The thing that made James Wan’s 2013 ghost story The Conjuring so effective – more than the solid cast, more than the tense atmosphere, more than those hideous Seventies fashions – was Wan’s use of practical effects.
That woman on top of the wardrobe?! Terrifying!
It helped that he had a creepy story in the hands of capable actors. More importantly, he knows how to frame scenes in a way that trains the audience to scan corners, peer into shadows and look through empty windows, constantly on edge waiting for that next spooky moment.
With his sequel, he still boasts two of those three elements.
Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson return as Lorraine and Ed Warren, real-life paranormal investigators working with the Catholic church to validate claims of hauntings and possessions. It’s 1977, and the two are still recovering from that incident in Amityville when they’re asked to help a single mum with four kids living in North London.
The put-upon family is sympathetic enough. Wilson and Farmiga are compelling enough. The period detail is nice. Well, The Clash’s London Calling wasn’t actually released until 1979, but all is forgiven because of the utterly fantastic use of Starsky & Hutch posters.
So, what’s wrong with C2?
A few things.
The story never feels particularly cohesive – more like a series of vignettes strung together. Because of this, characters never seem fully formed and relationships feel forced. Supernatural clues and plot twists border on the nonsensical. (Seriously, ask yourself about the bite marks.) Maybe that’s because there’s a red herring, but too much valuable time is wasted with that thread and not enough devoted to true scares.
There are two demonic images in the film – both excellently chosen nightmare images from childhood (mine, anyway) – but some video game editing and CGI identify them quickly as movie magic, leeching their power.
Most importantly, there’s no inspired, memorable, terrifying jump scare. Wan is an absolute master of the spooky longshot, the creeping camera, but in this film’s predecessor those unendurably tense spans were punctuated by some of the best spook house scares in recent memory. Think clapping hands.
Though there are some startles and above-average scares, there’s nothing to elevate this film above mediocrity.
A staple of the horror genre – the final girl. She’s been beaten, tied up, duct taped, stabbed and generally misused, but she soldiers on. Whether through virtue, savvy, or just general badassedness, these women are not above doing what’s necessary to make it through to the sequel – even if that means putting on Jason’s dead mother’s moth-eaten sweater, because that shit had to be gamey. So today our Senior Aussie/Slasher Correspondent Cory Metcalfe joins us again to celebrate the best final girls in horror.
6. Erin (Sharni Vinson – You’re Next, 2011)
Erin is Australian, which is clearly the deciding factor here. She joins her boyfriend for a family holiday in a gorgeous vacation home deep in the woods. Which sounds worse, the first meeting with the family or “deep in the woods”? In her case, that is seriously a toss-up. The gathering is disrupted by violent, mask-wearing psychopaths, but they weren’t prepared for Erin.
Erin’s one of the few at the event who’s new to the family, so she’s hard for the villains to predict. And we find that her boyfriend – a college prof who dates his students, including Erin – doesn’t know nearly enough about her. It’s a great tale of unreasonably low expectations. It’s also, a great character because Erin is savvy, tough, and fearless.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgkxIlw5HWw
5. Mia (Jane Levy – Evil Dead, 2013)
With the helpful pen of Oscar winner Diablo Cody (uncredited), Fede Alvarez turns all the particulars of the Evil Dead franchise on end. You can tick off so many familiar characters, moments and bits of dialog, but you can’t predict what will happen.
One of the best revisions is the character of Mia: the first to go and yet the sole survivor. She’s the damaged one, and the female who’s there without a male counterpart, which means (by horror standards), she’s the one most likely to be a number in the body count, but because of what she has endured in her life she’s able to make seriously tough decisions to survive – like tearing off her own damn arm. Nice!
Plus, it rains blood! How awesome is that?!
4. Sarah (Shauna McDonald – The Descent, 2005)
Sarah is another one who appears to be the weak link but proves her meddle. She suffers an almost unendurable tragedy in the opening scene, and a year later, when she and her friends regroup to spend a holiday together spelunking in West Virginia, she appears to be the delicate one. What she goes through in the early part of the film informs her ability to survive – as her friend Beth points out (to her and to us) when Sarah gets caught in the narrow tunnel.
She’s quiet and observant, smart and proactive – all excellent qualities once we find out that the group is not only lost inside an unmapped underground cave with no hope of being found, but that the cave already has residents, and dude! Are they creepy!
The way Sarah evolves, and the turns the character and the film take, are surprising and impressive.
Back in 1974, the “final girl” formula hadn’t been perfected. The slasher genre barely even existed, but Tobe Hooper already knew how to play with genre expectations. Yes, Sally Hardesty is the sweet one, the pretty one, the one likeliest to be the last in line for that chainsaw, but there’s a lot more to her than halter tops and bell bottoms.
Marilyn Burns mines for something primal in this performance, which is absolutely necessary if we’re to believe this girl has what it takes to survive the cannibal family. Sally’s mania is recognizable, necessary to the viewer. No one is yelling advice or judgement at the screen because who in the hell could possibly know what to do in this situation?
Unlike so many female characters in horror before her and since, Sally doesn’t whimper and rely on the villain’s conscience to save her. She negotiates, and when she realizes that’s getting her nowhere, she makes tough choices (like throwing herself out a window – because no fate could be worse than the one that clearly awaits her otherwise). In keeping with the film, Burns’s performance is gritty, unpleasant, insane and perfect.
2. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis – Halloween, 1978)
In 1978, Laurie Strode became the definition of “final girl” in much the same way that Carpenter’s horror masterpiece became the definition of slasher – the blueprint for the genre. For many, Jamie Lee Curtis’s girl-next-door is the ultimate final girl.
There’s great reason for that. She distilled everything that came before and became the model for what would come after in the slasher film: virtuous, smart, self-sacrificing. But Curtis does it with more intelligence and onscreen grace than those before or (mostly) after in the slasher genre. She’s virtuous, but not judgy. She’s hot, but not overtly so. She’s also brave and smart.
The reason the character transcended genre trappings to become iconic is not the writing or the film itself, but Curtis’s performance. An effortless intelligence shines through regardless of Laurie’s actions, and it elevates the film and the genre.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKvxAvkJkac
1. Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver – Alien, 1979)
Who could possibly push Laurie Strode to second place? Ellen Ripley could.
Sigourney Weaver’s character in Alien and its many sequels is a savvy, tough, no-nonsense survivor. She is clearly the smartest member of the Nostromo crew: she understands chain of command and values quarantine regulations; she’s the first to recognize Ash (Ian Holm) as a villain; she understands the need to blow the ship; she outsmarts the predator.
Her sexuality is beside the point, which is entirely refreshing in this genre and for the role of final girl. She also changed the game for “final girls.” No longer could we accept a beautiful, sobbing mess who made ridiculous decisions, refused to fight back, and survived based entirely on her virtue. Ripley is never a victim, rarely makes an uninformed decision, and kicks all manner of ass. That’s why she survives. She’s not hoping to be saved, she’s just doing what it takes to get the F out of Dodge and keep Earth safe.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: Out of the Shadows
by Hope Madden
Let’s say your 8-year-old child (or thirty-ish husband) really wants to see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: Out of the Shadows. Maybe they love the cartoon. Maybe they had a TMNT digital watch back in ’91. And socks. And a skateboard. What’s the harm in indulging?
It’s been a year since Shredder tried to annihilate NYC, but because the green brothers threw credit to their cameraman helper Vern (Will Arnett), they remain unknown to the town they love and saved while Vern soaks up all the glory.
But wait! What if a mad scientist wants to use a teleportation device to break Shredder out of jail? And what if that teleportation device sends the supervillain through time and space to meet with an even bigger, badder villain? And what if the two evildoers hatch a plan to enslave Earth and eliminate the turtles by creating sloppy, fat mutant animals of their own?
So, it’s a rock solid plot that only required about ten minutes of excruciating exposition, but the point is, turtles hate bullies!
How do they feel about objectification and exploitation? I’m going to guess they’re OK with it.
Yes, Megan Fox returns as the foursome’s ogle-friendly reporter/BFF. She has two costume changes within her first full 3 minutes onscreen, but they’re vitally important as they allow her to flirt her way close to the information she needs to sleuth out Shredder’s plan.
How else could she possibly do it!?
I could almost give the film’s banal screenplay a pass as simple, mindless kids’ fun if Fox’s presence matched that child-friendly stupidity in any way. Here’s the real tragedy, though: the great Laura Linney is in this dumpster fire of a film.
The sequel is directed by Dave Green (Earth to Echo) with no flair whatsoever for using CGI to move a story along, or even sensibly portray action. Muddy and confused, the set pieces are rarely if ever compelling enough to keep your attention away from the mind-deadening laziness of the screeplay.
By 92 minutes in, I’d lost the will to live, and there was still another twenty minutes to endure.
You love your kids and your husband, but be good to yourself. Skip this one. Dial up some old episodes on YouTube instead.
The destinies of two undersized twin wrestlers and a pair of aging prostitutes braid in Arturo Ripstein’s grimly surreal Bleak Street (La Calle de la Amargura).
The veteran Mexican filmmaker works again with his regular collaborator and life partner, writer Paz Alicia Garciadiego. The two enlist the aid of cinematographer Alejandro Cantu to conjure an atmosphere that is simultaneously desolate and dreamy.
Filmed in stylized black and white and set in a maze of back alleys in Mexico City, Bleak Street begins with off-kilter vignettes that provide glimpses into the dreary lives of the film’s four primary figures before pulling the strands together to depict the true crime that inspired the effort.
Juan Francisco Longoria and Guillermo Lopez play the twin brothers, costumed dwarf wrestlers who “shadow” full size grappling counterparts and never remove their masks.
Patricia Reyes Spindola and Nora Velasquez portray prostitutes facing the realities of their shelf lives as they watch younger women take over their corners and customers.
The two pairs have workplace struggles and disrespect in common, though this hardly binds them. While Ripstein never misses a chance to showcase the humanity of each of his characters, transcending their destiny is not his aim, nor theirs.
Ripstein adds to the hypnotic quality of his picture with a score consisting only of the nearly imperceptible sound of water as scenes fade to black.
Cantu’s lengthy, prowling shots underscore the voyeuristic feel of the film. His sparkling black and white fills the screen with brightly lit surfaces and shadowy backdrops, the landscape taking on a beautiful but nightmarish quality that suits the wild assortment of characters.
Regardless of their actions, these are not characters Ripstein judges. This is both refreshing and off-putting, because the film never feels like the tragedy it is.
Respectful but absolutely never preachy, Bleak Street holds itself and its audience at a distance from the characters onscreen. While that disconnect feels intentional, Ripstein missed an opportunity for lasting relevance because he doesn’t generate any kind of emotional connection with the tragic, true events unfolding.
Bleak Street screens this weekend only at the Wexner Center for the Arts.
Having a child is an amazing and joyous event. It is also terrifying. Alien knew it. That whole Season 8 arc of the XFiles knew it. We’ve even dedicated a Fright Club to Pregnancy Horror. But The Ones Below favors less bursting out of chests and more psychological slow burn.
Enter a small house containing two flats, one upstairs, and one downstairs. Upstairs is home to longtime residents Justin (Stephen Campbell Moore) and Kate (Clémence Poésy), who is pregnant with her first child after years of denying motherhood. New neighbors have moved in downstairs, and Kate finally catches a glimpse of equally pregnant Theresa (Laura Birn).
Theresa and husband Jon (David Morrissey) come upstairs for dinner one evening, and express how desperate they’ve been for a child over some very stilted small talk. Thus tears the rift between the two couples, which only grows after a tragic accident leaves everyone scurrying to dodge guilt and blame.
First time feature director David Farr chases a touch of timelessness in his arrangement and almost pulls it off. There’s a neither here nor there quality to the set and costuming. Milk is delivered daily in glass bottles on the doorstep, smart phones fill hands but pictures are taken with digital cameras, young couples work in open floor plan offices. The upstairs couple dresses as modern young professionals, comfortably. The downstairs pair is more pressed, more clean, and further off trend. A perfectly manicured garden gives off an eerie, Stepford feel.
The editing and design seem to struggle with Farr’s intention a bit. Cool tones downplay some of the raw emotional quality of the scenes, making more intimate moments feel a bit detached. This could be intentional, or I could be trying to cover up for the lack of chemistry between couples.
The most intriguing performance by far is Birn’s Theresa, who is fascinating to watch with equal measures of conniving and innocent. Poésy and Moore are both down-to-earth and relatable, but Poésy ultimately just doesn’t have much to work with. Moore, as the straight man character to everyone else’s crazy, gives a solid performance and becomes the beating heart of the film.
The dialogue mostly consists of bickering, which lends both realism and additional tension, but doesn’t seem to otherwise motivate the characters. There are vague references to strained relationships, which, while underdeveloped, provide breadcrumbs leading to both false and unbelievable-but-true conclusions.
The film ends, deliciously, with a few sharp twists. The thriller connoisseur will see these tricks coming, but the payoff to Farr’s mounting tensions is welcome either way. The Ones Below is a middling to good directorial debut for David Farr that promises, with a few more turns around the block, he will be serving up a style undeniably his.
One billion dollars. That’s global money, keep in mind, but still, who’d have thought Tim Burton’s utterly banal and forgettable 2010 acid trip Alice in Wonderland had made so very much money? Too much – and not just because the film had no genuine merit, but because that kind of sum necessitates a sequel, however wildly and wholly unnecessary – even unwanted – that kind of muchness must be.
And so, back to Underland we go, accompanying an adult(ish) Alice who returns from a stint as sea captain to find Victorian England just as restrictive as it had been when she was a child escaping into her imagination. And so, to her imagination she returns.
Director James Bobin (The Muppets) has the unenviable task of following Burton into the rabbit hole – not unenviable because he may suffer by comparison, but because his options are somewhat limited based on the film’s predecessor. Expect garishly overdone visuals that offset weekly drawn characters.
Familial tensions are at the heart of the tale, penned by Linda Woolverton and based on some of Lewis Carroll’s most dreamlike and incongruous storytelling. Too bad Woolverton and Disney insisted on hemming Carroll’s wild imagination inside such a tediously structured framework.
The Hatter is depressed to the point of death and Alice has to go back in time to save him. Basically. But you can’t change the past – a lesson she’d allegedly learned in her first fantastic voyage, but I guess it didn’t stick. So, let’s learn it again, with the help of Time himself, as played by Sacha Baron Cohen with a Schwarzenegger-esque accent.
Aside from that new face, the same forgettably wacky group returns to the future/past. The talented Mia Wasikowska struggles to find life inside the bland Alice while Helena Bonham Carter pointlessly chews scenery.
An underused Anne Hathaway brightens certain scenes, and Johnny Depp – reliable as ever inside a fright wig and exaggerated make up – does bring a wistful humanity to the otherworldly events.
But imagination and tiresome capitalism butt heads from the opening sequence, and without the foundation of compelling characters or the requirement of engaging storytelling, Through the Looking Glass proves to be a pointless, though colorful, bore.
Remember that infamous high school math problem about the trains? You know, the one where two trains leave different cities heading toward each other and you are tasked with discovering when and where they collide?
A Bigger Splash is a lot like that, only instead of trains we are dealing with ex-lovers and the location of the collision is a gorgeous volcanic island off the coast of Italy.
Rock star Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton) is on vacation, recovering from throat surgery with her studly younger partner Paul De Smedt (Matthias Schoenaerts), when they are interrupted by unexpected houseguests: her ex-lover and producer, Harry (Ralph Fiennes), and his recently-discovered, lascivious daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson). It’s clear that Harry still carries a torch for Marianne. It’s also apparent that he is more than willing to use the close quarters to fan those flames into obsession.
A catastrophe is inevitable. It’s just a matter of time — which, in this film, can tend to drag a little bit. This is not just a movie about nostalgic characters. With its long takes and dramatic score, director Luca Guadagnino’s film itself demonstrates a palpable longing for an earlier cinematic age. But with the stellar cast, breathtaking setting, and stylish costumes, the extra length, like a spare tire on an old flame, is easy to forgive. There is something beautiful in nearly every shot.
Schoenaerts and Johnson deliver solid performances in their somewhat underwritten characters (disdainful melancholic and crafted nymphet, respectively). Fiennes and Swinton, however, are delightful contrasts. Fiennes very nearly steals the show with his frenetic outbursts of verbal diarrhea — and in the scene where he dances to the Rolling Stones, he does. However, in the end this is Swinton’s movie. The layers of emotion she manages to convey with minimal dialogue is what truly makes the biggest splash.
Tell me you’ve seen any of the countless trailers for Shane Black’s new action comedy The Nice Guys. Funny! I haven’t had such high expectations for a new film yet this year.
Ever since Black announced his presence with authority, penning ‘87’s iconic buddy cop action flick Lethal Weapon, he’s been one to watch. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, his directorial debut, suggested he might even be keeping his best stuff for himself. But after a while, his tics and tendencies grow tiresome.
The Long Kiss Goodnight, anyone?
And though his newest effort absolutely revisits most of the filmmaker’s by-now obvious predilections, his craftsmanship and casting have never been better.
Hey girl, guess what – Ryan Gosling is a hoot! No, no, I didn’t say he’s hot (as that goes without saying). He’s a hoot. And if you found his scene-stealing performance in last year’s gem The Big Short a refreshing and joyous change of pace for the award-bedecked actor, you will surely enjoy this masterpiece of comic timing and physicality.
Gosling plays Holland March, an alcoholic PI with questionable parenting skills who reluctantly teams up with muscle-for-hire Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe). What begins as a low-rent missing persons case snowballs into an enormous conspiracy involving porn, the government, and the all-powerful auto industry. (It is 1977, after all.)
Aah, 1977 – when everybody smoked, ogled women, and found alcoholism a laugh riot. Black puts this time machine quality to excellent use in a film that would have felt stale and rote during his Eighties heyday, but today it serves as an endlessly entertaining riff on all that was so wrong and so right about the Seventies.
A brightly lit (if smog-choked) Southern California noir-turned-buddy-action comedy, The Nice Guys does a surprisingly good job at finding its tone. All the lurid, twisty plot fodder could easily weigh the film down in gritty drama, but Shane’s heart is in the budding, unsanitized bromance.
Gosling’s impeccable hilarity is custom-made for Black’s machine gun fire dialog, but Crowe also manages to get comfortable in the script, allowing both the conversation and action to breathe and take shape. The pair’s chemistry is a joy to watch, and is aided immeasurably by Angourie Rice’s flinty, intelligent turn as March’s disappointed daughter, Holly.
Who’s looking for a psychosexual acid trip? Well, it’s your lucky day because Belladonna of Sadness – Eiichi Yamamoto’s 1973 animated cult flick – gets new theatrical life thanks to a 4K restoration.
Based on Satanism and Witchcraft – a 19th Century text by Jules Michelet about seduction, witchcraft, and female empowerment – the film tells the story of a newly married couple and their troubles in feudal Europe.
Jean and Jeanne attempt to sidestep the law of the land allowing a baron to deflower a bride, but their pleas fall on sadistic ears. Yamamoto’s vivid depiction of the gang rape that follows is not only a sudden visual eruption in the dreamy watercolor style that precedes the scene, but a hint at the unsettling imagery that will punctuate the entire balance of the film.
The story pits feminine power against the systemic misogyny of the time as an allegory of modern feminism – well, modern in 1973. Jeanne slowly comes to the realization that embracing Satan to break from the repressive nature of bureaucratized Christianity may be her only road to personal power.
On one hand, this particular theme of revolution is older than Michelet’s work and as contemporary as Robert Eggers’s modern genre masterpiece The Witch. And yet, it’s a startling revelation, subversive in many ways, most of which are depicted in this film with wild abandon. As genitalia morphs into lion mouths and giraffe heads during extended, orgiastic sequences, Yamamoto equates sexual liberation with personal empowerment.
And yet, this is a Nineteenth Century text penned by a man, which has been reimagined and rendered – animated, written, directed, and scored – by men. It may be less than surprising to find that Satan (the empowerer) is depicted as a small but growing anthropomorphic penis.
Though Belladonna of Sadness finds tragedy in the repression and objectification of women, the film seems at a loss as to how to express its themes without objectifying Jeanne.
The film certainly can’t be dismissed entirely because of its somewhat conflicted sense of female empowerment, though. Yamamoto’s hypnotic yet jarring visual style, rupturing panoramic still drawings with bursts of movement and color, looks like nothing else onscreen. The aesthetic meshes with Masahiko Sato’s psychedelic score to create the trippiest film to open on national screens since the Age of Aquarius.
It’s a fascinating, disturbing, imaginative piece of animation that looks and feels like nothing else.
There have been a number of movies based on video games. From 1993’s Super Mario Brothers to the upcoming Tomb Raider movie, Hollywood has not shied away from mining video games as source material for film.
One of the latest in the video game to movie genre is The Angry Birds Movie, a film that seeks to explain why those birds who love to launch themselves at green pigs with enormous slingshots are so angry.
The focal character of the movie is Red, voiced by Jason Sudekis, an already angry bird living in a community of happy birds. Red’s anger gets him in trouble and he finds himself placed in anger management where he meets Bomb, Chuck, and Terence.
The arrival of a large number of green pigs to the birds’ island sets off warning bells for Red, but the other birds are happy to welcome the newcomers and chastise Red for his quickness to antagonism.
The major problem with Angry Birds is the lack of story. At 97 minutes, the movie has a lot of time to fill, and in the first half, the audience has to sit through quite a few montage sequences that are boring even for the youngest viewer. It isn’t until the second half of the movie, when the pigs reveal their true motives for landing on the birds’ island, that the movie starts to pick up. Where the first 45 minutes of the movie drag, the second 45 minutes make up for it with the action we know and love from the video game. The plot comes together, and children and their parents can both find something to enjoy.
The voice actors are myriad and lend their talents well to the film. Danny McBride as Bomb, and Peter Dinklage as Mighty Eagle, both stand out in their roles, providing much needed humor throughout. Jason Sudekis manages to carry a lot on his shoulders as the leading angry bird, but far too often the jokes he’s given to work with fall flat.
It’s unfortunate that the film isn’t 20 minutes shorter, as it might have been more appealing to both young and old had the screenwriters recognized the limitations of their source material.
