Screening Room: Haunting in Venice, Love at First Sight, Canary, Cassandro, Satanic Hispanics & More
Tag Archives: Madd at the Movies
Mucha Lucha
Cassandro
by Hope Madden
There’s rarely a good reason to miss a performance from Gael García Bernal. Even when the material around him doesn’t exactly work, he always does. His performances tend to be marked with a quietly observant, charming resilience.
In Cassandro, the narrative feature debut from documentarian Roger Ross Williams, Bernal amplifies that charm and resilience with an energy and magnetism that dares you to look away.
Bernal plays Saúl Armendáriz, a real life El Paso amateur lucha librador. Saúl loves wrestling, loves his mother, quietly loves another closeted librador, but wants more. Because of his size, he’s been pegged a “runt” which means, in the pre-determined and choreographed matches, he must always lose.
He doesn’t want to lose.
What Williams and Bernal channel is lucha libre – this unusual and rarely represented world – as a microcosm for society. The odds are stacked against Saúl. He cannot win. It’s not allowed. It’s not the role he gets to play.
So, he decides 1) to find a really good trainer (Roberta Colindrez, understated and excellent), and 2) play the “exotico” – that is, a wrestler who performs in drag.
Exoticos never, ever get to win.
And yet, the persona allows Saúl to be a little bolder, a little louder, a more vivid version of himself. It’s empowering. Cassandro still has to lose to the likes of El Gigántico because “lucha libre is a fairy tale and good must always triumph over evil.” But as his skill and charisma earn him fans, suddenly that old fairy tale feels less important to the promoters who decide match outcomes.
Ross’s documentarian instincts serve the film beautifully, as the world of lucha libre is never treated as a sideshow. There’s humor here, but we laugh with characters rather than at them. And though Cassandro hits the beats you’d expect from a dramatic biopic journey, moments feel authentic rather than manipulated for dramatic effect.
The entire ensemble shines, but Bernal owns the screen, his ever present smile a heartbreaking and beautiful image of the resilience and determination that fueled an icon of wrestling and LGBTQ culture.
Blood in an Elevator
Elevator Game
by Hope Madden
Urban legends, paranormal hunter shows, teens making bad decisions – Rebekah McKendry’s Elevator Game rehashes a lot of ideas but banks on a new game and villain to elevate the familiar.
Elevate, get it? It’s in an elevator.
Which, to be honest, seems like the first missed opportunity because McKendry chooses not to heighten claustrophobic tensions by trapping anyone with a monster in a tiny, enclosed box suspended in midair.
Huh.
Instead, gullible thrill seekers (and the hosts of a paranormal investigation show) follow the rules of the online sensation, the elevator game. Press a specific sequence of floors. When it’s finally time to press the button for floor #5, keep your eyes closed the whole time. Do that and the 5th Floor Lady will pull your car up to the 10th floor for a glimpse of her red world.
Sneak a peek instead of keeping your eyes closed and you – and anyone else sorry enough to ride the elevator with you – will face nasty consequences.
There’s an effective backstory explaining the origins of the 5th Floor Lady and an occasionally impressive use of shadow. But McKendry’s network TV style staging and drama leach all tension from the story.
Not one actor convinces as a high school student, nor do most of them convince as long-term best friends or even as frightened prey. David Ian McKendry and Travis Seppala’s dialog doesn’t help.
Nazarly Demkowicz comes off best, playing the gang’s occult-nerdy camera operator, Matty. His performance borders on comic relief, but offers more nuance than what you can expect from the balance of the cast.
McKendry’s 2022 WTF horror Glorious, while flawed, spilled over with imagination and sewage in equal measure. Elevator Game is in want of more imagination. (The sewage would really be out of place, though.)
Vitruvian Man
The Inventor
by Hope Madden
The Inventor, a beautifully animated lesson on the life and times of Leonardo da Vinci (voiced by Stephen Fry), offers a lot to digest, and I’m not sure who they think is eating.
Writer/co-director Jim Capobianco (directing here with Pierre-Luc Granjon) draws inspiration from his 2009 hand-drawn short, Leonardo. A delightful sketch about trying to fly, the film ran just 9 minutes and celebrated Da Vinci’s genius in the most charming way possible.
The feature looks into da Vinci’s curiosity about the existence of the human soul. This gets him into trouble with Pope Leo X (Matt Berry), so da Vinci moves from Rome to France, where he thinks he can follow his curiosity in peace.
He cannot.
Capobianco and Granjon land on a lovely mixture media. The tale is told primarily using a stop motion Claymation style that recalls the old Rankin/Bass Christmas specials of the Sixties and Seventies. (This is especially true of the pope, who’s the spitting image of Burgermeister Meisterburger.)
Scenes are often punctuated with the same hand-drawn sketch style used in Leonardo, and together the result is lovely. But that doesn’t help the storytelling as much as it should.
Even with a great cast – Daisy Ridley and Marion Cotillard co-star alongside Fry and Berry – Capobianco can’t maintain interest. He delivers so much information so superficially that it’s equally hard to keep up and care what happens.
The story takes too big a bite. Is our focus the soul? The perfect city? Weapons? Flying machines? Because each of those has its own background, implications, experiments and host of characters. Skimming over all of it gives us too much and too little at the same time.
It’s hard to determine the intended audience for The Inventor. The humor and political intrigue are a little sophisticated for children, and the history lesson is far too long and involves far too many characters to keep a child’s attention.
And though the animation is reason enough for an adult to give The Inventor a go, the simplistic storytelling and characterization will likely leave them cold.
Spirits in the Material World
A Haunting in Venice
by Hope Madden and George Wolf
If we’re going to congratulate Rian Johnson for reviving the murder mystery, save a backslap for Kenneth Branagh. His Murder on the Orient Express came two years before 2019’s Knives Out, and though Branagh may be adapting decades-old Agatha Christie classics, he’s proven adept at giving them a stylish and star-studded new sheen.
Branagh also stars again as Hercule Poirot, the legendary Belgian detective who showed a friskier side (probably thanks to Johnson’s sublime Benoit Blanc character) in last year’s Death on the Nile. Now for the third in their mystery series, Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green embrace the season with a gorgeous and frequently engaging update of Christie’s 1969 novel “Halloween Party.”
It is 1947, when the now-retired and war weary Poirot meets up with his old friend Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) in Venice. Oliver is a famous writer who considers herself quite the smarty, but she needs Poirot’s help to debunk the work of Mrs. Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), a medium whose talks with the dead are pretty damn convincing.
The setting is a Gothic manor with a disturbing past, where Poirot agrees to attend a seance on Halloween night. There, after a children’s party, Mrs. Reynolds will attempt to give Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly) the answers she seeks about the murder of her daughter, Alicia (Rowan Robinson).
But another murder soon steals the show, with even Poirot himself questioning his own eyes as things in the night go plenty bumpy.
Branagh again teams with cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos (Belfast, Death on the Nile), enveloping the film in a haunted house vibe that is wonderfully foreboding. The camera explores the confines of the manor via angles that are often extreme and disorienting, while lingering on cloaks, masks and other various other articles of creep.
Poirot is a changed man since last we met. He’s seen too much evil, and believes in “no God, no ghosts,” as a cloud of trauma and grief that fits the film’s mood hangs over him. Branagh and his stellar ensemble (including Jamie Dornan, Camille Cottin and Belfast‘s Jude Hill) work their character edges well, making sure no one is ever quite above suspicion.
And those suspicions are easier to play with when the source material isn’t as well known. But while revamping a deeper cut is welcome, the chance for creepy surprise does come at a price.
The core mystery just isn’t as compelling. Branagh and Green make alterations that prolong the chill factor, but result in moments that seem more like a Christie disguise than the face of the master herself.
A Haunting in Venice‘s lingering impression is as a slice of well-dressed fun. It’s a Spooky Season movie for those who don’t like things too scary, and an Agatha Christie tale for those who’d rather not think so hard.
Ave Satán
Satanic Hispanics
by Hope Madden
For genre fans, a well-made anthology can be a delight. Sometimes, like Michael Dougherty’s classic Trick ‘r Treat, one filmmaker pieces together a set of related short works. More often, though, a framing story connects the tales of many different filmmakers. The Mortuary Collection is an example of a recent gem.
Satanic Hispanics falls into the second category. It’s a collection of shorts made by Latinx filmmakers. Like, really good filmmakers. Eduardo Sánchez instigated the entire found footage phenomenon with his genre classic The Blair Witch Project. Gigi Saul Guerrero delivered geriatric fun in her 2021 film Bingo Hell. Demián Rugna’s Terrified is a haunting and effective flick, and Alejandro Brugués’s Juan of the Dead is the most underseen and brilliant film of the lot.
There’s good reason to be excited about the potential of the shorts assembled for Satanic Hispanics. And, on the whole, these filmmakers deliver on that promise.
Mike Mendez (Gravedancers) starts us out with the framing story, “The Traveler.” It introduces the titular character (Efren Ramirez, Napoleon Dynamite’s Pedro), the last man standing at a crime scene where 27 are dead. As he’s interrogated by two well-meaning detectives, he shares tales meant to persuade them that a great evil is coming.
Those stories range from Rugna’s creepy and trippy “También Lo Vi” to Sánchez’s comedic “El Vampiro” to Guerrero’s creature feature, “Nahuales”, to the Brugués insanity, “Hammer of Zanzibar.” Each has its charms, and every genre fan will find at least one or two films to take their fancy.
Rugna’s mindbender about light refraction, algorithms and inadvertently opening a portal to something sinister is the standout. Brugués delivers a stylized comedic adventure – part Tarantino, part Evil Dead. And if you can get past the troubling fact that a jilted boyfriend beats his ex-girlfriend with a giant penis for laughs, you might like it.
But the collection absolutely boasts some inspired talent having a blast, and when is that ever a bad thing to witness?
Fright Club: The Baby Made Me Do It
Pregnancy changes you. Your body betrays you, your personality takes of fin wild directions, and it can feel like there’s a little monster growing inside you. And maybe there is!
Quick shout out to the trashy options that we never seem to be able to fit in: Baby Blood and Inseminoid.
5. Antibirth (2016)
This one is nuts. Chaos reigns some blighted wasteland where Lou (Natasha Lyonne) squats in an abandoned trailer, picks up shifts as necessary cleaning a motel, and abuses her body so relentlessly that it becomes the perfect breeding ground for…something.
There’s a lot going on in this movie, most of it unrelated to the plot but aesthetically in line. Writer/director Danny Perez basically creates a fairly realistic town just this side of Street Trash.
Lyonne is unhinged, unperturbable genius in this piece of insanity.
4. Honeymoon (2014)
How well do you really know the person you marry? Leigh Janiak’s Honeymoon taps into that anxiety and blends it a bit with pregnancy horror to basically make everything about that new, conjoined life feel alien and weird and murdery.
Rose Leslie is particularly effective as a woman in transition. Her performance is simultaneously tender and sinister.
Janiak nails the smalltown horror, conjuring a kind of sci-fi Let’s Scare Jessica to Death.
3. Huesera: The Bone Woman (2022)
Michelle Garza Cervera’s maternal nightmare is bright and decisive, pulling in common genre tropes only long enough to grant entrance to the territory of a central metaphor before casting them aside for something sinister, honest and honestly terrifying.
While it toes certain familiar ground – the gaslighting of Rosemary’s Baby, for instance – what sets Huesera apart from other maternal horror is its deliberate untidiness. Cervera refuses to embrace the good mother/bad mother dichotomy and disregards the common cinematic journey of convincing a woman that all she really wants is to be a mom.
Huesera’s metaphor is brave and timely. Brave not only because of its LGBTQ themes but because of its motherhood themes. It’s a melancholy and necessary look at what you give up, what you kill.
2. Prevenge (2016)
Anybody with any sense at all is afraid of pregnant women. With unassuming mastery, Alice Lowe pushes that concept to its breaking point with her wickedly funny directorial debut, Prevenge.
Lowe plays Ruth. Grieving, single and pregnant, Ruth believes her unborn daughter rather insists that she kill a bunch of people.
Why such bloodlust from Ruth’s baby? Lowe, who also wrote the script, divulges just as much as you need to know when the opportunity arises. At first, there’s just the macabre fun of watching the seemingly ordinary mum pick off an unsuspecting exotic pet salesman.
1. Swallow
Putting a relevant twist on the classic “horrific mother” trope, writer/director Carlo Mirabella-Davis uses the rare eating disorder pica to anchor his exploration of gender dynamics and, in particular, control.
Where Mirabella-Davis’s talent for building tension and framing scenes drive the narrative, it’s Bennett’s performance that elevates the film. Serving as executive producer as well as star, Haley Bennett transforms over the course of the film.
When things finally burst, director and star shake off the traditional storytelling, the Yellow Wallpaper or Awakening or even Safe. The filmmaker’s vision and imagery come full circle with a bold conclusion worthy of Bennett’s performance.
Screening Room: Nun II, Big Fat Greek Wedding 3, Scrapper, 8 Found Dead, Our Father the Devil, Thirst
Sister Sleuth
The Nun II
by Hope Madden
The Nun II has at least one thing going for it. If someone could figure out what to do with her, that villain is creepy as hell.
Why? Partly because no one cuts a terrifying figure quite like Bonnie Aarons. And partly because, let’s be honest, nuns are scary. Like clowns. It’s just true.
We first ran into this Bad Habit in James Wan’s adequate 2016 sequel The Conjuring 2, but the film divided its villains up: old coot in a rocking chair (“I’m Bill Wilkins!”), the Crooked Man and – well, best not to say her name. But her screentime was very limited.
Then there was the tease in another middling sequel, Annabelle: Creation (a mediocre film, but miles better than the first in that particular franchise). She finally got her own story in 2018, with Corin Hardy’s wildly mediocre The Nun.
Can this excellent idea for a villain be put to good use, finally, with Michael Chaves’s sequel, The Nun II?
Meh.
It’s fine. It’s rated R, so that’s a start, although I’m not certain how it was deemed so problematic as to deserve the “keep the kids away” rating. There are a few creative deaths, almost elegantly macabre.
Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) is back on the trail of the demon nun after a series of disturbing deaths. Most of our time is spent in a monastery-turned-winery-turned-boarding school where Sister’s Irene’s old friend Maurice (Jonas Bloquet) has a job as a handyman and a crush on a teacher.
And, if memory serves, an inverted cross seared into the back of his neck. That smells like trouble (and burnt skin).
The setting is spooky, stagey and often quite atmospheric. Several of the set pieces are designed gorgeously. Bloquet continues to charm, and we not only get a nun this time but a very alarming goat-man. Nice!
The perversion of religious imagery continues to be the downfall of the series. It’s hard to take seriously, of course, because the Catholic church has a history of doing that itself. (The diocese of Syracuse claimed bankruptcy this summer due to the $100 million it owes to victims of sexual abuse.) This series would be more effective if the evil nun represented the decay within the church rather than a rogue demon weakened by an emissary of the Vatican.
Alas, Chaves settles for a bit of theoretical silliness bolstered by a nice touch of feminism, which feels delightfully heretical. So at least there’s that.
Method Acting
8 Found Dead
by Hope Madden
There are a lot of important elements that come together to make a good horror movie: tension, dread, atmosphere, maybe blood and gore. But nothing is more vital than the villain.
8 Found Dead, the Airbnb etiquette horror from Travis Greene, brings the goods when it comes to villains.
It seems Liz (Rosanne Limeres, splendid) and her husband Richard (real life husband Tim Simek) don’t have much to do now that their little hometown theater closed. But they can still put on a performance. Like pretending the Airbnb is double booked. Without Wi-Fi, how can anyone prove who’s really supposed to be there? Guess they’ll all just have to make the best of it.
8 Found Dead picks the same etiquette horror scabs as Speak No Evil or Funny Games – not quite as effectively, but with a macabre sense of humor that thoroughly entertains.
Rather than taking a chronological approach, Jonathan Buchanan’s script uses nonlinear storylines to allow each set of victims its own performance. Why should anyone have to share Liz and Richard?
Influencer Sam (Alisha Sope) and boyfriend Dwayne (William Gabriel Grier) head to an isolated Airbnb to make an announcement to Sam’s many followers. Carrie (Aly Trasher) and Ricky (Eddy Acosta) expect to join them, but they run late. Meanwhile, a 911 call brings two officers – an estranged married couple – out to investigate.
Each pair could learn a thing or two about commitment from Liz and Richard. These two are in it to win it.
8 Found Dead dances around some of the obvious questions that films like Barbarian and Funny Games address head on. But it also gets points for homaging the greatest lodging horror film of all time.
The opening falls to purposeless ogling – Jenny Tran’s performance deserved better – which the film struggles to overcome. But impressive editing and that shifting storyline keep Found Dead from ever getting stale.
Plus, there’s the promise that we could get to know Liz and Richard even better.
