The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)

In 2010 a gaggle of monsters that hadn't been considered 'scary' in a long time came crashing out of Norway in the form of found-footage hit Trollhunter, the most profitable film to come out of that particular frostbitten country in history. It would be a full six years before director Andre "Name With a Bunch of Accent Marks I Can't Replicate Unless I Reset My Keyboard to Norwegian Which I'm Not Gonna Do" Ovredal would release another film, this time in English, and while it couldn't be more different in tone and style from Trollhunter, I'm pleased to say The Autopsy of Jane Doe is just as impressive in it's own right.

We start off following a sheriff arriving at a home that also happens to be the sight of a grizzly triple homicide in which it appears all the victims died desperately trying to leave the house. But that's not the strangest thing; that would go to the partially uncovered body of an anonymous young woman --our titular Jane Doe-- in the dirt-floor basement. She's taken to the local funeral home, run by a father/son combo, both of whom are still grieving from the wife/mother's death two years before, for the procedure of the title. They open her to find shattered wrists and ankles, dozens of lacerations on her internal organs, and lungs like she inhaled enough smoke to smother four or five people, yet there are no indicators of any injury whatsoever outside. Far from it, her skin is alabaster perfection. Then, things start to get weird, with hallucinations, dead animals, and a very clear link to the occult.

Gone is the found footage aesthetic and all it's trappings of Trollhunter (though don't let the found footage thing scare you off from watching that film if you hate that style, because as April Snellings wrote in a review of the film it "owes more to Jurassic Park than The Blair Witch Project"), and in its place is an assured, fluid camera and careful lighting that recalls an antiseptic version of the gothic works of Terrence Fisher. Whereas Trollhunter wanted you to oogle over the titular creatures in all their glory, Autopsy is somewhat secretive, with very few on-screen special effects --except for the actual autopsy stuff, of course.

As far as acting goes, it's actually kind of amazing the best performance in the entire film is given by Olwen Catherine Kelly, who plays the corpse at the center of the mystery. Don't get me wrong, the other actors are fine; Emile Hirsch pulls off the idea of a character who wants to leave the situation he's in but doesn't know how to say it, and, frankly, I might have a little bit of a crush on Brian Cox and think he's wonderful in everything, but there's just some type of magnetism Jane Doe has that forces your eye to her every time. The minute changes to her facial expressions depending on what's going on in the scene make her feel almost more alive than any of the other characters whom are all stuck in the past in their own ways.

I guess what I'm saying is, I'm a fan of this Norse master of genre cinema and you should definable check out both films discussed here.

It (2017)

1986 saw the release a 1,138 page behemoth of a novel by insanely-prolific writer Stephen King titled It, his 22nd novel and yet another New York Times number 1 bestseller --indeed, Publishers Weekly listed It as the best-selling book, both fiction AND nonfiction, in the US for that year. It proved to be so popular, in fact, the story of a group of misfit kids fighting an ancient evil in a small Maine town only to be forced to return 27 years later when it was proved they didn't quite finish the job found its way to television in the form of a 2 part, 4 hour long miniseries in 1990. The series, directed by Tommy (Halloween III) Lee Wallace, is still well-regarded and has become something of a cultural landmark for those of my generation thanks to years of syndication. Therefore, given how iconic the book and the character of Pennywise the Dancing Clown (played to perfection by Tim Curry in the miniseries) have become, you could understand the trepidation when a new adaption was announced. The fact that it took several years to see the light of day after numerous re shufflings in the crew, including multiple changes in writers and directors, didn't help. Luckily, all that worry was for nought!

 Before I go any further, I want to address the red-haired, pasty-faced elephant in the room; the new Pennywise. Like a lot of people, I was unimpressed when the first pics of Bill (Hemlock Grove) Skarsgard's Pennywise, and the thing I didn't much care for was the fact that his makeup and costume seemed so....easy. It was an obvious, Horror Movie Clown (c) type of place to go with it. The thing is, both the book and miniseries clown are visually unremarkable, they just look like regular-ass clowns. The fear was generated by actions, like Pennywise appearing in locations a clown absolutely should not be. By comparison, Bill's Pennywise seemed like he's trying way to hard to look scary. But then, something happened. Randomly one day an interview I read with James Wan popped into my head where he was discussing his film Insidious. He was asked why the Lipstick-Face Demon was smearing the bright red cosmetic on himself, and Wan answered he was doing that in an attempt to replicate the appearance of clown to draw people to him. Suddenly, everything clicked! Pennywise is not a man, he is an entity, and Pennywise is simply its interpretation of a clown. I had the same epiphany when the film started and we finally got to hear the voice Skarsgard went with; it's an utterly bizarre voice, but again, it's an incomprehensible being from beyond space and time trying to replicate human speech, so it makes perfect sense the cadence and whatnot hit the ear wrong.

 And those perfectly sensible changes aren't limited just to the main baddie either, most characters and events in the film differ from their source material in smart ways that brilliantly update the material not just for the late-80s setting but for a 2017 audience. The seven members of The Losers Club, as they proudly refer to themselves, are fleshed out in ways that make them feel more like real characters, as opposed to both the book and miniseries where they're a bit more archetypal, and it's a real delight just watching them interact with one another. It helps that the casting was pitch perfect, of course, and not just when it comes to our young protagonists.

The pace clips along at a nice pace that belays the 2hr 15min runtime, and I found Andy (Mama) Muschietti's direction more palatable here than in his previous works, and considering this movie completely shattered a half dozen box office records I think we'll be seeing his name attached to It: Part 2. Frankly, despite a script that feels a bit shaky at times and a couple other minor quibbles, I think this is a fine updating of a modern classic and I'm excited to see what happens with the second half of the story.

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.

47 Meters Down (2017)

Last year around this time a little shark film called The Shallows made its debut and became the sleeper hit of the summer. So given that fact it really shouldn't come as a shock to see another shark movie released this summer in an attempt to capitalize on that film's success. Unfortunately, 47 Meters Deep --previously titled In The Deep-- feels like an Asylum ripoff, except nowhere near as hilarious as those tend to be.

Our story follows the Mexican vacation adventures of sisters Lisa and Kate, played by former pop star Mandy Moore and Claire Holt, respectively. We find out that Lisa's ass has just been dropped like a hot rock by either her husband or boyfriend (I can't for the life of me remember if they actually specified which), and considering she's the type who defines herself by whatever relationship she's in she's pretty broken up by it. We then immediately fly through a whole series of Screenwriting 101 scenes that are cut together so quickly all they would need is a peppy synthpop track to be considered a montage until the girls have met a couple of vacation boyfriends who convince them to come onto their friend's boat for a spot of shark cagin'. Unsurprisingly the winch holding their cage breaks and they wind up 47 meters --or 155 feet if you're American and fat-- under the surface, surrounded by Great White sharks.

So, guys, this movie is horrible. It looks amateurish at best and almost unwatchable at worst, though considering director Johannes (The Other Side of the Door, Storage 24) Roberts has been behind some of the worst horror flicks of the past few years I suppose that shouldn't come as a shock, which really upsets me considering he's been tapped to direct The Strangers 2. And the writing! Oh boy, the writing! You know how Blake Lively's character in The Shallows was a really likeable, interesting, multifaceted character? Well, Lisa and Kate's main character trait appears to be THEY ARE GIRLS, spending roughly 80% of the film squealing and the other 20% fumbling around inane dialogue. Furthermore, considering the sheer amount of time the bends was mentioned, I'm pretty sure Roberts and co-writer Ernest Riera have no idea what the bends actually is. I mean, it's a great album, why is that a problem?

Ironically, it features a song titled 'High and Dry'

All joking aside, considering the sheer speed those woman drop to the ocean floor, twice, and the fact Roberts went out of his way to include a shot of the glass watch face on Kate's wrist shattering, those girls should've been dead right then and their, their newly-liquefied brains leaking from their ears. I'm willing to overlook a lot of shit; I could've overlooked the bland and one-dimensional characters and the myriad plot holes (how many plot holes could possibly be in a movie like this, you ask? Oh my sweet summer child, you have no idea) if the ending worked. It does not. In fact, I haven't been this pissed off about a film ending in a long while. I'm gonna talk about it, so if you don't want to know you should stop reading now, because beyond here there be dragons.

Towards the end of the film, things are looking bad for our mousy friend Lisa. Her leg is trapped between the ocean floor and the cage after a failed rescue attempt left it on its side, her sister was just snapped up in front of her eyes by one of the sharks while picking up some spare air tanks, she even managed to shot herself in the hand with a spear gun. Then, crackling and whimpering over her little underwater radio thingy. It seems her sister is alive! Badly hurt and hiding a ways away between some rocks, but alive nonetheless. She suddenly switches over to total badass! She manages to unstuck her leg using the inflator on her bcd, finds her sister, swims her up to the top using underwater flares to keep the predators and bay, and even gouges a shark's eye out when it bites her pussy! She makes it one the boat, then her vision goes blurry and BLAM!, turns out she's still in the cage, her sister is dead as fuck, and she was hallucinating as a Coast Guard rescue team swims down to her!

W-what? Why!? Why would you do that!? Why would you give us a rad, tense (the only tension to be found in the entire fucking movie) ending where a character evolves and then snatch it away to present us with this uninteresting and, let's just go ahead and say it, misogynist (obviously a woman wouldn't be able to save herself, right?) ending instead?! It added nothing, instead shattering what would've been an interesting, if silly, character arc. I actively hate the two writers for this ending.

So yeah, I really, really, REALLY hated this movie. Shit, I'd recommend Jaws: The Revenge, over 47 Meters Down.

Gotta say, if it were me who'd had to suffer through all that, Matthew Modine's Shark Viewer Inc would be getting a sternly-worded Yelp review. "My sister died due to the Captain's negligence and faulty equipment! However, his prices were reasonable and technically we did see plenty of sharks! 2/5 stars" 

 

Siren (2016)

2012 saw the release of V/H/S, an anthology/found footage hybrid from mumblecore heroes such as Adam Wingard, Ti West, Joe Swanson, and the film making collective Radio Silence, just to name a few. Arguably the best segment --and some could make the argument it's the only decent segment-- is a short about about a trio of dudebros who pick up the wrong girl called Amateur Night, directed by David (The Signal, Southbound) Bruckner. In late 2015 the decision was made by Bruckner and Co, with Dance of the Dead director Gregg Bishop at the helm this time, to create a feature-length film based on the monstrous young lady at the center of the short, and in late 2016 they did just that with Siren. In fact, this could easily be seen as a prequel to Amateur Night.

It's the night of Jonah's bachelor party and his brother/best man (a title given him out of pity as he's the classic "Fuck-Up Brother" archetype) has promised to give him and his two other friends the night of their lives! Sadly, it turns out the reputation of crazy night life of the own brother Mac has taken them to was greatly exaggerated; what's a group of lame 20-somethings to do?! Well, clearly follow the random guy that approaches them in the saddest strip club in the world who tells them he can take them to the real party, duh!

Upon finally arriving at the party --a rundown plantation in the middle of a swamp, natch-- they're greeted by a very dark striptease and introduced to the club's proprietor, Mr. Nyx. He sets Jonah up for a special show with a girl behind a glass partition, the girl from Amateur Night and the titular siren, while the other's enjoy some paranormal cocktails. Well, good guy Jonah becomes convinced she's a sex slave being held against her will and breaks her out, only to discover both her penchant for wholesale slaughter and the fact that she mates for life, and she has her eyes riveted on his junk.

So Siren is kind of a weird movie for me to talk about. It's not a good film, don't get me wrong, but.....that's kinda why I like it. Ok, positives first. There are some CGI elements, but they're used sparingly and hidden in shadow a good percentage of the time. I also like that, despite seeing HOW Lily (the name given to the creature) came to be in our world, we really know nothing else about her, what she truly is, or where she came from. It implies a much larger world that could potentially be the basis for a franchise.

Everything else is pretty much what you'd expect it to be; the acting is simply OK at best, the direction pedantic, and the writing leaves a lot to be desired. Luckily I don't care about any of that. I think Siren is a fun time-waster, silly and cheesy in all the right ways. Give it a watch, couldn't hurt, right?

It Comes At Night (2017)

A mysterious sickness --which is both wildly contagious and fatal in just a couple days-- has ravaged the land and family man Paul, played by personal favorite Joel Edgerton (The Gift, Black Mass), has himself and his wife and son in isolation inside a massive cabin-y house in the mountains. One night a lone man tries to break in, telling a story of a wife and child and a desperate search for supplies. His story is proven true and pretty soon they're all living in that laughably large house together happily, but for how long?

 So it seems the major complaint with the film so far has been the pace; in fact, the pace has proved to be such a problem Cinema Score audiences are currently holding at a solid D! Now I personally don't mind a slow pace, generally speaking, but even I have to admit it really takes its time. Outside of one action beat at roughly the 30 minute mark not a whole lot happens. The title, the trailer (which is seriously one of the best trailers I've ever seen, BTW), and a weirdly-lingering shot of a particular painting all seem to suggest something more along the lines of a creature film when that couldn't be further from the case. The 'It' of the title is largely a metaphor for fear and paranoia destroying a group from the inside out, which is a type of film we've seen a million times. 

None of this makes It Comes at Night a bad film, per say, because there is a lot to recommend here. The acting is excellent, and the writing/direction by Trey Edward Shults are both great, but none of that saves this from being a perfectly skippable film. I liked it, but I don't feel I can recommend it, so make of all this what you will.