Colin Minihan’s a fun filmmaker. Not everything hits, but nothing ever entirely misses. His latest, the horror comedy with heart Coyotes, is one of his more pleasant, less memorable efforts.
Justin Long is a comic book writing dad living in the Hollywood Hills. His wife (real life wife Kate Bosworth), daughter (Mila Harris), and schnauzer Charlie life comfortably enough but they think they hear rats in their walls.
Rats won’t be their biggest problem once a pack of bloodthirsty coyotes stands between Long’s family and escape from the raging wildfire the neighbor inadvertently set after coyotes gnawed through his carcass.
Trip (Norbert Leo Butz), the neighbor, and his girlfriend-for-hire (Brittany Allen, frequent Minihan collaborator) balance the neighbor family’s earnestness with bawdy, slapstick humor. Allen’s comic sensibility is especially strong, her presence creating a consistent sense of random humor that elevates everything.
Allen’s wrongheadedness bounces beautifully off Long’s likeable dufus, leaving Bosworth the somewhat thankless straight man role. But she carries it with the right balance of dignity and impatience to give the character flavor.
The chemistry among the actors goes a long way to strengthen a slight script. The character motivations we’re told about don’t match the footage we see, and coyotes come and go with little rational explanation.
As for horror, nearly every death, even nearly every attack, is off screen. Reaction shots fill in for carnage, each intended more for a laugh than a scare. But there just aren’t that many outright laughs.
Still, it’s hard not to root for Justin Long to survive a horror movie. Here, he’s at his most likeable and goofy, plus he’s rightfully preoccupied with keeping Charlie from coyote clutches. Because screw the neighbors, protect that dog!
Coyotes is not one of Minihan’s strongest, and it certainly doesn’t measure up to Long’s better genre titles. The writing can’t measure up in logic, fun, humor or horror to what the cast deserves. But it’s a pleasant enough waste of time for horror fans.
“Hey, aren’t you a little old for trick or treating?”
If you’re looking for bite sized horror to match your fun size Butterfinger, the long running found footage franchise delivers a grab bag of options with V/H/S/Halloween. The anthology of shorts focuses on tales of Halloween. Expect costumes, pranks, chocolate, and a surprisingly high amount of child carnage.
Director Bryan M. Ferguson’s wraparound tale Diet Phantasma may mean more to me than it will to you. It would be hard for me to articulate how much I love horror movies or diet pop. In both cases, it’s an alarming amount of love. So, a tale of haunted diet soda and, beginning the theme, child slaughter?
Yes.
David Haydn is a particular riot as the exec who really needs to get this beverage on the shelf by Halloween.
Paco Plaza’s Ut Sup Sic Infra (As Above, So Below) follows a traumatized young man and a host of cops to a crime scene. This is an efficient little gem with a mystery to solve. Performances are solid all around, and the climax packs a frightening surprise.
Anna Zlokovic’s Coochic Coochic Coo and Alex Ross Perry’s Kidprint are the weaker episodes in the group. Zlokovic’s film follows two high school seniors who make consistently ridiculous choices leading to a nonsensical finale. Kidprint is a nasty short without the clever writing needed to elevate it.
Casper Kelly’s Fun Size gets off to a rough start—full grown adults who decide to be zany and trick or treat. But as soon as that “take one” bowl makes its presence known, things get weird. The balance between brightly colored confection and human dismemberment is impressive. This one’s wrong-headed in the best way.
Likewise, Micheline Pitt-Norman & R.H. Norman’s Home Haunt is a lot of fun. There’s a wholesome charm to this short that could draw your attention to the, again, sheer number of children being murdered. But the concept is sort of darling, and the performances are equally dear. The Normans strike a comedic tone that’s hard to manage, and the result is equal parts nostalgia, cringe, and terror.
You can’t get a Twix every time you dig into that bulk candy assortment bag. But V/H/S/Halloween’s ratio of choice treats to forgettable-but-edible is strong enough to leave you with a little sugar high.
This f’ing guy! He spends four or five years directing obscure music videos, hits us with a masterpiece of modern cinema, then back to the tunes. The Phantom Thread, The Master, Boogie Nights, Punch Drunk Love, Licorice Pizza, Hard Eight, Inherent Vice, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood—you get whiplash from genre and stylistic hopscotch. But in each is a gorgeous pathos, a meticulous cinematic experience, and ensemble piece teeming with dozens of the most stunning performances you’ve ever seen.
So, you know what to expect when you sit down to One Battle After Another.
Anderson based the film on Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, which contrasted the revolutionary spirit of America of the 1960s with the era of Ronald Reagan’s reelection. Anderson finds parallels in the generational necessity for revolution with Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio).
Years ago, Bob and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor, owning the screen no matter who she shares it with) were revolutionaries disrupting W.’s ugly border policies, among other things. But everything went to hell, much thanks to Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (great name!). And about 16 years later, Lockjaw comes looking for Bob and the baby he disappeared with off-grid all those years ago (Chase Infiniti).
Sean Penn is Lockjaw, and he hasn’t been anywhere near this compelling or transformed since Milk (although he was a ton of fun in Licorice Pizza).
Though the massive cast is characteristically littered with incredible talents crackling with the electricity of Anderson’s script, Benicio del Toro stands out. He brings a laidback humor to the film that draws out DiCaprio’s silliness. While much of One Battle After Another is a nail-biting political thriller turned action flick, thanks to these two, it’s also one of Anderson’s funniest movies.
It may also be his most relevant. Certainly, the most of-the-moment. A master of the period piece, with this film Anderson reaches back to clarify present. By contrasting Bob’s paranoid, bumbling earnestness with the farcical evil of the Christmastime Adventurer’s Club, he satirizes exactly where we are today and why it looks so much like where we’ve been during every revolution.
But it is the filmmaker’s magical ability to populate each moment of his 2-hour-41-minute run time with authentic, understated, human detail that grounds the film in our lived-in reality and positions it as another masterpiece.
Emma Thompson and Judy Greer go head-to-head in a kidnaping thriller set in a forsaken Northern Minnesota snowstorm? Dude, I am so in!
With Dead of Winter, Brian Kirk relies on nuanced character work, gorgeously isolating cinematography, and the desperation of human nature to keep you guessing. Thompson, who executive produces, is Barb. Barb with that Minnesota “r”. She’s hearty for a mature gal. And despite the weather forecast, she puts on the ol’ snowsuit, warms up the even older pick up, and heads to faraway Lake Hilda to do some ice fishing. And maybe something else.
But she gets a little turned around and hears chopping in the distance, so she goes to ask directions. Nobody else for miles around, what else is she to do? Barb finds a bearded man in camo (Marc Menchaca, excellent), who—very startled by the sight of her—directs her to the lake. But blood on the snow has Barb a little troubled, and soon enough, she sniffs out a kidnapping. Is she hearty enough to save that poor girl in the wood chopper’s basement?
In some ways, Dead of Winter—written by first time screenwriters Nicholas Jacobson-Larson and Dalton Leeb—feels like little more than a welcome update to a well-worn plot. A handful of flashbacks to Barb’s youth, which flesh out the film’s B-story and deepen Barb’s character, are just this side of Hallmark Channel. But Thompson, from her first determined sigh, is so utterly convincing that you’re hooked.
And that’s all before the glorious Greer makes her entrance. It’s hard to justify saying that the most versatile and employable character actor of a generation is playing against type, since Greer has played every imaginable type of character. But the blind desperation behind her unnamed (she and Barb never really get on chummy terms) character’s cruelty is so precisely wielded by this actor that you would believe this film no matter how farfetched it became.
There’s a simplicity to the storytelling that matches Kirk’s determined avoidance of cynicism. Like Barb, this movie marches on, not necessarily seeing the worst in this world even when it wouldn’t be too hard. Hard with that Minnesota “r”. But he never loses track of his chosen genre. Dead of Winter sidesteps cliché, delivers thrills, and finds new ways to showcase two tremendous talents.
The goat is an apt image to anchor a sports film. The Greatest Of All Time. Every athlete’s dream. If you’ve ever watched horror, goats are also excellent avatars for evil. In the case of Him, co-writer/director Justin Tipping’s feature from Jordan Peele’s Monkey Paw Productions, it’s a bit of both.
Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans) lives deliciously. Is Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers) ready for that? Cade is the up-and-comer, the college QB who may be the one man to dethrone legendary Saviors quarterback, White. The 8-time champion came back even after the bone-protruding leg injury Cam’s late father made him watch again and again as a child.
Why would a father make a child watch something like that? To learn what it means to be a man, naturally.
Him is dense with themes and imagery, beginning with the very real frights of traumatic brain injury and its effect on football players. But the larger horror is rooted in performative masculinity, of proving your physical superiority by overpowering an opponent, drawing first blood, drawing last blood, and calling it power when it’s simply entertainment for puny white men with money.
Tipping equates the mechanics of sizing up an athlete with preparation for an auction block in one of the film’s most quietly unnerving sequences. Later references to gladiators obediently entering the pit at the behest of their trainers serve as additional, hardly subtle, illustrations of the power dynamic afoot.
Withers’s overwhelmed acolyte feels more dopey than wide-eyed, but Wayans is slippery, diabolical fun as the primary antagonist. Naomie Grossman steals scenes as White’s biggest fan, and Tim Heidecker’s disingenuous smarm fits perfectly as Cade’s agent.
There’s an intriguing half to this film. It’s the half making points about the way those with a financial stake in the game proselytize brutal sacrifice in search of greatness. The delicious living half, though, feels like a cheat.
The supernatural elements in Him give way to a foggy mythology full of fever dream smash cuts and jump scares. At times—as on a shooting range—details are left delightfully, grotesquely vague. Elsewhere the ambiguity feels like narrative weakness.
Worse still, the supernatural side of the film, to a degree, lets capitalism and white supremacy off the hook, no matter how satisfying the final bloodletting may feel. The set design is evocative and cinematography impresses, but the film can’t quite live up to expectations.
Just about one year ago, images surfaced of Billy Zane on set as Marlon Brando for the film Waltzing with Brando. Zane’s an underappreciated talent relegated for decades to mostly B-movie hell. Brando is, naturally, a fascinating topic for a biopic. And Zane looked remarkably like him. Hello, cautious optimism.
Jon Heder (Napoleon Dynamite) plays Bernard Judge, the LA architect who heads to Tahiti to build Zane’s Brando an ecologically pristine hideaway on an uninhabitable island. Director Bill Fishman adapts Judge’s memoir of the years-long relationship—the hijinks, the struggles, the personal journey from square to somewhat rounded but thoroughly tanned.
It’s awful.
Because the arc we follow is Judge’s, Brando—easily and obviously the most interesting presence—is a supporting character. A magical figure, unknowable and wise and often nude, Buddha like, he exists only to enlighten our hero. Fully 35% of the film consists of Brando saying something vague and odd, Judge staring wide-eyed and confused at him, or Judge saying something stupid, Brando laughing amiably at him. The two then eye each other as if some wisdom must be passing, either between the two of them or between them and us. And scene.
It’s awful. I know I’ve said that but it more than bears repeating.
Heder often breaks the 4th wall, giving the viewer a little aside or comment. Judge is asking us to join him on his journey because we could relate. It seems like a sound narrative choice given the undeniable fact that we would all have more in common with this earnest, uptight nobody than we would with Marlon Brando. But the writing is so profoundly cloying, the performances so community-theater superficial, and the scenes so needlessly drawn out and sanitized that the result is unbearable.
To make an audience want to get to know an architect when Marlon Brando is right there is a potentially insurmountable task for a director, and Fishman is by no means up to the task. He surrounds the two men with countless one-dimensional caricatures of beautiful islanders, tricky islanders, benevolent islanders, and the inescapable long-suffering but supportive wife (Alaina Huffman) and precocious daughter (played by Zane’s daughter, Ava).
For his part, Zane delivers an impish and entertaining turn, though he’s never once asked to act, to find anything inside the provocative figure. We learn nothing about Marlon Brando, and honestly, very little about Bernard Judge. Tahiti looks nice, though.
High school can be a tough time. What the youth of today need are role models. Soul eaters. Werewolves. Witches. Girls who know their way around a power drill. There’s so much the teens in these films can teach us!
5. Slumber Party Massacre (1982)
There is a wild juxtaposition at work beneath what could be mistaken as a trope-riddled slasher. Director/co-writer Amy Holden Jones, writing with Rita Mae Brown, deliver over-the-top cliche (teens in a sleepover undressing in full view of a window, one wearing a negligee, etc.), laughably phallic imagery (that power drill!), and the very traditional hack ’em up stuff.
But the behavior of these high school girls at the sleepover, and the one across the street pining to be part of the group, is so wildly masculine it’s hilarious. One hides a Play Girl magazine (the one with Stallone on the cover!) under her pillow, while those undressing together discuss the play of then-Cleveland Browns quarterback Brian Sipe.
The combination of elements subvert expectations even as they wallow in cliche. It’s such a great B-movie that even Tarantino lifted one scene wholesale for his masterpiece, Pulp Fiction.
4. The Craft (1996)
Three Catholic high school outcasts find solace in each other, a coven they create for safety, escape, harmony, and camaraderie. Fairuza Balk is perfection as Nancy, the loose cannon leader of the group. And even though dreamboat asshole Chris (Skeet Ulrich) prefers new girl Sarah (Robin Tunney), Nancy and the coven (Neve Campbell and Rachel True) embrace her.
And that’s what they needed to find real power. With their fourth they learn that power sometimes only amplifies problems. But it’s great while it lasts, and Nancy turns into one of the best badasses in 90s horror.
3. Jennifer’s Body (2009)
If Ginger Snaps owes a lot to Carrie (and it does), then Jennifer’s Body finds itself even more indebted to Ginger Snaps.
The central premise: Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them. Better still, lure them to an isolated area and eat them, leaving their carcasses for the crows. This is the surprisingly catchy idea behind this coal-black horror comedy.
In for another surprise? Megan Fox’s performance is spot-on as the high school hottie turned demon. Director Karyn Kusama’s film showcases the actress’s most famous assets, but also mines for comic timing and talent other directors apparently overlooked.
Amanda Seyfried’s performance as the best friend, replete with homely girl glasses and Jan Brady hairstyle, balances Fox’s smolder, and both performers animate Diablo Cody’s screenplay with authority. They take the Snaps conceit and expand it – adolescence sucks for all girls, not just the outcasts.
2. Knives and Skin (2019)
Falling somewhere between David Lynch and Anna Biller in the under-charted area where the boldly surreal meets the colorfully feminist, writer/director Jennifer Reeder’s Knives and Skin offers a hypnotic look at Midwestern high school life.
Knives and Skin’s pulpy noir package lets Reeder explore what it means to navigate the world as a female. As tempting as it is to pigeonhole the film as Lynchian, Reeder’s metaphors, while fluid and eccentric, are far more pointed than anything you’ll find in Twin Peaks.
And everyone sings impossibly appropriate Eighties alt hits acapella. Even the dead.
1. Ginger Snaps (2000)
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.
A love letter to Baltimore and a beautiful showcase of talent, The Baltimorons is the yes-and of romcoms.
Jay Duplass directs a script co-written with Michael Strassner, who plays Cliff. Lovable, endearing, excruciatingly earnest, Cliff is headed with girlfriend Brittany (Olivia Luccardi) to spend Christmas Eve with her family. He falls on the back step, knocks out a tooth, and has to comb Baltimore for a dentist available to help.
Schlubby and sweet and desperately afraid of needles, Cliff makes quite an impression on the difficult to impress Dr. Didi (Liz Larsen). A series of mishaps, hijinks and opportunities keeps the two together for the balance of Christmas Eve.
This one-thing-leads-to-another cinematic structure can feel tedious and contrived, but Duplass and Strassner ground the narrative in Cliff’s two defining traits. Newly sober, Cliff is still learning who he is without alcohol. There’s a tentative, brave, sad but funny exploratory nature to the narrative that exactly mirrors this.
He’s also a sketch and improv comic, though he hasn’t done comedy since “the incident”—the catalyst for the film, for his sobriety, and for the personal journey that led Cliff to this moment. Cliff’s approach to life is the “yes, and” improv ethic. Whatever comes Cliff’s way, he’s not only up for it, he will meet it with the next most unexpected yet organic step to take.
Strassner couldn’t be better or more authentic in the lead, and his natural chemistry with Larsen compels interest. It’s a master class in opposites attract, two fully realized characters who are who they are, somehow warming to the thing in each other that most surprises them.
The Baltimorons is about fresh steps and reawakenings and taking what comes with humor and bravery. And it’s funny—sometimes slyly, sometimes hilariously. There’s substance to it, and romance, though the late-film reveal feels forced when compared to the balance of the film. Still, I haven’t seen a romantic comedy this romantic or funny since The Big Sick.
