31 Days of 2024 Horror - Day 15 - Double Blind (2023)

  Another Irish horror, notwithstanding this international poster.  Content warning:  animal death (mouse), needles, blood, some gore, allusions to child abuse

Seven twentysomthings join a stage-one drug trial.  Amir (Akshay Kumar), a med student hoping for an internship, becomes increasingly concerned about the side effects, especially after it seems that all participants in the study have received the experimental drug with no control group.  Oh, and they've gone over 100 hours without sleep.  Stuck in a facility-wide lockdown, the seven strangers must stay awake for a further 24-hours until help arrives or their brains will basically boil inside their skulls.  

The movie actually follows Claire (Millie Brady) but she doesn't really do anything to move the plot.  It just kind of happens around her.

Sound design was critical in this film, even more than the visuals, for creating an atmosphere of unreality.  Visuals are good, nothing ground-breaking but executed well.  For me, the standout is the dialogue.  It nails that feeling of having been awake too long but still expected to perform at top capacity.  I did find that I deducted some points for Claire being a weak protagonist but your mileage may vary.  Maybe you find her sympathetic and relatable.  It's currently streaming on Kanopy with a library card or on Tubi with ads.  About half of my ads were for prescription drugs, which I found very funny.

31 Days of 2024 Horror - Day 14 - Handling the Undead (2024)

  Here's your obligatory zombie movie.  Wish it was a better one.  Content warning:  dead child, animal killed on-screen (rabbit), suicide attempt

A strange power surge in Oslo causes the dead to re-animate, throwing three families into chaos as they try to cope with the return of a loved one that's not quite right.

This is based on a novel by the same guy who wrote Let the Right One In and there are moments that have the same feel, but overall this is a very weak film.  It doesn't say or do anything new with the genre and the overall message of letting go of grief is facile and frankly, condescending.

Can't even give it props for performances.  Everybody acts like they're on anti-depressants already and I don't know if that's just because they're Norwegian or what.  It's boring, it's sad, and it's insulting.  It's streaming on Hulu.

31 Days of 2024 Horror - Day 13 - Blackout (2023)

  Halloween checklist:  vampires?  Check.  Demons?  Check, check.  Werewolves?  Check!   Content warning:  gore, drunk driving

Charley (Alex Hurt) has a problem.  Three nights a month, he goes on a bender and can't remember anything the next day.  Also, his late father might have been involved in shady shit with the local developer (Marshall Bell) to poison the town, his relationship with said developer's daughter (Addison Timlin) is on the rocks, and to top it all off, all the nights he can't remember are correlated with a series of brutal murders.  

This movie understands that all werewolf stories* are ultimately sad.  They have been sad since 1941.  At their heart, they are about loss of control and humanity, guilt and personal and societal responsibility.  

There are a number of references to the original Wolf Man.  The town is called Talbot Falls, the practical werewolf prosthetics are updated versions of the original look, and there are a couple of references to Lon Chaney, Jr.  It also stars a famous actor's son.  Alex Hurt looks so much like his father it is unreal.  Kid's mom's genes never stood a chance.  Horror legend Barbara Crampton appears briefly as the lawyer, Kate.  

I'm going to stress again that this is not a movie you put on for a good time.  But it is a good movie.  And it's streaming for free on Tubi.

*This does not include book werewolves, whose defining characteristic is horny.  They can also be sad, but mostly just very horny.

31 Days of 2024 Horror - Day 12 - Arcadian (2024)

  Content warning:  mild gore

Paul (Nicolas Cage) survived the apocalypse and managed to get his infant twins to their teens.  They live in a farmhouse and abide strictly by rules about lockdown, making sure the house is securely fashioned by dusk.  It works, until Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins) falls for the girl next door (Sadie Soverall) and begins to push the boundaries in an effort to spend every waking minute with her.  Meanwhile, Joseph (Jaeden Martell) believes there is a pattern to the nightly attacks and that the monsters might be smarter than previously realized.

This isn't bad for creature design, although when you finally see the whole thing it's a little goofy.  It reminded me of the descriptions of boogeymen in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels.  There is more shaky cam than I would like, but it's not constant at least.  Performances were good.  Cage is damn near  demure and as the movie focuses on the sons, he kind of fades to the background.  Martell (née Lieberher) and Jenkins are both seasoned pros, despite their tender years and I look forward to following their careers with interest.

Arcadian is basically a better version of A Quiet Place and a much better allegory for fatherhood.  It's currently streaming on Shudder.

31 Days of 2024 Horror - Day 11 - In a Violent Nature (2024)

  Content warning:  gore

Six twentysomethiings find a gold locket in an abandoned fire tower in the woods and take it, unknowingly waking a revenant.  "Johnny" (Ry Barrett) was murdered 70 years ago but it didn't take and only his mother's amulet keeps him from wandering around, hacking people to bits.  

This movie was made by people who fundamentally misunderstood what a slasher movie is.  Where is the joy?  Where is the creativity?  Where is the madcap manic glee??  Nowhere to be found!  

There was a lot of potential here for a Hatchet or Tucker and Dale style hillbilly slasher.  The camera stays with the killer nearly all of the run-time which would have been really cool if he had been at all interesting.  Same thing for the conversations that don't happen on-screen.  You can't build any sympathy for the victims because you don't see them for much of the film and I personally found it harder to place voices with faces so I didn't even know who was getting murdered half the time.  

The dialogue itself was so stilted and unnatural.  Like somebody browsed Reddit and just wrote down "how young people talk" as a direction.  And the last 15-minutes of the film are taken up by a boring, long-ass story about a bear attack that had nothing to do with anything else.  

It's like a student film trying to use the slasher genre to make a point about human impact on nature that is completely obtuse and again, misses the entire point of slashers in an effort to "elevate" horror.  D-

It's currently streaming on Shudder.

31 Days of 2024 Horror - Day 10 - Oddity (2024)

  This was such a good movie!  Content warning:  gore

While renovating her new house, Dani (Carolyn Bracken) is violently murdered.  A year later, her blind twin sister, Darcy (Carolyn Bracken), shows up at the house determined to punish Dani's killer by any means necessary.  Dani's widower, Ted (Gwilym Lee), thinks Darcy is harmless if kind of a crackpot but soon can't explain the things she seems to know.

There are jump scares but no surprises.  The villain is exactly who you think it is and that could have made for a really boring movie but it's saved by being stunningly well-executed.  I think there's a particular dread? in the anticipation of something bad.  You see something, you think "that's about to do something bad," and then it does, and your thoughts and feelings are validated and reinforced.  Oddity has a cascading series of those moments, which feels vindicating especially if you've ever been told something is just your imagination playing tricks on you.

The characters have normal reactions to what's going on and that's always nice to see.  Performances are great across the board, but special shout-out to Tadhg Murphy as Ollin Boole.  I'll probably end up buying this one at some point.  It feels like the kind of movie that I will enjoy making other people watch and feeding on their reactions.

Currently streaming on Shudder.

31 Days of 2024 Horror - Day 9 - You'll Never Find Me (2023)

  Oh, Australia, never change!  

A woman (Jordan Cowan) seeks shelter from a storm at a trailer owned by a loner/pariah (Brendan Rock).  As the wind howls outside, a different, quieter storm is gathering inside.  Both of them are lying about who they are.  What they are.  

I loved fully 7/8ths of this movie.  I don't know if I liked the ending.  I have to sit with it a little longer to decide.  There's no gore, very little violence really, just violin-string tension the whole way through.  Everything is carried in the performances and dialogue.  The characters are trapped by the excruciating politeness of social convention more than locks and that is like catnip to me, specifically.  

I don't want to spoil it, even though I wouldn't necessarily call it a twist.  I think it's better to go in knowing less.  It's currently streaming on Shudder.