Another horror (mostly) movie roundup

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The First Omen

Dang, another recent horror movie that is much better than it has any right to be. Inspired editing and a fully committed soundtrack work together and raise this above the standard. There's a long wordless sequence of two intercut scenes well into the film that lets the music take center stage and just stay there, and it's nearly worth the ticket price on its own. Well, maybe not the 2024 ticket price. But the 2010 ticket price, certainly.

Horror is best when it's used to play just outside lines of a space that we're already uncomfortable exploring. Spaces on the ragged edges of humanity, like loneliness, addiction, social deviance and unrest, family loss -- and in this delightful case, the physical and mental toll of pregnancy and childbirth. I was kind of expecting this going in, with what little I heard of the film, but I didn't expect it to lean so very far in. And I love it.

It takes quite a while for the weird happenings to cohere and explain themselves. In fact the entire first hour of the movie will leave you just a bit adrift. But the director keeps a steady supply of off-kilter moments and odd compositions, and thankfully, there is more going on than you'd expect. You may even be tempted to scrub back through to the beginning when it's all over and see things with a new perspective.

7.5 out of ten wailing choral voices up.

The Watchers

The hook sounds like it would resonate with our young social media addled generation: A bunch of people find themselves trapped in a room with a one-way mirror, and as long as they amuse the unseen watchers beyond it, they are allowed to live.

But that hook, and our curiosity for how it might play out, are not enough for this movie. It wants to thread in a twist at the end. I suppose the lineage of the director sorta demands it, but there's too much structurally wrong with the screenplay for it to work. We get a pointless prologue, then we spend a lot of time getting into the wilderness, then we spend too little time exploring it, then we spend a bunch of time in the epilogue waiting for the twist. It was pretty clearly edited down from something longer, so what was removed was probably boring, leading me to blame the screenplay for that too.

Looking back, I can think of individual scenes that could have delivered a shock or a good creep-out, had they been shot and timed differently. A bit more patience, a bit more adherence to the point of view or state of mind of the character... But oh well. Nice visual effects at least.

4.5 out of ten over-explaining narrators up.

Abigail (2024)

It's been said that the cardinal sin of any director or editor is wasting the viewer's time, but there's an important corollary to that: You can't even give the appearance of wasting their time, even when you're not - even when you're actually showing them something that becomes very important later - because you have no right to expect the viewer to give you the benefit of the doubt. Unless you're already a giant draw by name alone, like Quentin Tarantino, people are not going to remain in their seats while you show them a bunch of important stuff that looks completely pointless at the time. They're going to start hating you, and when your balance of good will goes negative, you have to work a hundred times harder to move it back over the line and get them to forgive you.

I bring that up because this particular movie starts out as a heist/kidnapping movie and then takes a left turn into something juicier. However, the turn is not really a surprise, because the director wisely begins implying right from the beginning that something more complicated is happening, and that keeps us from losing confidence and sarcastically asking "Why should I even be watching this?" by the 15-minute mark. Without that weird foreshadowing I would have balked at the intersection, and not wanted to follow that left turn.

The characters are a patchwork of tropes, but the script is self-aware enough to try and lampshade that, and the cast practically dive-bombs into their one-dimensional roles to keep you interested. You're not going to see anything new here but you're going to enjoy the ride. And in case I'm playing it too close to avoid spoilers and you can't decide whether to watch this: You're going to see a lot of blood, gunfire, and double-crosses. Did I mention blood? Lots of blood.

Solid but not essential viewing. Six out of ten ballerina shoes up.

Immaculate

I saw The First Omen well before this, and the two demand to be compared. I was worried that I would be watching the same story twice. Instead these two films complement each other. The First Omen is the more stylistic of the two, but is also distracted by obligations to its franchise. Immaculate has no such burden. It sets out on one path, and keeps charging in that direction all the way through the last seconds of the final shot.

And even though you may feel like The First Omen is the better movie while this one is charging along, it turns out that those final seconds pack enough of a wallop to make you reconsider. In the end, it turns out that Immaculate is making a statement that The First Omen, for all its horror, is too cowardly to make. If you do watch them both, watch them in the order I did.

Seven out of ten spooky relics in glass cases up.

In A Violent Nature

The hook is, "it's a slasher movie from the point of view of the slasher". In execution it creates a unique mash-up between tones, and invites an odd comparison.

It's like this: If you're a slasher with a vaguely supernatural origin, you don't tend to talk. If you're walking slowly through the woods towards a campfire, what you hear is nature sounds - crickets, birds, crunching leaves - and then the sound of a conversation in progress, slowly fading in as you approach your victims, most likely gathered around a campfire or in a cabin. The entire time, the voyeuristic camera is trailing behind your back, seeing what you see. You probably stop for a while on the fringe of a clearing, listening to the dialogue so you know what you're stepping into. Then there's an encounter, and it will likely be violent.

What's this like? It's bloody well exactly like playing Skyrim.

This movie is even more like playing Skyrim than that: The dialogue is awkward and expository, the acting feels consistently like it was done with little or no rehearsal, and there is altogether way more walking around lost in the woods than you'd expect for a top-tier adventure game or a gory slasher film. And yet, that last thing is compelling, in both cases: It really is nice to just wander around lost in the woods for a while, with nothing at all on your mind.

It's not actually a good movie, but it's a unique viewing experience.

4 out of 10 dang black flies up.

Non-horror:

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

Lots of callbacks to the old movies and a satisfying involvement of the old cast. But also, an admirable focus on the emotional development of the new cast. The humor isn't as edgy as the original - for example there is no reference to sex and no attempts to be truly scary - but I'm very pleased to report that the same heart, and the glorification of obsessive geekery, are here.

There's no better way I can put it: It was a pleasure watching this. It's not breaking any new thematic ground or pushing the envelope in visual effects, but it's a nice weekend drive through beloved country. And that's enough.

Now what we need is another sequel, where Patton Oswalt and the kids go into the containment unit to help a ghost solve a mystery. Or something. Looking forward to it whatever that is.

6.5 wavy ghost limbs up.

Wicked Little Letters

This looks like a small-town comedy of manners with an edge to it, but it quickly gets more interesting than that, mostly because of the terrific cast. Lead actor Olivia Coleman regularly communicates entire pages of exposition with just a few well-timed expressions, and Jessie Buckley takes a lead role that could be painted with just the few broad strokes necessary to drive the narrative, and colors in details of pathos and self doubt to make someone whose obvious conflict with the rules of society around her is clearly fueled by deliberate choices part of the time, and unshakable inner nature at other times. It could have been different, and less interesting: The part could have been played only as a blameless victim, with barely a word changed in the script.

The result is a central conflict that immediately gets you thinking complicated ideas about the evolving roles of women and men in society, and keeps you thinking about them as it goes. There is a lot to unpack, and the movie invites plenty of discussion afterward. And there are delightful jokes as well!

Ironically, in a movie that's almost entirely female characters, Timothy Spall is a standout supporting actor, fully inhabiting a role that is such a deep well of fury and poisoned masculinity that you want to cry for him almost as much as you instantly hate his guts.

Check this one out. You'll enjoy it more than you expect.

7 out of 10 inventive swear words up.

Civil War

Very much a movie of our time. Tense and brutal. It's no spoiler to describe the premise: California and Texas have teamed up to declare independence from the rest of the United States, and have gone to war to ensure it. The question we immediately ask is, "How could those two states set aside their differences enough to form a team?"

But as you watch, it makes more and more sense, and the reasoning behind it makes you feel worse and worse about the current political climate between them. They're the two economic and resource powerhouses of the country, and their current feuds - huge as they seem in the public mind now - mostly amount to bickering over border policy and the centrality of the Catholic church in culture. The thing they can really agree on is, the federal government is taking quite a lot of their money and distributing it to other states, sometimes to advance policies that they don't care about or profit from. And this money talks; far louder than any of the divisions we obsess about today. Loud enough perhaps to unite them in a rebellion.

So as we watch this movie and ponder what it might be like if the country really turned on itself and gave up speech for bullets, we're also forced to ponder the question: Does American greatness derive its power from ideals? Or do the ideals ride easy, on a wave of money, energy, hardware, and labor ... such that if the states with the lion's share of those decided to leave, the ideals would go right along with them, like smoke out an open window?

As an aside, a surprising proportion of this movie's runtime is devoted to the mechanics of a press person embedded with a military unit: The movement, the signals, the positioning, and the weird version of respect that makes it operate. When it's done you'll have a new appreciation for the role; maybe even a sudden desire to take it up.

8 out of ten out-of-focus American flags up.