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.

Videodrome

On February 4, it will have been forty years since David Cronenberg’s Videodrome — his magnum opus about fantasy and control — emerged, like a rash, on theater screens and shortly thereafter withdrew its shingle and closed shop. In the decades since, it has been re-appraised as an important work on display in the Cronenberg museum of images and ideas. Taking the form of a classic noir, the film is less a whodunit than a what’s-it-gonna-do-to-me. The protagonist, Max Renn (James Woods, seldom moister or better), owns and operates a shady indie TV station that traffics in the obscure and the louche. Max is always on the lookout for harder content, and he finds it in Videodrome, a program consisting only of torture and murder (simulated or real? does it matter?). 

One of the great ironies of Videodrome is that the actual content of the Videodrome programming isn’t the problem — it’s not, in and of itself, harmful to the viewer. It’s just there to lure people — perhaps a certain kind of person not averse to violent fantasizing — and then the signal, which we’re told could just as easily be conveyed in a test-pattern screen, causes hallucinations and, eventually, death. The concept of salacious and/or violently stimulating content as a Trojan horse for something else is borne out by Cronenberg’s own movie, which attracts us with kink and splattery, suppurating Rick Baker special effects and then infects us with its virus of ideas — or at least an invitation to debate them. Unlike Videodrome, Cronenberg doesn’t want to hurt you, just provoke thought.

Following the rabbit hole of clues and sketchy figures, Max gets involved with Nicki Brand (Debbie Harry), who gives advice on the radio by day and indulges s&m urges at night. Nicki is intrigued enough by what she sees of Videodrome to want to be part of it. For Max, she becomes the erotically entreating face of Videodrome, her lips bulging forth from the TV set from which many of Max’s head trips flow. Despite the wild and often unprecedented imagery he puts on the screen, Cronenberg has never been a flashy director, which suits his material just fine. If we’re to understand what Cronenberg is telling by showing, we need to see it, straight on and dead-eyed. No fancy cinematic footwork will do.

Other figures fade into the picture, like gangsters out of the noir fog — mainly media cult types, who study the effects of mass communication and either caution against it or weaponize it. Somewhere in the film’s second half, Cronenberg gets a little lost in the weeds of his own story’s implications. But that’s what makes it art. Cronenberg has famously said that you make a movie to find out why you wanted to make the movie. Videodrome, possibly, stays unresolved for us because it was unresolved for him, and how can something this visually and philosophically tangled be resolved? It can’t. It can only go out on a small frequency and reach the like-minded, who may perceive its unanswered questions as a void they feel duty-bound to fill with interpretation.

Cronenberg began with a disturbing childhood experience with a TV signal that was barely coming in; the (again) unresolved fuzz and hiss of a bad signal, he thought, could have been a dark and frightening program without enough juice to cut through the static. That’s not even a premise, that’s a vibe, and the original tone of young Cronenberg’s unease makes it into the movie. The sometimey signal of Videodrome seems to cast its malefic spell by what it conceals as much as reveals. Sweaty imagination pastes in what the eye misses. Videodrome has a lot to say about the bad romance between eye and brain, mind and body. Cronenberg has taken his childhood fear and built a world of conspiracy around it. Some of it plays as old hat — Cronenberg had just been down a similar paranoid road with 1981’s Scanners — and some of it is an excuse for Cronenberg and Rick Baker to do the Lovecraftian work of imagining the unimaginable. “Long live the new flesh” are Max’s final words, and Cronenberg’s artistic credo. The flesh Cronenberg shows us may be new, but it’s as flawed as the old flesh, because it’s ours. 

Terrifier 2

“I react to the brutality,” wrote Pauline Kael in her review of the brutal El Topo, “because I still associate violence with pain.” Well, Damien Leone’s Terrifier movies are decidedly not for Kael or anyone else who associates violence with pain. For horror-movie fans who respond to the protracted kills in these movies as flashy crescendos, the viciousness is (again in Kael’s words) a turn-on. Terrifier 2, which earned $10 million last fall against a $250,000 budget, ups the ante on the grisly shocks Leone dealt in the previous films in the franchise — All Hallows’ Eve (2013) and the first Terrifier (2016). The films are unified by the star of the show, the silent creeper/killer Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton), but can be watched independently. The first Terrifier is a minimalist slasher that exists to send various characters to untidy deaths, but Terrifier 2 is some kind of ambitious work of art within the context of slasher sequels (it even, for Christ’s sake, boasts a musical nightmare sequence).

Art the Clown never speaks or even screams in pain, and when he laughs at his cruel works, he does it silently. He moves gracefully, even joyfully, and often reads as childlike. He’s much the best part of this series; he seems to wear an aura of nightmare logic around himself, bending the world’s reality to his designs. He does too many incredible things in these movies to be a realistic psycho; he seems supernatural, even immortal, and here we learn that he may have emerged from — or at least been predicted by — the sketches of an artist whose brain tumor drove him to madness and suicide. The dead artist left a bitter widow and two school-age kids: Sienna (Lauren LaVera), a gloomy teen who works for months on costumes in her room, and Jonathan (Elliott Fullam), who has a morbid interest in Art. The devilish clown zeroes in on these kids, sometimes accompanied by a little girl who shares his rictus leer and his worship of gore; she exists, probably, in Art’s imagination, or maybe not. The metaphysics of Leone’s movies are far from consistent or coherent.

The monstrous killer doesn’t seem to want anything from Sienna or Jonathan other than to kill them messily, which I felt missed a chance for the plot to be interesting instead of distended. (Terrifier 2 runs two and a quarter hours, a long time to indulge Leone’s bloody showmanship.) Still, anyone who cut their teeth on forbidden issues of Fangoria magazine in the ‘80s, cooing over the color photos of splattery massacres and (even cooler) how the effects were done, will recognize Terrifier 2 as the sort of over-the-top magnum opus we Fango kids always hoped for and seldom got because the MPAA always required horror movies to be whittled down to win an R rating. Terrifier 2 went out unrated, without major-studio backing, and wound up spending four weeks in the box-office top ten. That’s worth paying attention to, even if the film’s particular emphasis on surreally cruel mutilations and hackings requires a loud and receptive audience. If you’ve never heard of Fangoria, you are probably not among that audience.

Some have noted, here and in its predecessor, that Leone tends to linger on the agony of the female victims while giving male victims relatively quick and merciful deaths. I can’t deny that, and I don’t know the following for sure, but women/girls being stalked and slashed is a regrettable but inarguable trope of this subgenre, and by lavishing such attention and fake blood on those scenes, Leone may be (I suspect, perhaps too charitably) parodying or at least commenting on that trope. The violence here goes beyond misogyny; it’s often too cartoonish to be taken seriously, and it’s not truly intended to be associated with real pain. It’s the sort of horror comic, caked over with red crayon, that a spooky monster-loving little kid might come up with. Like Art himself, it seems innocent on some level. It appeals to the part of us that used to engage in verbal riffs on gross tortures when we were kids. Again, if you weren’t one of those kids…

The Menu

Who eats the wispy, elite stuff served up by chefs like Ferran Adrià and, in The Menu, by the well-regarded Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes)? Certainly not you and me, unless you routinely drop $1,250 on a meal. No, it’s for the rich and jaded. And the movie aims both barrels at those who have that kind of money, and would spend that kind of money on something that, as Slowik notes, “turns to shit in your guts.” The food doesn’t matter — it’s the status of being one-percenter enough to get a seat at the fancy table. On a mordant eat-the-rich level — though, to be fair, the film is never so obvious as to dabble in cannibalism — I enjoyed The Menu. But if you’ve consumed enough black-comedy horror about snobby gourmets getting their comeuppance, nothing much here will shock you.

Our entry point into this rarefied world is a young couple, Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) and Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), who journey by boat with ten others to Hawthorne, an exclusive restaurant on a private island. Chef Slowik rules his kitchen with military precision; essentially, he puts on a show, acting the way his audience expects a deluxe, eccentric chef to act. Tyler is a big fan of Slowik; the others, including a food critic (Janet McTeer), just buy tickets to the experience as a badge of superiority, or to find the less-than-robust fare wanting because, when you get down to it, most of these people aren’t as refined as they want to appear, and just want to stuff their faces like the brutal gourmand Mr. Spica in this film’s nearest ancestor, Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.

Margot is not what she seems, and neither is Slowik; they gravitate to each other, carrying similar demons, and Fiennes and Taylor-Joy do their nimblest work opposite each other. Their scenes will play all the better a second time through. Hong Chau is elegantly menacing as Elsa, who deals with the guests using a quiet but deadly politesse (she’s having quite the season — she’s in The Whale and Kelly Reichardt’s upcoming Showing Up). The acting, especially John Leguizamo as a past-it hack movie star and Judith Light as a rich matron in whose eyes we can see the light of hope slowly dying, is top-notch; the director Mark Mylod clearly sets the stage (The Menu could almost as easily be done as theater — it is theater) and gets out of the way so this crew of performers can assemble some fine dishes.

But once you’ve seen what the movie is, you’ve seen the strings, and there’s about half an hour to go in which you wait to see how savage the situation gets. Pretty savage. Anthony Bourdain would have cackled his dark cackle all the way through it. But, again, if your diet has been long on stuff like Cook, Thief and various horror comedies set in restaurants, you’ll most likely see the final course coming; the only suspense is what the ingredients are. The writers, Will Tracy and Seth Reiss, have typed up a doozy, and I can’t fault the showmanship. But I kept hearing in my head the voice of my late friend and fellow horror fan Ken Souza, who would have given the film points for craft (Peter Deming’s cinematography is swanky-creamy throughout) but rattled off like ten different sources it cribs from.

I am a little more forgiving of lapses in originality. As Godard supposedly opined, it’s not where you take it from, it’s where you take it to. And The Menu takes it to a satisfyingly apocalyptic conclusion, the only way, really, for such a nihilist-lite work to see itself out. (I say lite because not everything turns to shit in its guts.) There’s nothing much the matter with it — there’s just not, finally, anything great about it. As satire, it sets up easily hissable Richie Riches without much shading. And the film’s (valid) grumbling about the inequity between classes would have more bite if we got to know anyone on Slowik’s kitchen crew at all. (One is reduced to a loud portion of Slowik’s ghastly performance art; one poses as something else in a somewhat pointless diversion; the rest are as indistinct as most of the maggots in Full Metal Jacket.) The Menu is a competently prepared dish that would like to be thought of, ultimately, as a well-made cheeseburger. But it feels weird on our tongues, like the reconstituted, teleported steak in David Cronenberg’s The Fly. In more senses than one, it lacks taste.

Smile

Superhero movies aren’t the only kind of movies that survived the pandemic and restored some faith in the future of theaters. Horror movies (Barbarian, Halloween Ends, Bodies Bodies Bodies, Terrifier 2) have been rallying, and one of the bigger success stories has been Smile, which has taken $213 million worldwide against a $17 million budget. Smile was also helped immeasurably by its creepy marketing campaign, which involved putting people wearing menacing smiles behind home plate at baseball games. The actual movie, or should I say the actual story, doesn’t live up to the marketing. But its writer-director Parker Finn is a director to watch.

Note I don’t say “writer to watch.” Stripped down, Smile is the sort of curse film that was popular in Asia about 25 years ago, and then briefly in America. The way the smile curse works is simple. Someone cursed commits messy suicide in front of you (with their face contorted in an eerie, mirthless rictus), creating trauma that the entity feeds on; it then, within the next seven days, cozies up to you and torments you a fair bit before making you, too, kill yourself in front of someone, perpetuating the cycle. There’s a metaphor here for how the unchecked effects of trauma can repeat themselves. But Parker Finn is interested primarily in the number of startling “Boo!” moments — jump scares — he can get out of the premise. Which is disappointing, but Finn sets them up effectively and also creates a sense of oppressive dread as well as random freakiness.

Smile focuses on therapist Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), who had a traumatized patient slit her own throat in front of her. The patient is played by Caitlin Stasey, who played what I think is the same role in Finn’s 2020 short film “Laura Hasn’t Slept.” (I recommend that short, as well as Finn’s first short, 2018’s “The Hidebehind.”) This kicks off a standard supernatural-horror plot in which Rose sees weird, terrifying things, but nobody will believe her, and conveniently she has a cop ex-boyfriend (Kyle Gallner) who can help her track down people connected or related to the smile curse’s prior victims. Smile creates a simultaneous doubling effect in the viewer: we experience the story and we are unimpressed, but we see and hear the stifling moods of fear and frustration Finn can evoke and we wish they weren’t yoked to such a nothing-special story.

I guess Smile will be wild and strange for people whose tastes tend towards the norm of filmmaking. If your norm is Lynch or Cronenberg, you’re likely to shrug, while recognizing Parker Finn’s game as a pure horror director. “The Hidebehind,” for instance, is really nothing other than a piece about a guy lost in the woods who runs into a mysterious entity, but it’s simply and effectively wrought. Finn knows how to use ominous quietude and uncertainty to creep us out. Horror fans will hear more about him in the years to come, but horror fans will also have seen most of the story elements Finn has to offer here and will, again, shrug. Perhaps in the future Finn will hire a good writer, or find a story that means more to him than being a clothesline for ooga-booga freak-outs.

Past a certain point the plot stops making sense — Rose has been flagged as a potential danger to herself and/or others, and she’s still driving around (including to her abandoned childhood house where her mother killed herself, which you’d think would be staked out) as if no one were looking for her. Maybe no one is. Here and there, Smile chills when it brushes against the intractable realities of mental illness in America; Rose gets mildly called onto the carpet when she approves a mental patient for admission but the patient has no insurance. Later, we see that there was no meaningful help available to Rose’s mom; she could only suffer and waste away and terrorize her daughters. Some of the subtext here is cold and ugly in ways that befit a horror movie but put standard horror tropes to shame. And there’s a spectacularly horrific/awkward birthday party with a shock we see coming (and it’s another element whose aftermath is exquisitely implausible as a literal plot point — there would probably be jail time for that) but is still precisely carpentered. Some movies begin as dazzling scripts and get diluted in the filming. Smile may be the exact opposite, a humdrum script that shows off a director who, if he wanted to and had the right material, could really hurt us. Maybe next time. 

Nope

With Nope, his third feature as writer-director, Jordan Peele solidifies his status as one of the most exciting new American filmmakers now working. He has a steady command of mood and suspense, and he knows enough to let subtext be subtext and not overexplain it. I can’t tell you how relieved I was, for instance, that the sad and terrifying story of Gordy the trained chimp, which opens Nope on an ominous note, doesn’t turn out to be connected in some way with the larger plot.¹ Yes, we meet a survivor of the incident as a grown man, Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), but Peele has the sense to let the event linger and fester in the back of our minds while we watch what certainly appears to be an alien-invasion thriller.

Ultimately, Nope shakes out as a comment on Hollywood and how people are wasted, swallowed up, disfigured in the name of entertainment. But it’s also foreboding and spooky as hell, like Peele’s previous thrillers, Get Out and Us. The movie is set mostly on a ranch dedicated to training horses for use in TV, movies and commercials. The ranch is owned and run by OJ (Daniel Kaluuya), who takes care of the horses and occasionally sells one to Jupe, who now manages a Western theme park and low-key ghoulishly dines out on his traumatic experience with Gordy. 

All of this is background, and it’s a slow but compelling burn until we recognize what’s going on: a creature of unknown origin is feeding off of local life. I was reminded of Stephen King thinking about him and Louis L’Amour having separate ideas while standing at the edge of a pond: “His story might be about water rights in a dry season, my story would more likely be about some dreadful, hulking thing rising out of the still waters to carry off sheep . . . and horses . . . and finally people.” It’s OJ’s vibrant sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) who figures out what should be done about it: get it on video and get rich. For a while, nobody else comes up with any more productive notions, like how to kill it, because it takes a while to learn what might kill it.

There is one beautifully simple yet brilliant callback: the impact of a balloon popping. It’s a shame one particular character isn’t there to appreciate the second instance. Nope goes on a bit, slightly north of two hours, but is never boring, not with the amount of character and world-building detail Peele packs into the story. The people in the movie are written as utterly unique, including a Fry’s tech clerk (Brandon Perea) who helps set up surveillance and a grizzled cinematographer (Michael Wincott, with his usual gravelly growl) who rises to the challenge of capturing the thing on real film at magic hour. (Cinematographers — what are you gonna do?) Kaluuya gives us a stoic and almost comically unflappable figure — a classic Western hero — and Palmer crackles and pops as a firecracker with innumerable side hustles. 

Nope even tucks in some film history, telling us that the Black jockey who rode a horse for Eadweard Muybridge’s famous 1887 Animal Locomotion Plate 626 was the ancestor of OJ and Emerald. That’s a claim they make to boost their business; it’s also accurate inasmuch as the rider — to this day no one actually knows his name, though the fucking horse was identified — is, in a way, ancestor to all artists of color unnamed, dismissed, and ignored while they added to the history of cinema. The more we think back on Nope, the more depth it takes on; it is the work of a specifically Black sensibility fed by decades of Hollywood, for good (the influence on his own art) and ill (the reality of being non-white in the white dream factory). And Peele has fed well, and knows which bits are nourishing and which not, and he also knows the dangers of consuming too much filled with too little.

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¹Without getting into spoilers, what I mean is that Gordy doesn’t figure into the threat later on; it doesn’t turn out that he was controlled by the menace, or something. Other writers would try to tie those elements together in a neat, cheap little bow instead of allowing Gordy his own power as subtext.

Halloween Ends

We certainly can’t say that Halloween Ends, the last of the new trilogy supposedly putting paid to the struggle between superslasher Michael Myers and survivor Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), does the same old same old. It diverges so wildly from what most fans might expect of a Halloween film that I’d like to give it points on that basis alone. This leg of the franchise has taken the story deadly seriously, layering on subtext after subtext, which is fine if the text itself engages and entertains. But Halloween Ends, like its 2021 predecessor Halloween Kills, comes across more annoying and depressing than scary. 

A nerdy kid named Cunningham with an overbearing, forbidding mother runs across an avatar of evil and loses his moral bearings. John Carpenter made that movie in 1983, from a book by Stephen King, Christine. Well, it also describes the key conflict here. David Gordon Green, who has directed all three of these Halloween movies, and wrote this one with three other guys, has possibly placed this as an Easter egg for the fans. Okay, neato. But the kid here, Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), barely makes sense as a human being. Notoriety has followed him from an incident in which he accidentally killed a kid he was babysitting, and after he’s bullied and meets Michael in the sewers, Michael seems to recognize himself in the kid, and vice versa. 

Meanwhile, Corey also falls for Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), but if we’re supposed to root for him to reach out towards love and sanity and break from the “dark path” he’s trudging down, we don’t. We don’t like him and we don’t care. Green and his co-writers have made Halloween movies more fit for analysis than for seasonal scares. Everything in the movie only makes sense symbolically; taken literally, the plotting is stupid, depending, once again, on people doing the absolute dumbest things they can do. If Halloween Kills was “really” about the deranging power of fear, this one says that evil never dies, it just changes faces under the mask.

The kills are as brutal as ever, accompanied by stylized sounds of squelching, spattering, and slicing. The dirty secret of the slasher subgenre is that its structure allows us to enjoy the murder and mutilation; they’re the crescendos in a musical piece. To his credit, Green wants to do something different, uglifying the deaths. But without the fun or suspense or even the morbid curiosity that makes us want to look at the blood and brains on the floor, where’s the entertainment? I wound up not being sure what Green and his cohorts wanted to accomplish with this trilogy. Here, there’s more boring stuff about how violent tragedy can deform a whole community; we learn that some folks in Haddonfield, Illinois, the sleepy death town where all of this unfolds, blame Laurie for the new Michael murders. This is an example of how the script wants to Say Something Important — in this case, about victim-blaming, I guess? — but completely fumbles it as a plausible thing that happens in the story.

Rohan Campbell has been coached to play the faux-Michael as a sullen, misunderstood kid who kept reminding me unhelpfully of the irritating Caleb Landry Jones. There’s not much of a shift between Corey when he’s “normal” and Corey when he’s gone off the deep end. As for Jamie Lee Curtis, who has been riding a media blitz surrounding her last dance with Michael Myers, she gets a Big Moment near the end but otherwise can’t do a lot with Laurie as (inconsistently) written. I can read Curtis’ loyalty to this diminishing-returns trilogy — she’s said she owes her career to Laurie Strode and is grateful to the franchise’s fans for the life she’s had — far more easily than I can read anyone’s motivations in the film. I will always be fond of Curtis, but the Laurie in these films is beyond my understanding. Green’s 2018 Halloween famously proceeded from the 1978 original and disregarded any of the sequels. By and large, I would like to disregard Green’s sequels, too. His first effort was solid, and he should have stopped there and resisted the temptation to Say Something Important.

Hellraiser (2022)

Try as I might, I’ve never quite snuggled up to the Hellraiser franchise, a gory series of movies, comics and other media derived from Clive Barker’s 1986 story “The Hellbound Heart.” Why this particular tale, among dozens of others in Barker’s portfolio, wound up being his gravestone work is a mystery to me, though perhaps it shouldn’t be. It is, as noted, bloody and nasty, with a side order of cautionary horror about being careful what you wish for. If what you wish for is experience and sensation beyond anything imaginable, the punctured and harrowed angels/demons known as the Cenobites will oblige you — bloodily and nastily. Maybe it’s just a reflection of what scared the openly gay Barker himself during the peak of AIDS — a vision of blood-bound wrath drawn to hedonism.

Barker, who wrote and directed the first Hellraiser film in 1987, returns here as producer but leaves the footwork to other hands: director David Bruckner and writers Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski. What they come up with is sort of the same old story. The wealthy Roland Voight (Goran Višnjić) acquires the mystical puzzle box that summons the Cenobites and, so they claim, eternal pleasure. Gory things happen, and six years later the box finds its way into the hands of recovering addicts Riley (Odessa A’zion) and her boyfriend Trevor (Drew Starkey). The box is supposed to draw Riley’s blood, but instead it drinks from her brother Matt (Brandon Flynn); he disappears, and Riley determines to find him.

Anyone who’s seen the original Hellraiser probably remembers, with a sick laugh, the movie’s famous line “Jesus wept,”¹ which in its context is just what the narrative needs at that moment. The new Hellraiser contains no jokes nearly as good, or indeed many jokes at all. I’m not saying every horror movie should be The Munsters (or even The Re-Animator). But moments of dark levity like “Jesus wept” are what keep the 1987 film warmly thought of after 35 years, and what is there in the new film to compel any affection, either from newcomers or old fans? Not a lot. And even though the acting is fine — Odessa A’zion, daughter of Pamela Adlon, makes Riley touchingly vulnerable, and Jamie Clayton as the Cenobites’ leader “Pinhead” has an icy, mordant way with her lines — unless you’re heavily into watching blood flow and flesh ripped and taffy-pulled, there’s not much entertainment value here.

Better minds than mine have likely analyzed where the Hellraiser concept fits into gay literature. Those who watched lovers and friends fade in the hospital during AIDS’ heyday in the mid-‘80s, watched them become human pincushions and their flesh mottle and melt off the bones, will see more in the torments devised by the Cenobites than others will. And here, in the interest of inclusion, we have a gay male couple, and a trans woman playing Pinhead. Thus the franchise seems queerer than ever, but a Pride float is not the quietest and therefore most deadly vehicle on which to convey the original subtext. “The Hellbound Heart” was a gay male horror artist telling a scary story to other gay men, saying “Look, I get it, but the pursuit of too much pleasure leads to death.” People in other demographics took other things away, of course. It was a big crossover success.

Will this one follow suit? Even if it hadn’t been sent direct to streaming and condemned to an eternal fate of being subsumed into Hulu’s back catalog, Hellraiser ’22 would be too dreary and sober-sided to go over with the mass audience. It’s blandly unpleasant, and even the flesh-ripping scenes pack neither the sting of authentic pain nor the surreal excesses of Barker’s original story. It just sits there, not daring to be remarkably bad or, heaven knows, remarkably good. Like other recent horror “reboots,” its tone is tepid, never showing any personality, and taking the material deadly seriously because the filmmakers think that’s what the fans want. Jesus wept.

¹ Yes, I know the line was ad-libbed.

The Munsters (2022)

 

Why does everyone have their knives out for Rob Zombie’s The Munsters? It may be his most endearing feature film. Zombie, of course, is notorious for his grubby grindhouse exploitation throwbacks (The Devil’s Rejects, 31, etc.), but The Munsters is a PG-rated mad-lab goof full of dad jokes and neon colors. You’ll know within the first five minutes if it’s for you, but I took it as a relaxing, cornball Halloween party of the sort I might seek out when I’m sick, as a bowl of cinematic chicken soup or orange sherbet. It sparked warm childhood feelings, and I’m not all that big a fan of the show (The Addams Family has more going on). 

My hunch is that Zombie made this movie — a passion project for a couple of decades — for kids secondarily, and for himself as a kid primarily. There’s even an autobiographical element. The Munsters is a prequel of sorts, outlining how Herman (Jeff Daniel Phillips) and Lily Munster (Sheri Moon Zombie) met and how they came to live on Mockingbird Lane in Hollywood. Lily, who hasn’t had much luck on the dating scene, happens across the newly-created Herman at a Transylvanian dive where he’s setting his awful puns to punk-rock music. She sees him onstage, and it’s eternal love; she visits him in his dressing room, and the feeling is mutual. What we’re watching is the courtship of Sheri Moon and Rob Zombie through a Saturday-afternoon, groovie-ghoulie filter.

This movie, which minds its language and only floats a couple of jokes that’ll go over kids’ heads, is surprisingly good-hearted coming from a director who’s built his empire on profane nihilism. Far from being a sell-out, Zombie’s The Munsters takes him in a polar opposite direction, and it reads to me as a risk. After all, fans of the Munsters TV show will likely hate it, as will Zombie fans who just want him to do the gore-drenched adventures of the Firefly family over and over. It will appeal to a slim Venn diagram encompassing people with no strong feelings about the show and people who’ve been waiting for Zombie to change his pitch up a little. Well, he does; it’s loony and doofy, a full-color Mad magazine parody as well as a heartfelt tribute — Zombie very obviously loves these characters, and I responded to that. You may or may not. Like I said, you’ll know soon enough whether it’s a comfy chair you can settle into or a torture chair.

The script is pretty episodic; the plot motor has an obscure character, Lily’s ne’er-do-well werewolf brother Lester (Tomas Boykin) — who only appeared in one episode of the show — sucker Herman into signing over the Transylvanian castle owned by Lily’s vamp father the Count, aka Grandpa (Daniel Roebuck). That explains why they move to Hollywood (along with Herman catching a bit of a horror host on TV and figuring he could do that, too). I found the story didn’t matter (did it ever matter on the show?). I was content to hang out in the tacky haunted-house sets with a cast that seemed fully into it. Even the usually dour Richard Brake camps and vamps it up in two roles here; I was happy to see him smiling and cackling and departing from the sullen bad-asses he’s played for Zombie.

Zombie shares that spirit. I felt him having fun in his best previous efforts (The Devil’s Rejects is some kind of grotesque masterpiece and easily the pinnacle of his greasy-grimy-gopher-guts aesthetic), but this is a different flavor of fun; again, it’s a colorfully wrapped gift from adult Rob Zombie to young Bobby Cummings, who cut his teeth on Famous Monsters and Aurora monster model kits and, well, The Munsters. I can’t put it any other way: The movie made me feel good. Do I want a Munsters franchise from him? Probably not, assuming Netflix would even let him anyway (although the performances, particularly Jeff Daniel Phillips as the dense but jolly Herman and Daniel Roebuck as the caustic Count, are amiable enough to warrant revisits). I’d rather see him move on to other things that light him up, perhaps even an original idea that doesn’t involve the Munsters or certainly the Fireflys. 

Speak No Evil

The Americanized title Speak No Evil only really makes sense after you’ve watched the film; the original Danish title is Gæsterne, or Guests, which has some of the same deadpan wit as the movie itself. Either way it’s a creepy and needling thriller that takes the premise of something like 1981’s Neighbors — these people seem hostile and strange, but we must maintain our politesse — right up to the edge of horror and then pushes it over. Directed by Christian Tafdrup, who has a reputation for social commentary, Speak No Evil would fall apart if its protagonists were crass and unconcerned with hurting others’ feelings or with being seen as insensitive. It’s the movie’s observation of mores and behavior that makes it so unsettling and, in the end, such a sharp knock in the chops.

It may go without saying that the lead couple, Bjørn (Morten Burian) and Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch), are upper-middle-class; they can afford a vacation in Tuscany, and only a little while later they can afford to travel to visit a Dutch couple they met in Tuscany. The Dutch couple, Patrick (Fedja van Huêt) and Karin (Karina Smulders), seem warm and welcoming at first. But almost right away, they start transgressing good manners. Louise has said she’s a vegetarian, yet Patrick practically forces her to nibble a piece of beef he’s just cooked. There are other weirdnesses, and when we look back on the script, by Tafdrup and his brother Mads, we may realize just how tight it is, how many details are there right from the start. If Bjørn had been less laid-back about Patrick taking the pool chair, the movie would probably end there.

It doesn’t, and after a while we may also realize that Bjørn is an ideal mark, if that’s what he is. He isn’t just polite; he finds himself drawn to what he perceives as Patrick’s wilder existence. How right Bjørn’s instincts turn out to be is one of the dark jokes of the movie, which unfolds with an elegant malevolence, heightened now and then by ominous rumbles and stabs of Sune Kølster’s score. (The way the music sometimes surges up, seemingly apropos of nothing at all onscreen, is yet another way Tafdrup keeps us disoriented.) At a certain point, we may think Bjørn and Louise — and their little daughter Agnes — are in the clear, but their hosts lure them back in. Back into what, though? Are Patrick and Karin not just eager hosts, if a little unconventional? Are we not betraying some class prejudice towards them (their house is nice if a little small and cluttered) as well as some ableist bigotry because they have a little son, Abel, who was born without most of his tongue?

Well, it’s that sort of thinking that Christian Tafdrup wants to incinerate, or at least to throw back in our faces. Like many effective horror-thrillers, Speak No Evil is not remotely nice — in its universe, giving people the benefit of the doubt leads nowhere good. The acting is natural and pulls you along on a leash of credibility. Van Huêt and Smulders are particularly adept at making Patrick and Karin seem misunderstood; their customs are just a little different, that’s all. Right? They’re so nice, and they’d be so sad to see you go; why would you want to hurt them by leaving? Nobody wants to say no, nobody wants to look like a dick. They would rather die a slow, brutal death than be seen as stuck-up and rude.