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.

Three Films Make A Post: For Howard, things are about to get R'lyeh crazy.

Thir13en Ghosts (2001): The title is program in this attempt by Steve Beck to remake one of William Castle’s weakest films. I don’t know why you’d want to remake that one, but here it is.

Becks’s film is not very good, featuring music video-style ghosts not doing terribly much beyond hunting the main characters through corridors. To be fair, these are rather better looking corridors than usual in corridor runners but the decision to keep the body count low in a film that features nothing else beyond the ghost effects to keep the audience awake seems rather dubious to me. There’s really not much else to say here: Academy Award winner F. Murray Abraham doesn’t put any effort into his villainous turn, the rest of the cast is okay, and there’s nothing memorable at all going on.

Goldstone (2016): Ivan Sen’s sequel to his Australian rural crime movie Mystery Road on the other hand is just brilliant, again telling much of its story through the landscape it takes place in (which is also part of its philosophical argument), letting Aaron Pedersen say very much through saying very little, and again talking about the way little corruptions turn into big ones, the price of looking away, and why one might want to despair at the world but perhaps shouldn’t. It also happens to get close to breaking my heart in the process. Sen displays a keen sense of the way people tell themselves stories about the world and their places in it to justify any petty, evil act they commit but also some hard-won hope.

There’s some great filmmaking, great writing, and great acting (besides Pedersen, there are fine turns by among others Jacki Weaver, Cheng Pei-Pei and Alex Russell) on display here, too.

Shadows of the Dead (2016): John Ross’s film about a bunch of teens and their struggle against a shadow demon thing, is the sort of undemanding streaming service queue/SyFy Channel fodder one can watch with a mild degree of enjoyment on a day when one feels very undemanding oneself. Thus one can feel very mildly entertained by it and then forget about it completely. With a bit of work, this could have been a more interesting film: sharper characterisation of the protagonists, or a monster with less random powers, or hallucinations of the characters’ greatest fear with a bit more heft and thought to them are all things that come to mind immediately that could have made the film less bland.