL, despite what the Constitution says. And anyway, Presidents are allowed 10 years in office, not 8, which is a codicil in place to help anyone who was a Vice President who became President when someone else died - they can have up to two years after ascending and then serve two full terms. So I think Trump WILL run again, and Michael Bloomberg has already shown him how to do it. Bloomberg was the mayor of NYC for two terms, and then ran a third time, which should have been illegal due to term limits, but he changed his party to Independent, as if that made him a different person or something, and then ran again and won again. Nobody stopped him, nobody sued him, there was no class-action taken against him, and so Trump could easily pull the same trick. By the time the courts settled everything, he'd be midway through his third term. It could happen - now THAT's nightmare fuel.
Sophie Thatcher carries over from "MaXXXine".
THE PLOT: Two young Mormon women are drawn into a game of cat-and-mouse in the house of a strange man.
AFTER: This is a very clever film, all in all. It kind of serves as both a horror film and a treatise on comparative religion, which kind of is the biggest casualty here. After a pair of Mormon women visit a man who says he is possibly interested in converting, they end up debating with him over the finer points of religious theory, and then realize they are essentially trapped in his house, with no means of escape. The front door is locked, and the man, Mr. Reed, says it's on a timer, much like a bank vault, and it can't be opened. Furthermore, there is metal in the walls which prevents their cell phones from working, and one presumes that the house is also sound-proofed and such. Uh oh, this is starting to seem a bit like "The Black Phone".
Sisters Barnes and Preston are welcome to leave if they want, at some point they've figured out that pretty much everything Reed has said is a lie, like he said his wife was in the other room but she's very shy, and she's made them some delicious blueberry pie - but now they're assuming that there's no wife (which means they broke their Mormon rules by entering a house with no woman in it) and even worse, there's probably not any pie, either. Reed suggests they leave via the back door of the house, only they'd have to work their way through several rooms and hallways, and God only knows what might be back there. This guy might have a sacrificial altar or a torture chamber back there, or worse.
But no, it's just a library, and there are in fact two doors in back, but they'll have to choose the right one, and listen to another speech about the true meaning of religion. Yep, that really sounds worse, why couldn't it have been a torture chamber? Reed already knows a great deal about the Book of Mormon, in fact he seems to have studied ALL of the world's religions, allegedly in his search for the best one. But I think something funny happens when you study all of the religions, you might come to the conclusion that they're all false, which sure, seems likely, or even weirder, maybe they're all true. Maybe gods draw their power from believers, so maybe Yahweh and Jesus and Buddha and Satan are all in competition with each other to see who can get the most followers. But that's crazy, right? Anyway if you discount one religion as bunk you kind of have to discount all of them, it's the simplest answer, Occam's Razor, there is no God. The universe came about naturally and science explains the stars and the planets and life exists on Earth only because we're a certain distance from the sun and it developed over millions of years and stopped developing once we had television. Devolution NOW!
Ah, but it's not that simple. After an explanation about the "iterations" of religion that uses both the board game Monopoly and the song "Creep" by Radiohead as touchpoints, Reed offers the women two choices - one door marked "Belief" and one marked "Disbelief". Note that neither one is labeled "Exit". If they believe in religion they should choose accordingly, and if they're willing to admit their religion is bogus, they should choose the other door. Yeah, I pretty much picked up early on the fact that neither door was going to lead them outside. This guy is either a genius or a madman, or possibly both, and he's got a bunch of tunnels in his house that we haven't seen since the Minotaur's maze in ancient Crete, or possibly the passages seen in the film "Barbarian". Why do the stairs lead DOWN? Oh, because he lives at the top of a hill. Sure, and if you believe Moses parted the Red Sea and Jesus walked on water, I suppose you'll believe anything.
It's also worth pointing out that if you don't believe in any of the religions, then you also don't believe in sin, and under those parameters, what evil would someone be capable of doing? There would really be no limit under those conditions, and that's kind of what we're dealing with here. Such a person would kill these women, or rape them, or keep them locked up for his own amusement. Geez, and he seemed like such a nice guy at first, too, but that's kind of the point. What evils lurk in the hearts of man? Only the Shadow knows...and this guy. I don't want to give away too much here, because this really needs to be experienced, but in a way it reminds me of "The Menu" or "Opus" or "The Black Phone" in that one really unhinged person is running the show, however he wants, and all the other people can do is play along and hope to find a way out, choose their moment or whatever. As long as that person has his audience, someone to hear his views on the world and what a messed-up place it is, not to mention that everything you think you know about life and death and the afterlife is probably wrong.
Or is it? Some of the events that follow would seem to suggest that there IS something beyond death, only it's also very possible that it's just another deception, a magic trick of sorts. Which is all that religion really is, in the end, it's not even a magic trick, it's a belief in magic tricks that somebody did thousands of years ago, like appear to die and get resurrected, or appear to turn water into wine or appear to make a blind man see. And then somebody came along and said, "Wow, that was a really good magic trick, I should write that one down because I think we can build a religion around that, and sell people the promise of eternal life while we take their money." Come on, deep down you know it's true. And I say this as someone raised Catholic, I was an altar boy and my father was a deacon and my mother was the church organist. But at some point I decided to think for myself and see that the religion was based on the story of the magic tricks.
To believe that there is no God, other than the one humans created in their stories, yeah, it's truly terrifying. It means that maybe there's nothing after this world, you die and that's it, you're done and there will be things you never got to accomplish and quite possible the world will forget about you unless you did something really spectacular or extraordinary. But that's also very liberating, I mean you can still pray if you want and wish for good things to happen to you or to other people, just bear in mind that nobody is listening and it has no effect on changing reality. It might make you feel good to hope for good things, but it's probably more effective to try and make good things happen yourself. And there's an upside, if there's no God then there's no Satan, no demons or vengeful angels or an eternity of burning in hell or being bored in heaven. Then there are no monsters except savage animals, terrible people and the ones in our imagination.
There is one other possibility, which this film also raises, if only for a few minutes - that the world is a simulation or some kind of advanced computer program that we're all living in, "Matrix"-style. Then if we die in this reality, we're out of the program and we still exist somewhere larger, and that's our true form. Well, either we find a glitch in the matrix and prove that our reality isn't really real, or we just keep on going and we'll find out at the end whether there's anything else. The saving grace is that if there's nothing else, we won't be aware of it, we'll be blissfully unaware. Sorry to harsh your mellow but still feel free to check out the film, it's got some good ideas in it. A lot of bad nasty stuff too, but you know, some good ideas. This is probably the type of film you get after the "Saw" franchise makes a jillion dollars, but I haven't seen those films yet, I've been avoiding them.
Directed by Scott Beck (director of "65") & Bryan Woods (ditto)
Also starring Hugh Grant (last seen in "Paddington in Peru"), Chloe East (last seen in "The Fabelmans"), Topher Grace (last seen in "Under the Silver Lake"), Elle Young (last seen in "A Score to Settle"), Julie Lynn Mortensen, Haylie Hansen, Elle McKinnon (last seen in "Wonder"), Hanna Huffman, Anesha Bailey (last seen in "The Interview"), Miguel Castillo, Stephanie Lavigne, Wendy Gorling,
RATING: 7 out of 10 loose wooden matches
