Halloween Viewer's Guide - A Horror Movie Round-Up for the Harrowing Holiday

Horror Movie Round-Up And Halloween Viewer’s Guide

It is Halloween week so I thought I’d put together a quick movie guide to help you set the tone for the spooky times ahead.

I love Halloween, always have, and have spent the last few weeks gearing up for the festivities by catching up on some of the horror films released this year, and the last few years, that I’ve missed.

Here are the films I watched for the first time in recent weeks (all rated on the “1 to 5 horror movie scale” not the “1 to 5 regular movie scale”).

MaXXXine (2024) - Available on Max: This is the third movie in Ti West’s trilogy – which began with X (2022), then Pearl (2022), and now MaXXine. MaXXXine is hands down the worst of the three films. X was terrific and Pearl was pretty good too, but MaXXXine is just an incoherent mess that never finds its footing or a distinct flavor. It’s a mish mash of 1980s nostalgia stuffed into a dour and dull narrative that doesn’t really know what it wants to be.

Yes, Mia Goth is an intriguing screen presence, but even she can’t overcome the flaccid and foolish script for this seriously sub-par film. Very disappointing and definitely not worth watching. 2 stars out of 5

Late Night with the Devil (2024) - Available on Hulu: An extremely clever and well-executed movie that deftly uses the medium of 1970’s late nite tv to plumb the depths of devilry and the demonic depravity of the ruling elite who sell their souls to the dark lord at Bohemian Grove.

David Dastmalchian gives a fantastic performance as a desperate late night talk show host trying to catch Carson in the ratings. A very effective and captivating film…especially if you lived through the 70s. 4 stars out of 5.

The First Omen (2024) - Available on Hulu: Speaking of the 70s!! The First Omen is a surprisingly well-made and executed prequel to the iconic 1976 film The Omen. The First Omen won’t change your life but it will keep you mildly entertained and reasonably spooked for its two-hour run time. 3 out of 5 stars.

Immaculate (2024) - Available on Hulu: This is a not great movie but serves as a decent enough vehicle for Sydney Sweeney to keep building the foundation to her movie stardom. A rather forgettable film with a tenuous premise but the luminous Sweeney, who still manages to be insanely sexy even in a nun’s habit, makes the most of it…especially in the final scene. 2.5 out of 5 stars

Doctor Sleep – Director’s Cut (2019) - Available on Amazon Prime: A shockingly well-made and completely compelling sequel to The Shining which, like Late Night with the Devil, casts a severely jaundiced eye toward the ruling elite and their demonic ways, which include feeding off of the pain and suffering of regular people, most notably children. It’s impossible to watch this movie and not think about the infamous pedophile rings involving people of power, including the Jeffrey Epstein ring, the P Diddy accusations and the horrific Franklin Affair…not to mention the wholesale sickening and senseless slaughter of children in Gaza by the Israelis.

Doctor Sleep features two great performances, the first by Ewan McGregor, who gives a subtle, layered and impressive performance as the adult Danny trying to navigate life after the horrors he endured in The Shining. The other by the absolutely luminous Rebecca Ferguson. Ferguson is so good, so charismatic, so gorgeous and so sexy in Doctor Sleep it is astonishing.

I completely skipped Doctor Sleep when it came out in 2019 because I thought “a sequel to The Shining? No thanks!”. To me The Shining is one of the greatest horror movies of all time…and to be clear Doctor Sleep is nowhere close to being an equal of The Shining in terms of the filmmaking or storytelling. But…it really is a fantastic horror movie.  In some ways I’m glad I missed it in the theatre though because my first watch of it was of the three-hour Director’s Cut which is available on Amazon Prime. I highly recommend you watch the director’s cut and not the theatrical release.

Know this going in though, Doctor Sleep – The Director’s Cut, has one of the most disturbing scenes I’ve seen in a film in a long time. It deeply disturbed and unnerved me – which may say more about me and my life’s circumstances, but still…this scene was tough to watch, but necessary to see. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Smile (2022) - Available on Hulu: Smile came out in 2022 and has a sequel out this month…but I never saw the original so I watched it last week. Smile is a decent enough piece of trauma porn horror movie making. It’s got some clever story lines and keeps you engaged through out. I thought Sosie Bacon did a solid job as the lead, and she had some very heavy lifting to do. In some ways Smile is a typical middle of the road horror movie, but to its credit, it works. 2.5 out of 5 stars.

As for the rest of a Halloween Movie Guide…

My usual go-to horror films are previously mentioned The Shining (1980), The Exorcist (1973) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968). They are, to me, the best horror films around and they never fail to scare the living shit out of me.

I also love the Universal Classic Monster movies like Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), The Wolf Man (1941) and The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). Another old movie classic is F.W. Murnau’s masterful Nosferatu (1922), which is creepy as hell and well worth watching.  

Other less ancient notables would be most anything by David Cronenberg, his remake of The Fly (1986) is particularly fantastic and his films The Brood (1979), Scanners (1980), Videodrome (1983) and The Dead Zone (1983) are solid choices as well.  

You also can’t go wrong John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and The Thing (1982), which are all time horror classics that never fail to frighten no matter how many times you’ve seen them.

More current horror films that are most worthy of a watch are Robert Eggers’ extremely eerie The Witch (2015), and Ari Aster’s formidably frightening and fearsome Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019).

And finally, one movie which is not technically categorized as a horror film but which is as creepy, frightening, disturbing and unnerving as any movie out there, is David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007). Zodiac is a great film that pulsates with a darkness of such depth that haunts you for days and weeks after after watching.

And thus ends the Halloween viewer’s guide!! I hope everybody has a Happy Halloween and gets a bevy of tricks AND treats!!

©2024

No One Will Save You: A Review and Commentary - Keep Your Eyes to the Sky for the End is Nigh

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed but fantastic film that features a mesmerizing lead performance and top notch sci-fi and horror thrills.

In a movie year that has thus far been consistently underwhelming, No One Will Save You, the new sci-fi horror film currently streaming on Hulu that was written and directed by Brian Duffield, is an invigorating cinematic experience that far exceeds expectations.

No One Will Save You tells the story of Brynn (Kaitlyn Devers), a young woman living alone in a rural part of America in modern times (the exact year is never made clear at the film’s open). Brynn is an odd duck and an outcast in her rather unfriendly small town. She is unquestionably living a life of alienation and isolation…and then some-thing arrives in the middle of the night, and she is forced to deal with it…and with other things she’s long tried to avoid.

To be clear, No One Will Save You, which is writer/director Duffield’s second feature film, has its flaws and it isn’t perfect, for instance the last quarter of the film is tonally and stylistically not as strong as the first three quarters, but it is ambitious, inventive, very well-made, exceedingly well-acted and undeniably compelling.

Director Duffield shoots the film with an impressive amount of confidence and directs with a strong but deft touch. In order to avoid spoilers, I will not get into specifics but will only say that there are numerous scenes that are expertly choreographed and shot that leave you feeling like you’re in the hands of a master. For example, the kitchen sequence, bedroom sequence and basement sequence, are all top notch and exceed expectations and audience conditioning.

Even the last quarter of the film, which transitions from a survival story to a sort of spiritual and psychological, Jungian confrontation with the self, despite its unorthodox nature, is handled extremely well from a filmmaking perspective.

Throughout the movie Duffield pays homage, and borrows liberally, from a plethora of films, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Signs, War of the Worlds, and even The Exorcist, but he does so subtly and ultimately ends up putting an original spin on his alien encounter movie that in lesser hands could have been a trite and forgettable cinematic experience.

Duffield’s greatest tactic is that he consistently pushes back against the audience’s conditioning. We think we know what will happen next and how Brynn will behave, but Duffield almost always subtly subverts that expectation, and it is often exciting, occasionally confounding, but always compelling.

As great as the directing is on this film, the straw that stirs the drink is Kaitlyn Devers who stars as Brynn. Devers, who speaks only one line of dialogue in the entire film, is absolutely mesmerizing as she carries this entire enterprise on her shoulders and never falters.

Devers, who was terrific in the 2021 Hulu miniseries Dopesick, fills her continuous silence with a vibrant and vivid inner life that reveals itself in her expressive eyes. She wisely avoids the pitfall of over expression and simply lets her Brynn be and react in the moment, even when frozen in horrifying moments.

Devers’ skill and talent are on full display in this movie, and it is the type of performance that can catapult an actress on the road to the A list. One only hopes that Devers follows an artistic path rather than chase stardom, as she seems well-equipped to play nearly any role, but ill-equipped to do vacuous Hollywood bullshit.

Another notable thing about No One Will Save You are the visual effects. The film’s stated budget is $22 million and one can assume that a healthy portion of that went into the CGI aliens and it is money well-spent as the look and feel of the aliens elevate the film a great deal.

Most films with a smaller budget would bend over backwards to avoid showing the aliens in order to save money, but director Duffield never shies away from exploiting his superb supply of aliens.

The aliens in this film are fantastic as they are familiar enough to us from previous movies, but are still unique and original in their own right. The most impressive part about them is how organic and real they seem, and the diversity of alien types.

No One Will Save You comes at an interesting time in terms of taking the notion of aliens and UFOs seriously. In recent years the subject has been taken much more seriously by the political establishment and the mainstream media.

Just this year we’ve had congressional hearings on the issue and have had legislation passed giving whistleblower protections to people in the know who’ve been working in the shadows on the topic and may literally and metaphorically know where the bodies are buried. Exciting stuff for someone like me who’s been ravenously devouring any and all UFO related info since I was a kid.

In this context, No One Will Save You is an unnerving tale as it lays bare a likely reality regarding the UFO phenomenon…namely that aliens are not here to help us and that they are not benign. Many in the ufology field and many in the military hierarchy believe that UFOs and aliens are malignant predators and likely colonizers or destroyers. Some believe that the reason “disclosure” of all UFOs and aliens is being thwarted by the powers that be is because civilization will collapse when humans acknowledge that the reality of aliens on earth means we as humans are considerably lower on the food chain than we had hoped.

In this sense No One Will Save You is correct…if aliens are real and are coming to earth, no one will save us from them…not your community, not your government and not your church – as shown in the movie. If history teaches us anything it is that beings that have advanced technology and intelligence will enslave and slaughter those who are intellectually and technologically inferior.

The film’s title isn’t just accurate in regards to an alien invasion, as the coming collapse of not just the American Empire, but also the U.S. dollar and the economy as well as the entirety of Western Civilization (American and European), will lay bare the cold hard reality that…No One Will Save You. Your government won’t save you, the magic soil you live on won’t save you, the police won’t save you, your community won’t save you, your church won’t save you and your delusions of national grandeur won’t save you. And some benevolent alien species finally revealing themselves and solving all of our problems won’t save you either.

The Fourth Turning is upon us here in the West and that sound you faintly hear is the thin ice we’ve been living on cracking right before we plunge into the deep, dark depths of a new dark ages.

All the signs are there and they are flashing bright red. From our decadent culture to our decrepit ruling class to our malevolent media to our know-nothing citizens and our criminal underclass and criminally corrupt overclass. The house of cards is teetering and when it falls, not if it falls – but when…NO ONE WILL SAVE YOU.

Another interesting subtextual idea that you can ever so slightly perceive in the film is that tyrannical leadership, a sort of fascist or communist oppressive system, is the only thing that can keep humanity/community alive, even though the illusory life led under that despotic rule is not really living. In order to avoid spoilers, I won’t get into the specifics of how that conclusion is revealed in the film, but I think by the end it becomes clear.

Neo-Cons and war-hungry Neo-Liberals might argue that the thesis of the film is that the aliens are the Communist Chinese and they aim to wipe out human freedom and control all people…I am not reflexively anti-China but I can see that interpretation, especially considering the notion of social credit scores and incessant surveillance.

Regardless of what the film means – and it could mean even more than I’ve spelled out here, it is undeniably cinematically invigorating and definitely worth watching. Despite its flaws it features a terrific performance from Kaitlyn Devers and strong direction from Brian Duffield, as well as some fascinating CGI aliens. Overall, I highly recommend No One Will Save You to anyone even remotely interested in sci-fi movies or horror films, and even to those who don’t usually get into those genres.

 Follow me on Twitter: MPMActingCO

©2023

Barbarian: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed but smart and original horror movie that keeps you on your toes. If you like horror, you’ll love this.

I must confess that I don’t consider myself to be much of a horror movie afficionado. That’s not to say that I dislike horror movies, just that a horror movie has to be very good movie for me to enjoy it. I know people who just adore the genre and watch every horror movie and love it just because it’s a horror movie, but that’s not me.

My taste in horror is pretty specific, I love supernatural horror movies like The Shining, The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby, and I also like classic horror films. For example, this year on the week of Halloween I watched George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead as well as the Universal Monster Movie classics Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf Man and The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and thoroughly enjoyed them all for their originality, craftsmanship and artistry.

In contrast, I didn’t watch the most recent and allegedly last movie in the seemingly endless Halloween franchise, Halloween Ends. I loved the original Halloween (and most John Carpenter films) but I just don’t see the need to ever watch another Halloween movie.

In the wake of Halloween, the holiday not the movie, I did sit down and watch a new horror movie that has generated some buzz recently and which is now streaming on HBO Max. That movie is Barbarian, which is written and directed by Zach Cregger, and stars Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgaard and Justin Long.

Barbarian was released in theatres in September and despite having the most minimal of marketing budgets, it generated an impressive box office of $43.5 million against a $4.5 million budget.

I knew nothing about Barbarian prior to seeing it and the HBO description simply says that it tells the story of a woman who gets stuck sharing an AirBnB with a strange guy. Red flags immediately went up for me when I read that description as I assumed the movie was going to be just another flaccid #MeToo-men-are-monsters movie. As a devout kidnapping enthusiast who over the years has kept a multitude of women captive in my incredibly creepy basement, the last thing I want to watch is another scolding “men are awful” movie, thank you very much.

Fortunately, Barbarian masterfully plays with that expectation, and while it most certainly is a meta-textual meditation on #MeToo and the menace of men, which at times gets a bit too heavy-handed, it’s also a sophisticated sub-textual criticism and fascinating deconstruction of the #MeToo archetype.

I will not even begin to delve into the plot of Barbarian in order to avoid any semblance of spoilers, but will only say that, thankfully, the movie is so deftly directed and written by Zach Cregger that it’s never what you expect it to be. In fact, the film uses viewer’s preconceived notions, assumptions and cultural conditioning against them to always keep them off-balance. The film keeps its audience on its toes and is always one step ahead.

The film is structured in three acts with each successive act luring viewers deeper and deeper into the disorienting maze that is Barbarian.

The first act, starring Campbell and Skarsgaard, is so well-done as to be astonishing. Cregger plants various notions into the audience’s mind as to what type of film this is going to be…a Detroit-based Amityville Horror? A mixed-race The Sixth Sense or a mixed gender Single White Female? A straight-forward rip-off of Saw? Or is it an homage to all of the above and more?

Just when you think you know what’s going on in Barbarian, Cregger nudges you in a different direction and leads you by your nose down into a very dark and disorienting path.

Act two features the criminally under-appreciated Justin Long in a fantastically Long-ian role that spotlights his likeability and immense talent. Once again, I will not get into specifics of plot, but the jump from act one to act two is so jarring as to be cinematically glorious.

I admit that act three is the weakest of the three, and I found it to be considerably less engaging, intelligent and challenging, but, once again without giving anything away, I think that has to do with the type of horror movie that act three is paying homage to…which is my least favorite type of horror.

The thing I enjoyed the most about Barbarian is that while it’s certainly a #MeToo movie, it never panders and or signals its socio-political virtue too much. It tackles that complex topic with a nuance and complexity that is shocking for a low budget horror film.

Also tantalizing is how Cregger turns the film into a profound statement not just on the predatory nature of men but also on the apocalyptic results of Reaganism on America and the dehumanizing nature of poverty.

While there were certainly some flaws in Zach Cregger’s directing, most notably in a scene shot in dim light that fumbles perspective (to avoid spoilers I won’t say anything more than that) and act three’s many mis-steps, he’s obviously a filmmaker with some interesting ideas. One can only hope that Barbarian is a stepping stone for Cregger to make even better things.

The bottom-line regarding Barbarian is that if you are a horror afficionado you’ll love this movie as it operates from a deeply well-informed position in the genre. If you are, like me, a rather fair-weather horror fan, or are less-inclined to enjoy the genre, Barbarian is good enough to be worthwhile even though it sort of loses its way in act three.

The reality is that 2022 has thus far been an utterly abysmal year for cinema, so Barbarian, despite its glaring act three flaws, stands out because it’s a well-crafted, original piece of work, and that is reason enough for me to recommend it.  

©2022

Halloween Kills: Video Review

My review of Halloween Kills on The Cinephile with Michael McCaffrey.

Thanks for watching!

©2021

Hereditary: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars                     Popcorn Curve Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. A decent but not great horror movie that boasts two strong performances. Worth seeing for free with MoviePass or on Netflix/cable if you have a chance but not worth paying full price at the theatre.  

Hereditary, written and directed by Ari Aster, is the story of the Graham family who experience strange happenings in the wake of their reclusive grandmother's death. The film stars Toni Colette with supporting turns from Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff and Millie Shapiro. 

Horror films are not usually my thing but the ones I find to be the best and the scariest, The Shining, The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby all deal with existential threats from the spiritual/supernatural realm. Hereditary falls into the same type of horror film as those three classics, but while it is entertaining and has many quality elements, it fails to coalesce into a cinematic whole that lives up to the high standards of the unholy trinity of films mentioned above. 

In execution, Hereditary falls short of being what I consider truly noteworthy cinema, but with that said, the subtext of the film is absolutely mesmerizing and for that reason alone I was glad I used my MoviePass to go see it. Hereditary, intentionally or unintentionally, is a metaphor for Trump's America (the lead character even says "I am the only one who can fix this") and an ominous warning for what lies ahead for us all…but more on that at another time.

Beyond the fascinating themes bubbling just under the surface of Hereditary, the film also boasts two exceptional horror film performances from Toni Colette and Alex Wolff.

Colette is stunning as Annie, the mother of the cursed Graham family. Watching her simultaneously be wrapped too tight yet also wildly unraveling is a disturbing pleasure. Colette's Annie is perpetually containing a deep and pulsating wound that at times manifests so powerfully it jumps out of her mouth and cruelly strikes the ones she loves. Colette's ability to vividly portray Annie's spiral downward and descent into shadow is a testament to her deft skill and enormous talent.

Alex Wolff also gives a powerful performance as the families teenage son Peter. There is a sequence, which is pivotal to the film, where the camera stays in close up on Wolff's face without cutting away for a very extended period of time. Wolff absolutely crushes this very difficult sequence, never once hitting the slightest of false notes. Director Avi Aster obviously knew the gem he had in Wolff, for he effectively uses him in numerous extended dramatic close ups and Wolff is seamless every time. Wolff is an impressive actor and his future is bright indeed. 

Gabriel Byrne is one of my favorite actors and he plays Steve, the Graham family father. Years ago I had a transcendent experience sitting in the front row for Byrne's performance on Broadway in Eugene O'Neill's Moon for the Misbegotten. The staging of the play left Byrne about four feet from me for almost the entire second half of the production, and as he sat there weeping and wailing and emotionally contorting himself in all sorts of ungodly O'Neill-ian ways, I felt as if he was bringing to life my own tortured Irish sub-conscious. Byrne is an under appreciated actor and sadly, in Hereditary, Byrne is criminally underused, and for the life of me I cannot figure out why, as the film suffers because of it. 

Milly Shapiro plays the Graham's odd daughter Charlie. There is something wrong with Charlie, she may be autistic, or mildly retarded or something along those lines. Shapiro does well to embody Charlie's discomfort with being in the world in the state she is in. Shapiro is also pretty fearless as she let's the filmmakers make her look as distorted and odd as possible, which benefits the film a great deal but couldn't have been easy. 

Director Ari Aster and cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski do solid work in using the camera to heighten tension and fear. Pogorzelski's use of shadow is particularly effective in raising the creepy factor throughout the film, and he also pulls off some unconventional camera maneuvers that work surprisingly well.  

Pogorzelski's cinematography combined with Colin Stetson's music and the film's sound effectively set a very creepy mood and tone to the film. Stetson's music is particularly unsettling as just like the film's foreboding sub-text, it dramatically haunts from just below the viewers conscious attention. 

Ari Aster is a much more polished director than he is a writer. I felt Aster, much like his lead character Annie, was unable to keep control of the film for the duration. As the story expands and becomes more unwieldy, Aster loses his grip on it and the film loses much of its power. But to Aster's credit, even though the ending feels a bit out of place in the context of the rest of the film, I did find it well conceived and executed. 

As for the sub-textual themes that I found so engrossing and insightful for our time and for what lies ahead...I will write a separate piece about that this coming week because it would be much too difficult to get into it here without giving some spoilers away. 

In conclusion, Hereditary is a decent horror movie but it falls well short of being a great film. While I was glad to see it, I was even happier that thanks to the joys of MoviePass, I didn't technically pay full price to see it. If you like horror films in general, definitely see Hereditary in the theatre, as you will most likely love it. If you are lukewarm on horror films (and don't have MoviePass), then you can wait to see it on cable of Netflix and not be any worse for wear. 

©2018