Where the hell have I been?

Apparently I needed to take a l o n g break after October!  I haven't been paying much attention to what I've been consuming, mostly needing to turn my brain off and just veg in front of a screen of late.  I've watched a bunch of stuff, including:

• Batwoman which I rather like, just like I like the other Arrowverse shows (Legends of Tomorrow is my favorite, I think).  Like the others, Batwoman will have some growing pains but even the first season is improving as it goes.
• Crisis on Infinite Earths - since I was doing Batwoman, I figured I'd watch the Crisis episodes too, even though I haven't kept up with any of those shows besides Legends.  I'm a little in the dark as to Arrow - adult daughter from the future? - but I think I've figured everything else out.
• At the repeated urging of a high school friend, I've started Lucifer.  My friend says it has supplanted Buffy as his favorite show (!!!) so I'm giving it a go.  Tom Ellis is certainly charming, and I think it's getting better as it goes along, but I'm not 100% sold yet.
• I'm catching up on Legion episodes on Hulu too.  I never half know what's going on at any given time but it sure is pretty to look at.
• With this Hulu subscription, I've watched the first two Castle Rock seasons.  These are mixed, with some parts being very strong and others just ... meh.  I think S2 was better than S1, in large part because Lizzy Caplan (as Annie Wilkes pre-Misery) is SO AWESOME.  I also appreciate the fact that no one really tries to do a Maine accent (Tim Robbins skirts along the edge but never commits, thankfully) because I just don't think anyone who isn't a Mainer can do it.
• I've just started The Witcher, knowing nothing about the books or the games going in.  Reviews say that this show definitely gets better as it goes along, which is good because E1 was borderline incomprehensible.  I'm not sure I'm ever going to accept that godawful wig Henry Cavill wears, though.
• Finally, I watched The Shape of Water.  I'm a huge Guillermo del Toro fan but ... this movie won an Oscar for Best Picture?  Really?  Where was the plot (aside from being Beauty and the Beast)?  Pan's Labyrinth is a way, way, way better movie on all fronts.

Tenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #15 The Golem (2018)

I love The Bloggess.  (You should too.  She's very, very funny, completely weird and heartbreakingly honest.)  So when she says to watch The Golem, I watch The Golem.

It's 1673 Lithuania (note: everyone is awfully clean for 1673) in a small Jewish village.  Hanna chafes at the culture's enforced role: she studies her husband's Kabbalah texts in secret and goes to the local healer to make sure she doesn't get pregnant again, after having lost her only child Josef in a drowning accident seven years ago.  When neighboring plague-ridden Russian Christians start oppressing her village, Hanna uses the secrets of Kabbalah she has learned to create a golem to protect her people.  Rather than the hulking monster of Jewish lore, her golem takes Josef's form - and though child-sized, it still manages to kill a lot of people, both Russian villains and innocent Lithuanian villagers.  There are a LOT of exploding heads and ripped-out hearts.

The Golem has a lot going for it.  It is original, with a fairly deep dive (for a mainstream movie) into Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism.  It is well-acted, although I thought some of Hanna's dialogue seemed a little anachronistic.  There isn't a ton of violence even with the heads and hearts as mentioned above.  I just found it a bit boring and not at all suspenseful or scary.  (For an example of a 1600s-set film that is both suspenseful and scary: The Witch.)  Or maybe I didn't connect with it because I'm not a fan of creepy kid horror movies - and this Josef-golem is creepy. Other reviewers have liked The Golem a lot: see here, and here.  I could appreciate it but it's not a favorite.

 

Happy Halloween, y'all!

Tenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #14 Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987)

Do you need to have seen the first Prom Night to enjoy Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II? No, you do not!  This flick was exactly what I was hoping for in all its ridiculous, late 1980s glory, right from the beginning with its opening credits synthesizer music.

We start with Prom Night, 1957.  Mary Lou Maloney is a wild child.  She's gorgeous, sassy, knows what she wants and is popular enough to be voted Prom Queen.  She also cheats on her straight-laced boyfriend, Billy, with some other dude, right there back stage at Prom.  Billy decides to get back at her with a stink-bomb prank at her coronation, but something goes wrong and her dress goes up in flames just as she is to be crowned.  She dies, shrieking, right there on stage while no one even tries to put her out!!!

Then it's 1987, with its hair and shoulder pads and high-waisted, pleated, pastel-colored pants.  Vicky's mean mom won't let her buy a new dress for Prom - even though she's in the running for Prom Queen - so she finds something sparkly in the theater department's prop closet.  While she's rummaging around in there, she inadvertently sets free Mary Lou's vengeful spirit, which was somehow trapped in a steam trunk, along with her Prom Queen sash, cloak and crown.  Mary Lou gets right down to it: tormenting and then possessing poor Vicky and then killing all sorts of people.  Her old boyfriend Billy is now the high school principal (played by Michael Ironsides!), and father of Vicky's boyfriend, and the dude Mary Lou hooked up with is now the local priest, so you might imagine the high jinks involved.

Slight spoilers for a 30+ year old movie.  This is how you can die in HML:PNII: strangled with a cape and tossed out a window; stabbed with a crucifix; crunched in a gym locker; electrocuted by personal computer; impaled by a neon light.

This is not at all scary but it is a great example of late '80s campy horror.  It has no shame about cribbing from Carrie, The Exorcist or the Nightmare on Elm Street movies; the lolling tongue could be right out of Nightmare III.  The practical effects (I love practical effects) are superb, particularly the blackboard whirlpool and Mary Lou's resurrection.  There is a bit of a slow stretch between the first death and the second, as the movie is much more entertaining when Mary Lou is causing trouble.  I even had a bit of sympathy for Mary Lou: literally all she wanted was to be Prom Queen.  (Also, why did NO ONE try to put her out when she was on fire?!?)  Any horror film that says, "I've got places to go, people to kill" with a straight face is aces in my book.

Tenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #13 Grabbers

In the waters off the coast of Erin Island (fictional, actually filmed on location in Donegal), a UFO crashes and the inhabitants (the titular "grabbers") proceed to munch on the small crew of a fishing boat who is foolhardy enough to investigate.  As pods of dead pilot whales wash ashore, and lobstermen pull weird, tentacle-y things out of their traps, the local Garda outpost - currently manned by cynical alcoholic O'Shea and new recruit Nolan - begins their investigation.  It becomes clear that the aliens are, well, alien.  It also SPOILERS becomes evident that the aliens, who tend to drain humans of their blood via a leech-like protrusion, are deathly allergic to alcohol: when one tries to drain O'Shea (who is well above the legal limit), it vomits up his blood and collapses.  Since a storm is coming in and there's to be no help had from the mainland, O'Shea and Nolan convince the island's entire population to come to the local pub to get drunk.  To save their lives, of course!

Although the scenery is stunning and the actors charming, Grabbers is a slight, pleasant enough film that will be forgotten as soon as the credits roll.  It's billed as a horror/thriller-comedy: it's funny enough but it isn't scary at all, and when you're a horror-comedy, you need both halves of the equation.  I give it further points off for CGI monsters.  I know this was low budget, and I realize that the size of the big alien would have made it nigh impossible for practical effects.  But low budget practical monsters are wonderful; low budget CGI not so much.

I do give it some credit for an Aliens shout-out towards the end, however.

Tenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #12 Apollo 18

How in the world did I manage twenty-two movies last October?!!?  We're almost at the end of October 2019 and I'm only up to twelve...

Apollo 18 purports to be a found-footage film of the real final Apollo moon mission, recently leaked after being highly classified for decades.  The Apollo program ran from 1963 to 1972 and was designed to land humans on the moon (and then bring them back).  Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 were successful.  The movie is about the top secret mission that went out at the end of December 1974, sponsored by the Department of Defense, to set up early warning systems in case of Soviet missiles.  Apollo 18 was a three-astronaut mission: two landed on the moon while the third remained in low orbit, to reconnect with the lunar module after the mission and return to Earth.

Nearly immediately after landing on the moon's surface, near its south pole, the crew starts picking up communications interference and the overnight motion capture cameras (this is 1970s tech) seem to catch something moving out in the rocks.  The astronauts find footprints and other tracks that are not theirs; they find an abandoned Soviet lunar module and a dead cosmonaut; and inside their own lunar module, the collected rock samples seem to be moving.  By themselves.  As you might imagine, this causes some concern for our astronauts.

Look, this was an okay movie.  The story is compelling but it barely qualifies as "horror," with just a little suspense/paranoia, only a few jump scares and a little blood.  Because of the found-footage set-up, supposedly being from 1970s film, a lot of the visuals are difficult to make out and yes, I get that this is on purpose and is the point of found-footage.  But when there isn't a lot of plot, it helps if you can actually see what you're supposed to be seeing.

Tenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #11 Southbound

I do enjoy horror anthologies - I like the short film nature of the individual segments - and after reading the more-than-lukewarm review of Southbound (2015) on Final Girl, I thought I should check it out.  This one doesn't have a strong, overarching framework, just the voice of a radio DJ fading in and out, and characters from the various segments passing each other by.  I'm okay with that.  Sometimes the framework gets pushed too hard.  Here, the segments are only loosely connected.  Of course, everyone in the movie seems to be stuck in Hell, so that's a tie that binds.

The first segment has a couple of blood-spattered dudes just trying to get home after a rough night.  They stop by a diner/gas station and then get caught in a loop, unable to get away.  They are being stalked by some flying/floating/skeleton/tentacle/bug things and let me tell you, the creature design on those ... things is GREAT.  Really, really creepy off in the distance and fantastic up close.  Best part of the whole dang movie.

The second segment has a girl band stranded with a flat tire in the middle of the desert.  They are picked up by an extremely dorky couple who are straight out of mid-century.  Things go from weird to worse, however, and the girls find themselves in the clutches of a cult.  This segment is also pretty good.

One of the band members escapes and whilst running away, gets hit by a distracted driver in segment #3.  When he calls 911, they say they can't locate him and advise him to move the mangled girl to the next town he gets to.  He finds a small, seemingly deserted town with a hospital; the hospital is also completely deserted.  The 911 operators tell him he'll have to try to save the wounded girl himself and walk him through some gory body horror.  Pretty gross.

Then there's a completely WTF bit about an old dude that shoots up the sketchiest bar on the planet, looking for his sister.  Things get super weird and hard to follow there.  And then there's a nasty, violent home invasion segment that ties to the first segment, although it's not clear how or why, and then there are more tentacles and my notes at that point are just: WTF? WTF?? WTF is going on???

Like most anthologies, Southbound is hit or miss, with probably more misses than hits.  But while it may have been incoherent at times, it was never boring, so that's a big point in its favor.  Add that amazing creature design and you've got a low budget, indie omnibus flick that isn't a waste of its running time.

P.S. Stacie Ponder is doing an ENTIRE month of posts on the new Suspiria.  It's on my list to get to for this month.

Tenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #10 Event Horizon

Woohoo - space horror!  I mean, mediocre space horror, but still ...

It is 2047.  Seven years ago, deep space research vessel Event Horizon completely disappeared out around Neptune.  Official word was that it exploded, all lives lost, nothing left of the ship.  But then: it came back.  It didn't explode - its experimental [nonsensical movie science] drive bent space/time, delivering it across the universe in an instant.  And now it's back, from wherever it has been.

The search and rescue ship Lewis and Clark was sent to salvage it.  The small crew of Captain Laurence Fishburne, First Officer Joely Richardson, pilot Sean Pertwee, medical officer Kathleen Quinlan, mechanic (?) Richard T. Jones, loose cannon Jason Isaacs and some young redshirt are joined by the Event Horizon's designer, Sam Neill, who is, it must be said, rather weird.  The crew doesn't much like him and, as they board the derelict ship and progressively stranger things keep happening, they like him much, much less.  The crew suffers from hallucinations (maybe); the final ship's log is a garbled mess of shrieks and Latin; there are fluids and secretions exuding from the ship's walls.  As it turns out, the Event Horizon did not travel across the universe to [scientific star name] - it broke through space/time and went to a hell dimension.  Ooooooooo!

Despite its stacked cast, Event Horizon (1997) is a hot mess, with a confusing through-line, overacting and terrible dialogue.  It obviously steals from much better movies - Alien and Hellraiser spring immediately to mind.  The ship design is cool (see above re: Alien) but the story is pretty incoherent in places and when it switches over from what looked to be malevolent alien life to hell/evil (sans religion), it just got messy.

Tenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #9 My Bloody Valentine (1981)

After having tried for this in 2013, I've finally gotten around to watch the original My Bloody Valentine.  A classic 1980s slasher, starting right up with sex and death, the 1981 flick is vastly superior to the remake.

Twenty years ago (i.e., 1960), on the eve of the annual Valentine's Day dance in the little town Valentine Bluff, two supervisors left their posts and a bunch of miners were trapped in a cave-in.  When they finally dug them out six weeks later, only one was still alive: Harry Warden, stark raving mad after having eaten his compatriots to stay alive.  Harry eventually got checked into the local insane asylum after killing those two supervisors and a bunch of other people on subsequent Valentine's Days.  He swore that as long as the Valentine's Day dance was held, he would murder people.  The powers that be wisely shut down all Valentine-related festivities ... until now (1980), when they decide that it's been long enough and gosh darn it, they WILL have a Valentine's Day dance again. 

But the murders start up almost immediately so the mayor and sheriff cancel it all, since they lived through Harry Warden's terrorizing the first time around.  The town's young folks, however, don't remember those days and decide to have their own party out at the mining offices.  A few of them sneak off down into the mine and so when the murders start at the party, they are unaware.  And then the killer follows them down into the earth.

Look, this is a low budget slasher (I counted eleven kills btw, including one kid getting drowned in hot dog water lol) and follows the slasher conventions pretty faithfully; I even guessed the killer with about fifteen minutes to go.  I really liked this one, though.  The young people are not blank stereotypes: they have jobs, conflicts, names and distinguishable personalities.  The mine itself is a fantastic location - I believe they shot on location, in an actual mine, in Nova Scotia - very ominous, scary and confusing.  The killer fades in and out of the darkness, there are strange noises echoing through the  and it really feels as though one might get lost in there forever.  Well done, My Bloody Valentine, very well done.

Tenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #8 Mom and Dad

 2018's Mom and Dad, from the Crank director, is a very dark horror-comedy.  It's of the thriller variety, however, garnering its genre from the bloody violence; there is no suspense or dread - and only one brief, throwaway scene is at all creepy.  It does have a positively unhinged Nicolas Cage, however.

It seems like your typical day in typical suburban America: middle-aged parents bemoaning what has become of their lives, snarky teenagers and little kids who should be in school but who are home for some reason (seriously: why wasn't young Josh at school? Was he home sick?  Did I miss that?).  Until a mysterious and unexplained broadcast turns all the parents into homicidal maniacs - but only with respect to their own children.  They don't turn into rage-zombies or hulk out; they retain their personalities and revert back to normal, albeit with no remorse about murdering their children. 

Teenaged Carly escapes the frenzy at her school and runs home to get her brother (the aforementioned Josh) out of the house before their parents - played by a puffy Nic Cage and seemingly much-younger Selma Blair (who is actually 47 to Cage's 55) - get home.  Trapped in the house, it's a cat and mouse game played with knives, meat-tenderizers, wire hangers, a Sawzall and a redirected gas line.

Mom and Dad is ridiculous and very bad in a batshit, kind of awesome midnight movie way.  Did I mention a cameo by Lance Henriksen as Cage's dad?  It's violent and rather dark (see: parents murdering their children on-screen) but not scary in any way.  The only creepy scene takes place in the hospital as a row of dads stare intently through the nursery window at their newborn babies.

Tenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #7 Little Monsters (2019)

After watching Hulu Original Little Monsters, an Australian horror comedy, I have two songs stuck in my head, Shake It Off by Taylor Swift and Neil Diamond's Sweet Caroline.  And now so do you.  You're welcome!

Man-child Dave - crashing at his older sister's house after harrowing fights with his girlfriend result in their break-up - volunteers to chaperone nephew Felix's field trip to Pleasant Valley Farm.  Dave has a crush on Felix's kindergarten teacher, Audrey Caroline (Lupita Nyong'o).  Everyone should have a crush on Miss Caroline: she is bright, cheerful, clever, compassionate and full of songs.  Her kids love her.  And when the field trip rapidly devolves into a localized zombie apocalypse (the farm is located right next to a U.S. Army testing facility and their "Project Regeneration" goes horribly and predictably wrong), Miss Caroline is also ferociously protective of her young charges, not only trying to keep them alive but also shield them from being emotionally scarred for the rest of their lives.

The situation is complicated by Josh Gad's character, "Teddy McGiggles," a children's television show host.  His character is completely reprehensible.  Two minutes after his introduction, I wrote in my notes that he was so awful that I guessed he would die saving a child and redeem himself.  SPOILER The movie goes the other way: Teddy McGiggles dies as horribly as he behaved.  I was okay with that.

The zombie makeup is good; there's a shot of a zombie with a faceful of quills after eating the petting zoo's captive echidna that made me laugh out loud.  But the comedy is a little pale and the horror is too.  Little Monsters is good enough for the casual zom-com fan but by far fails to reach the heights of benchmark Shaun of the Dead.

Tenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #6 Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings

For some reason I have a soft spot for the original Lance Henriksen vehicle, Pumpkinhead.  I watched it online, on my desktop computer, in 2008 (twenty years after its release) and I just loved it.  The practical monster effects were terrific, the good guys and bad guys were amazingly not one dimensional.  It was way better than it should have been.

I am sorry to report that the sequel, Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings, does not meet the standard set by its predecessor.

We start with a black and white flashback to 1958 where in the tiny town of Ferron Woods, a group of hot-rodding townies beat, stab and hang a disfigured hillbilly boy, Tommy.  Some thirty years later, a group of teenagers - assholes who act out a bit but who aren't really all that bad, just obnoxious - steal a spellbook from the local witchy woman and do the ritual that raises Pumpkinhead II.  This iteration of the demon - smaller than the original and kind of looking like the mutant alien in Joss Whedon's Alien movie - was brought out of Tommy's remains and thus begins rampaging to avenge his death.  SPOILERS FOR A 1994 MOVIE.  The body count is relatively high: PHII gets the six original hot-rodders, now doughy middle-aged men, plus four of the teenagers who raised him, for no good reason I could tell.  The sheriff saves his daughter but the posse takes out ol' PHII (in theory - there are two more direct-to-video sequels after this one).

Look, this one isn't scary.  I'm not sure it was even scary back in 1994.  There is no sense of atmosphere or tension and the characters are wooden.  Even the creature effects are only middling - and I am a huge fan and proponent of practical monster effects.  This is a lightweight and fairly stupid movie, not even trying for camp or any touches of humor.  Except that one character is named "Mayor Bubba."  That's kind of funny.

Tenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #5 Carnival of Souls

Here's a cult classic from 1962.  Carnival of Souls never did much in the theaters but regular showings as a midnight movie on television gave it the audience it deserved.

We start with a chicks vs. dudes drag race!  The girls' car crashes through the side of a bridge into a muddy river.  One dazed survivor, Mary, pulls herself to shore.  A few days later, Mary continues on her way west to her new job as a church organist in Salt Lake City.  En route, she starts to hallucinate, seeing pale, scary faces staring at her.  After confirming her job and finding a room in a boarding house, she even goes to see a doctor after one such hallucination.  She's convinced it's residual trauma from the car crash.

Mary settles into her new life with her sweet landlady and pushy, cheeseball neighbor who literally won't take no for an answer when he asks her out.  Mary goes along with him only so far because she's a tough cookie: she doesn't want a boyfriend or any friends, really; she likes her job at the church but isn't religious; she stands up to her doctor when he tries to boss her around.  Things are eerie, however, and she finds herself drawn to the abandoned Saltair resort on the shores of the Great Salt Lake.

She drives herself out there and wanders around, finding more of the scary, dead-looking people.  Back in town, she slowly starts to go mad, unable to get the place out of her head.  She gets fired from her church job for playing "profane music" - which makes all the dead dance.  Mary can't escape it, however.

Carnival of Souls is slow, seemingly l  o  n  g  at only 78 minutes.  It is a gorgeously shot film and the scene at the Saltair - shot at the actual Saltair - is really creepy when the dead are dancing.  This movie has become a classic and has influenced many subsequent films, including George Romero's Night of the Living Dead.  What stuck with me, aside from how beautiful some of the shots were, was the intrenched sexism of the time: how all the men manhandled Mary and how skeezily pushy her desperate-for-a-date neighbor was.

Tenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #4 New Year, New You

Here's another Hulu Into the Dark offering, New Year New You.  It's New Year's Eve and Alexis, Kayla and Chloe, three high school friends, have gathered together at Alexis's house to ring in the new year.  They've also invited their fourth friend but aren't sure she'll come: they're just regular people  - with jobs and relationships and possibly some light mental illness - but Danielle has hit the jackpot as a self-help/influencer.  When she does show up, they are surprised and flattered and also a bit defensive.  Danielle flounces in with gifts of her own product, wanting to film everything for "content."  Everything she says is nice on the face of it but also sounds shallow and insincere and a little bit mean.  They aren't particularly surprised by this: Danielle was a Mean Girl back in high school and they all remember it.  Alexis also remembers that Danielle may have bullied a classmate into committing suicide - and we learn that this party has a purpose: to teach Danielle a lesson.

As things escalate, the viewer's sympathies switch back and forth.  Danielle is the villain, yes, defiantly manipulative (and looking Joker-esque as her makeup smears) but Alexis is unstable and somewhat scary herself.  Is she punishing Danielle for her bullying or is Alexis hoping to get more out of it than that?

I liked the Mean Girls to the nth degree aspect of New Year, New You, and Carly Chaiken (from Mr. Robot) was great as Danielle, but I felt that what the movie was trying to say got a little muddled at the end.

Tenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #3 Pooka!

Hulu has a horror anthology series, Into the Dark, which seems to consist of just barely feature length scary movies of varying quality.  I'm not sure I can bring myself to watch all of them, but I did see Pooka! (a bit of a stretch at 83 minutes), by Timecrimes and Colossal director, Nacho Vigalondo.  Scary Christmas, one and all!

Out of work actor Wilson lands a seasonal gig dressing up in a Pooka! suit for in-store appearances promoting this year's hottest toy: the creepy, blank-eyed Pooka! which can repeat what your child says in front of it, sometimes in a chipper voice, sometimes in a scary voice and sometimes not at all.  Things seem to be going pretty well for Wilson then: he starts dating single mom Melanie, he makes friends with his neighbor and the Pooka! gig is easy.  Before long, however, he starts getting disconcerting flashes, waking up and not remembering what's he's been doing.  Plus the Pooka! suit seems to come alive - and it's the scary Pooka - when Wilson is out.  He starts experiencing stranger crossovers: the scary Pooka punching the wall and Wilson's hands bleeding; Wilson wearing the good Pooka head while jerking off; Wilson listening through the walls as the bad Pooka kills his neighbor.  Or maybe not.  Maybe this is all in Wilson's head.  He starts to get paranoid and dependent on the suit as things unravel more and more.

Vigalondo displays the same penchant for slow pacing and playing with perception that he did in Timecrimes.  The pace did present a challenge for me to stay engaged with Pooka! but ultimately I did enjoy this weird little movie.  The twist at the end - similar to Triangle - made me like it more in retrospect.  I wouldn't call this a horror movie per se but it's a decent little flick.

Tenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #2 A Quiet Place

Who hasn't heard (lol get it?) about John Krasinski's A Quiet Place, that took audiences by storm when it came out in 2018?  I hadn't heard that it was only PG-13 and when that popped up on my screen before the movie started, I gave a big ol' sigh.  Still, this move is pretty effective.

Day 89.  We start with a family just under three months into dealing with pretty much the end of the world: they are walking barefoot, even though it's cold, scavenging for supplies and trying not to make any sound.  As we learn, the planet has been infiltrated by vicious, bloodthirsty creatures (which reminded me of Stranger Things's demogorgons) that, while blind, navigate incredibly well by hearing alone.  We get to see it happen.  Yikes.

Day 472.  In the year-plus that has transpired off-screen, the family has set themselves up with some mad survival skills.  The dad (Krasinski) is obsessive about protecting his family and trying to find a way to defeat the creatures.  He has a silent communications system set up via a flame atop the farm's silo; when he lights it, we can see a number of other flames alight in the hills surrounding the valley.  There are other survivors but they are spread out and of no help to each other.  In what I feel is a very, very bad idea, the mom (Emily Blunt) is pregnant and due fairly soon.  They have built a soundproofed cradle, complete with an oxygen mask, because they will have to shut the baby inside to keep it quiet.  Again, yikes.  Things are very tense, all the time.  On day 473, things start to fall apart, by which I mean get exciting.  There are no other lights up on the hill.  Emily Blunt gets the most terrorized: stepping on a nail, giving birth, getting trapped in the cellar.  She's an effing badass, though, and the ending of the movie is awesome.

I found A Quiet Place to be a solid flick, very tense and fast-moving.  I didn't find myself riveted by the movie but I loved the premise and seeing the family's survival solutions.  Young deaf actress Millicent Simmonds is terrific.  A well-done, taut little genre film.

P.S.  Minor spoiler:  did anyone else think of Kate Bush's Experiment IV while watching this?

Tenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #1 Us

Welcome back to the Tenth Annual Friend Mouse Speaks Scarelicious October Movie Series!  Also known as: the only time I post on this poor, neglected blog anymore.  I watched a record twenty-two scary (or, "scary") movies last October ... let's see how many I manage this year.

Jordan Peele bowled us all over with his intelligent horror movie Get Out in 2017, so his second scary movie, Us, was highly anticipated.  Headlined by Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke and Elizabeth Moss - with a tour de force performance by Nyong'o - I must admit I was left feeling a little meh after this one.

It all starts back in 1986, on a delightfully creepy boardwalk and a spooky, vision-quest-y fun house - what exactly did young Adelaide see in there?  Then we're bounced back to present day, with grown-up Adelaide and her family arriving at their Santa Cruz beach house.  Before they can even get unpacked, they're being menaced by a family of violent, feral dopplegangers.  Not only that, everyone in town is being menaced by their own doppelgangers.  Adelaide and her family have to find a way to fight back and survive, and hopefully get out of town alive.

Although Nyong'o is terrific in her role(s), this movie didn't do much for me.  I thought the Big Twist was totally telegraphed and I lost interest for a while in the middle.  I feel like Peele was trying to make some big statements about American society like he did in Get Out, but I didn't find Us to be as effective in communicating them.  Or maybe I just don't much like home invasion movies (I don't).

It made sense

After charging through Runaways, I went to Marvel's Cloak & Dagger and I have surprised myself by liking C&D even more.  My understanding is that it's rather different than the comics source material.  As small children, Tandy Bowen (Dagger) and Tyrone Johnson (Cloak) are subjected to a blast of supernatural power in an industrial accident; at the time of the accident, Tandy's dad and Ty's brother are killed in separate incidents, but each death has a huge impact on their respective families.  Eight years later, Tandy and Ty's powers start to manifest and they are thrown together - by accident? by fate? - unwillingly at first, and then with relief and trust.  The show is set in New Orleans and gives a rich backdrop as the young superheroes figure out how to use their powers to save their families and their city, all the while facing real life issues like abuse, sexism and racism.

The two leads playing Tandy and Tyrone have great chemistry together.  But I think what I like the best is the series' focus: the Runaways show spends so much time with the parents that we miss out on time spent with the kids.  With C&D, there are only two main kids (as opposed to six), plus a smaller cast of secondary characters.  Tandy and Ty seem more real, somehow, for superpowered teenagers.

I haven't heard yet if there is going to be a S3 (S2's ratings were markedly lower than S1) but there will at least be that crossover in Runaways S3.  I sure hope there's more - I'm really enjoying these street level teenaged Marvel heroes.

Run run Runaways

I have been enjoying binge-ing (bingeing? binging?) Marvel's Runaways on Hulu, so much so that I've also read the first two trade paperback collections as well.  I like to know the source material, although I'm not a big comics reader.  I'm not well-suited to it: I read very quickly and I don't give the artwork enough attention.  But the television has been a lot of fun and I'm glad to have had both perspectives.

For those who don't know, Runaways (written by Brian K. Vaughn et als.) is about a group of runaway kids who discover that their parents are a secret and very evil cabal of Los Angeles millionaires.  After seeing their parents sacrifice a young girl, they run away and adventures follow.  The girls have superpowers - Nico is/becomes a witch, Gert has a telepathic link to a sentient dinosaur, Molly has super-strength, etc. - and the boys are smart and/or assisted by tech stolen from their parents.  Nico is my favorite character in both the show and the comics; I also like sarcastic Gert  (especially the show's iteration) and her dinosaur, Old Lace.

PC: Ars Technica

While the show hews closely to some of the source material, it varies wildly in some regards.  I'm being vague on purpose as I don't want to spoil anything.  In the show, the parents are much, much better developed.  I find this to be a double-edged sword, however: the character development makes them much better villains ... but I also resent time spent away from the kids.  I like the kids.

I only have one episode left and then I'm up to speed on the series.  I'm torn as to what to watch next.  It would make sense to move straight to Cloak and Dagger, as that is also based on a Marvel comic that has connections to/crossovers with Runaways.  But over on Netflix, the new Dark Crystal series is out (and I love The Dark Crystal) plus I'm starting to get in the mood for horror movies in advance of this year's Scarelicious October Movie Series.  What to do, what to do.

Vacation reading

Mr. Mouse, the new dog - a/k/a Boy Genius, for his propensity for accidentally locking himself in rooms - and I were recently down in the southern Utah desert for a week's vacation.  We did active stuff in the mornings (mountain biking and hiking) but hunkered down through the middle of the day, in the A/C and out of the sun, napping and reading.

I read all of the above books.  Well, technically I'm not quite done with Swan Song yet, and I didn't read Witches Abroad because I picked it up out of order.  But I did read the rest of them, plus the last two books of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, so that's a decent number of pages read.

Joe Hill's Stranger Weather is not his strongest outing; his other short stories are much better.  Similarly, his father's Elevation is a slight thing, a novella very much of its time.  I appreciate King's politics but this little book was a wee dite preachy.  The Girl With All the Gifts seems to be the novelization of the movie that stemmed from a short story.  I really liked the movie and am inclined to re-watch it, now that I've read the book.

Next up: back to the library to keep working my way through Discworld.

Bits and pieces

Progress report: the Discworld series has stalled - but I haven't given up yet - but I finished the available episodes of Legends of Tomorrow, got sucked into Pretty Little Liars somehow (??!?), watched two episodes of Good Omens (I know it's an unpopular opinion but: I don't love it, although I do love the book), and have one episode to go on S3 of Stranger Things.  The Mindflayer monster is SO GROSS - I love it.  Very The Thing and The Fly.

I've also watched, and loved, Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse.  I watch all the Marvel superhero movies but I don't read comics, so my knowledge of Spider-Man lore is broad strokes at best.  But that didn't matter.  Into the Spiderverse is a fantastic superhero movie and a damn fine movie even without the genre tag.  It is funny, heart-breaking and never lets up for a moment.  The voice cast is phenomenal - Mahershala Ali! Hailey Steinfeld! Chris Pine! Kathryn Hahn! Lauren Velez! Lily Tomlin! Nic Cage! Liev Schreiber! and the perfectly-cast Jake Johnson! - and the movie simply gorgeous.  You've never seen visuals like that in a superhero movie.  I plan on watching it again soon because I'm sure I missed a bunch, just sitting there agog.

New goal

Not only have I utterly failed in my easily-attainable goal to watch one movie a month (just one!) to post here, I completely neglected to post ANYTHING for the month of May.  Not cool, man.  My excuse is that I've just been so caught up in watching television series.  I got through the Scooby Doo episode of Supernatural, I've started the guilty pleasure that is Pretty Little Liars, I've been getting caught up on the most recent Netflix-able season of Legends of Tomorrow, I'm two episodes deep into S5 of Black Mirror.  It doesn't end there either:  the final season of Jessica Jones starts in just a couple days,  S4 of Veronica Mars is just around the corner and I haven't even gotten to start in on Good Omens yet, much to my chagrin.  Golden age of television indeed (give or take Supernatural and PLL).

So I am therefore resetting my goal to this: I want to read all of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series by the end of the summer.  I've ready several of those books already, randomly, but this time I'm going chronologically.  I've finished the first four - The Color of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Equal Rites and Mort.  I think I can attain this goal.  These are quick books for me to read - I just need to keep going to the library.

Other books I've read:  Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, a wonderful collection of short stories that cannot be kept to one genre, instead incorporating horror, comedy, feminism and fantasy; and The Troop by Nick Cutter, a body horror/zombie-ish/Lord of the Flies mash-up that's good enough to have a Stephen King blurb on the front cover.

For my viewing pleasure

In the last several weeks, I have

• Gotten halfway through S2 of The O.A.
• Watched all of the most recent season of Santa Clarita Diet
• Re-watched the first half and watched the second half of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

Next up is to 

• Finish The O.A.
• Finish S12 of Supernatural (at which point I will have watched all twelve seasons in less than a year.  Yay?)
• Watch Hanna (on Amazon Prime)
• Wait impatiently for Good Omens
• Watch Red Riding Trilogy: Part 1: 1974

At some point I guess I should probably fold that huge mountain of clean laundry that is looming on the guest bed.

Public service announcement

This is a public service announcement:

WATCH RUSSIAN DOLL (on NETFLIX)

Natasha Lyonne is fantastic.   I've actually watched it twice already (despite having a huge list of other things to watch).  It's so good.

Mini movie review: Free Solo

Oh wow, you guys: Mr. Mouse and I went out to see a movie together.  Like, in the movie theater.  This is the first movie Mr. Mouse has seen in a theater since we moved to Utah ... 9+ years ago.  We went to see the Alex Honnold documentary, Free Solo - and before I say anything about that film, let me just digress about the movie theater.  It was playing in IMAX at the Larry H. Miller Megaplex in Sandy (not my usual movie theater) and it was like going to Las Vegas to see a movie.  There were twenty different screens and the whole place was like walking through the Vegas version of a town.  I can't imagine being there on a Friday or Saturday night when it is thronging with people.

Also: IMAX previews are played way, way, way too loud.

Ahem.  Now that I've gotten my old person reactions to modern movie-going out of the way, Free Solo was great.  The movie chronicles rock climber Alex Honnold's quest to be the first (and quite possibly only) person to free-solo El Capitan - 3,000 feet, without a rope - in Yosemite National Park, which is about the most insane thing a climber has ever done.  The filmmakers are also friends with Alex, so the fourth wall gets broken as they fear for his life in the midst of filming him.  This makes for a very personal film and even though SPOILER he doesn't fall off the face of the cliff and die, it's intense.

Photo: from National Geographic's Free Solo

I have already failed

I've blown my one resolution already: I am not going to get a movie review up here before the end of the month.  Sometimes life gets in the way.  Sometimes you're lazy and just want to turn your brain off to watch a bunch of Supernatural episodes.

I have watched Maniac but I truly have nothing coherent to say.  I just didn't get it.  I tried, I really did.  I like weird, trippy shows (Dirk Gently, Legion, to name a couple recent ones) but I just didn't understand Maniac.  I liked the way it looked, I loved Sally Field and Emma Stone.  I just didn't know WTF was going on more often than not.  I don't even think it really mattered that I fell asleep a couple of times either. 

Mr. Mouse and I, having just blown through all eleven seasons of Cheers [full disclosure: I prefer Rebecca to Diane by a long shot], were searching for something else that we both might like.  Seeing how we've watched all available/streaming The Good Place and Better Call Saul episodes, and Brooklyn 99 is not on Netflix (I can't stomach paying for more streaming services lest I start paying as much as when we had cable), we've started Schitt's Creek.  It's funny.  I find Catherine O'Hara a bit grating here but I really like the younger actors - the David and Stevie relationship, at least so far as we've gotten, which is halfway through S1, is tons of fun.

So that's where we stand.  Now shooting for a new movie review in February.  Wish me luck.

Resolutions

I am not a resolutioner but I feel the need to do something here, in public, to hold myself responsible for this little blog.  I started it all the way back in 2007 and while I have never been particularly prolific here (Octobers notwithstanding), I hate the way it has dwindled away since we gave up television and, thus, my television show recapping.  I haven't been reading much and I've mostly been watching Netflix television - Supernatural, Maniac (which I want to like but find a little boring), 3% (I liked S1 but S2 got ... a little boring), rewatching Jessica Jones and The Punisher and The Defenders because that's the mood I've been in.

So my promise/resolution is that I will watch at least one movie a month that is new to me and that I will review here.  I'd like to think that I'll do more like two or three, but let's start small and see how it goes.

But I'm going to finish S2 of JJ first.  Let's just be honest here.