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SPIRIT HALLOWEEN is Hauntingly Wholesome Good Time!
The costume superstore chain that’s both a beacon of Spooky Season and sign of our post-retail dystopia gets its own movie!
When they announced a film based on Spirit Halloween, the costume superstore chain that has become both a beacon of Spooky Season and sign of our post retail brick and mortar dystopia, I felt like this was a movie meant for me. I am not going to lie, I am THAT person who has basically made Fall, and Halloween in particular their entire personality. That being said, I usually spend my days leading up to the first Spirit store opening checking social media, looking to see what exclusive merch the stores that have already opened are carrying this year, and hoping to score a few. Hitting play on the film based on that store that meant that to me, I hoped for the best, and to be completely honest I was pleasantly surprised at what I discovered when I watched what has to be one of the oddest IP tie-ins to date.
For a store that basically relies on selling costumes and merch based on various other intellectual properties, shockingly they are nowhere to be seen here. I guess this is probably due to licensing among other headaches, but that said the film does take its queues from two big ones Stranger Things and Five Nights at Freddy’s. The film centers on three longtime teenage friends Carson, Jake and Bo. When Carson laments that this year ‘he’s too old to trick or treat’, Jake hatches a plan to keep the spooky spirit alive and spend Halloween night in a Spirit Halloween store. It just so happens the site of that Spirit Halloween, in what appears to be an abandoned Toys R Us is haunted every Halloween by a cursed spirit (Christopher Lloyd). He can possess their trademark animatronics, but not a living person unless they are unconscious. Throughout the night the friends argue, fight the possessed animatronics, all while eventually uniting in a mega wholesome story of friendship and family.
Spirit Halloween thankfully feels less like a commercial and more like a charming yearly Halloween special that you’d catch on Freeform. They don’t beat you over the head with the store’s name, and given Jake’s love of all things Halloween it feels more organic than I was expecting. The three leads honestly are decent and never really falter in their roles, while the clear standout of the young cast is Carson’s sister Kate (Marissa Reyes) who comes to save the boys, only to find herself stuck in a store surrounded by possessed animatronics. Also, did I mention Jake’s mom is played by Josie herself — Rachael Leigh Cook? While some of the seams of the indie production show themselves, when it comes to some of the more ambitious special effects sequences – there’s a real charm and wholesomeness to this film that will allow you to overlook its shortcomings.
I am going to be honest, Spirit Halloween downright surprised me with its whimsically nostalgic premise that was punctuated by both scary and heartwarming moments. It was a bit more family friendly than I was expecting, but its message of one kid’s love of Halloween essentially being the narrative engine of this story, gave the film a real heart that is usually reserved for its more Christmas-y counterparts. I think tapping into the lost trend of the Halloween Special, which this film definitely attempts to resurrect in its own way, delivering a spine chillingly wholesome good time that every Halloween adult, who was once a Halloween kid. Needless to say while I am terrified of the IP trend this may have put into motion, with stores now getting films, I couldn’t think of a better store, or a better scenario to start with.
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Blu-Ray/4K Double Pack: WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE and THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
Producer George Pal’s Ultra Sci-Fi Efforts Goes Ultra High-Def
Science fiction on film wouldn’t have been the same without uber-producer George Pal. Born and raised in Hungary, Pal created “Puppetoons,” first-gen animation involving replacement technology (a decades earlier precursor to Laika’s efforts in animation). The rise of Nazism in Western Europe led to Pal, like so many other filmmakers, to choose relocation in the United States over remaining in an increasingly tenuous, dangerous, destabilizing Europe. Pal continued producing Puppetoons in Hollywood through the 1940s, justifiably winning an honorary Oscar as a result, before turning to producing and eventually directing a series of science-fiction and fantasy films that redefined an often dismissed or ignored genre on film.
Pal’s best remembered for the 1953 adaptation of H.G. Wells’s seminal science-fiction novel, The War of the Worlds, transplanting the late 19th-century setting of Wells’s novel from England to contemporary America. Influenced at least in part by Orson Welles’s radio adaptation of his namesake’s novel, Pal, director Byron Haskin (The Power, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, The Naked Jungle), and their visual effects collaborators crafted a truly mesmerizing tale of alien invasion. Swapping out Wells’ original conception of the advanced war machines, three-legged, ambulatory vehicles equipped with death rays and piloted by mostly unseen Martians, Pal employed an ingenious alternative: the alien ships, mixing the anatomy of a manta ray and a cobra head, float above the ground via electromagnetic rays.
While meant to be invisible, those “rays” often couldn’t hide the wires suspending the alien war machines as they destroyed huge swaths of countryside and cities alike, but that, like so much of pre-digital effects work, retains much of its charms, highlighting both the craftsmanship involved in creating and filming the startlingly conceived miniatures and the limits of ‘50s-era technology. That audiences then and in subsequent generations could and did suspend their disbelief whenever the wires made an appearance says as much about audience desire as it does about those technological limits.
And with exquisitely memorable sound effects bordering on the terrifying and a more than adequate cast centered on Gene Barry’s science-hero, Dr. Clayton Forrester, and Ann Robinson as Sylvia Van Buren, the president and only member of the Dr. Clayton Forrester Fan Club, along with a who’s who of ‘50s-era character actors, including Les Tremayne as the appropriately named General Mann, fat-free storytelling that borders on the ruthlessly efficient and, at least by today’s standards, risible pretensions to connect Wells’s novel to Christianity and a god that’s both indifferent (allowing the Martians to land and wreak havoc) and when he’s grown bored by the carnage, merciful (the bacteria/germs that prove to be the undoing of the Martians), it’s easy to see why The War of the Worlds, presented here in 4K for the first time, has remained both a genre-best entry and continued to delight, amuse, and frighten audiences for more than seven decades.
While The War of the Worlds was a commercial and critical hit that allowed Pal and his imagination practically free rein over the next decade, but two years before Pal released The War of the Worlds into movie theaters, scarring generations of impressionable children and their parents, he produced two nascent science-fiction films, Destination Space, notable mostly for its then cutting-edge visual effects, The War of the Worlds wouldn’t have received the green light to move forward into production without the box-office success of Pal’s previous science-fiction effort, When Worlds Collide, just two years earlier.
Based on the otherwise forgotten 1933 novel co-written by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie, When Worlds Collide essentially created the tropes, traditions, and conventions of the apocalyptic disaster film. Without When Worlds Collide, specifically Pal’s adaptation, Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich might not have found their way to Hollywood and the mega-budgeted disaster genre they remade in their own image over the last twenty-five years. While imagining a scenario without When Worlds Collide borders on pure speculation, there’s no denying its significant influence on both the sub-genre and the filmmakers who’ve subsequently defined and redefined that sub-genre.
From the standpoint of 2022, though, it’s hard not to see where When Worlds Collide stumbles, falls, and ultimately fails. Certainly the visual effects border on the unpersuasive (the production team won an Academy Award for Special Effects), the “science” outlined in the film ludicrous (less excusable, but still worth the benefit of the doubt), but it’s in the conscious or unconscious decision to center the entire film on Americans strictly of the Caucasian persuasion that repeatedly stands out, suggesting that When Worlds Collide exists in a parallel universe where America was founded strictly by and for Europeans and the history familiar to elementary and high school students (e.g., slavery, genocide of Native peoples, the Civil War/Reconstruction, etc.) didn’t, in fact, happen.
It’s just as easy to imagine neither Pal nor his collaborators giving much, if any, thought to the idea that only the best and the whitest were worth saving when the worlds (actually a heretofore unknown rogue star headed for Earth) collide, wiping out humanity and necessitating a risky, dangerous attempt to relocate to a newly arrived planet, Zyra, to the solar system. Add to that the usual religious flavor/fervor and When Worlds Collide all too often feels like the unfortunate product of a casually racist time and place that should remain in the last century and not unburied, given a new suit of clothes, and presented as an objective reflection of permanent, unchangeable reality.
Extras — The War of the Worlds
- Audio Commentary with Gene Barry and Ann Robinson
- Audio Commentary with Joe Dante, Bob Burns, and Bill Warren
- The Sky is Falling: Making The War of the Worlds
- H.G. Wells: The Father of Science Fiction
- The Mercury Theater on the Air Presets: The War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast from 1938
- Original Theatrical Trailer
Extras — When Worlds Collide
- Original Theatrical Trailer
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Fantastic Fest 2022 Ranked! Cinapse’s Top 5 Films
Our team of six submitted their ranked choices for best of the festival
The first real Fantastic Fest since 2019 is over, and all that pent up energy of three years missing the best genre fest in the world crescendoed into eight days of filmic mayhem. There were shows, debates, parties, and concerts, but we’re here to talk about the movies.
Most of us saw over 20, and a few caught more than 30, so we worked to distill down the breadth of what we saw into the top five team favorites. Using ranked choice each participant submitted their five films, with first place getting 5 points, second 4, etc., and then the total was added up to give us this year’s picks.
Without further ado, here is the best of the fest.
1. BONES AND ALL
Bones and All is this author’s favorite film of the festival and will definitely end up among my favorites of the year. It was the number one pick for three of the six participants in this ranking.
“The cannibals of Bones and All who thrive out of spite gutturally speak to those whose behavior or way of life has been struck from the acceptable societal norms of Reaganite America. Whether it’s homeless veterans abandoned after Vietnam; neurodivergent individuals who were cast out of state-funded hospitals en masse; or the LGBTQ+ community plagued by HIV/AIDS, all to heterosexual indifference; all were victims shunned and scored to a deadly degree. The result is Luca Guadagnino’s most lush and romantic epic yet, one that recognizes the defiant and terrifying beauty at the heart of pursuing forbidden desires that aren’t our choices to make but are inseparable from who we are as human beings.”
Read Julian’s full review here.
2. Vesper
“Vesper is the special kind of film that I’ll find myself recommending to people many years from now as a brilliant example of what independent science fiction can look and feel like with visionary filmmakers like Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper at the helm. It’s getting a real US release from IFC, so I hope a wide audience will get a chance to experience this film for themselves. Seeing it on the big screen at Fantastic Fest certainly allowed it to wash over me and illicit tears of hope, but I imagine Vesper will also play strongly in more intimate venues as well. Fans of independent sci-fi and hope amidst poison should seek out Vesper with a quickness.”
Read Ed’s full review here.
3. Decision to Leave
The team didn’t write a full review of Decision to Leave (yet), so I’ll provide my brief thoughts here.
Park Chan-Wook is a master filmmaker with a classical style who has frequently devoted his talents to depravity, shock, and revenge. Decision to Leave is quite different; still just as controlled and thoughtful, but much more gentle, funny, and touching. It’s a love story that channels Hitchcock more than any of his other films, and mostly eschews action for slow tension building. It’s an incredible film, and quite a departure for Director Park — but a welcome one.
4. H4Z4RD
“Several days into a festival, you cry for films that will not only engage you but energize you. A viewing of H4Z4RD is tantamount to having a set of jumper cables hooked up to your chair. Showcasing a technical flex, H4Z4RD is a blackly comic heist thriller, that barrages the senses with thumping beats and fast, frenetic action.”
Read Jon’s full review here.
5. Hunt
“Beginning with a Tenet-esque sequence in and out of a theater in the heart of Washington, DC, Hunt plunges audiences into a late Cold War world of snipers, spies, and bloody double-crosses. Drawing from a wide-ranging history of action and procedural films ranging from Heat to Infernal Affairs to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Lee’s debut film breathlessly shifts between expansive and claustrophobic action. Amidst these rapid-fire scenes are dense moments rooted in the intricacies of North/South Korean political relations, scenes that benefit from a more nuanced understanding of decades of geopolitical conflict but successfully land due to the emotional stakes Lee establishes for his central rivals.”
Read Julian’s full review here.
Honorable Mentions:
Here are, ranked by amount of points the movie received, everything that was on the team’s list but didn’t make the top five:
Banshees of Inisherin
Venus
Project Wolf Hunting
Bad City
Huesera
All Jacked Up and Full of Worms
Hellraiser
Holy Spider
Smoking Causes Coughing
The Five Devils
Medusa Deluxe
Nightsiren -
Fantastic Fest 2022: ATTACHMENT is an Insightful Blend of Queer and Religious Horror
A trio of committed performances balances two worthy subjects of terror in Gabriel Bier Gislason’s debut feature
After a meet-cute in the library at her university in Denmark, study-abroad student Leah (Ellie Kendrick) and former children’s programming actress Maja (Josephine Park) begin a whirlwind romance. When Leah injures her leg after a mysterious seizure ahead of a trip back home to London, Maja decides to follow Leah back home to care for her. Leah welcomes Maja into her flat, located above the home of Leah’s orthodox mother Chana (Sofie Gråbøl) in the Hasidic neighborhood of Stamford Hill. As Maja struggles to navigate the traditions of her partner’s mother and the expectations of their neighborhood, she must also contend with the supernatural forces that may be at the root of Leah’s worsening condition.
While there are many religious horror films, it’s rare to see films that don’t use the tropes and trappings of their faith-based subject to carry a weak story, that don’t center around a crisis of faith as the main character arc, or don’t attempt to use their film as a method of conversion. I was nervous heading into Attachment, a horror film that features both Queer and religious themes; there’s fertile territory worth exploring in either subject, but either the LGBTQ+ community or the Hasidic community (or both) risk being othered as a source of the film’s horror. Writer-director Gabriel Bier Gislason skillfully balances each of his subject matters, exploring the contradictions and compassion at the core of each with sincerity and dramatic weight. Neither religion nor orientation is made to suffer at the expense of the other for the sake of the story. Instead, each is seen as a crucial facet of the main characters’ identities, with both playing important roles in confronting the supernatural evil afflicting Maja.
Much of the film is centered around the fascinating character dynamics between the lead couple and the religious mother who challenges them. Both Maja and Chana want the best for Leah, and as Maja uncovers Chana’s past as a woman who also hails from Denmark, they realize both have more in common with one another than they think; however, the traditions of Chana’s Hasidic faith are as much of a wedge in Maja and Chana’s contentious relationship as Chana’s growing realization of daughter Leah’s orientation. Each of the actresses deftly navigates the nuances of their characters throughout the film. Park’s Maja struggles to reckon her headstrong and outspoken nature with Chana and Leah’s more reserved approaches to life, and Maja riskily thrusts herself headfirst into Hasidic culture in order to provide a needed helping hand to both her partner and their mother. As Leah, Kendrick faces a classic trope of a more secular daughter reckoning her faith and relationship with her sole parent with their emerging identity, risking being forced to choose between two equal kinds of love. Gråbøl turns in a powerhouse performance as Leah’s mother Chana, who reveals herself as having many similar traits as both her daughter and her partner, but has willingly followed a faithful life in order to pursue her own higher sense of belonging and fulfillment.
Gislason’s screenplay manages to explore the intricacies of these characters in compelling ways, while also delivering on the scares audiences expect from a horror film. Unfolding in a fashion that echoes Rosemary’s Baby, Maja’s immersion into Hasidic faith (by way of welcome appearances by character actor David Dencik) gradually awakens her to the realization that all isn’t right with Leah and Chana. From creaks in the night to seizures to poisonings, many of the horrors of Attachment seem rooted in the toxic relationship between the central mother and daughter, until the religious horror at the story’s core makes itself very well known. The film’s pivot into externalized supernatural horror doesn’t cheapen the story that came before it. Rather, it augments the actions of Chana and Maja in ways that further their emotional complexity. By uniting Queer and Religious Horror, Gislason’s film recognizes how the parts of us that may be condemned or othered by the communities we belong to are in fact our greatest strengths (and attachments) to them.
Anchored by dedicated performances by a trio of skilled actresses, Gabriel Bier Gislason’s debut feature film successfully balances the tensions of Queer romance, religion, mother-daughter relationships, and outright supernatural horror.
Attachment had its Texas premiere at Fantastic Fest 2022, with a future release coming courtesy of Shudder.
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Fantastic Fest 2022: H4Z4RD is a Fast and Frenetic Thrill-Ride
Jonas Govaerts delivers controlled chaos in this blackly comedic, hyperactive heist thriller
Several days into a festival, you cry for films that will not only engage you but energize you. A viewing of H4Z4RD is tantamount to having a set of jumper cables hooked up to your chair. Showcasing a technical flex, H4Z4RD is a blackly comic heist thriller, that barrages the senses with thumping beats and fast, frenetic action.
The film’s hook is that it is entirely set in, and occasionally around a car. A heavily modified Lexus to be precise. The newly dipped and heavily customized vehicle is the prize and joy of Noah (Dimitri ‘Vegas’ Thivaios). He starts his day giving her a clean and polish, before zipping off across Antwerp to pick up his daughter and girlfriend, dropping them off at school and work in quick succession. This leaves Noah free to swing by and catchup with his old friend Carlos (Jeroen Perceval) who, freshly released from a 3-year stint in jail, has a new criminal enterprise that requires Noah’s help. They pick up fellow ex-con Kluddes (Frank Lammers), whose greased fingers and slovenly manner contrast with the pristine interior of Noah’s car and his cool manner. He directs them to a house in an upscale neighborhood where Noah’s remit is simple. Keep an eye out while they rob the place and be the driver. Preoccupied by a crack in his windscreen, the homeowners return and what should be a smooth heist goes south rapidly. A frantic escape in a shower of bullets leaves them with plenty of cleanup. But Noah’s day goes from bad to worse as he finds his daughter has been kidnapped by the people they robbed, and he has to race against time to reclaim the stolen merchandise, and reunite his crew, for a reckoning that he hopes will save his daughter.
From the moment of the heist, ever increasing amounts of shit keep hitting the fan. Garbage men, Russians, drag queens, a wolf on the loose, and even schoolchildren, all seem to have it in for Noah and his car. The script from Trent Haaga showcases the warped sensibility present in his previous efforts Deadgirl and Cheap Thrills. Absurdist action, hard hitting violence, and a warped sense of humor, including raps about sexual misdemeanors and wifi, Hitler-mustaches, and a scene which challenges Titane in terms of depicting affection for an automobile. These farcical interludes offer essential respite from the frantic and frenetic activity that propels the story along. Warp speed effects kick in as the car hurtles from problem A to problem B, accompanied by the ever present sounds of thumping electronic beats from the 2000s. A maelstrom of misery for Noah, imbued with a suitably brooding presence Dimitri ‘Vegas’ Thivaios. A man of few words, he deftly drives home how Noah knows his car and these streets, yet also manages to work in some tender touches to humanize him, and his plight. Perceval gleefully grates as a dim aspiring ‘rapper’ who provides much of the comic relief as he’s haplessly along for this wild ride.
The only thing more impressive than the chaos that unfolds onscreen, is the guiding hand of the man giving method to the madness, director Jonas Govaerts (Cub). The hook of shooting the film in and around the car is never overtly dangled in your face, instead, it’s a tool of immersion. Beyond this, Govaerts weaponizes even banal everyday moments and encounters to add an edge to the tension. A silent pause between friends, side glances from Russian doormen, stop lights and traffic congestion, even the site of a lolly pop in his daughter’s hand is shot as if it’s a hand grenade waiting to detonate and destroy his pristine car interior. H4Z4RD is a visceral, relentlessly chaotic experience, but also an indelible exercise in craft and control.
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Criterion Review: EXOTICA
Filmmaker Atom Egoyan’s mid-’90s peak remains unparalleled
Stripping and watching women strip as trauma therapy. In Atom Egoyan’s (Remember, Chloe, Ararat) career-redefining fifth, feature-length film, Exotica, a Toronto-based strip club, also called “Exotica,” becomes a literal and figurative microcosm for an exploration of ‘90s-era sexuality, performative and otherwise, and the essentially transactional nature of personal and professional relationships typical of late-stage capitalism. It’s intentional, not accidental, that practically every conversation in Exotica ends with either an exchange of money, the promise of money, or a revelation tied to a contract involving money. And if every relationship is essentially transactional and therefore, driven purely by self-interest, there’s little, if any, room for altruism, compassion, or empathy.
Exotica certainly isn’t as bleak or nihilistic as the preceding observation suggests, but it certainly comes close as it follows several characters, each one damaged in his or her own unique way, as their paths cross, uncross, and cross again. As the strip club centers the narrative in a reality-adjacent place and time, Francis Brown (Bruce Greenwood), a tax auditor for the Canadian equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service, functions as the pivot point or hub around which the other characters move. Both more and less than an auditor, Francis obviously suffers from deep, unresolved trauma. It’s in every word he doesn’t say. It’s in every look that suggests he’s never fully present, but lingering on a past he can’t change. And it’s in the wildly irrational actions he undertakes in the third act to recover an illusory sense of rationality and stability.
This is not the DJ you’re looking for. Several other characters circulate or orbit Francis, beginning with Christina (Mia Kirshner), the stripper whose onstage schoolgirl routine resembles an automaton going through pre-programmed motions, but whose interactions with Francis reveal a tenderness and vulnerability otherwise missing from her interactions with other customers. Their interactions run contrary to the superficial nature of their relationship, an exchange of feigned physical and sexual intimacy (strippers can touch, but can’t be touched) for cold, hard cash ($5 Canadian per lap dance).
Francis and Christina share a history that precedes and transcends the strip club or their interactions there, but Egoyan, a strong believer/follower of European Art Cinema and its ambiguity-favoring rules, keeps the exact nature of their relationship deliberately unclear until the final, devastating moments. Christina’s ex-lover and the club’s main DJ, Eric (Elias Koteas), however, sees Francis and his obsession with Christina as a threat, both to a renewed, if unlikely, romantic relationship with Christina as someone who perceives himself as a white male savior, rescuing Christina from Francis’s unsavory predations.
A voyeur at work and play: Looking at you looking at him. Keeping exposition to a bare, essential minimum, Egoyan presents Francis’s relationship with Tracey (Sarah Polley, Stories We Tell, The Sweet Hereafter). Francis periodically drops the teenage Tracey off at a rundown apartment overlooking a convenience store. Their awkward, clumsy conversations end with Francis offering Tracey money, Tracey’s performative reluctance, followed by Tracey grabbing the money from Francis’s hand, and all but running away from his needy, desperate presence. There too, Egoyan withholds key information, specifically the nature of their relationship, as late as possible in the narrative, forcing viewers to revisit and reconfigure any preconceptions they might have about Francis as a character. Spoiler: He’s filled with the contradictions and complexities that make him relatably human.
Eventually, Francis brings another character, Thomas (Don McKellar), a pet shop owner with a lucrative side business as a rare-egg smuggler, into the narrative, first as the subject of an audit and later as a potential co-conspirator in a plot to determine how and why the strip club’s owner, Zoe (Arsinée Khanjian, Egoyan’s longtime personal and creative partner), decided to redefine Francis’s relationship with both Christina and the club itself. Zoe isn’t without a not-so-hidden agenda herself. As a single woman nearing the end of her first pregnancy, she sees Eric as more than an employee and Christina as more than a surrogate daughter figure.
A rare moment of intimacy between characters seemingly at odds. Exotica’s characters, subplots, and relationships finally converge in a revelatory flashback near the end of the film. Egoyan teases that flashback, however, from the first moments on, returning to the flashback repeatedly, each time expanding on what we’ve seen and heard before. Not surprisingly, the revelatory scene connects Francis, Eric, and Christina in a way that’s both unexpected and entirely inevitable, ultimately suggesting that shared grief and loss can help overcome the kind of trauma that can irrevocably alter lives and relationships.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New, restored 4K digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Atom Egoyan and director of photography Paul Sarossy, with 2.0 surround
- DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- Audio commentary featuring Egoyan and composer Mychael Danna
- New conversation between Egoyan and filmmaker and actor Sarah Polley
- Calendar, a 1993 feature film by Egoyan, with a new introduction
- Peep Show, a 1981 short film by Egoyan
- En passant, a 1991 short film by Egoyan featuring Maury Chaykin and Arsinée Khanjian
- Artaud Double Bill, a 2007 short film by Egoyan, commissioned for the sixtieth anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival
- Audio from Exotica’s 1994 Cannes Film Festival press conference, featuring Egoyan, Khanjian, actor Bruce Greenwood, and producer Camelia Frieberg
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
PLUS: An essay by author and filmmaker Jason Wood
New cover by David de las Heras
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Supernatural Horror SMILE Shocks, Scares, and Disturbs
Parker Finn’s feature-film debut embraces its J-Horror roots
What you don’t see can most definitely kill you. The horror genre contains multitudes. Almost infinitely malleable, horror can embrace the universality of myth and the granular specifics of culture. Something as seemingly innocent like a smile, a facial expression typically associated with tenderness, amusement, or even delight, can be turned into a uniquely disturbing image the longer it’s held, a seemingly simple insight Parker Finn embraced for his first feature-length film, Smile, a psychological/supernatural horror film that uses the “smile” of the title to increasingly discomforting, disturbing ways until all that’s left is a singularly bleak image of never-ending trauma.
After a stealth flashback hidden inside the prologue, Smile jumps ahead to the present day. Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), a N.J. based-psychiatrist who prefers emergency hospital work to private practice, seemingly has it all: A beautiful life with her fiancee, Trevor (Jessie T. Usher), a large, cozy home that stretches as far as the eye can see, and work that gives meaning and shape to her life. That level of equilibrium, however, hides a past defined, at least in part, by the loss of her mother as a preteen to suicide, and the resultant trauma that’s determined the shape of her adult life.
Conversations can get awkward when the detective on a case is also your ex. Driven, however, by an almost pathological desire to help, she works long hours, aiding one long-term patient fixated on death and dying though talk therapy before making the fateful decision to see one more, late-arriving patient, Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey), an obviously unbalanced Ph.D. student. While Cotter desperately attempts to get a handle on Laura’s turbulent mental and emotional state, Laura succeeds in ending their conversation permanently, committing suicide in a harrowingly graphic manner as a stunned Cotter looks on.
As a science-trained psychiatrist, Cotter initially accepts Laura’s suicide as tragic, but not, as Laura argued in her final moments, spurred by an unseen, malevolent entity. Laura’s rant about witnessing a suicide of her own only days earlier doesn’t give Cotter pause, at least not until Cotter beings to experience a similar outbreak of the uncanny and the supernatural into her life, from maniacally grinning strangers and doppelgängers, to a birthday party for her nephew that goes sideways, leading to her already estranged sister, Holly (Gillian Zinser), to completely break ties with her and Trevor to coldly question the viability of their romantic relationship.
The smile says it all … Taking more than a few script pages from the last 25 years of the J-Horror sub-genre, including The Ring, The Grudge, and Dark Water (among countless others), Finn turns Cotter from passive, reactive, potential suicide to an active, clue-gathering investigator, getting periodic assistance from her onetime boyfriend/police detective, Joel Caitlin (Kyle Gallner, A Haunting in Connecticut). She may have little time left (supernatural deadlines add instant tension and suspense to any horror film) and her fate may be sealed. Like better horror heroines, however, Cotter won’t go down with at least attempting to understand the nature of the curse and what connection it might have to her fate.
Finn smartly ratchets up the tension, suspense, and yes, scares through an effective blend of shocks (gruesome suicides ghostly apparitions, perpetually grinning doppelgängers), dabs of necessary exposition relayed at periodic intervals, and a reliance on Sosie Bacon’s singular performance to carry Smile through to its inevitable, inevitably bleak, nerve-shredding conclusion. In practically every scene, often shot in claustrophobic close-up, Bacon conveys Cotter’s deteriorating mental and emotional state with an inside-out performance that, in another time and place where horror wasn’t considered unfit for year-end awards consideration, would certainly garner her one or more nominations.
At almost two hours, though, Smile comes dangerously close to overstaying its welcome, throwing in feints, switchbacks, and narrative dead-ends to delay what audiences on the other side of the screen have already deciphered for themselves. To be fair, a handful of late-film, momentum-stopping digressions ultimately do little to blunt the final, catharsis-free moments. In Finn’s figuratively and literally haunting exploration of psychological trauma, grief, and loss, the abyss doesn’t just stare back, it smiles and invites you in.
Smile opens theatrically in North America on Friday, September 30th.
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Fantastic Fest 2022: HELLRAISER Has Such Sights to Show You!
David Bruckner solves the puzzle, delivering the best HELLRAISER film in decades!
The Hellraiser franchise is a textbook example of the law of diminishing returns when it comes to horror sequels. What really amplifies this statement, is just how good those first two films were, before the series stumbled on its third outing after the property was picked up by the Weinsteins and Dimension pictures. There were nine Hellraiser films before this, and yes they even go to space (super underrated entry!), but they never get close to reaching the dizzying heights of those first two entries. Since the first film was based on a short story, the more they added the muddier the mythology tend to get as it went along and more than a few scripts for other projects were also repurposed by the Weinsteins and shoehorned into Hellraiser films. What I am trying to say here is it’s been 3 decades since there was a really good one. But that’s all about to change, originally announced in 2006, we are finally getting that series reboot thanks to Hulu, and it’s easily the third best film in the series.
Right off the back the film introduces us to Riley (Odessa A’zion), a troubled recovering addict who while robbing a shipping container supposedly containing “Billionaire shit” discovers only the infamous puzzle box. When her good hearted yet doting brother who spends his time attempting to keep Riley clean, accidentally triggers the box, he is taken by the Cenobites — who are led by a new “Pinhead” or priest if you will, played by Jamie Clayton. In this entry how you are marked by the box is not simply by “solving” it, after that piece is complete — a sharp instrument will usually be triggered and protrude from the box and takes your blood marking you as a sacrifice to the Cenobites. After Riley’s brother is killed, she falls down the rabbit hole into just what happened to her brother and how to get him back. This puzzle box has multiple configurations, and the way it works is to unlock each configuration it involves not only solving the box, but a human sacrifice as well. The last configuration offers a choice of either love, knowledge, power life or resurrection, this where you can resurrect the dead, like Frank in the original(this info was dropped by the director during the post film Q&A). This has the Priest forcing Riley to play a game and serving up sacrifices, to hopefully get her brother back.
The main thing I really dug about this new Hellraiser is the mythology that’s established in its runtime. In previous entries we’d see someone “solve” the box and the Cenobites would show up, or possibly something else would happen. We never really established any rules for what triggers what or how the box even works, we just kind of went with it. Here we get hard rules that establish 5 sacrifices have to be made to trigger six different box configurations, which will get you an audience with Leviathan to grant your innermost desire. Once you are marked by the box and it has your blood you belong to the Cenobites, so this motivates those looking for these delights to feed the box, to unlock the next configuration. But it appears there is still a bit of wiggle room in the finer print, this has the Priest playing a game with Riley offering her the ability to serve her sacrifices to resurrect her brother, taking her blood and setting her free so if she wanted to she could take her any time. Not only does this logic make sense it adds some real stakes to the story, while supplying the plot with real measurable goal posts.
The other thing I think most fans like myself will probably be surprised by is the new Cenobite designs. They are super slick looking, like they could have been from some lost video game, and practical as they should be. While there are some new designs that were really impressive, a few fan favorites return with a new spin. The biggest change in the Cenobite design is the lack of black leather, that was a nod to BDSM. This entry has them clad in a lighter leather, but made from their own skin that has been turned into garments or accouterments. Its garish and ghastly, but it was an interesting way to reinvent the wheel, while still adding to the horror and mythos of these new takes characters. We don’t really get a glimpse of the identities of this new batch of Cenobites and while this could function as simply a reboot, these could also be just a fresh batch who have taken over from the originals. In sort of a Halloween (2018) way, where they skip the convoluted fat directly sequeling the last good film in the series.
This film thankfully eases off the hornyness a bit of those first two films in favor of a story of a terrible person trying to save the only good person in her life. Odessa A’zion is remarkable here as the addict turned tour guide into this world, but since this is a Hellraiser film, everyone is simply here biding their time, while doing their best to leave an impression before they are torn apart by flying hook chains. The film takes some time to settle you in a bit before turning on the red stuff, while it delivers some really great practical effects setpieces for when our world splinters into the world of the Cenobites. Also Jamie Clayton’s take on the horror icon is just similar enough, while injecting some fresh blood into it to keep fans on the hook to see what happens next. Seriously she just imbues the role with its own take that still feels very close to what you’d expect from the character.
I hate that I have to note this but given the recent fan backlash about Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones and The Little Mermaid of all things, you can sadly expect a lot of unwarranted “Anti-woke” backlash here as well. Not only is the Priest played by a trans woman, who literally nails it, but Riley’s brother is openly gay, and there is even an Asian and a black cenobite who are pure nightmare fuel. There’s diversity and representation here, but I think that only adds to this richness of the world and the legitimacy of it. Given how the box traveled the world and has been propelled through time by those outsiders searching for its unearthly delights, this really made sense to me that there would be different races as well as genders. This not only helped ground the film for me in our reality, but it gives those horror fans coming to the series a chance to see themselves on screen.
Hellraiser is a gore soaked great time! It delivers the expected hallmarks of the franchise fans expect — characters of questionable morality, plenty of the red stuff and pontificating Cenobites, all while updating the series attempting to infuse it with a coherent mythology. The film is also not simply content to hit the same beats of that first film, which these reboots tend to do. Instead David Bruckner forges his own path ahead and gives us the best Hellraiser film in over 3 decades and everything fans like myself have been dying to see.
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Fantastic Fest 2022: BONES AND ALL is a Lush Romantic Epic About the Hunger to Belong
Luca Guadagnino returns with another sumptuous cinematic feast full of horror and wonder
Based on the novel by Camille DeAngelis, Bones and All follows Maren (Taylor Russell), an awkward teenage girl abandoned by her father (André Holland) after a traumatic incident involving Maren at a girl’s sleepover. With no home to speak of, Maren embarks on a cross-country journey to find her mother, using only a cryptic cassette tape and birth certificate left by her father as Maren’s only guides to her past and potential future. Along the way, she meets Sully (Mark Rylance), an enigmatic drifter who reveals he shares the same condition as her: they both have a hunger for human flesh and can sniff out others who share the same affliction. Maren also meets Lee (Timothée Chalamet), a scrappy waif of a boy who seems like her perfect match. As they navigate their overwhelming desires to consume one another as much as they do the victims in their path, the consequences of Maren and Lee’s actions never seem far behind.
What draws me to Luca Guadagnino’s period films is his reverence for the lived-in minutiae of his settings, especially with Call Me By Your Name’s pastoral Italian villas and the crumbling post-war decay of Suspiria’s 1970s Berlin. The knick-knacks and faded tacked-up posters of Guadagnino’s characters don’t just make his characters more of their time, but help lend them an essential vitality; every acquired souvenir or reaction to a musical needle drop makes them feel so much more alive…as if these small objects are totems of their souls. This approach applies tremendously to Guadagnino’s first American production, where Guadagnino and production designer Elliott Hostetter mine a grotesque and foreboding majesty out of Reagan-era back-alley Americana.
In Bones and All, the director and designer effortlessly evoke a shared cultural memory of the 1980s in all of its nostalgic exceptionalism: suburban families, packed carnivals, lakeside camping trips, bustling school campuses, and more. In anyone’s home, you’ll find Kiss records in milk crates or glitter makeup sprawled across glass coffee tables. However, Bones and All quickly peels back this comforting gloss like skinning a wild animal, exposing the festering anxieties shared by Americans who feel like they could never belong in such an exclusionary culture…whether it’s the America of the 1980s or the 2020s.
As Maren and Lee exist in the shadows of small-town America hunting for their next victims, they carve out beautiful moments of connection and endure greater moments of isolation. They learn how to sniff out others like them, discovering each other at bus stops, gas stations, or midway game stalls. They congregate in abandoned buildings, cornfields, or open fields to trade tips earned along the way for how to stay hidden, lure victims, and cope with their actions. Some, like Rylance’s Sully, have their “rules” (among them, not eating an “Eater”) that they hold on to in order to hold onto some semblance of normalcy. A rare intimacy is formed when these eaters share their struggles with one another, each of them knowing the pain of loss and rejection faced by so few in society. Lee, Maren, and dream of going back to human lives–even if the possibility of successfully doing so will mean inevitable failure as their need to feed arises. The cannibals of Bones and All who thrive out of spite gutturally speak to those whose behavior or way of life has been struck from the acceptable societal norms of Reaganite America. Whether it’s homeless veterans abandoned after Vietnam; neurodivergent individuals who were cast out of state-funded hospitals en masse; or the LGBTQ+ community plagued by HIV/AIDS, all to heterosexual indifference; all were victims shunned and scored to a deadly degree. The result is Luca Guadagnino’s most lush and romantic epic yet, one that recognizes the defiant and terrifying beauty at the heart of pursuing forbidden desires that aren’t our choices to make but are inseparable from who we are as human beings.
The intricately detailed production design and an achingly longing score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross help augment these fraught emotional landscapes, which are lovingly brought to life care of Guadagnino’s fantastic ensemble cast. A tapestry of character actors provides a supporting bedrock for the leads. André Holland and Jessica Harper provide two wonderful turns as parents whose inability to help their children frustratingly reveals the limits of their love for them. An unrecognizable Michael Stuhlbarg and a very recognizable David Gordon Green provide a gut-churning duo who bond in unexpected ways related to converting someone who’s fascinated with eaters into their way of life. Mark Rylance’s Sully wears a bone-chilling mask of sincerity as a Faginesque teacher to Maren who longs to be both her teacher and companion. Where Lee and Maren are staring down a long road of loneliness as Eaters, every mile of that journey is already worn into every wrinkle in Sully’s inscrutable face. The charm that endeared viewers to Rylance in films like Bridge of Spies or The BFG is wholly weaponized here, in a film where the teeth of a smile are easily comparable to brandished knives.
But Bones and All lives and dies by its leads, with Russell and Chalamet turning in deliriously romantic and broodingly intimate performances. Both of them delightfully twist the tropes of coming-of-age romances (Ferris wheel kisses, hillside confessionals, etc.) into secretive moments strengthened all the more by the brutal crimes they commit in order to survive. Despite Lee and Maren’s disturbing behavior, however, Chalamet and Russell never lose a sense of innocence or empathy. Much like Sissy Spacek in Badlands, you always wish the world would stop raging against these youths no matter how complicit they are in the horrors they perpetrate. Throughout, too, the cause and effect of Lee and Maren’s journey take a literal backseat to their emotional one. Unrooted and untethered to specific demands of timeline or location, Bones and All keenly charts its rhythms to the shifting desires of its leads and their struggle to belong in a world like this.
It’s worth noting that one sequence involves Lee’s seduction of a man (Jake Horowitz) to eat him, while the film’s chilling cold open crescendos with Maren’s devouring of a girlfriend’s finger. While a quick read could accuse Bones and All of equating Queerness with its cannibalistic subject matter, I didn’t consider this to be the case. Rather, both sequences have a tortured longing at their core, from a straight shunning by Maren’s friend to the shamed, closeted nature of cruising on both men’s behalf. It isn’t that their Queerness should be as repulsive as their cannibalism, but that it’s already considered as such before any bone-chomping takes place. However, Lee and Maren aren’t repulsed by this specific behavior in one another. Rather, they’re perfect for each other because they love and respect each other’s agency, emotional necessities, Queerness, appetites–bones and all.
Guadagnino and regular screenwriting collaborator David Kajganich ensure that it’s a journey that’s equally romantic and repulsive. The passions and dangers of Lee and Maren’s world are viscerally comparable, with rushes of blood felt as much in a stolen kiss as they are from a spurt from the jugular. The gore, of which there’s plenty to go around, will surely become a point of contention among the Stans who go see this on Thanksgiving weekend; however, it’s shot in ways that provoke equal disgust and fascination, replicating the dejected craving our characters feel. It’s a film that, however repelled we may initially be by its subject matter, yearns to be felt and understood–and through that, provoke some form of care and acceptance. It’s the embrace of inner and outer terror that allows Lee and Maren to revel in the passions only afforded to a free life.
If eating the living is the only way to earn a life worth living, so be it. In doing so, we satisfy our deeper hunger to belong.
Bones and All had its US Premiere at Fantastic Fest and will receive a theatrical release courtesy of MGM and United Artists on November 18th, with a wide release on November 23rd.
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Fantastic Fest 2022: LYNCH/OZ Goes Down the Rabbit Hole of Lynchian Inspiration
Alexandre O. Philippe’s latest documentary charts the surreal shaping of David Lynch
David Lynch has long evaded questions about the meanings of his work. A creative that allows his films to speak for themselves, however elaborate or surreal the message might seem to be. He himself once said in an interview, “As soon as you finish a film, people want you to talk about it. And it’s, um, the film is the talking”. Many people have tried to make sense of his output, and for a documentary to dive into Lynch’s psyche, who better than Alexandre O. Philippe, who has previously composed enthralling documentaries into the works of Alfred Hitchcock (78/52), Ridley Scott (Memory: The Origin of Alien) and William Friedkin (Leap of Faith). At the core of his interpretation into the meaning and origins of Lynch’s ideas, is the Technicolor musical fantasy, The Wizard of Oz. A film that pervades Lynch’s work like nothing else, from the overt appearance of a wicked witch (and other elements) in Wild at Heart, to common tales of innocent souls plunged into strange places, the recurring red shoe motif in Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and more. Lynch himself affirmed, “There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about the Wizard of Oz”.
Philippe’s approach is rather academic in nature. A collaborative study with chapters from critic Amy Nicholson, and filmmakers Rodney Asher (Room 237, A Glitch in the Matrix), John Waters (Pink Flamingos, Hairspray), Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead (Spring, The Endless), Karyn Kusama (The Invitation, Jennifer’s Body), and David Lowery (A Ghost Story). Each share some of their own personal encounters with Lynch and their interpretations of his work, with Oz as a backdrop. A revered classic, its impact on cinema (and pop culture in general) can be witnessed across genres and across decades. Permeating pop culture with its iconic images, memorable melodies, surreal characters, and surprisingly dark undertones.
John Waters is as engaging as you might expect, discusses the prevalence of nods to Oz in cinema, and draws parallels between his own oeuvre and Lynch’s. Benson and Moorhead talk about the glimpses of alternate, and often twisted realities seen in Lynch’s work. Kusama draws parallels between Dorothy’s quest to find a way home to a similar journey undertaken by Diane in Mulholland Drive. David Lowery (A Ghost Story) delivers perhaps the most well composed and considered piece, positioning Oz as an overarching indirect influence on all cinema that followed, cheekily undermining the central thesis of the film. Beyond these specifics, there are common threads that discuss ongoing themes in Lynch’s work, notably his interest that 1950s America, the post-war malaise and the general idea of peeking at the rot lucking under the tidy veneer of suburbia.
The contributions all conjure an evocative feel, and Philippe skillfully allows each to breath as a distinct piece, and yet click into a larger whole. He weaves the commentary over film footage, juxtaposed shots to allow comparisons, newsreels, interviews, and more. Visually and thematically, the documentary flows well, balancing analysis, insight, and personal reflection. Its only really when the film tilt away from Lynch that things start to feel a little dry. Overall, it’s an admirable effort to try to understand and recontextualizes Lynch’s work, these contributors striving to shine their own light on the method and meaning behind his madness. But, despite their insights, Lynch/Oz does not remove any of Lynch’s mystique. If anything, it manages to further burnish his enigmatic nature, reinforcing the depth and personal nature of his art. It leaves you with an urge to take yet another look at Lynch’s works, which is perhaps the best compliment Lynch/Oz could hope for.
