One Thousand Words

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Just saw “Mad Max: Fury Road” and it was utterly fantastic in so many different ways. Is it a perfect movie? No, of course not. But one thing I noticed was how many of the marginalized characters had agency, made their own decisions, controlled their own lives. There’s spoilers in this, so I’m going to tuck the text behind a fold.

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“Audrey Rose” is a movie about white people discovering Hinduism.

There are good things to say about “Audrey Rose.” Anthony Hopkins is outstanding in the film as bereaved father slash stalker, and child actress Susan Swift was simply phenomenal. Additionally, unlike a lot of modern films, background New York is filled with People of Color: Black cops, a Black bailiff, a Jewish lawyer who talks about Shabbas and Dybbuks, a restaurant filled with patrons including a Black woman and a Sikh family, a mixed race jury, Indian expert witnesses. Most modern movies are notoriously, unrealistically white.

Unfortunately, the film doesn’t have much else redeeming it, and also suffers badly under Indian-specific Orientalism.

The plot of the movie is that young Ivy Templeton regularly has night terrors right around her birthday. They get worse the older she gets. Meanwhile, around her 11th birthday, a creeper dude (Hopkins) has been lurking around outside her school, following her and her mom home, trailing her dad en route to work, slipping gifts for her into her dad’s grocery bag, etc. The tension ramps up and then takes a frankly bizarre and almost preachy turn for pro-reincarnation… from a very Western European/Monotheistic point of view.

Stalker Elliot Hoover reveals that lost his wife and daughter in a horrific car crash almost 11 years ago, and that night terror afflicted Ivy is his daughter reincarnated, and her soul can’t rest because reasons. Ivy’s mother Janice, who is very ineffectual (sobbing and screaming while her daughter has a night terror, for instance), falls for Hoover’s line of bull very quickly to her husband Bill’s disgust. The movie seesaws for a while between “Is Hoover just a creepy stalker” and “no this is for real come on” and comes down too heavily pro-reincarnation. It’s very much a Movie With A Message (reincarnation is totally cool and every single person in India has no fear of death and never grieves for the dead because they all, every single one of them, believe in reincarnation and everything’s totally peaceful and cool if filled with violence and starvation they’re just, you know, so SPIRITUAL) that includes a freaking court trial to determine whether or not Ivy is Hoover’s reincarnated daughter.

They decide to settle things with a dose of hypnosis/age regression which people keep stressing out about how OMG DANGEROUS!!!!!!!!! it is. Ivy dies from it, for ~reasons~ and the movie closes with Janice penning a thank you letter to Hoover where she talks about both reincarnation and heaven. The cosmology is sloppy.

I wanted to like this movie a lot, and would have enjoyed it more if there’d been more of a question over whether or not reincarnation existed/Ivy was Audrey Rose reincarnated. Also if there’d been less cultural appropriation of reincarnation/Hinduism. Anthony Hopkins is absolutely incredible, though, so if you’re a big fan watch it just for him.

This movie gets 2 out of 5 stars.

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“Candyman” is a classic horror movie about racism, abandonment, and Chicago.

I grew up in a really religious household, although I didn’t realize it at the time. I went to Mass every Sunday and Holy Day of Obligation, I went to Catholic school from second grade (CCD classes prior to that) through High School. The way I was raised just felt normal. Most of my friends were Catholic, or came from conservative families, or both. My parents were a little stricter in some ways than my friends’ parents, and I felt very little desire to rebel against them (out of very real fear of rejection/abandonment. Ironically, I got thrown out of the house for doing laundry at the wrong time and not for any petty teenage rebellion or high spirits. In retrospect, I could have lived it up a lot more and gotten the same result.). So when my parents banned almost every movie in existence, I didn’t really question it or try to sneak around to watch them. The upshot is that there are a ton of classic movies I have never seen. “Candyman” is one of them.

“Candyman” is a movie set in Chicago. Like the best urban fantasy and horror the city is a vital, integral part of the story. It’s almost a character in its own right. The movie opens tracking vehicles along the knotted tangle of expressways, moving from the South Side Northwards. Views of the luxurious high rise condos of the Gold Coast through protagonist Helen Lyle’s window; the cop car tooling down Lower Wacker Drive; Cabrini-Green, the setting of much of the horror; the University of Illinois at Chicago, pre-extensive external renovations; the bridges spanning the cold murky depths of the Chicago River; Stroger Hospital. Part of the character of Chicago is racism and segregation, and the movie digs much more deeply into issues like systemic racism and sexism than I was expecting.

Grad Students Helen Lyle and Bernadette Walsh are working on a thesis about Urban Legends, back when your average college student didn’t know what Urban Legends were. Helen’s husband, Trevor, is a professor at UIC. Despite her protests, he touches on Urban Legends in a lecture, cuing in potential interviewees/story tellers about what Urban Legends are and how they spread. He’s also very flirty with a female student, something he seems to have a history with. While transcribing tape recordings about a Bloody Mary-esque character named “Candyman” in her office, a cleaning lady mentions she’s heard about him. Intrigued and hungry for more data, Helen asks her and then another cleaning lady (who lives in Cabrini-Green) questions. They tell her a story about a woman who was killed by Candyman when he came in through her bathroom mirror… waiting in an adjoining apartment, removed the mirrored medicine cabinet, kicked her mirrored medicine cabinet out, and came through the hole. Helen does a bit of research and discovers that this is an actual thing that actually happened, and that the Housing Projects were so poorly made that the medicine cabinets were just set into holes in the cinderblock walls. There was nothing, no barrier, between the medicine cabinets. The victim called the police twice about the intruder, called 911 to report a break in, and was ignored.

I want to point out two things here:

1) Bernadette and the cleaning women are all Black, and the film passes the Bechdel test with wildly flying colors. Helen listens attentively to the cleaning women and treats them as experts in their knowledge, learns from them… but she’ll also be profiting from their story in a way they can’t, as she has access to academia and publishing and they don’t.

2) The bit about the congruent space between bathrooms? True. People WERE murdered by intruders punching through the bathroom cabinets. “Candyman” is based on a Clive Barker short story, a story written by an Englishman and set in England. Bernard Rose, another Englishman, wrote the script and directed the movie and did a fantastic job localizing the story. At the same time, he’s a white man who is literally profiting off the pain of Black people, sensationalizing actual horrific things that actually happened to actual people and making money off them in ways the people who experienced these things don’t have means of doing. Themes of abandonment thread their way through the film: people call 911 and are dismissed; Helen calls her husband for help and he’s off fucking a student; Helen and other people scream for help and are ignored; Trevor abandons Helen for his sexy perky-nippled student; multiple housing projects holding thousands of people are left to rot and decay, those within written off as unsalvageable human trash.

After a smug, condescending lecture from another man doing Urban Legend work, Helen decides that she and Bernadette are going to gather some first hand data and visit the Cabrini-Green projects, interview some residents, take some photos. This is a shockingly bad idea and Bernadette, who has actual brains in her head, does everything she can to convince Helen not to go. The two women wind up going together. A resident points out that every time white people come by bad things follow them, and this is very true as Helen’s actions rile up Candyman and cause problems for everyone, including herself.

The “real” history of Candyman, which omits his name and date of birth or death, is an absolutely unrealistic bit of unlikely circumstance and convoluted torture and murder, yet is told as unassailable fact by a man who studies Urban Legends and their hallmarks. The Urban Legend of a man breaking through a medicine cabinet is revealed to be true. UIC, a campus rich with Urban Legends of its own (both legends common to any campus with heavy use of Brutalist Architecture as well as more specific ones relating to the Behavior Science Building and Art and Architecture Building), is a wonderful choice as Helen and Bernadette’s college. Helen is attacked, but is not sexually assaulted or raped; she undresses on camera and it’s not titillating or voyeuristic. Her friendship with Bernadette is deep and loving. Helen repeatedly crawls through small openings, emerging from screaming mouths, born again from concrete birth canals. Helen fights to retain control of herself, of her mind, of her actions.

“Candyman” also explicitly questions the function of Urban Legends. Why are they so wide spread? Why are they so important? What do they mean, what do they offer? What if they are religion, a sacrament, something sacred and divine? What if we create god? What if our desires and fears manifest themselves as power and flesh, and become hungry? What if Urban Legends grant a special form of immortality?

It’s a fantastic movie.

It’s also not without its flaws.

One of the themes of the movie is that Candyman, a large Black man who is literally not human, preys upon and controls a white woman. He ruins her character, destroys her mind, posesses her, touches her body, kisses her. This is a pretty common, and pretty racist, fear about scary Black men despoiling white women. This could have been avoided by casting Helen Lyle as pretty much any ethnicity other than white, even made less obvious by darkening her hair. Urban Legends and stereotypes about sexually insatiable white-virgin-deflowering Black men abound. Does the movie knowingly play with this trope, or simply lazily fall prey to it?

Ultimately, I was pretty blown away by this movie and wish I’d watched it earlier. I was aware of its status as “cult classic,” and all too often that means “kind of shitty and very dated” (and so much about this movie IS dated, like UIC’s East Side architecture which as drastically been changed, or the fact that most of the housing projects have since been torn down and the ones close enough to the Gold Coast developed as luxury condos… which were supposed to be mixed-use with a certain percentage going to CHA (Chicago Housing Authority) tenants. That has overwhelmingly failed to happen, and a whole lot of people have been left homeless.). But there’s a lot about this movie to enjoy, to think about, and to unpack.

In my personal rating system for 31 days of horror, 5 stars means “buy this movie, it has good re-watch potential”; 4 stars means “rent this movie, watch it”; 3 stars means “find this movie for free, eh”; 2 stars means “skip it”; and 1 star means “ugh.” I’ve run across one movie that I thought deserved negative stars. “Candyman” is the first movie I felt deserved 5 stars. There’s a lot going on.

5 out of 5 stars for “Candyman.”

I’m really glad. I was getting super burned out by shitty, hateful, shallow gore horror and flapping tits.

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“The Awakening” is a tense ghost story set in a boarding school in the early 1920s.

If you’re anything like me, you saw “The Awakening” available to watch on netflix and thought to yourself “Huh. I wonder if there’s any connection to Kate Chopin’s feminist short story about desire and sexual awakening.” The answer is no, although the trousers-wearing (at home, at least), cigarette smoking, atheist, ghost debunking Florence Cathcart has consensual sex with the emotionally traumatized but sex headmaster of a haunted boarding school, which is pretty great for a woman in London in 1921. Cathcart, who’s written a best selling novel about ghosts not being real, also works with the police to debunk fraudulent charlatan spiritualists intent on ripping off grieving patrons… an actual thing that actually happened, although in real life they pulled cheesecloth “ectoplasm” from various orifices, instead of using blood capsules and killing birds. After one successful raid, she’s approached by a teacher at a boys’ boarding school in Cumbria. A boy has died recently, apparently at the hands of a ghost, and the students are terrified. After a bit of emotional blackmail on his part, she agrees to join him at the school and investigate things.

At the school she reveals she attended Cambridge, unusual for a woman of her time. She sets up a variety of ghost/fraud hunter traps including tripwire cameras, and investigates the school. Despite some creepy events (including an alarming and unsettling dollhouse), she figures out what happened: some of the boys pranked her… and the dead child was killed because the English teacher locked him outside in the dark to help him “man up.” Terrified and alone, he had an asthma attack and died. “These boys must be strong– stronger than us,” he says in his defense.

The specter of both victims of the flu and the dead and surviving soldiers of World War I are laced throughout the film. There’s conflict between Robert Mallory, the teacher who contacted Cathcart, who is a veteran and Edward Judd, the groundskeeper, who faked physical disability to avoid being drafted. Mallory resents Judd’s cowardice while Judd resents that Mallory and other veterans are treated as heroes, as his betters. Cathcart, it turns out, is obsessed with ghosts because she desperately wants them to be real, she desperately wants to make amends to her dead fiance.

The acting in the film is fantastic, and the cinematography is interesting. It has a washed out, faded look and feel to it that I absolutely adored. Had the movie ended with Cathcart solving the mystery of the student’s death and leaving the fate of ghosts up in the air, I would have been very happy. A nice little mystery neatly solved, with the question of spirits not conclusively solved. Sadly, the movie continues on, and although the acting and atmosphere are both wonderful the plot descends into convoluted yet predictable plot twists and el oh el the skeptic is proven wrongity wrong about her deeply held beliefs and career.

There’s also an attempted rape scene, where Judd just happens to witness Cathcart and Mallory having consensual sex, so he decides that Cathcart is a slut and he beats her and tries to rape her, because that’s the price that must be paid if one is to see a woman in a film I guess. It’s a price I’m getting increasingly tired of paying, and quite frankly I’m getting burnt out on movies at this point. I was really enjoying “The Awakening” ridiculous over-telegraphed “plot twists” and all, and then BAM! a violent struggle and attempted rape of a very cool woman. There’s no escaping it. And that’s just so incredibly depressing and disheartening.

If the movie had ended after the mystery of the student’s death was solved, I would have rated this a 4 out of 5 stars. But it went on and took some bad turns and ultimately, as much as I wanted to like this movie, it only gets 3 out of 5 stars. Which is a shame. The acting is great, the ghostiness is great, the creep actor ramps up nicely (I’ve never seen such an effective use of a spooky dollhouse), and the cinematography is gorgeous. Alas.

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“Pontypool” is a zombie movie without zombies.

There is an obvious appeal to zombie movies. A person or small group of people is faster, stronger, and smarter than the overwhelming shambling or running undead hordes. They thrive where others fall and fail. They survive, saving their own lives and possibly others. They are in the thick of things, confronting horrors directly, taking action. They see what there is to see and are able to find solutions to their immediate problems. They know what their probable doom looks like. How much more terrifying to be inactive, to be unable to tell what monsters are lurking, what they look like, where they are, what they want, when they will strike? To be passive, to wait, to listen and imagine?

This is the position radio DJ team Grant Mazzy, Sydney Briar, and Laurel-Anne Drummand find themselves in early one snowy Valentine’s morning in the small town of Pontypool in Canada. A boring morning stretches out before them, like so many other boring mornings, until they hear reports of a mob surrounding a doctor’s office and getting violent. They have difficulty confirming this. The police aren’t talking about it. They, especially new hire Grant, worry that it’s a hoax.

It’s not.

What’s going on is a virus infecting language. It’s not airborne, it’s breath born. An infected person has trouble with language, with thought, with words and they search for someone else to infect, to pass the infection on. Their behavior is pretty zombie-like, violent and single-minded and unnerving.

There is a lot of action, of violence, happening but for the first… half? two thirds? of the movie it takes place off screen. We hear it, we hear of it, but we don’t see it… until suddenly it’s there, a mob of bloody hands battering at the glass panes of a door. It’s a tense movie, suspenseful, and that tension is a wonderful combination of good writing and good acting. I sat through a movie about a small group of people locked in a room and I enjoyed it because I cared about the people and what would happen to them. Their personalities and histories were quickly fleshed out, they interacted in a fun and believable manner, the conversation revealed things about themselves and their town. The movie is fast paced without being frenetic.

I’ve had several people recommend this movie to me over the past few years, and I’m glad I finally got around to watching it. I know some people who watch it every valentine’s day, and that’s fantastic. I don’t know that it’d hold up to multiple re-watches for me, though, so I give this movie 4 out of 5 stars.

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“Lake Dead” is a very bad movie, unless you are a fan of rape.

Did you watch soap operas in the 80s? I grew up in a very small town, and our neighborhood was in a valley near electric transformers. We didn’t have cable or satellite, and we only got a handful of channels on our ancient Zenith television. When I was in high school, I babysat for a family across the street who had cable. That’s when I realized Kes of “Star Trek: Voyager” had ear prosthetics to indicate she was an alien. Our reception was so static-y I’d just assumed her ears were normal ears. When your television options are limited and you aren’t allowed outside because your mom needs to be able to reach you by phone at a moment’s notice, you wind up watching a lot of shit tv. I watched “The Monkees” even though I hated it, and I watched soap operas. There is a special kind of ~ACTING~ common to soaps of the 1980s. I don’t know if this is still true… I have a deluxe cable package and a DVR and mostly watch super nerdy documentaries about THE CELTS and shit. Are there ancient dead bodies? I am on that like white on rice. But for soap operas of my childhood there was a certain signature acting style.

I was surprised and perplexed to see it show up in “Lake Dead.”

The movie kicks off with an old white man yelling at an old white woman about things (a ritual?) were gross and wrong and he was going to end it. The woman yells back that it’s “all we know.” He storms out, drives off, is stopped by a cop car. He gets out and taunts the cop, who has a sheriff badge, and is shot int he head and killed. The yelling, the emoting, the scenery chewing… I was on the edge of my seat waiting for evil twins and surprise babies or something. I was also intrigued by the mention of a ritual. I started getting really interested in the movie. SPOILER: the ritual is never mentioned again, even though I wrote it down twice in my notes. This movie would have been a lot better with a ritual. Was that a red herring? Did they forget about the ritual element? Did I mishear? Any of these are possible. Well, the first one isn’t probable… the movie isn’t smart enough for that, and assumes the audience is stupid or stoned, over-explaining certain plot elements while completely eliding various character details.

After the old man’s murder there’s some extremely boring credits: white words in generic font on a black background, no image or art.

The acting is over all extremely wooden and stiff, expressionless. Within a few minutes, I learned the name and occupation of The Hot Boyfriend, but at the end of the movie I still didn’t know the occupations (or interests, etc) of two of the main (female) characters.

These characters are:

• Brielle: a hot blonde inheritor of the lake property, grand daughter of the old dude who was killed
• Kelli: a hot blonde inheritor of the lake property, etc, a barista
• Sam: a hot brunette inheritor of the lake property, adopted, brings strange dudes home and lets them sleep in her bed while she sleeps on the couch, drinks wine directly out of the bottle, owes Brielle $5k
• Ben: a hot fairly buff dude who’s a construction worker, Brielle’s (live in?) boyfriend
• Bill: chubby, hairy, unkempt friend of Ben’s; college athlete; Amy’s boyfriend; drinks early in the morning; serial cheater
• Amy: hot brunette friend of Brielle’s; put-upon girlfriend of cheating schlub Bill; loves to tan; accused of being jealous of her constantly betraying boyfriend
• Tonya: hot brunette friend of Kelli’s, asked to round out the numbers; likes having sex in the woods with hairy drunkards who cheat on their girlfriends; doesn’t go tanning

“Lake Dead” is very obviously a dude movie for dudes. Sam walks around in sexy underpants and a tight t-shirt to answer the door, which… look. Women, generally speaking, do not wear their underpants in public. They do not answer the door in their lacy lingerie. Do you know why? Because when a woman is sexually assaulted or raped one of the very first questions asked is “what were you wearing.” I’m not saying that a woman answering the door in sexy underpants is inviting rape. I’m saying that women are incredibly aware of the onus wrongly placed on them to prevent men raping them, and wandering around in public in your scanties is not a safe thing to do. And women’s underwear? Is pretty uncomfortable. The nicer looking/sexier/fancier it is, the less comfortable it is. Women, in general, do not lounge about in lingerie with their thighs crossed just so for the flattering angle. When you have a super hot chick and a dumpy dude fucking in the woods it is fundamentally WEIRD that the woman gets COMPLETELY naked for their quickie– the one his “jealous” girlfriend might interrupt at any second– while he stays fully dressed. I know, I know. you like tits! On women. You like women’s tits. And the whole point of your soft core sex moment in the film was to show off the hot actress you got and try to cover up how incredibly thin the plot is and how bad the acting is. I get it! That doesn’t make it any less ridiculous.

There’s 2 softcore sex scenes in the movie. There’s 4 attempted rape scenes. 2 of them are implied; 2 of them are interrupted, but the threat is there and the terror is there and the violence and physical restraint are there. There are twice as many rape scenes as consensual sex scenes in this movie, and one of those consensual sex scenes involves a dude who knows– he KNOWS– what he’s doing will hurt his girlfriend and doesn’t care.

This movie is a movie about attacking, controlling, and raping women. That’s what this movie is about– the assault, terror, brutalizing, and rape of women as entertainment. The psychological, emotional, and physical subjugation of women… for the enjoyment of a male audience. Brielle and Kelli are meant to be imprisoned, raped, and forced to bear children to continue a “pure” bloodline… and it isn’t lost on me that the “pure” women are blondes and the “impure” women are brunettes, one of them a WoC (Filipina). Nor is it lost on me that the blonde victims primarily scream and cry and are saved by Ben and by their estranged, alcoholic, abusive father. By the end of the movie, we know more about Ben than we do about Brielle. What’s her job? Does she have one? We at least know that Ben works in construction (and hates her adopted sister Sam).

Sam’s tortured extensively by her inbred uncles, dumped in a lake in the most inefficient and likely to be discovered way possible (they drive a shaft through her ankles while she’s still alive and attach a chain from the shaft to a cinder block to weigh her down. The open wound is a breeding ground for bacteria and an invitation for fish to nibble. Her feet will detach, the shaft will drop out, and her bloating corpse will rise to the surface of the “lake,” which is the size of a retention pond. they didn’t even bother to clean the room she was attacked in, leading to a ridiculous “close call” when the hotel manager/evil incest grandma gives the key to that room to one of the other girls.) but at least she isn’t raped (that I noticed). After her romp in the woods with Bill, Tonya’s chased through those woods and terrorized. As she’s pinned to a tree by a pickaxe through the face, one of the murdertwins (they are named, I shit you not, Kane and Abel) approaches her, unzipping his pants. We don’t see the rape, but it’s implied. Ben’s murdered and his corpse is hung from a tree, there’s no rape implication. The murdertwins attack the RV the survivors flee to, and Amy splits off to run into the woods and hide. She’s chased, brutalized, and bent over a tree branch while a murdertwin rubs against her from behind. Again, it implies rape, even though he appears fully clothed… Bill was fully clothed when he fucked Tonya in the woods previously.

When Sam was murdered and dumped in the lake, I was intrigued. Was this part of the ritual? Was there some kind of Wickerman-esque sacrifice? Did the lake need familial blood? No, as it turns out, there is no ritual. Sam was murdered, like Tonya and Amy and Bill, because they weren’t family. And Gloria, the hotel manager, was Grandpa’s wife (and sister?) and they had incestuous sex with their children, who apparently were all boys. But drunken daddy dearest got the hell out of dodge and spawned two girls and adopted a third and now grandma was all set to have her surviving male children rape and impregnate them. This is spelled out in detail in the movie. After being explicitly told this, we also see a character discover newspaper clippings lying out randomly on a table, and a family tree drawn on a wall. This movie takes absolutely no chances in underestimating the intelligence of its viewers. Daddy, of course, never told his girls anything about this… not even “my family was abusive and I left them because they hurt me, and they’ll hurt you too.”

This is not a good movie. There is nothing redeeming about this movie. The plot, the acting, everything is terrible and watching it left me feeling dirty and lessened. This is the second shitpile movie I watched on IFC. I’m starting thing Syfy will have better horror movies.

I give this movie 1 star out of 5 stars.

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“The Children” is a movie about kids going wild and murdering people, and is boring.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that little kids are creepy. There’s a lot of reasons for that: they don’t think and reason like adults; they don’t have the same morality as adults; they are tiny and easy to over look yet are very strong; they say creepy things; they see and talk to things that aren’t there; they have a hard time separating fantasy and reality; at night their eyes look weird; most of us feel an urge to protect them even when their behavior, if from an adult, would be scary or abusive. Creepy kids are a staple of horror films, and for very good reason. Family tensions and isolated homes are also staple horror fodder. “The Children” combines these elements, gives them a stir, and falls asleep.

The movie starts with a blended family of mom, teen daughter from previous relationship, husband, and their two younger children, driving up in a crappy old car to an enormous house in the middle of nowhere. They’re visiting mom’s sister and her husband and kids. Familial tension is established right away: the sisters’ families belong to very different income levels. The car they’re driving up is a cast off from Rich Sister. Their house is not as big or as nice. Etc. As they get out of the car the youngest child, a boy, wanders into the bushes and barfs. NOTE: there is a lot of barfing in this film so if that bothers you, give this one a pass. I mean, I’d recommend giving this film a miss anyway, but the barf doesn’t help at all. Once inside the house all the kids are excited and running around and screaming. The barf boy launches himself off a counter while screaming for his mummy, and when his dad (uncle? they looked a lot alike) catches him and starts rough housing with him, the kid punches him in the nose. Rich Sister asks Poor Sister if shes seen “that article about the MMR” and talks about her plans to homeschool; there’s mention of how great it is to see one of Rich Sister’s kids up and running around again (apparently she was very ill previously?).

For quite a while, as the other kids each start barfing/coughing up blood/whatever (and not telling anyone), their rowdiness and noise and roughness can be dismissed as kids being kids. Even the first death could easily be written off as an accident. The parents, however, are quick to yell angrily, to put their hands on the kids. The kids are frequently expected to parent the other kids while the parents sit back and drink… both Casey (teenager) and Leah (I think that’s her name?) (pre-teen) are expected to care for the other kids. Leah’s mom tells her that since she’s the oldest she has to act as mummy while mummy gets ready for the party… which consists of family who are already at the house. Both sets of parents think the other pair is stupid and bad at parenting, failing at life. (Both sets of parents, I’d argue, are correct.) The teen girl, Casey, has an incredibly poor quality tattoo on her stomach of a fetus… either because her parents attempted to abort her but she survived, or because they forced her to have an abortion. Her step-father is unrelentingly hostile toward her and her uncle gives her both whisky and pot at different times. The movie would have been a lot stronger if it had decisively selected her as a protagonist and swung behind her, putting focus on her. But it HAS no focus for most of the movie, a bunch of stuff just happening, the characters barely fleshed out except in the broadest strokes. We’re meant to see the murderous children as antagonists but frankly I was rooting for them.

“Child’s Play” managed to make me care about Karen, Andy, and Aunt Maggie in just a few minutes. They were very real characters who cared about each other and had lives and concerns and interests, and it was easy to get invested in them. The kids in “the Children” are a baffling smear of noise and action. They don’t have distinct personalities. Their parents are interchangeable stock asshole characters. One wants to home school her kids. One sells Chinese Medicine. They smack their kids, ignore them, trot them out to lisp out poorly pronounced Chinese phrases. I don’t care about anyone in this ovie, including Teen Casey who is essentially Misunderstood Goth-lite Teen Angster # 305. Forced to attend an unwanted, boring family gathering, she finds herself in the position of having to kill the whiny, loud, ill-behaved young children– a common teen fantasy.

They call the cops, of course, who don’t show up even after several hours and several phone calls. The radio plays only static. The woods are full of vomiting children. Is this how the world ends? If it’s full of people like this, maybe it’s time.

I will never get this time back.

I give this movie 1 star out of 5.

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“Apartment 1303″ is a remake of a Japanese movie, set in Detroit, about very sad white people.

The movie opens with a young white woman (Janet) walking down a city street enthusing over the phone about the super great awesome apartment she just rented. The young white woman she’s speaking to (Lara) scolds her for taking the very first apartment she sees. Janet is undeterred, and apparently using Lara’s money for the deposit, even though she’s got a full time job that pays her money. Janet, without enough money of her own to pay her own deposit + first month’s rent, hires a moving company to pack and move her stuff for her. She hauls her own little wheeled suitcase into her building, which is covered in graffiti and has abandoned, trashed furniture littering the lobby. What a GREAT apartment! Janet, you make the BEST life choices. Did you actually visit the apartment building, or just hear about what it looked like from the leasing agent? Do decrepit buildings filled with abandoned furniture and graffiti usually HAVE leasing agents? She sees a white girl in a school-type uniform in the lobby as she’s taking the elevator up to the 13th floor (her floor). As she gets off the elevator she sees the same girl, who she hails as “little girl.” The girl, Emily, tells her to clear out.

If you’re wondering why I’m harping on race in this review, it’s because Detroit is over 80% Black, with most white people living in the affluent suburbs and not in down town. However, most movies set in Detroit feature predominantly white casts, just as most news articles about Brave Bold Gentrifiers and Urban Gardeners etc focus on white people and not the Black folks who’ve lived in Detroit for generations. The folks who made this movie made a choice to 1) set it in Detroit and 2) center the story on white people. They made a lot of other frankly baffling choices as well.

Janet dismisses this and lets herself into her apartment, which is incredibly Japanese-looking (paper screened walls, etc), has appliances from the 1970s, and a view of an industrial corridor (“a great view!!!”). She puts some framed photographs of herself and Lara (her sister) onto the kitchen counter/island and tries to open a bottle of wine but doesn’t know how to use a corkscrew. She eventually sorts her shit out and gulps down a massive glass of wine while crying.

Janet spends most of her time in the movie whimpering or crying.

The lights go out twice her first night, her landlord tries to creep on her and force his way into her apartment, her boyfriend is nasty to her. She has nightmares, takes sleeping pills, dreams that she’s literally thrown around the apartment. The next day she talks about “all her bruises” and a coworker/friend comments on facial bruising and accuses her boyfriend of abusing her, and her of lying about the abuse which is… not a tactful or effective way of speaking to someone dealing with Intimate Partner Violence, y’know? Janet denies it all, and calls her sister to cry and talk about how she’s going to stay in a hotel. Lara says not to, because she (Lara) doesn’t have any money/has maxed out her credit card. Again, Janet is a grown woman with a job, relying on her sister to pay her bills.

I should note, here, that Janet and Lara’s mom (Maddie) is an abusive, alcoholic musician whose career is apparently on the decline. She’s had a DUI and is unable to drive, so Lara runs errands for her. Janet moved out because Maddie, while drunk, assaulted her… although Maddie claims Janet walked into her while she (Maddie) was playing guitar and got hit with the guitar. There is literally no reason for there to be an abusive back story for Janet and Lara. Like, Janet is a young woman living in a depressed economy. It would be totally normal for her to want to go out, rent her first apartment on her own, and not want to be some gross sad sack who goes running home when she gets creeped out living on her own. Nope! Women can’t exist in movies unless they are being abused in some ways. Right? Additionally, Maddie asks Lara if she’s been taking her medication because “you can do some sick things when you’re not on your medication.” So we’ve got a GREAT dose of lolcrazycaeks going on.

Long story short, Janet is killed by the ghost, her boyfriend is secretly an undercover cop, and Lara moves into Jan’s old place. A police detective dressed in street clothes who doesn’t bother showing her a badge leaves a file about the apartment with Lara, which is a totally realistic thing to do. He talks about the history of the apartment, implying there’s ghosts, except he totally doesn’t believe in ghosts. Secret-Cop-Boyfriend-Mark who was AT BEST distant towards Jan is incredibly concerned about Lara and spends the night with her several times “to protect her,” blowing off his ex-wife and his kid. Lara’s mom takes out a restraining order against her, yet continues to call her and also visits her. The ghost kills both Mark and Maddie, leaving Lara to get blamed for it. Emily and the superintendent are both ghosts. Blah blah blah. The end.

There’s no charm or subtlety to this movie, there’s a lot of ACTING, and all the women are weak sobbing victims or abusive and insane. I have a feeling the Japanese movie (and book) this is based on is a lot better.

I give this movie 1 out of 5 stars and will keep an eye out for the Japanese version.

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“Warm Bodies” is a Romeo and Juliet homage with zombies.

I didn’t realize that at first, even though the Designated Love Interest’s name is Julie (Juliet). It was while the zombie protagonist was trying to slur out his name and kept just saying “Rrrrr” and Julie was trying to guess “R” names that I chuckled indulgently to myself and though “lol “romeo” is an “R” name” and then I wanted to die. Unlike “Romeo and Juliet,” however, only 1 person dies in “Warm Bodies.”

I’ve mentioned before that I love vampires and vampire movies. I have a deep and abiding love for them. They were one of the first supernatural creatures I really got into (although I flirted with werewolves for a while, in part because I’m exceptionally hairy and have a unibrow I AM NOT EVEN KIDDING) and “Vampire: the Masquerade” remains a touchstone of my role playing life. But zombies? I love zombie books and movies, too, even though they’re pretty over done and cliche now. A lot of the focus now is on the scrappy band of protagonists being total survivalist badasses who are ace shots and super athletic and blah blah survivor porn. But the shambling hordes of things that LOOK human but AREN’T remains extremely creepy to me, and my favorite zombie stories are ones that do something a little different with the established tropes.

If zombies represent the fear of the implacable approach of death, the indignity of loss of rational thought and the fear of losing loved ones (and society), what do redeemable zombies represent? If we delay that final head shot out of desire to save the not quite dead, we risk losing ourselves- and the world. How merciful can we afford to be? How much hope can we risk having? “Warm Bodies” doesn’t really address the question. It spends no real time talking about how the zombies got started or spread, and there’s no real explanation of how the zombies come to life again… because they do. Their hearts start beating, they gain memories, they breathe, they come to life again. They become reintegrated into society. The zombie apocalypse lasts for less than a generation. And while I generally like more fake science-y explanations about zombies (it’s rabies! it’s magic! it’s a curse! it’s the cure for cancer crossed with the cure for the common cold! it’s an implanted parasite making a self-aware bid for freedom and separate identity!), the movie really isn’t about that: it’s about a walking corpse who collects records and is so totally misunderstood yet cool that a hot chick wants to bone him despite his murdering and eating her boyfriend and horrific stench and lack of conversational skills.

There’s some issues with this movie, like the massive security breach in the walled human city that nobody notices… not the shambling hordes of zombies eager for fresh brains, not the well trained and disciplined military groups constantly patrolling; or the fact that almost the entire cast is white (out of the entire horde of zombies, 5 of them look other than white; out of the walled city, 3 soldiers are Black. The love interests and all their friends are white or white passing); the fact that Julie goes from rightfully terrified to flippantly sassy toward her undead captor; the fact that Julie starts falling in love with a creature that isn’t human and eats humans. It’s kind of like a cow falling in love with a farmer… and a farmer falling in love with a cow.

There’s a lot that the movie does right, though. Julie doesn’t spend much time mourning for her dead boyfriend because in her world to love someone means preparing for their deaths. And it’s not a big tragic tear jerking thing when she says that, it’s a casual almost offhand thing. It’s just part of life, something common. How depressing. The acting is good. The make up affects on the “corpses” (traditional type zombies) looks good. The “bonies” (more advanced zombies) look pretty shitty, but the concept is creepy.

It was also interesting that zombies are able to make some decisions about how they kill. They can chose whether or not to eat a victim’s brains. If they don’t eat the brain, the body rises up as another zombie. If they do eat the brains, they gain the body’s memories and emotions (R likens it to dreaming) and the body just dies. R chooses, early in the movie, to eat Perry’s brain during the zombie attack on their looting party. This leads to a HORRIFIC scene where R, full of Perry’s memories and emotions toward Julie, approaches Julie, corners her, and gently touches her face with his gore-befouled hand. He smears Perry’s blood and viscera on her gently, lovingly, as she cringes and waits for death… and then he leads her out of there to the home he’s set up in an airplane (which… do the other zombies also have homes and safe places?).

Over all I enjoyed this movie. I do want to note that this is based on a YA book, and YA largely caters to a (young) female audience. Books about male characters coming of age are Great Literature while books about female characters coming of age are chicklit, you know? The primary audience for YA is young women. The primary audience for this movie, for this romantic comedy about cute teen zombies, is young women. And in this movie written for and advertised to young women a human woman escapes from the brain-eating monster that killed and devoured her boyfriend and that monster’s best friend dismisses her with the word “bitches.” Women. Such bitches. Why DO they act the way they do? Why don’t they realize that awkward soulful boys who don’t fit in DESERVE their love regardless of their own preferences or desires for safety? The casual misogyny was jarring, and while it might have been meant ironically it still stung. Other than that, though, Julie’s a pretty well realized character who drives the movie quite a bit. Her best friend Nora doesn’t get much screen time, but feels like a human being and not simply Generic Female Character Designation: Friend. The movie overall does a better job with female characters than most horror (or other genre) movies.

I give this movie 3 out of 5 stars.

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