Anonymous Industrial Walkabout

Heretic (2024)

This is a different Hugh Grant, though there is a passing resemblance to the rom-com Don Juan with the aw-shucks manner.

Written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, Heretic is another film set during a storm that makes the most of its few sets and small cast. Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) are young Mormon missionaries on bicycles visiting the home of Mr. Reed (Grant), a seemingly absent-minded scholar with an interest in religion and spiritual knowledge.

An approaching deluge induces the girls to accept Mr. Reed’s hospitality and enter his surprisingly roomy cottage. He mentions that his wife is in the kitchen making blueberry pie!

The front door closes and the camera backtracks down the foot path that approaches the house. It seems like a long way from the road.

Trap sprung.

Mr. Reed proves to be a highly intelligent and extremely well-read individual, who goes from asking questions about Mormonism to lecturing the girls on his own personal quest for the “one true religion.”

At times, he is a professor impressively expounding on several subjects at once to a class of freshmen, and Barnes and Paxton soon find themselves in over their heads as the subject matter becomes increasingly uncomfortable.

The time passes in conversation and the smell of blueberry pie fills a cozy sitting room that begins to look suspiciously normal.

Beck and Woods do a masterful job of gradually goosing up the tension without turning Mr. Reed into Dracula. Can this old duffer even be considered a physical threat?

Reed mostly remains reasonable, but the red flags are starting to pile up. Cell phones don’t work and the front door is on a time lock that won’t open till morning (!), so if the girls want to leave (and they’re always welcome to), they’ll have to exit through the back of the house.

Credit must be given to Chloe West and Sophie Thatcher for instilling their characters with brains and backbones, the ability to think and reason even when their situation hits nightmare territory.

As for Grant, the charmingly awkward Brit with the hots for Andie McDowell is a faded lobby poster, but he can still badger and beguile a captive audience. The ingratiating tendencies and ability to spin complex thoughts into amusing, provocative word bubbles remains intact in Heretic, and Grant digs deep to reach a rich vein of menace.

Trim Season (2023)

Though it has a few decent moments, Trim Season is mostly a harsh toke.

Director Ariel Vida definitely has a gift for visual flair but largely ignores storytelling in favor of making sure that the color red is fully represented in as many shots as possible.

A group of broke stoner girls and one trans man get a good paying gig trimming bud at a pot farm in Northern California.

Nothing wrong with that, I’ve done it myself. The isolation, drugs, little sleep, and sketchy authority figures make it a ripe scenario for any number of horror options.

The trimmers are introduced to Mona (Jane Badler), the mysterious and commanding owner of the operation, and quickly find her to be a firm enforcer of rules as well as their provider of weed and employment.

Emma (Beth Million) is our chief protagonist among the reefer recruits, but like most of the cast, she does little to distinguish herself, leaving Badler to dominate the action, as a sort of hippie Elizabeth Bathory, smoking her own strain of crimson cannabis.

I appreciated Vida’s gender tweaking throughout, as the girls are clearly protective of Dusty (Bex Taylor-Klaus), a vulnerable trans man, who would rather not talk about his past, but has an instant connection with Mona’s shy son, Christopher (Corey Hart).

Trim Season squanders much of its potential, however, thanks to stock characters, a wayward script, and careless plot developments: Why make a point of having Lex (Juliette Kenn De Balinthazy) being impervious to pain if it doesn’t come into play in any meaningful way?

It doesn’t help that when Mistress Mona flexes her witchy powers, she waves her hands in the air, remotely guiding her victims to off themselves like awkward, staggering marionettes. Instead of the intended dread, the results are comical, at best.

Also, note to the art department. The scenes featuring the girls trimming buds around the table are marred by the presence of weird, bulbous styrofoam cannabis. Is that the best we can do?

As I mentioned, this particular plot could have yielded some top-shelf terror. Sadly, Trim Season wouldn’t get a fly high.

In A Violent Nature (2024)

There’s quite a bit more here than meets the eye.

In A Violent Nature is not, as I had been told, a slasher movie told from the killer’s point of view.

Instead, writer-director Chris Nash dials up a multitude of perspectives, as if the doomed campers were being chased through a high-tech forest equipped with dozens of surveillance angles to choose from.

Stupid, soon-to-be-deceased college students rent a cabin in the woods. While hiking they disturb a memorial to Johnny, a mentally challenged boy who got bullied to death 70 years before.

Straight away we witness a now monstrous Johnny rise from the grave to seek revenge, and we spend considerable time riding shotgun alongside this unstoppable fiend as he makes an inspired mess out of the clueless kids.

Sometimes the murders are super gory, (the girl doing yoga gets some major stretching bodywork done) and some happen at a distance in the blink of an eye, as when a comely swimmer disappears below the waterline with a yelp from across the lake.

Nash keeps refreshing the views. He employs a static wilderness cam that dispassionately records long shots of the killer walking from one side of the frame to another. Next thing you know, we’re sitting on his shoulder, then a bird’s eye view, then a worm’s eye view.

With a string of cameras at his disposal, Nash asks us to consider the single-minded plight of a creative mutilator, in this case one that wears an old-time fireman’s mask, giving him the appearance of a predatory insect.

When Johnny occasionally pauses in his gruesome quest, we can get inside his horrible head and watch the wheels turn as he considers how best to maximize his menace, though he does remove his mask to play with a toy car at one point, a tragic reminder that this thing was once a happy child.

The undead death dealer featured in In A Violent Nature isn’t a killing machine, however. He wordlessly seems to enjoy the hunt and clearly takes pride in his victim-stalking and construction of murderous tableaux.

Johnny is obviously an artist, inviting us along to spy on his process. Now there’s a view you won’t see every day.

The Resident (2011)

It’s Hammer Time!

A release from the revived (and revered) Hammer Films imprint, The Resident traces its ancestry from gothic mysteries, slasher cinema, erotic thrillers, and Hitchcock’s Psycho.

It’s even got Christopher Lee in a supporting role! Doesn’t get more Hammer than that.

Oscar winner Hilary Swank portrays Juliet, a frazzled ER doctor on the fly from a failed relationship. In search of new lodgings, she chances upon an old building with a spectacular view of the Brooklyn Bridge, owned by Max (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a charming landlord who resides on the premises with his ailing grandfather August (Christopher Lee).

When Juliet flirts with and kisses Max, it seems perfectly natural. He and Juliet are both attractive and successful people, their mutual interest is a given. She’s also lonely and drinks too much wine.

Finnish writer-director Antti Jokinen infuses the standard melodrama in The Resident, with a willingness to get uncomfortably close to his characters. Juliet isn’t sleeping well and can’t shake the feeling that someone is invading her space.

It’s not much of a mystery, as we learn that Max, the guy who owns the building, is indeed a highly disturbed individual, but perhaps not unreasonably so. It could be argued that Juliet’s reckless behavior with the heart of an unstable suitor is the cause of all the misery.

“You kissed me first,” he reminds her. And when Juliet has the nerve to get back together with her asshole ex, the wheels really come off.

Jokinen’s use of floating and flying camerawork is absorbing, making a mostly single-set apartment appear to be filled with more passages and secret doors than the Vatican.

The Resident is better than it has a right to be, largely thanks to Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s impressively layered performance as Max, a tortured soul who maybe just wanted to meet a nice girl. And a doctor to boot!

Morgan isn’t shy about delving the creepier depths of Max’s obsession, whether it’s licking Juliet’s hand from beneath her bed while she sleeps, or having a little cuddle party with her clothes, he’s clearly an actor unafraid of committing to a role.

Anyone expecting an arrogant and antagonistic villain in the vein of The Walking Dead’s Negan will, I thnk, be surprised by Morgan’s ability to generate menace, revulsion, and sympathy—right up until the bloody nail-gun finale.

The Hunt (2020)

Rich people hunting poor people for sport. Yeah, so what?

Richard Connell’s short story, The Most Dangerous Game, featuring a Russian nobleman tracking an American captive on a private island, is the source material for this concept, and it was published just over 100 years ago!

A familiar premise, but in The Hunt, it’s all about where you stand politically that determines your fate. Always room for innovation.

The setup is pure boilerplate, as a dozen seemingly random folks are kidnapped and transferred to a private hunting reserve called The Manor, where they’re given weapons to defend themselves against their affluent captors.

But something’s just a little off. The victims are not what they seem, and neither are the hunters.

Writers Damon Lindelof (Lost) and Nick Cuse drop little hints throughout the film about who exactly is hunting who, and the reveal is both unexpected and fertile ground for hilarity, as liberals, who aren’t all that competent with guns, try to exterminate right-wing pundits, podcasters, and NRA supporters.

The Hunt leaves no room for good guys and bad guys, but Crystal (Betty Gilpin), an ex-military badass who was captured by mistake, takes the entire operation down, culminating in vicious hand-to-hand combat with Hilary Swank, the mastermind of the whole scenario.

The action sequences are tightly and efficiently orchestrated, particularly during a deadly shootout in a Mom & Pop grocery store, where in between salvos of bullets, a shopkeeper (Amy Madigan) wonders why one of the gunmen (Ike Barenholtz) feels the need to own so many guns?

Director Craig Zobel maintains a whippingly brisk level of excitement peppered with acidic observations from everyone involved, which should lead to repeat viewings in order to extract hidden gems.

Need to mend some fences after the election? The Hunt should satisfy both ends of the American politcial spectrum, and most points in between, as long as we haven’t lost the ability to laugh at our foolish selves.

Beetlejuice (1988)

I found it inconceivable that Mrs. Sharky hadn’t seen Beetlejuice! I mean, if we go to the sequel, she’ll be lost!

The original Beetlejuice holds up extremely well, and it’s a shiny example of filmmaker Tim Burton at his most creatively unfettered, before the weight of pleasing soulless studio executives damaged his goods.

The man who gave the world Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Edward Scissorhands, and Sleepy Hollow was firing on all cylinders, as yet unburdened with hallucinatory tasks like unsuccessfully updating Alice in Wonderland and Charley and the Chocolate Factory for new generations.

Burton casts a wild net in Beetlejuice, introducing us to Barbara Maitland (Geena Davis) and her husband Adam (Alec Baldwin), a recently deceased “normal” couple, who end up trying to haunt their own house to scare away the obnoxious family that moves in after their funeral.

The incoming Deetz family is fronted by brash, no-talent artist Deelia (Catherine O’Hara, who is wonderful),along with her fretful yuppie husband Charles (Jeffrey Jones), and darkling daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder), who has the ability to see the Maitlands and sympathizes with their plight.

The fledgling ghosts, after failing to frighten away the interlopers, summon the titular evil spirit (Michael Keaton) to handle the eviction process. Keaton is the the straw that stirs the drink, a Pu-Pu platter of perversion and patter, rightfully stealing every scene in sight.

In a movie about the importance of family—chosen and blood—we get three levels of domestic possibilities. The Maitlands, though dead, represent the most nurturing option for Lydia, while her parents are usually too distracted with their own devices to pay any attention.

But even the Deetz clan is preferable to Beetlejuice and his quest to take Lydia for his child bride so he can return to the land of the living. Yikes!

Burton earns an advanced degree in visual arts with his depiction of the afterlife, an impenetrable bureaucracy with frazzled, overworked caseworkers like Juno (Sylvia Sydney), in charge of crowded offices filled with confused corpses in various stages of dumbfounded decay.

The contrast between an increasingly bizarre real world, brought on by the arrival of the Deetz family and their awful Boho sensibilities, with a limbo full of mud-colored, take-a-number waiting rooms, helped to establish Burton’s outré credentials.

He also shows an uncanny eye for fashion, giving Lydia striking looks in both black and red. Burton definitely had a hand in Ryder’s ascent as a teen icon that learned to act and stayed forever.

The Vincent Price-loving Burton has honed a visual aesthetic of fascinating grotesquerie much like spiritual forefathers Edward Gorey and Charles Addams. And Beetlejuice is his master’s thesis, a riotous dark comedy that’s still cherished five decades later.

OK, bring on the sequel.

Oddity (2024)

Irish filmmaker Damian McCarthy made a bit of a splash with his debut, Caveat (2020), an indie-horror shocker that more than recouped the measly 250,000 pounds spent on its production.

Oddity is McCarthy’s second film, and the raw talent revealed in Caveat gains both power and polish, anchored by an incendiary performance by Carolyn Bracken, as twin sisters Dani and Darcy Timmins—the former a murder victim, the latter a blind collector of cursed objects.

Darcy decides that her sister’s murder at the hands of an escaped mental patient (Tadhg Murphy) is just a little too coincidental, considering her sister’s husband Ted (Gwilym Lee) is a psychiatrist at the nearby asylum from whence the killer came!

As if that weren’t enough to put a bee in her bonnet, Darcy discovers that Ted has a new girlfriend (Caroline Menton) less than a year after her sister’s brutal death by bludgeoning.

Through a magic ritual involving the glass eye of the alleged killer, Darcy figures out who the real culprits are and rebrands herself as an instrument of vengeance.

The obvious care and attention to detail provided by writer-director McCarthy is a pleasure to behold—the atmosphere of the mostly single set of a remote country house successfully develops layers of menace with each scene.

The narrative is bone simple, as Darcy arranges a sinister fate for the conspirators responsible for her twin’s demise, disguised as a bizarre housewarming gift: a life-sized wooden man that appears to be distressingly ambulatory.

The actual business of the revenge plot isn’t terribly intricate, but McCarthy consistently avoids the obvious choices, and the viewer is all the better for it.

Oddity is a first-rate horror experience that belies the lack of a body count, and indicates that Damian McCarthy is emerging as a confident comer in modern genre filmmaking.

Don’t believe me? See for yourself!

Ghostwatch (1992)

I watched Late Night with the Devil, but it didn’t bring me any joy. A far more effective version of hell breaking loose on the telly can be found in Ghostwatch a BBC mockumentary that originally aired on Halloween night, 1992.

Apparently Ghostwatch was so realistic that many citizens were fooled into thinking something truly paranormal was unfolding before their astonished eyes, and network censors vowed never to rerun it on the BBC, accusing the creators of “a deliberate attempt to cultivate a sense of dread.”

Cool beans! Sign me up!

The made-for-TV movie was written by Steven Volk and directed by Lesley Manning, and it follows a large team of 1990s-style BBC reporters and crew onsite at a very normal looking home in Foxhill, that’s been the scene of serious poltergeist activity.

We meet the unfortunate inhabitants of the house, Pamela Early (Brid Brennan), and her two traumatized daughters, Suzanne (Michelle Wesson) and Kimmy (Cherise Wesson).

From the studio, the veteran presenter (Michael Parkinson), a stodgy old skeptic, coordinates the various segments, including live reports from the haunted house, interviews with the beleaguered family, and assorted talking heads adding their two cents worth to the proceedings.

What elevates Ghostwatch is its organic flow from spooky fun to impending danger to an unearthly tele-event, as a very compelling guest crashes the “live broadcast” for a few announcements and a guest editorial.

The pacing is superbly handled and the characters behave as real humans probably would in the presence of a particularly evil entity.

That’s a heavy compliment. You should watch.

Monolith (2022)

An investigative journalist (Lily Sullivan) has suffered a career setback. Hoping to salvage her reputation with a new podcast about unexplained phenomenon, she retreats to her parents’ posh pad in the Australian wilderness to brainstorm some ideas.

“I need a story,” she tells her boss on the phone. To paraphrase Apocalypse Now, for her sins, they gave her one.

Monolith, written by Lucy Campbell and directed by Matt Vesely, is confined to one location, with a single actress interacting with other characters online and over the telephone.

The journalist, at first reluctantly, and then with single-minded vigor, pursues a juicy conspiracy story revolving around the mysterious distribution of “black bricks” that exert a kind of power over those who receive them.

As she assembles and submits episodes of her podcast, her listeners begin to take notice, and soon her inbox is full of testimony from people who’ve had experiences with these bricks, the effects of which include visions, loss of appetite, cognitive decline, and occasionally a fatal illness.

As often happens with conspiracy cases, the reporter gets swept up and goes down a very deep, dark rabbit hole, that originates surprisingly close to home.

Lily Sullivan dramatically carries Monolith and she’s quite up to the task, as her increasingly odd situation requires a fully stocked arsenal of emotional firepower. She threatens, cajoles, pleads, and does a remarkable job inhabiting what appears to be a nervous breakdown of some sort, that also could be a fight for her very soul.

Sullivan’s transformation from a sulky ego-driven internet personality to an obsessed participant in her own developing story, is astonishing and completely believable.

Well worth the watch, in my opinion.

Alien: Covenant (2017)

Yech!

Even with Ridley Scott directing, Alien: Covenant is another flop from a franchise that needs fresh blood more than Dracula.

Maybe we should blame Michael Fassbinder who gets to chew twice as much scenery in the dual role of Walter (the helpful, supportive android) and David (the amoral narcissist android).

Ten years after the events of Prometheus, which was also terrible, a new crew of explorers and sleeping deep-space colonists get a fragmented distress signal from a nearby habitable planet.

Surprise! It’s a trap! Didn’t see that one coming, did you?

Though there is space allotted for character development, nobody in the crew stands out from the usual trope type, except perhaps for Tennessee (Danny McBride), a good ol’ boy pilot in a beat-up cowboy hat.

See also: Lisa Standing (Kimberly Scott) in James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989).

There’s Captain Oram (Billy Crudup), a nervous newbie destined for failure; his second-in-command, Daniels (Katherine Waterston), still grieving her recently deceased husband, and Walter (Fassbinder), the android science officer who does most of the work.

We also get a bunch of Shemps, including Callie Hernandez, with very little to do other than perish.

Alien: Covenant attempts to re-create that ol’ black magic, but writers John Logan and Dante Harper spend too much time constructing familiar-looking scenes that hopefully resonate with long-suffering fans of the series. Consequently, there isn’t much of a story to hang your hat on, other than David’s mad ambitions.

There are elements aplenty wrangled from the first two (best) Alien films, including face huggers, gory birth sequences, automatic weapons, and renegade robots, but these never coalesce into anything able to stand on its own.

There’s the crew. The ship. The planet. The androids. Once again, the xenomorphs become an afterthought. In the final analysis, there is too much android angst and not nearly enough creature chaos, though it is a better-looking film than Prometheus.

The Alien series is stuck in a deep-space rut and could definitely use a change of scenery. I’ll let you know if there’s any intelligent life onboard after Alien: Romulus.