The subject of aging has become a popular trope in the world of horror. Films like M. Night Shyamalan’s Oldand the Aussie favorite Relic used our own fears of natural mortality to tap into something more supernatural. Ti West’s X comments on how aging – and the supposed loss of beauty – can have deeper psychological implications. Director Anubys Lopez’s Aged may not reach the highest highs of the aforementioned films, but what it lacks in originality it more than makes up for with old school things that go bump in the night.
Veronica (Morgan Boss-Maltais) has recently taken a temporary job as a caregiver for the elderly Mrs. Bloom (Carla Kidd). Shortly after arriving at Mrs. Bloom’s remote home, Veronica begins to sense a presence in the house. As the strange events in the house escalate, Veronica also begins to suspect that Mrs. Bloom herself might be harboring a sinister secret.
Aged checks a lot of low-budget horror boxes right off the bat.
Single location? Check.
Small cast? Check.
Simplistic story that requires little in the way of production value and special effects? That would be a check.
These aren’t detriments by any means. The simplicity of Aged is actually the film’s greatest asset… well, except for Kidd’s old-age makeup. That gag is right out of a Spirit Halloween and pretty wince-inducing.
Lopez aims high with the film’s visuals. The low-budget still manages to shine through here and there, but the emphasis on production design and shooting every nook and cranny of the desolate farm house helps create a real sense of place. Lopez has a good eye – so good, in fact, that it’s a shame much of Aged was filmed in the brightness of day.
Boss-Maltais and Kidd spend nearly all of their scenes together. Kidd chews up an enormous amount of scenery as the venomous Mrs. Bloom. Boss-Maltais’s Veronica is your standard bland non-personality-having lead. Veronica’s role is to walk the audience through the plot of the movie and not to have any real arc of her own.
Aged isn’t the first movie you should seek out this weekend – heck it might not even be the 10th – but it is an entertaining enough haunted house flick that’ll keep your attention for 90 minutes.
You see that a new horror flick is PG-13, and you might begin making some assumptions.
There will be jump scares, some dream sequence fake-outs, maybe a conveniently placed box ‘O clues. It’s hard to blame you for these expectations, and The Boogeyman does little to upend them.
Therapist Dr. William Harper (Chris Messina) recently lost his wife in a car accident. His teenage daughter Sadie (Yellowjackets‘ Sophie Thatcher) is withdrawing, while his younger one, Sawyer (supercute Vivien Lyra Blair from Bird Box and the Obi-Wan Kenobi series), has developed a strong fear of the dark.
And just when the family is trying to get back into some sort of routine, the troubled Lester Billings (David Dastmalchian) crashes the Dr.’s office with a wild claim.
Lester didn’t kill his three kids like the cops are claiming. A monster did it. A monster that lives in the darkness. A monster that follows you to places like home offices.
Writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods help adapt a Stephen King short story with little of the tension or thrills that drove their script for A Quiet Place. Director Rob Savage (Host) has some visual fun with Sawyer’s round nite lite rolling through dark spaces, but it isn’t long before the familiar beats, questionable internal logic and middling creature effects bog the film’s 98 minutes down in tedium.
The cast (including Marin Ireland as a battle-weary Mrs. Billings) is strong and willing, but the darkened playground of The Boogeyman is only for the scaredy-est of cats. And for horror fans wanting another PG-13 gem like The Ring, or a grief metaphor as deeply felt as The Babadook, the long wait just gets longer.
Big thanks to filmmaker Jeremiah Kipp, whose exceptional horror Slapface inspired our topic. We look into the best brothers (or sometimes worst brothers!) in horror. Be sure to listen in because Jeremiah has some thoughts and recs you won’t want to miss.
5) The Lost Boys (1987)
Joel Schumacher spins a yarn of Santa Carla, a town with a perpetual coastal carnival and the nation’s highest murder rate. A roving band of cycle-riding vampires haunts the carnival and accounts for the carnage, until Diane Weist moves her family to town. While hottie Michael (Jason Patric) is being seduced into the demon brethren, younger brother Sam (Corey Haim) teams up with local goofballs the Frog brothers (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander) to stake all bloodsuckers.
There are two obvious sets of brothers, one that’s falling apart and one that acts exclusively as a team, the band of vampires also represents a brother hood. This becomes clearest when Max (Edward Herrmann) makes it clear that his intention is to have Weist’s character play mother to all the boys.
4) Basket Case (1982)
This film is fed by a particularly twin-linked anxiety. Can anyone really be the love of one twin’s life, and if so, where does that leave the other twin? More than that, though, the idea of separating conjoined twins is just irresistible to dark fantasy. Rock bottom production values and ridiculous FX combine with the absurdist concept and poor acting to result in an entertaining splatter comedy a bit like Peter Jackson’s early work.
When super-wholesome teenage Duane moves into a cheap and dangerous New York flophouse, it’s easy to become anxious for him. But that’s not laundry in his basket, Belial is in the basket -Duane’s deformed, angry, bloodthirsty, jealous twin brother – but not just a twin, a formerly conjoined twin. What he really is, of course, is Duane’s id – his Hyde, his Hulk, his Danny DeVito. And together the brothers tear a bloody, vengeful rip in the fabric of family life.
3) Goodnight Mommy (2014)
There is something eerily beautiful about Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s rural Austrian horror Goodnight Mommy (Ich seh, Ich seh).
During one languid summer, twin brothers Lukas and Elias await their mother’s return from the hospital. But when their mom comes home, bandaged from the cosmetic surgery she underwent, the brothers fear more has changed than just her face.
Inside this elegantly filmed environment, where sun dappled fields lead to leafy forests, the filmmakers mine a kind of primal childhood fear. There’s a subtle lack of compassion that works the nerves beautifully, because it’s hard to feel too badly for the boys or for their mother. You don’t wish harm on any of them, but at the same time, their flaws make all three a bit terrifying.
Performances by young brothers Lukas and Elias Schwarz compel interest, while Susanne Wuest’s cagey turn as the boys’ mother propels the mystery. It’s a hypnotic, bucolic adventure as visually arresting as it is utterly creepy.
2) Frailty (2001)
“He can make me dig this stupid hole, but he can’t make me pray.”
Aah, adolescence. We all bristle against our dads’ sense of morality and discipline, right? Well, some have a tougher time of it than others. Paxton stars as a widowed, bucolic country dad awakened one night by an angel – or a bright light shining off the angel on top of a trophy on his ramshackle bedroom bookcase. Whichever – he understands now that he and his sons have been called by God to kill demons.
Paxton, who directs, leans on excellent performances from young Jeremy Sumpter as the obedient younger son and Matt O’Leary as our point of view character, the brother whose adolescent rebellion will pit him against the father he loves and the brother he’d like to protect.
1) Dead Ringers (1988)
The film is about separation anxiety, with the effortlessly melancholy Jeremy Irons playing a set of gynecologist twins on a downward spiral. Cronenberg doesn’t consider this a horror film at all. Truth is, because the twin brothers facing emotional and mental collapse are gynecologists, Cronenberg is wrong.
Irons is brilliant as Elliot and Beverly Mantle, bringing such flair and, eventually, childlike charm to the performance you feel almost grateful. Like some of the greats, he manages to create two very distinct yet appropriately linked personalities, and Cronenberg’s interest is the deeply painful power shift as they try and fail to find independence from the other. The film’s pace is slow and its horror subtle, but the uncomfortable moments are peculiarly, artfully Cronenberg.
Picture this: a loved one has passed away and you inherit a piece of property from them that they’ve never mentioned. You’ve been handed a house along the coast that comes with its own private beach. We’re talking beautiful, untouched land. An absolute dream come true, with no catch in sight.
Well, except for that weird water tank that’s hidden underground on the property. A tank that may or may not contain an ancient beast that loves to run amok when unleashed. That right, you didn’t just inherit your dream home. You inherited a horror movie as well. Congratulations!
Scott Walker’s New Zealand creature feature The Tank knows its tropes and revels in them constantly. If you’re rolling up to this coastal oasis of terror looking for heaps of originality, you’re going to swim away disappointed. However, if you’re the type that loves a good meat & potatoes monster movie, then you will find quite a bit to enjoy here.
There are two true stars of this bestial B-movie endeavor, with the first being the practical monster effects work on display from WETA Workshop. Their efforts here are just as good as you’d expect coming from the imaginative minds that brought forth the cinematic beasties on display in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, 30 Days of Night, District 9, and the cult classic Black Sheep. Richard Taylor and his team are in fine form, serving up a cool monster and delivering delicious creature carnage.
The other star is actress Lucianne Buchanan. While the other performances in the film are fine, Buchanan stands tall above the rest, gifting us with a new horror heroine to root for in family matriarch, Jules. Between her turn in this and her leading role on the recent hit Netflix action series The Night Agent, Buchanan is one to keep your eye on.
The Tank does have its issues. The pacing in the first two acts can be sluggish at times, the color palette can get a bit monotonous, and the family drama subplots don’t really amount to much. Of course, that’s not what we’re here for. The Tank promises you some lean, mean, and low budget monster escapism. For the most part, it delivers on that promise, so if this type of movie is up your alley, give it a look.
Wes Anderson with a Black Mass fetish and a feminist point of view, Biller wrote/directed/produced/edited/set-designed/costume-designed/music-supervised the seductive sorcery headtrip The Love Witch.
Elaine (Samantha Robinson – demented perfection) needs a change of scenery. Driving her red convertible up the seacoast highway toward a new life in northern California, her troubles – and her mysteriously dead ex-husband – are behind her. Surely, with her smart eyeshades and magic potions, she’ll find true love.
Shot in dreamy 35mm and produced in lurid Technicolor, the film achieves a retro aesthetic unparalleled in modern cinema. And yet, a mid-film cell phone and third act DNA evidence pulls you from the hip Sixties spell of burlesque shows and tea rooms – but don’t mistake this for anachronism. Instead, it fits perfectly into a narrative that sees a deranged lunatic embrace archaic gender roles with the rage of one already ruined by them.
Enough cannot be said for Biller’s imagination for detail – from the contents of a “witch bottle” to the retro look of every actor, the era-evoking flatness in line delivery to the excruciating art adorning Elaine’s walls.
The orgy of colors, textures and dessert treats signifies the sensual madness eating away at poor, narcissistic Elaine.
Biller’s casting sense is as keen. Every actor not only fully embraces the weirdness of Biller’s spell, but each looks like they just walked out of a Sears Roebuck catalog circa 1968.
Expect a loose confection of a plot, as Elaine molds herself into the ideal sex toy, winning and then tiring of her trophies. This allows Biller to simultaneously reaffirm and reverse gender roles with appropriately wicked humor.
Biller pulls thematically from her 2007 film Viva, but her epic knowledge of the sexual revolution era Black Magic Woman flicks (Oh, there are plenty: Mephisto’s Waltz, Season of the Witch, The Velvet Vampire) and her clear growth in her craft help The Love Witch exceed all expectations.
Deadites hit the big city in Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise, the latest instalment in the old Sam Raimi demon possession franchise. As was true with its predecessors, blood will rain, viscera will spew, chainsaws will bite, and the dead will most definitely rise. Just don’t expect any jokes this time around.
We open, as usual, on a cabin. Despite the top-notch title sequence, though, this episode will not be a cabin-in-the-woods horror. Cronin, who’s credited with the script as well, takes the Necronomicon and all its secrets into an urban high rise to see what hell he can raise.
Beth (Lily Sullivan) has some troubling news and wants to lay low with her sister’s family for a bit. But her sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) is about to have some real troubles of her own because an earthquake opened a hole from the parking garage to a vault beneath the building. That vault held a book and some vinyl.
Lessons we should all have learned by now:
Don’t play unknown albums backwards.
Don’t read from flesh bound books.
Stay out of elevators. I know this one is pretty inconvenient, but honestly, it’s for the best.
Cronin (The Hole in the Ground) tosses in some loving homages to the Raimi films. Who doesn’t love a demon POV shot?! In fact, he uses disorienting angels and shots throughout the film to beautifully bewildering effect. A fisheye-of-death through a peephole is just one of the film’s many horrifying highlights.
Sutherland takes the most abuse as devoted mother turned chief Deadite, a role her lanky, angular frame is ideally suited to. She’s terrifying, but the most disturbing idea at play in this sequel is that children are fair game.
Cronin’s vision offers none of the slapstick, Three Stooges-esque humor of Raimi’s original trilogy. In fact, it leans far closer to the tone of Fede Alvarez’s underappreciated 2013 genre treasure, Evil Dead. And while this installment’s nods to the iconography of the original set is wonderful, Evil Dead Rise also recalls [Rec] and Joko Anwar’s Satan’s Slaves: Communion and even a little bit of Kubrick’s The Shining, Carpenter’s The Thing (or maybe Yuzna’s Society) – all exceptional horrors and worthy inspiration.
It’s also fun that Evil Dead Rise boasts an altogether new storyline, since so many films in the franchise are reworkings of earlier episodes. That storyline is somewhat slight, but what the film lacks in depth it makes up for with inspired visuals, solid casting, and so much blood.
A stylish indie ride through the seedier side of filmmaking, James Smith’s Casting Kill delivers laughs and surprises on a shoestring.
The anxiety at the core of Casting Kill exploits an actor’s vulnerability. There are countless openings for a predator to take advantage, including desperation for a role and personal insecurities. It’s staggering what an actor might put up with – might make themselves see as “eccentricity” – in order to get a gig.
In this case, they have to put up with Arthur Capstone, whose eccentricities run deep. Smug, self-important and biting, Capstone somehow still wants you to relax as you audition for him. Specifically, he’d like you to close your eyes.
Rob Laird is Capstone, an identity thief passing himself off as a Hollywood casting director. But stealing hapless actors’ identities is hardly this guy’s biggest kink.
Hopeful after hopeful arrives, each starry-eyed for the big break. The film has the most fun in this early montage of mostly terrible auditions. It’s a laugh that makes the film’s final moments land with a smirk and a chuckle.
Gareth Tidball is a charmer in a small, doomed role – though she keeps delivering even when her lines have run out. Andrew Elias injects a bit of macabre fun into an almost unending supply of creepy characters.
Caroline Spence’s script has a grisly blast with this conceit, looking at the casting process from every angle to give the film a “behind the curtain” vibe that suits it.
Smith’s direction intentionally recalls Hitchcock, a theme amplified by Shaun Finnegan’s score. Framing, camera angles, and in particular Smith’s use of color give the film an unsettling, off-kilter vibe that helps to offset Casting Kill’s lack of movement and action. Smith makes the most of the film’s tight quarters with shots that are equally lovely and bizarre.
From Starry Eyes to Neon Demon to Pearl and more, indie horror never seems to run out of horror stories about trying to make it big. That’s scary and a little sad in itself, but the result is, once again, a thoroughly entertaining film.
It wasn’t always bears, kids. In other movies, people use drugs, although the result – limbs akimbo and carnage aplenty – usually still follows. Here are our favorite druggie horror flicks.
5. Cabin in the Woods (2011) (weed)
There are countless reasons to love Drew Goddard’s 2011 horror mash note Cabin in the Woods. Not the least of which is Fran Kranz as Marty, pothead.
Easily the favorite character (inside the cabin, anyway), Marty not only provides the levity necessary for this particular trope to work, his weedy logic is all that actually makes sense in this world.
The entire film is a trip, but it’s Marty’s trip that’s most worth taking.
4. Cocaine Bear (2023) (cocaine, obviously)
The year is 1985, from what I can piece together from an inspired soundtrack of pop hits spilling out of speakers, and one Jefferson Starship fan is about to make a jump from his plane with an awful lot of coke. Things don’t go well, and next thing you know, drug kingpin Syd (Ray Liotta in his final screen performance) is sending his reluctant son (Alden Ehrenreich) and best guy (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) to Blood Mountain to retrieve $14 million in missing blow.
As you may have guessed from the title, a bear found it first.
Inspired, manic carnage follows. Entrails spill, children fill their mouths with cocaine, skate punks lose their heads (well, parts of their heads), EMTs really earn their pay, and we all have an incredible, brightly colored, viscera covered good time!
3. Climax (2018) (LSD)
Oh, Gaspar Noe, you scamp! The provocateur returned to screens in 2018 with a bad trip full of percussive dancing and concussive beats that will leave you as bewildered, wrung out, unsettled and horrified as the characters.
Sofia Boutella leads an ensemble of dancers locked into a French warehouse post-production to just party. But there’s more in that sangria than fruit and soon enough, the party is an inescapable hellscape.
Noe has a way with pummeling an audience, overstimulating and punishing us into submission. Turns out, he can also choreograph a decent dance number!
2. Hagazussa (2017) (mushrooms)
Making a remarkably assured feature debut as director, Lukas Feigelfeld mesmerizes with his German Gothic poetry, Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse. Settled somewhere in the 15th Century Alps, the film shadows lonely, ostracized women struggling against a period where plague, paranoia and superstition reigned.
Albrun’s is a tragic story and Feigelfeld crafts it with a believable loneliness that bends toward madness. He’s captured this moment in time, this draining and ugly paranoia that caused women such misery, with imagery that is perplexingly beautiful.
He’s cast a spell and you should submit.
1. Mandy (2018) (LSD)
A hallucinogenic fever dream of social, political and pop-culture subtexts layered with good old, blood-soaked revenge, Mandy throws enough visionary strangeness on the screen to dwarf even Nicolas Cage in full freakout mode.
Not just Nic, either. Andrea Riseborough, cannibal bikers on LSD, The Chemist, and a religious sex cult led by a terrible folk singer. Plus a sword, an axe, a lot of blood, and did I mention the LSD?
Like director Panos Cosmatos’s 2010 debut Beyond the Black Rainbow, Mandy is both formally daring and wildly borrowed. While Black Rainbow, also set in 1983, shines with the antiseptic aesthetic of Cronenberg or Kubrick, Mandy feels more like something snatched from a Dio album cover.
It is as insane as any beautifully conceived, expertly executed film has ever been and you must give yourself to it.
In partnership with the Greater Columbus Film Commission, Gateway FIlm Center has announced that acclaimed new filmmaker, Kyle Edward Ball, will visit the Center on Saturday, March 18, to premiere a 35mm version of his film, Skinamarink (2023).
“We are excited to welcome Kyle to Columbus, to the Film Center, and to share the 35mm print of his incredible independent film, Skinamarink” said Gateway Film Foundation CEO, Christopher Hamel.
In Skinamarink (2023), two children wake up in the middle of the night to find their father is missing, and all the windows and doors in their home have vanished. To cope with the strange situation, the two bring pillows and blankets to the living room and settle into a quiet slumber party situation. They play well worn videotapes of cartoons to fill the silence of the house and distract from the frightening and inexplicable situation. All the while in the hopes that eventually some grown-ups will come to rescue them. However, after a while it becomes clear that something is watching over them.
The film stars Lucas Paul, Dali Rose Tetreault, Ross Paul and Jaime Hill and is executive produced by Edmon Rotea, Ava Karvonen, Bonnie Lewis, Alan Lewis, Josh Doke, and Jonathan Barkan.
Ball, a first-time filmmaker, made Skinamarink (2023), which premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal, for about $15,000. Since the film’s debut, it has become an instant cult classic, often compared to micro-budget horror hits such as The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007). However, Skinamarink is not found-footage or improvised, but is fully scripted and features images, sounds, and camera angles which were created to add depth and discomfort.
Shudder and IFC FIlms released Skinamarink (2023) in the United States on Friday, January 13, 2023. Gateway Film Center was selected as one of the first venues to feature the film and the Center has continuously screened Skinamarink (2023) since the release in January. To date, Skinamarink (2023) has grossed over two million dollars in the United States, making it one of the most successful and profitable independent films of all-time.
“Members of our community continue to hear about this film and want to experience it the way it was intended, with an audience and on a big screen. The Film Center is proud that we continue to present the film and I know Kyle’s visit, and this 35mm screening, will be a great event for Columbus”, said Hamel.
Tickets for these screenings are on sale now at gatewayfilmcenter.org. The 35mm presentation of Skinamarink (2023) on Saturday, March 18 will screen at 7:00pm exclusively for myGFC Members alongside a workshop co-presented with Film Columbus. The 9:30pm screening will be introduced by the filmmaker and is now on sale. Normal ticket prices apply. MaddWolf’s Hope Madden and George Wolf will moderate the q&a session following the 7:00pm performance.
Gateway Film Center is wholly owned by the Gateway Film Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, Campus Partners, The Columbus Foundation, and thousands of individual donors. To learn more, visit the website at gatewayfilmcenter.org.
It’s our favorite time of year! This is when we take the Way Back Machine (or this year, the Not-So-Way-Back Machine) to unearth 2023 Oscar nominees’ bad horror movie past.
Some nominees have made exceptional horror films. We’re looking at you, Brendan Gleeson (28 Days Later), Bill Nighy (Shaun of the Dead), Austin Butler (The Dead Don’t Die), Andrea Riseborough (Possessor, Mandy), and let’s not forget the queen, Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween, duh).
Of course, JLC has also made enough bad horror for her own entire Skeletons podcast. But today, we’re focused on other people. Why? Because these guys made some bad, bad choices.
5) Knock Knock (2015), Ana de Armas
In 2015, Eli Roth remade Peter S. Traynor’s 1977 cult horror Death Game for the uber generation. Ana de Armas and Roth’s then-wife Lorenza Izzo play two wayward strangers, drenched and looking for a party but their uber driver dropped them off at the wrong place. Won’t Keanu Reeves let them in for just a minute to use his laptop and figure things out? Their phones got all wet!
And he does. Where Trynor’s film was a belated entry into the “what’s with these damn hippie kids” horror, Roth only barely taps into the paranoia and tension around generational differences in the social media era. Instead, he digs into midlife crisis and male weakness as Keanu’s devoted dad Evan caves to the pair’s mocking seduction.
You don’t believe it for a minute. De Armas is fine (in her first English language film), but Roth doesn’t find anything to say and the slight premise feels stretched well beyond its breaking point.
4) The Grudge (2020), Andrea Riseborough
Oh, Andrea Riseborough! Oh, Nicolas Pesce!
One of the most reliable character actors of her generation teams up with Eyes of My Mother filmmaker to revisit the haunted world of Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On: The Grudge. The result is spectacularly unspectacular.
Riseborough is a detective in what amounts to an anthology film, each short a quick look at a haunting. Pesce, who co-wrote the screenplay, revisits a lot of Shimizu’s threads but breathes no new life into anything. Transitions from one short to the next are choppy, the imagery is never compelling, shocking or fun, and worst of all, that creepy sound design that made all the previous installments memorable is absent.
None of the talented cast members – Riseborough, Demian Bishir, Lin Shaye, Betty Gilpin, John Cho or Jacki Weaver (who seems to be acting in an entirely different film) – elevates the listless material.
3) The Intruders (2015), Austin Butler
It’s an iCarly reunion! Miranda Cosgrove and her sometime co-star Austin Butler co-star in this “your new house is probably haunted or something” thriller.
Cosgrove is Rose, and she has stopped taking her meds, so her dad (Donal Logue) doesn’t believe her wild stories about the house being haunted. And maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s that creepy yet dreamy handyman (Butler).
What it is not is good. Plot holes could swallow you whole, contrivance and convenience are the primary narrative devices, but Butler’s as cute as can be and his little smirk fits both the character and the film itself.
2) I, Frankenstein (2014), Bill Nighy
Good lord, who greenlit this mess? Aaron Eckhart is Frankenstein’s monster, unintentionally drawn into the ongoing war between demons and gargoyles because no one cares. On planet earth. Nothing could be less interesting.
Oh, wait. The CGI is less interesting. Everything looks like the pre-play opening to a 1990s video game. And the gargoyle queen gives the monster a name: Adam. Why? Because co-writer/director Stuart Beattie thinks so little of viewers that he assumes no one will realize Adam is his name. It’s in the book. He thinks we are illiterate morons.
He’s hoping so, anyway, because even the great Bill Nighy cannot do anything to help this turd.
1) Critters 4 (1992), Angela Bassett
So, what’s worse than I, Frankenstein? Worse, sure, but also far more charming, Critters 4 sends those Gremlin/Ghoulie ripoff fur balls to space with Angela Bassett, Brad Dourif and a terrible script.
Cheaply made and far too slight on carnage, the film still benefits from Bassett’s undeniable badassedness. Her lines are garbage, and yet you believe her. (Same with Dourif.) And it’s the kind of stupid that can, if you’re in the right frame of mind, almost be fun. What Bassett is doing in it is too puzzling to consider, but she got her Ripley moment and that’s all that counts.
