Vampires, Assassins, and Romantic Angst by the Seaside: Takoma Reviews

All Hallows’ Eve, 2013

In this anthology series, Sarah (Katie Maguire) is babysitting Tia (Sydney Friehofer) and Timmy (Cole Mathewson) one Halloween night. After discovering a VHS tape in Timmy’s candy bag, the trio sits down to watch a bizarre anthology VHS tape consisting of footage of gruesome and otherworldly murders. Stringing the stories together is the menacing Art the Clown (Mike Gianelli), who may be more than just a fictional antagonist.

Special effects proficiency and a memorable villain give a bit of heft to this otherwise underwhelming, overfamiliar splatterfest.

There’s a thing that children do when they’re first learning to how to write: they take big chunks of books they like and sort of mush them together. This is basically the effect of All Hallows’ Eve. There’s enthusiasm and some technical proficiency on display, but the references feel like too much borrowing.

On the positive side, Sarah is a likable protagonist. (I suppose the kids aren’t terrible--at least by the standards of children in movies---but they don’t actually talk like kids and thus feel less real). In Art the Clown, creator Damien Leone stumbled on an instantly iconic villain, though he feels less impressive the more time you spend with him, culminating in a strange left-turn shocker moment that I found more puzzling than impactful.

My overall struggle with the film was simply with the unoriginal staging of the different sequences. One sequence does have a novel beginning with Art the Clown menacing a woman in an empty train station waiting room. But she is then literally transported into a rip-off/mish-mash of Creep and about four different Satanic cult films (I have one late 2000s film particularly in mind, but that would be too spoiler-y). The staging of all of these sequences is . . . fine. But outside of the character of Art, there’s nothing new here.

And now, yes, it’s the paragraph about the gendered nature of the violence. I guess this movie raises the question: does mimicking misogyny as an aesthetic and/or dangling misogyny out there to get a reaction out of people make you a misogynist? As Leone sat in a studio, lovingly building/disfiguring a woman’s naked and mutilated torso, did he even stop to think for a minute about why he found this visual so thrilling that he’d use it as the second biggest moment in the film? No? Because he doesn’t have to? Right. Anyway. Aside from just, you know, misogyny-yuck, you run into redundancy and overfamiliarity. The physical and sexual violence inflicted against women in this movie is too familiar. It feels like Leone watched certain movies and thought, “I could do that.” And then he did. What a character arc!

I think that if I hadn’t watched any horror, I would have found this more interesting. As it stands, the charm of the practical effects doesn’t offset the fact that the segments mostly retread the kind of horror content I find the most tedious.

Art reached his peak here, imo.

It's the only sequence in the movie that doesn't feel lifted from something else.

Imagine how great the whole franchise could have been if the only thing Art ever did was menace people with that horn.

I've been saying this for 10 years

The way I felt about All Hallow's Eve, which I did like when I first saw it, was that Art was a sort of peri-Evil osberver/trickster who sort of showed up when people were about to get into some bad business. That was how The 9th Circle played to me and it seemed to be setting up that very thing. And while I have since been reminded of how ugly that segment is, it has an effective feel. Then the second segment is just not good at all and the presence of Art is shoe-horned in very weakly. Then the third segment, Terrifier becomes interesting because now you're waiting for something else to get after the girls because that's how the film has played up til now, but now it's him, he's no longer sitting on the sidelines, he's the game.
Some of that seems interesting but then the third segment is just so nasty and hateful as we've discussed that it takes any pleasure I could have gotten out of it away and because he's the Big Bad in it (and is maybe the worst Bad in the movie) it takes a little of the fun out of the wraparound, which would have been the most interesting place to reveal him as a Bad in his own right. Like if he had remained an observer for all three segments but ends up being the killer in the wraparound, that would have worked really well.
Of course, the issue here is that this not really a film and Leone really had no plan beyond keeping Art as his own.
It is two distinct short-films, The 9th Circle and Terrifier, with a last-minute, made-up middle segment that isn't good, and they end up getting tied together in ways that don't totally work by the desire to release a feature-length film rather than let Art be used as one story in an anthology that isn't Leone's. He doesn't have a movie yet so he basically takes two short films he has, makes a third segment (the middle one that stongly doesn't feel like it belongs) and puts it in the middle, and makes the wraparound. Listening to him try to make it sound like he had a "cohesive" vision is actually kinda funny when it's held up against the facts of the production or even other interviews he's given. All Hallow's Eve really isn't a movie, it was a play by Leone took keep Art The Clown his own thing and not let it be part of someone else's thing. And it worked I guess, but, as a movie, All Hallow's Eve does not.

American Fiction, 2023

Monk (Jeffrey Wright) is a scholarly novelist who has grown increasingly frustrated with the state of “Black literature”, which he views as pandering and demeaning. As a form of protest, Monk adopts a pen name and creates a novel full of cliches and offensive stereotypes . . . which is naturally a huge success. As he navigates the absurdity, he strikes up a relationship with an alluring neighbor named Coraline (Erika Alexander) whose views on popular literature challenge Monk’s own perspective.

A fantastically funny central performance from Wright is slightly let down by the screenplay.

It has been a while since I saw this film in the theater, so some of the details have faded with time. But what lingers even months later is Wright’s excellent performance as the exhausted---and often exhausting---Monk.

Wright’s Monk benefits not only from Wright’s performance---a sort of chronically shifting in his own body--but also from the best writing in the film. Monk is a prickly character, and it’s easy to see why he is alienating to many people, but at the same time it’s very easy to empathize with his position and his fascination with seeing how far he can push his outlandish assumed persona and hack writing.

Race is an incredibly complicated topic, even when restricted to the domain of literature. I think that what I appreciated most about the film is that it doesn’t try to pretend that there’s a simple or completely correct answer to the questions that are raised. Monk is perpetually frustrated by the fact that his literary works---specifically all pertaining to classic Greek mythology---are categorized and shelved as “Black Fiction.” He is affronted by the fact that so much “Black Fiction” is dominated by stories of hardship featuring Black people whose voices are angry and grammatically “unsophisticated.” But as a fellow author, Sintara (Issa Rae) points out, there are people living those lives and feeling those feelings.

I think that the film does hit the bullseye in one regard, namely the fact that it is often white, upper class people who are given the power to determine which Black voices and experiences are “authentic.” This is a perpetual issue in art in general: so often the people who are declaring portrayals as “real” don’t themselves have first-person experience that would merit making such a declaration. This sits alongside a challenging truth: portrayals of hardships can be important to illuminate how some people are forced to live, but at the same time, these portrayals can be used as a kind of misery tourism for an audience far removed from such challenges.

The rest of the film is slightly less compelling. The cast is really top-notch, whether it’s Alexander’s turn as Monk’s love interest, or Sterling K Brown as Monk’s gay brother whose relationship with their mother is damaged by her homophobic views. But somehow the cast of characters is a bit too sprawling. Their stories and performances are all good, but there’s some missing spark to really tie it all together.

This is also a film that clearly didn’t quite know how to end---and the movie itself even lampshades this predicament. I didn’t mind that the last act went in some really outlandish directions, but it feels as if the end of the movie went on a good 5 minutes longer than needed.

Overall this was a really enjoyable film to see in the theater, and Wright’s lead performance is an excellent piece of curmudgeon comedy.

Dangerous Waters, 2023

Rose (Odeya Rush) is a young woman whose mother, Alma (Saffron Burrows), brings her along on a sailing trip with her new boyfriend, Derek (Eric Dane). But something is not right, and shortly into the trip they are attacked by a mysterious group. Struggling to survive on the open water, Rose must figure out just why they were attacked and how Derek is involved.

A silly movie full of stupid people is mildly redeemed by a decent stretch of action late in the final act.

It’s so hard to say anything nice about this film that isn’t a backhanded compliment or that doesn’t come with a huge qualifier. As I wrote, there’s an okay action sequence in the last 15 minutes that’s the right kind of dumb fun. And . . . and . . . I don’t know. Here comes the back-handed compliment: if you need a movie to watch while you do something else, or the kind of movie where you can zone out for 10 minutes and not feel the need to rewind, this could be the film for you.

Everything in this film is exasperatingly predictable and the foreshadowing lacks any shred of subtlety. “Here, this is for you: it is a knife that is very sharp and can even cut through rope!”. Eric Dane projects “sociopathic creep” from the first second he is on screen. He’s not bad in the role, per se, but why any woman would date him, be around him, or, dear lord, agree to go sailing on a boat with him is one of the more unrealistic elements of the film.

This film is a mish-mash of two action subgenres. On one hand, you have people fighting for survival, not totally trusting each other. Then you have the old unlikely person finds themselves seeking revenge against someone who wronged them plot. Either of these would have been fine, but mushed together they just don’t work. There are so many coincidences in this film that it’s absurd. This is the kind of movie where people sailing around IN THE OCEAN just happen to run into each other. IN THE OCEAN!!! As if the Atlantic is about the size of a small town thrift store.

I will say that this is a film that is so obviously dumb from the get-go that there’s no frustration of wasted potential. It announces its stupidity from the jump and if you stick with it after the first 10 minutes, well, you have no one to blame but yourself. This film does slightly distinguish itself for having one of the most depressing “woman seducing a man to survive” scenes ever, a product of both the actual scene in the film and the real-life context of it all.

A big ol’ shrug.

Wright has been someone I've admired for a long time and have just been waiting for him to take center-stage so I was very excited for this movie.
But I was totally let down.
It felt like the movie was just unwilling to commit to its more interesting aspects and was high-brow at times and really low-brow at others - and by that I mean it got really on-the-nose to a degree that made me feel like I was watching a much dumber movie than I had been and got very by-the-numbers at times instead of the more challenging ideas it had earlier - and, as you say, didn't know how to end either. Parts of this feel like a pretty great movie and then other parts are like any disposable family drama and sometimes worse than that. Brown proves he's a really good actor trying to be convincing as the brother whose motivations and attitudes seem to change every scene just to make the narrative go where they want... which I almost wondered was that maybe intentional but then it pays off in no way so it comes off like bad writing... I dunno. They never seemed to know what they wanted the dichotomy of Issa Ray and Wright's characters to be other than just "it's complicated... but that's as far as we can take it."
This movie got so much praise for its script and I thought its script was a weird amalgam of inspired and downright amateurish.

It feels to me very much how I felt about the last act of the Barbie movie, as if the audience couldn't be trusted to handle a look at a really complex topic (race, gender roles, etc) and feel the need to try and have sequences that are easier to "digest". That lack of trust really irritates me. When the movie embraces the complexity, it's really good. In the last year I read two books (Heavy by Kiese Laymon and The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin) that tackled questions about race and representation, and included candid, at times unflattering and even stereotypical portrayals of Black people. And neither of those books are scared of that content and they don't try to dance around it in a cute way. They take on the fact that it's complicated and fraught.

There are so many interesting questions that emerge simply from Monk's conversations with the Rae character and his reactions to the literary taste of his love interest. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely laughed at almost all of the humor surrounding his annoyingly popular terrible novel, but it really feels like this was a missed opportunity to really take a darkly comic look at race and literature/publishing.

That said, the performances were so good and the writing was inspired enough at times that I still walked away with an overall positive impression.

I think we saw the same movie.
It felt like the central joke was one movie, mostly good but not always engaging with its own ideas as much as it could and then there was also this sometimes good sometimes mediocre and rote like family drama around it.

Something that I think was sort of in the film, but didn't work as well as I would have hoped with Brown's character was the idea that even within the same family people can have really different experiences, be valued differently, and have to play identity games to be loved and accepted. And then think about how big that question/challenge becomes when applied to a large group of people and the even larger society that surrounds them.

Anatomy of a Fall, 2023

Sandra (Sandra Huller) is a lives in an isolated chalet with her husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis). It is apparent that there are tensions between the couple, and when their partially-blind son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) leaves the house to take his dog for a walk, he returns to find his father dead in the snow. Did he fall to his death, or did Sandra murder him? A lengthy, emotional trial probes this question as Sandra and Daniel try to cope with the stress of having their lives under a microscope.

Fantastic lead and supporting performances meet a nicely nuanced take on marriage drama.

I will admit that in the first few minutes of this film I made some judgments: namely that Samuel seemed like a controlling jerk and that it was no surprise that someone might want to push him out a window. Indeed, the first few minutes set you up for the kind of movie where the premise is “yeah, he kinda (in movie-logic-world) deserved to die, but did she do it?”. What unfolds instead is a look at a relationship dynamic that many people will recognize.

As the trial goes on, we get more and more glimpses into Sandra and Samuel’s marriage, and start to get an understanding of how they came to that fateful day that ended in a deadly fall. The strongest throughline, for me, was the way that the film portrayed the kind of situation where two people have compromised and yet can only see the things that they have given up. Sandra resents Samuel because she’s agreed to move to an isolated house in a foreign country, while Samuel resents Sandra’s career success. Each of them stews in their resentment until they lash out at each other in verbal and sometimes physical battles.

And as our view of their relationship deepens, we watch as the lawyers on either side attempt to interpret the evidence in their own light. Another very strong aspect of the film is the way it portrays the tortuous process of being involved in such a trial. Everything in Sandra’s life becomes fair game, and there’s something particularly brutal about watching someone attempt to explain a complex, nuanced situation in a language that is not her native tongue.

Then there’s just the suspense of having to decide who and what to believe. I found Sandra to be a very credible witness, but at the same time you have to always question her motivations. When she waits a while to reveal that Samuel had a history involving self-harm, we must decide if she is protecting her husband’s privacy and legacy, or if this is something she has made up in order to divert suspicion from herself.

And while Huller is an incredibly solid center of the film, it’s Machado-Graner as the couple’s devastated son---and his amazing canine companion, Snoop--- who gives the film the heart it needs. Daniel is too closely involved to be a perfect audience surrogate, but we can feel some echo of his pain as he must decide if his mother could have killed his father. As Sandra testifies about different situations, some of them previously unknown to Daniel, he is forced to reevaluate what he thought of his parents. Machado-Graner brings a deeply-felt sorrow to his character, as well as a potent guilt and anxiety as his testimony about the fatal day could be the element that either frees or condemns his mother. Daniel also constantly calls attention to the fact that, for this young man, he must either believe that his mother is a killer or that his father wanted to die.

The only thing I didn’t love about this film was that it felt as if it could have easily been about 20 minutes shorter. There were a few scenes in the last act that could have been shortened without a negative impact on the story or flow of the film.

Overall, however, I thought that this film was pretty great.

That's probably my favorite film of last year. The lawyers providing their own interpretations to the couple's disputes was my favorite part of it. I remember getting the sense it's not fair for them to be weighing in on their drama and providing their own conclusions to their complex history together based off of limited evidence. But of course, that's not to say we should root for Sandra over that. When I got to the end and asked "Should I be happy with this outcome?", I came away thinking they mishandled the entire case and didn't ask what should've been asked. This balancing act ultimately prevented me from leaning to one side.

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For me, this movie suffered a little because I saw it as a double-bill with Past Lives which I LOVED.

I did ultimately take a side, and

I can understand taking a side. I was just left with the impression not enough compelling evidence was brought up by the lawyers, and I would've liked to hear more to be confident with leaning one way or another.

Speaking of which, how did you feel about the prosecutor's Stephen King speech? That was the only scene which I might've recommended removing. While the prosecuting lawyer didn't present the best evidence, I remember that being a little too out of character for me to buy him resorting to that.

I actually felt like a lot of the lawyer stuff was a bit over-the-top.

Significant Other, 2023

Ruth (Maika Monroe) and Harry (Jake Lacy) go on a hiking trip up a remote mountain. What should be a romantic getaway instead brims with tension as Harry clearly wants to get married, while an anxious Ruth deflects these overtures. But their relationship issues get shifted to a different gear when they discover something otherworldly in the forest.

A disconnect between the horror and dramatic elements leaves this film spinning its wheels.

There are a lot of parts of this film that work, that would be shocking if they did not work. This is a movie, like so many these days (and I’m NOT complaining), that takes place in a gorgeous, color-saturated forest. And you couldn’t ask for better than Monroe or Lacy, both very good in their roles as people we always must suspect are not quite right and/or not even themselves. Monroe is, at this point, a total go-to for a performance that is spikey and vulnerable, on-edge but strong. Lacy brings a perfect nice-guy-but-menacing energy to his role.

There’s also a nice stretch of the film, especially in the first third, where details and explanations are tantalizingly withheld and we are forced to guess at the motivations and intentions of the different characters. It layers an unreliable setting on top of an unreliable protagonist, and it’s relatively effective in generating tension.

Unfortunately, at a certain point the movie does start explaining, and things quickly go downhill from there. The problem isn’t so much what we’re told as it is where the film tries to go with that information. Horror can be used incredibly effectively to examine ideas about fear, identity, trust, and any other number of emotional, personal issues. But what the movie chooses to do once its concept is fully revealed . . . woof.

And the disappointing final third stings all the more because this film evoked, for me, at least 4 other movies with similar ideas and settings that simply worked much better. I wish the movie had managed to maintain the eerie weirdness and uncertainty that defines the first third. Instead, the actors are trapped in an increasingly redundant and frustrating sequence of events and interactions.

Probably worth a look for horror fans or those who like Monroe and/or Lacy, but beware the disappointing second half.

Good review. I liked it more, if only because it's so audacious and twisty, but I am famously forgiving of big, high-concept swings. One of those things where I'll gladly concede every criticism and just like it anyway.

I've been trying to talk my siblings into watching it, in part because I want an excuse to rewatch it anyway.

Agreed — the ambiguity is what I enjoyed the most about this.

It's twisty, but I'm not sure I'm onboard with audacious.

This might just be me, but I kept seeing parallels with another film (which I'll spoiler below) that I thought handled a very similar concept much, much better.

The film I'm talking about is (spoilers for Significant Other and another movie with a similar major plot twist)

So while I'm not saying that I thought Significant Other was ripping off other films, to me it felt like an unsatisfying mish-mash of .

I got less patient with it as it went along, but I think that's also because I didn't really resonate with its portrayal of mental health issues.

I know that sounds pretty negative, but I really felt like the first third/half was leading up to something cool and the second half (and especially the last 20 minutes) really didn't deliver the goods.

I suppose I'd be open to a rewatch at some point, and it will be interesting to see what I think of it then.