Honk. It’s such an inelegant word. Not that beep or toot are much more graceful, but honk?
That’s what makes it such a perfect choice for writer/director Adamma Ebo’s look at commercial spirituality, Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.
First Lady Trinitie Childs (Regina Hall, amazing as always) is launching a comeback. Her husband, Pastor Lee-Curtis Childs (the incomparable Sterling K. Brown), had a little run in with morality and scandal five years ago. Since then, their mega church, Wander to Greater Paths—which once boasted more than 10,000 congregants—has been shuttered.
Well, no more! That scandal is almost behind them (there’s the issue of one hold out in the settlement…) and this dynamic duo is ready. And they want people to know, which is why Lee-Curtis agreed to let a documentary crew follow them as they prepare for their upcoming Easter Sunday resurrection.
What follows is a mockumentary of sorts, although Ebo’s point of view is not exclusively that of the documentarian (that elusive Anita). And while the world seems most interested in the pastor and his past transgressions, that sly Anita seems more drawn to the first lady.
To call this a satire, or really even a mockumentary, is to be a bit off the mark. Though it’s often funny, it’s not exactly a comedy, either. Brown’s damaged, shamed pastor is so pathologically single-minded as to be villainous outright. But Brown seems incapable of creating a character whose flaws don’t make him all the more human, and therefore tender, however irredeemable.
Likewise, Hall, whose performance is more decidedly comedic, mines Trinitie for deep conflict between submission to spirituality or to patriarchal bullshit. Her profound unhappiness partnered with her pride make the character a preaching contradiction in a church hat.
Solid support work bolsters the comedy (Nicole Beharie, in particular) and the tragedy (the late introduction of Austin Crute’s Khalil is powerful).
What starts off as a bit of fun at commodified religion’s expense turns into a surprisingly layered and cynical investigation into the damage organized religion of any kind can have, especially on those who believe.
Perhaps the most terrifying horror born of neighborly manners is Michael Haneke’s unnerving Funny Games (either his 1997 German-language original or his 2007 English-language remake). Writer/director Duncan Birmingham doesn’t go that far. What he does is walk a tightrope that’s a little goofier, a little less horrifying, but effective nonetheless.
Margo (Melissa Tang) and Adam (Ryan Hansen) throw a housewarming party. Well, Adam throws it. Margo endures it. She doesn’t honestly know what was wrong with their old neighborhood. It doesn’t help that their 5-year-old has had nightmares every night since they arrived.
Adam invites all his colleagues and bosses, hoping to impress without coming off as douchey. He’s upwardly mobile, although the house —which he got at a steal because of that nasty double homicide—might make them look a little higher up than they really are.
Not that Margo and Adam are the only partiers who aren’t what they seem. That really good-looking couple—the two who look like they just came from a really hip funeral—does anyone know who they are?
Maybe Sasha (Perry Mattfeld) and Tom (Timothy Granaderos) are the neighbors, as they say.
But probably not.
What we can say for sure is that they do not want to leave.
What transpires after all the other guests have gone would be a comedy of manners except that it feels pretty clear that something awful lurks underneath the handsome couple’s evasion and gaslighting.
Birmingham’s film is a mystery of sorts, although you’ll have most of that intrigue figured out pretty early. There is also a subplot about Margo’s friends who are babysitting. This goes essentially nowhere. Worse still, Birmingham rushes Act 3 and leaves you feeling short-changed.
However, that 30 minutes or so that Margo and Adam and Sasha and Tom have on their own gets pretty uncomfortable.
Hansen unveils surprising warmth within the needy, insecure Adam. He and Tang take the married couple in surprising and welcome directions. Mattfeld and Granaderos are drolly perfect as the home invaders masquerading as partygoers who just can’t tell it’s time to go.
A tight script wastes little time and manages to surprise even if you figure out the main mysteries early. Who Invited Them isn’t flawless, but it is an anxious bit of fun.
Exciting all MaddWolf Pack episode! Daniel Baldwin, aka The Schlocketeer, and Brandon Thomas join us to talk about a topic we stole from their Twitter conversation: which directors not known for horror made the best horror movies?
Be sure to listen because Daniel and Brandon both bring much knowledge (plus extra movie titles!) to the conversation. But here’s our Top 5:
5. Nosferatu, the Vampire (1979, Werner Herzog)
Sure, it’s another Dracula, but because it’s another Dracula by way of Murnau’s masterpiece Nosferatu, and it’s written and directed by the great Werner Herzog, it’s weird and wonderful.
Herzog uses the imagery Murnau created – in particular, the naked mole rat of a vampire – to turn vampirism into a pestilence to evoke the Black Plague of Europe. Klaus Kinski is that naked mole rat, and he is glorious.
Isabelle Adjani is the pure of heart maiden who is his undoing, but the way Herzog reimagines Jonathan Harker gives the film a cynical twist that feels like a surprise within this dreamlike adaptation. Gorgeous location shooting and an astonishing score help Herzog create a suffocating but captivating atmosphere.
4. The Haunting (1963, Robert Wise)
Coming off the big epics of The Sound of Music and West Side Story, no one would have expected the intimate psychological horror of Robert Wise’s The Haunting.
Shirley Jackson fans have to appreciate the way the film remains true to her vision of horror. Fans of horror have to appreciate Wise’s unbelievable knack for generating terror with sound design and imagination.
Yes, the performances are magnificent – especially Julie Harris, whose bitter Eleanor is picture perfect. But Wise’s mastery of form is what makes this G-rated film a lasting terror.
3. Hour of the Wolf (1968, Ingmar Bergman)
Like all Bergman films, this hypnotic, surreal effort straddles lines of reality and unreality and aches with existential dread. But Bergman and his star, Max von Sydow, cross over into territory of the hallucinatory and grotesque, calling to mind ideas of vampires, insanity and bloodlust as one man confronts repressed desires as he awaits the birth of his child.
As wonderful as von Sydow is as the central figure, a man spiraling toward insanity, it’s the heartbreaking Liv Ullman who owns this movie. Heartbreaking, solid, and the most unusual combination of strength and weakness, her Alma grounds the surreal elements of the movie.
The result is gorgeous, spooky, and so very sad. It’s one of the most underappreciated films of Bergman’s career.
2. The Shining (1980, Stanley Kubrick)
You know who you probably shouldn’t hire to look after your hotel? Jack Nicholson.
A study in atmospheric tension, Kubrick’s vision of the Torrance family collapse at the Overlook Hotel is both visually and aurally meticulous. It opens with that stunning helicopter shot, following Jack Torrance’s little yellow Beetle up the mountainside, the ominous score announcing a foreboding that the film never shakes.
The hypnotic, innocent sound of Danny Torrance’s Big Wheel against the weirdly phallic patterns of the hotel carpet tells so much – about the size of the place, about the monotony of the existence, about hidden perversity. The sound is so lulling that its abrupt ceasing becomes a signal of spookiness afoot.
Nicholson outdoes himself. His early, veiled contempt blossoms into pure homicidal mania, and there’s something so wonderful about watching Nicholson slowly lose his mind. Between writer’s block, isolation, ghosts, alcohol withdrawal, midlife crisis, and “a momentary loss of muscular coordination,” the playfully sadistic creature lurking inside this husband and father emerges.
He’s not the caretaker management expected, but really, was Grady? Like Grady and Lloyd the bartender, Jack Torrance is a fixture here at the Overlook.
1. Silence of the lambs (1991, Jonathan Demme)
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.
Hannibal Lecter ranks as one of cinema’s scariest villains, and that accomplishment owes everything to Anthony Hopkins’s performance. It’s his eerie calm, his measured speaking, his superior grin that give Lecter power. Everything about his performance reminds the viewer that this man is smarter than you and he’ll use that for dangerous ends.
Demme makes sure it’s Lecter that gets under our skin in the way he creates a parallel between Lecter and FBI investigator Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster). It’s Clarice we’re all meant to identify with, and yet Demme suggests that she and Lecter share some similarities, which means that maybe we share some, too.
The logic seems inarguable. If Idris Elba wants to be in your movie, you say yes. If Tilda Swinton wants to be in your movie, you say yes. If both of them want in? You dance a jig.
To be sure, Swinton and Elba are excellent in George Miller’s new fantasy Three Thousand Years of Longing. Swinton is Alithea, a self-satisfied, hyper-intelligent, solitary creature who finds connection to her fellow humans through stories. She’s a narratologist. She studies stories, their structure and their meaning.
Elba is a djinn, a supernatural force Alithea has unintentionally let out of his bottle. He has some stories to tell. He is a maelstrom of weary tenderness and raw emotion, a wonderful balance of wisdom and naivete. Swinton’s chilly reason and childlike curiosity make a similar balance, and the two together are a delight.
Miller hasn’t made a film since his 2015 masterpiece Mad Max: Fury Road, and those are big boots to fill. His new effort looks gorgeous, as Elba spins yarns of his previous wish fulfillment mishaps across time.
Miller’s storytelling here is fanciful but meaningful. He is exploring storytelling, what it means to write your own story, and how authentic and original storytelling transports you. In this case, it transports Alithea from her modest hotel room to palace intrigue, battlefields and lustful chambers.
Both actors — two of the most talented and versatile working today — breathe life, love and dimension into their characters. It seems effortless, the way they make you believe them: two beings long resigned to being alone, slowly awakening to like-minded company.
They’re so good you can almost forget that they are playing the literally magical negro and the white heroine his magic helps on her journey. It’s a trope I think we all hoped was dead by now, but the truth is that the only way to avoid this trope with this particular film would be to deprive us of Elba, Swinton, or both.
It’s a conundrum and not the only flaw in the tale. The act three romantic plot feels a bit forced, though charming. Where Miller really succeeds is in delivering a layered consideration of the power and wonder of stories—even in the land of artless blockbusters, sequels and superheroes; even in an era of content creation.
It’s not a masterpiece and it falls into some old-school storytelling traps, but Three Thousand Years of Longing offers much originality and two undeniable performances.
John Boyega is here to remind us that he is more than Finn.
He has been, of course. He burned right through the screen in the raucous Attack the Block. He simmered with contempt and resignation in Detroit. And he charmed as the well-meaning hero in some light galactic fluff.
He explores something entirely different in Abi Demaris Corbin’s heartbreaking true story, Breaking. The filmmaker delivers a bleak look at bureaucracy and the plight of the Black American veteran without fanfare or sentimentality. Instead, her film aches with compassion.
Boyega is Brian Brown-Easley, a retired Marine on the verge of homelessness due to a clerical error made by the VA. He is about to do something very rash.
The set-up is pure high drama, a tension-fueled action flick waiting to happen. And it can wait, because Demaris Corbin and her cast take a profoundly dramatic situation, one exploited for its tension for as long as we’ve made films, and drain it of hyperbole, finding something not mundane but intimate.
Films like this are loud, but Breaking is quiet. Demaris Corbin builds relentless tension with very little volume, the silences only emphasizing the fear felt by a small group of characters inside an uncomfortably intimate situation.
Boyega disarms and devastates with clarity, tenderness, and touches of paranoia. You never know exactly what to make of Brown-Easley, but any tendency to underestimate him is met with rejection.
Nicole Beharie (Miss Juneteenth) meets that performance with fierce but terrified honesty. Her fiery performance demands that the film never resign itself to Brown-Easley’s fate, and reminds us clearly that the plight of the Black veteran looks different than that of a white one.
Michael Kenneth Williams, in one of his final performances, joins mid-film, playing against-type as a thoughtful hostage negotiator. He carries a sense of optimism with him that only deepens the tragedy the film tells.
Please prepare to be heartbroken, particularly when Brown-Easley’s daughter Kiah (London Covington – oh, that little face!) reminds her panicking father to breathe, imitating the proper way to do it as if it’s a ritual the two have. Covington is wonderful, heartbreakingly natural, and the scene offers a gorgeous piece of realistic tragedy, or day-to-day struggle and resilience.
Demaris Corbin uses visuals to move seamlessly from present tense to flashback, and one particular image of a blood trail across worn bank carpet is particularly effective. For a film trapped primarily in a single space, Breaking creates something tragically universal, but it never betrays its hard-won intimacy.
Idris Elba fights a lion. I don’t know what more you want from a movie.
Elba plays Dr. Nate Samuels, on a trip with his daughters to visit his late wife’s stomping grounds, the bush in South Africa. He and the girls (Leah Jeffries and Iyana Halley) had become somewhat estranged during their mother’s illness, and he hopes that staying with family friend Martin (Sharlto Copley) and touring the animal reserve he manages will help them all heal.
It’s more likely to kill them, as it turns out, because poachers have pissed off a really big lion and he’s gone all Jaws IV on the lot of them.
How is Mr. Elba? He’s very handsome. Dreamy, even. He’s also weirdly believable as a vulnerable widower, protective dad, capable doctor and badass who kicks lions in the face.
And he’s not the only one kicking lions, either. Halley gets some badassery in as well, as does Copley. Copley also takes a lot of abuse. Jeffries gets to be the smart one in a film unafraid to deliver teenage girls with agency.
This is not to say Beast is a great film. It borrows a great deal from a great many films: Jaws and Cujo most notably.
Director Baltasar Kormákur is an interesting filmmaker, able to produce smart, visceral thrillers like The Oath. Even his more flawed films —Contraband, 2 Guns, Everest, Adrift — make a valiant attempt at more than action for the sake of action. It helps when he writes. He doesn’t write this one.
Ryan Engle writes this one, and he’s not especially good, as a rule. He’s not terrible. His previous efforts — Non-Stop, The Commuter, Rampage, Breaking In — range from mediocre to poor. But Kormákur pulls a few tricks to elevate this material.
Firstly, he turns genre tropes on end by bringing a Black family to Africa and having their white guide be their wise mentor. Beyond that, there are not a lot of surprises, just a competent if uninspired adventure thriller in which Idris Elba fights a lion.
That was the excellent tag line for Jaume Collet-Serra’s fun 2009 surprise Orphan. Then 12-year-old Isabelle Fuhrman delivered an inspired performance buoyed by the nuanced work of two veteran talents (Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard), but it was the climactic shocker that guaranteed the film’s place in horror history.
The bigger surprise might be to make a prequel 13 years later with the same lead. Furhman, now in her twenties, reprises her role as the orphan you do not want to adopt.
In director William Brent Bell’s episode, we go back in time to meet up with our wee villain in an Estonian facility. It’s a fun, bloody start to Esther’s adventure and an early reminder (it has been 13 years) that if you wonder whether Esther’s evil, F around and find out.
That, of course, is one of the obstacles writer David Coggeshall needs to overcome. We already know Esther’s big secret and we already know what she’s capable of. What surprises are left?
Plenty!
Orphan: First Kill goes in unexpected places, many of them an absolute hoot. Bell’s film walks an impressive line between tension, horror and laughs. It works because of a tight script, but mostly because of rock-solid performances from Fuhrman and Julia Stiles.
Stiles is Esther’s new mommy, a wealthy helicopter parent with an artist husband and a teenage son. She’s magnificent.
Able support work surrounds the pair, and Coggeshall’s screenplay meshes the expected with the unexpected.
I had no idea Bell—whose previous work includes the unintentionally funny The Boy andBrahms: The Boy II—had this in him. Yes, Orphan: First Kill may have benefitted from low expectations: a heretofore weak director, a 25-year-old trying to convince the audience she’s 12, a franchise none of us thought needed a sequel. Still, there’s no denying it entertains.
The film is no masterpiece and Fuhrman’s age does take you out of the fantasy now and again. But it is sly fun.
Sixty years ago, Jack Clayton and Henry James mined supernatural terror with little more than the austere atmosphere built in one spooky location and the unnerving creepiness of children.
Sure, the youngsters in writer/director Eskil Vogt’s new Norwegian horror The Innocents look more like the icy blondes of Village of the Damned, but his film shares much more than just a title with Clayton’s masterpiece.
Vogt’s first triumph is his casting. Rakel Lenora Fløttum is Ida, a cherubic blonde 9-year-old idly wandering the tower block of her family’s new apartment. She doesn’t know anyone yet and doesn’t really want to play with her older sister Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), whose nonspeaking Autism keeps Ida from seeing her as truly human.
As Ida explores the area and the looming forest just beyond, Vogt’s observant camera builds atmosphere and dread. The tower block itself is a menacing presence forever in the background, the trees on all sides penning in these children on the loose.
Unnerving cinematography from Sturla Brandeth Grøvlen (Another Round) makes tiny children appear like playthings in the foreground of towering, watching buildings. Aerials of children on bicycles, their shadows seeming to be moving the bikes, unnerve and beguile.
Slowly, Vogt unveils the reality of the situation. We learn as the children learn, and we take on their curiosity and logic as we do so. Because there are several children in this complex who have some unexpected powers. Anna discovers hers through a little neighbor girl (Mina Yasmi Bremseth Asheim) who can read her thoughts.
Ida learns that her own new friend Ben (Sam Ashraf) may not have the right temperament for his gifts.
What unfolds is an observant and often terrifying origin story of sorts. The Innocents plays like a superhero story told with none of the drama, though an awful lot of horror. These children first thrill as their abilities blossom with camaraderie and commonality. Then comes the tricky test of good and evil.
On display with unblinking eye is the casual brutality of childhood. The Innocents is a film that sneaks up on you, rattles you, and sticks around for a while after the credits roll.
We wanted to call this Dressed to Kill, but that would just be confusing. No, this is not about dressing the part [or about horror’s terrible history of confusing sexual orientation with psychosis]. Nope. This is about actual killer clothing.
5. The Red Shoes (2005)
In 2005, Kim Yong-gyun updated the old, horrifying Hans Christian Anderson story of vanity. Do you know that one? Spoiled girl with pretty red shoes is cursed so the shoes never stop dancing, her only relief is to have her feet cut off? Excellent children’s fare!
Like a lot of Asian horror of the time, the film follows a newly single woman and her daughter as they move into a shabby new apartment before finding a cursed object – in this case, shoes that are actually pink.
Though Sun-jai (Kim Hye-soo) brought home the discarded pair she found at the subway for herself, it’s her daughter (Park Yeon-ah) who becomes obsessed with them. Too bad they keep killing people!
There’s the obligatory sleuthing into the mysterious curse, but the filmmaker keeps you guessing, keeps the blood flowing, and comes up with a solidly creepy little gem.
4. Deerskin (2019)
What makes a good midlife crisis? What gives it swagger? Physicality? Style? Maybe a little fringe?
Deerskin.
Welcome to another bit of lunacy from filmmaker Quentin Dupieux. As he did with 2010’s Rubber (a sentient tire on a cross-country rampage), Dupieux sets up one feature-length joke.
It’s funny, though.
Deerskin is also slyly autobiographical in a way Dupieux’s other films are not. An odd duck wants to follow his vision (in this case, the obsessive love of a deerskin jacket) and make a movie. Creative partnerships and collaboration, while possibly necessary, also soil the vision and make the filmmaker feel dumb.
No one understands him!
Or maybe they do and his ruse is up.
No matter. He still has killer style.
3. Slaxx (2020)
Absurdism meets consumerism in co-writer/director Elza Kephart’s bloody comedy, Slaxx.
Sehar Bhojani steals every scene as the cynical Shruti, but the jeans are the real stars here. Kephart finds endlessly entertaining ways to sic them on unsuspecting wearers.
Where Romero mainly pointed fingers at the hordes mindlessly drawn to stores like CCC, Kephart sees the villains as those perpetuating clean corporate hypocrisy. Still, it’s their customers and workers she murders—by the pantload.
2. Clown (2014)
Sympathetic, surprising, and often very uncomfortable, Jon (Spider-Man franchise) 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.
Kent (a pitiful Andy Powers) stumbles across a vintage clown outfit in an estate property he’s fitting for resale. Perfect timing – his son’s birthday party is in an hour. What a surprise this will be, unless the suit is cursed in some way and will slowly turn Kent into a child-eating demon.
It does! Hooray!!!
1. In Fabric (2018)
My last note after watching In Fabric: “Well, that was weird.”
Weird in a good way. The film follows a red Ambassadorial Function Dress and the havoc it wreaks on its wearers.
Strickland, apparently, is about as fond of consumerism as Romero or Cronenberg. He’s also as fond of the color red as Argento. Unlike the giallo films that clearly inform Strickland’s aesthetic, here commerce, not violence itself, is the seductive, sexualized element.
Nobody blends giallo’s surrealistic seduction with dry British wit (two elements that, to be honest, should not fit together at all) like Peter Strickland. Subversive and playful while boasting a meticulous obsession with the exploitation films of the Seventies, Strickland creates vintage-futuristic fantasies that live outside of time and evoke both nostalgia and wonder.
