"Accomplishments"
In theaters: I don't care what anyone says, Halloween Ends is one of the better films in the franchise. Take a couple scenes out of Kills and put then in the 2018 revival or in Ends, and you can do away with the padded turkey in the middle of this trilogy, it is almost entirely surplus to requirements. One of the things Kills did suggest was the idea of infectious evil, which comes to fruition in Ends as Michael directly infects a kid so as to become Robin to his Batman. One of the problems with Kills is that there's too much Michael, too early. Ends reverses that, letting us discover a new status quo a few years on, and teasing out both Michael and his protégé more slowly, to greater effect (I think the kill shots in this one are pretty cool, on the whole). I'd even say there's more Michael in it than I was led to believe by negative reviews. As a final chapter, it aims to really give Laurie, her granddaughter and the whole of the town closure. And us too. It's got a banger of an opener and I never felt let down as we headed down to the final credits. I don't have the cred to proclaim this the best since the original, but in my own head, that's what I'm thinking.
At home: Is it me or is Mimic a case of Guillermo del Toro doing Sam Raimi? There's something about the film-making... For all the bad press it's gotten, it's not a bad creature feature. I thought the bugs would look terrible on account of 90s CGI or something, but no, it's mostly practical, and when they do use CG, it looks fine. It's still a thing of parts, with some stock characters (in prominent roles, unfortunately), and some quirky, interesting ones (in smaller parts, natch). The "mimic" theme pleasantly carries through beyond the bugs' modus operandi - how humans use it against them, the kid with the spoons. The New York underground is a fun playground for the action, giving this stalking horror flick a Die Hard vibe. But then there's the double climax that really doesn't work, even as a "last scare". It's not staged correctly and feels anti-climactic. Like I said, a thing of parts. But del Torro on his worse day is still a lot more interesting that most directors on a good one. I think Mimic may be worth a second look if you dismissed it back in the day.
The premise of Vampire's Kiss is an interesting one - a man's nascent bat fetish gives him the delusion that he's been bitten by a vampire and is becoming one, and just how much of this is a delusion and how much of it is real, the audience has to parse out. After all, the story works whether he's fabricating the whole thing or it's part of a vampire's mind-clouding allure as she feeds on him night after night. Unfortunately, this man is played by Nicholas Cage, which is famously a 50/50 proposition. In this case, while the camp performance will have its fans, I could only bring myself to like it in the most ironic way, and indeed, DON'T. He's doing a weird accent from the beginning, well before the supposed bite, that's very distracting. As a vamp, he's playing it for arch comedy, which is at odds with much of the material (a rape, for example, and lots of sexual harassment - his suffering secretary, played by María Conchita Alonso, is the heart of the picture, and I wish she were given more respect by having the world around her played straight). If Cage's character had been a good guy who tragically becomes a monster, we'd be more attuned to him, but he's a creep and a jerk from jump, and is using his delusion to behave even more badly. I'm afraid everything interesting kind of gets lost in that crazy performance, but even if it had been played closer to the ground, it probably would still have been a tonal mess.
Out of Australia comes Next of Kin, in which a woman inherits her mother's small-town retirement home and starts uncovering her secrets, even as mysterious deaths begin to occur. It's a sort of, kind of ghost story, and much more interesting when it's withholding than when those secrets are finally exposed. The third act is, to me, a big slashery mess that comes out of nowhere and essentially kills the mood the first two created with strange incidents and atmospheric cinematography. Next of Kin could have eschewed the horror angle and just played out as a mystery/romance and it would have been fine by me. Once the genre mechanics took hold - abruptly! - my attention started to wane. Yes, even though the film opens on the end and I knew we had to get there somehow. But it's the same thing: It's a big mystery at first, but in the final act that last moment becomes quite predictable. I also need to mention some intermittent sound problems, an occasional reverb that mars even the better parts of the film.
David Keith is the prime suspect in a sadistic murder spree in White of the Eye, and what I really wish (though it sounds terrible to say it) is that there were just one more murder. Because the two we get, though completely different, both give film makers like Dario Argento a run for their money. Director Donald Cammell started out as a painter and it shows, preferring staged close-ups that look like macabre still life (in French, a still life is a "nature morte", literally "dead nature", which is more to the point here) and atmospheric landscapes, but also giving the camera a lot of motion to create unease. Though it angles for psychological horror otherwise, with the suspicion looming over Keith and his family, it makes a disappointing turn into slasher tropes in the third act, and never really connects with the Apache lore it that gives the film its title. It remains very strange, which is to its credit, but it's definitely a let-down compared to what went before. Almost a hidden gem.
What do I say about Julia Ducournau's stylish but mystifying Titane that does it justice, makes sense of it, and doesn't spoil its surprises? In terms of basic premise, Alixia (played by the highly transformative Agathe Rouselle, a performance worth seeing whatever else I think of the movie) has a plate in her head since she was in a car accident as a child, an accident/condition that seems to have given her a fetishistic attraction to cars (or amplified it to extremes, since I do think she has to already have had that in her for the themes to make sense). Humans are on the menu, but bring out the monster in her, and the first act is a gory, violent serial killer story. When Alixia goes on the run and becomes a kind of cuckoo in another family, there's a huge shift that still works on a pyschosexual level - questions of gender and sexual identity about, and the film questions masculinity and relationships between men when women aren't around almost constantly - but it can feel like a different movie. Our sense of dread slowly shifts from fear of the serial killer to fear FOR her. Frustration at one's incapacity to be one's true self (layers upon layers of this) as a source of violence and recklessness, I get, and the remedy is acceptance, not the toxicity of imposed normativity. So far so good. What never quite connects for me is the strange science-fiction idea that's causing Alixia problems, something I'd describe as Cronenberg meets Tetsu the Iron Man. Worth the trip even if questions linger.
Docteur Jekyll et les femmes (AKA The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne) is an oddity in that it's a French adaptation of a Victorian classic, but that's far from its only strangeness. When I saw Marina Pierro was in it, I let out an expletive, having recently been burned by her performance as a block of wood The Living Dead Girl. As the Fanny Osbourne to Udo Kier's Jekyll, she's mostly observes the action with those dead eyes of her. Kier and Patrick McGee are atrociously dubbed in this, their lips very obviously saying the dialog in English while stock French voices (I say stock because I was exposed to French dubs from a young age, and the dub artists are very recognizable) actually speak the words. It's Stevenson's premise played out as a vicious, sadistic, near-pornographic slasher inside a single house after an engagement party (dinner and boring philosophical discussions, mostly). It's got a nice hazy glow and a great twist ending that speaks to marriage being the acceptance of the other's dark side, but generally, I felt disconnected from it to the point of boredom.
A lot of actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood seem fated to do a horror/thriller movie when they get older. For Lauren Bacall, it's The Fan, in which she plays an echo of herself (i.e. an aging movie actress) who discovers the nightmarish side of celebrity when an obsessive fan (Michael Biehn, always the man when you need an unhinged character) takes his stalking to the next level - the slasher level! He's good and Bacall is of course very good, and there are a lot of fun surprises in the cast even way down on the call sheet (Dana Delany! Dwight Shultz!), but The Fan is VERY PG for this type of film. Ed Bianchi has some nice directorial ideas - weird close-up photography, odd top shots - but very few of these have anything to do with body horror, so it almost feels like a TV movie (albeit one with material that would never have made it to television back then). What's more memorable to me is the musical Bacall's character is in - "Never Say Never" - and I can't decide if this thing would have been good or quite terrible. There's almost more tension in that question than there is in Biehn's wounding spree.
2001's The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra is a spoof of 1950s B-movies, taking aim in particular, but not exclusively, at Ed Wood's oeuvre (even Orgy of the Dead, though the template is Plan 9 from Outer Space with its bizarre mix of aliens and the supernatural). Unlike Wood's movies, it's "bad on purpose", which mostly means the dialog that goes nowhere and overt padding are jokes that fill the time more entertainingly than those old movies do. Still, at 90 minutes, the joke goes on a bit long. While technically, it looks of the era - black and white, a smaller frame, bad effects - it fails to recognize that none of those movies were much longer than an hour. There were still chuckles throughout, the comedy right out of improv, right down to the characters playing for time. The parodic sexism, the action scientist trope, the aliens who look just like us but don't understand us, the random cat girl, the fictional element from space, and the badly-puppeteered skeleton all feel quite correct. A fun bit of business, especially if you know what it's laughing at, but not necessarily built for repeat viewings. The same group went on to make 3 more in this style in 2008-09, and I wouldn't be adverse to checking them out!
Justin Lin's first solo directorial effort, Better Luck Tomorrow, is, like Shopping for Fangs (directed with Quentin Lee), a quirky crime story set in L.A. suburbs and starring an all-Asian cast. Some would say that with both films, he's trying to be the Asian-American Tarantino (but to be fair, Quentin Tarantino was always trying to be the African-American Tarantino, which isn't half as legitimate), but that's just the 90s inspiration. Despite the fun modern tricks, Better Luck Tomorrow has more in common with Scorsese's crime pictures, showing the rise and fall of a criminal gang... of high schoolers, with heavy narration. It's the story of over-achievers who, in their senior year, are getting bored and start doing mischief (I relate, but not with the truancy chosen), and from cheat sheets and simple scams eventually graduate to more serious crimes. It's entertaining and fun, and the characters have a complex dynamic that leaves you wanting more after the curtain falls. Of note is a role for young John Cho (who was also in Shopping for Fangs), but we also have Sung Kang as a character called Han Lue... and if you want to think he and the Han Lue Kang plays in the Fast and Furious movies are one and the same, I think you'd be right. Justin Lin would go on to become a great action director, but it's stuff like this that makes me miss his more character-driven movies.
In Time Will Tell, a girl finds she's able to psychically travel back in time and observe other points in her lifetime, and uses that power to uncover the mystery of her family's deep set traumas. With an abusive father about to walk out of prison, the stakes for her are high. Unfortunately, the solution to the mystery is one I saw a mile coming. And then there's this crime plot at her job that I can't make heads or tails of, and that's really unnecessary except to get the movie to a reasonable run time. It's too bad because it's a good premise, and an intriguing science-fiction take on false memories and taking control of your narrative. And I find Louisa Connolly-Burnham engaging enough as the lead. I understand the need to create a framework in which she can have her fainting spells/trips through time, but this wasn't it. It's hard to track (and therefore care about) the situation nor the romance that arises from it.
Anyone who enjoys Bo Burnham's shows should definitely check out Tim Minchin's, an obvious inspiration across the board. Ready for This? (2009) is heavy on songs, all of them clever and befitting from this ragtime master's incredible piano playing. It's the stand-up I wasn't as familiar with, but it got me laughing several times. In either mode, Minchin is consistently attacking hypocrisy, often but not exclusively religious, playing one unacceptable thing against what we do consider acceptable and shouldn't. This was the London show, and I gather from YouTube there's an Australian one. Personally, what I've seen of the Australian DVD is better recorded and I entirely prefer its rendition of Prejudice, but Dark Side and Wine in the Sun (if you don't cry like a baby at this Christmas song, you're not human) are different but equally good. It does show that while there's a great measure of control in the stage craft in Minchin's shows, his crowd work is more much improvisational (to the point of seeming nervous) and every show, even the songs, is slightly different, which sets him apart from his spiritual offspring. Do wish I had the Australian concert in its entirety to compare, but either one will do me for repeat viewings.
RPGs: Though it didn't hurt my enjoying of our last Torg Eternity sessions - the very heavy metal Tharkold Cosm has never been a favorite. It wasn't one of the worlds in the original Torg game until late and felt to me like it was trying too hard. Technodemons attack Russia and turn it into a living hell. In Eternity, they made it more interesting to me by having the Russian government nuke Moscow, the fallout creating a Mad Max desert in the north of the country, an act that also won the Russians a seat at the Devil's table. The Day One adventure has an elite Russian commando squad rescue scientific data about the event just before the bomb drops (with the necessary race out of town before the nuke goes off). In terms of tutorial, it shows the players what "elite" characters look like (as opposed to the normal people turned into heroes of previous scenarios), and forces you to test out the vehicle rules - big chase, vehicular damage, etc. Perhaps not surprisingly given the state of world affairs, the players decided to play their soldiers as patriotic villains, solely focused on their missions, skipping over opportunities for heroic acts and/or saving civilian refugees. They couldn't know it fit the world laws so well, but it does. A GM might feel a pinch of disappointment when players don't take the bait, but I was chuckling at the devotion to playing the personalities as conceived. So long as I got to drop the introductory knowledge, it didn't bother me much. But I've rarely run characters as ruthless. Of course, by the end, they realize that their loyalty wasn't being reciprocated and decide to go rogue and live in the radioactive wasteland with new friends from the other side, so patriotism only gets you so far.
Best bits: Knowing they would play a tight unit, the players got together behind my back and worked out a system of code phrases (in Russian, of course) that would work as shorthand during the adventure. I quickly caught on and though I didn't know what they were saying, understood it's what allowed them to work in tandem. On the villains' side, I like the moment where a big bad technodemon (really, a lowly lowly Tharkoldu from his culture's perspective) swatted away a grenade, back into the junior team member's face. (He survived and played all his cards at once to bean the demon between the eyes with extreme prejudice and kill it.)
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