Three Films Make A Post: If you have to scream, cover your mouth

Sick (2022): I’ve seen this sometimes pretty brutal home invasion movie directed by John Hyams described as some kind of comeback for writer Kevin Williamson – who co-wrote with Katelyn Crabb – but I can only see it as a much weaker follow-up to Hyams’s brilliant Alone that’s failing mostly because of Williamson’s and Crabb’s limp script. As a director, Hyams is still fantastic at directing classical suspense and thriller scenes, but where Alone’s deceptively straightforward script earthed these scenes in great character writing and tense plotting, the film at hand falters at creating characters whose destiny you’d actually be interested in and can only understand suspense scenes as set-pieces instead of intricate parts of a greater whole. That the killer’s motivation come right out of the wet dreams of an anti-vaxxer forum doesn’t make things any better either.

There’s Something Wrong with the Children (2022): To continue grumping about movies, this Evil Children affair by Roxanne Benjamin is just not a terribly interesting film for most of its running time. Benjamin is clearly a competent filmmaker, but not one so good – or simply so experienced, this being her second feature – she can work around the fact the child actors she has to depend on can’t consistently hit the notes of required creepiness, which is pretty much the death knell in a film about kids acting creepy. The script can’t quite seem to decide if it wants to do something clever with shifting the usual role of the “woman who realized early on there’s bad shit going on, but nobody believes her because she’s mentally ill” on a man, or somehow talk about female scepticism of becoming a mother, tries both at once, and manages to do neither in a satisfying way.

It’s not a terrible movie, just one that’s perfectly forgettable.

Baghead (2008): As I have repeated ad nauseam in the past, I am not an admirer of the mumblecore canon as a whole (mostly not even in particular), with an aesthetic that never convinced me this is more than film school grad wank of the highest degree. Having said that, I do have a small place in my heart for this horror/hapless indie filmmaker comedy by the Duplass brothers. Mostly because this, like their other films, doesn’t feel trapped in its aesthetics like too much mumblecore does for me, but actually uses them intelligently. Even the – most probably in large parts improvised – dialogue comes to sensible points and shapes emotional beats instead of simply stumbling around, amounting to nothing.

Quite a bit of this is obviously thanks to the cast – Steve Zissis, Ross Partridge, Greta Gerwig and Elise Muller – as well as what I assume is judicious editing, but there’s also a pleasantly non-wanky sense of self-irony, as well as an abundance of heart (the genuine kind sometimes found on sleeves) on display that makes the film impossible to dislike for me.

XX (2017)

It’s time for another horror anthology. XX’s particular selling point is that its four episodes are exclusively directed by women, which at the very least makes a nice contrast to bro horror (though at least one of the producers and directors involved is rather ironically involved in the VHS franchise which to me – next to the films of Eli Roth – epitomises this particular sub-genre). The stories are connected by wonderfully macabre animated interstitial segments by Sofìa Carrillo.

Story number one, “The Box”, directed by Jovanka Vuckovic, and based on a story by Jack Ketchum, starts the film off very nicely. It’s a creepy and deceptively calmly told tale seen through the eyes of a mother (Natalie Brown) in one of those super-traditional suburban rich (what Americans tend to call middle-class but which certainly isn’t) families, whose little son (Peter DaCunha) suddenly stops eating after having had a look in a mysterious box carried by a stranger. The demonstrative family harmony frays, particularly since the knowledge of what is in the box seems to work like an infectious disease.

This one might be my favourite episode of the anthology, thanks to not just the fine cast but also to Vuckovic’s subtle direction that elegantly swerves around the most obvious interpretations of the tale. That doesn’t make these interpretations wrong, it just robs them of explanatory monopoly. Vuckovic keeps up a growing feeling of dread turning this into the movie version of really good contemporary weird fiction, or a nightmare.

The second segment “The Birthday Party” was directed by Annie Clark whom you’ll probably know better under her nom de plum as a musician, St. Vincent. On the visual, design and acting level, this darkly comedic little tale of an even richer suburban housewife’s (Melanie Lynskey) attempt to hide the suicide of her husband so as not to spoil her daughter’s birthday party is rather successful. On a less technical level, the story did little for me. There’s just too little substance to it as a story, and the message of “suburban housewives are neurotic because they are under enormous pressure” is not exactly news, nor does the segment really add anything – say emotional resonance – to that message.

The third segment “Don’t Fall” by Roxanne Benjamin changes tack completely by being a pretty to look at but short and pedestrian bit of monster filler that feels like something that didn’t make the cut in one of the other contemporary horror anthologies. There’s too little to it even for the low standards of something like the VHS films. It’s not, mind you, in any way, shape, or form, an incompetently made tale, it’s just terribly uninvolving in its competence, and as shallow as a campfire tale.

Fortunately, the film does find its feet again with Karyn Kusama’s unofficial sequel to Rosemary’s Baby and similar tales, “Her Only Living Son”. The segment about a mother (Christina Kirk) finally facing up to who - or what - her son (Kyle Allen) is when he turns eighteen has quite a bit of fun with winking and nudging towards the films it thinks further. It also picks up two finely realized scenes of paranoia on the way, and expresses rather more complex thoughts about the idea of motherhood and motherly love in extremis than horror films usually do, while also just being an effective horror story.


So, while one segment leaves me cold and another one feels like pure filler to me, the two good segments of XX are so well done, the film still is one of the best entries into the contemporary minor wave of horror anthologies. While I’d have been even happier if all four segments had worked for me, two brilliant segments, wonderful interstitial animations, and no bad segments do make for a very satisfying anthology.

Three Films Make A Post: Terror goes into over-time.

Home Invasion (2016): Despite being a direct-to-video production, director David Tennant’s Home Invasion looks and feels more like a TV movie, the sort of thing Lifetime gets up to from time to time, say. So the film doesn’t take the violence or the threat to its central characters very far and plays things rather safe and friendly for a home invasion movie, building up competent enough thrills but not exactly telling a riveting story. It also wastes Scott Adkins as the least interesting bad guy available, generally opting for stilted dialogue and little else whenever it can get away with it. Natasha Henstridge and child actor Liam Dickinson are okay, but the film plays the threat for their lives and limbs so conservatively, I found myself less than excited.

Mandrake (2010): Tripp Reed’s Mandrake for its part actually is a TV movie. Just another SyFy Original, this one’s concerned with an “expedition” (or as we in the biz call them, annoying people wandering through the jungles of Shreveport) that pulls out the wrong dagger from the wrong chest and has to contend with the resulting awakening of a very pissed-off ent (whose name probably would be Grumpyroot or something of that kind). For most of the time, this plays out like the adaptation of a second string Weird Tales story, with its same basic adventure tropes (including the usual bullshit about “natives”, though they aren’t exactly the bad guys here; in fact, punchier writing could have made something quite interesting out of the way they aren’t), the same somewhat cool monster, and the same pleasantly clichéd plot structure.

Additional selling point is that our heroes seem to be surprisingly okay with human sacrifice as long as they aren’t on the wrong end of the dagger. Obviously, I enjoyed the whole she-bang well enough, but who am I kidding?

Southbound (2015): Given how many of the people involved with this anthology horror piece concerning the misadventures of various soon-to-be-dead (or worse) characters travelling southbound on a nameless US desert highway have been part of the VHS films, I was rather expecting an unpleasant trip into the world of bro horror.
Instead, I got a pretty good horror anthology with some truly nasty bits, with rather simple yet very effectively realized short tales, and a sense of weirdness floating around the edges of the stories that to me is pretty much the opposite of bro´horror, like Twilight Zone episodes gone horribly wrong. It’s a delightful show case for all the directors – Roxanne Benjamin, David Bruckner, Patrick Horvath and collective Radio Silence – that also suggests they were rather held back by the VHS films’ paradigm to look really shitty.