Annabelle: Creation (2017)

2014 saw the release of Annabelle, a prequel/spinoff of the excellent period possession film The Conjuring. For those who don't recall, it was, as they say in Spanish-speaking countries, 'no muy beuno;' boring, uninterested,  needlessly complicated and featuring only one, possibly two, effective and memorable scare scenes, it was unanimously decried as a fairly dull time. Well, it's three years later and Hollywood is so devoid of ideas we now have a prequel OF a prequel to deal with. However, could it be that's a good thing?

12 years after the tragic death of their daughter, dollmaker Samuel Mullins and his mysteriously bedridden wife open their improbably large house (in an improbably idyllic location) to several young girls and their nun caretaker from a shuttered orphanage. Janice, one of the youngest girl and stuck with a leg brace thanks to a recent polio outbreak, finds the normally-locked door of the daughter's room open and finds the doll we all now and love(?) inside a closet plastered with pages of the bible. She soon becomes the major target of a demonic force --is there any other kind of force in these movies?-- that wants her body and soul for its own purposes.

Director David F. (Lights Out) Sandberg lends the film the tension and suspense that was desperately needed in the first Annabelle film, and while there's nothing here you really haven't seen before (this WAS written by Gary Dauberman, after all), the script had a nice amount of character and eccentricity that makes it feel less like a studio flick and more like something the people involved actually gave a shit about. Sure it feels a bit padded at times and the "twist" ending is contrived to the point your eyes might just roll right out of their sockets, but it's leaps and bounds better than the first film. Since they're written by the same person, let's hope the next Conjuring spinoff The Nun is of at least the same quality as this.

The Dark Tower (2017)

When one goes into a theater to see a film adaptation of a beloved book series it's always with a sense of trepidation, some of it deserved and some of it not as there are, without exception, ALWAYS changes made to various aspects of the story. This is especially true of Stephen King films. Sometimes these changes are for the best and end up causing the adaptation to outshine their source material, as in the case of The Shining, Misery, or 1408; every now and then they end up far worse like Night Shift or The Lawnmower Man. Which camp does the adaption of The Dark Tower end up? Well, I'm not entirely sure.

The film centers on Jake, a young New Yorker who's recently been plagued with extremely vivid and realistic dreams that feature red eyes, a tower, children having their brains sucked or whatever, a man in black (Matthew McConaughey, who's been looking disturbing waxy and skull-faced lately. Seriously, did he get surgery to look more like Peter Cushing?), and a dude who's super good with a gun. When the animal-faced creatures known as the Taheen, also featured in his dreams and able to blend in with regular people thanks to highly detailed human flesh masks, come for him, he away from his mother and stepfather and finds a portal to the land of Mid-World in order to find the gunslinger of his dreams and hopefully stop the Man in Black from destroying reality.

I'm a fan of the Dark Tower book series, which spans the years from 1982 with The Gunslinger all the way up to 2004 with the titular Dark Tower (there's also a book titled Wind Through the Keyhole that came out in 2012 that takes place between books 4 and 5 but I don't usually include it since as far as I'm concerned it really adds nothing to the plot nor is it important for character reasons), so you can imagine my excitement when it was announced an adaptation would finally hit screens after more than a decade of  rumors and false starts. Furthermore, I was fully aware significant changes would have to be made as large swaths of the books would be nigh unfilmable, and I'd made peace with that. I'd go so far to say that, and this is a conservative estimate, roughly 75% of what we see in the movie is either radically different or just straight up didn't happen in the book, and even that is ok so long as you can beat the idea that this is more of an "Inspired by" situation than a true adaptation.

However, there's one major change that I had a far more difficult time with. You see, the entire series, throughout all seven books, has always been Roland's --the name of Jake's dream gunslinger-- story. In the film version though, in addition to changing Jake's character from the son of a megaweathly media mogul to a troubled middle-class kid with a shitty stepdad, the narrative focus was shifted to him. Now, I'm not saying I don't get where such a radical change came from (I'd imagine the makers thought it would make such a wild story more relatable), but by doing so, and of course down playing all the gorier and more fucked up aspects of the books, they took a huge scifi/horror/western hybrid epic and turned it into something that is almost indistinguishable from all that YA tripe that glutted theaters not to long ago. Ultimately, The Dark Tower isn't BAD per say, but it winds up being a very underwhelming and somewhat forgettable film of an unforgettable series.

Since this movie flopped horribly, effectively killing the idea of future installments, I'm going to end this review with a list of cool stuff we'll never see visually realized:

--The dead city of Lud and its malicious inhabitants.
--Eddie, a junkie from '80s New York, and Susannah, a legless civil right proponent from the '50s, joining up with Roland and Jake.
--The adorable Oy, a talking mammal that looks something like a dog and a raccoon combined.
--Eddie killing an evil AI named Blaine with bad puns.
--Flashbacks to the fall of the kingdom of Gilead.
--The epic battle between Roland's gang and a group of child-snatching robots in wolf masks.
--The creation of the Tet Corporation.
--The inclusion of a major character from 'Salem's Lot.
--Stephen King playing himself.
--The werespider Mordred.
--And last but not least, Susannah holding a demon captive with her vagina.