If “hag horror” is a thing—and with examples like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Strait-jacketwho can deny that it is?—might there be a non-distaff version of the genre? That is, if we have genres featuring old women, former starlets, going head to head against each other, is there a genre where once strong young men stagger around as oldsters and ’cause mischief and mayhem?

This isn’t a rhetorical question. I really don’t know! Bubba Ho-Tep, maybe? Grumpy Old Men is a comedy, not really the same.

Well, if there wasn’t one before, we have the beginnings of in The Rule of Jenny Pen. A neat and nasty little horror out of New Zealand that pits John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush against each other mano-a-mano and cato-a-mouse-o and so on.

 

Snooty Judge Stefan (Rush) has an episode whilst sentencing a criminal (and scolding the victim’s mother) and ends up in a subpar nursing home—I guess he was too honest to steal a good retirement like any sensible judge—where he falls afoul of Dave, an unstable, occasionally catatonic weirdo who has a creepy doll puppet (the titular Jenny Pen) that he uses to deal with most of life.

He’s crazy enough to be in the secure ward but, as I mentioned, it’s not the greatest old folks’ home, and Dave is well capable of getting lose and causing mischief. Which, of course, he does, or we ain’t got a picture.

We don’t ever really know why Dave decides to abuse Stefan. It could be that Stefan just happened to get as a roommate the crippled rugby player Dave was already abusing. It could be they have some forgotten history. It could just be that Dave abuses everyone if he can get away with it.

Little bits of backstory dropped here and there add some depth, but ultimately, Dave is doing it for the kicks.

 

The challenge level here is that Stefan is a grade-A jerk. Imperious, superior and prickly, and also afflicted with an unspecified neurological that causes him to lose time. So no one believes him when he accuses Dave (who knows very well how to work the system). Maori rugby-player guy could back Stefan up, but his concern for being pitied and having his productive history occluded keeps him from ratting out Dave.

Dave meanwhile goes around demanding obeisance to Jenny Pen, an eyeless doll that looms in Stefan’s warped mind like a demon.

Solid Him-Hag-Horror. (“He-Hag-Horror”? We’ll workshop it.) There are a lot of ways a movie like this can go sideways. Like, there has to be humiliation of the elderly—just enough to get the audience fired up and ready for revenge, but not so much that the audience feels like they’re watching something shameful.

 

In a situation like this where a villain is tormenting a helpless victim, the victim has to have a way to fight back that is plausible, reasonably effective (at least potentially), and preferably a clever brain-over-brawn approach. Stefan comes up with some brilliant plans which are hampered by a lot of things.

There was also a teasing of the Jenny Pen doll. Stefan’s condition imbues the doll with supernatural power, and there was a whole path to go down that the movie just didn’t. (There were moments where I was thinking it might, and also wondering how I’d feel about it if it dd.)

Ultimately, the protagonist is actually Crippled New Zealand Rugby Guy. He’s a prisoner of his own making, preferring private humiliation to public exposure (even if the latter means the end to the former). And his acquiescence has been fully spiritual: He’s afraid of Dave and Jenny Pen.

Anyway, it all works pretty well. John Lithgow (85) is now entering his 45th year playing psycho killers, and he’s just as good now as he was in Blow Out. Geoffrey Rush, at 73, is a spring chicken but isn’t going to last long because of his infirmity. They’re good playing off each other.

A tight film overall, and one that manages to create a nice, low-key sense of dread, while staying away from shock and gore. Arguably more suspense than horror.

All you nearly 29-year-olds probably have grandparents that might need to go to a home, so the movie might be educational, too!

 

 

Steven Soderbergh. While best known for his breakout film Sex, Lies and Videotape, his award winning films like Erin Brockovich and Traffic, his Ocean’s Number-of-people-on-the-Team films, and his flirtation with communist thugs (Che), he’s actually made a lot of trash you’ve never even heard of. Or if you’ve heard of it, you didn’t know he directed it. Or you knew he directed it but forgot it right after you heard about some controversy.

Like, did you know he directed the Magic Mike movies? Did you remember the controversy where he hired an actual porn star to star in his movie Girlriend Experience about a hooker? He directed Gina Carano’s disappointing feature debut, Haywire.

Perhaps most relevant to today’s film, he also directed Contagion, which was a serious look at what would happen if Gwyneth Paltrow infected everyone with a deadly disease. It fit comfortably into the zombie genre (though there are no zombies) and felt kind of like a grown up entry into a hyper-sensationalized field.

This strength, the low-key realism, was also its weakness. It felt competent without being lurid, but a little more luridness might also have been more fun to watch.

When I saw he had directed Presence, that’s what I expected: A low-key, mature take on a haunted house story, like Paranormal Activity without the cheesy SFX.

Presence is exactly that: Done entirely from the haunting entity’s POV, we watch as a family moves into a (gorgeous, natch) house and learn about their weird little family dramas from the ghost eavesdropping. The youngest daughter has recently lost a friend to unnatural causes: suicide? drug overdoes? maybe something even more sinister? This closeness to death has made her sensitive to the titular presence.

The presence is shy and timid, getting close to the living, only to retreat behind doors and railings when spotted. Or sensed, really. While the presence is able to affect the world, she is not visible in any normal way.

Chloe (Callina Liang) comes to believe that the presence is her deceased friend. There’s not really a reason for that to be true, and I ended up thinking it wasn’t true, but I did come to think of the presence as a young female. Besides the furtive behavior, the presence has an affinity for Chloe, and has her only big outburst when Chloe’s brother Tyler (Eddy Maday) relates a story about how he and a bunch of his jock friend tormented and bullied an insufficiently attractive girl.

While Chloe binds with her dad (Chris Sullivan), Tyler is mom’s favorite. Mom (Lucy Liu) has invested her entire emotional being into Tyler. And he’s a real jerk, which pains his father and strains Mom and Dad’s already strained relationship—quite apart from the dodgy financial shenanigans mom appears to be engaging in at work. (The kids by the way are really Asian, so I kept wondering if they were adopted but, no, he’s supposed to be their genetic father.)

Anyway, lack of communication leads to ghostly shenanigans and family tragedy, and this is one of those sad, low-key horror movies, almost like an early Guillermo Del Toro type.

It’s not really scary. The lead character is the ghost. (And I thought of Beetlejuice more than once.) Since the only supernatural force is sympathetic, we must look for our monsters among the humans, and they are easy enough to find there.

It was exactly as I thought it would be. I enjoyed it, but it didn’t knock my socks off. I really appreciated the flipping of the POV to where a frightened ghost might look like a menace from the standpoint of the living. But there was a scene where a medium shows up to pull a little Zelda Rubinstein act, and I thought it really would’ve been shocking to have the ghost go into her body and look out from it.

Too flashy for Mr. Soderbergh, I guess, but it seemed to me like a missed opportunity.

David Koepp wrote the screenplay, and it’s nice that it hangs together well and make sense. Koepp wrote and directed one of my favorite ghost stories, Stir of Echoes and also wrote and directed The Secret Window and the ill-fated Mortdecai, both with Johnny Depp. As a writer, he wrote such smash hits as Jurassic Park, Death Becomes Her, Panic Room, the Dan Brown movies an the last two Indiana Jones movies.

So, this is better than some of those and worse than some of the others.

The two (Soderbergh and Koepp) have a spy thriller coming out next week (March 15th) with Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender. I’m sure it’ll be fine.

Talking with an old friend. He mentions a scene from The Big Lebowski.

“That’s playing tonight. About 45 minuets.”

“Really? Where?”

“The Nu-Art.”

“Could we make it?”

“Yeah, it takes about twenty-five minutes to get there.”

And so, dear reader, we found ourselves in Santa Monica on a Friday night watching The Big Lebowski, which I’ve reviewed and reviewed and reviewed, and I even think one review is missing.

Still made me laugh to beat the band. Even if I do have to cover my mouth to keep from repeating the lines. Terrific soundtrack, terrific score, terrific performances, of course.

What I noticed especially on this viewing is how tight the editing is. So much of the humor, and the cadence of the dialogue, depends on the careful editing. The reverse shot sequence where the Dude unravels the toe, for example. Today, most directors would probably do a simple reverse, then explain that there was a toe (with nail polish). The Coens slowly zoom in on the Dude while cutting back to The Big Lebowski ranting and Brandt looking concerned, with the climax of the scene showing the Dude unwrapping the toe.

Then, bang, cut to classic Hollywood diner where Walter scoffs at this latest attempt for These Amateurs to try to intimidate them.

My buddy, who had smoked a bit in his day, enjoyed all the various joint issues the Dude had. Apparently, he, too, had done all those things.

I, as always, love the dance cycle done to “Pictures from an Exhibition”, because it reminds me of stuff I actually went to back in the day. And the visiting of a barely remembered TV writer in a small house in the Valley. Driving into Simi Valley on pitch black canyon roads.

The Coens capture L.A. so well, the places where they bring in their Minnesotan tics kind of stand out like sore thumbs to this local. Jesus? A very L.A. character. Liam? Very Minnesota. (“Me and Liam? We gonna fuck you up!”) Rough, laconic black cop? Very L.A. Mild-mannered, doughy-blond cop who looks like he’s on his way to a casserole? Very Minnesota.

Look, how much more can I write about this film?

The theater was pretty full for a late Friday show, and some meager percentage of the audience other than us, was not smoking a joint.