Three Films Make A Post: Will Haunt You!

My Best Friend’s Exorcism (2022): Unlike most of the internet, I liked this snarky teen horror comedy about – well, you guessed it, with its completely overdone attempt at an 80s vibe just fine. But then, I did find the Grady Hendrix book this is based on as superficial and self-congratulatory as most of the author’s books I’ve read, so I just might be looking for something very different from this sort of thing as many of my peers.

Don’t get me wrong here: Damon Thomas’s film certainly is no masterpiece. The pacing is just ever so slightly off, tonal shifts work only about half of the time and the film’s humour is something of an acquired taste I’m not sure I care to acquire. The 80s emulation is so over the top, this nearly becomes a satire on contemporary attempts at The 80s™. Still, there are also some perfectly decently realized moments of actual horror, the young cast do their best with what they have to work with, and things do at least look glossy at all times – it’s the sort of brainless entertainment I can work with on a day I don’t want to watch anything with proper human emotions, meaningful themes explored in meaningful ways or even just decent jump scares.

Grimcutty (2022): John Ross’s Grimcutty contains one great idea that by all rights should have made this a clever and fun little picture: reversing the poles of the usual Internet and social media horror (hi, “Black Mirror”!) by suggesting the kids are perfectly alright, but the grown-up hysteria against a way of life and communication they can’t understand is the main problem.

While I – being an old fart myself – would at least partially disagree, this is definitely a good basis on which to comment on social mores in a scary and interesting way. Alas, there’s little else that’s good about the film. Its plot can’t wait long enough to actually define the baseline normality things are supposed to deviate from, characterisation is so flat I’m not quite sure the script is actually by Ross and not a bad AI, and the scary parts don’t just lack any imagination, they aren’t even good at the very basic jump scare biz of modern mainstream horror. Visually, this is professional enough, apart from the ridiculous and childish design of the titular creature, but professionality does not a good movie make.

Where Evil Lives (1991): I have to admit that, in comparison, I enjoyed this cheap, tacky and generally artless early 90s anthology movie in which Claude Akins presents three extremely generic – in the US post-EC style - tales about very traditional monsters, as directed by Richard L. Fox, Stephen A. Maier and Kevin G. Nunan (middle initials are mandatory), quite a bit more. At least, the tales do seem to know the kind of cheap and cheerful horror nonsense they want to be, present the little they have going for them in a short and efficient manner, and then simply disappear into the video aether.

In short: Crooked House

Marked Gatiss's semi-episodic TV three-parter of stories in the tradition of the classic supernatural tale is a fine demonstration that even a talented writer with an obvious love, and quite deep knowledge, of the genre he’s working in will not necessarily produce a story in it that's actually all that great.

It's not just that Gatiss's approach here is a bit too conservative for my taste. I have seen, read and heard everything in Crooked House many times before, and enjoyed it, and would probably still have enjoyed it again even if it didn't add anything new at all to the genre. The problem lies with an execution where only the most obvious way to set-up and solve a situation is taken, where the so-called plot twists (an unnecessary thing at the best of times) are made particularly useless through their obviousness and - sorry - lameness. Crooked House's slavish adherence to tradition except for the existence of gay people (but don't you worry, it's not that the series does anything with them) ignores everything that's subversive about the British ghost story and turns it lifeless; if the British supernatural tale were an animal, Crooked House would rather prefer the stuffed and dead version to the living, breathing thing.

Being who I am, I'd still be able to find a lot of enjoyment in this subservient approach to tradition, but the lifelessness of Gatiss's script continues through to direction without any visual imagination, sets that lack any atmosphere, and acting on the theatrical and stiff side, because people in the past clearly talked liked people in the novels of the past. In combination, this number of flaws doesn't add up to something horrible, or unwatchable, but rather to something pointless.

Technorati-Markierungen: british tv,horror,in short,mark gatiss,damon thomas