SEVERANCE Season 1 (February 2022)

 

SEVERANCE Season 1

(February 2022)

“The numbers were scary…”

Severance* takes the idea of work/life balance to its chilling extreme, as we bear witness to the denizens of Lumon Industries’ “severed floor,” where the employees have elected to undergo a surgical process that effectively separates the work persona (who only becomes active and awake at work) from who the individual actually is in their home life.
Work memories are not accessible when the person is out of the office, and the work persona has no idea what their home life is like (are they married? Do they have kids?).
It’s the kind of scenario that a corporation will absolutely love (no pesky personal problems to interfere with productivity; industrial espionage… what’s that?) but isn’t necessarily beneficial to the employee.
As we see over Severance’s nine-episode season, hopefully only the first of many more…
 
“I trusted you, and you abused that trust.
“Your inefficiency and free range chicken roaming is ultimately your responsibility.
“Escort him… to the Break Room.”
 
It’s odd, going over the quotes I’ve gathered here.
You read them and some are so patently absurd that the overall effect is whimsy.
And while, yes, the absurdist office humor is indeed off-the-wall, it is also, in practice, disturbing.
There are shades of Twin Peaks here, not just in a visual sense, but in the way that the crackpot, occasionally non sequitur humor serves to mask the cold, inhuman horror that lies beneath the cheery, quirky facades.
 
A worker may suffer injurious pain or ghastly dehumanization, and no workspace is without its perils. But whatever your task, dear worker, see that you perform it with love. Endow in each swing of your axe or swipe of your pen the sum of your affections, that through me they may be purified and returned. No higher purpose may be found than this. Nor any higher love.
 
So join us at Lumon, where no one quite knows what it is they’re actually doing (even in the office!).
Spend the work days with a truly excellent cast that includes Patricia Arquette, John Turturro, and Christopher Walken!
Thrill to passages of The You You Are, by the one and only Dr. Ricken (Michael Chernus)!
And watch out for the MDE!
 
Our job is to taste free air. Your so-called “Boss” may own the clock that taunts you from the wall, but my friends, the hour is yours.
 
Severance: A damning indictment of corporate culture, with all its perks and incentivizations and sudden terminations.
It’s a world where the terms “Break Room” and “overtime” are positively chilling to hear.
 
“Let’s burn this place to the ground.”
 
* Brought to us by an excellent team headed up by creator Dan Erickson, and Ben Stiller (yes, that Ben Stiller), who directed 2/3 of the season.
 
(Severance key art courtesy of impawards.com.)

FRESH (March 2022)

FRESH

(March 2022)

You are an obsession

I cannot sleep

I am a possession

Unopened at your feet…

-- “Obsession”

     Animotion

“You do not need a man, okay? Or anybody, for that matter. It’s just… the way we’ve been raised since f*ckin’ Disney movies.”

“Yeah. F*ck Ariel.”

“F*ck her. Stupid b!tch left the whole sea for a man. Come on, now.”

Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is definitely not a skilled player at the dating game, so much so that she tells herself she’s “very okay with” being alone.

But then…

One meet-cute at the grocery later, and “cute” and “funny” Steve (Sebastian Stan) is suddenly in her life.

Despite initial appearances and that opening stretch of pre-credits runtime though, this isn’t some random rom-com--that key art should be the tip off, right?--and Noa will ultimately have even more reasons to hate dating… if she survives “cute” and “funny” Steve’s attentions…

“… if it’s done right… it’s f*cking exquisite. It’s like nothing you’ve ever had before…”

Fresh is director Mimi Cave’s feature film debut, off a script by Lauryn Kahn, and this was a surprisingly gruesome title, with some serious teeth.

And a number of… wait for it… dance montages!

Plus the Yeah Yeah Yeahs burning up the end credits roll…

What more can you ask for?

This is some seriously twisted sh!t, no lie, so be prepared…

“You know how I knew you were special? ‘Cause you’re f*cked up, too.”

I feed you, I drink you

By day and by night…

I need you, I need you

By sun and candlelight

-- “Obsession”

     Animotion

(Fresh key art courtesy of impawards.com.)

THE VIGIL (September 2019)

THE VIGIL

(September 2019)

For thousands of years, religious Jews have practiced the ritual of “the vigil”.

When a member of the community dies, the body is watched round the clock in shifts by a Shomer, or watchman, who recites the Psalms to comfort the deceased’s soul and protect it from unseen evil.

This watchman is typically a family member or friend, but there are paid Shomers.

Hired to sit the vigil when no one else can.

And this is exactly the situation Yakov Ronen (Dave Davis) finds himself in.

Struggling with the rent, finding himself “… having to choose between medication and meals,” Yakov expects a vigil like those he’s sat before.

Which, of course, is so not what happens to poor Yakov…

The Vigil is writer/director Keith Thomas’ feature debut* and it’s a tight, expertly crafted film, as cramped and oppressive as the Litvak home, in whose dim rooms and shadowed halls Yakov must face the terrible weight of his guilt.

“He was broken by memories. Hmm! Those kind of memories that you saw. They bite. They bite and the biting never stops.”

* Which he’s following up with not just the Firestarter remake, but an episode of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities anthology as well…

(The Vigil OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

SYNCHRONIC (September 2019)

SYNCHRONIC
(September 2019)

“You drop the needle on the song you wanna play, but they’re all always there. These tracks are like time. Synchronic is the needle.”
 
The excellently adventurous Messrs. Benson and Moorhead are back* with the compellingly absorbing Synchronic.
In it, Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan play best friends and paramedic partners whose job brings them into the orbit of the latest designer drug to hit Louisiana, the titular “Synchronic.”
Originally “… meant to be a DMT-like drug,” Synchronic turns out to be something else altogether.
 
I’ve loved these guys’ feature work since their co-directorial debut, Resolution, on to Spring, and their contribution to V/H/S: Viral, “Bonestorm,” through till The Endless.
And now, we can add Synchronic to that list.
 
There isn’t much to say beyond that, except I suppose, to note to prospective viewers that, while Synchronic comes highly recommended, this doesn’t have the usual horror stylings of their past work.
While there are traces of horror here, it’s decidedly more muted and subtle than their previous films.
 
Okay.
That’s all you’ll get here.
Go on.
Check it out.
 
“The clock just… keeps tickin’ down and the lower that number gets, you realize how f*ckin’ amazing now is. The present is a miracle, bruh.”

* Actually, they're even more back with Something in the Dirt, which just screened last month at Sundance, so you can also look to Synchronic for a sweet Benson/Moorhead fix whilst we wait for Something in the Dirt to be unleashed upon us...

  
(Synchronic OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

WOODLANDS DARK AND DAYS BEWITCHED: A HISTORY OF FOLK HORROR (March 2021)

WOODLANDS DARK AND DAYS BEWITCHED:

A HISTORY OF FOLK HORROR

(March 2021)

“Folk horror very much channels people’s relationship to the land, to this sort of shared consciousness, these traditional beliefs that are somehow in the soil, in the landscape.

--Kat Ellinger
   Editor, Diabolique Magazine
 
Writer/director Kier-La Janisse brings us the incisive and absorbing 3-hour plus documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, which is, as its subtitle indicates, an expansive study of folk horror, from its literary roots onto its notable presence on both the film and television mediums.
 
“Like any decent piece of work, [The Wicker Man] survives. It has, coiled at the heart of it, a mystery. Peter Pan has it. It’s overtly a very silly play. But it isn’t, because it’s about something other than what its surface purports to be.”
--Anthony Schaffer
   Writer, The Wicker Man
 
If you’re the sort of horrorhead who loves to delve beneath the surface, who is (to use a morbidly appropriate analogy) drawn to rummage amidst the bloody innards of the slaughtered sacrificial lamb to see what makes it what it is, to study its innate lamb-ness as it were, then Woodlands… is, as they say, a “must-see”.
 
“Generally speaking, we wanna believe that the thoughts and fears and beliefs of a past generation, we’ve sort of transcended them, we’ve grown out of them, we’re above them. Horror films always pose this problem that in fact, it’s not as simple as that.”
--John Cussans
   Author, Undead Uprising: Haiti, Horror and the Zombie Complex
 
There’s a host of experts and writers and filmmakers interviewed during its runtime, and a whole bunch of films are touched on, including a number of personal favorites and titles that have been mentioned ‘round these parts.
As such, I could just go on and on with the quotes, but I imagine I should just leave you with this…

“So I think it’s super-interesting how these myths are, like, all around the world, they just have different names, and we make it local.”
--Abraham Castillo Flores
   Head Programmer, Morbido Film Festival
 
The fifth (and penultimate) chapter of the documentary, “All the Haunts Be Ours: Folk Horror Around the World,” is a key section that further expounds on the definition of folk horror and expands its borders to make room for a more diverse catalogue of titles beyond the usual suspects like The Wicker Man.
 
It’s somewhere towards the end of that section though, that I was starting to despair of seeing any kind of Philippine representation, when lo and behold, the film I consider, hands down, the best horror film our shores have managed to produce (and by this, I also mean it’s one of the best horror films ever made, regardless of country of origin) appears here under its international title, The Rites of May.
Go, Mike de Leon!
 
So, yes, check this out if you’ve a mind to, as it also makes the sobering case for the timeliness of folk horror in this very fraught moment in our race’s history…
 
“And ‘We don’t go back’ is the fundamental tension of folk horror.”
--Howard David Ingham
   Author, We Don’t Go Back: A Watcher’s Guide to Folk Horror
 
(Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror Blu-ray cover art courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com; Itim OS courtesy of imdb.com.)

YELLOWJACKETS Season 1 (November 2021)

YELLOWJACKETS Season 1

(November 2021)

“Something's coming.”

Now here’s a recipe:

 
Take a couple of chunks of Lost; the first, a plane crash; the second, a narrative timeline sliced into two, where we toggle back and forth between the crash and the mysteries and horrors of its direct aftermath, and 25 years later, where we see the survivors still dealing with all their shared, secret trauma.
Oh, and maybe grab some handsful of possibly supernatural craziness from Lost as well, and sprinkle that all over.
 
Then take a chunk of Lord of the Flies, and gender-reverse it, as we witness the trials and terrors of a girls’ high school soccer team who spend over a year and a half(!) out there in the wilderness doing shuddery, unimaginable things in order to survive.
 
Take a number of stand-out established actresses (Tawny Cypress, Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis, and Christina Ricci) and cast them as the adult survivors, then take a number of young and very capable up-and-comers--among them Jasmin Savoy Brown (The Leftovers and the current Scream) and Liv Hewson (Santa Clarita Diet)--to fill out the teen roles, some of which are of course, the younger versions of the aforementioned established actresses.
 
Then take a whole bunch of suh-weet needle drops and sprinkle those around too, and what you get, is Yellowjackets.
 
“Of course that’s how it ends. That’s all we are the whole time. It doesn’t matter; we’re just shells with nothing inside.”
 
The feeling has gone, only you and I
It means nothing to me
This means nothing to me
Oh, Vienna
--“Vienna”
     Ultravox
 
So yeah, on the way to Nationals, the Wiskayok Yellowjackets’ plane crashes in the depths of the Canadian wilderness, the inciting incident of this compelling and compulsive series, which, thanks to that dual timeline, is both a brutal and twisted coming-of-age tale, and an examination of women creeping up on middle age whose lives’ trajectories were forever altered all those years ago, out in those deep, dark woods.
 
And, just to assure you, lest you start to think this is all doom and gloom, let the records show that Yellowjackets has a sense of humor.
Sometimes dark and bleak and black, other times absurd yet somehow still emotionally resonant.
So yes, there are laughs, in betwixt the secrets and the mysteries, the blackmail and the blood and the… ummm… disturbing diet these girls may have had to resort to in order to survive.
And, speaking of surviving, that’s one of the key mysteries that drives the narrative: who exactly survived long enough to get rescued, and what exactly did they have to do to make it out of there.
 
“We won’t be hungry much longer.”
 
And if you bore me,
You lose your soul to me…
--“Gepetto”
     Belly
 
And did I mention the needle drops?
Aside from the ones that get quoted here, you can also savor tracks by Liz Phair, Kim Wilde, The Prodigy, Portishead, and Dinosaur Jr.
Yum!
 
And that theme song!
“No Return” indeed!
Brought to us by Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker (who also score the show), and wedded to that disturbo found footage credits sequence!
Chef’s kiss!
 
“I know what I saw. I don’t know what it meant… but I know I saw something. Something was out there with us.”
 
I think it’s strange you never knew…
--“Fade into You”
    Mazzy Star
 
So if all that smells enticing, then hey, you’re cordially invited to this scrumptious mystery box feast, with the Pilot episode directed by Karyn Kusama, and the season finale by Eduardo Sánchez, both names that have graced the ¡Qué Horror! Archives.
Kusama gave us The Invitation, while Sánchez was at the helm of ¡Qué horror! 2010 title Seventh Moon, 2012’s Lovely Molly, and the pre-online ¡Qué horror! Altered.
 
And don’t worry, ‘cause the show’s been renewed for a second season, so we’re at least assured of still more hijinx beyond the kookoo bananas craziness of this wondrously glorious first season.
Goooooo, Yellowjackets!
 
“What? There’s no book club?!”
 
Oh help me Jesus,
get through the storm.
I had to lose her –
to do her harm.
I heard her holler.
I heard her moan.
My lovely daughter –
I took her home.
--“Down by the Water”
     PJ Harvey
 
Parting Shot:
Yellowjackets has just received two nominations at this year’s Writers’ Guild Awards, for Drama Series and New Series.
Competition is stiff in both categories, so we’ll just have to see how things turn out on March 20, when the winners are announced.
 
Yellowjackets also gobbled up two nominations at this year’s Critics Choice Awards, one for Best Drama Series, and the second for Best Drama Actress (Lynskey).
Competition is likewise stiff over there, so we shall see on March 14 how the Critics Choice Association vote…
 
For what it’s worth, once more: Goooooooo, Yellowjackets!
 
“What if the truth is just that we’re all f*cked in the head from what happened to us?”
 
(Yellowjackets key art courtesy of amazon.com.)

reVIEW (51) SCREAM 2

reVIEW (51)

SCREAM 2

... and with a brand new Scream just around the corner, here’s the other zombie I wanted to resurrect…

Go, zombie, go!

Shamble across the Interwebz!

“Let’s face it, Sidney. These days, you gotta have a sequel!”

-- Stu (from Scream)

The menacing drone of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ “Red Right Hand” plays over the opening credits of a film called Stab.

Yes, Stab--the film based on the novel The Hillsboro Murders, written by the Antichrist of tabloid TV, Gale Weathers.

With an audience of howling gorehounds in white masks and black cloaks, the sneak preview of Stab (presented in “Stab-O-Vision,” naturally) serves as the opening sequence of Scream 2, an opening that is both a sobering indictment of how fanatical some gorehounds can get about their horror movies, and a brilliant follow-up to Scream’s taut opening; we even get to see Heather Graham (a long way from Twin Peaks, she is) do Drew Barrymore’s Casey Becker, in a great Psycho homage.

Slamming us with a coda that is a chilling example of what Scream 2’s “freaky Tarantino film student,” Mickey (Timothy Olyphant), terms “life imitating art imitating life,” the sequence drags us bodily into the second chapter in Kevin Williamson’s envisioned trilogy, a stunning continuation of the first film, many of its plot elements and surprises logical ramifications of events that occurred in the original.

“It’s starting again, Randy.”

-- Sidney

Two years after the bloodbath at Stu’s house in Scream’s climax, Sidney (Neve Campbell, back for a second round) and fellow Woodsboro massacre survivor Randy (Jamie Kennedy) have gone on to university, where they are pursuing a “pseudo-quasi-happy existence,” trying to put the past behind them. A past that refuses to go away, as not only has Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) written a book about Woodsboro, but a film has been made from that novel.

Then there’s Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber), falsely accused by Sidney for the murder of her mother (as seen in Scream), still trying to clear his reputation by getting on the tube to tell his story.

With Stab’s opening just around the corner, all these media prods set the stage for the renewed mayhem; as an Omega Beta Zeta sister puts it so succinctly, “It’s that movie, Stab. It’s bringing out the crazies.”

“If there is some freaked-out psycho trying to follow in Billy Loomis’ footsteps, you probably already know him. Or her. Or them. They’re probably already in your life. They get off on that.”

-- Dewey

The sly intelligence and self-referential wit evidenced in Scream is still here in the sequel, proving that Williamson’s skill at writing a nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat horror film that is also a statement on the genre and the medium, was not a one-off fluke.

From the broad thematic (and cinematographic) nods to Psycho (and, to a certain extent, Psycho II) to the particular--and peculiar--workings of the Scream universe (what could just have very well been a throw-away line from the first film crystallizes into “reality” as we see Tori Spelling essay Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott in Stab; it’s just too bad we don’t get to see David Schwimmer’s Dewey), Williamson displays firm control of plot and character, taking the survivors from the original and bringing them two years forward, each of them displaying scars--both physical and psychological--from the events in Woodsboro.

And given the strong sense of continuity between the first two chapters of the Scream trilogy, my mentioning Psycho may be very appropriate, since, the way I see it, after all the trauma the survivors of Scream 2 go through, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Scream 3 opens with said survivors running a motel just off the highway, dressing up in masks and cloaks and murdering unsuspecting secretaries on the lam.

“So it’s our job to observe the rules of the sequel. Number one: the body count is always bigger. Number two: the death scenes are always much more elaborate. More blood. More gore. Carnage candy. Your core audience just expects it.”

-- Randy

Though the death scenes here are not necessarily any gorier than those in the original, what are certainly more elaborate this time around are the set pieces leading up to those deaths; the chases, the thrills, the suspense. In an astoundingly nerve-wracking sequence, Williamson actually outdoes the “potential slasher victim trapped in the back of a cop car” scenario in I Know What You Did Last Summer with the one in Scream 2.

Williamson and director Wes Craven also utilize the Windsor College setting to its utmost, wringing all they can out of the “college campus as stalking ground” milieu.

Just as Scream played with the slasher setting archetype of the small town terrorized by the mad killer (as established in Halloween and done to death in many a subsequent film, such as The Prowler and My Bloody Valentine), Scream 2 trods the well-worn footpaths of such slasher fare as Graduation Day and Final Exam.

True to form though, Williamson takes it that one, smart step further. The script is so cognizant of its setting that the environment is exploited for all its thrill-worthy potential.

At one point, Kennedy, David Arquette, and Cox share a particularly intense scene set on the sprawling campus lawn in broad daylight, and in another (in what I like to think of as the film’s T.S. Eliot “Who is the third” moment), Campbell does a great turn in a slightly surreal dress rehearsal where Sidney plays the doomed prophetess Cassandra amidst a masked Greek chorus.

Even Sidney’s identification with Cassandra--who is doomed to live out a future she is intimately familiar with, because she can convince no one of its impending reality--is a stroke of genius on Williamson’s part. At one point in the film, Sidney laments, “I knew this was going to happen”; the police stations and reporters are now a painfully familiar sight for poor Ms. Prescott.

“Wow. That was intense.”

-- Cotton

Crackling with an air of tense expectancy and boasting a climax that has some last-minute mind screws and plot curveballs, Scream 2 is an expertly executed film that highlights not only the fascination of the movie-going masses with violence, but also the omnipresence of the media in our lives.

It is a film that once again proves that, 1) Wes Craven is alive and well and still quite capable of eliciting the scares, 2) it doesn’t hurt for horror to have a brain, and 3) Kevin Williamson is a brilliant writer with a deep respect for the genre and a great sense of humour.

Described by one critic as “a fascinating piece of work for a post-media society,” Scream 2 is a film that holds a mirror up to itself, the horror genre, and the audience, all in one graceful, knowing gesture (the audience being a microcosm of society at large); a film that gives you pause for reflection, as you’re running scared silly for your life.

“You do realize that if we were in a Scream movie, you'd be the prime suspect...”

-- Mark Gatela to me

[The above review existed in a former published life, and in slightly altered form, in the year 1997, under the identity of “Scream and Scream Again.”]

(Scream 2 OS courtesy of impawards.com.)