Tag Archives: Hope Madden

New In Theaters

I’m Not Looney, I’m Just Drawn That Way

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Coyote vs. ACME

by Hope Madden

Three years after Warner Brothers shelved Coyote vs. ACME for a tax write off, the delightful live action/animation hybrid finally hits big screens this week.

My interest hardly needed nudging after last year’s surprisingly entertaining The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie. The fact that Coyote vs. ACME is about a soulless corporation willing to sacrifice cartoons because of its greed only increased its appeal. I love a good “art imitates life” story.

And this one did not disappoint. Will Forte is Kevin Avery of the injury law firm Avery, Jones, and Maltese—the first of about a billion nods to the brain trust that created the nearly century-old Looney Tunes. Kevin makes a living helping cartoon characters settle disputes with ACME for a couple hundred per case of backfiring rocket skates, anvil incidents, and whatnot.

Then Wile E. Coyote walks into Kevin’s office with a bottomless knapsack full of whatnot and suddenly Kevin’s facing a case that might be bigger than he even wants to deal with.

Kevin’s nemesis, ACME Corp’s slick talking attorney Buddy Crane (John Cena), offers a sweet settlement, but Mr. Coyote’s having none of it.

Coyote vs. ACME delivers a classic legal thriller punctuated with laughs and loving nods to animated history. Director Dave Green and a writing team led by Samy Burch (May December) follow in Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s footsteps in more ways than one. The filmmakers’ Looney Tunes love runs deep, and their knack for sight gags is as on-point as their instincts with a David vs. Goliath storyline.

It’s a smart script, and Forte, Cena, and P.J. Byrne (as Cena’s assistant) are a riot. Coyote vs. ACME never aims for the heights of Roger Rabbit (which was, let’s be honest, essentially a brilliantly disguised Chinatown for a new generation), but it doesn’t try to.

Green’s film celebrates generations of animated history with love and skill while it tells a story that’s relevance is as timeless as the Looney Tunes.

New In Theaters

Problem Child

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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

by Hope Madden

Don’t make the mistake of assuming Jane Schoenbrun’s new feature Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a slasher. Or a slasher spoof. Or a satire about slashers.

It’s a sexual awakening brought about by Gillian Anderson. Obviously.

Up-and-coming (pun intended) queer filmmaker Kris (a wondrously vulnerable Hannah Einbinder) has been tapped to reboot a problematic slasher IP. She hopes to convince the Final Girl of the first installment, Billy (Anderson the Great), to return to cinema and star in the film. Turns out, Billy’s a recluse who bought and now lives in the camp from the original film. She hosts Kris for several days of movies, junk food, pot, and deeply sensuous slasher nerdery.

This is—and I say this with as much delight as possible—the nerdiest horror movie ever. How nerdy? The very second you hear yourself saying “that’s a split diopter,” Schoenbrun stand-in Kris says it out loud. When Kris apologizes for asking too personal a question of Billy, fearing it could be a #metoo violation, Billy replies, “I auditioned for The Burning. You know who made that, right?”

Nerds! And the best kind of nerds. Horror movie nerds! Sleepaway Camp trivia meets Friday the 13th nostalgia in a gloriously queer, brazenly shameless, wonderfully horny new horror film.

Like their last two features, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma concerns itself with transformation, identity, and horror. But Schoenbrun’s latest drops the dreamy melancholy of the previous films in favor of something tender, beautiful, and accepting.

The gender iconography littered across every scene finds its zenith in Little Death (that name!), the transgender marauder with a double-blade spear and an air vent helmet. (Honestly, if you haven’t read Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women, and Chain Saws, you should. Schoenbrun certainly has.)

TSADACM, like Schoenbrun’s last two films, is a gorgeous watercolor fever dream. It’s funny, incredibly bloody, and unabashedly in love with the aggressively sexual and sexually ambiguous slasher, no matter how problematic. Perhaps because it’s problematic.

The film is not just a wonderful walk through another person’s psyche, although it is that. It’s also a fascinating, deeply satisfying kick of a horror movie. You should go.  

Outtakes

Way Down in the Hole

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Bury the Devil

by Hope Madden

Things don’t often go well for live-in nurses in horror movies. Whether the caregiver is a loved one (Undertone, Relic, The Taking of Deborah Logan) or a professional (I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, The Dark and the Wicked), the patient always seems to bring with them an additional presence.

So, I guess Julia (Emmanuelle Lussier Martinez) only has herself to blame. If she’d watched more horror, she might have known that her latest gig in a gorgeous lakeside home with Evelyn (Dawn Ford) would take more from her than her time and compassion.

Writer/director Adam O’Brien’s Bury the Devil creates a great, spooky atmosphere. Long takes and a prowling camera give the film a haunted quality, and O’Brien makes the most of his limited budget with a small but talented cast and this stunning location.

Ford takes advantages of the opportunities afforded her, gliding from wistful old woman to confused dementia sufferer to something sinister and back with ease. She commands the screen as patients in these films rarely do.

Likewise, Martinez carves out a believable character—not the martyr or conniver, just a working nurse on her first night in a new home.

The writing is occasionally pushy, trying too hard to wedge information into conversations without forced exposition. We exist only in the present tense. There are no flashbacks or days marked on the screen to help us along. Instead, O’Brien drops us into Julia’s first night and possibly Dawn’s last. It’s a structure that keeps the film moving and surprising, but it doesn’t offer a lot of opportunity to expand the story.

The gaps in the mythology weaken the climax. What you don’t know and couldn’t possibly understand without some guidance leaves you guessing at too much. That guesswork keeps the finale from feeling like a resolution, like pieces finally fit into a puzzle. It’s not enough to ruin the movie, but it’s enough to keep it from leaving a mark.

Shudder Premiere

All You Care to Eat

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Buffet Infinity

by Hope Madden

At about the 5-minute mark, I’d begun to worry about Buffet Infinity, co-writer/director Simon Glassman’s very Canadian sci-fi/horror/comedy hybrid. So far, we’d done nothing but flip through various low-fi, low-budget, very local Canadian TV ads. For five minutes.

That seemed like a long time for a prelude to a narrative. By 10 minutes, panic settled in as I realized the flipping from a few seconds of this law office ad to a few seconds of that used car commercial to a few seconds of this buffet advert would compose the entire film.

About one minute later I’d submitted to the mind-jangling force of Buffet Infinity. Which almost certainly means I would not have survived whatever it is that happened in Westridge County, Canada the day the sink hole appeared behind that mall.

Glassman’s premise, built from a script co-written with Allison Bench and Elisia Snyder, is clever, but its execution is bananas and perhaps brilliant.

The film mimics the experience of channel surfing in the Nineties with all the regional news and commercials. Did your small town have a car salesman who took on a superhero alter ego? Or a badly dressed ambulance chaser promising you a big payout for your negligence lawsuit? These are joined by a delightful pawn shop, an untested diet pill, a hilariously lip-synched series of insurance commercials, one low-rent L. Ron Hubbard (every ad is hilarious), and a nasty grudge match between neighboring restaurants.

Edited masterfully and performed atrociously (intentionally and enjoyably), and aided by a handful of quick news bits, the clips tell the tale of a town fighting to survive some cosmic capitalistic catastrophe.

Glassman’s instincts for presentation are on point. Whether it’s the crawl on the screen, the news channel jingles, the insane verbal descriptions attached to the buffet commercials, or just the relentless and twisted familiarity of each ad, Buffet Infinity nails its style.

I wouldn’t call it style over substance because that feels like a knock against the narrative being unveiled with each changing commercial. Still, certainly the presentation and its unlikely durability (93 minutes!) make style the more impressive of the two.

Buffet Infinity is a wild watch, and though—given its channel hopping style—it seems ideal for Shudder, don’t let the home viewing let you get distracted. Glassman repays you for your attention.

The Screening Room

Screening Room: Union County, End of Oak Street, Wrong Girls & More

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Hope & George review this week’s new releases: Union County, The End of Oak Street, The Rivals of Amziah King, The Wrong Girls, Do Us Part – and we’re joined by the director and cast, Reed Arnold, Kelly Russo & Travis Laughlin! —Don’t Say Good Luck, Hellcat, Feed, and The Legend of Juan Jose Mundo.

Outtakes

Don’t You (Forget About Mom)

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Don’t Say Good Luck

by Hope Madden

There is a sweet, delightfully messy coming-of-age film at the heart of director Julia Hart’s Don’t Say Good Luck.

As high school sophomore Sophie (Sunny Sandler) nervously auditions for the school musical, navigating friendship and crush and theatrical nerves, her relationship with her mom takes a hit. What’s refreshing about Don’t Say Good Luck is that each of Sophie’s high school sources of angst takes a back seat to her issues with her mom, rather than vice versa.

In your average John Hughes film, troubles at home are the backdrop for our plucky teen hero. Hart, who co-wrote the script with Laura Hankin and Jordan Horowitz, reframes priorities. The film is about Sophie and her mom (Melanie Lynskey).

Hart goes so far as to soften the villainous stereotypes Hughes trained us to expect. By rounding out the more minor characters and refocusing attention away from high school angst and toward family relationships, Don’t Say Good Luck abandons the age-old trope that teens are on their own, their parents just don’t understand.

It’s nice. Beyond that, it’s often moving.

Lynskey is characteristically wonderful, and she and Max Greenfield present a very natural, endearing, weary bond as parents going through something tragic. The chaos of their lives—a busy high schooler, twin boys, a deli they co-own where they both work—feels lived in.

Add, in minor supporting roles, the great Bebe Neuwirth and Steve Buscemi, and you’re looking at an impressive ensemble, ostensibly there to buoy Sandler, whose father and mother (Adam and Jackie Sandler) produce.

Sunny Sandler does a fine job in the spotlight. She’s fine, like her sister Sadie Sandler was fine in Roommates. She’s probably not strong enough to anchor this film, but she doesn’t sink it, either.

Still, there’s a refreshing untidiness about Don’t Say Good Luck that keeps you off kilter and helps the climax hit harder. The film lacks cynicism, believes teenage girls do dumb things but are not dumb people, and sees depth where other films choose not to. It’s an enjoyable high school dramedy, and one that acknowledges its audience’s humanity.

Outtakes

Primeval Bloodbath

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Feed

by Hope Madden

Horror owes Ireland a huge debt for vampires. Yes, basically every culture and nationality has a vampire myth, but Ireland gave us Dracula and Carmilla. Remmick is the coolest vampire to come along in decades. But those bloodsuckers are predated by some millennia by the Dearg Due, Ireland’s first vampire, who finally gets her cinematic due in Marco van Belle’s indie horror, Feed.

It’s been a year since Orla’s (Grace Collender) tragedy. Her influencer/bestie Nessa (Daisy Jelley) is sure that a week away in a remote Irish cottage will help bring Orla out of her depression, and if Nessa can take advantage of the beautiful spot for some posts, all the better.

This is essentially a cabin-in-the-woods horror, isolating five attractive young people of mixed gender in a natural, even primeval, setting.

Is it a tired set up? It is. Do filmmakers drag it out time and time again because it’s effective? Also yes. Locals are spooky, there’s no phone service, characters are out of their element, and a natural evil is disturbed.

An early-film flashback gives us a sense of what that evil is, but van Belle could mine the mythology more effectively. It would have more effectively set Feed apart from other films. Instead, we spend most of our time inside the cabin with the more predictable storyline.

The cast does a fine job of finding characters hiding in these fairly typical characters. Jelley is the most hamstrung as the vain best friend and failing influencer, but Clinton Liberty, as Orla’s boyfriend, struggles with the film’s most underwritten character.

Collender’s solid and both Rhys Mannion and Oskar Smith find nuance and personality for their characters. Naimh Hogan’s central villain has come cool trickery, but her presence lacks real terror. Charlotte Bradley, on the other hand, is effortlessly frightening as the innkeeper who’d rather keep the vampire.

It’s a good looking movie and van Belle uses the tools of the influencer within the vampire myth well. He just doesn’t break out of routine often enough to make Feed particularly memorable.  

Shudder Premiere

The Passenger

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Hellcat

by Hope Madden

Writer/director Brock Bodell’s Hellcat keeps you guessing and intrigued with a tight premise, two locations, and a cast you can count on one hand.

Dakota Gorman is Lena, and she’s not having a good time. She’s awake, her head is spinning, her stomach is not right, and she’s moving. Unsure of how she got here, Lena’s in an Airstream, rolling down a highway to God-knows-where.

For the majority of Hellcat’s 91-minute runtime, Gorman is alone to throw fits, connive, sleuth, convulse, and rebel inside that camper. Physically alone, anyway. Over a sound system rigged to the pick-up hauling the thing is the voice of Clive (Todd Terry). Clive wants Lena to stay calm and stop busting up his home until he can get her to a doctor. She’s been infected, he says.

It’s a clever but simple premise, and the tensions and questions are mined well. Lena is quite sure she’s been drugged and kidnapped. Bodell drops well-timed hints and clues to keep you leaning one direction and then the other. Evidence suggests that Clive is not what he says he is, although there’s still some proof that maybe he’s not a villainous liar. It’s tough to know.

Gorman’s physical performance is impressive and grueling. She gives Lena a savvy, angry edge that makes you believe she’ll find or fight her way out of this.

Likewise, Terry makes you want to believe Clive.

The long, lonesome highway allows for some clever attempts at escape, and given your conflicting loyalties throughout, Bodell is not afraid to twist the knife.

As we head into the third act, things get a little contrived but weirdly, entertainingly so. The full backstory/mythology is never entirely articulated, which is a bit convenient given the direction things take. And the practical FX are slightly hokey.

But on the whole, Hellcat is lean, mean, and effective.  

Fright Club

Fright Club Bonus: Author/Publisher Billy Graves

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Thrilled to get a peek behind the indie publishing curtain with Lacandon Jungle Press founder and author of Seams of the Infinite, Billy Graves! We talk publishing, indie horror, and George lets us in on recording an audio book!

ljpbooks.com

lacandonjunglepress@gmail.com

The Screening Room

Screening Room: One Night Only, Cookie Queens, Ice Cream Man & More

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Hope & George review this week’s new releases: One Night Only, Super Troopers 3, Ice Cream Man, Cookie Queens, Tinsman Road, Big Baby and The Yeti. PLUS! News & Notes from The Schlocketeer Daniel Baldwin!