Horror movies! Also, if you're interested, my wife and I have a new podcast episode out, this time about Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.
Movies
Exactly the movie, no more, no less, you would imagine if I told you to picture the intersection of The Stepford Wives and the first act of The Matrix. There are very few—if any—surprises here if you have seen the right antecedent movies, and given that those antecedents are super popular, you probably have seen them. Obviously the problem with so openly aping such famous movies is that you're inviting comparison, and there's nothing about this movie that's better or even just more interesting than the movies it calls to mind. Nonetheless, it's not bad, assuming you aren't expecting it to be great. Olivia Wilde continues to be a director with an eye for striking imagery, even if she still doesn't let herself (isn't allowed?) to let that instinct fully flourish into something more striking; the production design, especially the costuming, is very good; Florence Pugh is, per usual, selling the crap out of her performance and probably carrying the whole movie in terms of acting, but the rest of the cast is no slouch either—I'm not sure what I was expecting out of Harry Styles, but he's good at playing a dude who is clean-cut and handsome enough to scan as vaguely menacing (though I do wonder what welcome chaos the originally planned Shia LaBeouf casting would have brought). It's just weird to see this level of prestige and budget brought to the kind of movie that probably would have gotten like $4 million and a late-January release like fifteen years ago. Grade: B-
A "happily married" dude is coerced (maybe?) into sex with two strangers, who then spend the rest of the film refusing to leave his house, which they are intent on trashing. I wish I had written this review before watching the 1977 film it's based on, because I'm already forgetting how I felt about this without the '70s context. But anyway, I guess when I get to Death Game I'll talk about the rest, but what stands out as distinct about Eli Roth's remake is the absolutely sublime Keanu Reeves performance. Like the other Roth films I've seen, the film style of this movie feels premeditated and precise to an extreme degree, this time to a fault that undermines the chaos of the two female leads (this is my experience with the '70s one bleeding in already, sorry). But as a counterpoint, the technique of Keanu's acting here is really wacky in a way that is kinda surreal and unpredictable. Whether or not this is an intended effect I have no idea, but the feeling I got was that as Keanu's character has more and more of his "good guy dad" persona stripped from him by the physical and psychological humiliation he experiences, the further out of Keanu's acting range he goes, to the point where by the time he's giving the absolutely demented "free pizza" monologue, he's in some really dicey territory in terms of the actor's ability to even match what the movie is asking of him, which is bizarrely compelling in the context of a movie that is very much about taking a genteel presentation of masculinity and baiting it further and further outside of its self-satisfaction until it transforms into something feral and raw but also deeply silly and humiliating. I don't feel like it's a coincidence that this is the funniest movie I've seen from Roth, and more so than anything else of his I'm familiar with, this one has this really impish sensibility that is constantly tip-toeing around boundaries before bludgeoning those boundaries completely all at once, and that centerpiece Keanu performance feels key to that sensibility. This movie is a perfect encapsulation of one of the things people find so infuriating about Roth, i.e. the way it dances around big political topics (in this case, a bevvy of issues regarding gender, sex, age, and power) while defying clean, safe thematic readings outside of its obvious provocations—its '70s predecessor is a lot clearer in intention, and it's a fascinating effect that Roth is able to stay almost entirely faithful to the plot of the original while muddying the waters considerably in terms of what it actually means. There's at least a 50% chance that this movie really is as gross as it seems to want to bait us into thinking it is, but also, I thought it was very funny, so I dunno what to do with that. Grade: B
A completely deranged movie on virtually every level. I'm not sure it's fair to Eli Roth to say that his remake is weaker for not having captured the pure chaotic spirit embodied by this film, because that clearly wasn't what he was after (maintaining the dirtbag ethos of grindhouse films while replacing their taped-together cheapness with a clean precision impossible in an earlier era seems to be a big part of Roth's thing, and godspeed to him on that quest, I suppose). But of the two films, this one is absolutely the superior one thanks to the ramshackle energy. Part of this seems like a happy accident of the era and the occasion of its production—as I understand it, this was stitched together from a reportedly unpleasant shoot in which nobody got along and which was plagued by money issues, and the result is a film that takes the typical amateurish messiness of exploitation films and, probably out of necessity, cranks it up to a ludicrous degree to the point of accidental psychedelia. Out of that haze come screaming the two central performances by Sondra Locke and Colleen Camp, and what proceeds from there is a bewildering kaleidoscope of extreme human behavior that feels almost otherworldly as it dementedly mixes camp with sadism. Even if Ana de Armas and Lorenza Izzo had had any interest and/or ability in recreating that tone in Roth's remake (as they are, their performances are merely serviceable, probably the biggest liability in the remake), I can't imagine that working well within Roth's smirking, detached mode, and what Camp and Locke achieve here feels like something that could only be achieved within the specific era of smut/fringe cinema that birthed this film. Both Roth's film and this original are playing with the idoms of porn from their respective eras, and while there's something to be said for the way Roth takes a porn premise and uses Keanu's goofy mannerisms to explore the shame and puritanical impulses of a modern masculinity that nonetheless is willing to indulge in erotic play, this movie's invocation of porn feels way more productive in the end, ironically because of the lack of Keanu (the one element of the remake that is unequivocally better than this version). Seymour Cassel's character here is such a nonentity, both as written and as performed, and in that relative emptiness, it's much clearer that this dude's self-satisfaction in his station in life is a character flaw, an icky dude who has won the game of life (probably at the expense of others) to such an extent that he has lost all understanding of the precarity that exists in most people's lives, and as such, the Bugs-Bunny-esque madness visited upon him by Camp and Locke has the feeling of an uprising, a kind of youth in revolt picture, a vestige of '60s counterculture cinema only with the perspective flipped, and the only way this gross man can interpret a youth revolt is through porn and the sexual pleasure it can bring to him. I saw a bunch of people comparing this to the Czech New Wave film Daisies, and before I watched it, I felt like that had to be a stretch, but I'm shocked to report that it's really not a stretch at all. We gotta get Eli Roth to watch some Věra Chytilová. Grade: A-
I haven't seen a lot of John Woo movies, but I do know that I'm supposed to get swept up in the melodrama. That didn't happen to me here; the friendship (romance?) between the two cops was fun enough, but I mostly felt distant from the movie when guns weren't blazing, which is probably a Me Problem. When the guns are blazing, though, this is of course a blast, and once they get to the hospital, this movie is basically nonstop blazing guns. This John Woo guy knows how to film gunplay, huh? Grade: B+
This movie's a lot of fun and much more patient in doling out the camp than I was expecting. Honestly, though, as good as the doll effects are, the best part is when an unattended six-year-old kid is able to skip school by getting on a train that takes him from his bougie neighborhood to some bombed-out hive of villainy across town, which is really the kind of future us transit advocates dream about for American cities. Grade: B+
About as much fun as the first one, even if it sweats just a little bit to try to reset with a new family at the beginning of the movie. The foster care angle pays off pretty well, though, if only for the addition of Kyle and her very sweet dynamic with Andy, and the movie in general does a great job of basically revisiting the most memorable beats of the original, including Andy almost taking the rap for Chucky's mayhem, without it ever feeling stale. The finale at the factory is pretty cool, too, and I like that it gives the kids the tools to dispatch of Chucky in some fun, inventive ways (multiple times, of course, since "He's dead—no wait, he's back again!" fakeouts seem to be a staple of this series). It makes sense that the series eventually juked into kookier territory, though, because I'm not sure how much more juice this formula has. Grade: B+
When everybody says that Rob Zombie based his career on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I guess I thought they meant the first one, but this one is definitely the germ of stuff like The House of 1,000 Corpses. Cranks up the waking nightmare element of the first movie until it wraps around to being overtly goofy but also still kinda scary. Weird, bonkers stuff that, aside from the central family, only feels of a piece with its predecessor by virtue of having this ineffable thisness about it that is hard to describe but nonetheless makes it feel weighty and sinewy in a way that is greater than the sum of its parts. Grade: A-
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