Hack-and-stack

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.

The Final Girls (2015)

It started with Back to the Future, of course, the idea that a troubled teen could fix the present by kicking ass in the past.

The Happy Death Day series introduces horror into the equation, and recent stabs at the genre include Totally Killer, a film reviewed here.

The Final Girls adds even more spice to the stew, as Max (Taissa Farmiga), grieving the death of her Scream Queen mother, Amanda Cartwright (Malin Ackerman), gets dumped into the early 1980s after a catastrophe at a screening of Mom’s most famous feature, Camp Bloodbath.

Director Todd Strauss-Schulson and writers Joshua John Miller and M.A. Fortin have a ball with a group of contemporary adolescents spun 40-plus years into the past to be fodder for a Jason Voorhees-style killing machine at a doomed summer camp.

Like the Scream franchise, the ability to adapt and survive by figuring out the “rules” of a slasher movie is the name of the game in The Final Girls, but the action also affords Max the chance to not only reconnect with her mother, but to act as a sort of spiritual advisor to a character carelessly described as “the shy girl with a guitar and a clipboard.”

Max and her friends travel even further back in time to witness the origin of the camp killer in the 1950s, and they all notice when the world around them is in black and white. One of them reckons she’s having a stroke because she’s suddenly colorblind!

The cinematography by Elle Smolkin also grabs our attention with a bevy of unbelievable shots, such as the killer, set ablaze, chasing the kids in slow motion. Or the apocalyptic purple sky during Max’s final battle.

There’s frightening fun in abundance, but there’s also inside jokes about lame movie stereotypes such as the airhead slut Tina (Angela Trimbur), who must be tied up to keep her from stripping off her clothes and summoning the killer.

Adam Devine from Workaholics delivers boffo laughs as Kurt, a one-dimensional stud from Hollywood’s disposable character drawer, who somehow makes his quest for endless nooky a righteous cause.

The Final Girls is an excellent example of a teen time-travel traumatic adventure. Maybe one of the best.

Abigail (2024)

“What are we talking about, like an Anne Rice or a True Blood? You know, Twilight? Very different kinds of vampires.”

So wonders Sammy (Kathryn Newton), one of a crew of professional criminals hired to kidnap the 12-year-old daughter (Alisha Weir) of a powerful crime boss.

This isn’t one of those vampire movies where the characters behave like they’ve never seen a vampire movie.

Quite the opposite, and directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett use the opportunity to remind us that maybe we don’t know shit about Nosferatu Nation.

“The thing about being a vampire is, it takes a long time to learn how to do the cool shit,” explains Abigail, the ballerina from hell at the center of the horror-thriller-comedy that bears her name.

Abigail is a blast, and way too freaking much fun not to earn my humble endorsement.

A group of Usual Suspects are promised $50 million to snatch the fancy dancing Abigail and bring her to a safe house to await a ransom payment from her father, Kristof Lazaar, a legendary criminal mastermind spoken of with Keyser Sozé reverence.

There’s Frank (Dan Stevens), the leader, a paranoid ex-undercover cop; Joey (Melissa Barrera), the empathetic army doctor trying to kick a drug habit. Peter (Kevin Durand), is a massive mob leg-breaker, Rickles (Will Catlett), a Marine sharpshooter, Sammy, the cute punky hacker chick, and Dean (Angus Cloud), a loose-cannon getaway driver.

The crooks, forced to hole up, quickly get on each others’ nerves with well-written, zesty crook dialogue leading us to believe we’re watching a hard-boiled caper flick, like, The Usual Suspects.

The similarities don’t end there.

As the captors settle in for a 24-hour babysitting gig, the frightened little girl reveals herself to be a vicious, sadistic bloodsucker who wants to “play with her food.”

We’re swept along as the tiny dancer turns the tables, easily terrorizing and dominating the band of seasoned professionals, usually accompanied by the thunderous strains of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.

It is at this point that Abigail reaches its comedic zenith, and it’s a dilly.

Joey: Why didn’t she kill you?

Frank: She is fucking with us!

Joey: I’m guessing none of the weapons worked.

Frank: Well, the stake worked on my fucking leg, and she used the crucifix on Peter like a fucking pincushion and the garlic did fuck all!

Amidst the copious blood-letting , savage sucking, and decapitation, bargains are made and broken as further scheming by henchmen complicates the caper considerably.

And then her father shows up, and we get some tips on the finer points of parenting. Abigail moves at a breathless pace, only slowing occasionally for a tactical pause before further mutilation occurs.

I’m clapping. Really!

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.

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.

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.