The biggest turd of the summer is finally stinking up homes this week, but there are two truly outstanding indies releasing this week that you should watch instead. Because The Mummy‘s not even “this is so bad I’ll just watch it at home and enjoy it ironically” bad. It’s the bad kind of bad.
Click the film title for the full review.
Click HERE to join us in the screening room where we chat about scary clowns! Yes, It is finally here, as well as Home Again, The Oath, Crown Heights. We talk through those as well as everything new in home entertainment.
by Hope Madden
Let’s say you love Nancy Meyers’s movies – you know, those fantasies like It’s Complicated or Something’s Gotta Give where late-middle-aged women land all the attention, sex, career opportunities and marital comeuppance they’ve always really deserved, only to realize that they had it all in them the whole time. Let’s say you love those, but you’d like them to skew maybe 15 – 20 years younger.
Boy howdy, is Home Again the movie for you.
Written and directed by Meyers’s daughter Hallie Meyers-Shyer, it spins a familiar, albeit younger, yarn.
Newly single, freshly 40, gorgeous, living in an unbelievable house and raising two precocious and adorable kids – man, does Alice Kinney (Reese Witherspoon) have it rough.
One contrivance leads to another and suddenly three Hollywood dreamers in the form of gorgeous twentysomething dudes hoping to realize their moviemaking ambitions are living in her guest house.
Why not? I mean, except for the high potential for murder and/or child molestation, but this isn’t that kind of movie. This is the kind that would never happen.
What will happen when Alice’s estranged husband (Michael Sheen) comes home unexpectedly?
Gasp – do you think he’ll finally see how special she is? Will she hear all those things she’s wanted to hear from him for years? Will it work, or will she slowly realize that she deserves better?
Hell, she deserves it all!
I will tell you who deserves better—besides the audience—Reese Witherspoon.
How great was she earlier this year in HBO’s Big Little Lies? Well, she’s not great here. She coasts along with awkward and/or appreciative faces. She does have some fun chemistry with the underused (but always welcome) Candice Bergen.
None, surprisingly, with the usually reliable Sheen and less than none with the trio of hotties (Nat Wolff, Pico Alexander and Jon Rudnitsky) taking up residence.
It doesn’t help that those actors are bland (Wolff) to middling (Alexander) to weak (Rudnitsky).
No problem appears to be especially troubling, no solution feels earned, no relationship looks authentic. Even Nancy Meyers’s most self-indulgent work had a hard earned charm about it.
What Home Again needed was a different Meyers. That or a scary clown.
by Hope Madden
Clowns are fun, aren’t they?
Back in ’86, Stephen King released the novel It, about a bunch of New England kids plagued by a flesh-hungry monster who showed itself as whatever scared them the most. Like, say, a clown.
The basic premise of It is this: little kids are afraid of everything, and that’s just good thinking.
Four years later, It made its way to TV as a miniseries, the first episode of which is one of the most terrifying things ever to grace the small screen, much thanks to the unforgettable presence of Tim Curry as Pennywise the clown.
It’s been 27 years, and as the story itself dictates, the time has come for It to return.
The Derry, Maine “losers club” finds itself in 1988 in this adaptation, an era that not only brings the possibility of Part 2 much closer to present day, but it gives the pre-teen adventures a nostalgic and familiar quality.
Though The Goonies this is not. Nor is it made for TV.
This version shares a lot of tonal qualities with one of the best King adaptations, Stand By Me. Both are bittersweet tales of the early bonds that help you survive your own childhood.
Bill Skarsgård has the unenviable task of following a letter-perfect Curry in the role of Pennywise. Those are some big clown shoes to fill, but Skarsgård is up to the challenge. His Pennywise is more theatrical, more of an exploitation of all that’s inherently macabre and grotesque about clowns.
Is he better than the original? Let’s not get nutty here, but he is great.
He and the kids really make this work. The young cast is led by the always strong Jaeden Lieberher (Midnight Special), and he’s surrounded by very strong support. Sophia Lillis charms as the shiniest gem in the losers’ club, and Finn Wolfhard (that is a name!) is a scream as the foul mouthed class clown Richie.
The almost inexcusably cute Jackson Robert Scott is little, doomed Georgie, he of the yellow slicker.
In keeping with that Eighties theme, both characters cast as minorities—the Jewish Stanely Uris (Wyatt Oleff) and African American “Homeschool” Mike Hanlon (Chosen Jacobs)—are noticeably underwritten.
So, they weren’t perfect, but the team adapting for this go-round got a lot right.
The best Stephen King adaptations are those with writers who know how to prune and refocus. Luckily, newcomer Chase Palmer, longtime horror writer Gary Dauberman and, maybe most importantly, Cary Fukunaga (who wrote Beasts of No Nation) are on it.
The trio streamlines King’s more unwieldy plot turns and bloat, creating a much-appreciated focus.
Director Andy Muschietti shows great instinct for taking advantage of foreground, background and sound. Yes, It relies heavily on jump scares, but Muschietti’s approach to plumbing your fear has more depth than that and he manages your rising terror expertly.
by Hope Madden
A fight for alpha ensues with a rugged Icelandic backdrop in director Baltasar Kormákur’s latest, The Oath.
Kormákur, a filmmaker known for action-heavy thrillers, also stars as Finnur, a surgeon with some family troubles.
Though his young wife and small daughter seem picture-perfect, Finnur’s 18-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, Anna (Hera Hilmar), is spiraling out of control. An entitled party girl, her drug flirtation blossoms into a full-blown habit, much thanks to her love interest and dealer, Óttar (Gísli Örn Garðarsson).
Finnur’s increasingly reckless behavior, all aimed at removing Óttar from Anna’s life, points as much to a need for control as it does misdirected protectiveness. The film’s title refers to the surgeon’s oath never to play god – which, of course, surgeons do daily. It’s an occupational habit, though, that Finnur is bringing into his time outside the office.
As director, Kormákur works to make both men equally detestable and tender. Óttar is vulgar and brutish, but regardless of the havoc he wreaks or the horror he threatens as Finnur tries harder and harder to separate the lovers, his affection for Anna feels authentic.
Likewise, Finnur’s behavior oscillates between imprudent protectiveness and troubling malevolence. Kormákur’s performance is the picture of restraint, his conflict primarily dealt with internally. It robs the film of some excitement but delivers tension and urgency.
Though both male leads impress, it’s really Hilmar who leaves a mark. Vulnerable, naïve and headstrong, her Anna’s a perfectly frustrating culmination of post-adolescent volatility.
The Oath lacks the slick production values and audience-friendly narrative found primarily in Kormákur’s English-language product (2 Guns, Everest, Contraband), favoring grittier fare and more subdued energy. These are choices that benefit the story, although Kormákur struggles to maintain a tone that suits the tale.
Finnur’s behavior at a highly critical point feels nefarious in a way that doesn’t fit Kormákur’s characterization, and his actions are so atrocious that the resolution feels unsatisfyingly easy. The Oath dips into horror territory, not necessarily a bad thing, but the film can’t make its shifting approach feel anything but jarring – as if an entirely different film landed around Act 3, then vanished for the final reel or so.
So many movies of the brand-spankin’ variety available this week in home viewing. You’ve got your bona fide awesomeness, some better-than-you-think big budget bombs, and one flaming piece of garbage. And more! More! So much, there may be no reason to leave home all week. Except to go see It, of course.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDn73s-oEJc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VC0aSPfyQk
My twin sister Joy and I have much in common aside from a birth date and pasty legs – we love her kids and mine; we love Pee-wee Herman; we enjoy a lovely nap and we eat soft boiled eggs over dry cereal – the important things. But our differences become more pronounced as we age.
She lived in Boston for maybe a decade, just a couple minutes’ drive from the greatest video rental place on the globe, Video Oasis.
Truly, it was an oasis of all things horror movie. It had everything. I would search the internet, compile lists, plot out every inaccessible horror film in creation and take said list with me to this glorious font of B-movies, where the overweight smoker of an owner always, always had what I was looking for.
1974 Blaxploitation classic Abby (aka The Blaxorcist)? Yep.
Martin Landau’s lost 1982 insane asylum flick Alone in the Dark? Got it.
Often I’d have to settle for VHS, sometimes for what was clearly a handmade, pirated copy, but what did I care? Sisters of Satan (noted by Satanist and film critic Nikolas Schreck as “the best soft core Satanic lesbian nun film that Mexico has ever produced”) wasn’t just going to find its own way onto my TV screen.
Alas, city life grew tiresome for my sister and her burgeoning family, and they uprooted to the wilds of Vermont. Only about three hours from Boston and its magnificent pool of schlock horror, Hinesberg, Vermont may as well have been another planet.
A heavily wooded planet.
They searched out their dream home, nestled in the woods on a lake. Technically – and by that I mean, if you ask Joy – they don’t live in a log cabin in the woods. For my purposes, it’s a log cabin. It is definitely in the woods.
I am not one with the woods.
In fact, of all my countless and paralyzing fears, nothing evokes the kind of panic in me that the woods does. The forest fills me with a pathological, deep and abiding, blind terror.
And yet—as if to get away from me—Joy moved her clan into one of my nightmares.
Joy’s family adapted quickly. I was on the phone with her and her wee one Vivian, then two, when Viv caught a fat frog. From my end of the phone I could make out Joy’s side of the conversation.
“Wow, it’s a big one. He has orange marks on his belly, can you see that? He won’t let you pick him up, though. Oh, look at that, he did let you pick him up. Be gentle. Be careful with him.”
“Don’t squeeze. Don’t Squeeze. DON’T SQUEEZE!”
The wildlife didn’t bother my little Vermonsters one iota. Ruby, Vivian’s older sister and bunkmate, came nonchalantly down the stairs one morning to announce on her way to eat breakfast, “There’s a bat in my room.”
“It’s black with a gray head,” she clarified as her dad Jeff made his way upstairs, as if he might mistake this bat with some other.
Given her utterly nonplussed response to the invader, Jeff assumed it was something else – a big moth, maybe. Ruby sleeps on the top bunk. Surely if an actual bat were flying around that close to her sweet little head, she’d be a bit more excited about it.
It was indeed a bat.
A good sized bat, which only made it all the more embarrassing for Jeff and Joy when they freaked right the hell out while their baby girls yawned and ate their morning granola.
But you have to get used to critters if you’re going to live where Joy and Jeff live.
At one point, their neighbors’ chickens were being picked off one by one.
“I think it’s a fisher cat,” Jeff said.
What’s a fisher cat?
“It’s not a wolverine,” Joy explained to me.
Wait, what?!! Is that supposed to be calming?
She has seen bears.
There are fucking predators in Joy’s yard.
Forgive me my ignorance. These are not worries we have at my house.
Off the deck out back Joy often sees woodchucks (according to Ruby, their babies are called chucklings), a fox or two, any number of birds – all of which possess a rustic charm when I can see them through the safety of a securely locked window.
At night, though, when these critters become nothing but glinting eyeballs, I prefer the comfort of the basement.
That’s where I stay when I visit, and that’s A-OK with me.
There are no windows in the basement.
In fact, I kid you not, the basement is so dark that Joy keeps a plastic miner’s helmet equipped with a light near the futon so guests can find their way around at night.
Whenever I visit the Family Vermonster I bring with me horror films set in the woods. I don’t know if it’s masochism or a clumsy attempt to face my fears, but it has become a ritual.
On one visit, after the girls went to bed, Joy, Jeff, and I lounged around the basement guest quarters and watched the sub-par Aussie camping nightmare Lost Weekend.
You know it? Fools dumb enough to spend time in the woods are unceremoniously picked off by angry animals.
Afterward, Jeff retired and Joy and I sat up making fun of people, as is our way.
We were interrupted by the sound of critters.
Joy kept talking, though through a nervous smile.
I silenced up and waited for Joy to share some comforting words about what that noise was and how it meant me no harm.
The noise came again.
It wasn’t a mouse, wasn’t even mice. It sounded like a multitude of medium sized mammals with claws skittering across the first-floor hardwood.
“What the fuck?” I queried.
She smiled again, shrugged her shoulders and held her hands out in a ‘kids do the darndest things’ kind of expression.
“What does that mean?!!”
“I don’t know,” she offered anxiously. “Maybe keep the basement door closed?”
AAaaaaaahhhhhhh!
That night I naturally lay awake until images of rodents and scurrying varmints overcame me, their glinting eyeballs creeping toward me from every dark recess in the basement.
Slowly the beings morphed with my dreamier brain into furry little beasties. Some were feline and fanged. Some had orange markings on their bellies, others, gray heads.
They dashed in and out of the shadows, under furniture, around corners, looking for what – meat?
It seems to me they were searching for meat.
I swear some of them were wearing miners’ helmets.
Click HERE to join us in the Screening Room to talk The Trip to Spain, Patti Cake$ and Goon: Last of the Enforcers. We’ll also break down what’s new in home entertainment.
Oh, siblings—our closest friends and the bane of our existence. Horror movies know that, which is why both sibling rivalry and sisterly bonds populate so many worthwhile flicks: Sisters, Excision, Mama, Only Lovers Left Alive, Kiss of the Vampire. Too many to count, really, but that’s exactly what we plan to do: count down the five best.
Sisters Gold (Michalina Olszanska) and Silver (Marta Mazurek) are not your typical movie mermaids, and director Agnieszka Smoczynska’s feature debut The Lure is not your typical – well, anything.
The musical fable offers a vivid mix of fairy tale, socio-political commentary, whimsy and throat tearing. But it’s not as bizarre a combination as you might thing.
The Little Mermaid is actually a heartbreaking story. Not Disney’s crustacean song-stravaganza, but Hans Christian Andersen’s bleak meditation on the catastrophic consequences of sacrificing who you are for someone undeserving. It’s a cautionary tale for young girls, really, and Lure writer Robert Bolesto remains true to that theme.
But that’s really too tidy a description for a film that wriggles in disorienting directions every few minutes. There are slyly feminist observations made about objectification, but that’s never the point. Expect other lurid side turns, fetishistic explorations, dissonant musical numbers and a host of other vaguely defined sea creatures to color the fable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxhi_3hDUPE
Sisters Ginger and Bridget, outcasts in the wasteland of Canadian suburbia, cling to each other, and reject/loathe high school (a feeling that high school in general returns).
On the evening of Ginger’s first period, she’s bitten by a werewolf. Writer Karen Walton cares not for subtlety: the curse, get it? It turns out, lycanthropy makes for a pretty vivid metaphor for puberty. This turn of events proves especially provocative and appropriate for a film that upends many mainstay female cliches.
Walton’s wickedly humorous script stays in your face with the metaphors, successfully building an entire film on clever turns of phrase, puns, and analogies, stirring up the kind of hysteria that surrounds puberty, sex, reputations, body hair, and one’s own helplessness to these very elements. It’s as insightful a high school horror film as you’ll find, peppered equally with dark humor and gore – kind of A Canadian Werewolf in High School, if you will.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zoa1A987A_k
Justine (Garance Marillier, impressive) is off to join her older sister (Ella Rumpf) at veterinary school – the very same school where their parents met. Justine may be a bit sheltered, a bit prudish to settle in immediately, but surely with her sister’s help, she’ll be fine.
Writer/director Julia Ducournau has her cagey way with the same themes that populate any coming-of-age story – pressure to conform, peer pressure generally, societal order and sexual hysteria. Here all take on a sly, macabre humor that’s both refreshing and unsettling.
A vegetarian from a meat-free family, Justine objects to the freshman hazing ritual of eating a piece of raw meat. But once she submits to peer pressure and tastes that taboo, her appetite is awakened and it will take more and more dangerous, self-destructive acts to indulge her blood lust.
In a very obvious way, Raw is a metaphor for what can and often does happen to a sheltered girl when she leaves home for college. But as Ducournau looks at those excesses committed on the cusp of adulthood, she creates opportunities to explore and comment on so many upsetting realities and does so with absolute fidelity to her core metaphor.
Bette Davis and Joan Crawford? Yes, please!
The two then-aging (just barely, if we’re honest) starlets played aging starlets who were sisters. One (Davis’s Jane) had been a child star darling. The other (Crawford’s Blanche) didn’t steal the limelight from her sister until both were older, then Blanche was admired for her skill as an adult actress. Meanwhile, Jane descended into alcoholism and madness. She also seemed a bit lax on hygiene.
Blanche winds up wheelchair bound (How? Why? Is Jane to blame?!) and Jane’s envy and insanity get the better of her while they’re alone in their house.
Famously, the two celebrities did not get along on set or off. Whether true or rumor, the performances suggest a deep, authentic and frightening hatred borne of envy that fuels the escalating tension.
Davis is at her unhinged best in a performance that earned her an Oscar nomination. Crawford pales by comparison (as the part requires), but between the hateful chemistry and the story’s sometimes surprising turns, this is a movie that ages well, even if its characters did not.
A lurid Korean fairy tale of sorts – replete with dreamy cottage and evil stepmother – Jee-woon Kim’s Tale of Two Sisters is saturated with bold colors and family troubles.
A tight-lipped father returns home with his daughter after her prolonged hospital stay. Her sister has missed her; her stepmother has not. Or so it all would seem, although jealousy, dream sequences, ghosts, a nonlinear time frame, and confused identity keep you from ever fully articulating what is going on. The film takes on an unreliable point of view, subverting expectations and keeping the audience off balance. But that’s just one of the reasons it works.
The director’s use of space, the composition of his frame, the set decoration, and the disturbing and constant anxiety he creates about what’s just beyond the edge of the frame wrings tensions and heightens chills. The composite effect disturbs more then it horrifies, but it stays with you either way.
Tale masters the slow reveal, and the dinner party scene is a pivotal one for that reason. One of the great things about this picture is not the surprise about to be revealed – one you may have guessed by this point, but is nonetheless handled beautifully – but the fact that Tale has something else up its sleeve. And under its table.
Cutie pies—that’s what’s available for home entertainment this week. Whether you’re in the mood to eyeball ab-tastic beach bods or baby pandas (and we will totally judge you if you pick the wrong one), what hits your screen will be far cuter than it should legally be.
Click the title for a full review. And as always, please use this information for good, not evil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGJh7Zhq6SE
