brendan halpin

Just me and the dog this weekend, and you know what that means. Horror movie time!

The Gorge: okay, really more of an action movie, but still. We’ve finished Season 2 of Severance and are about to cancel Apple+, so I thought I’d check this out before we pull the plug on that particular service.

The setup, which you know if you’ve seen the trailer, is incredibly promising. Two people living alone for a year in guard towers on opposite sides of a gorge that holds horrible things that sometimes try to get out. Also one of said people is Anya Taylor-Joy.

And for the first half-hour or so, it delivers. The inevitable romance is actually the best part of the movie as the two leads fall in love by holding up signs and looking at each other through binoculars. This part was charming and fun.

And then there’s the rest of the movie. Bad CGI guys who look like Groot, a big reveal that’s neither big nor a reveal since we knew it from the first five minutes of the movie, and an inescapable feeling that this would have made a really kickass video game. As it is, though, you don’t get to play, so it’s like one really long video game cutscene.

Points for an action movie in which a woman has agency and competence and is a real character and not just an accessory to the male character. (Usually this plays out as the woman being imperiled, injured or killed, thus giving the man motivation and/or emotional depth the screenwriters were too lazy to convey otherwise.) Anya Taylor-Joy is a trouper, clearly committing to the bit, cheesy Russian-ish accent and all. Miles Teller is miscast, in my opinion. Or maybe he can be interesting and charismatic but the filmmakers didn’t give him any way to show it. His role could have been played by almost anyone.

Overall, I thought it would be dumb fun, and I was half right.

Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made The setup is that there’s this lost movie from the 70’s that made people insane and/or dead after they saw it. I am an absolute sucker for the “cursed obscure media” trope, so I was absolutely on board.

There’s a “documentary” at the beginning about the movie, and then you see the movie in full, and then there’s a little more documentary at the end. And let me say this—the movie within the movie is really good. I mean, it didn’t make me homicidal, but the filmmakers do a great job of keeping the audience off balance and creating this pervasive dread. It’s about a brother and sister who go to the woods to dig a hole that will open a portal to hell because their mom told them their dead dog didn’t go to heaven and the brother really wants to free her soul.

And then things start getting really weird. Things are unexplained, bad things happen, and the filmmakers have done a fantastic job of capturing the 70’s aesthetic, down to the grainy film.

And, so, ultimately, I don’t think the frame is necessary. Especially because after the movie, they add some more documentary stuff about “oh, there were deadly sigils etched into the movie 13 times and these summon a demon” or some shit, and like, yeah, I noticed the sigils flash on the screen for fractions of a second, I noticed the weird footage seemingly from another movie that flashes in a couple of times, and none of this made an already weird and creepy movie any weirder or creepier.

Fun fact: the brother reminded me of Bob from Fulci’s The House By The Cemetery. So I looked up Bob from The House By The Cemetery. Turns out he works for a tech company in Chicago. So if you’re in Chicago and know Giovanni Frezza, say hi from me!

Slash/Back Utterly charming and heartwarming movie about Inuit girls fighting off an alien invasion in their tiny town in Nunavut. It sounds like the more widely-seen Prey, (which is a great movie, but I wonder why the movie directed by a white guy is more widely known than the one directed by an indigenous woman? Real head scratcher!) but the vibe is completely different. The setting is contemporary and I believe from what I saw in the credits that the cast was recruited from this tiny town on the arctic circle where they actually live. Some of the actors are better than others, but they all bring an authenticity that sells the whole thing. They are real middle school aged kids with real middle school problems (like who likes who, which, as in life, is mostly important for what it does to friendships and not for any kind of romantic relationship). I think not enough horror creators get this: that when you depict people realistically, your audience is more likely to believe in the supernatural shenanigans.

But writer/director Nyla Innuksuk does get it. So if you want to watch a ragtag band of modern underdogs embrace their ancient traditions to save their homes, you should watch this movie. And if that doesn’t sound appealing to you, do you even like movies?