...the new Hitchcock/DePalma style thriller from Blumhouse.
You can also check out my review of Truce...
...Cody Dull's comedy-drama, continuing at Stage Left Productions through April 27.
Showing posts with label BLUMHOUSE PRODUCTIONS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BLUMHOUSE PRODUCTIONS. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 15, 2025
Friday, November 13, 2020
SWAP MEAT
Opening today:
Freaky--The full title should be Freaky Friday the 13th, since this is a mashup of the old-school slasher flick with the adult-child "body-swap" genre of Freaky Friday, Vice Versa etc. Vince Vaughn plays the "Blissfield Butcher," a standard-issue masked killer of teens; Kathryn Newton is Millie, a wholesome "final girl" type. Via some mumbo-jumbo involving a mystical "Aztecian" dagger, they swap bodies.
Gruesome farce ensues, with Millie, inhabiting Vaughn's hulking body, trying to elude the police, but also discovering the perks of, say, peeing while standing up. Meanwhile, The Butcher finds himself in the body of a petite blond girl, less physically formidable but far more capable of avoiding suspicion while wreaking bloody mayhem. Millie also has to admit that The Butcher has a better sense of how to dress than she does.
The director and co-writer of this Universal/Blumhouse collaboration is Christopher Landon, who previously helmed 2017's redoubtable Happy Death Day, a similarly avowed horror spin on Groundhog Day. Freaky isn't quite the home run that Happy Death Day was; it's much gorier but not as scary, and it feels a bit more heavy-handed in its contrivance.
But it's pretty entertaining just the same. If you can resist the prospect of seeing the beefy, slovenly Vaughn get in touch with his inner teenage girl, and share a tender love scene with the boy she has a crush on, you're more respectable than I am.
Saturday, February 29, 2020
I SURE DIDN'T SEE THAT ONE COMING
Check out my reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of the new Universal-Blumhouse version of The Invisible Man…
…and the 1940 crime programmer Marked Men...
...filmed in Tempe, which shows this Wednesday, March 4, at Tempe History Museum.
The great Brazilian horror star Jose Mojica Marins—aka Ze do Caixao, aka, to his small but devoted cult of English-speaking fans of which I am a proud member, Coffin Joe—has departed this realm of reality, at the age of 83.
Just recently I was delighted to meet a young Brazilian Lyft driver in Seattle who knew of Coffin Joe (and was astounded that I did). Here and here are some things I've written about him. RIP, you sick and twisted and perversely endearing genius.
Just recently I was delighted to meet a young Brazilian Lyft driver in Seattle who knew of Coffin Joe (and was astounded that I did). Here and here are some things I've written about him. RIP, you sick and twisted and perversely endearing genius.
On behalf of The Day Gig, I had the honor this week of addressing the Boulder City Sunrise Rotary of Boulder City, Nevada…
…after which I was given a behind-the-scenes tour of Hoover Dam Mercantile. I’m not great with heights, but it’s undeniably a majestic place...
Also, I saw bighorn sheep in the wild for the first time, if memory serves. And I made this pal at a Sinclair station in Boulder City…
Monday, June 3, 2019
SHE'S SIMPLY MA-VELOUS
Your Humble Narrator didn't catch up with this one until this weekend...
Ma--Octavia Spencer seems like a game sort. She even came back to reprise her small role from Bad Santa in Bad Santa 2, though she'd won the Oscar for The Help between the two films. It suggests a lack of pretentiousness worthy of a British actor.
Now Spencer stars as the title character in Ma, the latest from the admirable Blumhouse factory. She plays the heck out of Sue Anne, a small-town veterinary nurse who gets confronted with a classic adult moral quandary: teenage kids ask her to buy them alcohol outside a liquor store. She refuses at first, but then, charmed by their pleas and flirtations, she gives in.
She later offers the kids the use of her basement, on the theory that they're safer partying there than outside somewhere. They dub her "Ma" and before long her basement is a popular party spot for the area teens. Her young guests are forbidden, however, from going upstairs. Other disturbing signs arise from this creepy but somehow distressingly plausible social scenario.
Though the product varies in success from movie to movie, I admire the commitment of Blumhouse Productions to provide their young audience with good value on a modest budget. Ma is one of the company's most interesting efforts to date; a horror movie based on character development and queasy inappropriateness rather than shocks. Spencer is emotionally naked here without hamming; using only shifts of expression on her sad-clown face and in her voice, she makes Sue Anne's motivations so painfully obvious that we don't really need the explanatory flashbacks to explain her psychology.
The director is the Mississippian Tate Taylor, who also directed Spencer in The Help. Working from a script by Scotty Landes, Taylor maintains a good balance between genuine pathos and macabre comedy, and he gets strong performances out of the youngsters, especially Diana Silvers as the good-girl heroine. There are amusing turns by vets like Juliette Lewis, Luke Evans and Missi Pyle, among others.
The violence doesn't really start until the last quarter or so of the movie, but once it does, Ma turns into a wild melodramatic bloodbath. This gory homestretch is entertaining enough, in a twisted sort of way--it even includes a gruesome outrage that Lionel Atwill committed in Murders in the Zoo back in pre-code 1933. This lurid stuff probably lessens the impact of the subtle, uneasy chills that precedes it, but not enough to dismiss the commanding potency of Spencer's performance. Be forewarned, however: Ma isn't a very comforting movie for parents of teenagers.
Ma--Octavia Spencer seems like a game sort. She even came back to reprise her small role from Bad Santa in Bad Santa 2, though she'd won the Oscar for The Help between the two films. It suggests a lack of pretentiousness worthy of a British actor.
Now Spencer stars as the title character in Ma, the latest from the admirable Blumhouse factory. She plays the heck out of Sue Anne, a small-town veterinary nurse who gets confronted with a classic adult moral quandary: teenage kids ask her to buy them alcohol outside a liquor store. She refuses at first, but then, charmed by their pleas and flirtations, she gives in.
She later offers the kids the use of her basement, on the theory that they're safer partying there than outside somewhere. They dub her "Ma" and before long her basement is a popular party spot for the area teens. Her young guests are forbidden, however, from going upstairs. Other disturbing signs arise from this creepy but somehow distressingly plausible social scenario.
Though the product varies in success from movie to movie, I admire the commitment of Blumhouse Productions to provide their young audience with good value on a modest budget. Ma is one of the company's most interesting efforts to date; a horror movie based on character development and queasy inappropriateness rather than shocks. Spencer is emotionally naked here without hamming; using only shifts of expression on her sad-clown face and in her voice, she makes Sue Anne's motivations so painfully obvious that we don't really need the explanatory flashbacks to explain her psychology.
The director is the Mississippian Tate Taylor, who also directed Spencer in The Help. Working from a script by Scotty Landes, Taylor maintains a good balance between genuine pathos and macabre comedy, and he gets strong performances out of the youngsters, especially Diana Silvers as the good-girl heroine. There are amusing turns by vets like Juliette Lewis, Luke Evans and Missi Pyle, among others.
The violence doesn't really start until the last quarter or so of the movie, but once it does, Ma turns into a wild melodramatic bloodbath. This gory homestretch is entertaining enough, in a twisted sort of way--it even includes a gruesome outrage that Lionel Atwill committed in Murders in the Zoo back in pre-code 1933. This lurid stuff probably lessens the impact of the subtle, uneasy chills that precedes it, but not enough to dismiss the commanding potency of Spencer's performance. Be forewarned, however: Ma isn't a very comforting movie for parents of teenagers.
Thursday, September 6, 2018
NUN BUT THE BRAVE
With the horror picture The Nun opening this weekend...
Monster-of-the-Week: ...let's give the nod this week to the fanged demonic sister from that film. Check out the "Unholy Card" I was given at the screening...
It's one of the odder pieces of movie schwag I've ever had. It has the Hail Mary in Latin on the back, along with a vaguely ghost-shaped figure and the cryptic (to me, at least) phrase "SNAP FOR FORGIVENESS." I snapped my fingers; does that count?
Monster-of-the-Week: ...let's give the nod this week to the fanged demonic sister from that film. Check out the "Unholy Card" I was given at the screening...
It's one of the odder pieces of movie schwag I've ever had. It has the Hail Mary in Latin on the back, along with a vaguely ghost-shaped figure and the cryptic (to me, at least) phrase "SNAP FOR FORGIVENESS." I snapped my fingers; does that count?
Friday, April 13, 2018
TRUTHS, DARES, AARDVARKS, PHANTOMS
Opening this weekend:
Truth or Dare--A college senior (Lucy Hale), planning to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity on her last spring break, allows herself to be pressured into going to Mexico with her friends instead. Down there, a stranger (Landon Liboiron) invites them to play a game of truth or dare in the ruins of an old church. When they get back to school, the participants in the game start receiving Truth or Dare challenges through creepy psychic visions, and if they fail to either tell the truth or complete the dare, they gruesomely die.
I’ve seen far worse horror movies than Truth or Dare, also promoted under the title Blumhouse's Truth or Dare. Directed by Jason Wadlow, it’s slick and polished, with an attractive cast playing characters that aren’t as abrasive and obnoxious as they often are in movies like this. It helps that they seem to care about each other. Hale is particularly charming as the earnest good-girl heroine.
But it is, unmistakably, very derivative of other flicks of recent years like Final Destination and It Follows, and I found the ending bungled and unsatisfying. I appreciate the way Blumhouse Productions tries to give its young audience honest value on a modest scale, and this movie is not without merit. But it isn't anywhere near as good as Blumhouse's Get Out, or even as last fall's Happy Death Day.
Aardvark--Josh (Zachary Quinto) is a psychologically troubled guy, haunted by the powerful presence, and absence, of his older brother Craig (Jon Hamm), a famous TV actor. Craig pays Josh's bills, but isn't otherwise in touch with him, except through Josh's occasional apparent delusions, in which a homeless woman or a virile cop seem to him to be his brother, buried in a brilliant new characterization.
The real Craig does show up in the life of Josh's lonely therapist Emily (Jenny Slate), and unethically but perhaps understandably they start an affair. Meanwhile Josh meets an attractive young woman named Hannah (Sheila Vand), but is she another hallucination?
And so on. Aardvark is worth watching. It's perfectly well directed by Brian Shoaf, from his own script, which has perfectly speakable, intriguing, at times touching dialogue. The acting is top shelf. The tiny, exquisite Slate continues to show her range; her prim evasiveness is both funny and moving. Hamm is effortlessly convincing as this veteran celebrity, simultaneously sheepish and confident, quietly disappointed in his life. And Quinto brings dignity and humor to Josh, declining to milk the part for overt pathos.
But I sat there hoping, and doubting, that Shoaf would be able to snap Aardvark's ambiguities together into a dramatically coherent whole, and alas, he missed, at least for me. It was a near miss, maybe; the movie has a number of minor emotional payoffs, but they don't add up to a major emotional payoff.
In case you're wondering, I'm happy to report that the title isn't a cheat: There is an aardvark in Aardvark, played by a handsome creature billed as "Amani the Aardvark." The culmination of the aardvark's strand is, indeed, one of the movie's sweetest moments.
Check out my interview, on Phoenix Magazine online, with my pal, Arizona actress turned mystery novelist Cindy Brown, who signs her book The Phantom of the Oz at the Orpheum Theatre next Tuesday, April 17, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., as a benefit for Friends of the Orpheum Theatre.
Truth or Dare--A college senior (Lucy Hale), planning to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity on her last spring break, allows herself to be pressured into going to Mexico with her friends instead. Down there, a stranger (Landon Liboiron) invites them to play a game of truth or dare in the ruins of an old church. When they get back to school, the participants in the game start receiving Truth or Dare challenges through creepy psychic visions, and if they fail to either tell the truth or complete the dare, they gruesomely die.
I’ve seen far worse horror movies than Truth or Dare, also promoted under the title Blumhouse's Truth or Dare. Directed by Jason Wadlow, it’s slick and polished, with an attractive cast playing characters that aren’t as abrasive and obnoxious as they often are in movies like this. It helps that they seem to care about each other. Hale is particularly charming as the earnest good-girl heroine.
But it is, unmistakably, very derivative of other flicks of recent years like Final Destination and It Follows, and I found the ending bungled and unsatisfying. I appreciate the way Blumhouse Productions tries to give its young audience honest value on a modest scale, and this movie is not without merit. But it isn't anywhere near as good as Blumhouse's Get Out, or even as last fall's Happy Death Day.
Aardvark--Josh (Zachary Quinto) is a psychologically troubled guy, haunted by the powerful presence, and absence, of his older brother Craig (Jon Hamm), a famous TV actor. Craig pays Josh's bills, but isn't otherwise in touch with him, except through Josh's occasional apparent delusions, in which a homeless woman or a virile cop seem to him to be his brother, buried in a brilliant new characterization.
The real Craig does show up in the life of Josh's lonely therapist Emily (Jenny Slate), and unethically but perhaps understandably they start an affair. Meanwhile Josh meets an attractive young woman named Hannah (Sheila Vand), but is she another hallucination?
And so on. Aardvark is worth watching. It's perfectly well directed by Brian Shoaf, from his own script, which has perfectly speakable, intriguing, at times touching dialogue. The acting is top shelf. The tiny, exquisite Slate continues to show her range; her prim evasiveness is both funny and moving. Hamm is effortlessly convincing as this veteran celebrity, simultaneously sheepish and confident, quietly disappointed in his life. And Quinto brings dignity and humor to Josh, declining to milk the part for overt pathos.
But I sat there hoping, and doubting, that Shoaf would be able to snap Aardvark's ambiguities together into a dramatically coherent whole, and alas, he missed, at least for me. It was a near miss, maybe; the movie has a number of minor emotional payoffs, but they don't add up to a major emotional payoff.
In case you're wondering, I'm happy to report that the title isn't a cheat: There is an aardvark in Aardvark, played by a handsome creature billed as "Amani the Aardvark." The culmination of the aardvark's strand is, indeed, one of the movie's sweetest moments.
Check out my interview, on Phoenix Magazine online, with my pal, Arizona actress turned mystery novelist Cindy Brown, who signs her book The Phantom of the Oz at the Orpheum Theatre next Tuesday, April 17, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., as a benefit for Friends of the Orpheum Theatre.
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