June 2023

Off Season (2021)

Old School creepy goes a long way in my book. I’m always in the mood for an immersive plunge into nightmare waters.

Off Season is Old School creepy, a diabolical downward spiral with definite shades of Carnival of Souls and Dead and Buried tellingly layered into a Lovecraftian landscape.

Writer-director Mickey Keating, a former Blumhouse intern, has manifested another one of those damned tourist trap towns that visitors find impossible to leave behind.

Marie (Jocelin Donahue) is the daughter of reclusive actress Ava Aldrich (Melora Walters), who recently passed away and was laid to rest on the small coastal island where she grew up.

Funny thing, before she died, Ava told her daughter specifically to not allow her body to be buried there.

Funnier thing: Two lawyers she’s never met inform Marie that her mother changed her will, and that she wanted to be buried on the island.

Shortly thereafter, Marie receives a mysterious letter from the caretaker of the cemetery instructing her to come at once to address the recent vandalism of Ava’s grave.

Once she and her whiny husband George (Joe Swanberg) arrive on the island, the trap springs shut and the real nightmare can begin. Marie discovers the community is a hotbed of pagan idolatry and that many years before the villagers made a deal with “a man who came from the sea.”

Off Season comes foggily shrouded in a fatalistic sense of inevitability that dwarfs our petty terrestrial concerns, offering us a glimpse of life everlasting.

And we all lived happily ever after in thrall to Cthulhu, or someone like him. Well, maybe not so happily. Let’s say creepily.

Significant Other (2022)

Camping makes everything worse. Debate me.

If you’re a real horror fan, you know it’s true. Significant Other is just another case study in the facts of life.

Written and directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olson, the movie also offers relationship advice on how not to upset your boyfriend when he’s been body snatched by an alien scout checking out Earth as a possible invasion site.

Harry (Jake Lacy) convinces his anxiety ridden girlfriend Ruth (Maika Monroe) to go on a camping and hiking weekend. The communication between Harry, a hearty, upbeat outdoorsman, and his dour partner is not good.

For the first quarter of the movie, Harry ignores and dismisses every word from Ruth, which leads to a really awkward marriage proposal that puts a damper on the campers.

Ruth storms off to be alone. Harry goes for a walk to clear his head. Both make discoveries of the Third Kind, and when they meet up again, they’re not the same people.

Harry plays host to an alien consciousness, and is as surprised as anyone that his feelings for Ruth are complicating his mission.

Significant Other almost ventures into romantic comedy territory, because this relationship turns toxic in a big way, leading to a modest blood bath. Harry falls off a cliff, gets eaten by a shark, and has his head smashed into pudding, but he’s harder to kill than a cockroach.

Finally, Ruth ends up in Harry’s shoes and seemingly outwits the cosmic conqueror, making her getaway. It’s a small victory, as it turns out, because like shitty boyfriends, there are always plenty of invaders to go around.

Recommended? You betcha.

Super Dark Times (2017)

I’d heard Super Dark Times compared to Stand By Me, but it reminds me more of a much grimmer movie that came out the same year (1986), Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge.

Known primarily as a launching pad for a young Keanu Reeves, it also came with barking mad performances from Dennis Hopper and Crispin Glover.

All three movies speak volumes about adolescent friendships put under stress by the presence of a dead body.

The resemblance to Stand By Me seems deliberate. At first glance, Super Dark Times appears to take place in one of those Stephen King-like clouds of sunny nostalgia based some time in the 1990s.

Boys on their bicycles, clunky portable phones with Walkie Talkie antennas, and a TV appearance by Bill Clinton anchor us firmly in the appropriate decade, much like Donnie Darko’s sister declaring her intent to vote for Michael Dukakis.

Zach (Owen Campbell) and Josh (Charlie Tahan) are high school best buds whiling away their virgin years in a small rural town that looks Norman Rockwell on the surface, with a noticeable David Lynch underbelly.

Their lives are mostly innocent fun punctuated with declarations of impending boy horniness until a terrible mishap claims the life of Daryl (Max Talisman), a pain-in-the-ass acquaintance whom no one wanted to hang out with in the first place.

Everyone agrees it was an accident that led to Daryl’s bleeding to death, and the decision is quickly made to bury his stupid body and play dumb.

Indeed, it’s the day-to-day mundanity of the average teen that director Ken Phillips and writers Luke Piotrowski and Ben Collins, get exactly right, to the point where we actually care about Zach’s budding relationship with dream girl Allison (Elizabeth Cappucino).

However, this isn’t a John Hughes film, either. Zach cannot be redeemed by love and Josh loses his way entirely.

Once the closest of friends, Zach and Josh now view each other with increasing suspicion, that builds fiendishly low and slow.

Josh becomes angry and distant while Zach can’t sleep due to vivid nightmares about their dark deed.

The inability of friends to trust each other with a hideous secret dooms the relationship and leads to an unexpectedly bloody finale, one that slays any notion of Super Dark Times taking place in a benign Stephen King universe.

More like Dateline with Keith Morrison.

SDT is a superb, riveting thriller as well as a brutally harsh coming-of-age story, with young protagonists that have yet to develop a moral center.

Enthusiastic recommendation from this corner. I ate it up like Junior Mints.