You’ll Never Find Me (2023)

Welcome to a dark night of the soul. Even bad people have them.

In some nameless Australian trailer park, Patrick (Brendan Rock) sits in his living room drinking whiskey. Outside, there is thunder and lightning, just like the night Frankenstein’s creature woke up.

Patrick is alone, but not for long.

A wayward woman (Jordan Cowan), lost in the storm and soaked to the skin, pounds on his door seeking a telephone.

“You’ve knocked on the wrong door,” Patrick tells the shoeless visitor.

Of course, things are not that simple. The wrong door depends on who’s standing where.

You’ll Never Find Me, written and co-directed by Australian newcomer Indianna Bell, is an intricately constructed two-person play, featuring unexpected shifts in the power dynamic taking place over the course of a dark and stormy evening.

It’s Patrick’s house, and he’s obviously a formidable man who prefers solitude. A drenched woman with no shoes can’t possibly be a threat.

So why is he uneasy?

Patrick explains to her that feral kids living in the park routinely beat on his door and run away. Even at two in the morning during a violent storm?

That’s enough to drive anyone mad.

Gradually, Patrick warms up to his guest and promises to help her, but he’s also clearly suspicious about her point of origin. She claims she fells asleep at the beach.

“The beach?” Patrick wonders aloud, as if he’d never heard the word.

Viewers are left to puzzle and ponder the scant information provided by these mysterious players, as both sides continue to distract and interrogate the other while passing the time with a few hands of cards.

We can tell from the outset that Patrick is a (deservedly) haunted man, and as the tension in the trailer escalates, a very big decision about his future—the same one faced by Hamlet—becomes an unbearable burden.

With its single set, minimal action, and tiny, terrific cast, You’ll Never Find Me is a harrowing and claustrophobic watch, with revolving doors of trust and deception leading to the ultimate question: To be or not to be.

Original, highly rewarding, and vigorously recommended.

I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)

Has it really been 27 years since that summer when everyone knew what we did?

Type O Negative’s gloomy cover of Seals & Crofts’ “Summer Breeze” playing over the opening credits should have tipped me off.

There’s angst in the air, probably from Y2K, just over the horizon.

We’ve got major marquee value here. I Know What You Did Last Summer has a formerly fresh cast to die for, led by Sarah Michelle Gellar as Helen Shivers, a small-town beauty queen being chased by a vengeful fisherman decked out in foul weather gear.

Along for the ride is her angry douche boyfriend, Barry Cox (Ryan Phillippe), the group’s moral compass, Julie James (Jennifer Love-Hewitt), and Julie’s working-class beau, Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze, Jr).

Best-looking cast ever assembled? No dogs in that bunch.

On a fateful Fourth of July evening, the four most attractive graduating teens in a North Carolina fishing community accidentally run over a pedestrian on their way home from a make-out sesh at the beach.

The formerly close-knit quartet quickly comes apart at the seams. They decide to ditch the stiff in the Atlantic Ocean, and seal their secret by vowing never to speak of this unfortunate incident again.

We skip ahead one year to find out that our pretty protagonists are suffering the effects of collective guilt as their lofty ambitions have fizzled out.

Instead of heading off to New York to become a star, Helen is stuck in town working at her family’s bridal shop. You know, in the fishing village.

Julie, the brain, is bombing out of college, and rich kid Barry is holed up at his parents’ house drinking and brooding. Ray is on a boat.

Then Julie gets a note with the title of the movie in it, and the band gets back together!

The script by Kevin Williamson (Scream) is played with a straight face, so anyone expecting witty insights into horror movie tropes, are simply left with a bunch of tropes to sort through.

The plot proffers suspects aplenty, red herrings, and a few surprises, but it’s all pretty standard cat-and-mouse revenge stuff that unfolds at a leisurely pace.

The kills, courtesy of a maniac mariner armed with a gaff hook, are nothing special, and the eventual unmasking contains zero drama.

Tack on a WTF ending and cue the music.

Most of the “entertainment” value derived from IKWYDLS comes from screen time spent with the spirited ensemble, but Gellar, Phillippe, and company aren’t given much to work with.

The principal characters are rough sketches from better movies, and our comely cast is mostly reduced to fleeing and fretting.

There’s something fundamentally wrong with seeing TV’s Buffy Summers afraid of some swab in a raincoat, and eventually being snuffed out in cursory fashion.

I get it, this is a different character, but even so…

Apparently there were sequels and a remake. I can’t imagine why.

The Changeling (1980)

George C. Scott in an understated role as a classical composer bedeviled by spooks in Seattle? It’s true!

I reviewed The Changeling upon its release for my high school newspaper, wherein I declared it “really scary.”

More than 40 years later, I am revising my opinion. Sometimes “scary” doesn’t age well. But then, neither do I.

Ivory tickler John Russell (GCS) is a recent widower, having lost wife and daughter in a wintery road accident. He takes a teaching job at a small college in Washington state to hopefully get his head together and start composing again.

Instead, the massive mansion generously rented to him by Claire Norman (Trish Van Devere, his real-life wife) from the local historical society, comes with a ghost in the attic that wastes no time banging around upstairs, depriving the maestro of much-needed rest.

A seance arranged by Claire with a psychic couple confirms the presence of a restless child murdered in the house, and it becomes Russell’s mission to bring metaphysical justice to the situation.

Director Peter Hyams (The Relic, Time Cop), a thoroughly capable and professional filmmaker, does a thoroughly capable and professional job on The Changeling.

The problem isn’t him, it’s me.

I suppose a scene in which a possessed antique wheelchair chases Claire around the upper floors of the mansion was sufficient to make teenaged me go, “eek!”

Since then, I’ve logged thousands of hours of community service watching ghosts, ghouls, creatures, cruel killers, and assorted hell-spawn ravaging their way through humanity.

The Changeling, even with its star cast and engaging mystery, comes off as quaint and dated. Weak tea and dry toast.

It’s not simply an age thing. A masterpiece of atmosphere such as Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963) requires nothing more than sound and camera movement to convince us that the supernatural world is all around us.

The Great Scott, who does not bellow, growl, or bloviate, is convincing as Russell, a (literally) haunted man vulnerable/receptive to unseen forces, due to the fresh tragedy in his life.

Though Hyams, Scott, et al, give it the old college try, their collective efforts fail to generate any genuine shock wattage in the 21st century.

Alone (2020)

“That’s one of the most stressful movies I’ve ever seen!”

This quote comes from Mrs. Sharky, who perhaps unwisely left the selection of this evening’s entertainment to me.

She says that Alone is like death by a thousand cuts and accurately represents the kind of micro-aggression that women traveling by themselves encounter far too often.

Sometimes it’s just assholes, sometimes it’s Ted Bundy.

Jessica (Jules Willcox) decides to pack up her troubles in a U-Haul and head for greener pastures after her husband commits suicide—a similar premise to Alex Garland’s recent film Men.

Instead of rest and recuperation, her healing mission gets derailed by a menacing motorist (Mark Menchaca) who proves harder to get rid of than a mosquito in your tent.

As previously mentioned, sometimes extreme tragedy and trauma are considered action items in the universe we live in, as the landscape shifts from indifferent to malign and the real character development gets started.

Alone director Johm Hyams (Black Summer) and writer Mattias Olsson devise a brutal (and stressful!) battlefield in the rainy tall timber of the Pacific Northwest.

There is very little dialogue and our protagonist spends much of her screen time hiding in the bush from a diabolical serial killer who knows the area well. Jessica’s propensity to make noise (heavy breathing, mewling whimpers) during these anxious interludes drove my wife nuts.

“Shut up, already!” she shouted more than once. “It’s easy to hide in the woods! Just shut the hell up!”

Pursuit, capture, escape, more pursuit, and murder are the forces at work here, and the tension levels go “pop” on several occasions, such as when Jessica agonizingly overhears her stalker talking jovially with his wife and child on the phone, telling them he’ll be home in a few days.

Take a break if you need to, but stick with it. Alone delivers a satisfyingly savage finale that will make your blood pressure dance the meringue.

Who says cinema should be relaxing? Take up yoga, or something.

The Fog (1980)

The Carpenter Kick continues.

Three years after John Carpenter set the night on fire with Halloween, The Fog, his return to the horror genre, earned lukewarm reviews and is generally considered one of his lesser efforts.

People forget that Carpenter came up helming made-for-TV movies with micro budgets, like Someone’s Watching Me, and Elvis, a surprisingly good Presley biopic from 1979 starring a young Kurt Russell, who was nominated for an Emmy.

Carpenter’s theatrical movies, which tend to feature desperate characters trapped together against unearthly enemies, are similarly economical affairs with superior practical effects by master technicians.

The Fog once again forces his cast indoors as vengeful spirits from a doomed sailing ship descend on a coastal California town on the night of its 100th anniversary.

Speaking of master technicians, makeup and effects whiz Rob Bottin even gets to step in front of the camera as Blake, the leader of the ghostly mariners.

Antonio Bay, California is the setting, as citizens excitedly prepare for the upcoming centennial celebration. Sad-sack sermonizer Father Malone (Hal Holbrook) discovers a diary written by his grandfather, detailing a treacherous deal offered by town founders a century earlier.

It seems that Blake, a well-to-do leper and his flaky followers, were determined to settle near the still-undeveloped Antonio Bay, even sealing the deal with a generous amount of gold.

Instead of welcoming their new neighbors with casseroles, locals lured the leprous crew’s ship onto the rocks with a false campfire, sending the scabrous sailors to a watery grave.

Once the founders lifted the lepers’ loot from the wreck, they had sufficient capital to incorporate and become an actual spot on the map.

To no one’s surprise, this original sin results in sword-wielding spooks rolling into town via a glowing fog bank on founders’ day to slay six unlucky souls to match the number of drowned crew.

The Fog isn’t exactly scary, but it’s got a ton of atmosphere, the 44-year-old effects are decent, and Carpenter keeps the action—and heads—rolling while notching the tension with minimal dialogue and unforeseen events, such as dissonant symphonies of car horns going off at night.

Carpenter’s cast is filled with reliable talent, including, Holbrook as the guilt-ridden Father Malone, Adrienne Barbeau (his wife at the time) as sexy DJ Stevie Wayne, Jamie Lee Curtis as a free-spirit hitchhiker, and her mom, Janet “Psycho” Leigh as the town mayor.

As is par for the course, Carpenter crams everyone into a church in the final scene to keep the spectral swabs at bay, but they only leave after Father Malone returns most of their gold and gets beheaded for his trouble.

And so, order is restored, because you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.

This is definitely a case that calls for an enhanced re-release with better picture quality, because The Fog is a very dark movie, and I don’t mean thematically.

Note to auteurs: If you plan on a lengthy career don’t use cheap film stock. It can can dim the enthusiasm of the newly curious.

Last Night In Soho (2021)

I’ve been a fan of Edgar Wright from his earliest work on Spaced, the hilarious BBC sit-com from the tail-end of the previous century.

This foundational series teamed director Wright with writer/actor Simon Pegg, a partnership that flourished with ace collaborations like Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007).

Pegg is certainly the more visible of the two, appearing in high-profile film franchises based on TV shows from the 1960s, Star Trek and Mission Impossible.

In Last Night In Soho, Wright’s musically minded, bloody Valentine to swinging London, he affirms his true love (and understanding) of those riotous times through masterful manipulation of color, sound, and movement in telling the story of two girls from different eras whose lives overlap in Dreamland.

We open with Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), a spirited lass from Cornwall with dreams of being a 60s-inspired fashion designer in London.

Upon landing in the big city, Eloise is treated rudely by her designing classmates to the point that she’s forced to abandon the dorms in favor of lodging with Mrs. Collins (Diana Rigg) a lovely old-lady landlord who doesn’t allow male guests after 8pm.

Soon after acquiring the new digs, Eloise begins a dream odyssey about the adventures of Sandy (Anya Taylor-Joy), a live-wire hip chick who captures the attention of everyone she meets during her meteoric ascent in London’s nightclub scene, circa 1965.

Coincidentally, it’s the very same historical period that Eloise obsesses about through her clothes and music. Cilla Black, Kinks, Chad & Jeremy, and Petula Clark can be heard plugging away on the phonograph, while her attempts at creating swing silhouettes and bubble dresses are clearly influenced by Mary Quant and other Carnaby Street regulars.

Eloise and Sandy overlap in these subconscious interludes: Sandy is portrayed by Taylor-Joy, but whenever an opportunity for a reflection appears, it’s McKenzie looking back at the action.

A lesser director would milk this device as a gimmick. Wright uses it to set the story to a fevered rhythm, as Sandy, a beautiful rising star, sees her ambition smashed to bits by horrible old men.

When not living her dream, Eloise styles herself as the beguiling Sandy, until the viewer loses her sense of identity in both the sleeping and waking worlds.

Last Night in Soho is a rise-and-fall fable that kicks off with a dazzling bang, and shifts gears into a sordid nightmare spiral that’s grim going indeed.

Wright’s poise and whirlwind finesse with the camera is thoroughly transportive, evoking both delirious highs and utter misery in strikingly composed scene after scene.

This is a bumpy ride, but Last Night In Soho is more than worth it. Instead of grousing about getting the rug yanked out from under, we should be thankful that an artist of Wright’s ability has fully materialized in our present day.

Fresh (2022)

Ask anyone. The dating scene can be murder, especially if the relationship consumes you.

In director Mimi Cave’s black-comic thriller Fresh, Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is a smart, witty, modern girl just looking for a meaningful nibble in her stagnant dating pool when she meets Steve (Sebastian Stan), a super-attractive doctor at her local produce market.

After a quick roll in the sack, Noa is whisked off for a magical weekend trip with the too-good-to-be-true Steve, despite warnings from her lesbian BFF Mollie (Jonica T. Gibbs) that there are some definite red flags in this picture.

Next thing Noa knows is waking up chained to a floor. This is never a good sign.

Turns out Steve has a thriving black market business that needs new blood occasionally.

“What the fuck is happening?” Noa screams at Steve.

“I’ll tell you, but you’re going to freak out,” Steve replies.

Noa is in a very bad place, but she shows grit and determination by convincing her captor that she shares his unusual tastes for the very finest cuts of meat.

Yes, it’s every bit as gruesome as you think, and then some, but Cave also sneaks in stress-relieving laughs when we need them most, particularly after one of the director’s many rapid-fire meat-cutting-and-eating montages designed to make the viewer queasy with self-loathing.

“I don’t eat animals,” Steve tells Daisy in the early days of their courtship. Not ones with four legs, anyway.

Fresh doesn’t pull any punches in its portrayal of toxic masculinity, embodied by the charmingly evil Steve, a respectable man with a home and family who just can’t resist a tempting morsel.

Unfortunately, as any upset stomach commercial ably demonstrates, sometimes your food will fight back.

Big Trouble In Little China (1986)

It appears I’m on a Carpenter Kick.

While The Thing (1982) remains one of my absolute favorite horrors, Big Trouble In Little China finds John Carpenter at the top of his game. I’d be hard-pressed to think of a film that can match it for sheer volume of fun, fights, and full-tilt frenetic action.

It’s the ideal midnight movie.

We must remember that Kurt Russell has been a leading man in Hollywood since The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. Big Trouble is essentially a live-action comic book, and Russell plays hero Jack Burton as a bumbling John Wayne caricature who’s routinely saved by his buddy Wang Chi (Dennis Dun).

Indeed, Burton’s capacity to stupidly screw up and still save the day is unmatched in my cinematic memory.

Trucker Jack Burton (Russell) gets his rig stolen after an all-night game of cards in SF’s Chinatown. The culprits are connected to David Lo Pan (James Hong) a sinister sorcerer/crime boss who has also arranged for the kidnapping of Wang’s girlfriend Miao Yin (Suzee Pai), a beautiful woman with green eyes.

From here, the plot thickens into a dark, delicious pudding of ghosts, monsters, sorcery, aerial martial arts, and a flying blade ceremony designed to make Lo Pan flesh and blood so he can wed Miao Yin after centuries of living as a formless ghost.

Unless he chooses Gracie Law (Kim Cattrall), another beautiful woman with green eyes.

Like a good paella, Big Trouble is a feast for the senses as Carpenter’s cameras fly alongside supernatural warriors locked in thunderous conflict. When you combine the movie’s breathless pace with acrobatic cinematography and those distinctively quotable tough-guy cracks from Burton, the results are pure gold.

But don’t take my word for it. Let the man speak for himself.

“Just remember what ol’ Jack Burton does when the earth quakes, and the poison arrows fall from the sky, and the pillars of Heaven shake.

“Yeah, Jack Burton just looks that big ol’ storm right square in the eye and he says, ‘Give me your best shot, pal. I can take it.'”

Indeed, you really can’t go wrong with the team of John Carpenter and Kurt Russell.

Let’s watch ’em all.

Prince of Darkness (1987)

Funny thing, I went to the theater and saw this when it came out. I remember liking it well enough, but Prince of Darkness is a relatively small-scale production for John Carpenter.

His previous run of films included Halloween, The Thing, The Fog, Escape From New York, and Big Trouble In Little China, so perhaps I was missing the star power typically provided by Kurt Russell and Jamie Lee Curtis.

The real reason, I now suspect, is that Prince of Darkness is more akin to Carpenter’s earlier, grittier Assault on Precinct 13, a no-name thriller about cops fighting off a crowd of vengeful gang members while trapped in a shuttered police station.

The cast of Prince of Darkness, including vintage TV stars Jameson Parker (Simon & Simon), Thom Bray (Riptide) and Dirk Blocker (son of Dan Blocker/Hoss), are similarly under siege, this time by a seemingly synchronized horde of hobo schizophrenics led by a menacing Alice Cooper.

Carpenter’s resident authority figure Donald Pleasence plays Father Loomis (Doctor Loomis’s twin brother?), a nervous priest who discovers an infernal device in the basement of an abandoned Los Angeles church.

The ancient artifact, which resembles a moldy lava lamp, appears to contain some kind of organic material that’s rapidly developing consciousness after lying dormant for untold centuries.

Loomis calls in Professor Birack (Victor Wong, Egg Shen from Big Trouble) and a group of his top physics students to study the strange canister and possibly decipher the accompanying doomsday grimoire also found on the premises.

How could they know they’d be hastening the return of the titular character, even providing a human vessel for its gestation period?

Nope, didn’t see that one coming.

I would expect college students to be dopey enough to take on this insane extra-credit assignment, but distinguished scientists?

All hell proceeds to break loose, as the assembled eggheads fall victim to having unholy water squirted in their faces from newly made zombies, or getting torn apart by the mute mob of street people that have surrounded the accursed church.

Professor Birack and the increasingly agitated Loomis deduce that the evil essence contained in the canister is now fully awake and influencing people on a subatomic level. Like ants working together toward a common goal.

You get it? Carpenter? Ants?

Carpenter is at his most diabolical depicting a wounded world, teeming with swarms of furious insects, that’s clearly reached end time, requiring an act of selfless sacrifice to save the day and keep the devil—and his creeping minions—away.

The dour final frame of Prince of Darkness indicates that he won’t be gone for long. A hell of a movie.

Monsters (2010)

British filmmaker Gareth Edwards is nominated for two academy awards this year for The Creator, a provocative and timely sci-fi tale about Artificial Intelligence.

In addition to directing a well-received installment of the Star Wars saga (Rogue One, 2016), Edwards made an auspicious debut with Monsters, a bit of speculative fiction that imagines a not-too-distant future where humanity has lost a chunk of Central America to alien life forms brought to Earth from a deep-space NASA probe six years previous.

Andrew Kaulder (Scoot McNairy) is a freelance photojournalist trying to get photos of the mysterious creatures that have “infected” Costa Rica and Guatemala, and thus making travel in the region dicey and expensive.

He is sidetracked from his quest for fame and fortune with an offer from a media mogul to escort the latter’s runaway daughter Sam (Whitney Able) through the Infected Zone and back to the United States.

What follows is a gritty survival film with a credible romantic subplot about two strangers who must learn to trust each other under fire if they’re to make it out of an embattled landscape, as soldiers try to contain a mounting threat from tentacled terrors from beyond the stars.

Though the alien menace appears infrequently, its presence is felt constantly, reinforced by scenes of people in small villages watching news reports of monstrous destruction.

“You leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone,” comments one local.

We’ve seen this movie . Most of the time the danger is posed from warring nations or an impending natural disaster.

Writer-director-editor-FX guy Edwards juxtaposes gigantic octopoids wreaking havoc into the background, but this dark journey of discovery seen through the eyes of two stunned civilians could be about any set of fleeing refugees.

Kaulder and Sam must negotiate with locals for risky transportation options that are rapidly shrinking in the face of alien aggression. Eventually they are forced to go on foot, bearing mute witness to eerie tableaux of fallen creatures and aircraft alike, that are staged for maximum shock and awe.

Before Gareth Edwards takes a turn at the Oscars, Monsters offers an opportunity to see noteworthy work from an emerging artist. I would advise you to do so.