X (March 2022)

 

X

(March 2022)

“That's right. The deviants are already amongst us, waiting for our sons and daughters. So heed dire warnings and repent before it is too late.”

Less than 24 hours in rural Texas in 1979 turns out to be enough time to build up to a disturbing and horrendous bloodbath in Ti West’s thunderous Iguana return with X.

As intimated by its title, X follows the cast and (minimal) crew of the, ahem, “adult” film, The Farmer’s Daughters, as they shoot on the sly at an isolated Texas farm.

Dreams of wealth and fame all come crashing down though, because this is “one G*ddamn f*cked up horror picture” from Ti West, after all…

“We shouldn’t disturb him. It would only make him angry. You wouldn’t like Daddy when he’s angry.”

West has been messing about on the TV front for the past few years (stray episodes of The Exorcist and Wayward Pines among his small screen work), so his return to silver screen horror is most welcome.

The fact that X comes not just with a soon-to-follow prequel (Pearl) but also a planned sequel, makes things all the more (heh) X-citing, even though this does look like the beginnings of the dreaded “F” word.

(Uurrmm… franchise?)

Still, West does remind us, “You can’t make a slasher movie without a bunch of sequels.”

And the fact is, X does position itself as a slasher, albeit one with other things on its mind aside from gory kills.

Prominently, it takes cues from cinema (and cinematic movements) at large to inform its narrative approach.

X is also juuuust self-aware enough so that West can occasionally remind us that there’s some grindhouse fun to be had here as well.

“Everybody likes sex. It’s a gas. We’re just not afraid to admit it. Queer, straight, black, white… It’s all disco.”

While there is an actual drug that’s showcased in X, the addiction that ultimately proves to be the most dangerous here is our very human attachment to youth (with the promise of ever-elusive fame coming in a close second).

Most of the film’s characters (played by familiar genre faces like Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Martin Henderson, and Brittany Snow) still have their youth and are quite brazen about that; a couple of other characters don’t, and it’s the friction between those two groups that sets off X’s slasher powder keg.

So, come in for readily on-display “f*cked up horror,” but stay for all the substance beneath the bloody celluloid skin that West manages to explore here.

“Porn ain’t only gonna be for perverts no more.”

“Awww… Toast to the perverts. They’ve been payin’ our bills for years.”

“Hear, hear. To the perverts.”

Parting Shot:

Previous Ti West Iguana appearances may be found here and here, while mentions of TV’s The Exorcist may be found here and here.

(X OS’ courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com & twitter.com.)

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.)