Hey, it's some spooky-feeling weather to match my spooky-oriented movie viewing!
Movies
A spectacularly outsized horror comedy with some serious fangs. In an attempt to prove she "has what it takes" to fulfill her ambitions to be promoted to the assistant manager of a regional bank branch, a woman decides to deny an extension on a frail old woman's mortgage, and then after the subsequent foreclosure kills the woman, our protagonist spends the rest of the movie being punished for her cruelty. True to form, Sam Raimi has a devious sense of slapstick (there's a literal falling anvil gag), and as a kind of counterpart to Evil Dead 2's obsession with the manipulation of Bruce Campbell's body, there's an obsession with bodily excrement here (often vomit) that's very physical but also kind of surreal—e.g. a nosebleed turns into a fire-hose of blood spurting from a nostril, or a burp released a fly from a mouth. But unlike Evil Dead, this body horror is less about existentially imprisoning the protagonist in her physical body than it is demonstrating the societal rot that her actions represent. Over and over again, excrement is flung at our protagonist until it's clear that it's just an extension of herself: she tries to re-frame her actions as a just response to torment, but by the movie's end (and particularly with the fake-out fairy tale ending), it's clear that she herself is the tormentor. The movie is complex in that it does a lot of work to show the systemic factors that put the protagonist in the position she's in: for example, the way that she, a low-ranking female employee, has to fight for a scrap of a promotion with a dude-bro new hire who is clearly less qualified than her while the bank itself uses both of their labor to make million-dollar deals is an obvious demonstration of how big institutions use false scarcity and baked-in sexism to pit against each other people who might otherwise cooperate and collaborate for mutual benefit. But the movie also makes of point of showing how when our protagonist is presented with a choice to either resist or reinforce this institution's power structure, she chooses to reinforce it, so in the logic of horror movies, she must be punished (and eventually, per the title, taken to Hell) for that, regardless of whatever justification she could give for her actions. It's a clever subversion of a typical horror premise that gives the film a deep mean stream that's tolerable (and even then, I'm not sure how I feel about the handling of our protagonist's body image issues) only because of how much of it is animated by righteous anger. Raimi's contempt for financial institutions, though present in something like the scene in Spider-Man 2 where the bank denies Aunt May her loan, has never been so fully articulated or acrimonious as it is here, and as such, it's probably Raimi's most overtly political film and an early example of Great Recession cinema in general. A funny, fierce, and fascinating film. Grade: B+
A solid little movie about finding companionship and meaning in old age. I'm not to that part of life yet, so maybe this is just some phony thing, but from the outside looking in, this seems exceptionally sweet and gently observed. Every actor in this movie is basically doing great, low-key work, though there's a plot development later in the film that feels more like Sam Elliott got busy and just couldn't finish the shoot, rather than the intense emotional turn it's meant to be, so it's not like the movie is perfect. But it's got good bones. Also, it's always good to see Rhea Perlman in something. Grade: B
Session 9 (2001)
Session 9 boasts a really terrific "set," i.e. the actual decommissioned Danvers asylum in Massachusetts, which was apparently not modified at all for the filming here. Otherwise, this movie doesn't really have a lot of offer. I found its cluttered, elliptical approach to psychological horror to be pretty tedious, and none of the characters feel like actual human beings we're supposed to be invested in—not always a problem in horror movies but is a major deal-breaker in this movie, where an investment in at least a couple characters' psyches is kind of central to the movie's project. The juxtaposition of early digital film with the crumbling institution makes for some interesting camerawork and atmospheres, but over the course of 90+ minutes, I need something more than that. Grade: C+
An utterly unhinged movie, but also kind of boring at times, especially in the opening sequences, where the movie seems to pay the most lip-service to a Victorian-novel-esque pacing and setup (the film is based on a notoriously awful novel by Bram Stoker, which I have not read). But when this movie throws off the shackles of good taste and plot cohesion, it becomes truly something to behold, especially in the dream sequences, when phallic and religious imagery combine into some striking sacrilege. It's also hilarious at points, too—there's one point where they play a record of a snake charmer, and it attracts a bunch of snakes as well as the snake lady villain, and the whole movie basically works on that kind of Looney Tunes logic. I just wish the whole movie were as fun as some of its parts. Grade: B-
An incredibly tight, Twilight-Zone-esque story about a guy who kills people and passes their clay-covered corpses off as fine art. This maybe takes some cheap shots at beat culture, but I dunno, I thought it was hilarious. Grade: A
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