I’m going to make a bold prediction that Dark Harvest becomes a Halloween movie-night staple.
Alternately luminous and vicious, Dark Harvest is a captivating adaptation of Norman Partridge’s 2006 novel about a cursed small town that must destroy a local monster every time the calendar hits October 31.
In a seasonal swash of ultra violence, the legendary Sawtooth Jack, a pumpkin-headed demon, rises from the cornfield and is hunted by a posse of hungry high school boys. Jack must be killed before the church bells chime midnight, or the community will be plagued by storms and misfortune for an entire year.
It’s a tradition, you understand.
At harvest time, the boys from the local senior class are locked up for three days without food so they’re properly motivated to bring down Sawtooth Jack, a frightening and deadly foe that is nonetheless loaded with candy.
Director David Slade and writer Michael Gilio conjure magic, madness, and terror in a coming-of-age tale that pounces on the viewer like a midnight collaboration between Ray Bradbury (luminous) and Joe Lansdale (vicious)—with a bit of Hunger Games thrown in after some focus-group input.
Editor’s Note: The kids attend Bradbury High School.
Dark Harvest could have used more exposition and context, but the fevered sepia-toned sights of raving teenagers versus an uncanny enemy, is first-rate cinematic mayhem that actually does justice to its literary origins.
Make it a welcome addition to your annual festival of fright films, m’kay?
Welcome to another edition of I Should Have Stayed In the City.
In Leaving D.C., a surprisingly anxiety inducing found-footage thriller, writer-director Josh Criss stars as Mark Klein, a 20-year veteran of working like a donkey as a technical writer in our nation’s capitol.
After achieving some measure of financial independence, Mark buys his “dream house” that comes with 17 acres of land—smack dab in the middle of Nowhere, West Virginia.
To chart his return to nature, Mark sends video updates to the members of his OCD support group back in Washington. These start out in relatively benign fashion, but it soon becomes apparent that our humble narrator is obsessed with the idea that he’s not alone in this remote wilderness.
Every night at a little after three in the morning, some form of disturbance takes place that causes the already anxious Mark Klein to devolve into a nervous wreck, despite the fact that he’s installed a state-of-the-art security system and even bought a handgun.
As an OCD sufferer myself, I found Mark’s slippery slope into extreme agitation a comically familiar one, as rational thinking is replaced with desperation and poor decision making.
The weirdest manifestation Mark has to deal with is flute playing right outside his window. In the middle of the woods. Miles from his nearest neighbor.
That would be enough for me to abandon ship, but Mark digs in his heels.
I don’t think I’m spoiling anything when I reveal that our man Mark is not up to the task of solving this mystery.
Instead, it solves him.
We are enthusiastically recommending Leaving D.C., and let it be a lesson to you.
You think you know who your friends are? Would you bet your life on it?
Certainly the most frightening aspect of director Halina Reijn’s Bodies, Bodies, Bodies is that every relationship in a movie about lifelong friends under pressure is so damn fragile.
Or in some cases, nonexistent.
Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) is bringing her new girlfriend Bee (Maria Bakalova) to a magnificent mansion owned by the family of her best friend, Dave (Pete Davidson).
So there’s a hurricane brewing and a bunch of Richie Rich kids have the run of a big house. What could go wrong?
Everything!
While playing a game of Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, in which someone “kills” people in the dark, and the remaining players have to figure out whodunnit, Dave the host turns up with his throat cut.
There are seven remaining party guests—including one who isn’t present for most of the movie—and all it takes is one grisly corpse and abundant cocaine for a bunch of 20-somethings to turn on each other like rabid rats.
Outside a storm is raging. Inside, there are accusations, confessions, and pleas for mercy, followed by the thunk of more bodies hitting the floor.
The zeal with which these “friends” tear into each other could be blamed on the nose candy, but inevitably comes back around to the most obvious conclusion. Nobody knows anybody. Not that well.
If you’re just too ADD for Agatha Christie, Bodies, Bodies, Bodies should keep you guessing to the end, or at least till something shinier comes along.
With Influencer, writer-director Kurtis David Harder (Spiral) successfully binds dazzling visual elements with an intricately plotted story that just keeps twisting.
Madison (Emily Tennant), a beautiful travel blogger and media influencer, is unhappily flying solo on a backpacking trip through Thailand, when she meets CW (Cassandra Naud), a free-spirited adventurer who offers to show her around.
The mysterious CW is the polar opposite of pale blonde Madison, most notably due to a prominent birthmark on her face, though she too is unmistakably attractive.
The new-found friends explore the intoxicatingly exotic landscape until CW shockingly abandons Madison on an island with no food or water, and assumes her identity.
We learn that CW’s diabolical modus operandi has been used before, and spend the majority of Influencer riding shotgun with an extremely complicated woman with an apparent ax to grind against alluring travel bloggers.
The tone throughout reminded me of Patricia Highsmith, the author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley, novels about unlikely and conflicted villains marching to their own drummers.
Cassandra Naud, an actress with an actual facial birthmark, absolutely owns Influencer as an often inscrutable psychopath with ninja Photoshop skills. We might even discover a wee sliver of empathy for CW, a testament to the multiple layers of nuance that Naud brings to every scene.
Quick-thinking and resourcefulness are usually attributes we admire in a leading character. Is it unthinkable that it’s a Bad Guy (Gal)?
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.
Time for another installment of The Babysitter Saga, where we get to know the folks minding our precious offspring, while Mom and Dad sip martinis beneath a romantic moon, in search of dormant passion.
Spoonful of Sugar introduces us to Millicent (Morgan Saylor), an awkward college student hired to keep tabs on Johnny (Danilo Crovetti), a nonverbal autistic boy with a ton of allergies.
Johnny’s mother Rebecca (Kat Foster) is a successful writer married to Jacob (Myko Olivier), a hunky, shirtless carpenter that works from home.
Yes, this is a basic recipe for any number of Cinemax potboilers. Fortunately, director Mercedes Bryce Morgan and writer Leah Saint Marie have bigger fish to fry.
Nothing in the film is what it appears to be—it’s much, much worse, often to the point of absolute lunacy.
Millicent seems a virginal innocent, charged with caring for a seriously damaged child in an astronaut costume, whose parents are at the end of their ropes.
And that’s when Morgan brings her ingredients to a furious boil. Jacob and Millicent explore their animal attraction, even as the latter self-medicates with generous doses of LSD.
Historically (hysterically?), it could be argued that the combination of sex and drugs transforms Millicent into something evil, but the evidence presented indicates she’s already had a thriving career in the field, leaving a discreet stash of bodies in her wake.
It’s a calling she shares with young Johnny.
What ensues is a surreal, nightmarish custody battle, with both parties revealing a heart of darkness.
Millicent and Rebecca square off centerstage in a bloody contest of parenting styles, competing for Jacob, and the love of a mute boy with increasingly special needs of his own.
The outrageous extremes and shocking tableaux favored by Mercedes Bryce Morgan slow cook into a marvelously harrowing stew of taboos that satisfies a craving we didn’t even know we had.
Spoonful of Sugar is potentially dangerous medicine. Please consult your mad doctor before ingesting.
Horror Romance. Seems simple enough, but there are thousands of things that can go wrong, and usually do.
Absence of chemistry between the leads; indulgent editing, inane dialogue, and indifferent art direction, to name a few usual suspects.
Director Luca Guadagnino—along with screenwriter David Kajganich, and cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan—makes magic happen on all fronts in Bones and All, an absorbing and tragic love story, based on a YA novel by Camille DeAngelis.
The moods here shift like unstable weather. We’re following a narrative that’s by turns gruesome, seductive, and visually intoxicating, even when the protagonists are merely rambling down the road, which happens a fair amount during the slow-burning, 2-hour running time.
Or when they’re eating people.
Yes, we are talking about young cannibals in love, but don’t have a cow, man. Weathering the outré scenes is a small price to pay for a unique experience.
As for the subject matter, cannibalism fits snugly into the metaphor drawer under Dark Afflictions.
To say that Maren Yearly (Taylor Russell) is a little different than the other girls at her high school, would be a vicious understatement.
While playing slap and tickle with friends at a slumber party, Maren, the new girl, mistakenly bites down on some finger food, forcing she and her nervous daddy (Andre Holland) to quickly relocate—again.
Soon after, Maren awakens to find Pops has abandoned her, leaving behind a cassette tape he made to help her understand her “condition.”
With little cash and no other options, Maren heads to Minnesota in search of her mother’s relatives and hopefully a sense of her own identity.
During her journey she meets Sully (Mark Rylance), a seemingly benign drifter who identifies her as a fellow “eater,” a small cabal of carnivores that strongly prefer human hocks to anything raised on the farm.
Sully, a smiling and helpful ghoul who feeds opportunistically, is a recurring nightmare for Maren, made flesh and bloody by Rylance’s riveting portrayal.
The next “eater” she encounters is Lee (Timothee Chalamet), a wiry skate dude with a lousy dye job driving a stolen blue pickup. This one sticks, and they drive off together like Thelma and Louise on a second date.
Luca Guadagnino makes bold style and story choices throughout Bones and All, and his judgment is razor-sharp. He grants the camera enough room to shape heartbreaking tableaux of faded beauty amidst a backdrop of rural American poverty.
Like Steinbeck characters, somehow retaining their humanity in the face of crushing circumstances, Maren and Lee are devoted and determined to carve out a bloody little life for themselves, no matter the price.
While they bear some resemblance to other fugitive movie couples (Sailor and Lula in Wild At Heart, Caleb and Mae in Near Dark, Kit and Holly in Badlands), these kids are a different breed.
Hunger is present in every word and action. It’s a black current that soaks into the fabric of a strikingly gorgeous film, and the actors, especially Taylor Russell, handle that internal struggle with amazing grace.
My wife (former Theater major, I’ll have you know!) remarked that Russell is flawless, and gives one of the most naturalistic performances she’s seen in recent years.
All that’s based on a single viewing. There will be more to follow.
Bones and All is an unexpected trunk of perilous wonders, with loneliness and loss lurking among shiner coins such as love and freedom.
It’s an emotional risk to sort it all out, but worth taking if we want to get better.
I hate waking up in a cornfield with no memory of getting there. So, right away, I was a little reluctant to proceed with Escape the Field, a succinctly titled puzzler from English filmmaker Emerson Moore.
Six people regain consciousness amongst an endless jungle of corn. They’re each equipped with a single item (lantern, matches, water, knife, etc), and together must reason their way out of ear shot.
The field is loaded with booby traps, and there is a killer shrewdly disguised as corn, lurking about and making life miserable for everyone.
Sam (Jordan Clare Robbins), who is clearly the brains of this bunch, quickly devours clues and discovers an evolving map that presumably leads to a less starchy environment.
Joining Sam on her doomed patrol, is Ryan (Shane West, in the Adam Baldwin role), a seething, guilt-ridded soldier; Tyler (Theo Rossi, in the Robert Beltran role), a smiling divorced father who develops a crush on Sam, and Cameron (Tahirah Sharif), an emotionally unstable British intelligence agent.
There are two other people in their little posse, but they don’t do anything except die.
After dodging Corn Man and and assorted deadly pitfalls, Sam begins to see a pattern. Someone is obviously watching their progress through the deadly gauntlet.
But who? And what do they want?
Don’t hold your breath waiting for answers. As more than one person remarks during Escape the Field, “there’s no way out.”
This becomes apparent at around the 30-minute mark, leaving another 58 minutes of futile floundering in the field.
Writer-director Emerson Moore surely should have known that we’d get fed up with all this friggin’ corn.
In the case of Escape the Field, I would stick with the old horror movie adage, “Steer clear of the Moore.”
Chef’s kiss for The Menu, a daily special filled with dark delights.
Directed and dressed with considerable panache by Mark Mylod, from a script by Will Tracy and Seth Reiss, The Menu is pitch-black comedy, skewering pretentious food snobs like so much shish kabob.
Twelve affluent diners are picked up by ferry and transported to Hawthorn Island, a self-contained culinary colony dedicated to growing, raising, and cooking food that’s showcased at its exclusive Hawthorn restaurant.
Here, Chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) prepares mind-boggling tasting menus for $1200 a head. But this particular evening’s service is special. There will be no coming back for seconds.
In fact, there will be no coming back at all! Class warfare has seldom been served up with so many diabolical surprises.
Among the doomed diners are the Queen Bee food critic (Janet McTeer); a has-been Hollywood star (John Leguizamo); a multi-cultural trio of blowhard bros (Mark St. Cyr, Arturo Castro, Rob Yang), and fawning foodie fanboy Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), accompanied by his dazzling date, Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy).
Like a master showman in the guise of a humble cook, Chef Slowik meticulously describes each course. While doing so, he drops not-so-cryptic hints about the various axes he has to grind with each guest.
And when Slowik announces that there will be no bread served with the evening meal, because of its necessity to a working-class diet, the assembled eaters become even more uneasy.
Many timely topics are trotted out in The Menu—celebrity worship, commitment to ideals, pitiful power plays—and they all get seared by the heat of righteous service industry anger.
The quieter scenes of Slowik and Margot, slowly revealing themselves to each other, give us a breather between the mayhem of each successive course, until the feast’s fiery finale unfolds.
Margot wisely orders a cheeseburger to go. No surprise, it’s delicious!
From its Read Window voyeurism to Julia’s (Maika Monroe) resemblance to classic Hitchcock blonde Tippi Hedren, Watcher is a first-rate homage to the 20th century’s finest suspense filmmaker.
Best of all, it’s exquisitely crafted by writer-director Chloe Okuno, who orchestrates grinding fear and dread for a serial killer’s potential victim, a woman who knows too much in a country where she doesn’t speak the language.
Julia and her husband Francis (Karl Glusman) have just moved to Bucharest for his work. Julia, a one-time actress, is left to entertain herself in their new apartment for long periods of time while Francis wheels and deals.
Right off the bat, Julia is unnerved by a silhouette in a window across the street, a figure that seems to be fixated in her direction. In what becomes a pattern, she tries to tell Francis about the suspicious person, only to have hubby minimize her fears.
Meanwhile, women alone in their apartments are turning up headless. Yeah, thanks for your concern, Francis! Probably nothing to worry about.
There isn’t an ounce of flab on Watcher. Dialogue is minimal. Each frame is a precision brick in a wall of menace that threatens to fall on Julia at any moment. Precarious angles of endless invention are used to create a perpetual male gaze on Julia, a person seen, but not heard, due to a language (and gender) barrier.
Maika Monroe (It Follows, The Guest) continues to bloom, transcending the genre’s Final Girl status and emerging as a reluctant action hero, correctly channeling frustration and rage into not only self-preservation, but victory.
Make no mistake: in the hands of a lesser actress this film would not have achieved such thrilling peaks. As the unwilling object of a madman’s desire, Monroe is charismatic, capable, and committed to each character moment, as only someone fighting for their life can be.
Julia’s determination to find her tormentor and destroy her victimhood provides serious octane in Watcher, a sleek thriller that both embraces the Hitchcock tradition, and flips the camera back onto the audience (and Hitchcock), as if to ask, “What are you looking at?”
Definitely a Top Ten film of 2022. See it straight away.
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