LITTLE MORE THAN PUMPKIN, AND LESS THAN KIND

A safe and Happy Halloween to all from Less Hat, Moorhead!

The Wife gave me a Dracula PEZ and Frankenstein Peeps...

On another note: Recently I found this rather badass hornworm in the backyard...

As I escorted him into the alley behind the house, I was startled by how muscular his flexing against my thumb and finger was...

It made me sympathize with poor Ida Lupino, attacked by the giant hornworms in 1976's The Food of the Gods...

A couple of other odds and ends:

I was very saddened to hear that Matthew Perry has passed on. He was possibly the funniest of the Friends, but I also loved him as White House Counsel Joe Quincy, one of the increasingly mythical-seeming "good Republicans" that The West Wing liked to optimistically depict. Nobody could deliver a line like "Sure, we'd never want to compromise the aesthetic integrity of the Steam Pipe Trunk Distribution Venue" with the effortless aplomb of Perry. A real loss.

RIP also to Richard Moll, best known as towering but sweet-natured bailiff Bull on Night Court. He was one of the first celebrities I ever interviewed, for the Erie Times-News back in the early '80s when he was in town for a convention or something. Very nice guy. In his MeTV obit, he's quoted saying that when he was auditioning for Night Court and they asked if he would shave his head for the part, he said "I would shave my legs for the part!" He told me the same story back in the day.

Here's a sample of the Halloween decor at Chez Moorhead...

And finally: Let's go D-backs!

THE BEAR MINIMUM

In theaters this weekend:

Five Nights at Freddy's--The Freddy's in question is Freddy Fazbear's, a defunct and long-shuttered pizza joint and game arcade of the Chuck E. Cheese or Peter Piper sort. Our down-on-his-luck hero Mike (Josh Hutcherson) accepts a job as a third-shift security guard there. Before long, he finds that the gone-to-seed animatronic animal characters featured in the place may still have some murderous life in them.

This chiller is based on a popular 2014 video game that has given rise to a series of sequel games, novels and other spin-offs. I've never played the games or read the books, so I can't remotely say if the movie is faithful to its source material, or if it should be.

On its own terms, it's okay at best. Like Cocaine Bear from earlier this year, it has a nice '80s throwback flavor in its look, editing and music. Director Emma Tammi manages a few amusingly staged sequences, and Freddy and the other animal characters, products of Jim Henson's Creature Shop, have the repellent horror of deliberate, calculated cuteness gone decrepit. They're legitimate additions to the stable of Universal Monsters.

But the script, by several hands including Tammi and game creator Scott Cawthon, feels overcomplicated. The premise, right down to the title, would seem to suggest a simple approach: A guy stuck in a bummer job, alone in a creepy setting, finds things getting creepier and creepier and more and more perilous every night, until at last he knows he's not imagining it; the cartoony animal robots really are trying to kill him. Five acts of rising tension.

Instead, Mike is given flashbacks concerning a family tragedy which he's still trying to solve via dream therapy--which means sleeping on the job--as well as a little sister (Piper Rubio) he's trying to keep custody of. This backstory is genuinely poignant and disturbing, to the point that it makes the overt spookhouse horror stuff seem trivial and unfrightening. It's like a Goosebumps movie was mixed with a grim Dateline NBC episode.

The smallish cast is capable; Rubio is a sweet presence as the sister and Matthew Lillard gets some laughs as the guy who offers Mike the job. It should be said that the former child and teen actor Hutcherson (from the Hunger Games flicks and The Kids Are All Right) shows impressive chops in this grown-up lead. He brings Mike an understated but believable aura of lifelong anguish. For me, again, he was too potent for the fun, silly shocker that this should have been.

FLOWER MOON SHADOW

Opening this weekend:

Killers of the Flower Moon--In the 1870s the Osage Nation settled on a large reservation in northeastern Oklahoma consisting of land thought to be of little value. But in the late 1890s, it was discovered to be sitting on an ocean of oil. Because the Osage had retained mineral rights to the land, by the early '20s they found themselves to be the wealthiest people, per capita, on the planet.

It need hardly be said that opportunistic white folks moved in fast to snatch this bounty through a variety of schemes, perhaps the vilest being the practice of marrying into an Osage family and then murdering the spouses and other heirs. Because the case was eventually broken by the nascent FBI, the story was briefly dramatized as one episode in The FBI Story, Mervyn LeRoy's 1959 chronicle (and whitewash) of the Bureau, starring James Stewart.

Martin Scorsese's account is not so brief. Scripted by Eric Roth and Scorsese from David Grann's 2017 book, the director's three-hour-plus Killers of the Flower Moon is an epic nightmare, solemn and heartbroken yet charged up with a fierce and sweeping vitality. The style feels different from his previous work, yet somehow it's still unmistakably a Scorsese picture.

The focus here is on Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a WWI vet who arrives in Osage country to work for his uncle, the cattle rancher William King Hale (Robert DeNiro). Ernest soon marries an Osage woman named Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) and starts a family with her. A dull, malleable sort, Ernest seems to genuinely love Mollie, yet all the while they're married he's secretly serving as a thuggish henchman for the sanctimonious Bill Hale, who condescendingly professes love for the Osage while conspiring in the deaths of Mollie's mother and sisters and others in the community. Eventually and inevitably, Mollie also becomes a target of Bill's plans.

Killers is shot in chilly shades of gray and sepia by Rodrigo Prieto, edited by Scorsese's longtime collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker and moved along by a brilliant, pulsing score by Robbie Robertson, to whose memory the film is dedicated. Yet despite the presence of these cronies, this isn't business as usual. Scorsese doesn't give us the kinetic flashiness of his gangster sagas here. There's no darting, antic camerawork, no wall-to-wall narration.

But this isn't a staid historical drama either; the tone is feverishly immediate and chaotic, almost hallucinatory at times, and there's a tinge, especially in the scenes between DiCaprio and DeNiro, of deeply grim comedy. Scorsese's comic edge doesn't distance us from the horror, either, as perhaps it could be accused of doing in Goodfellas or Casino. The murders and other violence are presented with an angry bluntness, as nothing but sordid, wasteful and evil.

Essentially, what Scorsese gives us here is a vision of life in hell, not just a hell of butchery and menace, though this is amply depicted, but of the fractured spirit and toxic guilt generated by racial terrorism and piracy. The agony of this life is reflected in the superb performances of DiCaprio and the serene, gravely beautiful Lily Gladstone. DeNiro is at the top of his form as the genially satanic Bill Hale, and the enormous cast includes fine turns by Tantoo Cardinal, William Belleau, Cara Jade Myers, Brendan Fraser, Scott Shepherd, Sturgill Simpson, Katherine Willis and Barry Corbin, among many others. John Lithgow appears as a prosecutor; he's always welcome but gets less of a chance than usual to flex here.

There's also a strong supporting performance by Jesse Plemons as Tom White, the Texas Ranger turned G-Man who led the BOI (later FBI) investigation. The case was an early success for the Bureau, depicted here as a largely unknown agency at the time (Grann's book is subtitled The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI), and Plemons, speaking softly and politely but firmly from under his Stetson, lightens this bleak and grueling movie's mood just enough to get us through; we at last feel a dawning of hope for justice and salvation. He shows up just in time.

One more note: I was expecting, and hoping for, the usual afterword before the end credits, explaining what ultimately became of these people. Kudos to Scorsese for coming up with a more creative and witty way to present this information. It's an ingenious coda to this great and terrible American tale.

SPORT CLIPS

Check out my quick article, online at Phoenix Magazine, about this year's edition of the Peoria [AZ] Film Festival, today through October 22...

...featuring, along with some intriguing new stuff, a series of favorite sports movies.

LOST ANGELA

Our dog Othello was a fan of Angela Lansbury.

My mother-in-law would often dogsit him, and she, like many people of her generation, was a devoted viewer of Murder, She Wrote, Lansbury's series that ran from 1984 to 1996 on CBS, and for decades thereafter in syndication. So she and Othello would sit happily on the couch together and enjoy the adventures of mystery novelist and small-town slueth Jessica Fletcher.

This is how many people will remember Lansbury. But her remarkable career is far from defined by the hugely successful Murder, She Wrote.

Sometimes the death of a famous person who has attained great age can be oddly more startling than that of a younger celebrity. This was the case, for me, with Lansbury, who passed on last October; today would be her 98th birthday. She was around so long, and so vitally, that she had become almost a symbol of geriatric health, agency and relevancy. She was on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit in 2005, and was still acting as recently as Mary Poppins Returns in 2018; she also had a cameo as herself in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. It seemed like she might outlive us all.

A native of London, Lansbury came to the U.S. in her teens when her family fled the Blitz. She studied at the American Theatre Wing, then made her movie debut, at the age of 17, in support of Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer in 1944's Gaslight. Her role as a shifty maid in that film got her the first of three Oscar nominations. The second came a year later, when she played Sybil Vane in The Picture of Dorian Gray. 

Many other film and television roles followed, from The Harvey Girls to The Court Jester to The Long, Hot Summer to Bedknobs and Broomsticks to Death on the Nile, but in the '60s and '70s Lansbury ascended to legendary stardom on the Broadway stage, with leads in productions of Mame, Gypsy, Sweeney Todd and others. She won a total of six Tony Awards, from eight nominations. In the  '90s, she provided the voice of Mrs. Potts in Disney's animated Beauty and the Beast, probably the role by which younger audiences know her the best, and sweetly sang the title song.

An impressive career by any standard. But none of the above achievements are what I think of first when I think of Angela Lansbury. No, for me her most memorable role is the one that brought her a third Oscar nomination, in one of my top ten all-time favorite movies: that of  Eleanor Iselin, mother of poor Laurence Harvey's hapless brainwashed Raymond Shaw in John Frankenheimer's 1962 political thriller The Manchurian Candidate.

Lansbury's Eleanor is the true power behind the title character, buffoonish McCarthy-esque Red-baiting Senator Johnny Iselin (James Gregory), and she's more than willing to conspire with Communists and to sacrifice her son Raymond's mind and heart to steer Johnny to the White House. Her performance is hard-edged and scary and despicable, but also strong, intelligent and witty, with a touch of wry lechery toward her husband and an unsavory Oedipal undercurrent toward her son.

It's strange to think that the same Angela Lansbury who played Jessica Fletcher and Mrs. Potts could also have created one of the great villains in American movies. But watch The Manchurian Candidate and you'll see the iron behind the sweetness.

UNBELIEVABLE

Opening in theaters this week:

The Exorcist: Believer--Two 13-year-old girls go missing one day after school. Their panicked parents, single Dad Victor (Leslie Odom, Jr.) and evangelical couple Miranda (Jennifer Nettles) and Tony (Norbert Leo Butz) frantically search their Georgia suburb, but three days later the girls turn up alive.

These early scenes of this sixth Exorcist follow-up are tense and gripping, convincingly dramatizing a dread familiar to parents, but also deploying a few well-executed cheap scares. Soon after the girls reappear, they start showing unmistakable signs of demonic possession. The nonbelieving Victor is skeptical at first, but before long he has enlisted the aid of Chris McNeil (the radiant Ellen Burstyn), who went through a similar experience with her daughter Regan up in Georgetown half a century earlier.

Act Two of Believer is mostly devoted to a rather ecumenical exorcism, with Catholics, Evangelicals and what appear to be Voodoo practitioners all participating, among others. This section falls flat. We get all the obligatory stuff--levitation, projectile tummy trouble--but none of the elliptical yet grueling intensity that the late William Friedkin brought to the 1973 film. Put simply, the second half of the movie just isn't very scary.

Part of what made the first film so potent was its harsh, judgy small-c conservative Catholicism. It seemed to suggest that Chris McNeil's worldly career and single life left the door open for the devil to take her daughter. The new film almost gets this right; it implies that Victor's daughter's yearning to communicate with her dead mom gives the demon a foothold, as Regan playing with a Ouija board invited in "Captain Howdy" back in the original.

But the kum-ba-yah sensibility of Believer's interfaith exorcism weakens this blood-and-thunder atmosphere. Don't misunderstand; I agree, on the whole, with the sentiments expressed in this movie's mild little homilies about faith and community and hope. But I don't think they're the most effective way to scare an audience. Decades ago I had a girlfriend, a lapsed Catholic, who found the original Exorcist so terrifying that she could barely stand to have it mentioned (I used to tease her by imitating the demon's voice).

The new film lacks the ruthlessness that could create that sort of reaction. Nor did I really find it plausible that these staunch traditionalist faiths could practice this archaic rite in harmony. As soon as anything went wrong, wouldn't they start blaming each other?

The director, David Gordon Green, works from a script that he wrote with several hands including Danny McBride. They were the team behind 2021's Halloween Kills, another honorable but unsuccessful revival of a classic horror franchise. The cast here is capable, with one standout--that splendid, always reliable warhorse Ann Dowd as a nurse with a relevant past who befriends Victor.

This much more, if little else, can be said for Believer: although the insolently absurd yet imaginative spectacle of John Boorman's 1977 Exorcist 2: The Heretic has its fascinations, Believer can probably still claim to be the best of the Exorcist sequels. But that's a low bar.