Revenge – Page 2

La Llorona (2019)

You can’t keep a good ghost down. Not when there’s justice to be meted out.

The titular spirit, who typically wanders the seaside mourning her deceased children in Mexican folklore, becomes a powerful avenger in the hands of Guatemalan filmmaker Jayro Bustamante.

In La Llorona, the vengeful ghost not only seeks retribution for the death of her offspring, but for entire villages of Guatemalan natives slaughtered and enslaved in the 1980s by General Enrique Monteverde (Julio Diaz), a military strongman currently on trial for genocide.

Now a delusional old paranoid, Enrique holes up in a spacious villa while outside the streets are stuffed with protestors, whose singing and chanting are a constant reminder of half-remembered atrocities.

Enrique’s sleep is troubled and he frequently sleepwalks through the house with a loaded pistol.

His steely wife Carmen (Margarita Kenefic) is determined to stand by her man, but their daughter Natalia (Sabrina de la Hoz), a doctor, is having doubts about her papa’s innocence.

With the arrival of Alma (Maria Mercedes Coroy), a beguiling Mayan maid, the stage is set and the Monteverde house is ready for its fall. Enrique is fascinated and troubled by the quiet girl with the long black hair, because she’s a dead ringer for one of his dead victims.

La Llorona is a riveting slow burner that draws substantial power from Bustamante’s steady-frame approach. Once he establishes a visually arresting tableau, he locks it down. There is almost no camera movement in the house and scenes run long with minimal dialogue.

This lack of flow effectively imprisons the viewer in the pressure cooker alongside the guilty parties, and it’s an unnerving experience.

After all, we’re not on trial here.

A House on the Bayou (2021)

Now here’s a movie that skips the main course and gets right to the Just Desserts.

As is so often the case these days, A House in the Bayou focuses on a family unit in turmoil, caused by a patriarch who can’t keep it in his pants.

John Chambers (Paul Schneider, from Parks & Recreation) is the unfaithful husband and father. His real estate agent wife, Jessica (Angela Sarafyan), is super pissed but doesn’t want to break-up the family.

Daughter Anna (Lia McHugh) is fearful of a divorce and having to attend separate Christmas dinners. I just assumed the last part.

Jessica packs her contentious clan off to bayou country in the hopes of getting past all the unpleasantness with a surprise vacation to a palatial plantation.

What a great idea!

Upon arrival, Anna meets Isaac (Jacob Lofland), a creepy boy who hangs out at the general store run by Grandpappy (Doug Van Liew), a creepy old geezer. Next thing you know, Isaac and Grandpappy are invited to dinner and hell can proceed to break loose.

Isaac is aptly named, because he has a similar vibe of righteousness as the leader of Stephen King’s Corn kids, not to mention access to a great deal of personal information for a hick from the sticks.

The clever teen also performs “magic tricks” like lighting candles without a match and bringing the family cat back to life.

Grandpappy tells the Chambers’ that Isaac “appeared out of the swamp one day” and the local rubes have been following his lead ever since.

This isn’t good news for a family starting over and learning to trust each other. “The Devil is watching you,” Grandpappy warns John.

Whether or not there are supernatural forces at work in A House on the Bayou, is a back-and-forth situation, but eventually lands squarely in the affirmative camp, with a clear-cut case of pagan idolatry unfolding in modern day Louisiana.

Feel free to use your spare time to figure out Isaac’s origin story. I’m sure it’s a whopper.

Writer-director Alex McAulay shuffles his clue cards with sufficient dexterity to keep a reasonably bright viewer guessing. The ending comes from deep left field, but even so, you probably won’t ask for your money back.

Editor’s Note: Cheating husband John is considering leaving his stunningly gorgeous wife in favor of a less attractive candidate. Doesn’t ring true, sorry.

The Resort (2021)

Is The Resort worth watching? Only as a last resort.

The glacial pacing is a major challenge. Nothing remotely frightening happens for like 45 minutes, and we’re left to tag along with one of the dullest character quartets ever assembled.

Seriously, these guys should have to study improv comedy or something. Entire scenes go by and we’re hard-pressed to remember anything that was done or said until the mayhem commences.

Lex (Bianca Haase) is hoping to write a book about a Hawaiian resort that closed after two years, “under mysterious circumstances.”

Her beard-o boyfriend Chris (Brock O’Hurn, who appears to have emerged from the same genetic material as the Hemsworth Brothers), springs for a ticket to Maui so they can explore the ruins of a vast luxury hotel complex in search of literary subject matter.

Along for the ride are two expendable friends, Sam (Michael Vlamis), an alcoholic asshole (gotta be one in every group), and Bree (Michelle Randolph), a flirty blonde (ditto).

After several days of travel and gum-flapping exposition, the group finally makes a helicopter landing at the titular destination, which turns out to be haunted by a ferocious specter known as “The Half-Faced Girl.”

The vengeful ghost exacts a 75% death rate in an efficient wave of mutilation, and Lex awakens in a hospital to a nosy detective who wants the whole story.

The (ten-minute?) sequence of the The Half-Faced Girl terrorizing these nimrods at the eerie, deserted resort is almost worth the downtime spent getting there. Heads are crushed, faces are peeled, and the dead rise with Raimi-esque abandon.

Writer-director Taylor Chien makes the rookie mistake of wasting too much of our valuable time on disposable characters. The Resort is not a flick we tune into for a Student Lounge discussion on what happens after we kick the bucket.

Fast-forward through the talking and traveling scenes, and start at their arrival on the island. It’ll save time and be way less annoying.

Animal Among Us (2019)

A very weird and cheap little film.

Animal Among Us kept me marginally enthralled through its entirety, and really, the best I can offer is that it’s weird and cheap, occasionally endearingly so, but mostly it’s a rolling mess.

Somewhere in the California wilderness lies Camp Merrymaker, a blighted spot that’s been closed for 15 years due to a couple kids getting mauled to death by a mysterious creature.

Anita Bishop (Larisa Oleynik) and her sister Poppy (Christine Donlon) are the cute caretakers of this forsaken forest community. They hope to reopen the ill-reputed summer camp with the help of Roland Baumgarner (Christian Oliver), the best-selling author who originally wrote about The Merrymaker Murderer case.

Editor’s Note: After the whole Friday The 13th debacle, why in God’s name would anyone with a grain of sense want to open a summer camp? Were they ever profitable? Just asking.

There’s a junk drawer of subplots spilling all over the place, and what starts out as Cat & Mouse with a monster in the woods, evolves into a revenge plot against the arrogant and faithless Baumgarner.

By no means is Animal Among Us compelling drama, but director John Woodruff and writer Jonathan Murphy pull a few rudimentary surprises out of an old, battered hat.

Their neatest cinematic trick is enlisting the talents of Christine Donlon as a sex-pot forest ranger, who seems to have wandered in from a steamy Cinemax thriller.

Donlon’s libidinous, unhinged performance works as an effective snare to the unaware, hopeful of bonus porn tableaux. (Cue saxophones)

And so the time passes.

Indeed, there is such a palpable sensation of delayed sexy time throughout, that the existence of a spicy director’s cut would surprise absolutely no one of this Earth.

With barely any gore and no actual nudity in the offing, Animal Among Us plays out like community theater Campground Gothic, as an evil, but determined family hangs on against all odds to preserve their vanishing way of life.

To be grudgingly honest, there is a smidgen of entertainment to be derived from witnessing this unstable combination of ludicrous script, wooden acting, and Craft Night special effects.

Keep your expectations as low as the budget and you’ll be fine.

Frankenstein: Day Of The Beast (2011)

Frankenstein: Day Of The Beast is the low-budget shocker being watched by the doomed audience in The Last Matinee when the maniac (played by Ricardo Islas, the writer-director of this film) goes on his cinematic killing rampage.

Truth be told, I was intrigued enough by the footage to give it a shot, and it turned out to be worth the effort.

In this version of the Frankenstein tale, Victor Frankenstein (Adam Stephenson) has fled to a remote island to wed his beloved Elizabeth (Michelle Shields).

Victor has employed a squad of mercenaries to keep her safe, but the monster (Tim Krueger, who’s quite good) has promised his creator that he would appear on his wedding night to take her.

Islas stays fairly faithful to Mary Shelley’s source material, but departs from the template in significant ways. This incarnation of the Frankenstein Monster is pure evil, with no grey area. He kills in extravagantly brutal fashion, bifuracting one unlucky guard with intestines on full display. Another gets his spine removed, and a blind man is forced to swallow his own cane.

The monster also eats human flesh, so there’s that. Apparently mangling his victims wasn’t sufficient to inspire terror. This guy bites faces off and rips throats out with his teeth.

How downright monstrous!

As the title implies, Frankenstein: Day Of The Beast is a more elemental take on a familiar story, one that doesn’t hold back on the blood and guts, and allows no sympathy for the monster, who doesn’t speak, but occasionally laughs cruelly.

The aforementioned budget limitations show up in various forms, from flimsy sets to terrible acting by supporting characters, but Islas clearly understands what makes Frankenstein’s creation so damned frightening. He is a relentless enemy who can’t be destroyed.

So what are you gonna do? As the vengeful Mohawk says to Max in The Road Warrior, “You can run, but you can’t hide.”

The Deeper You Dig (2019)

“Tell my mother what happened to me!”

“It was an accident!”

The admittedly tragic circumstance at the heart of The Deeper You Dig is indeed, an accident. What comes after is not. You would do well to pay attention.

Somewhere amidst the wintery rural recesses of upstate New York, Ivy Allen (Toby Poser) makes a living as a phony fortune teller, and apparently does well enough to support her 14-year-old daughter Echo (Zelda Adams), a sullen goth whose musical tastes include early 20th-century hit parade.

Just down the street, Kurt Miller (John Adams) is the new guy in town, fixing up a decrepit house in the hopes of a quick flip. This is all the setup we get before having to deal with a deadly event that traps all three characters into a single tense, tormented timeline.

Co-written and directed by Adams and Poser, and featuring their daughter, Zelda, The Deeper You Dig is a tight-as-a-drum domestic horror/occult revenge drama without an ounce of flab on it.

Kurt and Ivy’s parallel stories (him trying to escape a grim fate; her finding a missing daughter and rediscovering her gift), collide when Echo’s ghost comes a-haunting, effectively bedeviling Kurt by permanently fixing his radio to the Oldies Channel.

Meanwhile, Ivy interprets the signs left for her and finally makes direct contact with her daughter’s shade by mystical means.

The reunion scene in the forest, where Echo hovers above Ivy in the trees, is genuinely weird and otherworldly.

Major props to Toby Poser and John Adams (they even composed the screechy electronic score!) for concentrating not on their measly budget, but on inventing a dark and detailed world. Evildoers are not only punished here, they are recycled, reused, and renewed.

Fewer carbon footprints is a good thing.

Till Death (2021)

We’ve all had one of those nights. Maybe not quite as bad as the one in Till Death, but you know what I mean.

After an evening of sweet lovemaking at their secluded lake house, Emma (Megan Fox) awakens handcuffed to her very dead, attorney husband Mark (Eoin Macken).

As if this wasn’t enough of a predicament, the same thug (Callan Mulvey) that stabbed her during a robbery years before, is apparently dropping by to finish the job.

The vast majority of Till Death‘s running time tracks Emma’s excruciating adventures as she slides awkwardly into survival mode, with her late hubby serving as a constant ball and chain.

Director SK Dale and writer Jason Carvey make things rough on poor Emma, who proves to be more resilient than a powerful man’s trophy wife should be.

Tellingly, of all the items she has at her disposal, it’s Emma’s wedding dress that serves her best, both as bandage material, and as a travois for hauling a stiffening corpse around the frozen countryside.

Till Death works as a teeth-grinding thriller and as a visceral metaphor for the honeymoon being over in a big way. It’s in darkly comic top form when all the desperate parties are present and the cards are on the table—the same one Emma attempts to turn on her would-be assailants.

She was not a good wife. But Emma refuses to go down with the sinking matrimonial ship.

Lucky for her, she got custody of the survival instincts.

Seance (2021)

When you’re the new kid in school, it helps to be adopted by the popular clique, even if they’re into necromancy. Go along to get along, you know?

Seance is set at Edelvine Academy for Girls, a prestigious private learning institution with a recent opening, thanks to a student hopping out the window during a paranormal prank.

Editor’s Note: When are we going to outlaw pranks? Nothing good ever comes from pranks and people get hurt, disfigured, and killed all the damn time.

New student Camille Meadows (Suki Waterhouse) moves into the recently vacated room and gets picked on by the same Mean Girls who drove the previous occupant to jump.

Camille and the Mean Girls all end up in detention together, where an alliance of sorts is formed, and a seance is convened to see if any ghosts want to communicate.

Surprise! They do!

Featuring both a ghost and masked psychos bearing cutlery, Seance is smartly written and full of gradually revealed plot twists that take sinister shape under the guidance of writer-director Simon Barrett (You’re Next, Dead Birds).

There aren’t buckets of blood, but there’s a body count and a few memorable kills, including Bethany’s (Madisen Beaty) fluorescent tube tracheotomy.

It’s also a movie about duty and the bonds of friendship that run deeper than the need for acceptance within a group of nasty bitches.

Recommended! Start the new year off right.

Iron Sky (2012)

Nazis from the moon plan a planetary invasion in the Finnish production of Iron Sky. Directed by Timo Vuorensola, it’s an irreverent, low-budget space opera filmed in the same retro style as Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, that harkens back to cheesy old sci-fi serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers.

In an attempt to boost her flagging popularity, the President (Stephanie Paul, who looks and talks like Sarah Palin) sends James Washington (Christopher Kirby), an African-American model to the moon, where he’s captured by low-tech Nazis, who’ve been hiding out on the dark side since their defeat at the hands of the Axis Powers in 1945.

A foxy sympathetic Nazi scientist (Julia Dietze) takes a liking to Washington and gives him an Aryan makeover so that he can accompany her uber-ambitious fiance, Klaus Adler (Gotz Otto), on a scouting mission to Earth.

Adler wants nothing less than to be the new furhrer, resting control from sickly Wolfgang Kortzfleisch (Udo Kier), and perhaps, with the help of some wild analog technology, rule the galaxy.

Director Vuorensola and screenwriter Michael Kalesniko wisely chose to embrace their budget limitations, rather than hide them, and created a highly stylized model universe that almost glows with soft-focus close ups of heroes and villains, playing out against a hulking backdrop of obsolete machinery.

It’s also funny as hell, with a pinch of Dr. Strangelove satire, as when the president yells at members of the U.N. for having secret space programs of their own.

When they protest that she also broke her word, she says matter-of-factly, “We always break ours. That’s just what we do.”

Apparently, there is a sequel to Iron Sky released in 2019 titled Iron Sky: The Coming Race, with many of the same principals attached.

I will be watching the skies.

What Keeps You Alive (2018)

Talk about a relationship with serious obstacles.

Jules (Brittany Allen) and Jackie (Hannah Anderson) are a married gay couple who go off for a romantic weekend to a well-appointed house in rural Canada that belongs to Jackie’s family.

In horror movies, romantic weekends are second only to make-out pot parties as an invitation to trauma. What Keeps You Alive is no exception.

What’s different here is the source of the threat. Soon after their arrival, the couple is visited by Sarah (Martha MacIsaac), a local who recognizes Jackie, but calls her by the name “Megan.”

The next morning Jackie tries to murder Jules by pushing her off a cliff. This unexpected development caused my friend Kaja to remark, “I guess she fell for the wrong girl.”

Jules does not die in the fall, so Jackie begins tracking her, shouting conciliatory messages about how sorry she is, and that she wants to take Jules home.

The single scariest moment in What Keeps You Alive is when Jules, hiding behind a tree from Jackie, sees her wife’s flat emotionless face while she’s yelling endearments.

Presently, Jackie gets tired of playing the concerned mate and informs the unseen Jules that she knows the woods like the back of her hand and escape is impossible.

The sexual dynamic between the two lovers hovers over the carnage, occasionally referenced in flashback, as writer-director Colin Minihan explores the depths of betrayal that Jackie has orchestrated.

There’s plenty of nail-biting action, including a riveting rowboat chase across the lake, that will keep your hand close to the panic button.

Minihan alternates between closeups of injured and frightened Jules running through the house, and long establishing shots of the unforgiving terrain, effectively adding weight to the already considerable tension.

There are enough twists and reversals to keep even the most astute thriller fan off balance, and both Allen and Anderson bring everything they have to their respective roles.

We’re predisposed to root for Jules, who proves tougher than she looks, but Jackie’s unfolding madness is spellbinding. She shifts and sheds personalities seemingly at will to keep Jules on the defensive. Whether she’s cajoling, cursing, or crying it’s impossible to get an accurate read on Jackie.

Mercenary? Maniac? Misunderstood?

At one point, Jules demands an answer. “What happened to you? Was it your father? Did he do something to you?” she asks.

“It was nature, not nurture,” Jackie answers deadpan.

Definitely worth your time.