 On paper, Ti West’s “X” trilogy is a fascinating venture - an interconnected trio of horror films, each of which pays deliberate homage to a different stylistic era. But West remains a solid conceptual filmmaker who rarely backs it up with actual ideas or inspiration. X was basically a porn-themed riff on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - and 70s grindhouse horror in general… the end result intermittently fun but largely unadventurous. Prequel Pearl offered more surface intrigue as a Technicolor subversion of a Douglas Sirk period melodrama, but proved rather hollow outside of the marvelous platform it provided West’s muse/star/co-creative Mia Goth. Now - with concluding entry MaXXXine - the series jumps into the seedy underbelly of 1980s Los Angeles… and its giallo-tinted, 80s-pop-scored fervor initially feels like catnip. The opening of the film, in which adult film star Maxine Minx (Goth) nails her audition for a mainstream horror sequel and struts across the studio backlot to ZZ Top’s Gimme All Your Lovin’ as the opening credits unfold, is the single headiest dopamine hit of the year-to-date. It’s pure cinematic candy. And with the Night Stalker on the loose, a scuzzbucket PI (Kevin Bacon, stinking up the theater with sweat and cheap cologne) lurking in the shadows, the body count rising, a pair of detectives (Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale) asking pointed questions, and Maxine’s dreams of Hollywood stardom being threatened by her past, it very much feels like Ti West has finally gotten his narrative ducks in a row. Unfortunately, once West reveals where the story is headed, it all goes rather limp - not unlike the would-be rapist Maxine cathartically curb-stomps early on (the film’s creative stuntedness is perhaps best exemplified by the fact West is given the enviable opportunity to play with the Bates Motel on the Universal backlot… and basically comes up with zilch). Goth remains deeply committed to the cause, and her performance across all three films should cement her place as a neo horror icon. But she gets hung out to dry during the climax. Because the series was essentially conceived on the fly (West began writing Pearl while filming X and was inspired to take the project straight into production), the overarching commentary on fame and stardom feels haphazard - there’s no true connective tissue in terms of why Pearl’s failure ultimately becomes Maxine’s triumph. Maxine is hellbent on becoming a star… but when it comes time for the claws to come out, they remain frustratingly sheathed. For a movie that acts as if it were forged in the crucible of 80s B-movie sleaze, MaXXXine offers a tepid denouement that barely lives up to the sordid promise of a single X - let alone three.  “Peculiar” is probably the most apt description when it comes to Longlegs and its impressively muscular performance at the box office (it’s no stretch to call it the most significant indie horror breakout hit in years). The new Oz Perkins film is not particularly accessible, nor is it all that much fun. It’s obliquely mean-spirited, a nihilistic horror-thriller whose nastiness is only somewhat mitigated by a healthy streak of kook DNA. Maika Monroe (quietly making a case as the best horror starlet in the business at the moment) stars as fledgling FBI agent Lee Harker, whose clairvoyant potential gets her assigned to the “Longlegs” case… a serial killer responsible for a string of familial murder-suicides dating back decades, who leaves cryptic letters at the crime scenes packed with Satanic coding. To an extent, Perkins wants to have his cake and eat it too… he stages the film as a grounded procedural in a similar vein to the work of Thomas Harris, which makes it all the more jarring when the story zags into legitimately looney occult territory and just keeps going. The approach doesn’t necessarily serve Monroe - in spite of the increasingly harrowed tenor of her performance, she’s given frustratingly little agency in an investigative sense (either from a practical or a paranormal perspective) - no matter how many breathless comparisons people attempt to draw with Clarice Starling (clearly the template Perkins was working from). This isn’t incidental, admittedly - it’s all part of the plot’s cruel jape, which crystalizes in the third act… but feels dramatically limiting all the same. It’s hardly a spoiler to reveal that the titular villain is played by Nicolas Cage and one’s tolerance for the inherent campiness of his performance will definitely vary. The fact Cage is being hailed as a revelation is a puzzler; as a performer, he’s never been shy about indulging his inner-freak. With his pale, puffy visage and simpering, high-pitched voice, he’s wholly committed… but there’s also something a bit arbitrary about his choices, as if they’re informed by random whimsy more than anything (it’s not unlike Johnny Depp’s increasingly diminished collaborations with Tim Burton, who began to let him operate virtually unchecked). For all that, Longlegs still manages to strike a nerve. It permeates the skin and lingers there, slightly necrotic. Perkins doesn’t really sweat the wonky internal logic too much - his is a movie that’s more about basking in its own elliptically bleak vibes (Alicia Witt, long removed from her own teen horror days, makes an indelible impression as Lee’s religious-minded mother, clinging to her faith in what feels like a punishingly Godless world). One wishes Perkins were a little more disciplined in his approach; the storytelling can be casually sloppy. But Longlegs, oddly enough, feels like a movie that may get its hooks in deeper with repeat viewings. Only time will tell.  Cuckoo offers truth in advertising, because German director Tilman Singer’s sophomore feature is definitely horror moviemaking at its most rapturously bonkers. Euphoria’s Hunter Schafer stars as Gretchen, a teenager forced to join her semi-estranged father (Martin Csokas), indifferent stepmother (Jessica Henwick, disappointingly wasted), and her mute half-sister in the Bavarian Alps following her mother’s death. They arrive at a resort overseen by the enigmatic Herr König (Dan Stevens), where Gretchen takes a part-time job at the front desk and soon finds herself privy to bizarre happenings… such as vomiting guests, a mysterious hooded woman who lurks in the neighboring woods like some nightmarish, bled-together blend of De Palma and Cronenberg and Nicolas Roeg, and both seizures and apparent time loops induced by some sort of reverberating shriek. Revealing how all this knits together would, of course, be criminal… suffice it to say, the movie takes some big and seriously whacky creative swings. Who says there are no new ideas?
The talented Schafer feels destined to blaze a trail as a trans actress who isn’t restricted to playing trans characters. It’s a testament to her fearlessness - and Singer’s warped sense of humor - that she spends the majority of the film looking as if she ran smack into a brick wall…her face heavily bandaged and swollen like a catcher’s mitt. The lack of vanity (particularly for her first starring role) is delightfully refreshing. Stevens, meanwhile, continues to burnish his reputation as one of our most fiendishly warped character actors - it’s hard to remember when he was best known as the appreciably vanilla Cousin Matthew on Downton Abbey (or when his exit from the show felt like such an ill-advised betrayal). Between this film and Abigail (and, to a lesser extent, Godzilla x Kong), he’s already left an ineffaceable mark on 2024 (and given his accent kit a full-blown workout). One can argue that Cuckoo doesn’t entirely work - in fact, its script has a messy, staple gunned-together quality - yet it hardly matters when a film establishes a wavelength this weird, creepy, yet darkly funny. Singer (who showed initial promise with his 2018 debut Luz) demonstrates a bananas sense of showmanship during the climax… he juggles so many balls, more than a few are fumbled and hit the ground, but the sheer audacity is worth applauding all the same.
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8/7/2024 0 Comments Summer horror blowout (part 1): In a violent nature, the watchers, and A quiet place: Day One In a Violent Nature is the sort of movie whose premise feels commendably ingenious… until you actually stop and consider it for more than thirty seconds. The film functions as a standard slasher knockoff in the Friday the 13th vein, only in this case the camera remains purposely cemented to the story’s lumbering, implacable Jason Voorhees-esque antagonist at all times… from the moment his reanimated corpse claws its way out of the earth, following him from behind as he tromps methodically through the woods and eventually acquires a pair of dragging hooks and a vintage firefighter’s mask from the nearby park ranger’s office. At first, the approach feels thrillingly subversive (the sugar rush of the horror genre, after all, is that elusive sense of stumbling onto something creatively fresh), but reality quickly sets in - if you strip a horror film of any and all trace of character or suspense, what exactly are you left with? It’s to the movie’s credit that the end result isn’t as stultifying as it might have been. Director Chris Nash stages the film almost like a nature documentary, devoid of any sort of musical score, the drawn-out single takes achieving a soothing, almost hypnotic quality… reminiscent of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. But Nash doesn’t quite have a firm handle on the material. In a Violent Nature feels fundamentally at odds with itself, torn between its untextured yet high-minded sociological commentary and its deconstructionist approach to conventional slasher storytelling. It’s amusing that the film cultivates its own deliberately dopey lore in the narrative margins (the killer’s soul is tethered to a locket that’s swiped from his gravesite), largely conveyed through snatches of overheard dialogue… but its almost meditative regard for its central figure is undercut by the spectacularly graphic, borderline cartoonish manner with which he dispatches of the film’s forgettable cast. These kills (including one that’ll likely have gore junkies rhapsodizing for years) were clearly conceived to elicit a certain Pavlovian giddiness from seasoned horror fans. At any rate, the gimmick wears out its welcome long before the final frames (it’s hard to imagine a kill involving a log splitter feeling this tediously belabored - if I wasn’t ready to tap out then, I definitely was during the meandering climactic monologue… which feels a lot like a single-engine plane circling a dirt runway, unsure how to land). In a Violent Nature has a touch of ingenuity, and that’s to be applauded - but it doesn’t make the experience any less hollow.  Even by the indigestible standards of Hollywood nepotism, the meteoric rise of Ishana Night Shyamalan feels a bit, well… difficult to digest. Landing her first studio feature at the age of 23 (having honed her craft writing and directing on the Apple TV+ series Servant, which just so happened to be executive produced by her dad) undoubtedly feels like gravel in the eye for many an aspiring filmmaker. But this industry remains defiantly sink-or-swim and, unfortunately, Shyamalan’s debut The Watchers, which she adapted from the novel by A.M. Shine, mostly sinks. Initially, the way the story delves into Irish folklore feels promising. Dakota Fanning stars as Mina, a young woman driven to Ireland out of grief, who’s tasked with transporting a golden parrot she nicknames “Darwin” from Galway to Belfast. When her car breaks down less-than-fortuitously in the middle of the forest and night soon falls, she’s forced to take refuge in a single-room bunker… where the other inhabitants (including Olwen Fouéré and Barbarian’s Georgina Campbell) gravely instruct her to stand motionless before the mirrored window so the titular creatures can “observe” her. There are rules, you see - and breaking them would be inadvisable. Shyamalan clearly picked up a few tricks from her dad. She understands the value of a tantalizing plot hook, and demonstrates a solid enough grasp of mood and atmosphere. But like many of M. Night’s films, the setup is considerably stronger than the payoff. However, unlike, say, The Village - in which the fantastical was undercut by the mundane - The Watchers sees Shyamalan double down on the story’s supernatural implications… to the point of spiraling lunacy. Her still-budding screenwriting chops are increasingly exposed (we’re honestly supposed to buy that this group spends literal months inside the bunker and never once thinks to check underneath the rug?). Fanning is fine, but Fouéré is the real standout - with her piercing stare, slightly untamed, Targaryen-like silver hair, and aura of ethereal sagacity, she’s like something straight out of Celtic myth (actors from Ireland and the UK remain the most reliable defense against dubious dialogue and ham-fisted exposition). Her performance isn’t enough to salvage the movie - particularly during the rank nonsense of its third act - but Shyamalan has good casting instincts. Next time - and presumably there will be a next time - she should make sure there’s a script of corresponding quality.  At first glance, A Quiet Place: Day One has the acrid whiff of a cynical cash-in - an unnecessary prequel designed to milk some extra profit from John Krasinski’s popular sci-fi horror franchise before the third chapter eventually arrives. However, if that was the plan, the studio might have been better off hiring someone other than Pig’s Michael Sarnoski. This is one of those thrilling exceptions in which an indie auteur accepts a big Hollywood payday but effectively bends the project to his own artistic sensibilities, rather than submitting to the vulture-like whims of a production mandate that leave his creative bones picked clean.
The story takes place in New York, which is established from the outset as a sonic battleground (the film claims the city’s average decibel level is 90, the equivalent of a continuous human scream). Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) is a former poet, terminally ill with cancer and fairly embittered about the whole situation. Lured from her hospice facility to the city by the promise of pizza, she’s instead greeted by a shower of meteors that unleash vicious extraterrestrial creatures attracted to sound. It’s striking how indifferent Sarnoski appears to be to the trappings of conventional monster movies. He dutifully stages the requisite, nerve-fraying set pieces - which are given fresh dimensions by the urban landscape (the sight of the creatures cascading en masse down the sides of a glass skyscraper is terrifying) - but he’s clearly more invested in Sam and her support cat Frodo, who eventually cross paths with an English law student named Eric (played by Joseph Quinn of Stranger Things). What unfolds is a disarmingly sorrowful-yet-sweet meditation on mortality and making the most of what time you have left, the apocalyptic backdrop at times seeming almost incidental. Once again, it feels deeply exasperating that Nyong’o isn’t one of the biggest stars on the planet - like Sarnoski, she’s punching in a different weight class than a genre exercise of this nature typically requires. A Quiet Place: Day One still doesn’t feel altogether necessary, at least from a franchise perspective - it’s not like the story (concocted by Sarnoski and Krasinski) expands the nominal lore in any meaningful way. And those looking for summer escapism may not readily spark to the film’s existential approach. But this is purposeful horror moviemaking that embraces creative risk. Unlike In a Violent Nature and The Watchers, you can’t say its director doesn’t know exactly what he’s trying to accomplish. |
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