My website is moving to a new home!
During the transition, the site will be “under construction” … but within a week you should be able to find me at http://www.smrcooper.com just like before, where I’ll still be offering Adventures in Streaming as well as other blogs, and my new podcast – What Are We Looking At Here? – that launches at the beginning of May.
Thank you for your patience, and I look forward to seeing you in May!
* reviews of things i found on (mostly) netflix *
* now with spoilers *
American Haunting is partially based on a true story – the only case in US history wherein a man’s death seemed to have been caused by a spirit.
It starts with a girl’s nightmare about the Bell Witch chasing her through a forest. Her mother reminds her it’s only a dream and tells her to get ready to spend the week with her father. The scenes then shift to the past – the early 1800’s – where we meet John Bell and his family, including his teenage daughter Betsy, who becomes increasingly ill and is oppressed by what seems to be an angry spirit.
We learn that John Bell may have been cursed by a witch over his nefarious theft of her land. We’re introduced to a young man who has fallen in love with Betsy and convinces John to let him reside in the house to see what it is that afflicts her – is it really a ghost? A witch? A case of mental or physical illness? He soon witnesses a decidedly supernatural attack on Betsy, and both Betsy and John are then consistently accosted by this spirit, but ultimately Betsy and her mother begin to remember things they’ve blocked out – the true, fairly despicable character of John Bell.
The movie purports that John Bell was killed by his daughter, but in reality the matter seems to be fairly unresolved … maybe?
We then return to the present, where the girl in the opening scenes is leaving for her visit with her father. The Bell Witch appears to the girl’s mother, who realizes that she’s being warned about her daughter’s father – that he might have the same despicable character as John Bell.
American Haunting is presented pretty well; the acting is really good, the believability of the characters is solid, the plot moves forward at a good pace, and the atmosphere is flawless and captivating. The connection with the woman and her daughter in the present adds an interesting element to the spirit’s purpose, and is fairly unexpected. Even the original twist – the revelation that John Bell is not exactly a good man, despite his social standing in the town – comes as a bit of a surprise … but not a particularly huge surprise.
The trailers for the film sort of implicate John Bell as the bad-guy-behind-the-spirit; maybe they were trying some kind of reverse psychology? – leading viewers to think it wasn’t him because trailers are typically misleading, and then, wham! It was him all along dun-dun-duuuuun. Whatever their reasoning, the trailer gives away what the film treated as a significant, hidden twist. The supernatural element – a genuine part (whether real or not) of the true story – is not terribly well-balanced against the exploration into John Bell’s character; it’s hard to know if it wants to be about a supernatural murder or if it wants to be about unmasking a human bad guy through an intense psychological explore. Of course, it might have felt a lot more balanced if his character hadn’t been hinted at in the trailer, if we had been allowed to sort out his character without pre-conceived notions. The parallel story with the modern-day family is interesting, but … why is it there? It really didn’t need to be there. It’s not bad that it is there. It’s kind of cool, actually. But it didn’t need to be there for the Bell story to be complete and meaningful. It might have felt more necessary if we had a more solid reason for the connection – more description of the modern-day family’s situation or characters, more emphasis on why the mother is learning about the Bell story in the first place, maybe a few more parallel clues than just “Wait a minute! My daughter has a father! I wonder if …”.
Ultimately, American Haunting is a good movie and worth watching, even more than once. But it could have been better balanced (or better promoted), so it lost quite a bit of its sudden-twists punch.
There’s an awesome scene of a carriage flipping over a fallen tree in the forest – I recommend checking it out. Both the movie and the scene are good … but I suppose it doesn’t matter a whole lot whether you pick the former or the latter to entertain you.
6 out of 10
The Plagues of Breslau (2018) is a Netflix original out of Poland. The story revolves around a serial killer who kills his victims in horrific (and public) ways, precisely at 6 pm. The manner of death for each victim as well as deliberate clues left at each crime scene point to a parallel with a series of plagues that had affected the city of Breslau centuries before.
Police officer Helena Rus starts investigating the killings, aided by Magda Bogacka, an investigator sent from the central office. They know they’re up against the clock, since the killer apparently plans to strike daily until caught; Helena is also dealing with the injury of one of her fellow officers in the confusion surrounding the first crime scene.
As far as plot, Breslau is fairly standard. The motivations of the serial killer – revenge – are typical for the genre, and sorting out the clues isn’t particularly difficult. Even the ticking-clock element has been used in several other films of this type, so unless this is the first such film you’ve ever watched, there isn’t going to be a great deal of tension. The ultimate reveal of who-did-it is believable but not especially surprising, unless, again, this is the first time you’ve watched a movie in this genre.
That said, Plagues of Breslau is really good. The characters are interesting and realistic, there isn’t a bunch of unnecessary exposition, and the practical effects are flawless. The actors effectively convey tension and emotion, and even though the murders are depicted in a way that piques the imagination, the actors’ responses to it keep the movie from being about gore-porn and instead allow us to see the killings as horrific acts. None of the characters are stereotypes – unless Poland has its own stereotypes of which I am unaware – and none of the actions of the police are out of the bounds of normal police procedure.
Overall, Breslau is a solid entry in the serial-killer genre, with strong acting, a good story, and a fairly satisfying ending. It’s well worth watching.
9 out of 10
Thinner is the film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel of the same name. It tells the story of an extremely overweight man – Billy – who accidentally hits and kills an old woman with his car after not paying enough attention to the road. Because the man is well-known and well-liked by people in law-enforcement and the judicial system, he’s given a slap on the wrist for causing the woman’s death, an unfairness that upsets the woman’s (shockingly old) father.
Unfortunately for Billy, the old woman’s upset father is the head of a gypsy clan, and he places curses on Billy and on both the judge and the police officer who helped Billy avoid punishment. The judge begins to mutate into some sort of lizard creature, the police officer becomes a hideous mass of painful skin lesions, and Billy begins to get thinner. At first he’s thrilled, because he had the weight to lose, but he soon realizes that it’s never going to stop, and he starts looking for the old man to have him reverse the curse.
The movie is a strong adaptation, following the book faithfully and capturing the subplots and interpersonal exchanges very well. In addition, the special effects – noted quite positively at the time – still stand up: Billy’s overweight and eventual emaciation are both completely believable, and the make-up they put on Michael Constantine (who plays the head of the clan) is flawless – you pretty much forget he was ever a young man. The acting is solid, and even though Billy is not a squeaky-clean protagonist, he’s a good father, and we can easily find sympathy for his plight and balance his flaws against his deeper, basically decent character.
The only problem – and it’s not really a problem per se – is that Joe Mantegna plays a truly bad guy, a guy who’s helping Billy find the gypsy patriarch by sending some not-so-subtle messages to the other members of the clan. Mantegna is an excellent actor, and when he plays a bad guy, he really does seem like a bad guy. But through no fault of his own, at a couple of critical bad-guy moments, I could only hear his Simpsons’ Fat Tony character, which made me laugh instead of being intimidated by his bad-guy-ness. But then again, having that shift toward laughter and then watching him be pretty brutal and ruthless maybe made those darker images seem even more striking.
The change in tactics on the part of the gypsy patriarch is plausible, and the ending is satisfying with no particular unanswered questions. It’s a horror ending rather than a happily-ever-after, so if you’re looking for a feel-good film, this isn’t it. But if you’re looking for a tight story arc, strong character development, and fairly realistic actions toward a rewarding conclusion, then definitely give Thinner a try.
10 out of 10
Join me as I take a look at A Wrinkle in Time in my new video:
* reviews of things i found on (mostly) netflix *
* now with spoilers *
Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill! is … interesting.
It’s a B movie, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. It has a lot of predictable secondary characters and plot points, and everyone who is killed by this wandering Easter-Bunny-costumed guy is killed at the time and in the way that is expected of a serial-killer Easter-Bunny-costumed guy.
The main characters – the teenager and his mother – are presented about as realistically as a B movie can do. At the beginning of the film, some sort of family discord results in the father of the family being lost in a fire. The mother and her son (who has a cognitive deficit of some kind and is mentally about six or seven years old) do their best to get along without him, which leads to the introduction of some unsavoury characters into their lives. But don’t worry – Easter-Bunny-costumed guy will take care of that.
We’re given a few tense scenes – scenes where the bad guys pick on the disabled teenager, which is upsetting and stressful, and scenes where Easter-Bunny-costume guy is watching the family in a creepy manner. But overall it’s a standard stalking-slasher movie, and we aren’t even necessarily surprised by who the Easter-Bunny-costume guy turns out to be.
There is one surprise, though.
When the mother and son learn who the Easter-Bunny-costume guy is – and learn why he’s been killing the unsavoury characters – they aren’t even mad. They’re glad. They forgive him not only for what he’s done to the unsavoury characters (which, really, in the context of the film, they got what was coming to them), but also for things he had done to the mother and son earlier. They all stand together, a little nuclear-family-esque trio, and stare at the dead bodies and the huge quantity of blood … and then they decide to eat dinner.
I tried not to like Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill! I don’t really have any reason why I don’t hate it. It’s not poorly done for a B movie, but it’s not particularly well done either. It’s not poorly acted for a B movie, but it’s not particularly well acted either. The plot is so simple as to be trivial, the bad guys are bland, the main characters aren’t fleshed out really at all. The final scene with them deciding to eat dinner is humourous, but it would have been even without the movie preceding it.
I suppose I liked the fact that, even though Easter-Bunny-costume guy is the killer, he’s not really the bad guy, and in fact was acting in the defense of the mother and son as a way to redeem himself; tucked into this little, fairly silly B movie is this interesting take on good, evil, forgiveness, intention … all the things that people ponder every day as they make mistakes and try to make up for them.
I can’t really recommend Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill! because either you find B movies entertaining or you don’t. But I didn’t hate it.
And the last scene was funny.
— 4 out of 10
You can find my new video, Episode 1 of ‘Easier than This’, and start your New Year off right!
* reviews of things i found on (mostly) netflix *
* now with spoilers *
The Vault is a supernatural heist movie.
The opening-credit scenes show clippings from a bank robbery in 1982, during which the hostages were killed and the bank set on fire. As the film begins, we see Ed in the bank breakroom, having apparent flashbacks to that bank robbery – clearly he had been there in 1982, and it still haunts him.
Two women posing as a job-seeker and a customer reveal themselves to be armed bank robbers; three firefighters who claim to be fighting a fire “down the street” turn out to be the women’s accomplices. They quickly take over the bank, putting the hostages in the vault and demanding money. When they’re given all the money that the tellers can find, the amount is far less than expected, and the robbers become angry and anxious.
To prevent any violent escalations, Ed gets up, identifies himself as a bank manager, and admits there’s a second vault in the basement with millions of dollars inside. The robbers split up, some staying with the hostages, some going to the basement vault, and one staying with Ed in an office where they can see the basement via security cameras.
This is the beginning of the supernatural portion of the movie, where we meet the ghosts from 1982: the masked robber and his charred and/or bloodied hostages. The robbers meet the ghosts too, and their heist goes decidedly sideways.
The atmosphere of Vault is consistent but, more importantly, not all that creepy. It looks like any other heist movie the entire time, even when ghosts are physically terrorizing their victims. This has the ironic effect of making the ghost images more startling and eerie; we feel the way we would if we just looked up and saw a ghost standing at the end of our couch. The ghost scenes are also orchestrated in a way that doesn’t immediately suggest they’re ghosts – they might very well be bank patrons and workers that we haven’t meant yet, that Ed knew were in the basement and could overpower robbers who had separated from one another. So whether they’re ghosts or not, the audience has that “ooo, they got you!” feeling as these unknown people creep up and surround the bad guys.
Ed, whose character has so many unpleasant memories of the earlier robbery, avoids becoming the stereotype of emotionally-compromised-hero-looking-for-redemption; he doesn’t get more and more agitated or battle increasingly loud inner demons while trying to make this event play out differently than the last one. Instead, he acts like a bank manager should act: prioritizing the safety of the staff and patrons, remaining deadpan-calm while dealing with the robbers, watching impassively as events play out so that he can better assess what to do next. He obviously knows that something is waiting in the basement, and he’s not surprised by any of the things that start happening.
The lead teller, Susan (as well as some others), is fairly open about the supernatural experiences she and her coworkers have had in the bank – she tells the robbers that she believes the masked gunman from 1982 haunts the basement. Of course, the robbers don’t listen … why would they? Susan doesn’t even say it in a frightened manner; she says it as though she’s revealing that there might be rats. Again, this makes the paranormal events seem more unexpected and therefore a bit more real.
The robbers respond to the ghost encounters in a very believable manner, and their actions make sense.
The final reveal of the film is satisfying. The bad-guy-wins horror ending is well-done – we don’t feel like we don’t understand what just happened – and since the good guys were watching as one set of bad guys battled another set of bad guys, we end up with the good guys winning too … so it’s a fairly good “heist” thriller too, in that regard. There’s enough of a twist that we want to go back and watch it again for clues. It’s a two-genre film, but both genres are blended throughout rather than starting as one and ending as the other – this makes all the events seem more realistic and more immediate.
James Franco plays Ed, and since at the time of the film he was coming off of some of his more zany-character roles, we’re kind of waiting for him to be that person now … but he is a straight-arrow, sedate bank manager the whole way, which makes his character seem a little more “cool” and also supports the realism: it seems less of a “role” and more of the way real people deal with real situations.
Overall, it’s not particularly more than a solid installment in the ghost genre, and the heist aspect is fairly by-the-numbers, but it’s done well, with good acting, good pacing, and clear resolution. It also creates an ambiguity about just who is “bad” and who is “good” and who we should be rooting for, which is an interesting layer.
It’s worth watching, even twice.
9 out of 10
* reviews of things i found on (mostly) netflix *
* now with spoilers *
#Alive is a Netflix original. It’s a standard zombie flick, with a vague premise as to how the zombies became zombies, and an even vaguer justification for newscasters’ advice on how to stop the spread of it. It’s set in the city, in an apartment complex with a broad courtyard; the place is swimming with zombies from one building to another – although the zombies seem a bit visually impaired, they move normally, so escape seems unlikely.
Joon-Woo is a young man very much living the video-gamer life. He wakes up to find his parents and sister are not at home, and settles in to play games and enjoy the day … only to find that the world has gone to hell, and neighbours are turning on one another just outside his windows.
He was supposed to go shopping but had never gone, so his food stores quickly deplete, and his water situation isn’t much better. He believes his family to be dead, and although he’s streamed a couple of videos to the outside world, there are no services, so he doesn’t feel there’s much chance of rescue.
It’s at this point that he realizes there’s a girl (Yoo-bin) across the way who has also been barricaded in her apartment. She’s in another building of the complex – across the zombie-infested courtyard – so she might as well be on the moon, but he uses his drone to send messages to her.
The rest of the film revolves around their finding ways to communicate, to transfer food and water, to finally meet face to face, and to try to escape to the roof – typical zombie plotline, I suppose.
In fact, the plot is so typical that the movie itself comes as something of a surprise: none of the scenes seem sluggish, everything moves at a good pace and keeps the viewer’s attention, and the various elements that it shares with other zombie films actually provide a nice bringing-the-viewer-in experience – we’re pretty sure we know what’s about to happen, so rather than the tension of wondering what they’re going to face we feel the dread of certainty, and watch anxiously to see how they get out of a pit-trap we recognized all too well.
Of course it’s a girl and a boy – of course – but neither is cast in a know-it-all role; sometimes Yoo-bin knows more about something than Joon-woo, and sometimes he knows more about something than she does. Both of them exhibit bravery and clear thinking, and even when they don’t think there’s any hope, they keep moving toward escape and rescue.
Is it a wildly outside-the-box zombie tale? No, it’s pretty standard. But the characters are very likeable, the pace is decent, the atmosphere alternates effectively between serious and light-hearted, and the ultimate showdown is suitably tense and satisfying. There’s also a significant comment on the interconnectedness of online communities, something that is still criticized by people who grew up in a more face-to-face world but which has its own adaptations for creating friendships, connection, and community.
All in all, #Alive is a very good installment to a saturated genre, and well worth watching.
10 out of 10
* reviews of things i found on (mostly) netflix *
* now with spoilers *
* be aware: this is a synopsis review, so it is one big spoiler *
The Final (2010) tells the story of a group of high school outcasts who decide to exact revenge on their tormentors.
It begins in a restaurant, where a girl with a burn-scar over half her face experiences stares and whispers from the other patrons. She finally lashes out, saying that she didn’t ask to look that way.
The film then turns to the group of outcasts (Ravi, Emily, Jack, Dane, and Andy) and follows their fairly significant bullying by the “popular” students; we also see each outcast’s home life – none of them have pleasant home lives, their parents being either neglectful, chaotic, distant, or hostile. We meet Kurtis, an agreeable young man who seems to like everyone and to treat them all equally (and kindly). When he witnesses Ravi being bullied, he stands up for Ravi. The outcasts discuss Kurtis, in fact, deciding that he’s a “good guy” and that he should not be allowed to attend “the party”.
“The party” is the site of the outcasts’ revenge, where they get all of their tormentors into the same house in the woods, drug them, and then torture them. Kurtis has shown up after all, so Ravi allows him to escape before the torture begins, and points out that if everyone were like Kurtis, none of the film’s events would be happening.
Kurtis encounters a racist man – Parker – who ties Kurtis up and goes to see if his story about the “party” is true. Parker is ambushed by a trio of students on motorbikes, but he’s able to eliminate two of them; Kurtis frees himself and calls police. By the time the police get to the party-house, however, the outcasts have turned on one another (Dane is particularly touchy, having expressed intense suicidal ideation and deep anger throughout the film). Jack is the only outcast still alive, and kills himself after telling the police that there are “more of us” out there.
Kurtis returns to school, where he recognizes the third motorbike rider; we realize that one of the bullies is the girl from the beginning of the movie – Emily gave her those scars, at a party that several other students did not survive.
On the surface, the story is one we’ve seen quite a bit – the bullied kids, who are always really good people, get back at their aggressors, who are always really bad people, and the aggressors finally see the error of their ways. We see how dismal the bullied kids’ lives are, how unworthy their families are, how mean the meanies can be. We do feel sympathy for the outcasts; we do feel outrage at the bullies’ actions. For anyone who’s been bullied themselves, the notion of revenge can be quite appealing, and the graphic torture of the bullies in the film might even act as a cautionary tale for any real bullies who might be watching.
But Final goes a little deeper into the matter.
We see the outcasts’ negative home lives, but the outcasts themselves aren’t all squeaky clean. Dane especially has so much misdirected rage that it borders on psychopathy; by the end, he’s lashing out in all directions, even at his own friends and allies, in his attempt to stop the pain he feels. He stops caring about revenge or lessons and focuses instead on hurting others for hurting’s sake. Most of the others, too, are so consumed by their pain that they no longer see the bullies as human beings – even though being unable to have compassion is usually described as the problem bullies have.
We don’t necessarily get a deeper look at the bullies, but they are presented more as real people than as stereotypes – during the torture experience, they exhibit concern for their friends’ lives (well, some of them exhibit concern). And the school hasn’t been divided into “us” and “them”, with only bullies and good-guys – Kurtis, among others, is just a regular person, not hurting anyone, not hating anyone, just making his way through school without an agenda.
The bullies are pretty solidly the bad guys … but the other characters aren’t so clearly delineated and compartmentalized. The atmosphere is one of stark realism, so we feel the pain inflicted by the bullies. We don’t like them. But we also can’t quite get swept away on a wave of revenge-porn, because all of the characters are just kids, just people: there’s no particular struggle between good and evil, but rather a grey and protracted conflict between teenagers of all stripes and the many parts of being human that hurt or don’t make sense. Instead of being able to vicariously feel avenged by the actions of the characters, we’re struck by how gritty and pointless it all is, by how important high school feels when really it’s just a small interlude in life, by how much life can suck for even the best of us.
Jack’s warning that there are “more of us” is no doubt true, but the effect isn’t one of chilling realization wherein we contemplate a world full of angry, disaffected outcasts who may finally snap. Instead, the thought that there are more people who feel such a deep pain is just kind of sad – the film has illustrated very well that people in pain, particularly those who don’t feel like anyone hears or cares, will eventually be overcome by those feelings. They’ll lash out at others or at themselves, they’ll feel more and more lost and broken, they’ll feel more and more helpless against the negative forces that seem to press in on them from all sides. Basically, the film shows that bullies and the bullied are all just acting out their anger, hopelessness, and confusion; that neither side has a corner on good or evil; and that so much of the “drama” grown-ups mock about adolescents is a fairly understandable response to a world that doesn’t seem as welcoming and warm as it did when we were small.
There were a few things that didn’t quite mesh with the rest: the families were all so uniformly unconcerned with their children’s well-being that it sort of felt like a ham-handed parade of dysfunctional stereotypes, and Parker’s random racism was out of place in a movie that dealt with a different kind of negative social experience. If the goal was to suggest that even Kurtis – whom everyone liked – had his own problems, then it fell a bit short because of its incongruity. Some of the torture scenes went for the gore-porn vibe, but most of the film went for realism, so there was some conflict there in how the audience was expected to receive the images. And of course, as with most teen-centered works, it’s a bit unlikely that absolutely zero parents were concerned about a teen party in the middle of nowhere.
But overall, the message and its delivery in this film far outweighed these flaws, and the feeling we’re left with at the end is one not so much of vindication or even enjoyment but of sadness and reflection.
8 out of 10
S. M. R. Cooper 