You Mother _____! - The Divisive 'mother!'

Darren Aronofsky's latest opus mother! has made some of the "Worst Dressed Lists" out there this past week. It received a Cinemascore rating of 'F' (but really, do we care what Middle America rates something as complex as mother! or other F-scoring films like Solaris (an F? Really?) or William Friedkin's Bug (a great, nasty little story about drug addiction and paranoia)? Remember, Cinemascore gave Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon an 'A' rating. Citizen Kane material, right there.

Although I don't want to give away spoilers (I won't), mother! is, on the surface anyway, about a husband and wife (Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence) living in a sprawling, remote house in the country. He is a writer and she has spent ages refurbishing the farmhouse to an artisan sheen, worthy of being photographed for interior design magazines.

Their idyll is interrupted by a visiting stranger (Ed Harris) who is a fan of Bardem's writing and who ensconces himself into their home. Harris is followed by his blousy wife the next day (a sharp Michelle Pfeiffer), and soon after, their two belligerent sons.

Tragedy strikes one of these interloper characters, which spirals into a cycle of potential sinister guest upon guest entering the home uninvited and "setting up shop" so to speak.

I could continue describing plot points but I walked into the movie unaware of its contents and it made for a better experience.

I found mother! to be a gripping chamber play for the first two-thirds of the film. It had strong traces of Rosemary's Baby and The Amityville Horror (hidden rooms, strange "neighbors" stopping by, unsettling changes in environment), but much less straightforward.

I won't reveal any further plot points but just say that the movie addresses themes of men's attempts to control and exploit women for their own gain, environmental destruction of the Earth for selfish goals, and the modern disease of fame and fortune at any cost. That's just for starters.

Aronofsky says there are strong biblical references in mother! to events and stories from the Bible (didn't hear about this til after seeing the movie). I find this biblical claim runs the gamut from strong to flimsy. I can even see mother! as a take on the 2016 election. Bardem as Trump and Lawrence as Hilary in a sick "marriage," where he will destroy her at any cost, by any means possible, in order to win and feed his insatiable hunger for attention and fame.

Now, that's a horror movie of epic proportions.

Night Fever: 'It Comes at Night' and Psychological Terror vs. Gore

As summer bakes on and we hit 105 degrees today and 108 tomorrow, we fantasize about being in a dark, shaded forest in October at 55 degrees. That's the setting of this overlooked indie, directed by Trey Edward Shults, that is being billed as a 'horror movie' but is more a psychological drama/thriller.

It Comes at Night stars edgy Joel Edgerton (fantastic, as usual) as Paul, husband and father who is hiding out in a cabin in the woods with his wife Sarah and teenage son Travis after some sort of unnamed health catastrophe has seemingly affected the world (nuclear war, plague, zombies?).

Their life is upended as Will, a young man, breaks into their sealed-up house looking for food, and winds up becoming their captive. They quickly ease their grip on Will and Paul goes with him to bring back his wife and young son to their cabin.

They all return safely to stay in the cabin but let's just say paranoia, cabin fever, anxiety, and creeping fear take hold of everyone involved and things go from bad to worse.

Although promoted with a very "scariest bits" trailer (above), this movie was not a "zombie film" or even much of a gory horror B-movie. It is truly a psychological horror film about survival, family, and fear. Also throw on heavy doses of mistrust and breakdown of society's rules and a dash of the (un)kindness(?) of strangers.

With a tiny budget and few recognizable actors, the small-scale It Comes at Night delivers with a fantastic sense of mood and place, a slow burning turning of the screws, and some stellar acting. Unanswered questions and motivations are littered throughout the picture to put you on edge and keep you guessing what's happening and why are people so cruel.

Deep, dark, and brutal, It Comes at Night scores more with its mundane, quiet take on the end of the world than the latest seasons of cacophony on The Walking Dead.

Back in the Tank: 'Altered States' and Where '70s Experimentation Meets '80s Sci-fi Pop

As we all know, the '70s in Hollywood is seen as a second Golden Era, where scrappy film school grads came into their own, using big money from eager studios to rope in a youth generation raised on a druggy counterculture vibe.

Scorsese, Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg, they all went big ideas and bigger budgets by the time 1980 rolled around. Ken Russell, the iconoclastic British director was a bit older than this crew and spent the '70s breaking down boundaries with films like the controversial anti-religious bombast of The Devils and the more user-friendly, rock opera psychedelia of The Who's Tommy. Russell was also edging toward the mainstream by the end of the '70s, looking for a pop hit that mixed his opulent weirdness and some kind of sci-fi angle that Hollywood was gaga for, post Star Wars.

[Back in an era when movie posters were allowed to have paragraphs of copy on them for movie-goers to read. We'd be lucky for a full sentence nowadays.]

Russell adapted the sole novel by Oscar-winning screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky (the genius behind Network) to the screen with his usual psychedelic aplomb. This is the story of Edward Jessup, a research psychologist (a striking William Hurt in his screen debut) studying schizophrenia by using sensory deprivation in an isolation water tank.

This deprivation isn't enough to get the out of body experiences he desires, so he travels to remote Mexico to experience a sacred drug ceremony. There, the natives use a special hallucinogenic natural potion to open up their consciousness. Jessup tries it and is hooked on the mind trip hallucinations.

Back in Boston, Jessup mixes the isolation tank experience with some of the mind-altering drug mixture from Mexico. This is when the film gets truly silly and Hurt's hallucinations manifest themselves physically. He starts to morph into a caveman/animal state, escaping the tank and running amok through the nighttime city streets.

Altered States is a whole lot of mumbo jumbo, psuedo-science but makes for a fun, dated ride through theories about "biological devolution," energy waves, and bad primitive caveman bodysuits. It's the dead serious, existential questions about the origin of man and men becoming godlike through drug and mind-expansion tools that all seems very '70s self-help meets heavy drug experimentation. Russell puts this through a filter of a glossy, FX-heavy sheen of the upcoming '80s wave of sci-fi, horror, and action films about to barrel through Hollywood and become the norm.

Altered States rides the tightrope between the two decades and between exciting boundary-pushing and schlocky fun. It's too silly to even get mad at. C'mon, we're all just energy, man! Enjoy the ride.

Micro/Macro: the Big and Small Stories in British Horror

Tons of horror movies come out weekly and it's hard to keep up. It certainly is one of, if not the, highest volume film genre. It's great to see smart, budget-conscious (I won't say "cheap" cause that implies they're tacky, home-made little projects) horror films released amidst all the hackneyed movies that fill up the Netflix 'Horror' genre listings.

Two new-ish jewels that came out recently are from the UK area, and tell both intimate and larger-scale stories of various kinds of horror.

The Girl with All the Gifts (see above trailer) is of the "macro" kind, a somewhat small story encased in a larger, epic environment of global collapse after a zombie virus. In a militarized UK, a collection of hybrid, second generation children are incarcerated and used as test subjects for curing the virus.

Glenn Close stars as the head scientist who sees the cure as the shiny goal, whereas the children are all expendable specimens. The children's teacher Helen (Gemma Arterton) is the more empathetic heroine, and her favorite student is the titular character, the whip-smart Melanie (Sennia Nanua).

After an attack on their base, the core group of survivors make a run for it and it becomes a road zombie movie, in the vein of 28 Days Later or The Walking Dead. The effects are smart, small, and subtle. Aside from fallen city landscapes, any CGI nonsense is smartly kept to a minimum.

The Girl succeeds on its small team-focus in a larger world narrative, whittling it down to the main players fight for survival. It's tense, savvy, and still finds a new angle or two in the overdone zombie genre.

A Dark Song is another UK isles (in this case Ireland) horror/thriller but is much smaller in scale, a micro two-person story about loss and the lengths people will go to hold on to their loved ones.

Sophia (Catherine Walker) mourning the loss of her dead son, rents a house in the Welsh countryside and hires an occult "expert" Solomon (Steve Oram) to make contact with her son and find out the identity of his killers so she can seek revenge.

The dilapidated mansion itself becomes a third character as the length of time of their stay grows from days to weeks, and seemingly months as they "train" and study for this ritualistic seance to connect with the dead child.

Almost like a filmed stage play, the two go from curiosity to anger and hatred as their rituals slowly spin out of control. Like in The Girl, the CG is tasteful and used smartly. Budget constraints, and maybe a good old fashioned dose of British reserve holds A Dark Song back from becoming a ridiculous, by-the-numbers Hollywood schlockfest.

The pay-offs are simple and small and the amount of dour suffering in the film is not for the weak-hearted.

It's interesting how something as seemingly crowd-pleasing and larger scale as The Girl with a name actor (Close) could have such a tiny, direct-to-streaming release. Who knows what the intricacies are in Hollywood studioland where one seemingly sure-fire hit is subjugated to "direct to..." status, while another horror movie is chosen as the one that will probably "break through."

It is always a blessing though, for horror movie fans, when someone has done the thankless work of pushing the "good" films towards the light through a sea of noise, grabbing them before they slip through the cracks.

You WISH You Were Sybil!: M. Night's 'Split'

I haven't seen an M. Night Shyamalan movie since 2008's miserable The Happening (Mark Wahlberg playing earnest nerd; Zooey Deschanel playing....anything; pollen being a population killer instead of a nasal enemy). I'm not sad about it either.

The Lady in the Water, The Last Airbender, After Earth? No thanks. But after mega-budgeted, mediocre sci-fi tangents, M. Night moved in to the low-budget, PG-13 level horror realm of The Visit and now Split. He's earning back some street cred and increased critical praise. But is it earned? I haven't seen The Visit beyond the trailers and teasers that were everywhere when it was released. But my opinion on Split? Well, it's split. C'mon, you knew that had to be coming, right?

The film is a psychological thriller about three teenage girls who get kidnapped from a mall parking lot and put into the underground lair of a split-personality killer named Kevin (James McAvoy, chewing the scenery, sometimes whole). Why is it that even the most working class of villains, like Kevin, somehow have the money to set up some kind of elaborate system of rooms, locks, endless unused spaces, etc.?

Betty Buckley stars as McAvoy's psychiatrist Dr. Fletcher (a nod to Angela Lansbury's Murder She Wrote persona, perhaps?) and does a relatively good job of selling M. Night's sometimes ridiculously overstuffed script. As the lead captive girl Casey, Anya Taylor Joy is the real heart of the story, as the cool, calm, and Clarice Starling-level resourceful heroine. She's the one to watch, amidst the hamminess of McAvoy.

Though not awful, I felt Split's best bits were cribbed from the superior 10 Cloverfield Lane, and of course the final act of Silence of the Lambs. Even the newish Netflix series The OA did a more novel take on young people trapped in a basement by a demented mind.

Is it a good Shyamalan movie? Yes. He seems to be climbing out of the big-budget bloat of his mid-00s schlock period. Is it derivative as well? Yes, of course.

It also wouldn't be an M. Night film without a much touted "twist ending." This film's twist? Not very interesting, and more subtly meta in regards to his other films. If you're waiting for that mind-bending twist, don't hold your breath.

"There's Nothing There, Man, It's Just....Void" - Missing Something with 'The Void'

The quote in this post's title is actually from the '80s comedy Sixteen Candles, but even though it's being uttered to high school stud Jake Ryan, it is still apt when describing the new indie horror film, The Void.

I saw the trailer a month ago and was excited for its release. The trailer seemed to promise a return to the '80s body-morphing "practical effects" (i.e., non CG) of classics like The Thing (oh, you mean THAT movie?) or much of Cronenberg's '80s gems.

The Void does make good on its vibe of non-CG, model-made creatures, which is one of its definite pluses. And it's familiarity in story and vibe is like a warm, friendly blanket of horror movie commonality. But it's also what eventually sends this film off the rails.

A small-town cop on night duty finds a disturbed, injured man crawling on a desolate forest road and brings him in to a small local hospital. The tiny night staff of nurses and doctors and a few patients are caught up in a quickly disintegrating mess of possessed murderous staff, renegade hicks with guns, and a growing crowd of masked, robe-clad cultists surrounding the hospital. What's not to love?

The movie both benefits and suffers from its mash-up approach of other, usually better films. The location and intro seems to riff on the hospital set of Halloween 2, and the melting and morphing alien/human hybrids in the film's second act definitely take a huge influence from The Thing. Speaking of John Carpenter, with the trapped and surrounded in a small location set-up, I'm getting shades of Assault on Precinct 13.

Where the movie starts to fall apart is the final act. With its nonsensical plot splinters and reliance on Hellraiser-style characters and situations, it leads to a head-scratching final shot.

Do you remember Danny Boyle's sci-fi thriller Sunshine, a remarkable visual feast of outer space travel and a thrilling tale of survival and escape? It also ended with clunky humanoid/demon nonsensical mess. The Void seemed to think that was a good call for an ending as well.

Hoping a re-viewing of the film will fill in plot holes and clear up the confusion of a promising story that went off-track.

Bon Appetit! - 'Raw'

[The trailer is a bit NSFW]

How's your appetite for cannibalism in movies these days? They usually center around zombies and The Walking Dead, but the new French horror film Raw brings it back to the living. And it's not to everybody's taste.

French filmmaker Julia Ducournau's film follows Justine, a newbie at vet school who is unsure of the world around her. Caught up in a chaotic first few weeks at a strange vet program (frat-style hazing and "Hell Week"; is this normal to starting school, any vets out there?), this lifelong vegetarian is forced to eat raw meat as a hazing ritual. Looks like it starts off a chain reaction of her ever-increasing, terrifying behavior.

Her older sister Alexia, also at the school as a student, and her gay roommate, the gorgeous Adrian (it's France, they don't care) both egg her on and shield her from the chaos of her new found cannibalistic urges. You know how Freshman year is.

The uncomfortable, increasingly twisted gross-out horror comes rapidly as Justine's hunger moves from curiosity to insatiability. Garance Marillier, as Justine, gives a go-for-broke performance as an unhinged student discovering her sexuality, her bloodlust, and her stellar vet studies all at the same time. It's an impossible acting chore for this far-out role but she manages as well as one could hope.

Director Ducournau creates some indelible shots in the film (lots of animals - horses, dogs) in both movement and as carcasses. She has a keen eye for stark beauty and clinical, medical chills. The film gave me shades of Cronenberg's body-morphing films, as well as the brutal Catherine Breillat film Fat Girl.

There was also an odd dark, dark humor in Raw. The whole set-up of the story, and the eventual pay-off is so over-the-top at times, it may bring a few nervous laughs. Melancholy, dark humor, brutality; I have no idea what Ducournau will bring to her next film, but I will definitely watch.

Silence: 'I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House'

Isn't silence scarier than noise? Especially when you're in a big house alone, or almost alone.

Osgood Perkins, son of famous actor Anthony Psycho Perkins, makes his directorial debut with I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, a slow-burning gothic ghost/haunted house story. Moving to the other end of the spectrum from the screeching, jump-cuts of movies like The Conjuring or Insidious, Pretty Thing is a quiet, delicate thing of beauty. Modern American audiences would no doubt find it 'boring' and 'slow' but the slower and quieter it got, the more it unnerved me.

The simple set up is that Lily (Ruth Wilson, like an older, timid Emma Stone) is a live-in nurse who moves into the large isolated home of an elderly author (Paula Prentiss) known for her mystery/thriller novels. Lily is nervous and lonely and soon to be enthralled with uncovering why her almost catatonic patient keeps referring to her as 'Polly' and why she keeps hearing voices and thumping noises in the house.

The imagery and set design in the film is impeccable. The interiors and natural lighting are clean and crisp (sunny entryways, white-washed wood) or faded and decaying (molding walls, grimy wallpaper) depending on location of the characters and time of day. The CGI is kept to a minimum and beautifully evocative (see the above ghostly trailed image). Faded, foggy, muted, shadowy; these adjectives describe the film well.

I see references to Kubrick and Polanski, on a shoestring budget, and flashes of films like The Tenant, The Changeling, The Shining, The House of the Devil, but much more sedated. Discoveries of turned over rugs, bubbling paint on walls, growing black mold, upside down chairs are all the more effective when the horror seems mundane and not doled out in jump scares. It's like the anti-Crimson Peak.

The one edit I would make is to strip back some of the voice over narration. The intro/outro are nice, but there seems to be a bit too much throughout. Really capitalizing on those long stretches of silence that do exist in the film are what drew me in to this ghostly vibe wholeheartedly.