"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Advancing the timeline 4 years to 1982, Black Phone 2 seems to pull its plot from various horror hits of the early 80s - there's a sleepaway camp, a snowbound mountain, and something evil can kill you in your dreams... so I liked to call it Black Phone on Elm Street. After the first film, I said I would have wanted more of Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), and that's what I got here. With the Grabber dead, the story turns to her (and her late mother's) prescient dream powers to expose more of the villain's crimes, use him as a dream demon, and craft a supernatural mystery for the kids to solve in a wintry Christian youth camp. There are some fun bits, though I often felt the script turned to melodrama and over-explained itself. Frequently felt like I was well ahead of the characters and that the mystery was pretty obvious. The Black Phone now-franchise still impresses with its sense of period, and director Scott Derrickson could have done worse than make a pilot for a paranormal-fighting YA show.
At home: Sally Hawkins, nooooo, why you so creepy??? Well, I love sally Hawkins in anything, and in Bring Her Back, she's just about the worst foster mom imaginable, a kind of Mike Leigh character if the improvs had gone off the rails, a woman who has lost her daughter and seems intent on keeping young, visually-impaired Piper (Sora Wong - she's great) for herself and prevent Piper's older brother Andy (Billy Barratt) from getting guardianship when he comes of age. Take out the supernatural doings at play and I would still have enjoyed this as a straight thriller about a master manipulator who understands the foster care system intimately and uses it to fulfill one's desires. It would still have been upsetting and fascinating. The fact that there IS something supernatural going on doesn't detract from it, however, and that something holds a lot of ambiguity that might make audiences rewatch several times to catch the clues or amend their theories. Not a bad place to leave it.
I'm rather unimpressed with 1953's The Maze, though I admit I've never seen that particular monster realized in a film before - not that that enhances the terror in any way. A still fairly well produced B-movie inhabited by big name lookalikes - Veronica Hurst is a ringer for Marilyn Monroe in the year Norma Jean blew up, can't be a coincidence - it's got a Gothic castle on the moors, a mysterious hedge maze, and things going bump in the night. Also, a weird twist. But does the Silver Age comics explanation at the end REALLY explain everything? I don't think it does! The mysterious deaths... the heir's accelerated aging... just the general attitude towards the creature... Nope, it really doesn't explain any of that. And that's where my disappointment lies, rather than any production values. Note that it's also an early 3D film, with all the artifacts that implies - things coming at camera, layered focuses... but what I'll remember most about the film's look is how much head room William Cameron Menzies (Things to Come) leaves in his shots. Was this also part of the 3D process? Or just something to give the film some added oddity?
Roger Corman's Frankenstein Unbound is also Brian Aldiss' Frankenstein Unbound, so Corman's last film before his death (15 years after his last effort) has some strong literary underpinnings. From there, he also guided the adaptation to make something much more palatable to audiences than Aldiss' meta-textual fable, better explained characters' motivations, and so on. I quite liked the result. This is also Corman with a fair budget - nice locations and sci-fi matte shots, plenty of imagination, and a great cast. John Hurt is a scientist who accidentally creates a rift in space-time and ends up near Mary Shelley's villa that fateful summer. He's shocked to meet a real-life Dr. Frankenstein ( Raúl Juliá, who I just wanted more of) and his monster (who could have walked out of a Buffy episode a decade later) and after a girl is blamed for its murders, endeavours to stop them. I remain unconvinced by Bridget Fonda's libertine Mary, and given how much she knows of what's happening, she intuits an awful lot (though Corman proposes a possible bootstrap paradox). The film is WILD, with talking cars, sexy poets, and postapocalyptic landscapes, and quite cool as a result. Hurt realizes he's a modern (well, future) day Frankenstein himself and seeks to atone for his own trespass in God's domain, and I feel like he has enough of a literary transformation there to pay tribute to the novel's.
The Beast of Gevaudan is a famous, werewolf-adjacent, French legend, and Le Pacte des loups (Brotherhood of the Wolf) takes it into unusual territory (some of it political). But I now also understand why the werewolf-centric Doctor Who episode - "Tooth and Claw" - had acrobatic fighting monks. It was clearly referencing this film from five years earlier. It's, in fact, VERY 2001, with shoehorned martial arts (after The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, there was a quick fad), ropy CG, and frequent speed changes. It makes the action somewhat dated, but otherwise, I quite like this historical monster movie, shot as a lush epic, and taking various turns one wouldn't expect. Being set in the shadow of a looming Révolution opens the door to courtly intrigue and weird conspiracies, and though quickly drawn, the leads - a brawny naturalist and his Native Canadian partner - are engaging as they explore this mysterious rural province. Everyone's talking about Monica Bellucci's landscaping, and well they should (that sounds dirtier than I meant it, sorry).
A study in conspiracy theory addiction, Something in the Dirt has co-directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead as new neighbors discovering what they initially think is a ghost (but could be aliens or something else) in their rundown building and think maybe it could be their meal ticket if they made a documentary about it. What we see is partly that documentary, partly reality, unless it isn't, but part of the fun is drawing multiple interpretations from it. On the surface, it seems to be in the same world of strange anomalies as Benson and Moorhead's Resolution and The Endless. But there are hints that one character may be manipulating the other from the off, and documentary "re-creations" could be lying to us. It largely spoke to me as a parody of conspiracy docu-thrillers like Holy Blood, Holy Grail (they reference Dan Brown who poached a lot from that book for The Da Vinci Code), with investigators jumping to conclusions, losing the evidence they claim to have, and moving from coincidence to coincidence as if these were reasonable "leads". Where it becomes parody is in the way the guys jump from theory to theory, but it also works dramatically as the two men's mistrust of reality is fuelled by a mistrust for each other. Ironically, if dubious misdeeds can be explained away as innocuous, why can't the strange coincidences that surround their city block? Throw on a neat layer tying one character to gravity (ever falling) and the other to electromagnetism (invisibly manipulating) - the two forces seemingly at play - and you have quite the clever movie.
Even if it's a lot of fun, Shadow in the Cloud never settles into a proper tone, so I can't give it my full-throated support. Still a lot of fun though... It's World War II, the Pacific Theater, Flight Officer Chloë Grace Moretz boards a bomber with a confidential "package", is immediately treated abominably by the crew, thrown into a turret for safekeeping, and... is attacked by a veritable "gremlin". That's your hook, and honestly, I would have enjoyed this movie even without the monster (dogfighting with her in there, etc.) and without the twists to come which is where they start to lose me. In the melodramatic reveals. THEN, we have some action bits that are absolutely RIDICULOUS and you either accept them and have a laugh, or you tap out in disgust. I decided to go with the former. Those sequences may be silly, but they're excitingly vertiginous and pretty satisfying. And though I resented the melodrama, it does give a metaphorical sheen to the monster and what's personally at stake for Moretz's character. The movie also wants to be a tribute to the era's female pilots and I think that's a cool thing in and of itself. The year was 2020, but Chloë Grace Moretz was more Kick-Ass than ever.
Robina Rose's NIghtshift gives me big Chantal Ackerman vibes, or perhaps the small London hotel, with people walking past cameras with fixed positions reminds me of the Hotel Monterey, while the desk clerk and her chores evoke Jeanne Dielman. Pamela Rooke here looks like a fortune-reading automaton in a cabinet, mechanically going through a night at the Portobello Hotel, and almost making us believe, in the final moments, that we were watching some grand illusion. But no, despite some bizarre moments, especially when we shockingly leave the lobby to look inside the rooms, we're in a dreamy realism. The film captures the night shift in the service industry, with its forgettable intersections with random people's lives, active in the evening, and the tedium of keeping watch once everyone has gone to bed. Which all sounds pretty boring, but the sumptuous cinematography and clever staging create interest - the humming vacuum cleaner, the window washing at dusk, the enigmatic ending... The sleepy bits end up being more noteworthy than the randos going about their business.
[Palau] Though made in 1996, the Islands on the Edge of Time documentary attacks problems we still live with today - imperialism, colonialism, corporate exploitation, pollution and rampant corruption- which makes this look at post-independence Palau still remarkably relevant (even if it still feels like a news special of the era in method and look). We don't really think about all those Pacific islands unless they're the setting for a season of Survivor (which Palau definitely was), so this was especially interesting. Manipulated by the U.S. to make themselves beholden to foreign interests, the islands' national independence is quick to become illusory, and suffer disastrous ecological consequences that mirror situations in other countries. We also get a glimpse at a lost culture whose matriarchal leanings still have vestiges, but was diminished, possibly even erased, by patriarchal globalization. The film ends on a hopeful note, but it's hard to believe things got better in the last 30 years.
Books: As far as 8th Doctor novels go, Steve Lyons' The Space Age would sit somewhere in the middle of a "season". It's a meat and potatoes story with an intriguing premise, some action, and the Doctor playing peacemaker to factions at war. The twist is that the Rockers and the Mods are alien abductees from the 1960s fighting in an alien city based on the futurism of time, complete with robots, elevated roadways, and food pills. So if it's the future, why did the gangs bring their old beefs with them? It's kind of like the Jets and the Sharks knifing each other in a Jetsons episode. Fan wisdom has this as being boring, but I don't think it is. I kind of wish Lyons had done more with the "rock'n'roll" element, and writers don't know what to do with Compassion now that she's a TARDIS, so she just stares into space (and time, I guess) most of the time. The Space Age is practically a two-hander between the Doctor and Fitz, and the guest stars have a lot to do. It might pale compared to the books right before and right after it, but it's still quite readable.
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