Tag: horror

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Midnight Mass

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Mike Flanagan, the creative force behind The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, returns with Midnight Mass, a new limited series on Netflix.  Similar to his two previous series, Midnight Mass is a combination of earnest performances, thoughtful, introspective dialog and stealth horror elements.  This time around, Flanagan has decided to de-emphasize the scary stuff, and the result is incredibly underwhelming, to the point where the series should have been titled Tedium.

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Malignant (long take)

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Malignant is a combination of horror movie references, James Wan’s usual bag of tricks and other things that he likes thrown into a blender and pureed together.  The resulting mixture is slick and very entertaining, but not as engrossing as Wan’s previous horror movies.  The movie is a creepy funhouse, relying on paper-thin characters to drive the plot.  The movie works, and horror movie nerds will find it’s fanboy signalling endlessly entertaining, but the movie lacks the emotional connection that elevated The Conjuring to more than your average horror movie.  Recommended.

A detailed summary and analysis follow.  Spoilers abound.  You have been warned.

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Candyman (2021)

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Candyman ignores the inferior sequels that preceded it and instead acts as a direct sequel to the 1992 movie of the same name.  As in the original, Candyman features a hook-wielding ghost who is brought to life by saying his name five times in a mirror. Director Nia DaCosta and producer Jordan Peele have upgraded the Candyman legend deftly for modern times, contextualizing his gruesome origin story as the starting point of decades of systemic racism and violence.  And instead of having the requisite white woman be the audience surrogate, two African American men take center stage.  The first is a young artist (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) seeking inspiration from the notorious history of the now-gentrified Cabrini-Green projects.  The second is a middle-aged man (Colman Domingo) who never left, still seething from an unjust killing he witnessed as a child.  The end result is riveting, scary, insightful and moving.  The (white) victims are written a bit thinly, but turnabout is fair play, as they say.  Candyman is a horror movie by definition, but it has much more up its sleeve than shocks and gore.  Mind that ending–it’s not the triumph it appears to be.  Highly recommended.

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The Night House

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The premise of The Night House, that suicide irreparably damages the lives of the survivors, is a compelling one for a horror movie.  For Rebecca Hall’s Beth, her husband’s death understandably leaves her an emotional wreck, unable to control her anger at work and her despair at home.  The night brings no solace, with Beth possibly being haunted by her husband’s ghost.  After an engaging first act, the movie shifts our attention to the mystery of Beth’s husband’s death and the secrets he kept from her.  Was he having an affair, or affairs?  Why was he reading books about the occult?  What do all those strange architecture diagrams mean?  One twist gives way to another, and then another, until the movie lays on a heavy dose of the supernatural in a strained attempt at tying everything up.  The final reveal is logical, but nagging questions remain unanswered.  Hall delivers a compelling and convincing portrayal throughout, possibly a career highlight.  David Bruckner’s naturalistic direction gives the movie a disarmingly creepy vibe, at least until the final confrontation.  Recommended.

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Old

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Old has a great opening act: a group of vacationers are taken to an exclusive beach. Once there, they age rapidly and cannot find a way to leave. The movie is undone by talky dialog and weak acting by the leads. The middle act gets weighed down by sappy sentimentality when it should have ratcheted the tension and the horror of the situation. The mystery is revealed in the end, and while it is intriguing, is loose in its reasoning and cannot erase what came before. A disappointment after the one-two punch of Split and Glass. Not recommended.

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Fear Street: Part One 1994

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Fear Street:1994 opens promisingly with a skull-masked slasher taking out a young, pretty bookseller at the mall.  The movie then introduces five high schoolers who unwittingly unleash the malevolent spirit of the Fier witch when they disturb her bones lying in the forest.  The witch was killed back in 1666, but has been the influencer behind inexplicable homicides for decades.  The actors portraying the teenagers either bring too much or too little intensity to their roles, resulting in a “who cares” attitude when they are eventually stalked by resurrected killers from the past.  1994 Is competently directed, and I liked its day-glo aesthetic, but its reliance on  Nineties music becomes a distraction.  Not recommended.

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Werewolves Within

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Werewolves Within is a throwback to the werewolf-comedy movies of the Eighties, where classics like The Howling and An American Werewolf in London unabashedly combined macabre humor and gruesome killings.  Based on a video game, Werewolves Within is actually a mashup of two genres: werewolf-movies and murder mysteries, with some romance thrown in for added seasoning.  I enjoyed the horror-comedy and the quirky romance between the leads, but found the mystery uninteresting and unnecessary.  Overall, the movie is a solid B-movie.  Recommend for the parts that work and gratuitous use of Ace of Bass.

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The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It

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Released five Years after The Conjuring 2, The Conjuring:The Devil Made Me Do It (or C3) shows how horror movie sequels have diminishing returns.  I enjoyed The Conjuring 2, with its wacked-out funhouse sensibilities.  C3 has many of the same elements as C2, and this time around they felt too familiar.  C3 has several good scares, but nothing in it surprised me.  The performances were also underwhelming, with Vera Farmiga’s Lorraine Warren and Patrick Wilson’s Ed delivering perfunctory turns as the self-styled demonologists.  Recommended for Conjuring completists only.

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