"Accomplishments"
At home: Firing Melissa Barrera from the Scream franchise was a mistake as much as it was an injustice. The second trilogy and its "Core Four" (which we named our movie-going group after) was in good hands, and with her went Jenna Ortega and the director. So Scream 7 is an obvious rush job, an exercise in nostalgia for fans of the first trilogy that completely forgets what Scream is supposed to be despite the participation of the original screenwriter. Despite a couple of winks at the formula, it's just an ordinary slasher without any big meta-textual elements, as Sidney tries to protect herself and her daughter from one of the original killers meant to be dead (or a copycat using deep fakes). The returning dead killer is a trope that could have been used as the "meta" element, but it isn't. There was also potential for the movie to forget about "horror film rules" and replace them with those of the true crime genre, but they don't do anything with that at all. Instead, it's more interested in the franchise's own lore, and features kills that are more gross than clever, some pretty dodgy motivations, a terribly dumb final reveal, and substandard acting (except from Neve Campbell's). It really falls flat, and as someone who's always given a good score to every film in the franchise (yes, even #4), I'm sorry to say this is a real dud (or glad to say it, perhaps, since the studio acted in bad faith and got what it deserved).
Has Major Tom seen this? But seriously, folks... Oddity feels like a puzzle like Damian McCarthy's more recent film, Hokum, and though I think there are competing horror tropes and the ending comes too soon, I still find myself thinking about its images and ideas, and going back and forth on whether those complaints are problems at all. Those competing tropes: A woman has been murdered in house and she obviously haunts the place, or perhaps just the camera, since the other element is a store full of cursed objects, traded by the woman's psychic twin, now out for revenge on her sister's murderers using pieces of her inventory (McCarthy also lays in some Easter Eggs from other films, one of them his own). If objects can be haunted and cursed, then it may all be of a piece, fine. There's an attempt at making the situation ambiguous, since the twin has a brain tumor that might impose a false reality - do we believe our own lying eyes if the flashbacks are hers? - but it can't really be sustained. Ultimately - and quite in line with its title - it's the film's oddness that wins me over rather than its plotting. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with a horror movie that's just a VIBE.
Making me realize I really don't know anything about Korean folklore in regards to ghosts and other supernatural phenomena, Exhuma teams up a modern-day shaman and a geomancer (and their partners) on a case involving a haunted bloodline. To say a newborn, they must exhume an ancestor's body from his corrupted grave and see it sent to rest. This section plays like a procedural from another planet and it's great. The lore, the rituals, it's all grounded in a reality just askew from our own. And because of bad faith actors, things go dreadfully wrong. The story seems to resolve halfway through the runtime, and satisfactorily, too, but things kick off again as the grave site keeps on giving. Its mysteries yield even crazier threats, wrapped up in Korea's difficult history with Japan, and while turning it into a sort of "monster movie" towards the end doesn't mean Exhuma forgets its roots. It still seems all steeped in the same kind of detailed mysticism as its more procedural first act. Perhaps cremation is better, after all.
Oh, so the Taiwanese film Detention is based on a horror video game? Never heard of it, but playing the game probably spoils the film's mysteries. Doesn't affect me! Set in the early 60s, when Taiwan was under martial law, an illegal school book club has been rumbled by government forces and now two students - one a member, the other an unaffiliated girl who has a crush on hot book club teacher - enter their school which looks abandoned/ransacked. Is one of them having a nightmare, is it haunted, or is this eternal "detention" their afterlife? Thankfully, the mysteries go beyond ascertaining the film's reality, in particular just who sold the club out and why, and there are several surprises (at least to the non-gamer public). I felt like we got into the situation a little too quickly, but flashbacks eventually fill in what is meant to be a memory hole, so trust the process. The horror imagery is effective and plays on themes present in the "real world" sequences. And I thought the ending was strong. I do like the vein of horror where it's about national (rather than personal) trauma, reckoning with one's history as a "ghost" or "monster".
I read the original Dr. Giggles story by Steven Grant in the pages of Dark Horse Presents back in the day, and it was so soon out in theaters that one might wonder which came first (the comic, but it was done to be a film). Larry Drake plays the eponymous slasher who could have been a Batman villain if the Crime Doctor didn't already corner the market, a giggling madman who uses medical paraphernalia and doctorly death puns to take revenge on an entire town for his father's downfall. His prime target is a final girl with a heart problem. It's all rather goofy, in a comic book way, so it's never particularly scary even though there are plenty of kills. The comedy breaks the tension and you're left waiting for the next death, hoping it won't be TOO off-screen this time. The best part by far is Giggles's origin story told in a lore dump flashback. Neither great nor bad, I think it'll work best seen with a reactive group.
I've been watching too much Man from U.N.C.L.E. lately not to recognize Robert Vaughn as the uncredited voice of the supercomputer in Demon Seed, a film that could have gone the way of the Forbin Project, but perhaps by virtue of having been adapted from a Dean Koontz novel, instead dives into horror tropes. Weird horror tropes, but horror tropes nonetheless. The hardware is dated, of course, but the idea of a home entirely connected to a computer network that starts to misbehave has come true, so Julie Christie's humanist character is living through our nightmare. It's really a home invasion story, where the invader is a powerful A.I. who wants to breed with Christie - cold experimentation with sexual and abortion undertones - and can turn into one of those Rubik's Twists to crush potential rescuers. Like some reported A.I. conclusions, the machine wants to save us from ourselves and is anti-resource exploitation, but because it's run on math rather than empathy, it doesn't much care for individual rights. Demon Seed tries to say too much, so ends up not saying enough, I think, and the weirdo ending leaves one wanting more, but the 70s loved its EC Comics endings.
Aside from Edward Woodward, I don't especially feel like The Appointment features any kind of great acting, certainly not from Samathan Weysom (who would one day be Lex Luthor's girlfriend, but y'know, in The Quest for Peace) who plays his creepy psychic teenage daughter, though she is quite good at staring, surely a requisite here. It's a film that seems to ditch its own potential - the docu-drama narration, the suggestions of an inappropriate father-daughter dynamic coming either from him or from her - but perhaps it's all interrelated as it heads into its final territory, Woodward driving (and driving and driving) into a prophetic dream and the best car accident ever filmed. I'd be recommending it just on the latter's basis, but I think the surreal ambiguity of the plot also warrants the watch. Is the selfish daughter causing these events, or has she communed with something? What triggered the "evil force", and is it the father's behavior? Why is the entire family having the dream? The lack of definite answers may irritate some, please others, see which one you are.
2010 predicting the Monarch of the American Godzilla films by way of celebrating that ONE British kaiju movie, Waiting for Gorgo is a cool little short that pokes fun at bureaucracy as two old civil servants are discovered in a Ministry of Defence basement doing... well, what exactly? If giant monsters exist, they haven't shown up for a long time (Gorgo was made in 1961), and that's not exactly proof that the department is responsible. If they DON'T exit and it's all some crazy clerical error, then their "work" is even more futile. And isn't that how a lot of these jobs feel? Collecting data, filing, running numbers, planning for things that may never happen (usually because the government has changed policies, but is still funding redundant or forgotten programs). I used to call it shovelling. Imagine two piles and shovel dirt back and forth between them. The office comedy still manages to provide a couple of fun twists to keep things moving, so it's doing better than the department.
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