Column, Midwest Film Journal

No Sleep October: Sinister

Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

At this point, I think it’s a bit of an understatement to say that COVID-19 screwed a lot of things up. Somewhere far down that list is the fact that Host, the screenlife Shudder exclusive that takes place during quarantine, knocked 2012’s Sinister off as the “scariest movie of all time”, according to Science of Scare. The BroadBandChoices project, which measured heart rate changes in 250 audience members during 40 renowned horror movies, previously crowned Sinister above modern favorites like Insidious and The Conjuring for the top spot. While any such study is a bit silly and doesn’t quite measure exactly what makes a movie “scary”, it’s no fluke that such a terrific horror entry would top the list.

Directed and co-written by Scott Derrickson, Sinister stars Ethan Hawke as true-crime writer Ellison Oswalt, whose pulpy sagas like Kentucky Blood and Cold Diner Morning have scored him national attention. Desperate for another hit, he moves his wife Tracy (Juliet Rylance) and their kids Ashley (Clare Foley) and Trevor (Michael D’Addario) to a Pennsylvania home where a family was murdered nearby. Early in his research for the book, he happens upon a trove of Super 8 reels stashed away in the otherwise vacant attic and fires up his film projector to investigate. What he finds is a series of gruesome “home movies” where a happy family is murdered in different ways during each film. Further sleuthing allows Ellison to conclude that something supernatural (and perhaps…sinister…?) binds the footage of each of these accounts together.

With co-writer C. Robert Cargill, Derrickson sets up a properly compelling foundation around a man who’s willing to put his wife and children at risk just for another round of success. It’s a potentially difficult protagonist to pull off but Hawke, one of the most amiable actors around, makes us believe in Ellison’s drive and struggle to taste the spoils of victory one more time. Tracy throws everything she has into her support of him and his work — “when you’re happy, we’re all happy,” she acknowledges — but makes no secret that she’s at her wit’s end with his selfish determination. We learn that the fallout from his previous book made them pariahs in the town where they previously resided, a fate that Tracy understandably can’t bear to relive.

It’s a believable setup of pressure and expectation that puts Ellison in a compromised position even before the first frames of the formidable films flicker. With seemingly innocuous titles like “Pool Party ‘66” and “Sleepy Time ‘98”, it doesn’t take long for their opening scenes of familial bliss to turn grisly in a hurry. Derrickson adds a nice directorial touch in the form of a progression (or regression, of sorts) of Ellison’s dependency on alcohol to cope with the violence he observes in his line of work. By the time he watches the second movie, he breaks out the whiskey. By the third home movie, gentleman’s on-the-rocks sips have devolved to desperate straight-up guzzles. By the fourth, the rocks glass is out of the equation entirely and it’s just Ellison vs. the bottle.

It’s not hard to see why. The Super 8 segments are masterfully crafted bits of nightmare fuel — “Lawn Work ‘86” is my personal favorite — scored to supremely unsettling music from composer Christopher Norr. None of the home movies have audible dialogue but Norr’s warbly pianos and muted guitars do all the talking that’s necessary. The terrifying sequences, which were shot using real Super 8 cameras and film stock, have a grimy quality to them that chillingly recalls the aesthetic of actual snuff films. The single point light source limits our perspective and forces urgency on the already horrible images, drawing our focus away from who is shooting these awful films and why. The same morbid curiosity that drives audiences to slasher movies time and time again will keep them glued to the screen during these stretches of Sinister.

The other sections of spookiness in the film are a bit more rote but still quite effective, mainly comprised of Ellison chasing after bumps in the night while having too much pride to turn some damn lights on. The sources of noise turn out to be traceable to tangible objects at first before eventually giving way to apparitions that pop up with increased frequency. These ghosts could probably just float around casually but let’s face it: it’s much more fun when their presence is a bit more demonstrative. The film’s finest jump scare, which caused my wife to make a terrified noise so embarrassing that she still remembers it almost 10 years after we first saw the film in theaters, occurs at such a moment.

Grossing $87 million against its budget of $3 million (a proud Blumhouse tradition), Sinister went on to generate an inevitable sequel that doubles down on its ultimate baddie much in the way the Cars franchise went all-in on Larry the Cable Guy for Cars 2. Without giving too much away, the monster in Sinister is frightening in his own right but it’s the atmosphere and build-up that ultimately make his presence menacing. In the sequel, he looks like someone cosplaying as a member of Slipknot. The focus on the backstories of the ghostly children doesn’t give the film extra depth either; it just drags everything down. Sinister II isn’t the first horror sequel to miss the boat when it comes to what made its predecessor work so well but its failings may actually make the original’s successes even more pronounced by comparison.

After directing another horror film with 2014’s Deliver Us from Evil, Derrickson got sucked into the MCU to helm a little indie called Doctor Strange, whose recently-delayed sequel will arrive next Spring. Fellow horror director Sam Raimi taking the reins on that franchise freed Derrickson to team up again with Cargill and Hawke for The Black Phone, another supernatural chiller arriving next February. I’m doing my best to avoid trailers these days but on the strength of their work together on Sinister along with the news that Hawke will be portraying the villain instead of the hero, I’m in line for it already. No matter how that turns out, I’ll always have this 2012 classic to revisit each year when the leaves start trembling and darkness creeps up a little earlier every night.

Reel Views, Review

Halloween Kills

All things considered, horror movies aren’t dissimilar from comedies. Both benefit greatly from the element of surprise and suffer most when redundancy renders story beats predictable. One has setups and punchlines; the other has tension and release. Scary movies and funny movies tend to perform better in movie theaters than their dramatic counterparts, most likely due to their ability to draw spontaneous reactions from a crowd. For the same reason you don’t see many consistently great comedy trilogies, outstanding horror triptychs aren’t very common either and the latest Halloween entry Halloween Kills is further evidence of why that’s the case. It’s a middling middle chapter of a three-part saga that is still struggling to find purpose outside of furthering a franchise fronted by an unstoppable force.

Those who have yet to watch 2018’s Halloween or haven’t rewatched it since its initial release would do well to remedy that before going into Halloween Kills, as it picks up the action right after its predecessor. Michael Myers survivor Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is being rushed to the hospital by daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) as the masked murderer stays trapped in her burning home. Unfortunately, firefighters didn’t get the memo about basement-bound Michael and are taken out one by one after unwittingly freeing him. After hearing the news of Michael’s escape, town local Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall) rounds up a posse to put an end to Michael’s 40-year reign of terror.

Fans of the Halloween franchise will recognize the setup of Halloween Kills mirrors the now incontinuitous Halloween II, which also takes place primarily in a hospital where an injured Laurie Strode hides from Michael Myers. However, the pace and atmosphere of the two movies are vastly different. Eschewing the cat-and-mouse tactics of that 1981 sequel, this new film favors a much more chaotic and vicious methodology when deploying its narrative. The inevitable slayings at the hands of Myers are curiously absent of the kind of suspense that John Carpenter built up so flawlessly in the original 1978 Halloween. Instead, returning director and co-writer David Gordon Green seems especially fixated on the bone-crunching and blood-squelching brutality exhibited towards Myers’ victims.

Of course, this is a slasher movie and I can’t exactly begrudge its impulses to stack up bodies, especially when some of Myers’ murders are admittedly well-staged and well-lit. Additionally, the camerawork and editing during the film’s climax are more compelling than most of the aesthetic choices Green made previously in 2018’s Halloween. Another welcome diversion that he makes to the traditional formula for this series is the exploration of themes like herd mentality and the insatiable desire for revenge. When Tommy Doyle leads an angry mob chanting “evil dies tonight!” past security guards protecting the hospital, its real-life parallels are truly scarier than anything in this film.

When Green conceived of this new trilogy (which will “conclude” with Halloween Ends next October) with co-writer Danny McBride, he seemed to have a beginning and end in mind but not quite as much for the middle. Asking myself the questions “where is Michael and why?” at various times during the movie, I struggled to produce satisfactory answers. If Michael’s sole motivating force is to kill Laurie Strode, as it would seem to be, then this film is nothing more than a collection of particularly gruesome detours. Perhaps Green and company will have something more profound to say about Myers and Strode in their final chapter but until then, Halloween Kills will have to suffice as a halfway decent time-killer during the spookiest of seasons.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters and streaming on HBO Max is Dune, a sci-fi epic starring Timothée Chalamet and Rebecca Ferguson about the son of a noble family entrusted with the protection of the most valuable asset and most vital element in the galaxy.
Coming exclusively to theaters is Ron’s Gone Wrong, an animated comedy starring Zach Galifianakis and Jack Dylan Grazer about an awkward middle-schooler and his new robot friend whose malfunctions send them on a journey of self-discovery in the digital age.
Streaming on Netflix is Night Teeth, a horror thriller starring Megan Fox and Sydney Sweeney about a Los Angeles chauffeur who picks up two mysterious young women for a night of party-hopping but soon discovers that they’re actually centuries-old vampires.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

No Time To Die

After a year and a half of delays, Bond is finally back. No Time to Die is the 25th movie in the James Bond series but most notably, it’s the fifth and final film for Daniel Craig since his first outing in 2006 with the franchise-best Casino Royale. Each Bond entry since then has built on top of the previous one, an attempt at serialization that makes the Craig era unique in the franchise’s history and gives this final film even more dramatic weight than it would have otherwise. In hindsight, its predecessor Spectre got caught up in the same trap that Warner Bros did with Justice League in trying to match the intertextuality of the ever-elusive Marvel Cinematic Universe without organically leading up to the climax. No Time to Die gets bogged down with canonical calculations but works best as a standalone piece of popcorn cinema.

An extended cold open reacquaints us with Bond and Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) as their picturesque Italian vacation is violently cut short by Spectre assassins. Feeling that Swann must have betrayed him by tipping them off, Bond sends her away and retires from MI6 to Jamaica, only to be pulled back in five years later at the appearance of his old CIA buddy Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright). He’s looking for a scientist who was kidnapped in the process of building a highly-targeted bioweapon and Bond suspects that his nemesis Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) is behind the plot. Aiding Bond in his mission are old MI6 colleagues M (Ralph Fiennes) and Q (Ben Whishaw), alongside Nomi (Lashana Lynch), a new agent who undertook Bond’s 007 alias after his retirement.

When No Time To Die‘s release was pushed last year from April all the way to November, it was thought that it was due to anticipation that movie theaters would close due to the pandemic. While that is still most likely the case, part of me wonders if the plot of the movie, which hinges on an invisible infectious virus, was one of the reasons behind the film’s initial delay. As the title suggests, time has proven to be the film’s greatest enemy; fittingly, “my timing” is a punchline during an exchange between Bond and Swann. But timing is one thing and planning is another and looking back on this five film arc, it’s clear MGM could have planned things a bit better. Blofeld being unveiled as the big baddie in Spectre was premature and if development had gone differently, No Time To Die could have served as a much better precursor to Spectre.

For those who don’t care about these interwoven plot threads and just want a fun blockbuster to herald the return of the theatrical experience, the film succeeds on delivering on that promise. Much of the marketing has highlighted the action in Italy during the enjoyable, albeit overly long, prologue but there are several other setpieces that match its quality. A detour in Cuba reunites Craig with his Knives Out co-star Ana de Armas, who charms as an inexperienced CIA agent who gains experience by kicking henchmen in the face with high heels. A foggy jungle-set sequence in Norway shows an outgunned Bond using field smarts to fend off a caravan of assassins. But the most visceral action scene is saved for the third act, in which director Cary Joji Fukunaga flexes the one-take muscles he built during the first season of True Detective to satisfying effect.

While the quality of Bond films that Daniel Craig has starred in have been up and down, he’s given everything to this role and his dedication to the performances has never been in question. For a new generation of Bond fans, he has redefined who the character is and made it almost impossible to imagine someone else taking the reins from here on. Where the franchise goes from here will be the subject of thousands of think pieces and forum posts until MGM (which is, sadly, set to be acquired by Amazon) makes their next move but I’m looking forward to Craig’s post-Bond career. He did excellent work in films like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Logan Lucky even during his time as Bond. Whether you view it as a season finale or a standalone episode, No Time To Die has all the time in the world to entertain and inspire.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters and streaming on paid tiers of Peacock is Halloween Kills, a slasher sequel starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Judy Greer that follows the women in the Strode family as they defend themselves against the masked killer Michael Myers.
Premiering exclusively in theaters is The Last Duel, a historical drama starring Matt Damon and Adam Driver about a trial by combat ordered by King Charles VI in medieval France between a well-regarded knight and his squire.
Streaming on Apple TV+ is The Velvet Underground, a music documentary which explores the multiple threads that converged to bring together one of the most influential bands in rock and roll.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Podcast

Ep. #59 – No Time To Die

I’m joined by my friend Logan as we find some time to scrutinize No Time To Die, the latest in the long-standing James Bond film franchise. Then we talk over some new series that we’ve been streaming, including Only Murders In The Building, the comedic whodunnit series available on Hulu, and Midnight Mass, a horror miniseries available on Netflix. We also mention a video essay which makes the argument that The Rock is a secret James Bond movie. Find us on Facebook, Twitter and Letterboxd.

Reel Views, Review

The Guilty

It’s no secret that American remakes of foreign-language films often fall short of their predecessors. For every success like The Departed or The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, there seem to be a handful of duds like Downhill or The Grudge — both of which were released just last year — that get lost in translation. Based on the 2018 Danish thriller of the same name, The Guilty retains many of the plot points from the film that inspired it but amps up much of the understated tension that permeated the original. This formula could spell disaster for an adaptation but in this case, the result is a hot-blooded American companion piece to the cool and collected European original that is nearly as effective.

The plot centers around Joe Baylor (Jake Gyllenhaal), an overworked police officer working 911 dispatch who receives an especially distressing call at the end of his late-night shift. The voice on the other line is that of Emily (Riley Keough), whose hushed tone and coerced responses lead Joe to surmise that she’s being kidnapped. Outside of her name, phone number and a few clues regarding her situation, Joe isn’t able to get the details that he needs to intervene in a meaningful way. With what little information he’s able to gather from the call, Joe phones other police forces like his partner Rick (Eli Goree) and his sergeant Bill (Ethan Hawke) to help find Emily before it’s too late.

The man heading up directing duties for The Guilty is Antoine Fuqua, known for helming high-octane blockbusters like the deeply silly but shallowly enjoyable Infinite from earlier this year. Predictably, Fuqua amps up the drama and emotion from its source material but wisely retains its limited perspective. With a few minor exceptions, we never see outside of the dispatch building where Joe is trying to solve this pressing case, limited to just hearing the voices of the people with whom Joe is communicating over the phone. As handsome as Gyllenhaal may be, staring at him for 90 minutes could get stale after a while but Fuqua along with editor Jason Ballantine urgently piece together the right shots to command our attention.

One of the most reliable and compelling actors around, Gyllenhaal turns in another terrific performance as a broken hero who feels paralyzed behind a desk when he knows what he’s capable of doing in the field. His work is unmistakably angrier than that of Jakob Cedergren as the composed protagonist in the 2018 original but it suits the revised time and place of this American update. Surrounded by out-of-control wildfires in modern-day Los Angeles, Joe barks orders and lashes out at fellow police officers on the phone as a result of the helplessness he feels bearing down on him. The voice cast, which also includes Paul Dano and Gyllenhaal’s real-life brother-in-law Peter Sarsgaard, is uniformly great but Keough is especially captivating as the shaken woman that captures Joe’s unshaken attention.

With its narrative primarily being told through a series of phone conversations, The Guilty has parallels to the indie drama Locke, which is effectively a one-man-show as Tom Hardy is the only actor seen on screen. Both films ask much of their central performer, dedicating the vast majority of their screen time with the camera centered solely on them. While Hardy had even less room to move as his Locke was locked into the speaker phone in his car, Gyllenhaal is still flanked by 5 imposing computer monitors and an anxiety-inducing red light that indicates when the phone line is live. Though it contains a few creaky platitudes that Fuqua couldn’t seem to resist, The Guilty is a taut and electric thriller that will keep you on the line to the final frame.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming exclusively to theaters is No Time To Die, the 25th film in the James Bond franchise starring Daniel Craig and Rami Malek which finds the iconic spy getting back to work to locate a missing scientist and uncovering a sinister scheme in the process.
Streaming on Netflix is There’s Someone Inside Your House, a slasher movie starring Sydney Park and Théodore Pellerin about a group of high school students in small-town Nebraska who are terrorized by a masked assailant.
Continuing on Amazon Prime is the Welcome to the Blumhouse series, marked by a new quartet of anthology horror films centered around institutional horrors and personal phobias.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Dear Evan Hansen

Based on the Tony Award-winning smash of the same name, the new movie musical Dear Evan Hansen is an unmitigated disaster, a winding road of cringe-inducing character moments and baffling creative choices paved with good intentions all the way along. After striking out fantastically with the tragically misconceived Cats in 2019, Universal Pictures tries and fails again to translate a Broadway favorite to the big screen. If their goal is to make the division between musical theater geeks and the uninitiated even larger than it already is, then they’re succeeding better than any other major studio at the moment. This is a film that takes on tough and timely themes like teen suicide, mental health and social media but comes up with bad takes on nearly all of the subjects that it covers.

Reprising the eponymous role he created on-stage starting in 2015, Ben Platt plays a troubled high school student whose anxiety and depression stifle his ability to create meaningful friendships. On the advice of his therapist, he writes notes to himself for motivation to get through the day. One such letter ends up in the hands of Connor Murphy (Colton Ryan), a brusque classmate who is incensed by the mention of his sister — and Evan’s secret crush — Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever) in the note. A misunderstanding begins when Connor’s parents Cynthia (Amy Adams) and Danny (Danny Pino) approach Evan with the note, thinking he wrote it to Connor, who took his own life just days afterwards. Instead of clearing up said misunderstanding, Evan perpetuates the lie and insinuates himself into the grieving family, weaving tales through song of moments that never occurred between Connor and himself.

This premise may seem shockingly cold-hearted and in devastatingly poor taste — don’t worry, it is — but what makes Dear Evan Hansen so despicable is how it expands and doubles-down on its loathsome setup. First, we’re to believe that Evan doesn’t clear up the misconception about the intended recipient of the note and his relationship with Connor because social anxiety kicks in when the Murphys meet with him about it. As someone who has struggled mightily with mental health over the past two years, I’m completely sympathetic to those who battle these issues every day of their lives. However, I also believe that even someone who suffers from a particularly profound case of Social Anxiety Disorder would pump the brakes on this mix-up before a sitcom-style snowball effect would start up.

In addition to deceiving the Murphys, Evan also involves a tenacious classmate who is also battling depression played by Amandla Stenberg, the film’s sole highlight. She proposes The Connor Project, a crowdfunding effort to preserve the memory of their fallen classmate and reopen an orchard where Evan claims to have spent many an afternoon with Connor. Where director Stephen Chbosky and writer Steven Levenson look to cut corners with their shallow protagonist when it comes to visibility into mental health, Stenberg makes up ground with her authentic portrayal of a teen doing her best to overcome. I would have much rather seen a movie centered around her character for many reasons, not least of which being the good it could have done in reducing the stigma of mood disorders among the black community.

But instead, we’re forced to endure a duplicitous creep belt out song after song about his fake friendship while the Likes and Shares inevitably rack up on social media platforms. It’s utterly inexplicable to me that composers Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who contributed to the miraculous La La Land, could come up with music as cloying and uninspired as this. Perhaps the best of the musical numbers were left on the stage but the ones in this film have the phoniness of bad contemporary Christian music. Only one sequence, set to “Sincerely, Me”, manages to do anything meaningful with the cinematic form but it’s still mired in the movie’s icky subtext of exploitation and deceit. Don’t be thrown by its pretty packaging; Dear Evan Hansen deserves to be marked “return to sender”.

Score – 1/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing only in theaters is Venom: Let There Be Carnage, a Sony Spider-Man Universe sequel starring Tom Hardy and Woody Harrelson which finds the titular antihero squaring off against a new alien symbiote.
Opening in theaters and streaming on HBO Max is The Many Saints of Newark, a crime epic starring Michael Gandolfini and Leslie Odom Jr. which depicts the days of the infamous Tony Soprano in his youth.
Premiering on Netflix is The Guilty, an adaptation of a Danish thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Ethan Hawke about a 911 dispatcher who receives an emergency phone call from a kidnapped woman.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

The Eyes of Tammy Faye

Like its subject, The Eyes of Tammy Faye is a bit difficult to entirely figure out. It’s a biopic based on a documentary that came out over 20 years ago, which does generate a new wave of sympathy for the late Tammy Faye Bakker but seems more than a little late to the party in doing so. Neither hagiography nor hatchet job, the film also can’t be described as a warts and all account of how she and husband Jim Bakker rose to prominence and fell from grace during the 1970s and 1980s. At times, the movie threatens to spin out of control with montages that condense far too much information but with a 126-minute runtime, it ultimately doesn’t seem to be in too much of a rush either. The one thing that’s clear is that Jessica Chastain puts everything she has into the lead role and gives the project the sense of purpose that it needs.

After a brief prologue set in the mid-90s, we travel back to mid-50s Minnesota, where Tammy Faye was raised to be God-fearing and proper by her stern mother (Cherry Jones). This upbringing later leads her to North Central Bible College in 1960, where she meets the handsome and charismatic Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield). Smitten with one another, they get hitched and drop out of school to spread the word of the Lord on the road, eventually crossing paths with televangelist Pat Robertson (Gabriel Olds). Working under him at his Christian Broadcasting Network, the Bakkers form their own channel called PTL and reign supreme in the televangelist market until sexual misconduct and fraud allegations bring their operation to a halt.

Director Michael Showalter made quite an impression with his excellent directorial debut The Big Sick in 2017 but his two films since then don’t quite transcend their respective genres. The direct-to-Netflix The Lovebirds was a solid base hit of a romantic comedy and The Eyes of Tammy Faye fits the same descriptor in biopic form. It hits many of the familiar beats, from early childhood to young love, from the soaring heights of success to the agonizing depths of failure. The overall shape of this narrative is nothing you haven’t seen a thousand times before and it’s a bit of a disappointment that Showalter doesn’t try a bit harder to shake things up. Aside from a few match cuts that generate some of the film’s best punchlines, it’s hard to see his artistry come through in the way the story is told.

Chastain, on the other hand, has an abundance of personality and perspective that come through in yet another terrific performance in her already laudable career. Tammy Faye Bakker was a larger than life figure and while Chastain wisely embraces the traits that the public knew best, she goes deeper to suggest desires and dreams that the cameras never captured. While it takes a bit of time for Jim to reveal his true colors as a cheat and a huckster, Tammy Faye ultimately comes across as a decent person whose enormous need for love and attention led to unprecedented audience sizes. I saw a good bit of Dolly Parton in Chastain’s performance, someone who also feels deeply, sings proudly and knows how to keep the public’s attention through the years.

A through line of the movie is Tammy Faye’s conversations with God throughout her life, growing more urgent and desperate the more dire her circumstances become. Prayer isn’t depicted very often in mainstream film, just as religion is typically relegated to faith-based movies that are released only to specific markets. The crisis of faith depicted in The Eyes of Tammy Faye isn’t the driving force of the plot but it’s a revealing track of character development that candidly reflects how beliefs can be shaken in trying times. When you strip away the layers of gaudy and gooey storytelling, there’s a more simple and moving story to be told that sadly feels the need to be done up to appeal to audiences.

Score – 3/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Playing only in theaters is Dear Evan Hansen, a musical starring Ben Platt and Amy Adams about a high school senior’s journey of self-discovery and acceptance following the suicide of a fellow classmate.
Streaming on Netflix is The Starling, a dramedy starring Melissa McCarthy and Chris O’Dowd about a married couple who suffer a hardship and find their way through it with the help of a bird nesting in their backyard.
Premiering on Amazon Prime is Birds of Paradise, a drama starring Kristine Froseth and Diana Silvers about two ballet dancers who find their friendship tested when they compete for a contract to join an elite academy in Paris.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Column, Midwest Film Journal

13 Fridays: Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives

Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

I don’t know much about the Friday the 13th series. I know the main character is Jason Voorhees, who wears a hockey mask while he hacks horny teens with a machete. I know “ki ki ki, ma ma ma” and that the camp where Jason was “born” is called Crystal Lake. I know that Jason’s mother (not Jason himself) being the killer in the first one has been an old chestnut of movie trivia geeks and the “Well, actually…” crowd alike in the decades since its release. I remember seeing Freddy vs. Jason when I was about 14 or 15 but I couldn’t tell you the outcome of their fight or much else about the movie, other than I thought the lead was pretty when I was a teenager. It’s with this baggage and/or lack of baggage that I proceeded to watch Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives.

The film opens, fittingly, on a dark and stormy night. Tommy Jarvis (Thom Mathews) has just been released from a mental institution and is headed to the grave of Jason Voorhees (C.J. Graham) with his friend Allen (Ron Palillo). Haunted by paranoid hallucinations centered around Voorhees for years, Jarvis intends to see Jason’s corpse in the hopes of finally putting his nightmares to rest. Things don’t go quite as planned. Trying to “kill” Jason once and for all, Tommy impulsively impales Jason’s lifeless body with a metal fence post. In a tragic twist of irony, a lightning bolt strikes the pole and reanimates Voorhees, not dissimilar from the way Dr. Frankenstein gives birth to his monster in Mary Shelley’s classic tale. Jason makes short work of Allen while Tommy gets away, dons his trusty hockey mask once again, and we’re off to the races.

It’s at this point that Jason Lives reveals its title card and with it, its ace in the hole: a cheeky sense of irreverence and metahumor to presumably shake up the series. Parodying the infamous and often skewered gun barrel sequence from the James Bond franchise, the frame narrows to that iconic circular shape while Jason makes his way to the center of the shot. Instead of shooting a gun at the camera like Bond, Voorhees chucks his signature machete at us instead, with blood running down the screen just as it does in the Bond movies. Taking this with the over-the-top opening, it’s clear that even for a slasher movie, Jason Lives isn’t interested in taking itself particularly seriously and is all the better for it.

Jason’s mission is pretty simple: go back to Camp Crystal Lake (renamed Camp Forest Green since Voorhees attended) and lay waste to the new crop of camp counselors who now work there. He doesn’t even make it to the campgrounds before taking out poor youngsters Darren and Lizabeth as they drive through the woods. “I’ve seen enough horror movies to know that any weirdo in a mask isn’t friendly,” Lizabeth whimpers before Darren unloads a series of seemingly useless bullets into Jason. Darren gets dispatched a bit quicker than Lizabeth, who hilariously tries to bribe the resurrected killer with a pocketful of $20 bills and a shiny AmEx card. It’s made clear that it’s going to be quite difficult, if not impossible, to take Jason out, but it would also be quite dull if no one tried.

Tommy tries to warn the local sheriff of Jason’s monstrous return, only to be thrown in a cell for his efforts. The sheriff’s daughter Megan (Jennifer Cooke) sticks around at the station long enough to hear Tommy’s warning and takes the threat more seriously when Darren and Lizabeth don’t report to camp. It’s not enough to stop a now superhumanly strong Jason from breaking up a game of paintball between 5 counselors, some of whom literally sport headbands that read “DEAD”, with more murder and mayhem. The final victim, whose face is slammed into a tree, leaves a bloody smiley face upon impact with Jason is reunited with his beloved weapon of choice: the machete.

If only this all could’ve been avoided. In a cutaway to a B-plot where the sheriff goes back to Jason’s grave site, a gravedigger laments “why’d they have to go and dig up Jason?” before addressing the audience with “some folks sure got a strange idea of entertainment!” Perhaps we do. But writer/director Tom McLoughlin reminds us why we keep coming back with strongly choreographed slayings shot handsomely courtesy of DP Jon Kranhouse. Consider the brilliant shot of Jason standing triumphantly atop an overturned RV with two fresh victims inside, with fire rising up below him and smoke billowing behind him. When Jason finally descends upon the campers, another outstanding shot frames his enormous figure as it enters a cabin against the rustling autumn tree branches.

The 80s was a time of excess and as such, a perfect breeding ground for the often excessive slasher genre. The soundtrack doesn’t let you forget it, pumping out multiple hair metal headbangers from artists like Felony and Alice Cooper, including the film’s theme “He’s Back (The Man Behind the Mask)”. Of course, we also get all of the loud 80s fashion trends and weird niche insults like “does he think I’m a farthead?” that could only live inside a movie from the 1980s. Oddly, the only place it doesn’t go overboard is in the nudity department. Sure, there’s sex but I don’t recall any toplessness or bottomlessness or any combination therein. I’m not complaining; just noting.

So, is Jason Lives a good movie? I have no idea. Did I have fun watching it? Absolutely. I’ve seen my fair share of slasher movies but not very many slasher sequels and it’s to this film’s credit that I felt right at home, even though I haven’t seen the first Friday the 13th in at least 15 years. I can’t imagine the movie reinvents the wheel in the context of the franchise but it seems to provide enough of the familiar while introducing some comedic elements that really liven things up. I can imagine it joining Halloween III: Season of the Witch and Fright Night in my lineup of schlocky spookfests to stream around Halloween each year.

Podcast

Ep. #58 – Malignant

I’m joined again by my lovely wife Aubree as we carve out some time for Malignant, the new over-the-top horror film from director James Wan. Then we recap some Sydney Sweeney-starring streaming selections, including The Voyeurs (streaming on Amazon Prime) and The White Lotus (entire season streaming on HBO Max). I also get briefly bummed about Pixies canceling their fall tour. Find us on Facebook, Twitter and Letterboxd.

Reel Views, Review

Malignant

As movie theaters around the country still struggle to replicate pre-pandemic numbers, the horror genre could ironically represent the light at the end of the tunnel. Recent offerings like Don’t Breathe 2 and Candyman both exceeded box office expectations relative to their modest budgets and it’s not hard to see why. Scary films have often appealed to younger crowds, who are the most likely to return to theaters despite lingering covid concerns. There’s also something about leaving the safety of one’s home to go into a darkened room with strangers and experience the unexpected and potentially terrifying together that streaming just can’t touch. After all, how scary can something be when you’re half-watching it behind your smartphone? I didn’t see the new horror movie Malignant in theaters but given these factors, I wish I had.

The film tells the story of Madison (Annabelle Wallis), a Seattle-based mother-to-be who is plagued by graphic visions of gruesome murders following an incident with her abusive husband Derek (Jake Abel). She observes these happenings as if she’s in the room when they take place, like a more visceral form of sleep paralysis amid waking nightmares. First, she sees Derek attacked in their kitchen, followed by a woman being abducted in the Seattle Underground. When Madison awakes, she’s terrified to learn that all of these disturbing premonitions are actually events that have already taken place while she was asleep. With more crime scenes piling up, Madison works with her sister Sydney (Maddie Hasson) and a beleaguered detective (George Young) to put a stop to the brutal violence.

Those worried about another rote scare fest should be heartened by the fact that Malignant is helmed by none other than James Wan, the mastermind behind the Insidious and Conjuring franchises. More pertinently, this is the man who made cars fall from the sky in Furious 7 and made a CGI octopus play drums in Aquaman, which mirrors the kind of devil-may-care attitude he brings to his return to the horror genre. Wan’s direction here is reminiscent of the over-the-top supernatural aesthetic pioneered by Evil Dead creator Sam Raimi, who sadly hasn’t made a horror film since 2009’s minor camp classic Drag Me to Hell. I was also reminded of the lesser-known, Ti West-directed The House of the Devil, which chugs along like a mild-mannered haunted house movie until its bombastic finale.

And boy, does Malignant ever have one of those itself. This is a film that dares you to solve what’s really going on in real time and if you’ve seen a horror movie in the past 50 years, there’s a good chance you’ll guess the broad strokes of what screenwriter Akela Cooper has cooked up. But the devil, as they say, is in the details and Wan saves the most outlandish reveals for the third act, paying off some clever bread crumbs of foreshadowing while taking things further than the Conjuring crowd may anticipate. In this way, Malignant has the most in common with another Wan feature that kicked off a mega franchise: Saw. He peppers in loads of visual cues to that surprise 2004 success, from moodily lit shots of decaying bricks to a skulking, trench coat-wearing killer who moves like the Jigsaw Killer from the Saw movies.

As distinct an impression as Malignant leaves in its final 30 minutes, I wish the film had been a bit lighter on its way there. Wan and his editor Kirk Morri could’ve cut off about 15 to 20 minutes from the runtime and I doubt much would have been missed. A movie like this really shouldn’t stick around much longer than it needs to, lest the audience give themselves time to subject the narrative to further scrutiny and uncover plot inconsistencies. There’s also heavy subject material at the beginning, involving miscarriages and child abuse, that is tonally inconsistent with the kind of campy conclusion that Wan is ultimately setting up. Malignant could have used a bit more of a surgical approach to carve out its scares but Wan proves that, even with blunt instruments, he can get the job done well.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters and on HBO Max is Cry Macho, a neo-Western starring Clint Eastwood and Dwight Yoakam about an ex-rodeo star who is hired by his former boss to kidnap his Mexican son and transport him to Texas.
Opening only in theaters is Copshop, an action thriller starring Gerard Butler and Frank Grillo about a wily con artist on the run from a lethal assassin who devises a scheme to hide out inside a small-town police station.
Streaming on Amazon Prime is Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, a coming-of-age musical starring Max Harwood and Sarah Lancashire about a teenager from Sheffield, England who aspires to be a drag queen.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

My thoughts on the movies