Hello, neighbors! You all know me, the daughter of the light who comes ‘round to remind you of the teenager’s path to salvation through the cross of Jesus. These are Godless times. The children are wandering through the wilderness of sin these days. But there is a path! We can help them see the sin of their days and ways. We can help them remain sinless.
I’m here on the Lord’s work, spreading the gospel of God’s salvation through Christ’s blood. I want to invite you to send your teenager to me. They are overstimulated, surrounded by temptation. But in my prayer closet, your child will have time to think and pray.
Eve was weak. Don’t you be weak. Don’t let your children be weak. I can see inside them. I can see their sin as surely as God can. Send them to me. We’ll pray.
Any time, day or night! You know where to find me, the big white house on Caroline Street.
I pray you find Jesus.
-Margaret White
*by Hope Madden. Voiceover Hope Madden. Audio production George Wolf. Art by Michael Anthony Carroll.
Disclaimer: Villain Diaries is a non-commercial work of fan fiction and parody. All characters, names, and elements from the film belong to their respective copyright and trademark holders. I don’t own them and I’m not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the creators, studios, or rights holders. This piece is an original creative commentary inspired by their work. It is shared for free, for entertainment and critical purposes, and earns me no money. If you’re a rights holder and have concerns, please contact me at maddwolf95@gmail.com and I’ll respond promptly.
The first scene of director Maclain Nelson’s film Don’t Move is the kind of opening that one will either find brutally traumatizing or emotionally manipulative. Or perhaps a little of both. Either way, it starts with a bang.
Things slow down a bit as we spend time with Megan (Lyndsy Fonseca) while she processes the events of the opening scene. She’s persuaded to take a long-weekend camping trip with Pastor Rizzo (Tom Cavanagh) and a half-a-dozen others.
It’s surprisingly easy to find the cast endearing rather than irritating. Even though two macho dudes (Joseph Lee Anderson and Ricky Vargas) threaten to derail the peace Megan seeks while camping, their back-and-forth jabs are delivered with such flair, you’re entertained rather than annoyed.
The film moves slowly toward the inexorable confrontation between man and… something in the woods as our camping group settles in. The acting among the many cast members remains top notch, and a touching relationship builds between Pastor Rizzo and his daughter Emma (Hunter King). This could have devolved into a stereotypical “daughter hates and resents overbearing father,” but instead their relationship is more believable. It’s not perfect, but it’s sweet.
Once the action picks up, things get interesting. Jump scares are few, which makes them even more effective. The cast continues to work well together, so even as their situation deteriorates, we want them to succeed in overcoming the monster in the woods. It’s unfortunate that one of the strongest cast members (Vargas) is saddled with exceedingly cliché one-liners. The movie would have worked so much better if the character had been more original.
Of course, one of the hallmarks of any movie with a cast greater than five is that characters often rely on tropes to let us get to know them. Success here relies on the strength of the actors. In this case, they more than meet the challenge of differentiating themselves.
The cast and good special effects help create a film that’s a cut above similar fare.
Hope & George review this week’s new releases: Whalefall, Sense and Sensibility, You Can See Everything, Musk, Crawlers, Hallowarrior, and Following Harry. PLUS! An in-person visit from The Schlocketeer!
Austin Abrams is having quite a year. First, he battled mutants all over Raccoon City (Resident Evil), and now the poor guy gets swallowed whole by a sperm whale! Dude cannot catch a break!
Whalefall director Brian Duffield, who adapts Daniel Kraus’s book, traps you in there with him and for an hour and 46 minutes, you both struggle with Josh Brolin’s memory, an undigested octopus, time, and digestive fluids as Jay (Abrams) fights to survive.
Brolin is Mitt Gardiner: scuba enthusiast, tourist whale watching boat captain, and Jay’s combative father. Remember how fun it was to watch the two of them fight in Weapons? Well, this is not like that. The sparring Jay and his dad do, and the regret and resentment left behind, echoes loudly through Jay’s entire ordeal.
Were there no underlying metaphor, no larger concept fueling Jay’s fight for survival—no reason to cut away from that pulsating pool of goo now and again—Whalefall would have been little more than a pretty gross survival tale. It is as much a story of surviving grief as surviving the whale. Those daddy issues are a little heavy handed and sappy, sure, but still, you’ve never seen anything like Whalefall.
Editing, creature design, set design, and sound design coalesce to heighten tensions and convince you that you’re surrounded by innards. Crushing, moving, opening, closing, unpredictable innards. Duffield plays with the most primal of fears, and somehow, he and his team have crafted an environment that convinces.
Terrifying, claustrophobic, squishy, and primal, the anxiety Duffield creates is extraordinary. Is it realistic? How the hell do I know? But the filmmaker is committed and confident, and he’s found the perfect hero.
There is just something deeply likeable about Abrams. Whether he’s the laid-back smack head in Weapons or the arrested post-adolescent in Resident Evil, Abrams’s performances are earnest. There’s truth to them, as well as humor. For Whalefall, less humor and more earnestness. In many ways, that’s why the film succeeds. It is unabashedly sincere, and Abrams carries that off perfectly.
Not sure you’ll get this. I’m writing it with a wet nail along the slimy walls of this well. But we’ve always had such a psychic connection, maybe you’ll still receive my thoughts.
I don’t hold the punishment against you. I understand. You were fond of those horses. Those simple, stupid animals. It’s like you to care for them. You’re so alike. That’s why you’ll go over the cliff too.
But before you do, I want to draw you a picture. Maybe a few pictures. Something to remember me by, while I’m here, alone, in the dark and wet. That is, here until some day, when another terrible mother is ready to put her child in harm’s way to save me.
Moms are so funny!
Love,
Samara
*by Hope Madden. Art by Michael Anthony Carroll.
Disclaimer: Villain Diaries is a non-commercial work of fan fiction and parody. All characters, names, and elements from the film belong to their respective copyright and trademark holders. I don’t own them and I’m not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the creators, studios, or rights holders. This piece is an original creative commentary inspired by their work. It is shared for free, for entertainment and critical purposes, and earns me no money. If you’re a rights holder and have concerns, please contact me at maddwolf95@gmail.com and I’ll respond promptly.
Has it really been 31 years since Emma Thompson and Ang Lee beguiled us with Jane Austen’s iconic tale of love, sisterhood, and the crushing effects of patriarchy in Georgian England?
Georgia Oakley (Blue Jean) helms the latest look inside the Dashwood family. Level headed Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her free spirited sister Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles) face perils of heart and home after their father’s death leaves them, their mother (Caitriona Balfe, Belfast) and younger sister (Bodhi Rae Breathnach, Shelter) facing homelessness as the estate passes to the sisters’ dullard half-brother and his greedy wife.
Class, the economic powerlessness of women, love, and sisterhood are among Austen’s most cherished themes, and every adaptation of each of her novels chooses its primary target. Usually, it’s love. But for Oakley and screenwriter Diana Reid, Sense and Sensibility is about sisterhood.
That hardly means that the quiet aching between Elinor and Mr. Ferrars (George MacKay, ideal) goes ignored. Or that Marianne’s passions for the rogue Willoughby (Frank Dillane) don’t throw the Dashwoods into a chaos of emotion. The new Sense and Sensibility is perfectly swoony in those important ways.
But Reid’s adaptation streamlines tangential characters to draw focus, and Oakley’s attention is paid to the effect love, passion, worry, and dependence has on Elinor and Marianne. Their relationship anchors the film and colors the rest of the tale with a sense of hope and struggle for agency that reminds you how timeless Austen can be.
Oakley also lets the girls’ hair down. The Dashwood women are less cinched and coiffured this go-round. Marianne, in particular, prefers her hair loose. It makes her connection to the wilds more vivid, but this earthiness carries over to the story as a whole. The Dashwoods are far easier to connect to as they do their own laundry and then stain their dresses eating wild berries.
The bones of Austen’s story are absolutely intact, but Reid and Oakley amplify interactions that may mean more to a modern audience than those attended to in previous interpretations, big screen and small.
Flesh is horror cinema’s stock and trade. Peeling back the skin on the genre takes us to places like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Tattoo. But what if it’s more of a personal skin problem? Like The Fly or The Believers (there are spiders in that zit!) or even Acne?
No, we’re looking at more skin than just that. These films ask you who you are and who that skin you’re wearing makes you.
5. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
There have always been those who claim The Silence of the Lambs is not a horror movie. A tale of a man who eats human flesh helping the FBI hunt down a man who wears human flesh feels like horror to us.
It’s to director Jonathan Demme’s credit that Silence made that leap from lurid exploitation to art. His masterful composition of muted colors and tense but understated score, his visual focus on the characters rather than their actions, and his subtle but powerful use of camera elevate this story above its exploitative trappings. Of course, the performances didn’t hurt.
4. The Skin I Live In (2011)
In 2011, the great Pedro Almodovar created something like a cross between Eyes Without a Face and Lucky McGee’s The Woman, with all the breathtaking visual imagery and homosexual overtones you can expect from an Almodovar project.
The film begs for the least amount of summarization because every slow reveal is placed so perfectly within the film, and to share it in advance is to rob you of the joy of watching. Antonio Banderas gives a lovely, restrained performance as Dr. Robert Ledgard, and Elena Anaya and Marisa Paredes are spectacular.
Not a frame is wasted, not a single visual is placed unconsciously. Dripping with symbolism, the film takes a pulpy and ridiculous storyline and twists it into something marvelous to behold.
3. Clown
Sympathetic, surprising, and often very uncomfortable, Jon Watts’s horror flick, though far from perfect, does an excellent job of morphing that lovable party favorite into the red-nosed freak from your nightmares. Because clowns are terrifying.
Watts, who co-wrote with the talented Christopher Ford, weaves a fantasy of Nordic folklore turned modern nightmare. There are moments of grotesque brilliance and edgy horror as poor Andy slowly, painfully morphs into a monster who feeds on children.
2. Under the Skin (2013)
Light on dialogue and devoid of exposition, Under the Skin requires your patience and your attention, but what it delivers is a unique and mesmerizing journey, a science fiction film quite unlike anything else out there.
Early elements call to mind Kubrick’s 2001, and once the film falls into its pace it conjures last year’s brilliant Upstream Color, but Glazer’s effort is certainly its own artistic achievement. Though an almost relentless series of similar incidents, somehow he punctuates this weird monotony with a fascinating balance of perplexity and humanity, and slowly, themes, character and plot emerge.
1. In My Skin (2002)
One of the less-scene gems of the New French Extreme, In My Skin is a tough watch. Esther (writer/director Marina de Van) loses grip on who she is at her very core when she fails to notice a serious injury done to her leg. This alienation from her physical self becomes an obsession with her physical self.
As bloody and uncomfortable as any film you will ever see, In My Skin succeeds as a horror film and a comment on identity and control both mainly due to de Van’s laser focused performance. Introspective, never showy, and unrelentingly believable, the turn anchors all the wild behavior in a way that makes it simultaneously mesmerizing and revolting.
*by Hope Madden. Voiceover and audio production by George Wolf. Art by Michael Anthony Carroll.
Disclaimer: Villain Diaries is a non-commercial work of fan fiction and parody. All characters, names, and elements from the film belong to their respective copyright and trademark holders. I don’t own them and I’m not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the creators, studios, or rights holders. This piece is an original creative commentary inspired by their work. It is shared for free, for entertainment and critical purposes, and earns me no money. If you’re a rights holder and have concerns, please contact me at maddwolf95@gmail.com and I’ll respond promptly.
Is Crawlers the best arachnid horror movie ever made? No. It’s not the best arachnid horror movie made in the last couple of years. Did I nearly scratch myself raw watching it, certain I had spiders crawling on me? And did I have a nightmare later that I was looting a shoe store trying to find tie-up boots for my son to protect him from the spider invasion?
Yes, to both.
So, obviously director Ángel Gómez Hernández was doing something right as he traps us for 90 minutes in a quarantined 4-floor LA apartment building very recently overrun with spiders. Not just any spiders. Spiders that, as clarified by the opening title cards, have decided to eat people.
Decided. They decided this. But you know what? Writer Jayson Rothwell’s lack of imagination here frees us up to spend more time where we want to spend it. And if you’ve chosen to see a movie where an apartment building full of tenants is trapped inside with thousands of killer spiders, my guess is that you want to see some nasty spider business. Crawlers has it.
Matilda Lutz (Revenge) is Serena, the put-upon would-be musician/building super, who finds the first body. It looks bad, so the police put the building on lockdown until they can figure out what kind of virus took out George (Chris Rogers). And then once they realize it was no virus, they drape the building so nothing goes in or out, just as Serena’s neighbors are starting to see evidence of the infestation.
It’s a great way to build tension. And we’ve spent just enough time with the tenants to root for some to survive, and root for others to get into that elevator. And the film’s CGI is believable enough that I was forever scratching and swatting in my seat.
There’s little underneath the basic story, so you’ll have to make do with surface level tension and character development. For more visual panache, check out Kia Roache-Turner’s 2024 terror Sting, and for more visceral scares with character, Sébastien Vanicek’s Infested makes every move Crawlers makes and does it better.
But those movies are not on the big screen right now, and if you want to be in a dark room full of skittering, hungry spiders, Crawlers delivers the creeps.
You killed my sister. She hated me, yes. And I hated her. But I also loved her in my way.
And you steal her shoes?! What kind of monster takes a pair of shoes from a dead woman’s body? Well, they’re all I have left of her. You’ve left me with nothing. No family. Give me the shoes. They aren’t yours. You stole them. Stole them from my sister’s dead body. Yet somehow I’m the ghoul?
You cannot have them. You’ve no right to them. Just because this mob tells you that you do, you must know in your soul that it’s wrong to steal from a corpse, to deny a grieving sister. Have you no soul?
Give them to me! Don’t test me, girl, I am beyond my limits! It’s an easy choice, an obvious conclusion. Why do you vex me? Give me what belongs to me so I can grieve my sister! What are the shoes to you?!
Your pointless greed is cruelty! Why would you treat someone so, even as they look at what little you have left of their only family, the only person they ever cared for, who ever cared for them? I don’t know what I’ve done to merit your hate and torment, but you will live to regret it.
Those you do not know have taken all else from me, ostracized and taunted me, shown me nothing but hate all my days. And you, a stranger, have destroyed and stolen what little remained. There is nothing left in me but seething, bottomless rage and I will destroy with malicious glee you and all you hold dear.
And your little dog too.
W
*by Hope Madden. Art by Michael Anthony Carroll.
Disclaimer: Villain Diaries is a non-commercial work of fan fiction and parody. All characters, names, and elements from the film belong to their respective copyright and trademark holders. I don’t own them and I’m not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the creators, studios, or rights holders. This piece is an original creative commentary inspired by their work. It is shared for free, for entertainment and critical purposes, and earns me no money. If you’re a rights holder and have concerns, please contact me at maddwolf95@gmail.com and I’ll respond promptly.
