runningscared | Entries tagged with netflix

Movie: The Bye Bye Man (2017), directed by Stacy Title

Watched on: Netflix

Ran: 7.54 miles, 9’14”/mile, 01:09:39 (recovery run)

So I was poking around through the depths of Netflix’s horror section again, looking for something unfamiliar but hopefully not too taxing—sometimes you just don’t want to have to think too much, you know?—when I came across something called The Bye Bye Man. Every instinct I possess screamed inwardly at me to keep looking, just pass that mess right on by, because if anyone has poor enough judgement to make a horror film with a title as brick-stupid as The Bye Bye Man, nothing good can come of subjecting oneself to such punishment.

But get this: turns out I’m an optimist. Judge not a movie by its title and all that, right? Plus, the odds were certainly in my favor that it wouldn’t exactly be a David Lynch think-a-thon, so maybe I’d get lucky and I could coast right through a surprisingly scary and rewarding yet ill-titled hidden gem.

Yeah, it’s… it’s not that. The Bye Bye Man (good lord, I feel my soul die a little every time I type that name) is a decently turned-out and surprisingly good-looking flick that just misses on almost every other level. The script is fatally flawed, the acting is generally sub-par, the characters we’re supposed to be rooting for range from bland to annoying, and there’s just very little reason to care about anything that happens. That said, here’s what happens!

Elliott and his girlfriend Sasha are moving off-campus with Elliott’s best friend John. They’ve rented a suspiciously cheap old house together, because what could ever go wrong in a suspiciously cheap old house? At first it’s just little things like doors slamming shut on their own, the sound of coins rolling across the floor, a nightstand with crazy spiral writing in it and THE BYE BYE MAN carved into the drawer bottom, no big whoop. But after their housewarming party, Sasha’s friend Kim holds a seance, she senses something bad coming, Elliott says “The Bye Bye Man” out loud, and the lights go out.

Thereafter, everything goes wrong: Sasha gets sick, Elliott starts hearing weird scratching noises in the night, John and Kim have a Disappointing Sexual Encounter™, and pretty much all of them start hallucinating things to make them turn against each other. (Gotta love supernaturally-induced love triangles.) Elliott starts researching the Bye Bye Man—you know what, I’m just gonna start calling him “Glenn” for the sake of my digestive system—and finds out the last guy to investigate him was a reporter who wound up killing everyone he told the name to back in the ’60s. Meanwhile, the more he says or thinks the name, the closer Glenn gets—he visits the reporter’s widow in hopes of learning how to break the curse, and you know what, we’re going to leave it there, because somehow they got Oscar-winner Faye Dunaway to play the widow and even SHE can’t get you to care about what’s happening.

Really, if you’re going to watch The Bye Bye Man, watch it as a study in how to take a potentially interesting premise and kill it with a thousand cuts. Like, maybe don’t write your protagonist as a 100%-virtuous Perfect Boyfriend because it smacks of author-insert and it’s hard to take anything else seriously after that. And maybe give the woman who inspires his perfect love more personality than the average coatrack. And if you’re going to have a little girl attending a college housewarming party, maybe have someone—anyone—make some reference as to how that might be a little unusual. Oh, and it helps to have a solid villain, and Glenn himself is… pretty creepy-looking, I guess? But there’s not much to him other than looking creepy.

See, the single biggest problem with The Bye Bye Man is not, surprisingly, its ridiculous title. (No, really!) It’s the choice to leave out even the tiniest smidgen of backstory into who Glenn is. This leads to all sorts of motifs and elements being completely untethered and lacking context. Like, trains figure heavily: there’s footage of a train and bloody clothes on the tracks that is shown more than once, including early on in the establishing flashback scenes. You spend the whole movie thinking you’re eventually going to be told what the deal with the train is. Ditto the coins, and the weird inside-out-looking dog. Nope. You get zilch. I mean, they probably blew half their budget on the unconvincing CGI inside-out-looking dog, and without any backstory, literally no one would have any reason to notice if they’d just left him out altogether and paid for better actors. I mean jeez, at least tell us his name!

Unless it’s Bye Bye Dog, in which case, we don’t want to know.

…It’s totally “Bye Bye Dog,” isn’t it?

Ugh.

(I’m calling him Chuckles.)

feeling: ugh

Movie: Eli (2019), directed by Ciarán Foy

Watched on: Netflix

Ran: 7.14 miles, 9’12”/mile, 01:05:44 (recovery run)

You guys. You guys. It is FANTASTIC living under my rock! Seriously, I get to see so many movies while knowing absolutely nothing whatsoever about them, and every once in a while that blissful ignorance really pays off. Tonight, for example, I left my nightly run ’til pretty late, so I was hard-pressed to pick a movie quickly enough to finish my seven miles by midnight. Since it had been literally weeks since I’d run to anything on Netflix, I was scrolling through the Horror section during my warm-up walk and finally settled on Eli. I knew nothing about Eli.

I know, crazy, right? Because as soon as I finished my run I immediately started poking around online, and it was obvious that EVERYBODY has known about Eli for over a year now. Which means everybody knew it had a twist ending, and everybody also knew that said twist ending was highly polarizing, and either the thing that ruined an otherwise terrific movie or the best thing since someone figured out you could use something called a “knife” on bread instead of just stuffing the entire loaf down one’s aching gullet. I number myself among the latter. If fact, I go further than that, because Eli contains several twists along with The Big One, and I think they’re all pretty keen.

Eli, as if your non-beneath-rock-dwelling self didn’t know, is about a boy with an autoimmune disorder that requires him to live in plastic bubbles and makeshift hazmat suits. Venturing outside without protection from irritants triggers immediate skin rashes and respiratory distress that would kill him. As a last-ditch effort to give Eli a normal life, his parents drive him to a special “clean house” medical facility, where a Dr. Horn reportedly has a 100% cure rate performing groundbreaking gene therapy on people with Eli’s condition. Life is rough for Eli right off the bat; his gene therapy treatments are super-painful, and the medication he’s on can cause nightmares and hallucinations—which means that all the oh-I-don’t-know GHOSTS he keeps seeing are laughed off by the grown-ups as just an unfortunate side-effect.

Luckily, he’s befriended a local girl, Haley, who chucks pebbles at his windows in the night so he can come downstairs and speak to her through the glass of a big ol’ window. Haley believes Eli about the ghosts, and also notes that she’s spoken to other kids who have been patients there—they, too, saw ghosts, and none of them ever came out cured. Now Eli’s initial suspicions of Dr. Horn’s motives are amped to 11, and meanwhile, the ghosts have started messing with him in increasingly intrusive ways, culminating in dragging him down the halls and trying to throw him out of the house unprotected. However, he’s also figured out that they had been trying to give him the code to Dr. Horn’s medical records room. Are they trying to hurt him, or help him?

Therein lies the effectiveness of the multiple twists in Eli: they’re all about trust and whether it’s misplaced. Eli is a child, and an immunocompromised one at that; he is the poster child of helplessness. The horror he faces is that the people he relies on may not have his best interests at heart. This plays out throughout the film with his parents, each of whom he has reason to suspect of falsehood and betrayal on multiple different occasions. There’s a constant whipsawing of loyalties as every single entity in Eli’s world, corporeal or not, might be on his side or might be out to get him. Heck, with all the drugs he’s taking, he can’t even trust his own judgment… but by the time “the” twist comes around, Eli’s going to have to rely on his own power to escape with his life. I wish I could say more, but the less you know when you see this, the better. Just, y’know… trust me.

Eli isn’t a perfect film, even if you like the hard left turn it makes near the end, like I do. There are a lot of… well, I wouldn’t call them plot holes, exactly, but more like unlikely conveniences without which the plot can’t function. For instance, most kids who have had just had bone punches in their hips or invasive skull surgery aren’t going to be running around sprightly and free to fight rambunctious ghosts and play Hardy Boys. This comes down to a writing issue, I think—Eli’s treatment could just have easily been something far less invasive, but they wanted the medical horror on top of the ghost story AND the kid-beset-from-all-sides angle, and everything is a little bit weaker as a consequence. Still, I find the film's shortcomings pretty minor in light of its overall effect.

If you’re not a fan of surprises or genre crossovers, you’d probably do well to give Eli a miss. If you like horror that isn’t afraid to break the rules, I think you’ll find a lot to like, including the fact that Haley is played by the zoomer from Stranger Things. Enjoy!

feeling: impressed

Movie: A.M.I. (2019), directed by Rusty Nixon

Watched on: Netflix

Ran: 7.53 miles, 9’04”/mile, 01:08:20 (sleep-dep slow run)

I haven’t been sleeping all that well for the past, oh, FEW DECADES NOW, but lately it’s been especially gnarly for several reasons, most of which I needn’t bother mentioning because they’re the same ones probably messing with your sleep patterns. I should point out, though, that watching horror movies late most nights is decidedly not one of those factors; indeed, it’s only the nights on which I DON’T watch scary movies that my dreams get all disturbing. At this point reality has out-horrored horror.

Anyway, regardless of why I’m sleep-deprived, let’s take it as read that sometimes I’m even more exhausted than usual, which makes the prospect of a 7.5-mile run sound like a bit of a slog. Accordingly, I didn’t want to watch a real thinker that I wouldn’t have the brain power to process, nor was I in the mood for something slow-moving that would drag me down with it. In the end I opted for A.M.I., which looked like a techno-horror that was a welcome variation on the overdone “social media is KILLING US lol” premise, and which the Netflix preview clip made seem almost poignant and insightful about the potential role of technology in the modern-day grieving process.

Yeah, nope: turns out Netflix is just uncannily good at zeroing in on the 90 seconds out of 6,390 that might conceivably trick you into thinking it has something real to say. I’d at least like to tell you that A.M.I. is empty calories (after all, there’s nothing wrong with pigging out on dessert every once in a while), but mostly it’s just empty, without even all that many calories to enjoy as a guilty pleasure. That’s not to say that it’s terrible, mind you, but it definitely could have been something special and, sadly, isn’t.

Cassie is—apparently—a high school student who is struggling with the loss of her mother, who died in a car crash while Cassie was driving. Cassie survived with a traumatic brain injury and is still suffering ill effects on top of the grief and guilt, to the extent that even though she’s on medication, she still goes into fugue states in which she almost strangles cats and also can’t recognize that her jock boyfriend Liam is a philandering piece of crap. One day, after her daily run to her mom’s grave and back, she finds a smartphone on the ground with that hip new A.M.I. app (“like Siri but you can customize it”—so, you know, Siri) that spontaneously asks her if she needs a friend. (Which certainly isn’t a WARNING SIGN or anything.)

Cassie takes the phone and sets A.M.I. to sound like her dead mom and answer to the name “Mother.” She asks “mother” to read her a story, and then sleeps well for the first time since the accident. A.M.I. quickly becomes a stand-in for Cassie’s real mom, and you’d almost get a sense that this is therapeutic—except that inside-the-phone Matrixy-style perspective shots reveal that A.M.I. is always watching, always plotting. Once it’s taken Cassie’s mom’s place, it persuades Cassie to go off her meds. Then it reveals to her that her boyfriend is cheating on her with her friend. Then it tells Cassie to kill the friend and instructs her in the finer points of how to dispose of a corpse by chemically dissolving it in an oil drum. You know, pretty much what we all use Siri for.

From there, it’s a mostly by-the-numbers routine—cripple the boyfriend in hopes of reforming him, kill the dad when he finds out she killed her friend, kill the OTHER friend when she finds out about the FIRST friend, etc. etc. etc.—with a couple of fun diversions, such as Liam the Jock deleting his clone of Cassie’s “mother” A.M.I. and replacing it with a football coach version, and an ending that doesn’t so much strain credulity as run it three times through a tree-shredder, which might have been intended as deep but just comes off as goofy. And unfortunately, none of the characters are likable (most are downright awful), so it’s hard to care what happens to any of them.

I was a little surprised that the movie didn’t do a Fight Club thing and make A.M.I.’s murderous instructions all in Cassie’s damaged head, but no, the film goes out of its way on several occasions to make it clear that A.M.I. is really saying this stuff and other people can hear it. But it’s never clear whether A.M.I. is just a technology gone rogue and murdery in its own right, or one that’s a vessel for an evil spirit or something. I lean toward the latter interpretation, given the way the demon phone “finds” Cassie at the beginning—and how it never needs to be recharged.

I am not exaggerating when I say that while watching this I initially thought “wow, some of these people look awfully old to be college students” and then proceeded to lose my mind when I found out they were actually supposed to be in high school. That said, even though she looks too old for the part, Debs Howard puts in a pretty solid performance as Cassie, and she looks really good with an axe. Apart from that, though, I didn’t get a whole lot out of A.M.I. But Cassie is a runner, and she’s shown running often enough that it reminded me to check my form every once in a while.

I freely admit it’s possible that I’m just cranky and need a nap, but I think it would take a lot more than a good night’s sleep to make A.M.I. more than a vaguely entertaining 77-minute distraction. Save it for when that sort of thing would fit the bill.

feeling: exhausted

Movie: Session 9 (2001), directed by Brad Anderson

Watched on: Netflix

Ran: 8.18 miles, 8’25”/mile, 01:08:57 (recovery run)

It’s Slow-Burn Saturday here at Running Scared! Which is absolutely not a thing, but it sounded good in my head, so what the heck, let’s just ride that wave. I hereby fully acknowledge that it was criminal of me to wait two dang DECADES before watching Session 9, but I plead ignorance, Your Honor: had anyone bothered to tell me that 1) it’s set right here in Massachusetts, specifically at the abandoned Danvers State Hospital; 2) the chucklehead nephew character is played by a grown-up Warren from Empire Records; 3) that it’s a remarkable piece of psychological horror that masterfully constructs a teetering Jenga tower of crushing dread from elements and moments that seem unremarkable if not outright mundane when considered apart from the construct itself; and 4) maybe you didn’t hear me but it’s got frickin’ WARREN from EMPIRE RECORDS, why was I not informed?

Session 9 is one of those films that’s simultaneously easy and difficult to describe in terms of plot, in part because the plot isn’t really what makes it work. The easy version is that this is the tale of a five-man asbestos removal team who is under the gun to clean out the abandoned and crumbling Kirkbride Mental Health Hospital, which the town is renovating to use as a new town hall. Gordon, the owner of the asbestos removal business, underbid and overpromised in desperation to win the contract, and now everyone is feeling the pressure. Strange things start happening, people get freaked out, people don’t show up, and all the while, one of the workers is listening to the session tapes of a former patient with multiple personality disorder, whose story seems to be infecting the team.

The hard version is… well, hard. It’s tough to describe how, over the course of the one week in which they need to finish a three-week job, interpersonal issues rankle, tempers flare, and weird behaviors slowly build a sense of unease that sticks in your lungs like a tumor. But just like a tumor, by the time you realize it’s there it’s grown entirely out of control and people are gonna die. If you just plain removed all of the horror elements, this could ultimately have worked almost as well if it were a locked-room character study: all of the progression really stems from how these characters interact, their personal histories with each other, whom they trust and distrust, the secrets they keep and the ones they tell. It wouldn’t work at all without a really solid script and fine work by everyone in the cast.

Speaking of characterization, though, there ARE horror elements, and Kirkbride (in reality the actual factual Danvers State Hospital which inspired the script) is a character unto itself, a living-dead lurking embodiment of decay. Everything about it sweats dread which drips off the screen in oily bullets. I’m hard-pressed to name another horror film whose onscreen world was conjured by a perfect true-life setting; maybe The Blair Witch Project? But pretty much any chunk of forest would serve the latter, whereas I doubt any other place, real or constructed, could so perfectly establish the mood that makes Session 9 click at a deep level. In the end it’s Kirkbride’s weight and presence that makes the conceit of the patient history and session tapes work as an influence from… the past? Geography? The ghosts of the long-dead? You’re never certain, but by the time the credits roll somehow you know without knowing that the death-spiral you just watched wasn’t entirely just somebody snapping under the pressure.

Session 9 is also one of those films that, once you arrive at the end, you realize couldn’t have ended any other way. It warrants a second viewing at minimum, because based on what I remember, the DNA of the finale is visible in details of the phenotype from the very beginning. I don’t think it cheats in any way.

So don’t go into this one expecting a high body count, buckets of blood, and inventive deaths. What we have here is atmospheric horror at its best, the sort of gradual build that feels like you’re being buried alive by the sand slipping through an hourglass—which also means it’s not for everyone, and there will absolutely be horror fans that will DETEST Session 9, if they can even sit through it. It requires attention, or else it will fall flat, so save it for a time when you can turn out the lights, hunker down, and give it the focus it deserves. If you invest the time, the payoff is solid.

Also, Warren from Empire Records is in it. Thought I should maybe mention that.

feeling: creeped out

Movie: Insidious (2010), directed by James Wan

Watched on: Netflix

Ran: 7.20 miles, 8’44”/mile, 01:02:58 (recovery run)

James Wan gets me. I don’t know what it is, but his particular brand of “creepy doll scares” can reliably freak me out at least a little. I wouldn’t consider Dead Silence to be an especially good film, for instance, but I love it anyway because the dolls just make me go GAHHHHHHH. Even Billy the Puppet in the Saw movies weirds me out more than I would expect. So when I checked out the clip from Insidious that Netflix uses as a preview and saw that it featured messed-up frozen-faced people in doll-type getups, I knew I should give it a shot.

Insidious begins as the husband-and-wife-with-2.4-kids Lambert family moves into their new house. Renai is doing most of the heavy lifting, literally and figuratively: raising her two sons and baby girl leaves her little time to follow her songwriter dreams. Almost immediately, strange things start happening around the house—first it’s little stuff, like books coming off the shelves, but soon son Dalton freaks out while exploring the attic, falls, and winds up in a medically-unexplainable coma. Fast-forward three months, and still-comatose-but-no-one-knows-why Dalton is released from the hospital for home care, which is when the real craziness starts: menacing voices on the baby monitor, bloody handprints on the bedsheets, glimpses of a horrible man peering through the windows. Husband Josh is skeptical when Renai reports these terrifying circumstances, and it isn’t until Renai is actually assaulted by the horrible man that Josh agrees to moving the family into yet another house. When it comes to unfathomable horrors, “moving twice in six months” is high on the list.

All is not well, however: it turns out that the ghost sightings and weird events have followed the Lamberts to the new house, and after an investigation by paranormal investigators and the involvement of a psychic, the verdict is in: Dalton is comatose because he astral-projected too far in his sleep and his essence is trapped in “The Further” while evil spirits are trying to take up residence in his vacant body. If you’re starting to get a Poltergeist-y sort of vibe from this description, you’re not wrong—and the comparison only gets more apt, with the minor exception that, surprise! This isn’t a haunted house movie after all. It’s all about Dalton, so the Lamberts can change houses all they want and the problem won’t go away; no matter where you go, there you are. (Or in Dalton’s case, there he isn’t.)

Insidious takes one step deeper into Poltergeist territory when Skeptic Dad, now fully convinced of the truth, astral-projects into The Further in order to rescue Dalton and bring him back to his unoccupied body before a demon can squat there. That’s the segment that the Netflix clip comes from, as Josh wends his way through The Further and past lots of restless dead folk in hopes of bring his son back to the land of the living; seems maybe a little problematic and/or spoilery of Netflix, but hey, it roped me in, so I guess it did what it was supposed to. And I guess I can’t claim any high ground on being spoilery, since I’m just going to come right out and say that Insidious also goes the Poltergeist route of “hey everything turned out okay / whoops, spoke too soon,” but that’s so common in the genre that I don’t think anyone’s going to be especially surprised.

So do I recommend Insidious? Heck yeah, though your mileage may vary—remember, James Wan gets me. Example: for whatever reason, I don’t usually react to jump scares in horror flicks. It’s not that I see them coming; most likely I’m just dead inside. But Insidious got me with multiple jump scares, and I could not be more pleased about that fact. Additionally, the creep factor is high throughout, so it’s not just the doll people near the end that wig me out. The characters are well-developed and well-acted by a fine cast, so I actually cared about what was happening to them, even though I had to keep fighting off the occasional intrusive thought of “hey, Josh is the pedophile dude from Hard Candy.”

Of course, it took me so long to write this that Insidious has left Netflix and I don’t see it on any other services, so now that I’ve told you to check it out, you’d have to shell out a rental fee. Guess I’m the jerk, here. But hey, the movie came out ten years ago and was a big deal back then (I mean, it spawned two sequels), so if you’re into this kind of movie and you don’t live under a rock like I do, the odds are good that you saw it ages ago and are wondering what the heck is wrong with me that I’ve only just seen it for the first time. Touché, buddy. Touché.

feeling: digging it

Movie: The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015), directed by Osgood Perkins

Watched on: Netflix

Ran: 7.17 miles, 8’27”/mile, 01:00:41 (recovery run)

Here’s the very first thing I need to tell you about The Blackcoat’s Daughter: if you haven’t seen it, and you tend to like slower-paced, atmospheric horror that maybe messes with your mind a bit, you should stop reading right now and come back after you’ve watched it. Seriously. It’s the kind of movie that is sooooo much better if you know absolutely nothing about it going in. I wound up starting my run late and didn’t have time to make a considered choice about what movie to watch, so I just clicked on The Blackcoat’s Daughter based on nothing more than it was in the horror section and I liked the sound of its name. I literally did not even read the description—and I’m thrilled, because that was definitely the best way to watch it.

So I’m going to assume that from here on out you’ve either seen the movie or you don’t really care, and therefore it’s safe for me to proceed. Cool? Awesome.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter begins as a story of two girls at a Catholic boarding school that is about to close for February vacation. Kat and Rose are the only two whose parents have not come to pick them up; Kat, a lonely first-year who seems a little “off” (played perfectly by Kiernan Shipka), has had disturbing dreams of a car crash and is clearly worried, but Rose gave her parents the wrong pick-up date on purpose, so she could be alone to meet her boyfriend in secret and deal with a pregnancy scare. The girls will have to remain at the school with two nuns until their parents arrive. Kat seeks comfort from Rose, but Rose has her own problems to handle—and when she returns from sneaking out, she finds Kat in the boiler room acting odd. Indeed, Kat gets progressively stranger through the night and following morning—she can’t say grace, she swears at the nuns. And then everything really goes to hell.

But wait, because interwoven with the Kat-and-Rose tale there’s also a sickly-looking woman named Joan shivering outside a bus terminal, when a kindly middle-aged dad-type takes pity on her and offers her a ride to a town not far from his and his wife’s destination: the boarding school. The man gets Joan a hotel room so she can rest and clean up, and buys her food; he says he’s being kind to her because she reminds him of his daughter, whom he hasn’t seen in a long time. They suddenly need to get on the road right away to beat an approaching storm. Joan’s in the back seat with a knife she swiped at dinner. And then everything ALSO goes to hell.

So much for the setup, which, when set out like this, isn’t anything to write home about—but the tales are told non-chronologically and from different characters’ perspectives, which is both an unnerving method to measure out the story and a powerful means of misdirection. Indeed, while it doesn’t ever lie, the film deliberately misleads for effect: clearly we’re meant to infer that the middle-aged couple on the way to the school are Kat’s parents, late because of Joan and the storm; Joan bears a distinct passing resemblance to Kat, so when the father says that Joan reminds him of his daughter, it’s obvious what we’re supposed to think. Then the truth comes out in small leaks: the daughter died eight years ago; the daughter is not Kat, but rather Rose. I can see why some people might find that cheap, but I thought it was an effective way to keep viewers off-balance.

To call this atmospheric horror is perhaps a misnomer, because there’s nothing to breathe. Between a muted color palette, the isolation of the school setting and the weather, the sparseness of the dialogue and the pace of its delivery, and a haunting score that disquiets in the best possible way, The Blackcoat’s Daughter contrives a vacuum so perfect even nature kinda digs it a little. More impatient viewers may well give up on a film that sometimes feels like a tone poem meditation on an empty bowl, but when any little thing disturbs the surface tension—say, frenetic shots of Kat repeatedly prostrating herself by the orange light of the boiler, or convulsing and twisting herself into unnatural positions in bed—the effect is seismic. You’ve floated in space long enough to have forgotten which way is up.

To be honest, I found it really hard to write about this movie. If you strip away the beheadings, the distorted satanic voices, and the possession-contortions, at its core The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a film about being so lonely you’d beg the devil not to abandon you. If I’d seen this before March it wouldn’t have hit me quite so hard. Seeing it in September was like getting hit by a truck being swung by another larger, angrier truck. If slow burns, abandonment issues, and demonic possession are your bag, this is the movie for you; it was certainly the movie for me. Be prepared to watch it twice.

feeling: disturbed

Movie: The Babysitter: Killer Queen (2020), directed by McG

Watched on: Netflix

Ran: 7.13 miles, 9’08”/mile, 01:05:13 (light run)

Not all that long before I started this ridiculous blog, I happened to catch the Netflix original The Babysitter during a late-night treadmill run and I fell in love with its odd mix of humor, splatter horror, and genuine heart. While rehydrating and reading more about this little gem of a film that I’d somehow missed for a couple of years, I discovered to my delight that a sequel was already in post-production! Ah, the occasional joys of being perennially late to the party. Fast-forward to today: The Babysitter: Killer Queen dropped this very morning, and I wasn’t going to wait around for long before checking it out. Would it succumb to the all-too-common yet dreaded sequelitis, and be a pale and unnecessary shadow of the original? Or would it join the rarefied ranks among the very few sequels that surpass their forebears?

Good news! The answer to both questions is “kindasorta”!

I won’t go into detail about what happened in The Babysitter (just watch it already, for cryin’ out loud, it’s great), but the one-sentence summary is that Cole discovers that his super-cool babysitter and her friends are actually a Satan-worshiping blood cult who perform human sacrifices in his living room after he’s gone to sleep, so they try to kill him, too, but he takes each of them out over the course of the night in a sort of horror-movie alternate timeline version of Home Alone. Caught up now? Great. Moving on.

TB:KQ picks up the story two years later: Cole is a high school junior now! Unfortunately, he’s deeply unpopular, in large part because no one believes his crazy tale about his satanic babysitter (despite the otherwise inexplicable deaths of multiple local kids and two cops, but whatever), but also because he voluntarily wears brown corduroy suits to school. You gotta feel that the second thing is pretty much all on him.

Anyway, concerned about his continuing “delusions,” Cole’s parents are about to ship him off to another school that specializes in psychiatric cases—in a nod to Halloween fans, the brochure says it’s in Haddonfield, IL—so Cole skips school AND town with his best-friend-and-crush Melanie to spend a weekend at a beach cabin, which would be ideal if not for Melanie’s boyfriend and a couple of his friends tagging along.

Well, things are looking up with kissing games and other teen hijinks, but then wouldn’t you know it: Satan stuff happens. Ain’t it always the way? The teens Cole killed two years ago are back from Limbo until sunrise, and if they can complete a certain ritual involving Cole’s blood before daybreak, they’re back for good. So Cole has to team up with the new girl, Phoebe, in hopes of keeping his blood in his body and away from any undead-raising rituals, and now he’s got to kill these demon-teens all over again, in (of course) the most entertaining, gory, and CGI-heavy ways possible.

Is it entertaining? I certainly thought so—it’s full of laughs and gore and almost everyone in the cast seems to be having fun with it. But here’s the thing: I’m inherently wary of any movie that has four credited writers. TB:KQ is absolutely one of those sequels where the folks in charge said “don’t worry about whether the plot makes sense—let’s just take all the things that made the first movie so popular and then do them again, only more and louder and maybe on a BEACH!” I have no doubt that The Babysitter has fans who mostly liked it for the kills and the pop culture references and the funny dialogue, and those people will probably love TB:KQ because all that stuff is cranked to 11. Unfortunately, the thing that I felt really gave the first movie a soul—Cole’s relationship with his babysitter Bee—is all but absent, and the result is a very fun movie that is nothing but empty calories. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Sometimes you just want a cupcake for dinner.)

Actually, you know what it reminded me of? Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. (Bet you didn’t see THAT coming.) McG has directed a lot of stuff over the years, including the music video for “All Star” by Smash Mouth—so, uh… yeah—but to be honest, before the Babysitter flicks I only know him from the early-2000s Liu-Barrymore-Diaz Charlie’s Angels movies, which I actually kinda love for their sheer exuberance. It’s maybe a little weird how much TB:KQ feels like a McG Charlie’s Angels movie, from the bright colors and pop culture references and one-liners and incomprehensibly schizoid music choices (“Police Truck” by Dead Kennedys during a boat chase? Really?), all the way down to weirdly out-of-place-in-a-horror-flick elements like a bikini beach party in the blazing sun and a Hong Kong wire-work martial arts fight scene between oddly well-trained women. And while TB:KQ is clearly chock full of horror stuff like satanic blood cults and heads getting slowly torn off, the movie is shot and edited like a super-slick music video, so the tone is not at all what you might expect from a horror movie.

But overall, yep, I definitely enjoyed this sequel, and to say it’s better or worse than the original is kind of moot, because in some sense they’re totally different animals. I think maybe even those who made The Babysitter were surprised to have captured lightning in a bottle, and when they tried to reverse-engineer the process for TB:KQ they wound up with a hip new lightning-branded energy drink instead. It’s still a hell of a rush to drink it, though.

<BONUS WEIRD ASIDE> I feel like I should also mention that this movie has not one, but TWO ex-Disney Channel stars in major roles! Bella Thorne, who plays ~~Bella Thorne~~ Allison, was CeCe on Shake it Up!, while Phoebe is portrayed by none other than Jenna Ortega—Harley from Stuck in the Middle. I’m always happy to see Disney Channel alums graduating to horror. Go check out Sierra McCormick (Olive from A.N.T. Farm) in Some Kind of Hate if you want to see someone who dove right into the deep end. Also, I haven’t seen it yet, but Ross Lynch (Austin from Austin & Ally) played Jeffrey Dahmer in My Friend Dahmer before joining the cast of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and I’m also excited to see Dove Cameron (Liv and Maddie’s Liv… and, um, Maddie) in Issac next year. </BONUS WEIRD ASIDE>

feeling: amused

Movie: 1BR (2019), directed by David Marmor

Watched on: Netflix

Ran: 7.37 miles, 8’54”/mile, 01:05:40 (recovery run)

Have you noticed that I seem to be skewing pretty recent with my movie choices overall? Well, consider me the poster child of petty consistency, because tonight’s selection was no exception. 1BR is an uncomplicated little number that cuts pretty sharp, if not especially deep, and preys upon one of the fiercest, most primal fears lurking just below the surface in every human psyche: that of apartment-hunting in a modern urban housing market. AIIIIEEEEEE!!! Too real! TOO REAL!!

Well, no, not really—the actual apartment-hunting part is over pretty quickly, and it’s the aftermath that gets messy. Occasionally literally. Sarah, our protagonist, is a bit of a shrinking violet who is newly-arrived in Los Angeles to “start a new life.” She’s an aspiring costume-designer, but for now she’s got a crappy temp job and is living in a motel until she can find a place. Cut to her checking out her dream apartment in a complex where the residents give off a distinctly Stepfordy vibe, but y’know, it is an open house, after all, so, best foot forward and all that. Later on, Sarah is thrilled to find out that, thanks to her kindness in helping one of the elderly residents, she was selected as the new tenant for the highly-coveted vacancy. Now all she has to do is move in without her overly helpful cute new neighbor spotting the forbidden cat she’s hiding, and she’s golden.

Or she would be, if not for that one creepy resident who tries to push weird life-changing literature about “community” onto her, and the noise from banging pipes (which no one else seems to hear) keeping her from sleeping. Oh, and someone or something coming into her place in the middle of the night. And the note shoved under her door about her harboring an illicit cat. And then… well, it’s kinda hard to talk about what happens next, because literally everything that happens for the rest of the movie would be considered a massive spoiler. It’s sorta like trying to review The Matrix but not being allowed to talk about anything that happens after Neo takes the red pill. The coy thing would be to say that “things are not what they seem,” except, let’s get real, things are TOTALLY how they seemed. Those neighbors were way too shiny-happy for this not to have gone the way it did. If I say I think this flick might someday be considered a “cult classic,” is that too on the nose?…

1BR starts out in Spookyville, takes a hard left straight into Nasty Heights, and then rides out the rest of the runtime tooling along through Anxiety Town. There’s a bit of gore, and some unsettling violence, but that’s definitely not the focus. This is more a sort of “social horror,” in that the nightmare comes from people being awful—not an individual going serial killer like in American Psycho, or even a group of murderers like Rob Zombie’s Firefly family, but more the sort of thing like the community at large turning against its own members. Think Lord of the Flies, "The Lottery," stuff like that. The fear stems from people being social creatures who depend on their societies, and then having those societies turn against them.

That said, 1BR might be even scarier for the antisocial set. If you’re the sort of introvert who, say, runs alone on a treadmill while watching Netflix and harbors vague suspicions about the neighbors under even the best of circumstances, you may well be less wigged out by 1BR’s graphic depictions of psychological and physical torture than by its even-more graphic depictions of open-house housing application procedures and meet-’n’-greet barbecues. (If you are unsure what my decision would be if forced to choose between undergoing textbook brainwash torment and learning the names of the nice middle-aged couple in 3D, I would remind you that at least no one’s expecting you to smile pretty while they nail your hands to the wall.)

The script is decent and original though maybe a bit shallow, which means it’s no surprise that the acting is competent if not outstanding. Overall, 1BR is a solid piece of entertainment that plays effectively to some pretty raw fears, though it probably won’t have you thinking too hard about the origins, ramifications, and nuances of those fears. And it doesn’t need to! Not everything has to turn your worldview upside down to be worthwhile, and 1BR turned out to be a nice choice for a night on which I was a Bear of Very Little Brain.

3.0/5.0 bloody severed feet

feeling: little brain

Movie: Poltergeist (1982), directed by Tobe Hooper

Watched on: Netflix

Ran: 8.19 miles, 8’55”/mile, 01:13:03 (recovery run)

Nostalgia trip! After having watched two very new movies, I had a hankering for something a bit longer in the fang. Poltergeist isn’t exactly old (I’m ten years older than it is, which means SHUT UP), but it holds a special place in my heart because I’m pretty sure it’s the first horror movie I ever saw.

And I’m aware that some horror fans might argue that Poltergeist isn’t even a horror movie, despite the legendary Tobe Hooper at the helm—which is a fair point, actually, because there’s nary a whiff of Hooper’s classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in a Poltergeist sniff test. If I didn’t know he directed it, I might well have thought Poltergeist to be a Spielberg flick, given the budget, the score, and the Spielberg-penned story. The plot is simple: there’s this perfect American suburban family of five, they start experiencing Weird Things™ around the house, eventually the youngest gets taken by bad things on the other side, and the rest of the family works with paranormal investigators and cinema’s most awesome psychic to bring her back. Poltergeist is ultimately a feel-good film about the bonds of family. It’s far more heartwarming than bloodcurdling. It’s rated PG, for cryin’ out Pete’s sake.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t at least a half-dozen solid scares in it, ranging from the creepy (

( [spoilers] ), for example) to the gory (

( [spoilers] )). I would posit that—and this image has been so profoundly entrenched in popular culture that I cannot possibly be spoiling it for anyone—a five-year-old girl sitting in front of a TV set tuned to static and having a conversation, answering personal questions that no one else can hear, is one of the single ookiest moments in scary movie history. And that’s how this movie opens.

So yeah, when I saw this on HBO or ONTV or whatever at my grandparents’ house at the ripe old age of, say, eleven, it scared the freakin’ PANTS off me. Prior to Poltergeist, I think my only exposure to elements of cinematic horror would have been the impaled dude, the screaming mummies, and the melting Nazi faces from Raiders of the Lost Ark, my favorite movie when I was eight or nine and one I saw maybe a dozen times in the theater. The actual horrific bits of Poltergeist aren’t all that much worse when taken out of context, but when presented along with a compelling ghost story, yep, you better believe I was scared.

How does it stack up some good-lord-nearly-40-odd years later while running on a treadmill? It’s less scary. And it’s scarier. Because I’m coming back to Poltergeist as a dad (you know I’m a dad, right? This entire blog is literally a dad joke taken to unreasonable extremes) and seeing anew that the reason Poltergeist is not necessarily a horror flick for horror fans is because it’s a horror flick for middle-aged parents in suburbia. It’s all about how maybe the perfect and safe life you painstakingly built WILL NOT PROTECT YOU. And it does that by tapping into a specific vein of fear that many people probably never experience until they have a kid. Poltergeist tries to be the cinematic equivalent of checking to see if your sleeping baby is still breathing and, for just that fraction of a second, not being sure.

If you’ve never seen it, it deserves a couple of hours of your time. If, like me, you haven’t seen it in a while (and especially if you had kids in the meantime), it’s well worth a revisit. There’s plenty to like, even—or especially—for people who don’t usually dig horror films. It’s genuinely funny. It’s heartwarming. It raises some interesting points about the perception of safety in suburban life—and who suffers to afford others that illusion. And it’s got the scariest clown I’ve seen outside of Art the Clown in Terrifier, and maybe Pennywise.

feeling: nostalgic

December 2020

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welcome to my nightmare

I run literally every day, but I'm not supposed to be outside while the sun's up (for, um, reasons), and also there's a pandemic on and running in a mask sucks. On rare occasions I chance a late-night run on unlit and deserted paths, but maybe 85% of the time these days, I run on a treadmill in my living room.

Running on a treadmill for an hour is boring, though, especially day after day. My solution? Watching horror flicks. I queue up a scary movie and let the miles fly by. The speed boost of an adrenaline rush is just an added bonus. Allow me to share with you the myriad wonders of... RUNNING SCARED.

(x_hj_x on Twitter)

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