The Matrix Resurrections

Year 14, Day 306 - 11/2/22 - Movie #4,276

BEFORE: OK, now that October is over, on with November, back to any and all subject matter, whatever's going to get me to the topic of Thanksgiving and Christmas is fair game at this point. 

Yahya Abdul Mateen II carries over again from "Candyman". 

Also, here's the format breakdown for October's films: 

9 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Don't Let Go, Carrie (2013), The Addams Family 2, The Amityville Horror (2005), Ma, Swallow, Love and Monsters, Us, Candyman (2021)

5 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, The Nines, Colossal, Underwater, The Invisible Man (2020)

2 watched on Netflix: Identity, Hubie Halloween

1 watched on Amazon Prime: Hotel Transylvania 4: Transformania

1 watched on Tubi: Lizzie

1 watched on a random site: The Witches (2020)

19 TOTAL

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Matrix Revolutions" (Movie #156)

THE PLOT: Return to a world of two realities: one, everyday life, the other, what lies behind it. To find out if his reality is a construct, to truly know himself, Mr. Anderson will have to choose to follow the white rabbit once more. 

AFTER: Wow, so it's been a minute since the last "Matrix" film, which was released in November 2003.  But I watched it in June 2009, back in Year 1 - still, it's Year 14 of the project, so even though I caught up with installments #2 and #3 LATE, it's still been 13 whole years since then.  Do I even remember what happened in "The Matrix Revolutions"?  Does anyone?  

What the hell was the Merovingian? Or the Trainman?  The Architect?  Anybody?  I watched all three "Matrix" movies before this one, but I only remember what happened in the first one - that is NOT a good sign, especially if this new film is going to pick up on a few of those threads after a long period of down time and try to get something going again.  There's no momentum, like the series came to a dead stop and it's going to take a ton of energy to get it moving again, let alone moving in the proper direction.  Let me go read the plot summary from the previous 2003 film on Wikipedia before I talk about "Resurrections"...Wow, back then I labeled "Matrix Revolutions" as a "pointless waste", but why did I also rate it as a "6"?  What the hell?

Yeah, both Trinity and Neo were toast at the end of the last film, but we know that in the big movie (and comic-book) franchises, nobody dies forever, right?  They only stay dead until a new writer came come up with a new angle and a semi-believable way to bring them back.  A large sum of money is also frequently required to convince an actor to step back into a role, though apparently no amount of money was enough to get Laurence Fishburne to come back, he's been replaced with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Morpheus, or the entity that was Morpheus, or the digital avatar that's replacing Morpheus, whichever. 

It's years later, though - 60 years later - and there is a thing that looks like Neo, only he goes by Thomas Anderson and he works as a video-game designer, specifically a game called "The Matrix", which has the characters Neo and Trinity in it.  But Bugs, someone from the real world, spots this code-within-the-code somehow, and they investigate, only to find a thing that sort of looks like Morpheus, but instead is just some kind of digital simulation of him. (?) Neo/Anderson is stuck in a daily routine full of endless meetings when his company decides that a sequel to "The Matrix" is needed, after a long period of avoiding sequels. There's a HUGE inside joke here, I'm guessing, because the Wachowskis also declined all efforts to make another "Matrix" movie for a long time. (What changed?). Neo/Anderson takes the prescribed familiar "blue pills" every day so that he'll stay in the virtual reality world, presumably. 

But Morpheus and Bugs strive to free him from the Matrix, and drag him into the real world, which once again is populated by machines that feed off of human energy, keeping millions of people alive in those pods while their minds inhabit the simulation.  This is something that never really made sense to me about the "Matrix" films, these aliens came and took over Earth at some point, and they captured people one by one, or perhaps en masse, and transferred almost everyone over to the pods - but these machines feed off human energy?  Wouldn't solar power be a lot more efficient?  I mean, the sun is like RIGHT THERE.  But no, let's spend a TON of energy to keep the pods running, just to harvest a bit of energy from the humans?   

I know, I know, this is all about the effects, what can happen in what is essentially a virtual world where people can run up the walls and force-push a car or move faster than a bullet.  So expecting this world to make some kind of coherent sense is pointless, but I'm also talking about the world outside the virtual world, the one that's run by the alien machines.  Once some of the humans know that THAT one is the real world, why continue to spend so much time in the virtual one?  Why aren't all efforts being directed to (once again) defeat the evil power and take back control of the planet?  I'm not quite getting it, where's the sense of focus, it's like everybody's distracted by the minor details and they're not acknowledging the bigger picture.  So, am I missing something? Why are things this way?

Everything here seems to be about Neo and Trinity, even though these aren't really those characters, but some kind of recreated version of them?  (Another thing that's pretty unclear.) But why would the machines spend so much energy rebuilding them from the ground up? I think they NEED them somehow because the virtual world is so damn boring without them, it's all just staff meetings and brainstorming sessions and the occasional office birthday party.  OH, if only we had a couple of creatively trained fighters who could liven up our drab workdays!  Gimme a break...

I think perhaps they waited too long to make another "Matrix" movie?  The fans came out, of course, but the problem with making a movie that's THIS expensive is that the film can gross over $157 million and still be considered a box-office bomb, because they spent over $190 million making it.  I'll say again what I said after watching "The Matrix Revolutions", that's it's a damn shame so much money got spent on this and not eliminating a disease or world hunger or something more positive and useful.  It's a great deal of time and effort just to get Neo and Trinity back together.  Come on, was it really worth it, in the grand scheme of things? 

Oddly, this is the third film to directly reference "Alice In Wonderland" that I've seen in the last two weeks: "Underwater" and "Us" both had a bunch of this stuff - one had a stuffed rabbit and a bunch of dialogue lines about going down the "rabbit hole" and "Us" had real rabbits and an underworld situation, plus the doppelganger characters wore red outfits, and I guess "Red" was a take on the Queen of Hearts?  But really, the "Matrix" franchise has them all beat, one you factor in that Jefferson Airplane song, with those lyrics "One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small..."

Also starring Keanu Reeves (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Carrie-Anne Moss (last seen in "The Chumscrubber"), Jonathan Groff (last seen in "The Normal Heart"), Jessica Henwick (last seen in "Love and Monsters"), Neil Patrick Harris (last seen in "Downsizing"), Jada Pinkett Smith (last seen in "Scream 2"), Priyanka Chopra Jonas (last seen in "Isn't It Romantic"), Christina Ricci (last seen in "Mermaids"), Lambert Wilson (last heard in "Ernest & Celestine"), Andrew Lewis Caldwell (last seen in "Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny"), Toby Onwumere, Max Riemelt, Joshua Grothe (last seen in "Gunpowder Milkshake"), Brian J. Smith, Erendira Ibarra, Michael X. Sommers (last seen in "Playing It Cool"), L. Trey Wilson, Mumba Maina, Max Mauff (last seen in "The Reader"), Purab Kohli, Freema Agyeman, Sabrina Strehl, Andrew Rothney (last seen in "Mary Queen of Scots"), Cooper Rivers, Leo Sheng, Telma Hopkins, Chad Stahelski, Julian Grey (last seen in "Downhill"), Gaige Chat, Stephen Dunlevy (last seen in "Jungle Cruise"), Ellen Hollman (also last seen in "Love and Monsters"), Daniel Bernhardt (last seen in 'Term Life"), with a cameo from Tom Hardy (?) (last seen in "Stuart: A Life Backwards") and archive footage of Laurence Fishburne (last seen in "Running with the Devil"), Hugo Weaving (last seen in "Mortal Engines").

RATING: 4 out of 10 exomorphic particles

Candyman (2021)

Year 14, Day 304 - 10/31/22 - Movie #4,275

BEFORE: Today is Halloween, so it's the end of my Shocktober chain, which, because of my vacation, had to be cut short, only 19 horror films this month, this was by design.  BUT, if you allow me to count back to "Muppets Haunted Mansion", which I watched in mid-September, perhaps this is just a scheduling issue.  The "Purge" films were horror movies of a sort, and so were "Morbius" and "Last Night in Soho", and even "Sweet Girl" had a bit of the macabre to it. And "Charlie Says" was about the Manson family, so there you go.  Once I factor in the September films that might have qualified, I get 28 movies, that's nearly a full month, it's just one that started early - so, on some level, this year's mission was accomplished. 

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II carries over from "Us", and so does Jordan Peele, as a writer and producer. It took me so long to schedule his two follow-ups to "Get Out" that there's now a new Jordan Peele film, "Nope", which I won't be able to get to this time around.  I saw bits of "Candyman" while working at the AMC in the summer of 2021, and I saw bits of "Nope" earlier this year while working at my current job...I'm obligated to poke my head in on the screenings, just to monitor the sound level, and make sure that the theater-goers are keeping their masks on.  Sometimes I see bits of the film this way, and sometimes those bits make sense, and, well, sometimes they don't. 

But there's a whole lot of horror films I couldn't get to this year, about 50 that I have tangible copies of, either on DVD or my DVR, and then there's a whole list of both classic and new horror films available on streaming that I'm tracking, in hopes of putting together a solid chain for next year. That gives me a list of about 90 or 100 horror films, which theoretically should be more than enough, but right now, I've only got three small chains of 10 linked films each, another chain of 7 films, and then little bricks of two films here, three films there.  Can I work my magic on this list over the winter break and maybe put together a bigger horror chain for 2023?  It's tough to say. 

Here are some of the classic films left over: "Ben" and "Willard", "Evil Dead" and "Army of Darkness", "Species" and "Species II", "Blair Witch 2", "Jeepers Creepers", "The Relic", "Swamp Thing", "Dead Ringers", the "Creepshow" movies, "The Amityville Horror" (1979), "Q: The Winged Serpent", "A Return to Salem's Lot", "Children of the Corn" and "Hocus Pocus". 

Then there are the new horror films that MAYBE can help me link some of those classics together: "Antlers", "The Discovery", "Ghostbusters: Afterlife", "Nightmare Alley", "The Babadook", "Old", "Pet Sematary" (2019), "The Munsters" (2022), the latest "Scream" film, "Freaky", "Blair Witch" (2016), "Barbarian", "The Forever Purge", "Army of Thieves" and "Army of the Dead", "The Night House", "The Wolf of Snow Hollow", "Lamb", "The Black Phone" "They/Them" and "Wendell & Wild". 

And the franchises I haven't even touched yet, like "Child's Play", "Nightmare on Elm Street", "Halloween", "Friday the 13th", and the "Saw" films, where could they all fit into the mix?  I try to knock off at least one franchise, like "Twilight" or "Scream" each year, can I do that again?  I not only don't know, I don't even have time to start researching this. First I've got to get my romance chain for next February into some kind of shape, then add some new horror films over the winter and spring, and then MAYBE I can have some kind of solid answer by summertime.  Maybe. 

THE PLOT: A sequel to the 1992 horror film "Candyman" that returns to the now-gentrified Chicago neighborhood where the legend began.  

AFTER: You get it, right? Halloween, trick-or-treating, candy... Candyman!  I played "Candyman" myself this year, sitting on my porch with two bags full of drug-store, fun-sized candy, after removing all the Kit Kats for my wife and all of the Reese's peanut butter cups for myself, of course. Let the neighborhood kids have all the Jolly Ranchers, Twizzlers, and Dum-Dum lollipops they want.  This is a capitalist country, after all, and trick-or-treating is a socialist practice - they need to learn about trickle-down economics the hard way, I'm keeping the good candy for myself and donating only the stuff we don't need. I didn't seem to get many takers, I don't know if that's because we're still not fully out of the pandemic yet, or because a big man sitting alone on a porch with candy for kids just isn't a good look. Well, kids, nothing ventured, nothing gained - though maybe putting the candy bucket inside a giant cage was the wrong way to go. (I'M KIDDING!)

I'm new to the "Candyman" franchise, and it looks like this was some kind of remake or reboot, several of these actors were in the 1992 film, so I admit I'm sort of at a loss here. There are so many things I don't understand about the Candyman myth, even after watching this film, but my primary question is now, "Why does anybody say this guy's name five times in the mirror, anyway?"  I mean, the second part of the urban legend is that after you do this, he appears as if by magic AND KILLS YOU.  So, umm, why even take that chance?  Sure, you want to test out the legend, to see if it's real, but if it is, YOU DIE. Well, I guess you die with a sense of resolve, with that big question out of the way, at least. I hope it was worth it...

And I get that we're dealing with racism again, that place where African-American social issues intersect with horror.  But they really laid it on thick here, with issues concerning the projects (ghettos) in the Chicago area, also gentrification and the abysmal history of lynchings and race-based violence in the U.S., right up to an incident of cops shooting a homeless man in 1977, a man who was suspected of giving kids pieces of candy with razor blades in them. The man, Sherman Fields, was later proven innocent, but since he had a hook in place of one hand, he was believed to be evil. And then, the theory goes, he'd appear back in the land of the living any time someone said his name five times in the mirror....

But then there's another story, told with the aid of shadow puppets, of a painter named Daniel Robitaille, a black man born in the late 1800's who grew up to become a famous painter, but after he fell in love with a white woman and got her pregnant, he was tortured and killed by a mob of white men. So, wait, is HE the Candyman?  Damn, this was so confusing, now I'm wishing I had watched the original 1992 movie, some of the same actors were in that film, and it feels like this film picked up on some threads from that film and followed them forward.  The charater of Anthony McCoy was in that film as a young boy, and in this sequel/reboot he's a grown-up adult, a Chicago painter who's in a relationship with an art gallery owner.  

There's something suspicious right there - isn't it a conflict of interest for a gallery owner to be sleeping with one of her artists?  We see the other artists complain that Anthony's got an inside track toward getting his pieces shown in the gallery, and they may be right.  Anthony hasn't made a new artwork in two years, he's creatively blocked until he starts researching the legend of the Candyman, and even then, he doesn't make a painting or anything, he just hangs up a mirror in the gallery with a plaque daring people to say the Candyman's name.  WOW, is that lazy work by an artist or what?  He just went out and BOUGHT a bathroom mirror at the Home Depot and called it art?  Marcel Duchamp would be proud, I suppose, but we're not in the age of Dada any more, and I'm with Anthony's fellow artists on this one, if he weren't sleeping with the gallery owner, there's NO WAY that piece would make it into the show. 

What's worse is that Anthony is having visions of the Candyman, or at least Sherman's ghost.  Jeez-us, why don't you paint THAT?  Inspiration is where you find it, after all, paint the gruesome guy with the hook hand that you see when you close your eyes, DO THE WORK, instead of just coasting and hanging up that bathroom mirror on the gallery wall!  Anthony also gets stung by a bee at some point, and he keeps scratching the bite until it gets infected and pieces of his skin are falling off.  Umm, he may want to have that looked at.  Before long, his whole arm is going to...AHH, I see what you did there. 

For some reason, the word spreads, and people keep testing out the theory by saying "Candyman" in the mirror five times, and they KEEP DYING.  Does this make any sense?  Hey, I heard about these high-school kids who said "Candyman" in the mirror and they all died, I can't wait to try that?  Sure, and why not do the Cinnamon Challenge and eat some Tide Pods while you're at it, the world will be better off without you, or at least smarter.  And when Anthony finally goes to the hospital, he accidentally finds out that he was born in the projects, and this leads him to ask his mother about the events seen in the first film, when he was kidnapped by the Candyman as a small child, and a woman named Helen Lyle saved him, but died in the process.  Coincidentally, Anthony had been using her research on the legend to create his art, go figure!  

I still didn't really understand what was happening at the end, maybe there is a Candyman collective and it seemed that William, the guy in the laundromat, seemed to know a lot about this. After all, he was present when Sherman Fields was killed by the police. But even though I saw the ending several times while working at the AMC last summer, I just still didn't quite get how it related to the rest of the film.  Is it just me?  I had to read the whole plotline on Wikipedia just to grok what was taking place in the last 15 minutes or so. And honestly, it's still pretty unclear.  

It's not even really a NITPICK POINT, but the reports over the years of razor blades in Halloween candy have been blown completely out of proportion.  The simple fact is that razor blades are larger than you think (also pretty outdated, most people these days use disposables or electric razors, but that's neither here nor there) and most Halloween candy is what they call "Fun-Sized", aka smaller than usual.  So merely concealing a full-size razor blade in a fun-size treat would be quite a challenge, nearly impossible to do. Now, razor blades in APPLES is another story, however what kind of a sick, perverted person hands out FRUIT on Halloween instead of candy?  Most kids would boycott those houses in the first place. Yet, the simple truth is that when people do investigate reports of tainted candy, it's often determined that a family member was involved in placing the foreign object in the candy, which means that either the parents loved their kids enough to teach them a valuable lesson about stranger danger, or they hated their kids enough to try to kill them for reals. You make the call. Yet, the urban legend about strangers trying to kill kids with candy persists - the story is stronger than the reality, which also kind of explains the Q-Anon thing with the non-existent pizza parlor somewhere in the D.C. area. Well, you can't prove that it DOESN'T exist...

Speaking as someone who was working as a theater usher when this film was theatrically released, it's really a dirty trick to flip the screen image for the first few minutes of the film.  Do you know how many patrons just at the ONE theater I worked at ran out to complain that the film was being shown all backwards?  A lot, so much that the management had to put up a SIGN warning people that the first few minutes of the film were meant to be screened in an inverted fashion.  To make matters worse, the Sammy Davis song "Candyman" plays over the opening vanity logos, and it sounds all distorted and jittery.  So the first few minutes of this movie are a projectionist's nightmare, even when it's being screen perfectly, it looks and sounds all messed up...

Well, it all doesn't really matter now, because Halloween is over and that's a wrap on the Shocktober chain for another year.  Now I've got 25 movies left in 2022, but I have to watch 15 of them in the next 24 days if I'm going to make it to my Thanksgiving movies in time. It's still going to be tight, I've got a bunch of shifts coming up at the theater, but then the screenings sort of dry up a few days before the holiday. So, I like my chances.  

Also starring Teyonah Parris (last seen in "How Do You Know"), Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (last seen in "The Kid Who Would Be King"), Colman Domingo (last seen in "Freedomland"), Kyle Kaminsky, Vanessa E. Williams, Brian King (last seen in "Widows"), Miriam Moss, Rebecca Spence (last seen in "Man of Steel"), Carl Clemons-Hopkins, Christiana Clark, Michael Hargrove, Rodney L. Jones III, Heidi Grace Engerman, Ireon Roach, Breanna Lind, Malic White, Sarah Wisterman, Sarah Lo, Mark Montgomery, Torrey Hanson, Cassie Kramer, Cedric Mays, Hannah Love Jones, Genesis Denise Hale, J. Nicole Brooks (last seen in "The Weather Man"), Pamela Jones, Tien Tran, Katherine Purdy, Mike Geraghty (last seen in "The Trial of the Chicago 7"), Aaron Crippen, Dan Fierro, Nancy Pender, Johnny Westmoreland, Guy Spencer, Daejon Staeker, Tony Todd, Ben Marten, Fady Naguib (last seen in "Eternals") and the voice of Virginia Madsen (last seen in "Mr. North").

RATING: 5 out of 10 industrial-size clothes dryers

Us

Year 14, Day 303 - 10/30/22 - Movie #4,274

BEFORE: Well, damn it, because I'm locked into a chain that will get me to the end of the year, and the new "Black Panther" film comes out in 10 days.  With a little more foresight, I might have found a way to end my October chain with tonight's film, take a few days off, then go see "Wakanda Forever" as soon as it opens.  Well, then I'd have no outro for that, in addition to shaking up my chain at essentially the last minute, so I'm not going to do that. I'll just put the new Marvel film on my list and I WILL get to it ASAP in the New Year.  Considering that I caught up on Marvel this year, by watching "Shang-Chi", "The Eternals", "Doctor Strange 2", "Venom 2" and "Spider-Man: No Way Home", and even the "She-Hulk" series, I think I've done pretty well in 2022, no regrets. Tomorrow I'll list all the horror movies I didn't get to - but hey, I'll need some material for next October, too.

Elisabeth Moss carries over from "The Invisible Man". 

THE PLOT: A family's serene beach vacation turns to chaos when their doppelgangers appear and begin to terrorize them. 

AFTER: Well, here's the good news - if your whole family is stuck for Halloween costumes, or decides at the last minute that they all want to do something together, then all you need are some red jumpsuits and long pointy scissors, and you can all just go trick-or-treating as your own doppelganger family.  You just need to mess your hair up, open your eyes real wide and learn how to smile like a crazy person. Problem solved.  

This was the hot horror film of 2019, I think you can see from my choices this year that even if I put a horror film on my list and try to fast-track it, it still can take me two or three years to get to it.  I got very lucky this year and found slots for "Morbius", "Last Night in Soho" and "Hotel Transylvania 4", but the rest have been around for a couple cycles, at least.  And "Tales from the Darkside", how long has THAT one been on my list?  Possibly since the beginning, it's tough to say. But I'd been trying to get to the "Purge" franchise and "The Amityville Horror" for a while, thankfully it's the newer films that allow me to use the older ones as linking material, or perhaps vice versa.  

But if I think back, it was two years after "Get Out" was the hot movie, and literally everyone was waiting to see what Jordan Peele would do next.  The answer turned out to be "Us" and then "Nope", but neither one really struck gold in the way that "Get Out" did - then Peele became the latest filmmaker to fail at trying to revive "The Twilight Zone", and I think we all wished him well, but let it rest already, stop trying to make "The Twilight Zone" happen. It had its day in the 1950's, and a movie in the 1980's, I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I don't have time for another anthology TV series that I have to watch. I made it through all the Rod Serling episodes when I was a kid, learned a lot about dramatic irony, sure, but I committed them all to memory so that I'd never have to watch them again - because it turns out that when you play everything for shock value, there's not a great desire to watch that movie or TV show again.  Once you learn the "Big Twist", you'll see it coming the second time, and its lost its impact. 

And there is a "Big Twist" here, but it's buried in a very confusing, convoluted plotline - I still saw it coming a mile away, probably because I trained myself as a kid to figure out all those "Twilight Zone" episodes.  Don't get me wrong, there's a great set-up here in "Us", the opening half-hour is 100% solid - it's the last half-hour, the time during which everything is supposed to be revealed and explained, where things just kind of fall apart.  Oh, umm, how about a mid-review SPOILER ALERT here, if you don't want to learn the whole plotline of "Us" then please stop reading now, there's just no way to talk about this film without giving it all away.  Anyway, a family on vacation gets a visit from their creepy doppelgangers, which is a German word that means "I look just like you, and I'm here to replace you."  

The Wilson family is no match for their doppelgangers, who wear those red jumpsuits and carry those long pointy scissors and talk about "the Untethering" in a creepy way.  Actually, only one of them talks, the others are either silent or make creepy growling or bellowing noises.  Creepy, right, and what are they going to do with those scissors?  At the same time, we're shown flashbacks of a little girl at a California beachside amusement park, wandering away from her parents and finding some kind of hall-of-mirrors in a funhouse, as one does at an amusement park.  But within the hall of mirrors she meets her own reflection, that is to say, a little girl who looks and dresses just like her.  Also creepy.  So, umm, what's the connection between the stories?  Is the little girl from the hall of mirrors the grown-up doppelganger, and if so, how did she get a whole doppelganger family that looks just like the real Wilson family?  

Before we get any constructive answers, there's a drawn-out fight where the Wilson family has to defeat their doppelgangers, which isn't easy because they're suburbans, not really the killing type.  Put anybody's back up against the wall, however, and they could be made to defend themselves - and any parent might have it within them to defend their children if needed, so deep down, perhaps we're all killing machines, when push comes to shove.  Would you kill somebody to save your children, or your parents?  Who can say what can happen in the heat of the moment?  Would you kill a home intruder in the middle of the night, to protect your family?  

But then it turns out that what's happening to the Wilsons is happening all over the city, maybe even all over the country.  Crazed people in red jumpsuits are turning up all over the place, and if left unchecked, they're finding their human counterparts, presumably killing them, and then taking their place in a long, protest-like line of doppelgangers, what gives?  A reference early in the film to the failed 1986 public event "Hands Across America" gives another clue to what might be going on here.  The film also opens with the strange fact that there are miles and miles of tunnels under the United States, many of which don't have a known purpose.  

But the big problem here is that even after the big reveal, when you try to put all these little narrative pieces together, it doesn't really make any sense.  It's creepy, sure, but it still has to WORK as a story, and this just doesn't.  If you tell me there's a guy who lives in a shack in the woods and he's killing people with a machete, I can understand that.  If you tell me there's a vampire who lives in a castle and he sleeps in a coffin during the day and turns into a bat at night to drink human blood, it's a big ask, but I can still get behind it.  But then if you tell me that the government somehow cloned everyone and made the clones live in the underground tunnels, where they all constantly mimicked the actions of the citizens living above because they don't have complete souls of their own, and this was some failed program to try to control the population, well, sorry, I'm not coming along on that ride.  This seems even more far-fetched than saying that celebrities and politicians are drinking the blood of frightened babies in the basement of a Washington DC pizzeria. 

How does this even work, anyway, if the government is no longer in control of the project, then who's feeding the clones, who's getting them the jumpsuits, how do they learn English or take showers or get supplies on a regular basis, and why don't more of them come up the stairs or the giant escalator and escape through the amusement park on a regular basis?  And then who decided that completing the Hands Across America project was the ultimate goal, the thing they should be focused on?  If they're all about the Untethering, and replacing their counterparts, why isn't THAT the main goal?  Wouldn't it make sense for them to come up above ground one by one, initiate the take-over gradually, like the Skrulls in "Secret Invasion", rather than do it all at once, thereby revealing their presence to the world and tipping their hand?  

Sure, I get it, mirrors are creepy and amusement parks are creepy, empty beaches are creepy, and rabbits in cages are creepy, but the pieces of the puzzle just aren't coming together for me here.  And twins are creepy for sure.  People who look a bit like you are definitely creepy - if you let them be.  I've got photos of myself encountering my doppelgangers at comic-con - this happened when someone came to my booth who was also wearing a baseball cap and a similar Hawaiian shirt, and at that point what can you do but hug that other person and have your picture taken together?  To me that seems like a much better way of handling things than just killing them outright.

I suppose there's a big metaphor here for the class system in the U.S. - as there's one group of people who get to live above ground, have jobs and houses and cars, while another group of people lives "underground", and doesn't have all of those things.  That's fine, I get the race-based metaphor, but it's somewhat contradicted by depicting an upper middle-class African-American family, so the whole message gets kind of muddled.  Sure, we all expected Jordan Peele to make another horror film connected to the Black experience, but there were scarier alternatives out there - gerrymandering, for example. I can't think of many things more terrifying than a whole group of people losing their voting rights and representation, but I guess that would be a lot harder to translate into a horror-movie plot.  

Also starring Lupita Nyong'o (last heard in "Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker"), Winston Duke (last seen in "Spenser Confidential"), Shahadi Wright Joseph (last heard in "The Lion King" (2019), Evan Alex, Tim Heidecker (last seen in "Brigsby Bear"), Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (last seen in "The Trial of the Chicago 7"), Anna Diop (last seen in "Message from the King"), Cali Sheldon, Noelle Sheldon, Madison Curry, Ashley McKoy, Napiera Groves, Lon Gowan (last seen in "The Call of the Wild"), Alan Frazier, Duke Nicholson, Dustin Ybarra (last seen in "Ted 2"), Nathan Harrington, Kara Hayward (last seen in "Paterson") and the voice of Jordan Peele (last heard in "Toy Story 4")

RATING: 4 out of 10 whacked moles

The Invisible Man (2020)

Year 14, Day 302 - 10/29/22 - Movie #4,273

BEFORE: OK, now I'm officially late, and the prospects for catching up aren't great.  This was always going to be my Saturday film, but since I lost Friday night and I have to work ALL DAY Saturday, then I have to watch this Saturday night, after a 12 hour shift, and (presumably) some kind of nap.  I'm going to be wiped out, I don't know how I'll be able to stay awake.  Hopefully this one will be just scary ENOUGH to hold my attention and make me afraid to close my eyes, that might be the saving grace.  However, there's no way I can post a review until Sunday, so to me, that's late - even if I end up staying awake and watching it "on time", which for me, means late. 

Amali Golden carries over from "Love and Monsters", she's got an uncredited role in today's film, but that's OK, because according to IMDB, she's in here somewhere, as "Annie". 

THE PLOT: When Cecilia's abusive ex takes his own life and leaves her his fortune, she suspects his death was a hoax. As a series of coinciences turns deadly, Cecilia works to prove she is being hunted by someone nobody can see. 

AFTER: OK, so I survived the long Saturday shift, somehow I managed to get to the theater before 6 am and open up, and get it ready for the school's Open House.  As soon as we got all the tables and chairs in place, all of the teachers and volunteers showed up at the same time, and before I knew it, we were swamped with prospective students and parents, there to learn more about the college, I guess for next year?  Damn, it's been so long I kind of forgot how college selection and admissions works.  I guess colleges have to promote themselves to the parents so they can get that sweet, sweet tuition money and use it to pay the hourly wages of the worker drones like me, so, umm, thanks for considering art school, parents!  

I somehow got home before dinnertime, on a weekend night when most adults just want to get out there and party, I saw a lot of people in weird costumes on the subway - well, more than on the average Saturday night in NYC, anyway.  Coming home from the late shifts I can sometimes spot a drag queen or two, that's fairly normal now.  Then I figured I'd watch TV and take a nap, but I didn't - and a couple of bottles of pumpkin ale didn't knock me out, either.  Sometimes beer keeps me up rather than puts me to sleep - so 11 pm rolled around and I'd figure I'd start the movie, thinking I'd probably be asleep after 10 minutes, but I stayed awake!  That's a good sign for a horror movie, remember that "Underwater" kept making me doze off, again and again. 

All week, I've found my films at the intersection of horror and bad relationships, like "Colossal" and "Swallow" both riffed on women's relationships with toxic men, and this one fits right in with those.  (Let's file "Lizzie" and "Love and Monsters" under "It's Complicated", OK?). "The Invisible Man" is about a woman trying to escape from a controlling husband, somebody who's rich and a big tech executive in the optics market (hint, hint) but wants to keep his wife under wraps at his compound, and be in charge of everything she does, says and eats.  This guy could apparently be with any women he wanted, but then when she splits, his obsession goes into overdrive, and then he can't imagine himself with anyone else.  Perhaps no other woman would put up with his controlling ways, and in Cecilia he found the perfect submissive - and of course, he desperately wants back the person he can't have. It all kind of fits, psychologically speaking.  

However, not everyone would go to such extremes to get someone back, like faking their own death after crafting a will with such outrageous terms - Cecilia gets his entire optics fortune, but in monthly increments of six figures over four years, provided that she remains innocent of any criminal wrongdoing. (Now, why would THAT be in the terms of the will, hmmmm...). It seems her late husband is still controlling her, even after his "death", that's the easiest assumption to make, but for God's sake, why does she agree to these terms?  Can't she get her own lawyer, and negotiate a better deal, like how about she gets everything right away and doesn't have to jump through any hoops?  Or she gets to run his company as the majority shareholder?  And to get the money, of course she has to sign the contract, provide her bank account information and her current address, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?  That would only be bad if her husband was only MOSTLY dead, and wanted to stalk her...

I think this is the stupidest part of the film, perhaps, because with his invisibility power, Adrian Griffin can do so many things, he could rob jewelry stores or sneak into bank vaults, or if he's a total perv he could just walk into any women's dressing room or locker room, yet he instead devotes all of his efforts into winning back the ONE woman who is sick of him and can't stand him. Just move on, dude.

Before long, the film turns into a solid creep-fest, because, well, because we know it's called "The Invisible Man", and we know that sooner or later, there's going to be some hijinks caused by somebody we can't see on camera.  I admit I had a bit of an advantage here, because ever since I got my hearing aid, I've been watching films with the captions on, and any notable sound effects are mentioned in the captions for the benefit of the hearing-impaired.  Whatever technology the Invisible Man is using here apparently makes some kind of clicking noise, because whenever he was in the room, I got a heads-up about the clicking from the captions.  That's a big clue that I should be looking for curtains moving, doors appearing to open by themselves, or chair cushions that are indented as if somebody you can't see is sitting on them...

But what's really clever here is the uncertainty, even if Cecilia feels like there's somebody invisible in the room with her, how can she possibly prove it?  What if that noise she hears is just the wind, or the normal creaking noises that any house might make?  Is that bump on the ceiling from an invisible person in the attic, or maybe it's just a squirrel that got inside, or an acorn that fell on the roof?  Never mind that, what if she's going crazy?  Certainly everybody THINKS that when she says that her husband is stalking her from beyond the grave, how do we in the audience really know what's going on in any particular situation?  Is Adrian dead or not?  Is Cecilia crazy or not?  And where is all of this going to end up?  

They kind of keep you guessing here - Adrian's brother just happens to also be his estate lawyer, so maybe he's in on the conspiracy.  Is he evil or, you know, just a lawyer?  He claims that he also hated how controlling his brother was, and so he's a sympathetic figure, for a time.  But maybe he's a little TOO sympathetic, is that all an act?  Cecilia's sister is very helpful when she's trying to get her life back together, but then she starts acting cold to her, what's up with that?  By the time Cecilia is spreading dirt or flour around on all the floors, we have to consider that maybe she's just gone completely off the deep end.  

Between this and "The Handmaid's Tale", Elisabeth Moss really has become the go-to actress for the neurotic doormat, I realize that her character was in a bad relationship, but when we first meet her she's got not only the fear of relationships, but anxiety over going outside, fear of being watched, intimacy issues, control issues, somehow she found the strength to leave her controlling husband, but then immediately reverts to a state of weakness.  Where did that resolve suddenly go?  Maybe it does work this way, I don't know - maybe the mistakes of the previous relationship do follow you around for months or even years.  Sometimes literally.

But pity the actor who gets the news from his agent that he's got the starring role in that new big horror movie, only to find out that he's going to be playing the Invisible Man, and he won't be seen for about 95% of the film...

I'm trying lately to not overthink things, and just let things go when they don't make much sense.  BUT, if I were still that guy who called out the NITPICK POINTS I'd be inclined to mention that even if a person were wearing a special suit that was covered in a ton of tiny cameras that could somehow each take a picture of what you might see on the other side of a person, and transmit that to a tiny screen that was somehow not blocking another one of the cameras, and thus it would appear from all the tiny screens together that you were looking THROUGH the person instead of at him, that image, theoretically, would never look QUITE right, because the angle would be wrong.  You'd be across the room, so the image your eyes would expect to see, let's say of the wall behind the Invisible Man, wouldn't be completely matched by the one taken by the camera that was on his back, so I'd have to call B.S. on this technology, as depicted here.  At the very least, even if the suit was working perfectly, you'd see a kind of shimmer as he walked by, as the projected images wouldn't totally line up right. 

This project was originally going to be part of a shared universe for the old Universal Monsters, like Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolfman.  Remember how Dr. Jekyll turned up in that Tom Cruise re-boot of "The Mummy"?  After that movie tanked, the plans changed and so somebody decided to re-work the "Invisible Man" part of the franchise into a new stand-alone film, but one that really drew power from the #metoo movement, with a strong female character.  So Johnny Depp was out as the main character, which is probably a good idea, because who would believe that Johnny Depp would be involved in a bad relationship, with a husband and wife each trying to get control over the other?  Hey, wait a minute...

Then the film had the bad fortune of booking a release date in February 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was starting to hit, and people stopped going to movie theaters.  This was doubly ironic, since it featured a main character who for the first third of the film is under lockdown and afraid to leave the house.  Still, the film managed to turn a profit, grossing $144 million against a $7 million budget, partially because it was played a lot in drive-ins, which re-opened in some parts of the U.S. before regular theaters did. 

Also starring Elisabeth Moss (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Oliver Jackson-Cohen (last seen in "The Lost Daughter"), Harriet Dyer, Aldis Hodge (last seen in "One Night in MIami...."), Storm Reid (last seen in "Don't Let Go"), Michael Dorman (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"), Benedict Hardie (last seen in "The Light Between Oceans"), Renee Lim, Brian Meegan, Nick Kici, Nicholas Hope (last seen in "Scooby-Doo"), Sam Smith, Vivienne Greer, Cleave Williams, Cardwell Lynch, Zara Michales, Nash Edgerton (last seen in "Jane Got a Gun"), Xavier Fernandez (last seen in "Fool's Gold"). 

RATING: 7 out of 10 camera pans to "empty" spaces

Love and Monsters

Year 14, Day 301 - 10/28/22 - Movie #4,272

BEFORE: OK, now that I'm back on more monster-y monsters I'm feeling good about The Road to Halloween.  "Muppets Haunted Mansion" and "Hotel Transylvania 4" are way in the rear-view, and it's time to get serious.  Just in time, because Halloween's on Monday, it's going to be tough for me to stay on track because I'm working all day tomorrow at the theater, like a 12-hour shift.  So I can't watch a movie tonight, because if I stay up too late then I'll oversleep, then there goes that job - I HAVE to be there at 6 am with the keys to open the theater. If I were a younger man, I'd just stay up all night and go for 36 without sleep, but I can't do that any more, I think our vacation last week proved that. I stayed up to catch an early morning flight and I was just no good that day, and I needed afternoon naps for about four or five hours before I could catch up.

OK, so no movie Friday night, no caffeine or sugar either, I need to be asleep by midnight to have a chance of getting any solid rest, before a long shift.  I'll just have to watch my Saturday movie on Saturday night (I know, it sounds crazy...) and then proceed from there.  This is why I like to start movies the night before, so if something DOES come up that prevents me from watching a late-night movie, I'll still have time to get the film in the following evening. 

Jessica Henwick carries over from "Underwater". 

THE PLOT: Seven years after surviving the monster apocalypse, lovably hapless Joel leaves his cozy underground bunker behind on a quest to reunite with his ex. 

AFTER: Well, I'll give this one points for originality, I've never seen an apocalyptic story quite like this one.  The lead-in starts with an asteroid approaching Earth, likely the kind that's going to wipe out all of human civilization, as many of us have come to expect.  (Well, there ARE a lot of asteroids out there, so I suppose it's just a matter ot fime....). But WAIT, humans send up a bunch of rockets or missiles that blow the asteroid up, or knock it off course.  So the planet is saved...but then there's chemical fallout from the explosions that affects all life on Earth, turning all of the smaller, non-human life-forms into giant monsters.  So this also means the end of civilization as we know it, just in a way that we weren't expecting.  All right, I'll roll with it. 

(Well, OF COURSE I have nitpick points, the two main ones being: did we HAVE to use rockets with toxic chemicals with unknown side-effects in them?  I mean, it seems easy, just build the rockets and DON'T use any materials that are untested or possibly hazardous, right?  AND then of course there's another question, which is - if the chemicals fell from the rocket and affected the whole planet?  Aren't humans part of that "whole planet" thing?  Why weren't humans affected by the chemicals, did we as a species build up some kind of immunity by drinking diet sodas?  My point is, if there can be giant snails and giant worms, where are the giant humans?)                                           

The only other sticking point was that the lead character does a lot of talking to himself, but over the course of the film I came to accept that and I was rooting for him by the end. He's that certain kind of loser/loner/everyman, and maybe you see a little of yourself in him, and thus you're right with him on his quest and you want him to succeed.  Or maybe not, maybe you're a total bastard or a socipath, but I was cheering him on as he tried to travel 90 miles on foot through a land where nearly everything wants to kill him.   

Huh, maybe the secret to enjoying movies more is for me to not overthink them, and stop taking them so seriously.  I wish I could do that more often, because when I do, I think I stand a better chance of having a good time.  So, there you go, give this one a whirl if you can, just try not to take it so seriously, relax and try to enjoy it. You're welcome. Since the world's going to end soon, anyway...I'm fairly certain of it.                    

Also starring Dylan O'Brien (last seen in "Deepwater Horizon"), Michael Rooker (last heard in "Vivo"), Dan Ewing, Ariana Greenblatt (last seen in "In the Heights"), Ellen Hollman, Tre Hale, Pacharo Mzembe, Senie Priti, Amali Golden, Te Kohe Tuhaka, Tasneem Roc, Thomas Campbell, Joel Pierce, Melanie Zanetti, Bruce Spence (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"), Hazel Phillips, Miriama Smith, Andrew Buchanan, Tandi Wright, Damien Garvey, Julia Johnson, Donnie Baxter, 

RATING: 8 out of 10 sand-gobblers

Underwater

Year 14, Day 300 - 10/27/22 - Movie #4,271

BEFORE: This film (and tomorrow's) got stranded last October when I found out that Jessica Henwick's scenes got cut from "Godzilla vs. Kong", I had to scramble at the last minute to find another way to get to my Halloween film, thankfully I had sort of a back-up.  I just wish that Hollywood directors would consult me more often before editing people out of their films, last-minute changes can really screw me up. But see, it's OK because I've circled back to it, which encourages me that anything I don't get to this year, I can maybe get to next time.  My horror film list is a mess right now, I think the longest chain I can form out of it is 15 films, but that could change, more films will be added to the list over the next few months, and I'll try to forget about it for a while and then work my linking magic on it next spring, which will give me the whole summer to figure out how to get there. 

Kristen Stewart carries over from "Lizzie". By my count it's 5 films until Halloween, 20 films until Thanksgiving, and 30 films until Christmas and the end of Movie Year 14. 

THE PLOT: A crew of oceanic researchers working for a deep-sea drilling company try to get to safety after a mysterious earthquake devastates their research facility located at the bottom of the Mariana Trench

AFTER: Well, maybe sometimes a film needs to sit on my DVR for an extra year, it needs to learn its lesson, be trained not to be bad.  Too bad the process doesn't work that way. 

I had trouble staying awake during this film, so I had to rewind several times to find that spot, about 25 minutes in, where I kept drifting off. But this is perhaps a fine example of a movie that actually could be improved by falling asleep. That's the way I recommend watching it, in fact. 

This story plays out like the early "Alien" films, just set at the bottom of the ocean instead of in outer space. It's also set in the future, some year like 2050 when humans have to resort to drilling in the Mariana Trench to find oil, so I assume that they emptied out every other place on Earth?  Like, why else would they set up a drilling station at such an unreasonably deep spot, where the water pressure is so great that the building could collapse at any given moment? Explain how this makes any sense...

Another bad sign, I found myself rooting for the sea monsters...I couldn't wait until they started picking off the survivors, one by one, as they made their way across the ocean floor (?) to the next station.  If that's really what was happening, honestly it was hard to tell because everything was so dark and murky, all the time. 

Hey, maybe WE'RE the monsters, just saying.  We're the invasive species, coming down into the water where we don't belong, just to get those last few drops of oil.  Sure, it's international waters based on our human laws, but maybe the creatures who live down in the trench don't see it that way.  If that's the case, the scientists and drillers and oil-company shills got exactly what they deserved - they knew the risks, after all. 

Also starring Vincent Cassel (last heard in "Becoming Cousteau"), Mamoudou Athie (last seen in "Jurassic World Dominion"), T.J. Miller (last seen in "Office Christmas Party"), John Gallagher Jr. (last seen in "Peppermint"), Jessica Henwick (last seen in "On the Rocks"), Gunner Wright (last seen in "King Richard"), Fiona Rene, Amanda Troop. 

RATING: 3 out of 10 references to "Alice in Wonderland", for some reason. 

Lizzie

Year 14, Day 299 - 10/26/22 - Movie #4,270

BEFORE: I seem to be in a run of horror films/thrillers with strong female central characters, this reaches back to before the vacation, with "Ma" and "The Witches".  And this week "Colossal", "Swallow" and now it's a fresh take on Lizzie Borden, the infamous woman from Fall River, MA, who was accused of killing her parents with an axe.  From what I've heard, this film was pretty controversial a couple years ago, and I think not just because it had Kristen Stewart in it.  This was based on a book, I think, that set out to stir up some new controversy over this 130-year old murder trial, which I now realize I don't know very much about, but after the film I'll go straight to Wikipedia to try to separate fact from ficiton.  

Denis O'Hare carries over from "Swallow". 

THE PLOT: A psychological thriller based on the infamous 1892 murders of Lizzie Borden's family. 

AFTER: Well, clearly we can see that whenever someone makes a historical biopic or a period piece, it's done with the sensibilities of a modern writer or director, there's just no getting around that, because none of us truly know what it meant to be alive in 1892, we can guess and speculate but we can't really be sure about anything.  Lizzie Borden was described as a "feminist", but what did that mean back then?  Was it the same concept as it was in the 1960's, the 1980's, or today?  It's tough to say for sure.  But clearly the men back then had strong opinions about what women's role in society should be, remember before 1920 women couldn't vote, and most couldn't hold down jobs except for cook or maid, and society had determined that the best thing a woman could do was to marry well and then look after husband, who was the one that went out had earned money.  I know, the U.S. of the 1890's feels a lot like some foreign backwards Third World country sometimes. 

The speculation in this story sort of starts with that feminist angle and then says, "Well, what if she were really super-feminist, and what if she liked women?" which may or may not be the next logical step, depending on your point of view.  It's certainly possible, there had to be gay women back then, but just because it was possible doesn't mean that it was true. Still, possible - and I'm sorry, but as a title, "Lezzie Borden" was RIGHT THERE.  Forgive me for being blunt, and liking puns just a little too much maybe.  Portraying Lizzie Borden as a lesbian is also a convenient short-cut to set up conflict with her parents, if they knew about her orientation - sorry, that's a dirty word these days, so is "sexual preference" - if they knew about her sexual identity they might have a problem with it.  Again, possible, but that doesn't make it true.  

(ASIDE: I'm thinking that "Lezzie Borden" is probably being used by a drag king somewhere as a stage persona, or at the very least, it's the registered name of someone competing in female roller derby.  Gonna Google it to check - yep, there's a roller derby person with that name, also a queer horror movie critic. Should've seen that one coming...)

But I'm glad to learn that the Borden's maid, Bridget "Maggie" Sullivan, was a real person, she wasn't a character invented for this movie to make Lizzie a more likely lesbian.  However, there's nothing really certain in the history books that says that Lizzie and Bridget were a couple, or for that matter, there's no record of Lizzie's father forcing himself on Bridget sexually, it's another thing that is both speculative and makes a little bit of sense after the fact, creating another motive for the murders, but then this makes me wonder if some writer is really connecting the dots in the proper fashion, or if they're connecting dots with the lines THEY want to craft the story that THEY want to create. 

Conventional wisdom is that Lizzie Borden killed both of her parents - and she's still the main suspect in this 130-year old case, but she's not the only one.  Bridget Sullivan is another, if you want to believe that Andrew Borden was raping or molesting her then there's motive there.  Emma Borden, Lizzie's sister, also lived in the house, and like Lizzie she was concerned that her inheritance might not be guaranteed, especially if her maternal uncle were placed in charge of it.  That uncle was John Morse, and it's not too far-fetched to think that he might have had a hand in the killings, because then he could be named executor of their estate.  If forensic science had been a little more advanced in 1892, a proper CSI investigation could have shed some light on these murder, but I think even fingerprinting wasn't around back then, or it might have been at a very early stage.  The only thing that investigators could tell back then was that Abby, Lizzie's mother, had been killed an hour or two before her father.  Which is significant, because if Abby Borden died first, her estate would be inherited by her husband, and then upon his death that wealth would be distributed according to HIS will, presumably to his daughters. 

If Mr. Borden had been killed first, the estate would transfer to his wife, and then to HER heirs, not his, since she was his second wife.  

What's odd about the trial of Lizzie Borden isn't the fact that the maid vouched for her whereabouts at the time of the murders, it's the fact that Lizzie herself was never put on the stand, perhaps because her answers to police investigators were so vague and cryptic, but still, she stuck to her story.  But the prosecution didn't even TRY to make her seem like an unreliable witness?  Jeez, guys, this is "Law & Order" 101.  She was acquitted by a jury of 12 men - which I guess means women couldn't serve on juries back then, either - who simply couldn't believe that a woman of her high social standing could kill her parents with an ax. This would be kind of like if the jurors in the O.J. Simpson trial were all fans of the "Naked Gun" movies, and couldn't see him as anything but a lovable comedian.

The film states that after the trial, Lizzie and Bridget went their separate ways, but other reports say that they lived together for 12 years after the incident, and perhaps split when Bridget came to believe that Lizzie was in fact guilty and not innocent.  Bridget moved to Montana, worked as a maid and married a man she met there, and allegedly gave a death-bed confession in 1948 about changing her testimony at the trial.  So I guess that's about as close as we're going to get to solving this case after the fact.  Hey, did anyone ever figure out that JonBenet Ramsey thing?

Eventually, the film does get around to showing us what it wants us to believe went down on the day in question, August 4, 1892.  I mean, I guess if you're going to kill somebody, it makes sense to be naked, because then you don't get all that blood on your clothes. Just saying.  But if you've tuned in to this one for the nudity, then you may be here for the wrong reasons. I'm sure this is somebody's favorite fetish film, but that person might also need professional help. In the end I'm not sure that it helps Lizzie to be portrayed as a lesbian, or if that helps feminism or the gay rights movement.  Let's just say it's a muddle. Gay people, do you want to claim Lizzie Borden?  Because if you want to claim James Buchanan and Abe Lincoln, you've got to bring her along, too - gotta take the bad with the good.  

Really, it's just one small mental leap from this depiction to "repressed lesbians are axe murderers", isn't it?  I'm not saying I agree with that, but it's the easy take-away here. 

Also starring Chloe Sevigny (last seen in "Shattered Glass"), Kristen Stewart (last seen in "Equals"), Jamey Sheridan (last seen in "Driven"), Fiona Shaw (last seen in "Ammonite"), Kim Dickens (last seen in "The Blind Side"), Jeff Perry (last seen in "The Grifters"), Tara Ochs (last seen in "Selma"), Daniel Wachs, Jody Matzer, Don Henderson Baker (last seen in "October Sky"), Jay Huguley (last seen in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"), Roscoe Sandlin, Tom Thon, Katharine Harrington, Darin Cooper (last seen in "Ford v Ferrari"), Laura Whyte (last seen in "The Dilemma"), Terry Jackson. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 pigeons in a coop