Late Night with the Devil

For the longest time I kept giving Late Night with the Devil the benefit of the doubt, overlooking things and tones that didn’t square with the film’s presented milieu — it’s supposed to be footage from a late-night TV talk show that aired live on Halloween 1977. It’s got subtly powerhouse work by David Dastmalchian, striding into a rare lead role with confidence and his usual emotional transparency. He’s playing Jack Delroy, the host of the fourth-network show Night Owls with Jack Delroy, and it’s clear he’s watched enough vintage chat and horror-host shows to have internalized how such hosts acted and spoke. Dastmalchian makes the movie fun to watch all by himself. It’s the movie around him that falters.

Obsessed with beating Johnny Carson’s ratings, Jack loads his Halloween show with guests he hopes will lure and hook viewers. There’s “Christou” (Fayssal Bazzi), a psychic who purports to be in touch with audience members’ deceased loved ones. There’s Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss), a Randi-type debunker of flim-flam. Finally, there’s reputedly possessed girl Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), whose parapsychologist guardian Dr. June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon) saved her from some sort of demonic cult. It’s not long before Jack finds out the real target of satanic energy isn’t any of his guests. 

Gee, could the (real-life) Bohemian Grove and its shadowy meetings of powerful men in the entertainment industry have something to do with it? Grasping at any means to take down Johnny, Jack has joined these weird ritualistic get-togethers in the woods. This isn’t a spoiler, as the too-explicit narration spills the beans right at the start. We then learn Jack’s wife had died of lung cancer despite never smoking (such a thing is rare but not so unheard-of as to suggest demonic cause). So we go into all the supernatural events with the knowledge that it’s all happening due to Jack; he is the nexus of this paranormal activity. 

This is why horror movies get less legitimately frightening the deeper they wander into the weeds of exposition. It becomes Jack’s problem, Jack’s fault, rather than something random and scary that could happen to you. As I said, Late Night with the Devil is a fun tribute; sometimes it looks like genuine 1977 video footage and sometimes not (I assume because if it looked too much like video from 1977 it’d just look terrible, like a smeary, staticky fifth-gen dupe). It’s a decent enough stylistic calling card for the director brothers Colin and Cameron Cairnes, who also wrote and edited the film; perhaps next time they could hire another writer, or resist whatever pressure they may have been under to force the weird events — including levitation, projectile vomiting and someone with worms emerging from his flesh — to make some sort of narrative sense instead of allowing them to be harrowingly unexplained.

What’s worse, rather than letting the whole film just be the show’s footage, the brothers Cairnes often give us black-and-white “behind the scenes” segments that are necessary, I guess, to deliver plot points (as when someone dies offscreen and Jack hears about it during a commercial pause), but that also violate the imaginative contract we’ve bought into that this is actual coverage taped off of late-night TV. Not that we literally believe it’s real, of course, but we want to like what the movie is doing, want to make ourselves vulnerable to whatever scares it packs, and such breaks in the style and narrative shatter what should be unquestioning absorption. Again, it’s a writing issue. 

Dastmalchian is one of the most effortlessly engaging actors we’ve got. In a recent two-parter on The Rookie he played a corrupt ex-soldier who faked his own death; his character showed such strong certainty that he was untouchable by the cops (including the one he once served with) we were left with little reason to doubt him. Late Night with the Devil lets Dastmalchian run the gamut from TV-host smarm to insecurity to grief to terror — it’s a full package. The movie would be considerably easier to dismiss and forget without him as Jack, the ringmaster of his own small circus whose animals get out of his control. For his pains, he’s just surrounded by a bunch of Australian actors who needed work. One of them, Rhys Auteri as Gus, Jack’s Ed McMahon figure, gives an on-target performance without ego. Most of the rest of the cast appear to be too “in character” as guests on a Halloween show — are they on the level or not? These directors seem to know how to leave good actors alone, but the (let’s say) other actors don’t get the guidance they need. By the time the climax fizzles out into a weak post-climax that fills the studio floor with casualties but leaves us unmoved, some of us may already have checked out mentally. Enjoy the movie for Dastmalchian, but don’t expect much more.

The First Omen

The last time one of these Omen things came around — nearly twenty years ago! — I said we seem to get a lot of demonic cinema when there’s trouble in the Middle East (more so than usual, that is). I don’t know why. But the world situation is what it is, and lately we’ve gotten a slew of brimstone beasties. Last year gave us new installments of Evil Dead and The Exorcist, along with a group of others; this still-young year has brought Late Night with the Devil, Immaculate, and now The First Omen, a prequel set before the infernal events of the 1976 original. (It’s not a prequel to the 2006 remake, since we see a photo of the 1976 film’s star Gregory Peck here.) In such times, people prefer being scared by things that don’t remind them of the world outside the multiplex, I guess.

Visually, this may be the best-directed Omen yet. Cowriter/director Arkasha Stevenson and her cinematographer Aaron Martin offer an early-‘70s Rome done up in dark amber and burgundy, the color of hellfire, as though the world capital of Catholicism were hell on earth. Our heroine is Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), an American novitiate who arrives at an orphanage in Rome to take her vows as a nun. Margaret has been plagued by disturbing visions all her life, and she develops concern for an orphan girl named Carlita, whose drawings indicate similar troubling spectres. As Margaret eventually finds out — with the help of Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson), the priest headed for freak impalement in the ’76 film — she hasn’t been brought to Rome just to become a nun.

The movie is dark and often quiet, and takes its time. Arkasha Stevenson knows her stuff and creates a suffocating mood. It’s the script, whose end is designed to click neatly into the 1976 movie’s beginning, that lost me. Nell Tiger Free plays Margaret honorably, but as written she’s made a bit too perfect, boringly perfect. There’s more going on with Margaret’s roomie Luz (Maria Caballero), who wants to take Margaret out on the town before they both take their vows, and Sister Silvia (Sonia Braga), the chain-smoking, trampoline-hopping Abbess of the orphanage. These two women both imply vivid past lives before their calling, and Sonia Braga cast as a nun will amuse fans of her ‘70s and ‘80s work. Margaret might have been allowed her own secret quirks and foibles. Or perhaps the writers didn’t want to link female individualism with vulnerability to demonic interest. 

In these movies it’s usually a virginal innocent (almost always female) who attracts the notice of Old Splitfoot, the better for her to lure him and risk being defiled by him. Such narratives tend not to be especially feminist. They’re not built to be. Stevenson and her collaborators try, however, to make this a glancingly empowering story by establishing rapport between women (this film, incidentally, would pass the Bechdel Test breezing). The problem is, the script doesn’t create any pockets of warmth between them, no funky humanity whose violation we can mourn. Even in the sober-sided original film there was David Warner as a skeevy tabloid photographer whose manner amusingly rubbed Gregory Peck the wrong way. There’s no David Warner figure in The First Omen, and it could have used one, desperately. 

It does occur to me that these lacks may have more to do with studio meddling than with the creators, who may have initially delivered a movie more in line with what I might’ve liked. As it is, the film — despite freaky bits like a demonic birth that almost got an NC-17 rating — feels, like many prequels, like a bland and unnecessary story. We know, after all, that Damien will be born and taken into the highest halls of power until he grows up to be Sam Neill. Nothing in this film will — or will be allowed to — change that. The only story here is how Margaret, a nun from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, ends up being part of the Damien saga. She has nothing much intriguing about her aside from that, and despite what I’m sure were the writers’ best intentions, she becomes reduced to what these movies always reduce women to: her body. 

The Boogeyman

Stephen King’s 1973 short story “The Boogeyman” gave me a few sleepless nights when I was a kid. For King, the tale arose from his fears of his children dying. For kids, it was even scarier: a monster could come for you in the night, and your parents couldn’t stop it. The story is told by Lester Billings, who has lost three of his young children to what they described as “the boogeyman,” a thing that hunkers down in dark closets, waiting to strike. Lester isn’t very relatable — he doesn’t seem to like his wife or kids, and he’s actually kind of a huge prick — so we suspect, like others in his life, that he himself killed the kids and made up the boogeyman as a sort of coping mechanism. But no, the boogeyman is very real … although we may wonder to what extent the monster has acted on a resentful father’s suppressed desire to be rid of the shackles of family.

The new movie version (there was a cheesy short version forty years ago, usually packaged with a much better Frank Darabont short also based on King) takes an entirely different psychological tack. For one thing, Lester — in the person of the likable, sometimes painfully vulnerable David Dastmalchian — is presented in his limited screen time as a genuinely bereaved father who needs to make sense of what happened. A better movie might have wanted to follow Lester on his journey, but he — and, sadly, Dastmalchian — exit the picture early, leaving us with the therapist Lester visits, Dr. Will Harper (Chris Messina), and his two daughters.

I won’t abandon him as quickly as the film does; I find David Dastmalchian a fascinating, hooded presence. He can be creepy or friendly (or both), and he just pulls us naturally into whatever his character is feeling. His haunted, agonized features promise a much more impactful horror movie than The Boogeyman turns out to be. When he goes, the movie I wanted goes with him, and I was stuck with Dr. Harper, sullen teen Sadie (Sophie Hatcher) and cute-as-a-button Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair) as they grappled with the death of Dr. Harper’s wife. Thematically, this family’s pain isn’t very satisfying because the boogeyman isn’t drawn to grief. It just wants to drink the life out of children, and the only reason it imprints on Dr. Harper and his daughters is that Lester (unknowingly) brought it there. It’s said their weakness in time of grief makes them easier targets for it, but I was still left wondering why this story wasn’t about Lester and his growing terror and madness when his children kept being killed.

It took three guys to work up the script pitting two brave girls against a monster who doesn’t like the light. A couple of clever moments come out of this, such as when the younger girl, playing a videogame, makes the TV screen flash just long enough to reveal the boogeyman creeping in the shadows of the room. Whoever designed, rendered and animated the monster has earned a salute, and director Rob Savage is shrewd about how much of the boogeyman he shows us, and when. The atmosphere is heavy, with just about the only levity coming from Sadie’s high-school friends, one of whom is annoying enough that we want the boogeyman to visit her.

Nine out of ten horror directors think a dynamic soundtrack will scare us, and Savage certainly isn’t the exception. The movie gets plotty and goal-oriented when it should be parking itself quietly in front of a closet door creaking open by itself and letting us fill the darkness with our own fearful demons. If you’ve seen enough horror movies, you know all the tropes and all the techniques. So sometimes a frightening sequence in an otherwise non-horror film — I always cite the room full of mummies in Raiders of the Lost Ark or the terrifying figure behind the dumpster in Mulholland Drive — hits us squarely in the fear center, because we don’t see it coming. We horror-movie buffs may still have fun at a horror movie — even The Boogeyman has its enjoyable bits — but as far as genuine scares, well, that ship sailed for most of us somewhere in our teens. The Boogeyman isn’t scary, but it could have been. The source material was right there. David Dastmalchian was right there. 

The Last Voyage of the Demeter

It was Cleolinda Jones, that consistently amusing and insightful pop-culture blogger, who pointed out a simple fact: “People in Dracula don’t know they’re in Dracula.” What this means is, not only do the characters not know that someone named Dracula is bad news, they aren’t aware of all the vampire tropes we’ve seen a thousand times, so we have to watch them get wised up, sometimes impatiently. Which brings us to The Last Voyage of the Demeter, where the characters don’t know they’re in one chapter of Dracula. Most of them aren’t even named in the book.

The movie is based on a section of Bram Stoker’s novel dealing with the trip Dracula makes by ship to London. The short passage is creepy and allusive, told in terse semi-sentences by the captain, powered by our imaginations reading between the lines. The film, directed by Norwegian horror journeyman André Øvredal (Trollhunter), turns the story into what Øvredal has described as “Alien on a ship in 1897.” Like a lot of critics, I appreciate what they were going for — a moody old-school monster mash — but the result is aggressively boring. 

The characters are standard-issue placeholders defined by a couple of Screenwriting 101 habits or beliefs, not filled out by personality or action (though David Dastmalchian is commanding as usual as the saturnine first mate). The hero is Clemens (Corey Hawkins), a doctor with experience in astronomy and general ship’s duties. He winds up on the ship after saving the life of the captain’s grandson. There is also a woman, Anna (Aisling Franciosi), who stows away on the ship and drops a lot of infodumps about a creature her people call Dracula. He’s the one, she says, who’s been slinking around the ship, warming up by killing all the animals on board and then picking off crew members one by one every night.

The main problem is that there’s no intrinsic interest in or mystery to any of this, since we know how it ends, although the writers extrapolate as much as they can. It’s a long wait between killings, and the killings are never very impressive or even distinct from each other. Someone is foolishly alone on the ship after dark, and Dracula rushes forth from the shadows, and the blood-draining commences. Dracula is played by Javier Botet, a creature actor in the mold of Doug Jones, and he’s covered in latex that makes him look like a man-sized bat monster. So the movie envisions Dracula solely as an almost-wordless beast who might as well be the xenomorph from Alien. Ultimately he’s just a slasher. We know that Dracula has a human form so as to travel among humans, but we don’t see one here; apparently he just needs to put on a hat and suck in his bat wings and he can pass as a regular human tourist in all that London fog.

All the ideas that might have made The Last Voyage of the Demeter fresh or intriguing or even witty are muscled aside in favor of tediously shot kill scenes, which we might overlook if the entire structure of the thing didn’t point to them as the gory crescendos, and if there were anything else of note going on. I’d say it was a waste of a good premise, but what about this story, as told here, needed to be told? (The best treatment of the events aboard the Demeter remains chapter 7 of Stoker’s novel.) If Dracula is ultimately a slasher here, then this is ultimately a slasher movie despite its trappings and literary pedigree. As such, it is fatally uninteresting.

The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has launched any number of adaptations, variations, and permutations in the 205 years since it was first published. The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, a modern-day riff on the story, may be one of the more touching — up to a point. A first feature by writer-director Bomani J. Story, ABG&HM is bound to be derided as “woke” by a certain contingent, though none of the Black characters in it is especially heroic or faultless, least of all Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes), a student at an advanced high school. 

Vicaria rattles off elements and scientific facts, and Hayes lets us share how good it feels to Vicaria to be in control of something. Her home life is gutted though (barely) functional, her neighborhood is infested with crack dealers and the resulting violence, and the (white) authority figures who enforce the rules in school and on the streets won’t help her. I believed very quickly and completely in Vicaria as a brilliant girl who may also be missing a few pieces psychologically.

Vicaria’s mother was shot to death years ago, leaving behind Vicaria and her father (Chad L. Coleman), who buys crack from the cold-blooded local dealer (Denzel Whitaker) when he’s not working two jobs. The movie is matter-of-fact about the misery it shows us, and is also willing to sketch in some genuine warmth between family. The portrait of a bleeding community feels full and lived. To complicate things, Vicaria’s brother Chris (Edem Atsu-Swanzy) has recently been killed by the cops. Vicaria steals his body — not the first corpse she’s squirreled away, we learn — and decides to test her theory that death is a disease and can be cured.

This angry Black girl’s monster isn’t just the re-animated Chris; it’s rage itself, which Chris seems possessed by, and by the need to act it out. Fury flows through the monster’s veins as much as the electricity Vicaria uses to jump-start him. (When he strangles people, he leaves deep, ugly burn marks on their flesh.) Bomani J. Story uses Frankenstein to tell a tale about how anger and desperation can napalm the innocent and guilty alike. Chris wreaks havoc on cops and criminals — destroying the world that destroyed him — and we get the impression he’s acting as much on Vicaria’s wishes as his own. Her name probably sounds like “vicarious” for a reason.

ABG&HM is a fine, wounding drama that occasionally puts on a Halloween costume and gets its hands gory. It’s a hell of a calling card, and Story can take a bow for the seeming effortlessness with which he juggles thematic concerns and sustains an oppressive tone usually in exciting conflict with the snappy filmmaking. But the movie doesn’t hit us as deeply as it might, and it’s easy to see why: We never get to know Chris as a living person — he’s dead right from the start, and the artsy, wordless flashbacks we get of him don’t help. Story may have needed to keep the film to a certain length, and scenes of Chris and Vicaria sharing warm moments may have been sacrificed. So there’s no contrast between whatever he was before and the growling, haltingly spoken monster he becomes. 

Chris’s own family, even including Vicaria, doesn’t seem to have much of an emotional response to his recent death, either (and nobody goes looking for his body, which it’s assumed that someone “sick” made off with) — not even Aisha (Reilly Brooke Stith), who’s carrying Chris’s baby. They all get together for a family dinner that, as I noted above, is a welcome respite from the grimness — but shouldn’t they show a bit more consciousness of who isn’t at the table? (Chris is mentioned a couple times.) I know, I know, Story has more on his plate than grief and its realistic impact; an entire movie could be made (and has been) about processing all the intense, tangled emotions following a loved one’s violent death. Here, Chris’s death isn’t the subject, it’s a delivery system for a premise, and we sort of need to agree to go along with that to get the most out of the film. It’s not perfect, but it leaves me wanting to see more from this filmmaker. It gets our interest and holds it.

Renfield

Of the things we might expect from a Dracula movie, particularly one starring Nicolas Cage as the legendary bloodsucker, the top of that list would probably not be a crime comedy. But that’s what Renfield shapes up as. There are a few decent ideas in Renfield, but they’re left to die of starvation while the plot gives us scene after scene in which gangsters have shootouts with cops or are bloodily dispatched by Robert Montague Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), the immortal familiar of Count Dracula. Renfield is an unassuming-looking British dude until he eats bugs, at which point he turns into Super Renfield and the movie turns into super crap.

After about a century of doing Dracula’s dark bidding, Renfield has sort of a mid-unlife crisis; he feels he’s in a codependent relationship with the vampire. So he attends a support group of such people, and he thinks that by feeding some of his fellow sufferers’ toxic S.O.s to Dracula he can do good and do bad at the same time. But one of those toxic boyfriends turns out to be mixed up in crime, and Renfield’s plan to kidnap him is foiled by a hit man from the Lobo crime family. This, not very long into an 87-minute movie less six minutes of end credits, is where the movie goes badly wrong and never recovers. I’m never unhappy to see Awkwafina, and she’s fine here — none of the cast is the problem, really — but she’s playing Cop Trope #7189, the cop’s cop daughter still sore about his murder by the Lobos, with a side order of tension with her FBI sister. All of this is awful and takes valuable time away from Renfield and Dracula.

A whole dark-comic movie could have been made about the relationship between the familiar and his master, but that’s not what Renfield is truly about. Cops and criminals are brought into it to ensure bang-bang and fight scenes and lots and lots of gore. (Between this and Evil Dead Rise, I’m just gonna say the MPAA doesn’t even care about blood any more. Have as much of it as you want in your movie, you’ll still get an R rating and be able to get a wide theatrical release.) But the idea of Renfield helping his codependent fellows by sending their tormentors to Dracula is lost, and Dracula himself barely makes any sense. Cage is game to give a mint-condition camp performance, but the material just gives him Dracula’s resentment of Renfield to work with. That isn’t enough to make him interesting, or even plausible as a powerful force in Renfield’s life. So Dracula wanders into the sphere of the Lobo family, and a movie that died half an hour ago now lets its corpse fall into a vat of rancid shit.

Speaking of powerful forces, Shohreh Aghdashloo turns up as the matriarch of the Lobo crime clan. The role and dialogue are insults to her, but she still rallies and comes up with a menacing growl to top any vampire’s. When her mob boss and Dracula meet, she purrs “Enchantée,” and he kisses her hand, lingers over her scent (he seems to be sniffing the metaphorical blood on her hand), and says, as genuinely as only Nicolas Cage can say it, “The pleasure is all mine.” That short exchange, showing what great actors can do without explosions of gore, contains the sum total of the Renfield I wanted, something that speaks of dark unslakable desire and ghastly alliances. It’s what it should always have been about, instead of Renfield’s redemption arc and Awkwafina honking insults at people. And a movie this incurious about what the vampire master/human slave dynamic might really be like suffers in every imaginable way in comparison with the fraught relationship between vampire Nandor and familiar Guillermo on FX’s What We Do in the Shadows. Any vampire comedy now has that show to compete with. Renfield ain’t got game. 

Evil Dead Rise

Here’s the thing about the Evil Dead franchise. It needs Bruce Campbell’s Ash Williams the way the Alien franchise needs Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley. Without those characters and those actors, you may have in-name-only franchise sequels with gnashing xenomorphs and unruly deadites, but you don’t have the heart and soul. In the first three Evil Dead films and three seasons of Ash Vs. Evil Dead, Campbell and director Sam Raimi gradually leaned into knockabout comedy, until the stories were informed as much by the Three Stooges as by The Exorcist. 

Campbell comes on for a quick aural bow in Evil Dead Rise, and his out-of-patience voice on an ancient record snapping “It’s called The Book of the Dead for a reason” conveys more of the old Evil Dead spirit than anything else in the film. Here, we’re in a condemned old apartment building in Los Angeles. We meet our hero Beth (Lily Sullivan), a guitar tech, her sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), a tattoo artist, and Ellie’s three kids. Ellie’s husband is out of the picture, while Beth has recently discovered she’s pregnant. Writer-director Lee Cronin kicks back and lets the women marinate in their sorrows for a while, just as though any of this is going to matter much once the evil dead barge in.

Which they do, possessing Ellie and then others. There’s a fair amount of nastiness involving the de-souled Ellie taunting Beth about her being a “groupie slut” and carrying an extra soul for Ellie to eat. I’d just as soon not get into the implications of that second bit.* And it’s weird to complain that a horror movie gets us to care about people, but this was a family I didn’t particularly relish watching as they suffered, bled, grieved, bled some more, and literally almost drowned in blood. We never “cared” about Ash — we liked the guy, but to enjoy him getting bashed around we had to keep some detachment from him. Ash didn’t really have feelings. He was a slapstick figure at the center of a horror-fantasy series.

But here, and also in its grim predecessor from ten years ago, there’s no slapstick, no “Klaatu barada nikto,” no fun. These are realistic people with real pain over real problems. Turning deadites loose on them is like kicking a dying puppy in the face. Now, that kind of nihilistic cruelty to characters can work, and has worked many times, in good horror stories. And none of those horror stories were called Evil Dead. But now here we are. You can no longer be guaranteed a rowdy good time with this franchise. It has become rancid, humorless, toxic. Apart from the spasmodic, shambolic, cackling-witch behavior of the possessed, the tone of these latter Evil Dead films is so different they don’t even seem part of the same series. 

The two leads, both from Australian TV and film, work strenuously and honestly as sisters with all sorts of brittle feelings between them. They aren’t the problem here — the conception of the film is unappealing, and they do what they can within it, maintaining some dignity in circumstances that mitigate against dignity. The movie itself doesn’t work hard enough to deserve them (the kids are all great too). The gore level is off the chart, leading comics artist and horror buff Stephen Bissette to opine that this might be the bloodiest movie ever to pass with an R rating. It may well be. Maybe if it’s demonic blood it doesn’t count as real blood. That’s fine; to me, this doesn’t count as a real Evil Dead film either. 

*All right, I will here. The movie basically says the fetus has a soul, a classic pro-life stance. 

Scream VI

“How are you still alive?” someone says, near the end of Scream VI, to someone who certainly seemed to be Ghostface fodder. The question would almost be funny, if it weren’t so frustrating, because we’re not sure why anyone in the movie is still alive, nor why some others are dead. One person takes a deep slash to the arm and is seen, not much later, using the arm as though it were untouched. Sometimes these discrepancies between those who should be dead but somehow aren’t, and those who suffer similar or even lesser damage but expire anyway, are due to changes made during editing, preview screenings, or even filming; sometimes, though, it’s just lazy screenwriting, and that explanation fits Scream VI best.

“Fuck this franchise,” someone else says — yes, these movies are as meta as ever — and that quote shows more relevance with each new sequel. The Scream franchise is three years shy of its 30th anniversary at this point, but that’s to be expected in the horror genre; hell, Halloween was 40 years old the last time it got rebooted. But the particular whodunit emphasis of this series means that each new entry has to up the ante and devise ever more convoluted motives for the killer(s), and by now the reveals have become rote, boring. Well, we know the killer can’t be Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), the sole hangover from the 1996 original film. Nor, probably, is it the sisters Sam and Tara Carpenter (Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega), especially since Ortega has a Wednesday fanbase now, and Paramount isn’t going to lose any factor they have left to put butts in seats.

Other than that, the masked Ghostface could be anyone, taunting our protagonists over the phone in that same insinuating growl through a voice modulator (though actually voiced, since day one in this series, by Roger L. Jackson). And when I say anyone, I generally mean anyone new to the series. That narrows it down nicely. The movie also brings back Kirby (Hayden Panettiere), Ghostface survivor turned driven FBI agent. Why? To jazz the longtime fans, which now means those who were around in 2011 to see Kirby’s last Scream appearance. The one thing I freely enjoyed here is Gale Weathers’ baffled reaction to Kirby, whom she remembers as the high-school kid she was in 2011, being in the FBI now: “You’re, like, a zygote.” I get it, Gale. 2011 was five minutes ago for us Gen-Xers but 12 long years ago for the young’uns. 

Is the merciless passage of time the only thing the Scream films have to scare us with now? Certainly the murder scenes are no more interesting or impactful. It’s just stab, stab, stab, though the killer does grab a shotgun at one point; hey, it’s New York City. Horror films of late have benefited from the MPAA’s lax attitude towards gory violence, probably at least since The Passion of the Christ and surely since 2008’s Rambo. What once would have obliged a slasher flick to go out unrated, or with a self-applied X, or later with an NC-17, now coasts by with an R rating. So in Scream VI, people take a few more knife thrusts than you expect, or we’ll glimpse a bit of intestines peeking out. It was said after Columbine that movie violence would get more restricted as a result (indeed, Scream 3 in 2000 was a casualty of that), but these days Americans don’t care if kids are shot in school, so the movies are back to being bloodthirsty.

Anyway, the older sister Sam is the daughter of OG killer Billy Loomis (a de-aged Skeet Ulrich keeps turning up in Sam’s hallucinations), but at this point it’s clear she’s not going to take after him. The series, under the tutelage of directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, has decided to be about putting the past behind us and embracing the future, which is very noble and “live, laugh, love” and all that, but looks awkward draped over what started, in Wes Craven’s and Kevin Williamson’s able hands, as a gory, nasty thriller. Well, the nastiness is gone and the gore feels thin and inconsequential. In the first two Scream movies, the self-referencing felt sharp and added to the fright and the fun. Now it just feels tossed in there because it’s a Scream film. Like the directors’ previous Scream film last year, it doesn’t sting us or stay with us. It’s just pausing on its way to becoming content on Paramount+, where it will submerse into the back catalog and seldom be heard from again. 

The Pope’s Exorcist

If you plan to see The Pope’s Exorcist, may I suggest you preface it with a viewing of William Friedkin’s 2017 documentary The Devil and Father Amorth? The Friedkin film isn’t much as a movie (it’s streaming free with ads on Tubi), but its long centerpiece containing footage of a purported real exorcism is worth a look. It conveys the frustration and boredom as well as the drama and fear evoked by the ritual, and it shows us the then-91-year-old Father Gabriele Amorth at work, starting off by literally thumbing his nose at the devil and then exorcising, steadily and patiently, for however long it takes. And the result isn’t a Hollywood triumph, either. The victim, Cristina, has undergone nine unsuccessful Amorth exorcisms, including the one we see, and for all we know she suffers to this day.

Father Amorth gets his Hollywood close-up in The Pope’s Exorcist. Hell, he’s even played by Russell Crowe, here chowing down on his favored meal of late, a nice ham sandwich. Crowe must have seen the same footage of the real Amorth, because he gets the man’s sometimes goofball sense of humor and a degree of unflappable calm in the face of demons. I think the actual Amorth might have laughed heartily at this film’s depiction of him as an action exorcist, kicking down doors and investigating an ancient corpse’s stomach. And Crowe, who seems to have eased into this B-movie camera-hog stage of his career, enjoys himself. Too bad we can’t really share the fun.

We probably shouldn’t look to most exorcism movies for physical realism. But this movie doesn’t even gesture towards plausibility. People are supernaturally flung into walls with a force that should kill anyone, and they just groan a little and get up; one woman gets her head slammed onto a bathroom sink hard enough to shatter it, and somehow her skull doesn’t follow suit. This is all caused by Asmodeus, a demon whose ultimate goal is to possess Amorth and infiltrate the Church. The demon starts off in the frail body of a little boy who hasn’t spoken since seeing his father die a year ago. His mother and sister have accompanied him to an inherited Spanish abbey, which we gather was the site of a lot of evil. The demon, apparently there waiting, takes over the kid and demands a priest. They send in a wet-behind-the-ears fellow, and the demon roars “Wrong fucking priest!” I liked that a lot, but there’s nothing else here as good.

So this younger priest joins forces with Amorth against this demon, who taunts them with visions of the women they sinned against. I can see how this could have been treated as a feminist wrinkle in the movie’s premise (God is cool, the Church is shady), but in practice it’s bloody, highly sexualized women bashing celibate men around, and it brings up tonal and thematic questions this frequently dumb movie doesn’t have the wherewithal to answer. Maybe the director, Julius Avery, and the five people credited as writers on this thing have made an unconscious indictment not only of the Church but the toxic masculinity that powers it and commits so much evil behind closed gilded doors. We chew this over; maybe the movie is more thoughtful than we’d assumed. But then it’s back to the demon pretending to be a woman biting the head off a bird.

It’s not every movie that suffers in comparison to not one but two William Friedkin exorcism movies. The Exorcist, of course, is an enduring ornament on the gnarled tree of horror. And even The Devil and Father Amorth, for all that it feels like a DVD extra that probably wouldn’t even have gotten the small release it did if Friedkin’s name weren’t on it, has that blandly filmed ritual with a growling, obviously pained woman at its center (possessed or psychologically/neurologically wounded? the movie leaves it open), creating the drama the one-take filmmaking lacks. The Pope’s Exorcist is dramatic bordering on melodramatic, but it doesn’t take any of its own concerns seriously, the way you definitely felt Friedkin and William Peter Blatty did on The Exorcist. This might as well be an Evil Dead film a week early. 

Cocaine Bear

A movie like Cocaine Bear has to do what it says on the tin, and it does. A big bear gets into a fumbled stash of cocaine out in the woods, and it kills people. The film is a horror-comedy — full of blood and guts, but somehow the director, Elizabeth Banks, keeps the proceedings as light as possible. She doesn’t want to bum us out or, particularly, to gross us out (although there are several nasty, messy kills, not all of them at the hands — er, paws — of the bear). She wants to entertain us. Set in 1985, when the actual events that inspired the movie took place, Cocaine Bear is short and, yes, kind of sweet. Banks and screenwriter Jimmy Warden make most of the characters likable by giving them identifiable quirks and needs. Even the piece’s real villain, drug dealer Syd (Ray Liotta in one of his final roles), has recognizable resentments and fears. 

This is notable, because Cocaine Bear, of all movies, did not need to go the extra mile to flesh out the characters, thus making us care if they wind up as bear scat. It could just as easily have coasted on its absurdist premise and fed stick figures into the powdery maw of the beast. But the script sets several groups in motion, sometimes at cross-purposes, all heading towards the bear. Even the tourist couple whose troubles kick the movie off seem to have a history in back of the film and a hoped-for future in front of it. Once the threat is established, we get to know the threatened. Sari (Keri Russell) is a busy nurse who goes looking for her teenage daughter in the woods. Daveed (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) and Eddie (Alden Ehrenreich) go looking for the cocaine, at Syd’s command. A park ranger (Margo Martindale) and wildlife activist (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) get involved.

Most of this goes like a shot. Banks attends to the humans and their plot threads, almost at the expense of the bear, who just wants a quiet place to scarf down some cocaine and a side order of severed leg. Banks’ amused affection extends to the bear (who, it turns out, has kids). The bear’s scenes are achieved with a computer, but the movie doesn’t feel like a CG demo. Some tense sequences have little to do with the bear at all, such as the standoff between Daveed and a cop (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) standing atop a gazebo. The cop seems to be there to bring a cute, foofy little dog into the movie (don’t worry, no harm befalls her). You might question why the dog is there, as well as the other cop who looks after her, but there’s a payoff later, and Banks pulls it off without undue throttling of our heartstrings. Banks has described the movie as “the bear’s revenge tale” — the actual cocaine bear didn’t kill anyone — and the movie believes in redemption. The park ranger and her hypothetical love interest are handled a little cavalierly and cartoonishly, but no matter how warmly Banks paints the characters, the deaths in a movie like this have to come on schedule. 

Cocaine Bear has the structure of a slasher movie (the ‘80s), though it owes a lot to the animals-attack subgenre of the ‘70s, which were essentially proto-slashers with Ungentle Ben or whatever else (birds, bees, frogs, rabbits — yes, rabbits, I’m not kidding) menacing the dwindling human population. The it-is-what-it-is title has drawn comparisons to Snakes on a Plane, though this film doesn’t depend for most of its effect on seeing it with a packed and snarky audience on opening night. I have now seen two out of three Banks-directed films (her Charlie’s Angels reboot from 2019 was well-meaning but kind of null), and this one sticks with me for its unstable but winning mix of heart and gore. The tone is a very tricky needle to thread, but Banks does it. And the box office has rewarded her: Cocaine Bear made $3.8 million on its fourth weekend in theaters despite having been available to stream since March 14. That’s word of mouth: “Hey, you gotta see this, it’s fun, I’ll go see it again with you.” Banks, an amiable working actor for decades, has earned this modest triumph.