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Watched on: Showtime

Ran: 7.44 miles, 9’27”/mile, 01:10:24 (slow recovery run)

 

So the other day I was saying to myself, “Self,” I said, “you really aren’t watching enough sequels these days.” Running Scared currently has a grand total of TWO sequels in its review list—and one of those I only watched because I didn’t know it was a sequel. Not that I have anything against sequels! They are, after all, one of our richest sources of the raw ore from which cinematic snark is refined. But it does seem weird to write about a sequel here if I haven’t already written about its original.

 

Well, good news: since I watched Urban Legend a few weeks back, I harbored no such qualms about revisiting Urban Legends: Final Cut during tonight’s pathetically slow recovery run! Yes, apparently they’d hoped to turn one of my favorite not-especially-great horror flicks into a franchise in which each mostly-standalone film would continue the theme of grisly deaths patterned after urban legends—hence this outing’s unwieldy title and sketchy connection to the storyline of the original. Indeed, the first time I saw UL:FC I was uncertain whether it even WAS a sequel until the films’ single shared character showed up ten minutes in.

 

This time around, we’re at Alpine University’s film school, where daughter-of-an-Oscar-winner Amy Mayfield is struggling to come up with a script for her thesis project, which will also be her entry for the prestigious Hitchcock Awards. (The Hitchcock is a big deal: the winner is virtually guaranteed a Hollywood career, so the competition among the seniors is fierce.) One night, Amy hitches a ride home with a security guard named Reese—yup, THAT Reese!—who tells Amy about how she’d been head of security when the urban legends killer offed all those people at Pendleton. Amy decides her Hitchcock entry will be a horror film loosely based on the Pendleton murders. So we’re watching a sequel to a movie about an urban legends killer in which they’re making a movie about an urban legends killer. Got it?

 

But all is not well on the Alpine campus; Amy’s crush Travis, a filmmaking wunderkind, has allegedly killed himself after receiving an unthinkable C- on his thesis film. And Amy’s own shoot isn’t going so great, because everyone working on it seems to vanish or die: her lead actress Sandra disappears but is captured on film in an uncharacteristically believable death scene, her cinematographer is bludgeoned to death with his own camera lens, her two visual effects wonks are electrocuted on set, etc. A mysterious figure in a fencing mask seems to be behind it all, and just to make things weirder, Travis’s identical twin Trevor is lurking around on campus secretly trying to solve what he insists must be Travis’s murder. Can Amy and Trevor crack the case before she runs out of cast and crew? Her future film prospects (and, I guess, some lives) hang in the balance.

 

(By the way, that means this is actually a sequel to a movie about an urban legends killer in which they’re trying to make a movie about an urban legends killer while being killed off by an urban legends killer. But who’s counting?)

 

I will make this plain: no matter how many times UL:FC invokes his name and work, Hitchcock it most certainly ain’t. It labors under the burden of an overly large cast, which contains too many generic white dudes to try to keep track of—and just to add insult to injury, when one of them dies off, his twin immediately pops up, like a head on a Wonder Bread hydra. Its running time of 1:37 isn’t all that hefty, and yet the movie does feel a little long; the chase scenes in particular seem to drag a bit, which is the exact opposite of what a chase scene should do. Some people might also find the plot overly complicated and/or contrived—again, twins? Really?—and the final reveal of whodunit a bit out of left field, but at least it all mostly makes sense in hindsight.

 

But a movie with delusions of Hitchcock doesn’t have to be Hitchcock to be enjoyable, and I honestly enjoyed UL:FC. Movies about making movies, like books about writing books, all too often fall into the solipsism trap and expect everyone to be fascinated by navel-gazing. UL:FC kindly spares us this fate, and its self-referential digs at lousy actors, flaky crew, and limited resources are, if anything, more entertaining than the murders. With the exception of the very well done first kill (a kidney heist and impromptu decapitation), I barely remember the deaths, but I have a clear memory of one of the effects wonks cursing out George Lucas for using CGI and then looking like he expected to be struck by lightning or something.

 

I’d say that if you liked Urban Legend at all, give UL:FC a spin. Despite a similar theme transplanted to a different school, it’s actually a very different flick. Gone, for example, is the Dawson’s Creek-style script and a cast pulling hard from the Brat Pack ‘90s Edition; the most recognizable cast member here is Joey “Whoa!” Lawrence, a decade removed from his Blossom fame, as one of the Indistinguishable White Males. And there’s something refreshing about a slasher flick that aspires to Hitchcockian qualities, even if it doesn’t necessarily hit the mark. Honestly, in some ways I feel it’s a better movie than the original, if not necessarily more enjoyable to watch. And the coda scene is worth a grin.

 

Watched on: Showtime

Ran: 7.06 miles, 9’06”/mile, 01:04:16 (recovery run)

 

In case it wasn’t totally obvious by now, I live under a rock. It’s a cozy rock, nothing fancy, but it has a “ROCK SWEET ROCK” embroidery on its face and protects me from seeing or hearing anything about what any of you humans are up to, so I like it and it’s mine.

 

What this means, of course, is that I frequently find myself in amusing circumstances like the following: “Oh hey, let’s see if there are any good horror movies I can run to on Showtime: seen it; [swipe] seen it; [swipe] looks dumb; [swipe] …hmmm, “The Witch.” Sounds kinda generic, maybe another time. Oh, wait, it expires TODAY? Okay, guess I’ll give it a shot, whatever. How bad could it be?” And that, friends, is how I finally came to watch a movie that some have called the greatest horror film of the current millennium, that others have dubbed the apotheosis of the genre, and that I personally might have heard mentioned once or twice but I may be thinking of something else.

 

So: The Witch. It’s about a 17th-century English family who gave up their well-to-do life to emigrate to the Plymouth colonies and has recently been banished by the elders over some religious dispute. So William and Katherine take their kids Thomasin, Caleb, and twins Mercy and Jonas and set up a little farm on the edge of the Big Evil Woods™, where Katherine has another baby, Samuel. One day, while Thomasin is playing peekaboo with little Sam, the baby just disappears in a really impossible and disquieting fashion, and that’s when this little game of life switches from HARD mode to NIGHTMARE. Katherine is understandably inconsolable, on top of the family’s other woes: William feels increasing stress to provide for his family, the adolescent Thomasin feels unjustly blamed for Sam’s disappearance, Caleb feels like he’s being treated like a little kid, there’s drama about a missing silver cup (Thomasin is low-key blamed when in fact William secretly sold it to buy traps in hopes of catching meat for the family), and the twins are acting out, as young twins are won’t to do, I guess.

 

Where is the witch in all this, you ask? Well, we do see her onscreen after Sam is taken, but the glimpses are fleeting and it’s uncertain whether we’re meant to take them as literal truth or as a representation of what the family fears; most of the film is like that, and one could make the argument for an interpretation utterly devoid of any supernatural presence or actual-factual witch at all, in which the family’s downfall is due entirely to their own interpersonal suspicions, lies, and communication breakdowns, colored ever darker by their religious beliefs. But yeah, that said, we do see the witch doing horrifying things to little Samuel—and then seducing young Caleb in the woods, after which he is found alone, naked, and ill. Meanwhile, the twins are also holding conversations with a goat named Black Phillip, which isn’t at all suspicious or anything.

 

Anyway, it’s not long before the family is accusing Thomasin of being a witch and the ultimate cause of the family’s problems (sure, blame the teen), whereas she feels compelled to defend herself by accusing the twins, what with their Black Phillip games and all. We’ll leave off the narrative there, because that’s when the real fun begins. I’m probably not spoiling anything to say that if you’re a happy-endings kind of person, maybe give this one a miss.

 

As you no doubt already know (unless you, too, are a rock-dweller—hi there! Let’s get coffee after the next club meeting), The Witch is a damn fine film. Critics absolutely lost their minds over it, heaping praise on it like they were hucking cheese on their baked russet at the potato bar. Moviegoers, on the other hand, had mixed feelings; apparently The Witch was marketed as a straight-up horror movie, which is most decidedly is not, so people expecting lots of jump scares, gore, heads twisting around, and kids spider-crawling on the ceiling were disappointed. The Witch is more a 90-minute art-house exercise in the painstaking building of a psychological bonfire, which finally gets lit in the final act. In hindsight I took it as a study in family dynamics, trust issues, and the ways in which people can be subtly set against each other, especially if someone might be, say, grooming a young teen for any of a number of nefarious reasons. (By the time the credits roll, you might have a different idea of the identity of the witch in the title.)

 

If you’re a film buff who likes horror, you’d be sure to love this—but who am I kidding? You’ve already seen it. If you’re more a genre horror fan, you might be a little bored by the lack of machetes and hockey masks, but if you adjust your expectations, there’s a lot to like. The look and feel of The Witch is off the hook (apparently they only used sunlight and candles for lighting, I mean COME ON), everyone in the cast is stunningly good, the story is slow-moving but gripping, and the sparing use of horror imagery is very effective. I don’t think I found the movie quite as scary as some others—Stephen King famously said it scared the hell out of him—but if you don’t get at least a little creeped out watching it, you’re dead inside.

 

Incidentally, The Witch still appears on Showtime and the expiration date no longer shows up (not sure what that was about), so check it out there if you’re so inclined. Climbing back under my rock now. I recently added some moss on its north face; it’s nice.

Watched on: Showtime

Ran: 7.54 miles, 8’23”/mile, 01:03:12 (recovery run)

 

This was my first indoor run of the fall, boils and ghouls! Around here, the houses start getting decked out for Halloween pretty much right after the equinox, so the neighborhood lawns are already sprouting inflatable jack-o’-lanterns and the hedges are covered in that dorky-looking fake spiderwebbing, and that’s A-OK with me. As far as I’m concerned, as soon as August is off the calendar I’m running around yelling “it’s HalloWEEEEEN!!” at strangers in the street and counting down the days until October’s monthlong flood of scary movies on all channels. I don’t even care that they’re edited for television. Sometimes that’s part of the fun.

 

Sadly, it’s not October yet, but since ’tis still the season and all that, I wanted a Halloween-themed movie to run to tonight:ideally something fresh and unfamiliar to get my mind off my cooked quads (last night’s run included a mile and a half of steep uphill), but still easy enough to follow that I wouldn’t miss anything too important when wiping sweat out of my eyes or getting distracted by something shiny. After poking around through a few streaming services, I settled on Candy Corn, which turned out to fit the bill nicely.

 

Here’s the guts: Mike, Bobby, and Steve are three young ne’er-do-wells sitting in a small-town diner planning their annual bullying of Jacob, the local special needs kid—which is apparently a longstanding Halloween tradition I somehow missed, but whatever. Steve’s girlfriend Carol “I Could Do Better” Saperstein unsuccessfully tries to dissuade them, and the next day the Thug Patrol (comprising our three miscreants plus a Sad Diner Loser named Gus) confronts Jacob at the carnival where he works. Jacob fights back, things get out of hand, and the thugs beat Jacob to death and flee the scene. As it turns out, though, like all traveling carnivals, this one is run by a diminutive necromancer named Dr. Death, who handily resurrects Jacob as a masked instrument of vengeance. Never mess with a carny, folks!

 

What follows is a by-the-numbers affair in which each of the thugs, and even the guilty-by-association Carol, are isolated and killed by Jacob one by one in borderline inventive ways—tongues ripped out, spines ripped out, any number of things ripped out—usually after they spot his trademark jack-o-lantern full of—you guessed it—candy corn. Meanwhile, Head Thug Mike just happens to be the son of the local sheriff, who tries to unravel the mystery of the sudden spate of murders in this normally sleepy town; will he discover the carnival’s terrifying secret in time? And I doubt I’m spoiling anything for anyone when I say the answer is no, of course he doesn’t, because this movie ends exactly the way you expect it to.

 

I mean, it is what it is, and what it is is a Halloween movie. It has, for example, the most perfunctory gratuitous nudity ever seen just because it had to tick that box. The writing is marginal and certainly not original, but then it’s clearly an homage to what came before, so take that for what it’s worth. The characterizations are, for the most part, paper-thin—especially for the bullies, so that as they’re picked off one by one, it’s hard to care. Mostly you cheer, I guess, because… bullies? But they were more like props then people so it didn’t really matter much one way or the other. You maybe feel a little sorry for Carol every once in a while, but then she keeps making out with Steve ON PURPOSE and you’re like, okay, she’s digging her own grave, here.

 

The acting is passable, with two notable exceptions. First, the guy who plays Head Thug Mike is just appallingly awful, which I would like to believe was intentional because every Halloween movie needs that one terrible actor for everyone to make fun of. Second, Pancho Moler is punching way above his weight (note: not a short joke) as Dr. Death, and to its credit, the film gives him a fair bit of screen time, because he’s the heart and soul of this flick, and I could watch him insult the police all day long. Meanwhile, if there were any doubt that Candy Corn is a movie made for horror fans by horror fans, it’s worth nothing that genre mainstay Tony Todd has a small but non-spooky part as one of the carnies (he’s also an executive producer), and P.J. Soles of Halloween and Carrie fame does a fine job as Marcy the police dispatcher.

 

For a low-budget indie endeavor, Candy Corn has a surprisingly high production value, though of course the ’70s-nostalgia feel helps a bit with that. There’s a little CGI for some extra blood spurts, I think, but otherwise what gore there is seems to be good old-fashioned practical effects, and done reasonably well and with love; the only real standout, effects-wise, is probably the design and execution of Jacob’s back-from-the-dead masked avenger look, which is stellar.

 

Bottom line, there’s not all that much going on… and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Candy Corn is a good Halloween movie: it conjures the feeling of the holiday; it knows, loves, and exploits the tropes of the genre; and it’s uncomplicated enough that you’re not going to miss much when it’s your turn to get up and dole out candy to the trick-or-treaters who just rang the bell. As long as your expectations are modest, this is a decent popcorn flick for a Halloween night.