70s-ish Horror Stay At Home Double Feature

Different times.

This thing has sat unwritten for a while - it seems stupid to write about cult movies when such large and devastating issues are unfolding outside the House of Sparrows. But the House is safe on lockdown, well-resourced and comfortable, if cluttered. And one of life's deepest challenges is that it doesn't stop - we don't cease to be ourselves or lose our interests just because we're under quarantine.

Upping the internet bandwidth and speed on this end has been an absolute godsend, making for better newsgathering and vastly improved viewing options. Loath as I've been to dive into the whole streaming sphere the distraction has been more than welcome, and it's been good to finally catch up with things that had eluded me previously. (Indeed, in honor of Walpurgis Night, I think tonight is the night I finally take in Sarah Phelps' adaptation of Christie's The Pale Horse.) And it's been a pleasant surprise to find that the internet doesn't necessarily inhibit spontaneity (serendipity, even), that streaming movies occasionally co-mingle with the artful clarity of in-cinema double features. Two movies taken in on different platforms within 24 hours of one another had a lot to say to me, and each other.

Jack Starett's Race With The Devil has an absolute dream quartet of actors (Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Loretta Swit, and Lara Parker) as two married couples who take off in an RV for an off-season vacation, and run afoul of a cult of Satanists who spend the last hour of the movie stalking and chasing them across half of Texas. It's wildly implausible and incredibly fun, with our heroes responding with the hysteria and anger you'd expect people to feel under such dire straits. And it's an engaging combination of horror movie and car chase caper, with mounting paranoia and truly inspired stuntwork throughout. It's gritty enough to engage on the grindhouse level, and one might be surprised to recall it slipped out into the world with a PG rating.

Horror filmmaker and musician Rob Zombie would have been around ten when Race With The Devil was released, and it's very easy to imagine the mid-1970s monster kid Zombie must have been seeing it multiple times. I hadn't intended to follow Race with a thematically similar motion picture, but Zombie's indie horror opus 31 would sit very comfortably beneath Race on a double bill, taking in as it does the story of a group of clowns who pile in a van and head off on a road trip only to run afoul of an oddly-aristocratic cabal who force them into a violent game with death as the stakes. (Sealing its kinship with the prior movie, the movie takes place on Halloween, 1976.)

31 clinched my suspicions that there are two Rob Zombies - a consistent-but-unimaginative writer and more-than-competent director - vying for supremacy of his brain, never mind his films. The story is a rote re-hash of The Most Dangerous Game that teases but doesn't pursue an obvious line of class-consciousness. But it's beautifully executed on a largely crowd-funded budget, unfolding in a palpably grimy setting shot through with moody atmosphere and striking use of color. There's always something to look at, and the textures of skin, wood, fog give it a tangibility that makes for effective horror (cinematographer David Daniels takes over for longtime Zombie shooter Brandon Trost and proves just as adept in making Zombie's outre world look and feel real.)

Most of the characters of 31 speak in the same colorful yet witless white trash patois that Zombie has been putting in the mouths of 85% of his characters since House of 1000 Corpses, and most of the villains stalking them through the movie's lethal factory maze match the cheerful vulgarity of the protagonists with a similarly Southern-fried sadism. The cast uniformly commit to and sell their dialogue - as limited as Zombie's scripts often are I can't recall an actor who did anything less than demanded of them. Many horror filmmakers have either a strong visual sense or a sure hand with actors, but Zombie has both, and I suspect that many actors who continue to work for Zombie genuinely enjoy doing so. (The most striking figure is cut by Richard Brake as nominal-lead heavy Doomhead, who brings such terrifying and charismatic intensity to his monologues that I wished they'd been written by almost anybody else.)

This double-feature of not great movies took the edge off a couple of quarantine days, and offered a welcome reminder that cinema remains a living, breathing thing. An actor's medium that presents you new work by old favorites and introduces new favorites in even less-than-auspicious settings (I'd pay real money to see Richard Brake's MacBeth). A venue for ever-new, visceral thrills. A companion and friend even, especially, in times like these. As my new favorite channel says so charmingly, stay home/stay alive, friend.

HELL FEST

It's not a novel premise, necessarily: a killer is stalking young people in a horror maze attraction in an amusement park during Halloween.

I don't remember seeing a slasher movie that felt so airy and carefree. It's a modest affair, but that's part of what makes it so special. It avoids quite a few slasher cliches - in particular, its young attractive cast aren't jammed into archetypes (The Jock, The Nerd, The Soulful Loner, etc.) but are instead given the freedom to simply be young people. And they're given space to breathe, quip, hang out, bullshit, and kvetch. They're a fun bunch to hang out with, to a point that it's genuinely alarming when they start getting killed off. Set inside amusement park haunted house thrill rides, the movie gives us the cinematic equivalent - cinematographer Jose David Montero catches a vibrant array of carnival colors, and the thing visually pops in ways few horror indies try to.

In a peculiar era where horror movies are making overt and strident gestures toward respectability it's easy to overlook a movie like Hell Fest. Though it doesn't punch up its more novel or political aspects those aspects are there. It manages to address toxic masculinity (via its antagonists stalking strategies) without gruesomely sexualizing its violence. In the end, it's as much a horror house ride as any of its settings, and though it doesn't overtly reinvent any wheels, it remains an engaging and worthwhile Halloween treat, right down to the truly unsettling coda.

THE HORROR AT GALLERY KAY

Two women, their relationship past its last legs, make a last-ditch salvage effort at couples counseling. The grounded Petra (Maine Anders) is going through the motions (even though the therapist is an acquaintance of hers), while the flightier Olive (Rosebud) seems almost naively convinced that theirs was a love meant to be. Therapist Claremont Bazill (Brian Silliman) lays out the ground rules for the session, and insists that he's there to illuminate the relationship, not necessarily to save it.

Abe Goldfarb's tight, intimate film (scripted by Mac Rogers) plays so firmly as an intimate, black-and-white, play on film that one gets onto its wavelength regardless of preconceptions. The Gallery of the title isn't even mentioned until about 20 minutes in. One or two frenetic phone calls later (and with at least one untold story looming over the story), our cast take off for Gallery Kay at the movie's midpoint.

Much of the joy of this movie comes through the steadiness of its revelations, and it's a difficult thing to write up without giving those things away. Those who catch the distinctly Lovecraftian whiff off the title have a hint of where it winds up, and should be delighted how it gets there. Despite the neat bifurcation of its settings, the movie remains a relationship drama, even as its stakes turn downright apocalyptic. And though the power dynamics shift among the characters, their roles remain movingly consistent. We want Petra and Olive to stay together, and not just because the fate of our world may depend on it. And Bazill's insistence on sticking to what he knows, and talking these women through their increasingly-complex relationship, could have been played for bloody-minded comedy but instead comes off as desperate, terrified, and bracingly human.

One wishes for more overt, on-screen flourishes of the story's growing unease and horror. The otherworldly madness in the eyes of the receptionist (an eerily convincing Kristen Vaughan) over an ambiguously bloodied hospital mask is an unsettling touch, but the film plays the let-it-play-in-the-imagination card a mite too stridently and too often. There's enough intelligence and creativity on display throughout the movie to suggest that more overt twists were within the filmmakers' reach. But Goldfarb has sacrificed such gestures in favor of grounding his more-than-capable cast inside the rich world(s) of their characters, and on that front the movie certainly pays off. We may not get to really see the true horror unfold, but thanks to the performances we sure as hell feel it.

In all, The Horror at Gallery Kay remains an effective slowburn, a must for those who appreciate creative, low-budget horror with a patient, character-driven approach.

THE PASSION OF PAUL ROSS

For the two decades I've known filmmaker Bryan Enk (so, no, this will not be an impartial review), I've been impressed by, among other things, the sinister energies he finds inside everyday spaces. This is something he shares with a number of filmmakers whose influence is apparent, but the energies Bryan has mined are very specific. His earlier work was informed a kind of perception that imaginative suburban kids seem particularly able to cultivate. Happily this perception remains a key part of Bryan's aesthetic; though it shares aspects with the territory charted by other filmmakers, the surreal world just a little right turn from our own is informed in Bryan's work by a particular Bowling-Green-after-dark vibe that is all his own.

That it resonates so thickly in THE PASSION OF PAUL ROSS is hardly surprising. This decades-later sequel to the four-part surreal horror opus PINK COFFINS sees Bryan returning to Bowling Green, taking stock of where he came from and chasing that familiar vibration into deeper territory. That energy is colored by the growth and depth of the intervening years, and Bryan's process has grown and sharpened as well. Low-budget though it is, PASSION is a work of confidence and assurance. If turning a Days Inn hotel room into a set for a third of the movie was an action borne out of necessity, it doesn't even register thanks to the ingenuity with which it's placed in the story, and how disorienting a place it is as rendered thru Bryan's lens.

About a third of the way thru the doomed singer Natalie (an effectively world weary Amy Beth Coup) relates her experience of "a place, a place that shows you things. Things that might seem nice but aren't really there. The place lies. It lets you think everything is okay but it isn't." The passage feels like a summing up of The Story So Far, and feels like a description of the setting for every movie Bryan has made, from the delightful dorm room Draculas of his college days to his immensely powerful Manhattan-set corporate MacBETH. (It's also as concise and poetic a definition of Cinema as I can recall Bryan offering in his work.)

But even inside such a fraught liminal zone, mapped throughout by the dreams and stories related by its inhabitants, we feel a storyteller taking stock of life and work so far. It is the work of an older, wiser person returned, weighing options, held down by the past and learning what he should (indeed, must) let go and finding, in the process, that some things are best held tightly. Much of this process happens before our eyes, as the title character (a mainly slowburning, but intently perceptive, Steve Bishop) navigates a purgatory built as much by his own estrangement as by the otherworldly people passing through it.

It's an intricate and surreal head-trip with heavier things on its mind: aging, misspent youth, the pressure to wake up and act before it (whatever it is) is too late. Happily, it's also as playful as many of Bryan's other works, his sense of humor manifesting in references to GHOSTBUSTERS, EVIL DEAD, DISTURBING BEHAVIOR (and even 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, for chrissakes). A number of familiar faces and voices play thru, echoing back to PINK COFFINS. Among the new faces Becky Byers strikes the most powerful impression as Amity; she has both the otherworldly intensity and unique physiognomy particularly favored among many of Bryan's most indelible characters, and brings a new darkly playful (and completely appropriate) spirit to the table.

Given the resonance that my years with PINK COFFINS brings to the movie, I'm curious to imagine how it plays as one's first exposure to Bryan's work. That body of work continues to grow - I'm curious to see what form BLOOD DAUGHTER will take, and where Bryan goes after the sublime resolution to THE PASSION OF PAUL ROSS. Take the trip. Treat yourself.

THE MUMMY (2017)

This one hurt.

It hurt because it was clearly the product of people who knew what the hell they were doing. Everything that happens in THE MUMMY happens for a reason, and the story is solid. You have a good script (by Christopher McQuarrie and David Koepp, among others) that is logical when it needs to be (triangulating the hero's fate along the axes of a love triangle, between two poles) with flourishes winningly insane enough that you just go with them (Doctor Jekyll is a) alive in 2017, b) chasing monsters, and c) played by Russell Crowe). So many people showed up ready to play in this thing, including Sofia Boutella in the gender-swapped title role.

BUT GOD DAMMIT. The game cast doesn't feel like it had a chance to let loose, to explore the emotional life and conflicts that are right there in the material. Director Alex Kurtzman brings in the action and the spectacle, but does nothing to cultivate the emotional lives of the characters. The problem may simply be with his leading man, who has been better managed in the past: Tom Cruise here is required to be roguish, clever, conflicted, and ultimately full-hearted, and though he speaks the lines that indicate all of this, he doesn't seem to believe any of them. For a man ultimately torn between the otherworldly realms inhabited by Boutella and the more earthy and human love of archaeologist Annabelle Wallis, Cruise has no real chemistry with either. (Even Jake Johnson, cast in a funny wiseass role he could play in his sleep, seems, oddly, to be sleepwalking through the movie.) And the moments that should transcend and take the characters beyond themselves simply (though clearly) register as beats, without ever taking us beyond ourselves.

In the end one isn't bored by it, but that's hardly enough to kick off a franchise, is it? At first blush I mused that all of the movie's problems would be solved had Cruise and Crowe simply switched roles: as overvalued as THE NICE GUYS was, it did remind us that Crowe still possessed reservoirs of charm, action chops, and a sense of humor that would have lent themselves to THE MUMMY's roguish lead; and given the rumors that handily explain why Cruise's chemistry with his female co-stars is so flat, one salivates thinking of the subtexts he'd bring to Jekyll and Hyde. And one is depressed further to think that without Cruise in the lead, this movie doesn't get made. That a great movie that would have kicked off a franchise with grace, smarts, and style is right there in plain sight yet beyond its makers' grasp is a huge disappointment. To your proprietor, an engaged cinephile looking for anything in 21st century Universal Horror to believe in, such a missed opportunity is frustrating and painful.

that fucking trailer

< 60-second-HATE >

So the latest salvo in the ongoing onslaught of DC's superhero movies got fired this weekend, and if the fans can have their say so can I. Yes, it's cool that we've got some parademons in there, and the Mother Box, and they actually made Cyborg look like an interesting character, and Momoa looks hot, and yeah yeah yeah

But we're subjected to the same on-the-nose needle drops on the soundtrack, the same listless looking action, the same drabid-awful-looking dull bluish gray color on everything when this thing, given the revitalizing focus on team-based action, should be exploding across the spectrum.

And I was ready to just write this off as another superhero movie that simply held nothing for me until we got to this choice bit of dialogue.

AQUAMAN: So what's your superpower?
BATMAN: I'm rich.

NO NO NO FUCKING NO YOU FUCKING MOTHERFUCKER

This is the trademark tone-deafness of auteur Zack Snyder creeping in. This is this franchise's ongoing cordial dialogue with, and reinforcement of, the absolute worst in the American status quo. This is Batman-as-Donald-Trump, and we're supposed to cheer this bullshit. This is an absence of understanding that Batman holds his own among magicians, among aliens, among gods not through the pricetag on his toys through sheer force of will. The corrected dialogue follows:

AQUAMAN: So what's your superpower?
BATMAN:

That's it. That's the fucking line. That line became a meme for a reason. That's all the goddamn Batman ever has to say to justify his presence to anybody. But the cheap laugh (if that) provoked by "I'm rich" is a tacit understanding that money = power, that the money spent on this thing is what makes it great.

And I'm tired of that shit.

So in closing, and this is the last I'll say about this: Fuck this movie. Fuck Zack Snyder. Fuck DC "Entertainment". Fuck superhero movies in general. And while we're at it, fuck you.

< /60-second-HATE >

a quiet House in a besieged world

Yes indeed, it has been ages since any light shone forth from the House of Sparrows. With your proprietor happily working in service one of the best film video programs in the country, and trying to roll amid any one of a number of other preoccupations flying around his head, updates have been scarce.

And I'm not the only writer struggling with the notion that there's much going on in the world that deserves a lot more attention and action than one would give an unvisited fantasy film blog. Happily my office is a place that encourages political action and ongoing check-ins, but it's still alarming to wake up to both the latest barrage of horrible executive orders and the accompanying apocalyptic narrative. And also the ongoing inference that the shit that you're taking action against was only a distraction from the REAL shit going down, which only exacerbates the ongoing numbness.

I do take comfort in the ongoing work of my fellow culture workers, be they on behalf of the arthouse or the grindhouse. And I'm grateful to those who simply keep showing up and bearing witness. When culture is under fire, simply showing up to share at places that preserve and exhibit culture is a political act, and an activist one. There is great power in simply coming together, sharing stories, and drawing strength from the context they bring to our lives, and that's as true of schlocky fantasy as of political documentaries. Showing up for culture absolutely matters, still.

And if you can find that elusive harmony of pen and sword, it's a sweet spot. Indeed, if you can make it to the Alamo Drafthouse in San Francisco on February 15, you get to see your proprietor in an away game performance, introducing Jim Jarmusch's drone metal political fantasy The Limits of Control. I'm grateful that Mike Keegan booked one of my favorite films of the last ten years, and is letting me intro it and give it appropriate context for this moment. I hope your mission will at least bring you by, to share this story in the dark, to challenge the notion that life is nothing but a handful of dirt.

And right now your proprietor's going to call the office of his congressperson, make a quick dinner, and head out into the night. See you in the dark.

CRIMSON PEAK

This house opened six years ago, I am helpfully reminded, and how lovely it is to commemorate that milestone with the opening of horror's newest and loveliest house. The latest from fantasist Guillermo del Toro, Crimson Peak is a fine thing, indeed, an old school gothic romance that puts its feet right.

As respectful as I am of del Toro's extensive knowledge of horror history and his enthusiasm for same, it's rare that one of his movies truly resonates with me; I was peculiarly unmoved by Pacific Rim, his extended and explosive love letter to the kaiju cinema we both loved. And yet a romantic ghost story, set inside a brooding manse that becomes a powerful character in its own right, is right within my wheelhouse. If its story - that of a young woman (Mia Wasikowska) whisked away by a handsome suitor (Tom Hiddleston) to a sinister mansion bearing the scars of his family history - is familiar, it hits that story's beats artfully and emotionally. del Toro knows we know this story, how to engage us with what we know, how to get us to look at it with fresh eyes, and finally when to inject a subtle twist that quietly but powerfully upends our expectations.

One appreciates that del Toro's strong visual sense never results in a cluttered frame, and that when he does indulge in jump scares and blood they juice the intensity without overwhelming his audience. It's funny to think that by exploring classic horror built on such solid mythology that del Toro has crafted a TRUE alternative horror. In a field where jittery found footage has become the norm (playfully tweaked by del Toro here as Wasikowska finds clues among discovered audio cylinders), a return to the roots feels like a true resurrection. And at a time when Universal is franchising its storied monsters along the Marvel Avengers model, del Toro finds life in an old sinister house, and makes "Universal horror" truly mean something again.

(Bonus: getting to see this movie on film at Frank Lee's old survivor, Clement Street's 4Star Theatre in San Francisco, on opening night with dear friends.)

STRETCH

This blogger's old enough to remember when a movie going straight-to-video was a ghetto proposition. One would have hoped that such conceptions would have loosened up in recent years, with more and more movies being made and more and more movies being seen for the first time inside homes, rather than theatres. And yet it feels like there's a deeper divide than ever between A-list Hollywood Fare and / Everything Else. With hundreds of movies accessible with the click of a remote, more and more off-Hollywood movies are being consumed like snacks. But sometimes if you give a direct-to-NF movie a little attention, you realize that you're seeing a movie that may have been a little too weird for straight release. And though you imagine being blown away by it at a theatrical screening, there's a weird gratitude that at least you're getting to see it, even as it takes yet another oddball turn that few features would even dare. And if you see its final flourish coming, there's still love and art in the way it lands that leave you glad you gave it your time and eyes.

Truth be told, I was already expecting at least an opus-level experience from Stretch, the latest from writer-director Joe Carnahan. I've long been a fan of Carnahan's work, recognizing a compelling amount of heart behind his movies' macho bluster, thrilling that he's as adept at grounding his stories in our current political reality as he is at building highly stylized worlds and choreographing mayhem - it's that sense of reality that makes his work so strong. And though the fast-and-loose Stretch abandons the political inquiries of Smokin' Aces and The A-Team (gone, too, is much of the emotional poetry of The Grey), it finds Carnahan applying his momentum to a straight up B-movie noir, giving us a neon-lit, increasingly dangerous and complex night that may just annihilate its put-upon title character, a failed actor turned limo driver who sees his current assignment - shepherding a deranged billionaire from one sleazy port of call to the next - as a quick fix for a gambling debt that's suddenly become due.

Patrick Wilson is one of America's finest undersung, though steadily employed, actors, and the commitment and grace he's brought to everyman characters under the direction of James Wan and Todd Field is very much in evidence here. He's utterly believable as an otherwise ordinary guy forced to increasingly desperate and deranged ends to just get his life together, and he's as solid delivering both Stretch's growing capacity for improvisation in the face of danger and his understated reactions to the insanity blossoming around him. Even his voice-over narration transcends its use as a device, as it gets derailed by Stretch's genuine surprise at the explosions of chaos within his story. Though Wilson feels like he's in every single frame of the movie, Carnahan populates the space around him with a colorful rogues gallery, all vividly realized, from a couple of actors playing jacked-the-fuck-up caricatures of themselves to Jessica Alba's gentle and sharp limo dispatcher to the spectacular turn by Chris Pine as Karos, revisiting his Tremor brother from Smokin' Aces by way of Howard Hughes. (Ed Helms seals the movie's simpatico link with the Hangover series as Karl, a deceased driver who appears as a ghostly vision to Stretch in moments of extremis.) The whole thing is held together with gorgeous photography by Yasu Tinida, who both captures the vivid sleaze of Carnahan's cartoon noir L.A. and turns in as vivid a portfolio as any actor could wish of Wilson's various moods, dreams, nightmares.

Minor a work though it is, Stretch is no less enjoyable for it. Its presence online suggests that there's life in the ol' B-movie yet, and its style and fearlessness remind us that the B-movie's where those in the know go to see cinema really cut loose. If it and other creative, out-there movies like it are deemed too weird or risky for theatrical release, at least we get to see them in one format or another. If we can get past our notion of a straight-to-video ghetto and see these available-on-demand movies with fresh eyes (open mind, open heart, per Mr. Luk), all manner of wonderful experiences may await us. Your ride awaits.

MAGIC MIKE XXL

It's delirious, infectious fun, even for viewers without a predilection for gorgeous men. Magic Mike XXL offers all of the action and drama one could possibly want from a summer blockbuster sequel, and continues what one hopes will be an ongoing franchise, even as it gets the gang back together for a final blowout appearance at a Myrtle Beach convention. It's less mired in character drama than its predecessor, giving itself up to greater spectacle, a more fantastic perspective on its dance sequences, and an engaging sense of forward motion.

Hot damn, Magic Mike XXL is first and foremost a quest. I marveled in my seat when I realized that the makeup of the typical Dungeons & Dragons adventure party could be flawlessly mapped onto Mike and his fellow male entertainers: Ken (Matt Bomer)'s status as a level 3 Reiki healer clearly marks him as the party's cleric, but there's a rogue, a fighter, a bard, and a wizard as well. (In one of the movie's sweetest sequences, a character tries some new moves on an unsmiling convenience store cashier, leveling up before our very eyes.) It's not facile to suggest that it's a summer action movie with dance sequences instead of explosions, though the franchise sequel it most resembles is Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's 13; like that movie it gives itself over to its fantasy elements so uninhibitedly that parts of it feel beamed in from another planet. (Though Gregory Jacobs takes the directorial reins for MMXXL, original director Soderbergh's fingerprints as cinematographer and editor are all over the movie, from a hilarious perspective of a car wreck from the passenger's seat to a gorgeous traveling shot of the Myrtle Beach surf, the tide line beautifully bisecting the frame.)

Hollywood's summer spectacle has been largely overtaken by sequels that present mounting, ever-graver threats to the world, only surmountable by increasingly cookie-cutter action heroes. By comparison, Magic Mike XXL's action men are refreshingly down to earth (which makes their choreographed, non-CGI moves all the more affecting), and yet the movie feels as explosive and action-packed as any other movie Hollywood's put out. The world doesn't hang in the balance, but the movie finds all the dramatic heft it needs in our heroes' simply stated quest: to restore a woman's smile. And watching them pull it off is an absolute thrill.

SEVENTH SON

I mean god dammit, you try to go into each movie with open mind, open heart. You recall the universal scorn received by undeserving movies that obscured their virtues: the solid, old school fantasy adventure JOHN CARTER (OF MARS); the far-from-perfect but surprisingly smart and movingly revisionist THE LONE RANGER; hell, even an effervescent, fun, and sexy piece of pop cinema like DRAGONBALL: EVOLUTION. And so you go into something like Sergei Bodrov's SEVENTH SON, which disappeared quickly after a widely-lambasted theatrical run, expectations low but (previous examples in mind) hoping for at least a modest diversion.

All the elements are there: actors who've done good work elsewhere (including reuniting LEBOWSKIites Jeff Bridges and Juliette Lewis), a decent-enough story (from a YA fantasy novel by Joseph Delaney), an actual plot that expands a bit on the usual Chosen One tropes common to this kind of story, attractive effects and decently-conceived environments and creatures. But it all just seems to unfold uninvolvingly before your eyes, never taking hold of anything inside you, just existing lifelessly on screen before you. Everyone commits, but nothing catches fire. The three movies cited above, though they vary in quality, all possess something soulful that involves us, but that involvement is never felt in SEVENTH SON. Was it a language barrier (with Bodrov making his English language debut)? Was it tinkered with by unseen hands in the two years (TWO YEARS) between its completion and its release?

Even in as productized a landscape as contemporary Hollywood it is rare that a movie appears with no clear reason for its existence. Routine story elements can be viewed with fresh eyes and mined for small original tweaks (or at least invested with genuine emotion), but no one involved seems to have asked how to make this modest little fantasy something different, or special. (Indeed, it regurgitates some of the genre's more tiresome aspects, from its villainess turning to evil after being rejected by a lover to a group of villains cast with most of the movie's non-male, non-white actors.) There is no excuse for SEVENTH SON to be as lifeless as it is, and it's frustrating that the talented people assembled to make it couldn't (or wouldn't) elevate it to the level of even a modest pleasure. No one looking at the movie during its making could have thought that they had a complete movie on their hands - why should the audience feel any different?

GODZILLA (2014)

The giant creature (Muto, it's called) wreaks havoc and devastation. A massive foot lands in the foreground. The camera pans up, up, still farther up the length of this creature. Eventually we’re face to face with it, and as if finally introducing itself, the title creature roars, a sonic blast recognizable from decades of giant monster cinema, but given a new, 21st century feel. And at this point in Godzilla, I start crying.

It was always going to be a difficult assignment. Director Gareth Andrews had drawn, for his second feature directing gig, the 60th anniversary iteration of a beloved fantasy series with a gigantic, iconic monster at its center. He was doing this in Hollywood, whose previous attempt in this franchise was a resounding failure. Even Toho Studios, Godzilla’s home studio, had retired the character indefinitely.

Happily, Edwards was scrappy enough to address the Godzilla mythos much in the way that Orson Welles took on the Shakespeare canon: an avowed fan of the series who wanted to do right by it and by its fans, Edwards nevertheless brings his own eye and ideas to the table. There are aspects of its story familiar from the genre: a wild-eyed scientist (Bryan Cranston, here) whose findings point to something nasty on the horizon; the title monster heading, with ambiguous intentions, to the point of conflict; the ascent of an unambiguously destructive other monster; the failure of the military to repel/contain either creature; the dire prognostications of a Human Who’s Seen Too Much (here scientist Serizawa, a minimal but earthy turn from Ken Watanabe); and the final showdown amid a major metropolis-turned-war-zone.

If these beats are overly familiar, they’re given new life by the energy Edwards brings to them. Edwards (and scenarists Max Borenstein and David Callaham) further embellish the scenario with a number of flourishes and details that make this Godzilla their Godzilla. Not all of these ideas land (at least one fight scene is cut away from cruelly early), and yet some of them, in this context, are downright daring (we’re suddenly seeing this fight on cable news, through the eyes of a young child whose mind is freakin’ blown)(and we’re kicked back to our own first childhood experience of kaiju action). The rogues gallery cast at the very least execute their functions dutifully; Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s munitions expert Ford Brody emerges as the movie’s hero in a somewhat meandering process, but he wins us over. Even Sally Hawkins, who subdues her usual exuberance in an ongoing presence as Serizawa’s aide, gets a sublime quiet moment in her final reaction shot, a graceful, moving coda that the movie earns. I wanna see her go hand-to-hand with the Controller of Planet X. Maybe next time.

Edwards executes this without indulging in overt fanservice. Edwards only really gets meta in a dialectic going on between American general Stantz (David Strathairn), who prefers to simply destroy all (of the) monsters, and Serizawa, who believes that Godzilla is an agent of nature working in the Earth’s defense. It’s as if the militarized action of filmmakers like Michael Bay and the mythic fantasy of Japanese cinema are quietly arguing their virtues and differences right up on screen. (Serizawa’s admonition to “Let them fight” effectively ends the dialogue, as effective a statement of purpose as you could ask from a summer movie.)

Yet even here, there’s more going on: Stantz isn’t simply a power-mad military man. Though all smooth efficiency and military might, his thoughts are never far from the civilians whose lives are at stake. When a plan is launched to defeat the creatures with a bomb, Stantz immediately plots to withdraw civilians from the blast radius, rather than write them off as a regrettable but necessary loss. This morality extends across the movie, with Edwards accounting at some length for the lives at stake; even Godzilla seems to tiptoe carefully around high population areas, and doesn’t even tear through the Golden Gate Bridge until those trigger-happy soldiers leave him no other options (yet even there do Edwards and co. account for the safety of a school bus crossing in his path). Compare this to Zach Snyder’s tone-deaf Man of Steel, in which Superman pummels Zod through buildings across Metropolis, collapsing buildings in his wake without a thought for those inside. (And a friend reminds me that Benedict Cumberbatch’s Khan killed more San Franciscans than Godzilla does here.) It’s yet another balancing act in a movie full of them, and Edwards manages to create blockbuster-level destruction without callousness or cynicism, thrilling us while keeping us mindful of the human costs of the unfolding story.

I’m not sure if Godzilla will turn out to be a favorite for the year. And yet it pleased both the eternally-young kaiju-fan and the older, more discerning moviegoer in me. It is a rare movie, to be acknowledged, that fully engages one’s adult sensibilities while satisfying something so primal, deep-rooted, and cherished as the love of gigantic monsters beating the tar out of each other.

(Gratitude to Aaron Luk and Chris Sellers for clarifications & discussion.)

STRANGER BY THE LAKE

So easy to describe this movie: Hitchcock's Fire Island adventure. A film blanc with cumshots. Surface analysis of a movie that, in many ways, is all about surfaces. But this story of a young gay man drawn into murder and obsession during a jaunt to a lakeside cruising spot is all about the depths beneath those surfaces. Dive in.

The whole thing takes place by the titular lake; we infer from conversations that there are restaurants, bedrooms, and a police station nearby, but we only ever see our characters in various states of undress frolicking, chatting, and hooking up in and around the lake, swimming naked, fucking in the forest. The idyllic, dreamy atmosphere is only enhanced by early chat of a silurus, maybe as long as fifteen feet, that lurks beneath the lake's surface.

We follow young Franck as he sunbathes, swims, hangs out, and hooks up, and follow his growing relationships with two men. Henri is a shlubby logger, shy but good-natured, who only ever sits by the lake and chats with anyone who engages him, without any serious interest in sex. And Michel is a gorgeous, experienced swimmer whose clingy boyfriend one night disappears.

Stranger by the Lake moves at a languorous but steady pace, rendering its landscapes and characters beautifully. Writer-director Alain Guiraudie is remarkably direct in depicting the sex lives of his characters. But the sex that many filmmakers build to is where Guiraduie begins. His characters' hidden depths and personalities, their darknesses, courage, obsessions are ultimately what truly fascinate Guiraudie; I don't remember being so artfully absorbed into characters in quite the way Guiraudie pulls off. Such depths does it plumb in its characters that we wind up looking into ourselves.

It is very much a film blanc, its menace lurking not in the shadows but naked in front of our very eyes, illuminated and obscured in the bare sunlight. But when the night finally falls, it falls hard.

BYZANTIUM

On the basis of the evidence here, Moira Buffini is my kind of playwright. Like many of my favorite British artists, she rejects the kitchen sink realism so prevalent in that country's cinema and theatre in favor of a more fanciful maximalism. At the same time, she uses genre and fantasist tropes to address and explore contemporary social concerns as diligently as any naturalist. It is no surprise then that Byzantium (adapted by Buffini from her play A Vampire Story) should address gender politics, family relations, the frailty of the body, and our relationship to our history within its story of a mother-daughter pair of vampires on the run from undead elders. What is pleasantly surprising is how entertaining and moving Byzantium turns out to be.

Buffini's script is gorgeously realized by director Neil Jordan, an old hand at adapting vampire literature by female authors. In the opening moments of the movie Jordan effortlessly balances two plotlines, as daughter Eleanor Webb (Saoirse Ronan) gently comforts an old age pensioner she's about to kill, while across town mother Clara (Gemma Arterton) is chased on foot from a neon-lit strip club through a shopping mall skylight to a dingy apartment by a mysterious but dogged pursuer. This kind of parallelism seems to run through the entire movie, and Jordan proves incredibly perceptive of many dualities running through Buffini's story: mother/daughter, past/present, living/undead, female/male, sex/violence. (Many of these seem to land during a stunning early moment in which Eleanor finds herself on a beach, face-to-face with her 19th-century self). The thing flows gorgeously, and the tale of the Webbs' vampiric origins unfolds deftly as their present-day difficulties escalate.

As commonplace as vampires seem to have become, it's no mean feat playing one well. Arterton, perhaps unsurprisingly, plays the now familiar blood-letting, leather-clad, ass-kicking female vampire with sleazy grace, but she's just as strong conveying the weariness of centuries in hiding, and the endless reservoir of love of an undead parent for her child. Ronan is just as strong in a quieter but equally deep role of an undead but ethical blood drinker, her pangs of conscience as strong as her thirst for blood, her need to tell her story sitting hand-in-hand with a longing to simply, finally connect. Buffini's depth & generosity extend to her male characters as well - Sam Riley and Jonny Lee Miller are strong as men who figure prominently in the Webbs' long lives; Daniel Mays and Caleb Henry Jones bring keenly felt (and very different) vulnerabilities to their roles as mortal men in the women's orbit.

Sean Bobbitt (cinematographer for some of last year's finest movies, including The Place Beyond The Pines and 12 Years A Slave) seems to capture an otherworldly luminosity unleashed by the Webbs in the dreary, everyday world they inhabit. I complained a while back that digital photography and presentation undermined the gothic atmosphere so desperately sought by the makers of The Woman in Black; perhaps I'm finally getting used to seeing such tales being told in this medium. Perhaps Bobbitt is simply a great cinematographer. The visual strengths of the movie are matched by its music, as Javier Navarette's score boosts the story with knowing, gentle intensity.

The whole thing feels like one of the best movies I've seen in recent memory. Byzantium finds new life and energy in the vampire story, and, finally, makes a compelling and persuasive case for the vitality of the 21st century horror movie. Long live the Webbs.

THE LORDS OF SALEM

Oh, how I wish I'd seen this thing theatrically. I've long been, not a fan, but certainly an interested observer of Rob Zombie's movie work. I was quite pleased by House of 1000 Corpses, which felt like the id of the grindhouse era unleashed on unsuspecting screens. The follow-up, The Devil's Rejects, left me rather cold, feeling that its relentless sadism was largely unleavened by wit (I said then that I found much to admire in the movie, and nothing to like). His Halloween remake and its sequel were rife with good ideas, strong moods, and more than a few truly harrowing shots, and yet they didn't really cohere.

But what the hell do I know? Zombie has his devotees, some of them close friends whose opinions I respect. And Zombie's movies grew steadily more ambitious, and between that and his clear devotion to genre films, I figured it would be only a matter of time before he made a movie I connected with. After finally seeing The Lords of Salem I felt like he was a lot closer to delivering that film.

And yet the movie's stuck with me since last night (among other things, it seems to have parked the Velvet Underground's "All Tomorrow's Parties" in my head for the foreseeable future). Zombie's tale of Heidi (Sheri Moon Zombie, of course), a nighttime DJ plunged into a nightmare by a mysterious recording, is rife with atmosphere and slow-burn horror. It feels like the most patient movie Zombie has made, though in retrospect there are plenty of visceral jolts throughout the piece And even though it feels like a more polished and refined Rob Zombie movie, there's still a superabundance of weirdness in pretty much every scene, delivered so gently and directly that at times one struggles to process what one is seeing.

Zombie is as much a child of genre movies and media as Tarantino, but Zombie's figured out how to use those inspirations beyond just slavishly quoting them. The Lords of Salem is a cocktail of influences from 70s Hammer horror (the witchcraft movies especially), Stanley Kubrick (from whom Zombie's assimilated much about manipulating cinematic space - check out the hallways of Heidi's apartment building and how Zombie maps her psyche with it), and Ken Russell (a clear and direct influence on the often mannered grotesquerie throughout, and especially the explosive and downright festive parade of blasphemy that climaxes the thing). And yet in addition to the visual quotes of those who came before (and his generous casting of those actors they worked with), Zombie's assimilated some of their boldness. Zombie's figured out that there's more to pushing the envelope than more tits, more blood, louder music, more violence; he's also figured out that there's more to Kubrick than just creepy atmosphere and one-point perspective. As the malevolence around and within Heidi grows in power it seems to take over the movie, which abandons narrative and, indeed, reality. Suddenly we're not watching a horror movie. Just as Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey became an otherworldly object not unlike the monoliths that drive its story, so does The Lords of Salem become something dark, mysterious, and finally magical.

The movie is by no means perfect; I can think of a half dozen actors I would rather have played Heidi (Zombie's ready to collaborate with a lead actor who'll challenge him). But it's a huge step forward. You could call it a more mature film than he's made, and not just because the soundtrack includes Mozart's Requiem alongside the Velvet Underground. I'm sad that some of his fans have rejected it (perhaps they feel it would have been more radical to simply resurrect the Firefly clan for yet another bout of psychobilly mayhem), but others more invested in his work than I are also calling The Lords of Salem their favorite Rob Zombie movie. I said earlier that it was a step closer to a Rob Zombie movie that I could connect with, but obviously that I even wrote this makes it clear that this is, in fact, that movie. I'd always been curious to see the next Rob Zombie movie; now I can't wait for it.

THE COUNSELOR

I can not dismiss the artistry of Cormac McCarthy as easily as his detractors. And I will not read any kind of depth into his nihilism, as would his defenders. I certainly agree that McCarthy is the guiding auteur of this thing more than director Ridley Scott, but what the hell do we get out of it?

Perhaps his detractors, finding his shallow worldview given such a clear and uncluttered depiction here, are realizing that they overpraised NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN back in the day, and trying to backtrack. McCarthy's "we're trapped by our bad decisions, everything and everyone is fucked" semi-philosophy always struck me as high school-level nihilism. Even given a high shine and executed by strong actors, as it is here, it's still high school nihilism. Such a worldview is better (or is at least more honestly) played for comedy, as the Coens did in their post-NO COUNTRY project BURN AFTER READING, or as Javier Bardem does in his fantastic monologue in this movie, recalling his girlfriend's sexual encounter with his car.

The movie moves with style and grace, and does find variations on its one-note message. McCarthy's style tends to give each member of the cast the same voice (much in the manner of Tarantino or Sorkin). Happily, there is poetry in that language, and the movie's greatest gift is letting its veteran cast go to town with fairly lengthy and eloquent passages (among the supporting players, Bruno Ganz finds fine purchase in his scene as an eternally wise diamond merchant; Ruben Blades offers a perfect sardonic world-weariness to his own summation near the end of the movie). But in the end its all lip service to the same petty, faux-deep nihilism, and no matter how eloquently it delivers its message, THE COUNSELOR can't hide the fact that it isn't saying a damn thing.

THE WORLD'S END

And some movies cut so damn close you almost want to recuse yourself from talking about them. And though they never made me uncomfortable, the similarities between me and Gary King, Simon Pegg's strung-out, hard-partying protagonist, made themselves keenly known: an occasionally overwhelming sense of nostalgia; the all-black uniform of your youth, slightly (but only slightly) modified here in our mid-40s; and a curiously abiding, nay unshakeable faith in the Sisters of Mercy's FLOODLAND. And though I'm more aware than Gary that "This Corrosion" is only half-serious (director Edgar Wright is definitely in on the joke), I suspect we both grow silent during "Driven Like The Snow."

Gary's so at odds with the modern world that he gets the lads back together to recreate an epic but incomplete pub crawl that, in retrospect, was their last real night of freedom. And though none of the lads (Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman, and Eddie Marsan in uniformly well-observed turns) can seem to communicate to Gary that he's living too too much in the past, soon even Gary realizes that all is not right in Newton Haven.

It's a grand and funny conclusion to Pegg & Wright's Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy; the comedy lands and the fight scenes (built around the notion that our heroes become better fighters the drunker they get) match those of any purer action movie. Its portrait of a small town beset by unseen and sinister forces is social genre fiction in line with Wyndham. But more than any of its substantial gifts, I'm savoring its bittersweet taste of melancholy. Wright has commented that even when things are good one is always drawn home, driven by a strange need to go back. And as specifically as my life resonates with Gary's (though I like to think I'm not quite so addled, or pained), I suspect this aspect of the movie will resonate with many. It's a clever and thrilling movie, to be sure, but one with much to say about our world and those who live discontentedly within it, whether they acknowledge this discontent or not.

FLOODLAND begins righteously with meticulously produced Eldritch/Steinman epics, and ends in Never Land (fragments); epic but incomplete. THE WORLD'S END also ends in a kind of Never Land (fragments). Like FLOODLAND, it bestows a certain energy, a righteous rock & roll thrill. You leave it with a new perspective on the world, and its goofily apocalyptic pop playing in your head. Like FLOODLAND, I can't wait to see it again.

THE HUNT

Perversely, perhaps, I find myself longing for an American remake of this thing. Thomas Vinterberg's moving, harrowing tale concerns a kindly schoolteacher (Mads Mikkelsen, worthy of every award he's won) facing alienation and worse when a misunderstanding leads to accusations of pedophilia. The story's remarkably free of one-dimensional villains (or villains of any kind, really), but generates powerful tension as rumors escalate beyond the point of no return. Though a universal story to be sure, it could easily happen in the American heartland. Yet I wonder if American producers and audients would shun the movie for capturing their reflections all too well, if anyone seeing it would fess up to being capable of the kind of hysteria the movie so beautifully portrays. In the end it asks us how well any of us really know or trust our children, or those tasked with their care. Serling would have admired it.

TRANCE

A good friend once commented that THE DA VINCI CODE existed for the sole purpose of making stupid people feel smart. "Well, it's got Da Vinci, and he's smart, and it's about a code, and I figured it all out, so I'm smart! Wa-hey!" I can not speak to the accuracy of this assessment of THE DA VINCI CODE, and yet I feel, having seen Danny Boyle's TRANCE, that I have experienced the exact movie my friend was describing.



The movie is as empty as the frame held above by Vincent Cassel. For all its games of dress-up in the complexities of the human psyche and entry-level art history, TRANCE has nothing to offer us. No credible, dimensional characters (the leads are revealed to be as shallow and duplicitous as the multi-ethnic but otherwise interchangeable thugs that make up the cast); no reason to give a damn about the fate of the missing painting that serves as the movie's MacGuffin; no real plot on offer that isn't driven by the schemes of these shallowly drawn and uninvolving characters. The truly lovely cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle and brisk filmmaking do their damnedest to make something look like it's going on, but it very carefully explains every stray image, sealing everything so neatly that even the most dense viewer is sure to not be left behind. If after seeing this you have a desire to go again to catch the details you've missed, then you've been conned, and are a suitable target for the anti-human disdain this smug motion picture oozes from every scene.

WARM BODIES

Eight years after an unknown event brings the dead back to life to feast on the flesh of the living, one young zombie (call him R) shuffles through an aimless existence; though vocally reduced to monosyllables, R is able to take startlingly clear perspective on his life with a robust inner monologue. Protracted circumstances find him feeling oddly protective toward Julie, a young survivor suspicious of her undead savior. But R's growing feelings for Julie begin to have startling effects on both of them, and the shattered world around them.

WARM BODIES is certain to be deemed not-hardcore-enough by the zombie faithful. But though clearly pitched mainly at a young adult audience, its orientation is pitched toward fantasy rather than pig-guts-and-fake-blood. As such, it's absolutely charming, and disarmingly earnest. Nicholas Hoult is as adept at R's zombie meanderings as his glib, smart voice-over; Teresa Palmer offers a solid and believable young heroine in Julie. (Rob Corddry brings a nice energy to a solid supporting arc R's zombie peer M.) Jonathan Levine keeps the whole thing balanced, mixing some overt Shakespeare references, a nice wrinkle on zombie-unlife-as-contemporary-metaphor, and, most crucially of all, an unflinchingly sincere sense of romance. Whether or not the hardcore zombie crowd are open-hearted enough to accept it is open to question; the rest of us get to enjoy the spectacle of unabashed romantics injecting new life into the dead genre.