Another day, another Yorgos Lanthimos film.

That’s a slight exaggeration, though Bugonia is his third film in short order. Poor Things, came late in 2023—so it mostly played in 2024, Kinds of Kindness came later in 2024, and now this film, which retains my general purpose review of all Yorgos Lanthimos films: I enjoyed it, but I can’t think of a person I would recommend it to.

Apart from the Boy, who actually enjoyed it more than I did.

For all its expertise in the telling, I found myself wearying of Lanthimos misanthropy, which is, of course, on me. Yorgos has always been the same guy, finding new ways to alienate the audience from human nature, and the depth of his storytelling seems primiarly to revolve around showing you that this character you might have been rooting for was really just as awful as the one you were rooting against.

Poor Things seemed to arrive at a different point, where the characters found their humanity through a circuitous, inhuman path. I thought maybe Yorgos was possibly growing and changing, but this movie feels like a thin veneer over a misanthropy that is nigh absolute.

But first, let’s look at the story: It’s Frailty, but with aliens instead of demons.

On the off-chance you haven’t seen Bill Paxton’s 2001 gem: In Bugonia, loser Teddy enlists low-IQ cousin Don in a scheme to kidnap high-powered CEO Michelle because she’s an alien (an An-drah-mih-dawn) whose species has come to earth to oppress and enslave humanity. It is the Andromedons who have turned the world bad, and Teddy is going to hold Michelle hostage in his basement until the lunar eclipse (in four days) and force her to, uh, “take me to your leader” to negotiate their withdrawal from Earth and perhaps a more productive relationship than just, y’know, messin’ with everyone.

The movie contrasts the two young men’s pathetic training ritual with that of the CEO, who is a high-powered, driven girlboss, apparently aware both of her actual capability and her cultural and political power (as a girlboss).

Teddy’s case, as he makes it to Don, is not super-convincing. Far more convincing is Michelle making a “diversity” speech which she clearly has little interest in, and her telling her employees they should go home at 5:30PM to be with their families, unless of course they have work to do.

Since the crux of the movie is is she or isn’t she? this very inhuman sounding corporate speak combined with her general intensity is cute and kind of clever.

There are a number of twists and turns here, and Yorgos has enough Lanthimosity to dole the story points out in a way that keeps things interesting. But Teddy’s torment—torture, even—of Michelle is increasingly extreme and I found myself questioning not whether, from a narrative perspective, his ends justified his means, but whether I, as an audience member, wanted to view this escalation of abuse. You know, for “larfs”.

It looks good and I think was shot on film. Lanthimos had his usual composer, Jerskin Fendrix (not his real name) go ham-handed on the score which works well. The budget was allegedly around $50 million, which seems like a lot, but then the ten million spent on Paxton’s Frailty some twenty-five years ago seems like a lot, too.

The acting is good, as always. Emma Stone (as “Michelle”) gets her head shaved and, quite frankly, looks like an alien bald. Her eyes are enormous. Jesse Plemons (Kinds of Kindness, The Irishmen) plays the desperate and resourceful Teddy. Autistic actor Aidan Delbis plays dimwitted Don so convincingly he may have trouble getting roles where he plays smart people. (Amusingly, he also resembles the fat-J.D. Vance-meme.)

And, not to make you feel old or anything, but Ted’s mom, a sickly, ravaged opiod addict who rants to young Teddy about “them” is played by none other than the Clueless Batgirl herself, Alicia Silverstone.

Ultimately, with all the twists and turns, this movie never surprised me. The ending seems both scold-y (in the way of a bad ’50s sci-fi film) and nihilistic, with a full play through of “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” which (like the earlier comparison of HR-dominated corporate speak to alienese) struck me as a wry nose tweak of the current culture but, I dunno, maybe I just wasn’t in the mood.

I think I just expect Yorgos to give me something interesting to chew on, and this felt very by-the-numbers from a philosophical standpoint.

This film is a remake of the 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet!, and remarkably faithful in some ways, down to the ending, though the difference in the Korean rendition is…interesting.

Check it out, if you like Yorgos, it’s very Yorgos. I suppose there’s some chance that the kind of Twilight-Zone-esque story will catch on with the public, but otherwise I would not expect it to break $30 million. (I said that about Poor Things, which did finally make $35 million domestically.)

I found reviews for both this and If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You titled something like “The Feel Bad Surprise Of The Year.”

A24 has made a name for itself as a purveyor of odd, artsy and sometimes divisive horror flicks. And while this has created a kind of aura of nonsense around their releases—people are always trying put modifiers on “horror” to separate the kinds they like from the kinds they don’t—it has definitely allowed for small, intriguing, thought-provoking films that might not be widely appealing to genre fans. Dream Scenario, for example, tells the story of a schlub (Nic Cage) who starts appearing in other people’s dreams—for no reason.

It wasn’t very successful financially ($12M on a $10M budget, allegedly), and even artistically it was kind of a miss—but it was interesting. It’s not horror, though there are some scary parts to it—it’s almost magical realism, really. I’m sure it was difficult to market and marketing to horror audiences probably accounted in part for its failure.

Which brings me to If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, Mary Bronstein’s masterpiece of…of what? It’s not horror, though there is certainly an element of horror to this story. It’s sort of “slice-of-life”, where the life being presented is one that nobody wants to visit.

Rose Byrne (Insidious, Bridesmaids, Spy) plays Linda, a woman who is trying to manage her daughter’s condition while her husband (Christian Slater!) is away somewhere. When we join her, he’s been away maybe…a week? Or two? It’s not clear, and one of the things this movie does very well is immerse us in Linda’s sense of time, which is highly fractured, stretching out and compacting according to various events. (Almost all movies, by necessity and tradition, give us a distorted view of time, but this one does so very consciously.)

Linda’s falling apart when we meet her and so is her house, the first floor ceiling of which caves in and forces Linda and “Child” (Delaney Quinn, also in this years remake of The Roses) to move out and into a dubious motel while the ceiling is repaired.

Nobody’s handling this well, and the camera stays on Linda’s face as she hears her child complaining and being difficult, and deals with the various “programs” that are meant to help the Child, but also result in creating tremendous stress for Linda. In fact, they may primarily create this stress. Since Linda is an unreliable narrator, it is nigh impossible to tell what’s what in this story.

We don’t know what the Child’s mysterious problem is, only that there are enough others like her for their to be a large institute devoted to helping her. We know only that it involves food: The Child does not eat well, and must gain weight in order to have a tube removed.

The Therapist (Conan O’Brien!) is worthless, bored of Linda and—well, there’s a lot going on there, which I don’t want to reveal in case you decide you want to see this nearly two hour, stress-inducing, picture-perfect portrayal of what it’s like trying to deal with the outer reality and internal struggles that accompany having a sick child in this society.

There are just a lot of perfectly ordinary dramatic elements that count as twists here, and I enjoyed them (to the extent that this movie can be “enjoyable”), and quite a few are darkly humorous.

The strength of this movie is that the characters are extremely well-drawn. One element that’s stressful (and there are many) is that the dialogue is kind of disjointed. Why? Because one person will say something, then the next person will say something after, and you’ll realize the response wasn’t a response. The person is just waiting for their turn to talk.

People are not nice to each other, much, either. People treat Linda indifferently or badly and she tends to treat them that way in return. Bronstein and Byrne manage to create this antagonistic world without demonizing anyone. You’re rooting for Linda, even if she sometimes doesn’t seem to deserve it. And you can see how she provokes antagonism in others.

Bronstein herself plays Linda’s major human antagonist, the doctor to The Child and head of the institution, whose sympathy is as oppressive as her rules are inflexible. She’s demanding Linda attend a group session for mothers which is a thing Linda’s avoiding, and which is just as unhelpful and soul-grinding as it sounds.

It reminded me more than anything of “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” where the a small but ultimately fatal accident reveals to Ivan the complete facade that is late 19th century Russian culture.

It is extremely well done. It handles the self-medicating unreliable narrator thing excellently.

On the other hand, would I recommend it? It borders on a kind of trauma to watch. The Boy, who has not himself had a medically compromised child, enjoyed it more than I did, but I have no doubt that my own experience is at the root of that.

I will say this: It’s a kind of a happy ending—not a Hollywood happy ending but nothing bleak or nihilistic. The camerawork is amazing, deftly giving the audience an insight into Linda’s mental state. The spaces we experience are as cramped as her mental state.

Chinese director Zhang Yimou’s breakthrough film Raise The Red Lantern (1991) lost the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar to Meditarraneo, but he’s been on the American radar ever since, especially with his elevated treatment of chop-socky movies like Hero, House of Flying Daggers, and Shadow. His most famous film may in fact be his most visible flop, the Matt Damon starrer The Great Wall, which I’m told (whatever its faults) looks good. (And apparently, it’s become a kind of streaming sleeper hit.)

But here we have a movie from a time when Hollywood reigned supreme, and foreign markets were helpful to secure profits rather than expected to drive them.

The story is simple: An abusive man, Jinshan, has an adopted “nephew,” Tianqing, whom he raised from an orphan and treats like crap. Recently, he’s purchased Ju Dou, his third wife (after killing the first two for not giving him children, apparently), and tortures her in an attempt to get her pregnant. (I mean, he’s doing the regular stuff to get her pregnant, too, but he’s also torturing her.)

Tianqing, over 40, is not allowed a wife, because Jinshan just sees that as another mouth to feed. He does have a knothole through which he can spy on Ju Dou’s shoulder blades—a knothole which she discovers and blocks until one morning, after a particularly savage beating, she disrobes and her shoulder blades are now scarred and bruised.

Still, the faithful Tianqing refuses her advances when his uncle goes into town—for a while.

Then…he doesn’t.

Then, whaddayaknow, Ju Dou is pregnant. Nine months later, she’s got a baby. (The Chinese can only produce some things faster than everyone else.)

That this is going to happen is pretty obvious from the first five minutes of the movie. From there on, though, the movie becomes an interesting morality tale. (In the book, Tianqin is actually Jinshan’s nephew by blood!) The story takes place in the ’20s in rural China, so things are basically medieval.

Jinshan is a propserous dye mill giving Zhang and excuse to hang gorgeous dyed silks all around, and The Boy especially enjoyed the “insiders” look at old-time crafting work, with dye pits and donkeys powered machines, and so on.

It’s really a simple story, in terms of what happens, and the drama comes from the social expectations of the Chinese village, as well as the presence of the menacing Tianbai, the offspring who grows up, silently watching and growing angrier at the perceived immorality of his mother.

But it’s all in the telling, isn’t it? The visuals are always interesting, the characters strongly drawn, the conflicts apparent, the doom inevitable.

Wonderful performances from the lovely Gong Li (Raise The Red Lantern, Farewell My Concubine, Memoirs of Geisha and many more), Baotian Li (as Tianqin), Wei Li (as Jinshan), and the kid(s) who play the son.

Definitely worth a watch.

If you see only ONE Estonian horror musical this year, make it Chainsaws Were Singing!

How’s that for a log line? Well, I guess it’s not really a log line because it doesn’t tell you what the movie is about. It’s more of a blurb.

But it’s a good one. If I were an Estonian filmmaker, I would plaster

“If you see only ONE Estonian horror musical this year, make it Chainsaws Were Singing!” — moviegique.com

all over my posters.

But hey, nobody asks me, and for good reason.

This…is a movie. No really. It is. And it’s a musical. And it’s a horror story, sorta, though more of a spoof of a horror story. (Side note: It would be extremely cool to do a serious horror movie musical, like that Polish mermaid horror musical from a few years back, but without running out of money.)

It begins with the Final Girl being captured by a chainsaw wielding maniac as her hapless boyfriend…actually, I’m not 100% sure where he was in that first scene. Chasing after them? Doesn’t matter much, the movie flashes back from there to earlier that day where the hapless hero is about to throw himself off a bridge after being shunned by his current girlfriend (or maybe crush, doesn’t matter).

The fishermen underneath tell him to find another spot and in the ensuing delay Tom spots Maria. They then have an amazing montage until Killer interrupts them and kidnaps Maria. Tom then goes on an adventure to save her, while Maria uses her wits to survive in the basement of the house where Tom lives with his psychotic mother, his incestuous twin cousins, and his sensitive painter younger brother. Oh, and a pre-toddler baby the twins have acquired.

The gay incestuous twins are a hoot. They’re about to retire from the murder-spree lifestyle to a cabin in Bratislava, which they continually wax upon. How it’s in the Alps…where you can smell the ocean breeze…and look out over the Eiffel Tower.

Killer’s name is literally “Killer”. It appears on his clothing, for example, and in flashbacks where we learn the horrible story of how he killed his father and now does his mother’s maniacal bidding. Of course, she killed the Father and blamed eight-year-old Killer for it which is both immediately apparent and the big reveal.

Along the way to rescue her, Tom meets with some very incompetent police, and a happy-go-lucky idiot named Pepe. There’s also a completely random, unexplained mysterious cult segment which…well, in the movie the characters say “What the the heck was that?” and “I don’t know, I guess we’ll have to watch the director’s cut.”

This is all done to music of course.

Peppy, upbeat music.

So we don’t really have a The Lure situation here. That movie had a darker torne and heavier music. I generally don’t like modern musicals because the production quality of music pulls me out of the story. My brain always knows the visuals don’t match the audio, but my heart is willng to believe if when the sounds seem more plausibly natural.

So where I favor of The Lure’s less “meta” approach, the music didn’t work for me while the happy music satire of this film did.

The whole thing is a what we used to call broad comedy. The Boy and I agreed it worked more than it didn’t, and it managed to be entertaining for a 113 minute runtime that only felt a little long. It’s additionally amusing if you’re familiar with the horror tropes it plays on.

The acting is—well, it’s appropriately comedic. Laura Niils is especially adorable as the world’s weirdest and best horror girlfriend.

And to cap off the oddity, the final scene where the sensitive younger brother flees on a motorcycle, grabbing the baby in a carrier as he drives by, is a direct lift from Raising Arizona.

I think we just have a situation where Estonian film lovers put together a wacky musical adventure. Lots of fun.

 

In leiu of the traditional “Mutant Meetup” (which took place in Pennsylvania, Memphis, and the last two years in Vegas), Joe Bob and Darcy had a one night “Halloween Spooktacular” at the Texas theater in Dallas from dusk till dawn.

The first year in Vegas was the most hardcore: Friday and Saturday we stayed up till around 3-4AM and Sunday night didn’t finish till dawn Monday morning, so a single night of movie madness without a lot of pre-movie mingling time was a little bit of a disappointment. (I guess the very fist year, in the rapidly forming swamps of Pennsylvania, was the most hardcore, with rain and essentially mandatory camping.)

Still, your humble correspondent was grateful to have another year with the premiere Drive-In Movie Critic of Grapevine, Texas, and the indefatigable “Darcy The Mail Girl,” who is the reason this and the last meetup happened at all.

I’ve seen The Tingler (1959) relatively recently and my opinion of it from that viewing has not changed. It’s audacious, funny, creepy, genuinely unsettling when the poor mute woman is being terrorized to death, and it survives the snickers that its very name causes, at least in a crowd of reasonably intoxicated mutants.

Seriously. It’s night impossible not to snicker when someone says, “Did you find the tingler?”

It was more fun than before because the crowd was basically unleashed, yet at the same time there’s a fair amount of respect that goes along with the Joe Bob crowd. These are people who love Street Trash and who can both argue something to the mattresses without getting upset.

As a bonus, my chair was wired up with an actual “tingler”—a very mild electrical vibrator, I think it was. Cute. Might have even startled me but I spotted it and it was more refreshing than shocking.

The show was preceded (I think, event order is kind of blurry a week later) by a sort campy, schlocky magic/vaudeville act—basically the classic kind of bit you’d expect from a show like this. We’d also have three burlesque dancers and a costume contest.

We were off to a great start: The Tingler is a movie which encourages audience participation without descending into camp or meta-humor. Unlike the films to follow.

The fall typically brings a spate of horror films as moviegoers seeking safe thrills head to the cineplex in advance of Halloween, which simultaneously expands its reach into the summer while being consumed by Christmas on the other end. While the stores are already full of Santa Clauses, the movie holiday window actually seems to narrow over time—nobody’s watching “It’s A Wonderful Life” in October.

Oddly, this year, the cineplexes are not exactly flooded with horror fare: The (perhaps final) entry in the Conjuring series; The (perhaps not final) entry in the Black Phone series; Good Boy (a horror movie with a dog as the final girl); and of course, scads of throwbacks, like Halloween, etc.

We happened upon the New York Film School’s first horror movie marathon to help get in the spirit—a side-effect of going to Knott’s Halloween Haunt in September is that by the time October rolls around, we’ve pretty much moved on, emotionally—and they showed, in one day, Funhouse (1981), Phantom of the Mall (1988), In the Mouth of Madness (1991), Meathook (2024), and Re-animator (1985). We skipped the last, having just seen it.

But we also caught one special event from Fathom (at a price of $60 for the two of us, plus popcorn and a soda!), on the semi-obscure, semi-cult, semi-classic Trick ‘r Treat, an anthology picture that feels like the last gasp of an era.

An early Legendary Pictures film, this movie is a kind of throwback to Creepshow and other ’80s movies and TV shows, but with a more integrated and cinematic feel.

We start with a very random, very standard horror movie kill, as a young couple comes home from a night of revelry, and the wife insists that the decorations be cleaned up before her mother gets there in the morning. He demurs so she starts cleaning things up on her own, apparently unaware that There Are Rules.

It’s not novel, but horror movies (of this sort) are like musicals: It’s not that you’re looking to be surprised to discover someone bursting into song-and-dance, it’s the quality of the song-and-dance. This first kill is fine, a bit above average in terms of visuals, but nicely revisited at the end where things come together and we see the scene recontextualized after the other stories. (“Three hours earlier…”)

From here we have Dylan Baker as a serial killer, comically interrupted by neighbor Brian Cox and others as he tries to bury his latest kill. This segues into a town party where, dressed as a vampire, he kills a female partygoer. At the same party Anna Paquin’s and her slutty friends visit a costume store (because we all buy costumes on Halloween night, right?) and pick up guys for a later shindig, leaving virginal Anna alone. We break for a ghost tale of children visiting an old quarry where a school bus full of “unspecified special children” are sent to their demise at the behest of their parents, and their vengeful ghosts remain. Then we finish the Paquin story and cut back to Brian Cox who, lives across the street from our first vignette couple and finds himself terrorized by tiny Sam Hain because he sends his dog out in a Halloween mask to scare the trick-or-treaters, rather than giving them candy. (Now, he steals their candy, which to me is a very Halloween thing to do, but Sam Hain disagrees and tortures Cox for about 15 minutes.) Close on opening vignette and final coda.

For stories, this stuff is all very stock, but there are things that elevate this and make it worthy of a watch. Most famous for writing X-Men 2: X-Men United and Godzilla: King of the Monsters, my favorite work by writer/director Michael Dougherty is the under-rated Krampus, but it’s really his direction here that makes this more enjoyable than a typical horror anthology, as well as kick-ass set design, music and acting.

The typical situation with a horror anthology is: We have this great idea for a story but it’s only about 40 minutes long. So we package it with two or three twenty-minute throwaways, and we got ourselves a feature!

These stories are all in the “fine” category. The twists aren’t likely to shock you, although the Dylan Baker one is kind of “nice”. But the threads of the first story feeding into the second and the fourth, and the fourth story feeds into the third story and the bookend story (which might be considered just a part of the fourth)—the whole thing coalesces like a classic “Simpsons” storyline and becomes satisfying in a way the basic stories would not be by themselves.

Meanwhile, this movie looks great in 4K. Taking place over a few hours on Halloween night, gorgeously lit with alternating bright orange-and-black and vague, misty blue-and-green, this feels like a bookend to the horror tradition that started in the late ’70s with Halloween and, yes, Creepshow, down to comic-book-style title cards. It’s R-rated but has basically vestigial nudity and mostly implied gore, with black humor running through some of the most “horrific” elements.

Great traditional score by Douglas Pipes (also of Krampus and Monster House).

It’s fun and it’s not boring. Even if it’s sort of a throwback (for 2007, to say nothing of today), it was clearly done with a lot of love and sincerity.

And now for some background info: Researching it, it appears that writer/directory Dougherty had no plans to direct originally. In fact, he had Tobe Hooper, George Romero, Stan Winston and John Carpenter set to direct the segments, but in the end not a single studio wanted to buy it.

Every studio passed on it. Not every studio, but I remember one keynote we got was, ‘Nobody wants to see vampires, werewolves or zombies because they’re too old-fashioned

This would’ve been in the early 2000s, around the time of 28 Days Later (2002) and not long before Twilight (2008) and Walking Dead (2010). This truly encapsulates Hollywood wisdom.

On the plus side, I’m not sure this film would’ve been as good if the four stories had been as segmented as they’d have to have been with four separate directors. Either way, we’ll never know, since Carpenter is the last man standing of those four.