There were a couple of points of note on our journey to see the Irish horror film, Oddity.

It had opened on July 19th, after a flurry of other horror flicks, and The Boy and I had gambled on The Vourdalak, a peculiar French film based on a story by Aleksei Tolstoy. (That’s the 19th century’s Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, not the 20th century’s Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy. Even Russian authors have confusing names.) We enjoyed this folkloric tale of a French dandy who finds himself adrift in the Balkans among a family whose ancient patriarch has gone to fight the Turk and returned…a vourdalak!

Two things really stood out: First, the French dandy is a rich character, vain and spoiled and definitely #metoo bait, but while not especially brave, he has a moral core and actually does a few right things at some personal risk. It was frankly a more strongly drawn character than we see these days in serious dramas.

Second, the vourdalak himself is played…by a puppet. A large puppet, but a puppet nonetheless, or maybe even just a doll. This probably knocks a few potential viewers right out, but The Boy and I loved it. It was far superior to using CGI, and it created a different kind of “uncanny valley”, an edge of insanity to the spooky proceedings.

While it certainly must have been low-budget, there’s real brilliance in some of the camera work, in the acting, and the creation of a feeling (like The Witch) that just a few miles outside of major cities lies barbarism the courtly types are unsuited for.

But moviegoing is, for no reason I can fathom, feast or famine. There just wasn’t much out, and Oddity had already left most of the local theaters.  I dragged The Boy to the 60th anniversary of Red Desert, a Michelangelo Antonioni film, he was too tired to appreciate. On the other hand, I wasn’t tired and I also didn’t appreciate it all that much, being of that period I don’t particularly care for—the era of washed-out Technicolor—but which I sample periodically looking for gems.

This story of a depressed housewife looking for meaning in life culminates with her cheating on her husband—no spoilers, it’s obvious from the get-go this is going to happen—and discovering that only makes her feel worse. It reminded me, actually, of Melancholia, though it is nowhere as splashy nor self-indulgent. And it didn’t have the “leave your husband and child to be happy” vibe of Louis Malle’s The Lovers, which we saw back in June. Still, it’s two hours of a woman being depressed.

Our presented maintained that it was ground-breaking for pointing out the dangers of pollution, which inverted my thinking as I watched it. I was thinking “Oh, her emotional state is reflecting the pollution in the environment.” I’m sure now that’s backwards: The pollution was the external reflection of her internal state. (Again, not unlike Melancholia.)

It’s not something I would watch for enjoyment but it’s masterful in its storytelling of a kind of story I’m not crazy about. Antonioni would follow this with The Three Faces and then his most famous directorial effort, Blow Up, which per IMDB, is almost as good as Red Desert.

Also, Italians from the ’60s were weird. Bocaccio ’70—heck, almost all the Italian movies of the ’50s and’60s, have this otherworldly character of poverty being right around the corner. And here, where the characters are upper middle class (for Italians), a bunch of grown-ass adults hang out in a shed in the wharf for a day playing teenager drinking and spin-the-bottle type games. (This stuff is interesting for historical reasons, at least.)

Meanwhile, Oddity hadn’t quite gone away. It had very high ratings for a horror film (anything above 7 on IMDB is remarkable, and it was at 7.5), and we had one day to catch it at the Music Hall in Beverly Hills, after which it would only be playing in  distant Long Beach. So up, over and down we went.

There was a premiere for Neil Marshall’s new film, Duchess going on. Marshall directed the excellent horror flick The Descent almost twenty  years ago (currently 7.2 on IMDB), and he’s never made a good movie since. He’s apparently done some top-notch TV (“Game of Thrones”, “Constantine”, etc.), but that’s entirely different from the auteur films he’s famous for.

The lead actress was posing for pictures on the red carpet (horror stalwart Charlotte Kirk), which always cracks me up because (short of the mega-events), the carpets are pretty small and the surrounding environs rather shabby.

The theater itself has gotten shabbier, too, since 2019. The Laemmle family stopped leasing it in 2019 after decades. (They wisely own most of the land their theaters are on.) Most assuredly this was due to the rent-being-too-damn-high—Laemmle theaters have always been the lowest price for first run theaters (and their popcorn, which is topflight for movie popcorn). But the staff was very nice and competent, and I’m very appreciative of both in 2024.

(Movie review begins 800 words in):

The most surprising thing about The Oddity, The Boy and I agreed, is that it’s a good movie. Not “good for a horror movie” or “good for a low-budget movie” or “good for a movie made in the 2020s”—but just a good movie. And it’s good in a lot of ways we don’t see much these days. It begins with a simple premise, reminiscent of an urban legend: Somewhere in Ireland, A woman, Dani, whose husband works nights at the insane asylum decides to stay in this (gorgeous) old house that they’re restoring.

Dani’s lost her cell phone, so she goes out to her car to look for it, and when she comes back, there’s a banging on the door. A one-eyed vagrant-looking guy named Declan tells her someone snuck inside when she went to the car. (This is in the trailer, so no spoilers.) This, of course, raises the question of why Declan happened to be watching her very isolated country house. It turns out he’s a recently released patient of her husband.

Cut to months later, and we discover Dani was murdered that night, presumably by Declan.

Months later, our new widow, Ted, gives Declan’s fake eye to Dani’s twin sister Darcy, a blind psychic who runs an oddities shop where all the items are cursed (curses are removed at the cash register to deter shoplifting). She’s still a bit piqued about her sister’s death and wants to do a reading on the eye.

Well, before you can say “too ra loo ra lie”, Darcy’s invited herself and her family’s treasured wood golem to the old Irish house because (as noted in the trailer), Dani never would have opened the door to the crazy man. So what really happened?

That’s when things start to get weird.

There’s so much good here. First of all, there’s a solid underlying story. This is at heart a murder mystery with supernatural elements. The supernatural elements are pervasive without being substantial. That is, it feels like there are ghosts everywhere, but they’re not being used as a crutch for the plot. (You know, that sense you get in some horror movies of “well, wait, why did that happened?”, and the answer is very clearly, “because the movie formula requires it, and besides Ghosts Did It”.)

And I’m being tongue-in-cheek, calling it a “wood golem”: It’s essentially the creepy doll trope, only the doll is six feet tall. It mostly exists to unnerve the characters, as it’s always turning up in different attitudes and positions, even though no one ever seems to move it.

The characters are really well developed, which makes the story cohere well. For example, Darcy had convinced Dani to set up her camera so it took pictures every few minutes. This could seem incredibly contrived, except that it’s perfectly in character for occult-obsessed Darcy. Ted’s a jerk, but a somewhat indulgent jerk, who suffers his wife and sister-in-law’s interest in the supernatural while being “a man of science”. Yana, Ted’s new squeeze, is bitchy and shallow, but not to where you want to see her die for it (probably).

It’s one of those movies where you think the actors must be playing to type, they’re so natural at it. But then you realize Carolyn Bracken plays both the sweet, domestic Darcy and the acerbic, fierce Dani. (I mean, they’re twins in the movie, but I had to keep reminding myself it was the same actress.)

There’s actual blocking in this film, which is something I harp on a lot. But because today’s filmmakers are allergic to setting the camera down, actual good shots in movies are hard to find. This movie has none of that. It lets the camera do a lot of the storytelling using lighting and color and framing and blocking—moviemaking techniques, in other words—to create suspense.

And there is actual suspense in the film. For those who don’t know, “suspense” is almost like “justice”. Any modifier added to “justice” means “not”. (“Social justice”, e.g.) Well, any modifier to suspense means “Nothing happens but we can’t just say boring.” Last year’s Anatomy of a Fall, for example, was often described as a “suspense drama”. But in order for there to be suspense, at some point something has to happen. You can’t create suspense without a credible threat of action (sorry, Skinamarink!).

This movie has half-a-dozen genuinely suspenseful scenes, from the opening “will she, won’t she” open the door to “you’re not really going to stick your fingers in the wood golem’s mouth, are ya?” And it works because sometimes the dreaded thing happens and sometimes it doesn’t and sometimes a third, unexpected thing happens.

There’s comedy! I mean, very dark Irish humor, and comedy-of-manners stuff, as Darcy exploits her blindness to try to get to the bottom of things, but it works without breaking the atmosphere.

And there are jump scares that actually work! We’ve noticed lately a lot of filmmakers moving away from the jump scare, which is good because the Blumhouse formula has made them more irritating than anything. But Oddity earns its scares. It tells you, “Yeah, you’re gonna get scared. This is going to happen. You know it, we know it, and you’re gonna jump out of your seat anyway.” And jump scares are just one of many horror techniques it employs.

A lot of movies we see get worse the more you think about them (last time’s Longlegs, or Avengers: Infinity War), but this one we walked out of the theater the four blocks (the closest parking) to our car liking it more and more as we went. There’s nothing wrong with a movie that entertains you for its runtime, but it’s nice not to feel cheap afterwards.

Oddity has made only about $1.1 million, which isn’t great for a movie that opened in nearly 800 theaters. (Hundreds of Beavers was still playing at the Music Hall, and its B.O. has crept up to $500K, and it’s never been in more than 24 theaters.) Hopefully it will catch on in the home theater market when it becomes available on August 20th.

 

The paucity of big summer flicks aside, or perhaps due to said paucity, it’s been a pretty good moviegoing summer. Sure, Inside Out 2, Bad Boys 4 and Twister 2 aren’t for everybody (me, for example), there has been enough room in the cracks for more interesting fare and the quality has been strong. It doesn’t hurt that Seven Samurai is out for its 70th anniversary and, as someone who has trouble getting into Kurosawa, is conventionally entertaining (as well as iconic, influential and derivative all at once) for the entirety of its 3 1/2 hour length (plus intermission).

It also doesn’t hurt to live in a city where there are a couple dozen throwbacks every week. For example, I took the Barbarienne (who has a strong interest in art, puppetry and stop-motion animation) to see a Quay Brothers retrospective at the Philosophical Research Society. The executive summary of the Quay Brothers: Mad God for people who find Mad God too cohesive and coherent. It was fun, but not something I’d generally recommend.

And if that’s not the watchword for post-lockdown movies, I don’t know what is. We saw four new movies released in the past three weeks, described heretoforeafter in the order we saw them and, coincidentally, almost in the order of box office success.

Kinds of Kindness

Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Favorite, Poor Things) strikes again, with this anthology of three stories, clocking in at about 2 1/2 hours. The typical anthology is one good story that isn’t long enough to be a feature, so it’s padded out with jokey garbage. This isn’t that, at least. The three stories are thematically very tight, they feature the same cast in vastly different roles (good acting, to say the least) and they highlight an issue with YL’s style of storytelling: If everybody’s acting like a weirdo, it’s hard to know what it is we’re supposed to care about.

The first story has Jesse Plemons as an office worker whose life is dictated by his boss, Willem Dafoe. And when I say dictated, I mean not only his working hours, but his diet, his drinking habits, his reading list and the time and form which has sex with his wife. When his boss instructs him to smash into another car at high speed, in a way that might cause the death of the person driving (or indeed his own death), our protagonist takes a strong stance—only to discover his life has no meaning without his boss. He then takes drastic steps to try to get back in his boss’s good graces.

The second story has Plemons as a cop whose wife has gone missing after an expedition on the high seas. (Plemons is so different in this role, I kept looking at him and thinking “What’s Matt Damon done to his face?” before realizing it wasn’t, in fact, Matt Damon.) Where the first story is immediately and repeatedly alienating, so we’re never in danger of caring too terribly much what happens, this one plays on the tropes of the loving policeman/husband mourning for his lost wife, even if in a comically lugubrious way.

His friends, another couple, come over to comfort him and he asks if they can “watch the video” as consolation and one knows immediately what’s on the video from their reactions. Their reactions (chagrin) are the expected ones, but the viewer has to try to figure out why Plemons’ would ask to watch that video at that time. OK, we can write it off to grief, but this creates an interesting stress when the long-lost wife (Emma Stone) turns up, and he becomes increasingly convinced that she’s not actually his wife.

The final story has Emma Stone as a member of a cult who’s trying to locate a “chosen one” who can heal and even bring the dead back to life. She and her partner (Plemons, again) venture into the corrupt, unclean world to seek this person out, only to return periodically to the cult’s compound and its cleansing waters. Cult members are tested for purity and forced to sauna till they faint if found to be impure (then to be banished if they are). Emma hits a snag when she is found to be corrupt and, while exiled, discovers the chosen one (Margaret Qualley, Drive-Away Dolls).

The Boy and I liked this film. (My summary: “A lot of Yorgosity, not enough Lanthimos.”) But to say that it’s “hard to recommend” is to undersell exactly how weird and alienating these stories are. They all feature weird sex (much like Poor Things and The Lobster, Lanthimos is positively daring you to find anything erotic about the proceedings) and the character’s motivations, while comprehensible are not usually relatable.

If we take the first story, e.g., our protagonist’s desire to strike out on his own is admirable, but Lanthimos tells us, well, no, he doesn’t really even exist without his boss’s say so. This is probably one of the most degenerate statements about existence that could be made. And if we look at the second story, our protagonist seems to be going insane and manifesting higher and higher degrees of cruelty—only to be proven correct. (The best part of this story and the whole movie is the end credits, which features an island of dogs, driving cars and living their best doggy lives. This is, in fact, relevant to the story.)

And in the final story, Emma Stone’s character is not particularly admirable. She’s abandoned her family. She has no moral or ethical qualms about harming others to reach her goals. And in the end her character flaws lead to her tragic failure. Yay?

So, again, we enjoyed it, but there aren’t a lot of weirdos like us, and that’s probably a good thing.

That said, it did better than than:

Kill

My first genuinely Hindu movie, which won me over by being not 3 hours long but a spritely 105 minutes, has been loudly proclaimed as The Most Violent Indian Movie Ever Made!

It’s Hindu John Wick or Die Hard on a Train 2 (if Under Siege 2 is Die Hard on a Train 1). Special Forces dude Amrit rushes to snatch his true-love’s hand from an arranged marriage (arranged by her very powerful Train Mogul Dad) only to end up on a train with them which is beset by bandits. Much like the Fast and Furious movies, this is a story about family. In this case a family of bandits.

As the good guys fight the bad guys up and down the train with Amrit climbing up and down and around the cars, supporting characters pitch in, or do heel turns, or get kidnapped and used as pawns. If there’s any real flaw with this movie, in fact, it’s that it hits the same tropes too many times. (She’s been captured…again?! Amrit thinks about his love’s fate and gets superpowers…again!) But I’m not gonna quibble. It’s an action movie that really delivers on the action, and gives you enough character to hang your hat on.

It humanized the bandits without making them sympathetic, which is a hallmark of good action films, too.

Every other sentence spoken in Hindi was actually heavily accented English. No idea what was going on there. Subtitled but sort of “so what” subtitles. It’s not like you can’t figure out what’s going on from the action.

Bonus points for every middle-aged chubby Indian dude dressing like every IT middle manager I’ve ever met.

MaXXXine

The thing about Ti West is, he makes period pieces. And they’re good just as that. His breakthrough film, The House of the Devil really captures the babysitter-in-peril era of the late ’70s, for example. And X, the first movie in the Maxine trilogy, captures the early gonzo porn/horror of those same years. Pearl, the second movie in the trilogy, suffers very slightly (for me) from being too spread out. It takes place in the silent era but is shot (boldly) in a style mimicking Technicolor. So while it’s more a dark “Wizard of Oz” instead of “Caligari”, it’s still effective and different. (I literally cannot remember another horror movie made in recent times that was shot in full, vibrant color with naturally beautiful, sunny days.)

The final movie in the trilogy is MaXXXine, which features our eponymous heroine in 1985, a literal porn star trying to break into mainstream cinema. By which we mean a trashy horror film called The Puritan 2. (That title itself is interesting: There was, of course, no such franchise in the ’80s, but there is a silent era Satanic horror called “Puritan’s Passions” with a similar plot!) As Maxine’s star rises, Los Angeles is being terrorized by The Night Stalker (Richard Ramirez) and all her friends are dropping dead from a copycat. Meanwhile her past is catching up with her as someone who knows the events of X is trying to lure her to her doom.

There’s absolutely zero mystery about who the someone is, though. You don’t even have to have seen the previous films to be able to figure out the villain.

That said, it’s a solid suspense film, not really a horror, though there are some gruesome kills and a particularly graphic scene of Maxine defending herself from a would-be rapist. It evokes, more than anything, the 1983 “classic” Angel (“Honor student by day! Hooker by night!”) with a heaping side of Body Double, without really being derivative of either. I’m not saying West nails Hollywood in 1983, but I am saying Maxine’s apartment looked exactly like the one I lived in from that era.

I will temper this by saying it looks more like a movie from the ’80s than the actual Hollywood of the ’80s, but they manage to avoid the obvious traps, like using the exact same songs everyone else does. For example, instead of “Relax”, they use “Welcome To The Pleasure Dome”, so you’re thinking, “Hey, that’s Frankie Goes To Hollywood but not the one song of theirs I know.”

Kevin Bacon plays a disreputable PI and Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monoghan play LAPD detectives, but this is the Mia Goth show, once again, and she doesn’t disappoint.

A solid ending to the series, though Maxine could be Mia Goth’s Rocky. She could follow that character throughout her life. Ending where the movie does, it’s a kind of happy ending, which almost feels odd.

Longlegs

The Red Letter Media boys did a bit on this and The Arcadian, the other Nicolas Cage horror movie out this year (so far). I found The former movie disappointing, particularly in what I saw (and what I almost always see) as a failure to think the implications of your world through. Longlegs sorta does that, too, but the way it elides over certain nonsensical details, you might just miss them.

As far as the RLM boys were concerned, Longlegs suffered from over-hype, like Blair Witch Project, with people saying this is the scariest movie they’d ever seen, and such nonsense as that.

The plot, such as it is, involves a potential serial killer who kills the families of girls born on the fourteenth of the month. Our hero, a socially awkward young FBI agent (Maika Monroe, It Follows) is on the case with her older partner (Blair Underwood! Remember him?!) and putting together the pieces from psychic flashes.

Now, she is psychic. They test her and she guesses the right number between 0 and 100, 50% of the time over a couple dozen trials. They say “half-psychic” but those odds are more than enough to break the bank at Vegas. The funny thing about this psychic-ness is that, apart from the opening scene, it really doesn’t matter. But it does set up a supernatural element.

And this movie is very much a supernatural movie, despite how strongly it evokes Silence of the Lambs, what with all the Satanic imagery and Nicolas Cage running around pretending to be a woman, sort of, at the center of all these murders. The catch is that he never actually seems to go into the houses where the families are killed. The families all seem to kill themselves For Some Reason.

You know, as I go over the movie in my head to try to relate it, I realize how little sense any of it makes. And how many disparate ideas it throws out that don’t actually go anywhere.

Still, it’s a creepy little move, atmospherically evocative, with some nice scares. Nothing in the way of jump scares. The whole thing is just a little off. But, yeah, sitting back and thinking about it for even a moment raises all kinds of questions that don’t have any good answers on screen.

Just goes to show you…something.

This is the only one of the four films mentioned to crack the top 40. But they all delivered on what they promised: It’s just a matter of whether or not anyone wants what they promised.