Occult – Page 2

Out Of Darkness (2022)

If you have a craving for rugged terrain, Out Of Darkness is your oyster.

Otherwise, patience is required for this impressive-looking hero’s journey into the unknown against an unseen enemy.

About 45,000 years ago, a small tribe of prehistoric explorers wash up on a distant inhospitable shore, determined to carve out a future for themselves.

Fortunately they speak in subtitles or we’d be as lost as they are!

The group is led by alpha male Adem (Chuku Modu), an arrogant hothead long on bravery and short on common sense. When they determine that something is stalking them, their search for food and shelter takes on a sense of urgency, especially after Adem’s son Heron (Luna Mwezi) gets snatched away from the campfire.

As the not very tightly-knit unit comes unraveled, it’s up to Beyah (Safia Oakley-Green), a relative stranger among them, to figure out what nature of beast is decimating the tribe.

Shot in Scotland, the location scenery is the best thing about Out Of Darkness. The landscape is pure primeval desolation, and proves to be a mightier foe than the “demon” that’s assailing the company.

The atmosphere of hiding and hunting is fairly absorbing, but the pace is painfully slow and the ending is a tepid letdown that should rightfully inspire shouts of “What? That’s it?” from the home audience.

Out Of Darkness fails to live up to the potential of its savage setting—instead we get a fossilized lesson about living and dying by the sword. Or in this case, the spear.

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.

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.

The Skeleton Key (2005)

Yes, the ending of The Skeleton Key is kind of a bummer. Think of it as social justice from beyond the grave.

The luminous Kate Hudson headlines as Caroline, a big-hearted hospice care worker hired to look after catatonic Ben Devereaux (John Hurt), a senior citizen sucking his last few breaths in a decaying plantation house somewhere in the Louisiana bayou.

Caroline’s routine is not made any easier by the presence of Ben’s overbearing wife Grace (Gena Rowlands), who rules the swampy mansion with an iron will in service to an arcane agenda.

Director Iain Softley (Hackers, Backbeat) and writer Ehren Kruger (The Ring, Scream 3) successfully stitch-up a scary Southern gothic, placing the very curious Caroline smack-dab in the middle of a mystery that will test her to the limits, and then some.

Softley deftly guides his camera through keyholes and tumbling tumblers as Caroline unlocks the secrets of a blighted house, mostly kept in the attic. It could be argued that she makes a few too many discoveries for her own good.

John Hurt has no dialogue, yet his face is required to reveal multiple layers of unexpressed anguish, as a man who literally hasn’t a clue how he got here. Gena Rowlands, who recently passed away, is highly animated as a mad matriarch wielding sorcerous formulas to prolong her already very long life.

As previously noted, the finale of The Skeleton Key is decidedly downbeat—until we consider the context of the tragic events that caused the curse. Then, maybe, it’s not so bad.

While you sort out your feelings, please enjoy this crackerjack feature.

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.

Night Swim (2024)

“I’ve always wanted a pool.”

Kurt Russell’s kid, Wyatt Russell, stars as an ailing baseball player who lucks into a house with a magic swimming pool.

Unfortunately, his family may not survive a comeback.

I went into Night Swim under the impression that it was a goofy monster-in-the-drain romp, accompanied by a heavy body count, but writer-director Bryce McGuire threw me a curveball.

Instead, it’s a movie about hope and how misplaced faith in miracles can be a dangerous thing. It also does a very credible job of capturing the joy and terror of owning a backyard pool.

A swimming pool used to be a mighty source of entertainment for the entire family, with a few short breaks for potato chips and kool-aid. Got a jar of change? Kids will dive after dimes all goddamn day.

A child’s introduction to liquid immersion is a unique feeling that goes back to the womb. Weightless, wet, wonderful, intoxicating, and frightening—it’s a different dimension that can play tricks on our senses.

McGuire makes fertile use of those familiar sensations, shooting every scrap of action from multiple angles for an extra slow and scary fun slide into the dark tank.

The title taps into the curious dread that comes with nocturnal aquatics, the feeling of not knowing how deep the deep end goes, and the uncertain possibility that you’re not alone in the pool.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Hollywood film about a swimming pool without the ancient game of Marco Polo being involved. Do they really play this antique pastime in the 21st century?

I’m skeptical.

Night Swim also includes the obligatory Camel Fight sequence, and sure enough, people escape death by a hair’s breadth. Having once been pinned to the bottom of a pool during a losing Camel Fight, I can confirm that this is the sort of horseplay that can ruin everyone’s good time.

No one wants to see your stupid lungs explode.