Monthly Archives: April 2017

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Free for All

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Free Fire

by Hope Madden

The first notes I took, about ten minutes into the screening for Ben Wheatley’s latest Free Fire, read like so: This is a ballsy first act.

Indeed. Co-written with his wife and frequent collaborator Amy Jump, the Seventies crime thriller wastes little time on backstory, context or exposition. None, really.

You gather that two Irishmen (Cillian Murphy, Michael Smiley) wait in a warehouse parking lot with their liaison (Brie Larson) to a gun runner. They’re always waiting for their own henchmen, as well as the gunrunner’s liaison (Armie Hammer).

I love Ben Wheatley. In 2011, he and Jump brought forth the utterly brilliant horror show Kill List, and I have waited breathlessly for every collaboration since. Free Fire included.

And while each of Wheatley’s films is decidedly different from each other, Free Fire is very different from most films altogether.

Imagine if the entire 93 minutes of Reservoir Dogs took place in that last act shootout among the pack.

The noteworthy fact about Free Fire is not that it has a ballsy first act, but that the entire film is a third act. With scarcely a word of context, we’re rolled into an empty warehouse just in time for a shootout to begin, and there we will stay until the film concludes.

It’s pretty brilliant, really. Character development happens under fire. Hammer’s “Ord” (yep, that’s his name) brings a lot of laid back comedy. Brie Larson is characteristically spot on, as is the always welcome Cillian Murphy. The two infuse characters and the proceedings with some authentic humanity.

Also working the comedy angle is Sharlto Copley – always reliable for some scenery-chewing, here working those mandibles as a South African imbecile/arms dealer once misdiagnosed as a child genius.

Jump and Wheatley rob the gang meeting of any of the slick romance or brutal gravitas usually bestowed on such events by cinema. There is a barely controlled, very funny, incredibly bloody chaos afoot here, and it is a wild and entertaining sight to behold.

Verdict-3-5-Stars

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Boy Interrupted

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After the Storm

by Christie Robb

There’s something about being a parent that helps you put into context and process the resentments you held about your own parents’ mistakes. You understand why they zigged when they should have zagged. Having the responsibility to create some sort of stability and comfort for a child drives home the fact that adulting is something that we make up as we go. None of us is perfect. And we all make mistakes. So, we treasure, even more, the good memories.

After the Storm is a meditation on this theme. Writer/Director Hirokazu Koreeda centers the film on Shinoda Ryôta (Hiroshi Abe), a moderately successful novelist turned private detective. Shinoda mourns the death of his father, the demise of his marriage, his separation from his adolescent son, a stalled career, and a gambling addiction.

He’s at the point where he has to decide whether to give up hope for being a late-bloomer and admit failure.

Unable to find happiness in his present life outside of a cheap high in the midst of a gambling binge, he’s eternally looking backwards at the opportunities he let slip away or dreaming about a future where he can finally buy his kid that new top-of-the line baseball glove, finish his novel, oust his ex’s new boyfriend, or win the lottery.

After the death of his father (also a gambling addict), Shinoda starts showing up at his mom’s house to help her out a little bit, to give her some spending money, and also to look for stuff to pawn. He’s months behind on child support. He’s turning down paid writing gigs to blackmail high school students. He’s spying on his ex.

One day, on a visitation with his son, Shinoda takes him over to his mom’s so the kid can visit with his grandmother and Shinoda can weasel a free meal. The weather turns bad just as Shinoda’s ex-wife (Yôko Maki) drops by for pickup. A typhoon ultimately strands the estranged family together at Shinoda’s mom’s cramped apartment. Initially awkward, the forced extended contact gives Shinoda a chance to live in the present, confront some of his flaws, and recreate a treasured moment that he shared with his father.

This isn’t a simple movie of redemption. But it’s not a melancholic tear-jerker either. It is a movie that will make you think about what kind of person you thought you might be when you grew up and weigh that against your assessment of your current character. And if you are a parent, it might make you wonder about what particular moment your kid might remember years later and wish to relive.

Verdict-3-0-Stars

So that happened...

First Dates Happen…

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Thanks, Mom

by Christie Robb

About five minutes through my first date I realized something was going horribly wrong.

When I met the boy I was 15 years-old and trying my very best to be unconventional—which pretty much meant that I had a bad haircut, wore entirely too much eyeliner, and sported a pair of white fingerless gloves that I wore so often that the palm had permanently taken on a grayish-brownish hue. Not surprisingly, my love life to that point consisted almost entirely of one-sided crushes suffered in silence.

But this time I was determined to woman-up and ask the boy out. One day, while milling about in the auditorium lobby after a school play, I pointed the boy out to my mom.

“That one,” I said. “I’m going to ask that one.”

“What, that one with the black hair over there?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, suppressing a grin.

“Really?”

I turned, suspicious. “Yes. Why?”

“No reason.”

In the weeks leading up to the dance I was a wreck, unable to eat solid food, fueled almost entirely on Dr. Pepper and social anxiety adrenaline. The notes I passed the boy in between classes were damp with flop sweat. Our phone calls had pauses where I tried and failed to ask the question I imagined was hanging in the air.

Eventually I asked, but I couldn’t tell you how I did it as I think I blacked out in mortification while doing it. However, I eventually came to and it seemed like he had, in fact, agreed. So, this was happening and I needed something to wear.

At my school, in the grungy ‘90s, the Sadie Hawkins tradition involved, not only girls asking guys, but for the couples to attend dressed in drag. So not only was I going to be trying to make it through a first date without humiliating myself, I was going to have to do it while dressed as a dude. Fine.

After many trips to thrift shops, I settled on a pair of black leather pants and a small man’s tuxedo jacket with tails (and the ever present gloves, now even more dingy as a result of all the sweating). Apparently the look I was going for was Punk Oscar Wilde Madonna.

On the big day, being 15-years-old and unable to operate a car, my mom drove me over to the boy’s house and dropped me off in the driveway. After shutting the door behind me and struggling not to hyperventilate, I heard my mom’s tires squeal as she peeled out of the driveway and fishtailed around the curve of the subdivision.

She was usually so overprotective. I’d expected her to come in to meet the boy’s parents like she did with the parents of every other new friend I’d ever had.

I mentally thanked her for granting me my privacy and recognizing the woman that I was struggling to become.

Taking a big breath to calm my battered nerves, I slogged up the driveway and knocked on the door. I was starting to see spots. Breathing, I reminded myself. You gotta keep breathing.

The boy’s mom answered the door. She explained that he was still getting ready upstairs. Then she peered out into the darkness of her yard and asked if my dad had dropped me off and if he was still out there.

This seemed like an odd question, but I figured maybe she wanted to meet my parents and reassure herself that we weren’t all psychos. I shook my head, unable to say words.

His mom ushered me into the living room and sat me down on a couch and asked me if I wanted a soft drink while I waited. I nodded and looked around a little, wringing my hands together in an attempt to keep them from shaking.

Her house had a unique decorating scheme. There were a lot of tchotchkes bolted to the wall. A lot of them looked sharp and pointed. Old timey farm equipment? I wondered. Gardening tools? I gulped. Instruments of torture? In a few minutes the mom returned and handed me a cold class of soda and a photograph.

I reached out and grabbed the photograph, my gesture a reflex more than anything else. I looked at the picture. Faded and wrinkled, it featured a bunch of people wearing the autumn color palate of the ‘70s. The picture showed a youngish man feeding a woman something from his fork. I gave her a vague smile and wondered why my date’s mom was showing me this.

“Recognize anyone?” she said.

This feels weird, I thought. Is this how dates normally go? The overhead light glinted off the prong of some sharp thing on the wall. What were the consequences of getting this question wrong?

I looked closer. Ok, the woman in the picture kind of looked like the mom, but younger. Maybe this was a picture of her first date? I squinted at the man in the photo trying to see features of the boy in the youngish man’s face.

I had to admit the man did look familiar.

But not because it looked like my date. It looked…like the old pictures of my dad from my parents’ photo album.

“I used to know your dad,” my date’s mom said.

Apparently.

It’s taken me about 20 years to realize this, but I have finally decided that there was no graceful way to react to being shown this picture. At the time I stammered something inane like, “that’s nice.” Then, my date came down the stairs dressed in his mom’s little black dress, a pair of Doctor Martin’s boots, and full make up. I took a sip of my soda and glanced at his features out of my peripheral vision. Do we have the same nose? I wondered. Or is that just contouring?

It occurred to me that there was a very high probability that I had accidentally managed to ask my half-brother to a Sadie Hawkins dance.

Once we were out of sight of the house walking towards the school gym, the boy pulled aside, turned his back, and extracted a squished up soft pack of Marlboroughs from his pantyhose.
“Got one of those I can bum?” I asked.

Once I got home, my mom sniffed me and looked at me with disappointment. “Did you smoke?”
I brushed her off.

“You got something you want to tell me, Mom?”

She blushed. “I didn’t want to ruin your first date,” she said.

“You were going to let me commit incest?” I asked.

“What?” she asked. “No.”

Apparently, the night of the play she recognized the boy’s mom as her friend from back in the day—a good friend whose friendship had been strained a bit due to the fact that my mom may have stolen my dad from the boy’s mom at a holiday party sometime before 1979.

It was a fact she’d apparently decided to keep to herself, first dates generally being awkward enough on their own.

Thanks, Mom.

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Shop ’til you Drop

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Personal Shopper

by Hope Madden

Kristin Stewart is an acquired taste. In the last few years, though, she’s shown in a handful of indies that she has some talent. Not a great deal of range, but some definite talent.

That shone most brightly in writer/director Olivier Assayas’s 2014 film Clouds of Sils Maria.

In that film, Stewart played the put-upon personal assistant to a demanding celebrity. Assayas places Stewart in a similar position but with wildly differing themes for his latest, Personal Shopper.

Stewart plays Maureen, an introverted American in Paris. By day, Maureen darts around Paris and even trains to London to pick up fancy-schmancies for her A-lister boss to wear to this red carpet or that fashion show.

By night, though, Maureen wanders the empty rooms of her deceased twin brother Lewis’s old house. Both siblings possessed the gifts of a medium, and Maureen wants to contact Lewis.

It’s a ghost story of sorts, with a bit of a mystery thrown in for good measure, but what Personal Shopper really offers is an exploration of isolation, alienation and identity in the digital age.

Maureen is almost always almost alone. As the film opens, her friend drops her off at Lewis’s old house and Maureen asks, “You’re not staying?”

No, she is not. It’s just Maureen in this old house and her desire to connect with someone.

Likewise, Maureen periodically Skypes with her boyfriend, on some kind of IT assignment halfway across the globe. And she is always just missing the celebrity she shops for. Maureen’s solitary existence is a series of near-connections.

Assayas explores this most fully with an anxiety-inducing texting relationship with an unknown contact – a plot device that attempts to drive the themes and storyline forward. But, as is often the case with this filmmaker, ambiguities and curiosities are more important than closure or action.

Aside from an unfortunate run-in with CGI, the film barely registers as horror and impatient genre fans are likely to be disappointed. But for a lonesome comment on modern times – or for proof that Kristin Stewart can actually act – it’s not bad.

Verdict-3-0-Stars

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Girl with All the Gifts

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Gifted

by Hope Madden

A pensive charmer tries to raise a child prodigy on his own. Gifted offers a premise as rife with possibilities as it is weighed down by likely cliché and melodrama, and it strangely meanders somewhere between the two.

Chris Evans attempts the gruff everyman with some success, playing Uncle Frank, guardian to math genius Mary (Mckenna Grace – very solid). Against the advice of his landlord and Mary’s bestie Roberta (Octavia Spencer), Frank enrolls Mary as a first grader in a local public school.

There Mary wows her good natured teacher (Jenny Slate), and draws the attention of her grandmother (Lindsay Duncan), who’s been MIA since Mary’s mother – another family genius – died when the girl was just a babe.

What’s the best way to care for a gifted child? This is the conundrum at the heart of the film. In rooting out the answer, writer Tom Flynn wisely keeps Mary at the center of the story. She’s an actual character, not a prop for evangelizing one course of action over another.

Luckily, Grace is up to the task, and her chemistry with Evans feels genuine enough to make you invest in their story.

Perhaps more important is Duncan, a formidable talent who elevates a tough role. She, too, shares a warm chemistry with Evans, and it’s that kind of unexpected character layering that helps Gifted transcend its overcooked family dramedy leanings.

On occasion, Gifted is Little Man Tate without the pathos. At other times, it’s Good Will Hunting for first graders.

Strong performances help the film navigate sentimental trappings, but Flynn’s script veers off in too many underdeveloped and downright needless directions, and director Marc Webb ((500) Days of Summer) can’t find a tone.

Gifted is warm without being too sweet. Though it knows the answer to the question it’s asking, the film resists oversimplification and never stoops to pitting one-dimensional characters against each other in service of a sermon.

Though the final decision about what’s best for Mary is really never in doubt, in getting to that revelation, the film acknowledges nuance in the choice.

That’s not to say Gifted avoids cliché altogether, or that it embraces understatement. It does not – on either count. But it does present an intriguing dilemma, populates its story with thoughtful, almost realistic characters, and refuses to condescend to its audience or its characters.

Verdict-3-0-Stars

Fright Club

Fright Club: Rituals

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Everybody has their rituals, and that’s all fine and dandy. But we aren’t looking for fine and dandy, are we? Hell no – we’re looking for the kind of rituals that generally includes goats heads and/or black candles and/or virgins and/or special meat preparation.

Where will we find these? In some great horror movies. Check it.

5. Kill List (2011)

Never has the line “Thank you” had a weirder effect than in the genre bending adventure Kill List.

Hitman Jay (a volcanic Neil Maskell) is wary to take another job after the botched Kiev assignment, but his bank account is empty and his wife Shel (an also eruptive MyAnna Buring) has become vocally impatient about carrying the financial load.

Without ever losing that gritty, indie sensibility, Ben Wheatley’s fascinating film begins a slide in Act 2 from crime drama toward macabre thriller. You spend the balance of the film’s brisk 95 minutes actively puzzling out clues, ambiguities and oddities.

Everything builds, unsettlingly, to a climactic ritual you won’t see coming.

For those looking for blood and guts and bullets, Kill List will only partially satisfy and may bewilder by the end. But audiences seeking a finely crafted, unusual horror film may find themselves saying thank you.

4. The Wicker Man (1973)

In the early Seventies, Robin Hardy created a film that fed on the period’s hippie- versus-straight hysteria. Uptight Brit constable Sgt. Howie (Edward Woodward) flies to the private island Summerisle, investigating charges of a missing child. His sleuthing leads him into a pagan world incompatible with his sternly Christian point of view.

The deftly crafted moral ambiguity of the picture keeps the audience off kilter. Surely we aren’t to root for these heathens, with their nudey business right out in the open? But how can we side with the self-righteous prig Howie?

But maybe Howie’s playing right into something he doesn’t understand – and what would the people of Summerisle do if he didn’t play along? The ritual would be blown!

Hardy and his cast have wicked fun with Anthony Shaffer’s sly screenplay, no one more so than the ever-glorious Christopher Lee. Oh, that saucy baritone!

The film is hardly a horror movie at all –more of a subversive comedy of sorts – until the final reel or so. Starting with the creepy animal masks (that would become pretty popular in the genre a few decades later), then the parade and the finale, things take quite a creepy turn.

3. We Are What We Are (2010)

In a quiet opening sequence, a man dies in a mall. This is a family patriarch and his passing leaves the desperately poor family in shambles. An internal power struggle begins to determine the member most suited to take over as the head of the household, and therefore, there is some conflict and competition – however reluctant – over who will handle the principal task of the patriarch: that of putting meat on the table.

We’re never privy to the particulars – giving the whole affair a feel of authenticity – but adding to the family’s crisis is the impending Ritual, which apparently involves a deadline and some specific meat preparations.

Grau’s approach is so subtle, so honest, that it’s easy to forget you’re watching a horror film. Indeed, were this family fighting to survive on a more traditional level, this film would simply be a fine piece of social realism focused on Mexico City’s enormous population in poverty. But it’s more than that. Sure, the cannibalism is simply an extreme metaphor, but it’s so beautifully thought out and executed!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBkNz3_pzsw

2. Martyrs (2008)

This is one you may need to prepare yourself for. Equal parts orphanage ghost story, suburban revenge fantasy, and medical experimentation horror flick, the whole of Martyrs is a brutal tale that is hard to watch, hard to turn away from, and worth the effort.

Mining the heartbreaking loneliness of abandoned, damaged children, the film follows the profound relationship between Lucie (Mylene Jampanoi) and the only friend she will ever have, an undeterrably loving Anna (Morjana Alaoui).

Constantly subverting expectations, including those immediately felt for Anna’s love, writer/director Pascal Laugier makes a series of sharp turns, but he throws unforgettable images at you periodically, and your affection for the leads keeps you breathlessly engaged.

The third act offers the most abrupt change of course as well as tone. Here is where the ritual begins – it began long ago, but the subject wasn’t quite right. Though it feels like an abrupt shift, it ends up a gruesome but inevitable conclusion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbct9qWBSME

1. The Exorcist (1973)

For evocative, nerve jangling, demonic horror, you will not find better than The Exorcist.

Slow-moving, richly textured, gorgeously and thoughtfully framed, The Exorcist follows a very black and white, good versus evil conflict: Father Merrin V Satan for the soul of an innocent child.

But thanks to an intricate and nuanced screenplay adapted by William Peter Blatty from his own novel, the film boasts any number of flawed characters struggling to find faith and to do what’s right in this situation.

So was Friedkin, the director who balanced every scene to expose its divinity and warts, and to quietly build tension. The titular ritual was simply the climax of a film filled with rituals, big and small, Catholic and non-religious, that we use to keep us clean and safe.

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Rocket Men

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Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo

by George Wolf

Just in the last few months, the smash movie Hidden Figures – plus the death of American hero John Glenn – brought renewed attention to the birth of the U.S. space program. Director David Fairhead moves the spotlight a few years ahead with Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo, a fitting salute to both teamwork and an amazing job well done.

And don’t forget those splashdown parties. “We drank a lot of beer.”

After JFK’s “moon promise” of 1961, Project Apollo took the space race baton from Mercury, working overtime to stay on the President’s schedule and get a man to the moon and back before the end of the decade.

Fairhead, in his feature documentary debut, makes the most of some stellar archival footage, often cutting from present-day interviews with mission controllers to decades-old looks at their younger selves moving through an ever-present cigarette haze to get astronauts to the moon.

I’m telling’ ya, these guys could smoke.

And they could work. Despite the eventual gratification of success, the strain on family life became so great that at least one crew member now admits that if given the choice to do it all again, “I wouldn’t.”

As enthralling as the historical footage may be, it’s an equal treat to hear the behind-the-scenes story from the men themselves, and Fairhead lets us glimpse the unique personalities that made up an incredible team. We see men committed to the Apollo mantra of “tough and competent,” and we see hard-nosed flight directors who knew when to step back and let people do their jobs.

In its entirety, the Apollo mission saw tragedy, triumph, and lives in the balance, persevering  through situations that were “complicated as hell back then.” Mission Control can’t help but get a bit wonky with the space geekiness, but by the time one crew member gets choked up at the pride and amazement his memories still bring, it’s pretty hard to blame him.

Verdict-3-5-Stars

 

 

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Fate of the Furiosa

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The Fate of the Furious

by Matt Weiner

Maybe it was when it rained cars down on 7th Avenue in New York. Maybe it was the shootout on a plane with a baby. Or maybe—just maybe—it was when the gang attacked a nuclear submarine with sports cars gliding across a tundra.

However naturally each absurd setup manages to segue within the operatic universe of the franchise, the totality of The Fate of the Furious finally answers the question: how much is too much Fast and the Furious?

In the eighth installment of the series, the gang goes up against one of their own: Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) breaks bad to abet a criminal hacker (Charlize Theron) in mass genocide, and only Dom’s makeshift family of gearheads and misfits can save the day.

(If you need to review how Dom’s crew went from outlaw street racers to extralegal super-spies over the last 15 years, there’s Wikipedia—or there’s the fact that it doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t matter, you’ve either bought into these movies by now or you haven’t.)

To help take down Dom, the gang has to work together with a former foe, Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham). It’s not an original twist, but the chemistry between Statham and Dwayne Johnson is the most pitch-perfect sendup of action movie homoeroticism since Hot Fuzz—maybe more so, given how truly gifted the two men are at contrasting their action figure physiques with deadpan comedy.

If the film has one glaring weak spot besides a wanton disregard for physics, it’s that Cipher is a too-aptly-named villain. Charlize Theron does her best to inject some genuine fear and malice into the character, but all the effort in the world can’t change a flimsy backstory and the fact that she’s basically just there as the catalyst for Dom vs. Everyone Else.

When the film sticks to that hook, director F. Gary Gray (Straight Outta Compton. The Italian Job) delightfully serves up the best and worst of the franchise. There’s more excess, more teenage boy wish fulfillment, more glib treatment of women, more stereotypical wisecracking—and since more is more, there’s over two hours of it.

Which brings up the question: has the series gone too far? The Fate of the Furious without a doubt sacrifices some of the franchise’s ramshackle charm in order to deliver a smorgasbord of winking action comedy.

But it would be unwise to accuse this franchise of jumping the shark. Really, it would be unwise to mention sharks anywhere near these movies. If the crew ever does come across a shark, they’re just as likely to punch it in the face, strap sticks of dynamite to it, launch it at some larger, angrier target and keep moving without missing a beat. Isn’t it comforting to have a family you can rely on?

Verdict-3-5-Stars

 

 

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Too Much Movie, Too Little Time

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Tommy’s Honour

by Christie Robb

I know zilch about golf, and was fascinated by the story of the father and son who pioneered the modern game, Thomas Morris and Thomas Morris Jr. But there was just too much story squeezed into this movie: class snobbery, ambition, shifts in morality, romance, father/son drama, the development of golfing as a profession, the innovations in technique, the designing of greens, death, grief, alcoholism…

The movie lacked clear focus and, thus, presented enough of the elements of the story to intrigue, but not enough to satisfy—often the case when a book is adapted. In this case, the screenplay was written by Pamela Marin and Kevin Cook, based on Cook’s own 2007 book Tommy’s Honor: The Story of Old Tom Morris and Young Tom Morris, Golf’s Founding Father and Son.

In Jason Connery’s film (yup, Sean’s son), the story is framed by the questions of a young reporter. He has traveled up to Scotland to interview Old Tom (Peter Mullan), who then launches into the tale of his son (Jack Lowden): a golf prodigy discontent with the way the gentlemen at the St. Andrews club treat his greenskeeper father. Young Tom is also unhappy that the toffs take the lion’s share of championship winnings and is determined to correct this, over the protestations of his father who is more at peace with the status quo.

Young Tom’s machinations to obtain more cash and to increase the prestige of the golf player come off a bit petulant and his disdain at his father’s lot in life undercuts the coolness of his father’s career. (Not only a greenskeeper—he was himself a champion—still the oldest winner of the Open Championship—who designed something like 70 golf courses and made equipment.)

It’d be enough, I think, to keep the focus on the golf, but at the same time, the movie tries to cover the relationship between Young Tom and the older woman he falls for (Ophelia Lovibond). She’d given birth to an illegitimate child and this causes a rift between Young Tom and his religious mum. Fine, certainly interesting. But there’s not enough time spent on the relationship to make the audience care about it and the romance takes focus off the golf. Then the woman’s death in a subsequent birth seems to be the catalyst for Young Tom’s decent into alcoholism and early “tragic” death. (Tragic in quotes as the movie seems to imply that Young Tom died from exposure—insisting he finish a golf match inexplicably held in Scotland on Christmas Eve, in a blizzard. A death’s not tragic if you can avoid it by going inside.)

To me, the best part of the movie was the credits sequence where the Connery flashes old photos of the real-life father and son with some simple accompanying text about their lives. So, ultimately, I’d have rather have been introduced to this story as a documentary. Or, if acted, as a BBC or Netflix series that would have allowed all the different facets of the story enough room to really shine.

Verdict-2-0-Stars

So that happened...

Drama Happens

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Tales of a 4th Grade Psycho

by Hope Madden

I learned precious little in my 12 years of Catholic schooling. (That’s more on me than it is on the schools, to be honest.) But one lesson that did stick: nuns are judgey.

When I was a 4th grader in Tiffin St. Mary’s Catholic Elementary school, my teacher, Ms. Teill, was charged with generating some kind of skit to entertain at an upcoming PTO gathering.

I volunteered my services.

I would not act, oh no. I prepared to write and direct my first stage play. I called it, “When a Stranger Calls.”

If that title sounds familiar to you, it’s because it is. I stole it from the box of a VHS rental I coveted at the local video store.

As a child, I was fascinated by horror films.

I attribute this to inaccess (my parents only allowed G-rated films until I was about 12), and my abiding fear of all things.

As a preschooler I was afraid of Sesame Street – you must admit it is lousy with monsters. I found Boo Berry cereal equal parts delicious and frightening. Trees and the woods still terrify me – a handicap in rural Ohio.

Odd as it sounds, my ritual for overcoming my fear was to write scary stories.

Not just any scary stories – I would rewrite those tales I overheard that frightened me, allowing me a sort of ownership, I suppose.

I had notebooks full of them – tales crafted of what I could glean from a commercial I’d seen for Helter Skelter, or after eaves dropping on the babysitter as she summarized the film Carrie over the phone to a friend, or after poring over the box for the VHS tape of David Cronenberg’s Rabid. All these became inspiration to my 10-year-old self. Little did Miss Teill know.

I’m not sure how familiar you are with the 1979 slasher whose plot I attempted to plagiarize.

A babysitter receives creepy phone calls telling her to check the children. She ignores the message, the children are slaughtered, and eventually she finds that the calls are being made from inside the house.

“Have you checked the children?”

In the film, the babysitter survives – a fact I did not grasp from the VHS box, so in my play, she dies. And the children die. So do the parents, the police who investigate – actually, every character in my play died except the maniac, who lived to kill another day.

So my friends and I rehearsed during recess. We honed our tale until we were ready to share it with our parents – and everyone else’s – as well as most of St. Mary’s faculty at the PTO meeting.

Poor Miss Teill. Well, I suppose she should have paid more attention during rehearsal.

As it happens, it was Holy Week – those sacred days leading up to Easter.

Let’s be honest, though, there is a lot of blood shed in those days leading up to Easter. Is this really that different?

Where do you think Sister Cleofa landed with that argument?

It turns out, child slaughter doesn’t play that well with the nuns.

My parents were mortified, as was the whole of the audience. As I recall, Miss Teill was reprimanded. I was definitely reprimanded, and had to promise to stop writing anything at all.

And to stop being morbid.

There were several children I had to promise to stop playing with, also, at their parents’ request.

But otherwise, the performance went well, I think.