Three Films Make A Post: Don't rush, die slow.

Slotherhouse (2023): Only a hopeless optimist would go into a movie about a slasher sloth (sloth slasher?) hoping for much of that elusive quality normal people describe with the word “good”, but Matthew Goodhue’s film still manages to disappoint the hardened cynic. Sure, you’ll expect the lame, would-be self-referential humour, the “irony” (where irony is defined as not giving enough of a shit about your film to come up with decent jokes), the harmless kills.

What you might not expect is that about half of the film’s running time is spent not on a slasher sloth but on the race for the role of sorority house president, and the bad moral influence this race has on the good girl trying to beat the generic bitch character; or how much that part of the movie feels like a modern Lifetime movie in all the worst ways.

The trailer’s pretty fun, though.

Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose (2023): Also pretty underwhelming is Adam Sigal’s movie about one of my favourite bits of Forteana, the mysterious talking mongoose its friends call Gef (the voice of Neil Gaiman, for some reason). Despite a pretty fine cast (Simon Pegg, Minnie Driver, Christopher Lloyd and so on), there’s just very little here, mostly because the filmmakers can’t seem to be able to decide what exactly they’re trying to do here. Is this a broad comedy? A comedy about a man being confronted with his failings and only half-way learning anything? One of those insufferable movies about The Power of Belief™? The film never seems to be willing or able to decide, and so never quite arrives at anything you might want to call a point. Plus, the real Nandor Fodor was much more interesting than the one the movie concocts. And Harry Price was, not to put too fine a point on it, a damn liar.

Bones and All (2022): Luca Guadagnino’s cannibal romance, on the other hand, wants to be more than one film at the same time and has not problems at all coping with that. So this is a doomed teen romance, a sometimes surprisingly nasty cannibal film, a serious movie about falling in love badly and with the right wrong person, a road movie, and one of its directors slick pseudo-artsy endeavours like Call Me By Your Name, just with a lot more blood. But then, after his fantastic Suspiria project, I’ve grown to expect surprising shifts in Guadagnino’s body of work from the mid-brow towards the interesting.

Somehow, all of these different approaches to the material at hand feel as if they belonged to each other in Guadagnino’s hands, characters and tone subtly gliding from one to the next, resulting in a film that shouldn’t work at all, but does so wonderfully.

In short: Escape Room (2019)

Take a couple of strictly one-note characters whose so-called character arcs will be clear to anyone who has seen any movie at all after their introductory scenes (using actor and character names seems to be overkill by suggesting there’s anything going on there at all). Drop them into a boring and unimaginative series of escape rooms that end in strictly family-friendly deaths, like an even worse version of Saw had a boring baby with the mutant love child of Final Destination and The Game, excising every bit of possible excitement and depth that might still exist with the axe of the lazy hack writer. Direct the whole affair with little flair and only the most basic of craftsmanship. Subtract any knowledge of the real world, the laws of physics (even those that would arguably make the set pieces here more exciting). For some godawful reason add two and a half endings more than this needs, including what feels like a cringeworthy bid for a sequel. Voila, you have Escape Room, the final proof that you really don’t need any craftsmanship or effort to make a movie for Sony. Which is also rather confusing, seeing as director Adam Robitel’s other feature length movie was the rather wonderful The Taking of Deborah Logan, a film that’s the opposite of this one in basically everything.

The worst thing about the whole affair is that there’s no reason for the film to be quite this bad: I’d be perfectly willing and able to suspend my disbelief when it comes to the one-note characters and its complete dependence on artificial dumb set pieces. However, the film would need to meet me halfway by, say, demonstrating some sense for constructing set pieces that are interesting or exciting, or by having them resonate with character backgrounds in ways that actually make sense (which would also help elevate the characters to a second note), or by at least pretending to attempt to entertain me.