Red One

 

The Long
List Goodnight

Red One
USA/Canada 2024
Directed by Jake Kasdan
MGM

I actually wanted to see Red One when it came out at the cinema but, alas, it was released in November over here in the UK and I really try not to watch Christmas films out of season (aka, out of December!) so I waited a few weeks. Weeks in which my perception of the film was changed by word of mouth... both from audiences who had seen it on Twitter and, yeah, it took an equally bad pasting from the critics too. So it would be true to say that, by the time I got to see this movie for myself (aka, in December!), my expectations for the movie had plummeted way below zero.

But I did see it and, what can I say? Once again I am reminded why the opinions of both fellow audience members and a bunch of professional critics should sometimes be taken with a pinch of salt. Frankly, I loved Red One. It was everything I was expecting from a big budget Christmas movie plus, had the unexpected bonus of being cannily well thought through and a lot more clever than I think people realise.

So at the start of the film we are introduced to Jack O'Malley played by Chris Evans (I suspect taking on this role to further shed his squeaky clean Captain America image). He’s a somewhat criminal hacker known as The Wolf who is wanted by organisations like the FBI all over the world (in order to try and recruit him) and who, in his opening heist, shows that he would sink so low as to steal candy from a baby. At some point he is anonymously hired by someone to find the co-ordinates of an undisclosed location. Which he does, not realising he gives the villain of the film, played by Kiernan Shipka, the information required so her team can abduct Santa Claus, played by the always brilliant J. K. Simmons, for her own, world threatening and evil ends.

Meanwhile, Santa’s number one bodyguard Cal Drift, played by Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, part of E.L.F (Enforcement Logistics and Fortification) needs to get Santa back for his annual Christmas run in two days time. So, working with Zoe, who runs a kind of ‘mythical creatures police’ organisation, played by Lucy Liu, he recruits the cynical, world weary Jack to help him find where Santa has been taken.

Tolerating their differences before the expected male bonding, they follow the leads and punch their way through various adversaries to give a crowd pleasing conclusion to the film, aided by E.L.Fs technology such as a device which shrinks and grows toys and people to be used as equipment for the mission (such as toys like Hot Wheels cars for transport, Raving Bonkers robots... which I think were known as Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots in the USA... and so on). So yeah, you get some Ant-Man style shenanigans in the action sequences too but, apart from getting a nice joke around Jack, who upon seeing how the toys are enlarged and made practical immediately asks a shop owner if he has a Wonder Woman action figure... there actually is a really vital logic as to why Santa and E.L.F would actually have this specific technology in their arsenal in the first place (but I’m trying to do this without spoilers so, just keep a look out in the last sequence of the film to find just how this comes in handy if you are Santa).

And, as I said above, I loved it. It’s got its heart in the right place, has some great action scenes (like fighting giant sized killer snowman on a tropical beach), shoe horns in some nice moments with Krampus and, yeah, in my opinion has some good chemistry going between the leads. Added to this it’s got a great, dynamic score by the great Henry Jackman which keeps things going but, alas, is not issued on a CD at time of writing.

So yeah, sorry if it deflects any credibility on my part but, I had a really good time with Red One and I hope it gets a Blu Ray release at some point soon so I can show it to my folks next Christmas. An entertaining movie, I reckon.

Glorious

In Glory Hole Bastards

Glorious
USA 2022
Directed by Rebekah McKendry
Shudder

Warning: Very slight spoilers through the round hole.

I have to be honest here. The only reason I decided to watch Glorious is because it’s directed by Dr. Rebekah McKendry who, with Elric Kaine, comprises one half of the podcast team for All The Colours Of The Dark, which is one of those shows which helped make things a little more bearable for me during home office sessions throughout the pandemic (that and their former incarnation of the show Shockwaves). I always find it a fun show and I was curious to see what McKendry is like as a director. The answer to that is... pretty darned awesome, it has to be said.

The story, such as it is, tells of Wes, played by Ryan Kwanten, who is on the road after a bad break up with his girlfriend (played by Sylvia Grace Crim in some flashback/memory reconstruction scenes). After spending a night of self torment parked outside the Route 37 Rest Area (is that a Kevin Smith reference there?), Wes goes to use said rest room. It’s literally just one of those bathrooms with, if you’re lucky, a vending machine attached to it... which you sometimes see on our motorways over here in the UK, too. A poor excuse for anything anyone would call a ‘service station’, for sure.

Anyway, Wes goes in to throw up and, through what is essentially a glory hole in the side of the stall (if you’re going to Google that term, just go into that knowing that it’s NSFW), with an elabourate painting of a Cthulhu-like God around it, he begins to hear the voice of an actual, ancient God talking to him and trying to engage him in conversation. And the rest of the film is almost extensively set in the rest room (hey, low budget is great when you can do it right, as here) and is, for the most part, a two hander between Wes and the mostly unseen God in the toilet stall, as voiced by the always brilliant J. K. Simmons.

And it really works. It’s well written and, thankfully, well performed by the two actors (Simmons comes off at points almost like a very polite, ‘ancient wisdom’ version of HAL 9000 from 2001 A Space Odyssey... and I mean that in a good way). Backing these two performances up is the direction and staging which, considering it’s obviously going to have a naturally claustrophobic feeling to this kind of environment, is surprisingly well handled... to the point where it never, ever gets dull (which is a big  plus).

McKendry uses lots of camera movement, coloured lighting and just enough ‘outside influences’ to keep things interesting while allowing the actors to exist in this film world without ever once losing a sense of credibility, or a sense what is very demonstrably at stake in the scheme of things... I won’t say much about it but, the future of all life in the universe hinges on how the conversation and a certain ‘favour’ asked of Wes plays out.

It’s also very funny.

Yep, McKendry and co pour on the jokes here and, again without spoiling it, there are some nice moments where the edit between two shots of Wes using a urinal and the toilet stall home of the God in question make for some hilarious viewing moments, with a repeat structure joke. And I can’t think of any other film right now where I would be as likely to encounter lines such as “You thought your human penis was going to save the universe?” There are also, as expected, a fair few nods to horror movies over the years, many of which I probably missed but, even to the extent of a quick practical effect at some point mimicking a 1989 film (not one of my favourites, it has to be said... I won’t reveal the film here for obvious reasons).

And before I finish up on this short review, since I always shout it out on the very rare occasions it happens (as regular readers will know)... there’s a slight twist reveal near to the end which I totally didn’t see coming. Unlike many other modern film makers, McKendry doesn’t telegraph her rug pulls by giving away too much stuff to prep the audience. Like I said, it’s extremely rare anyone fools me with this stuff but there’s a sequence where the contents of one of those ‘shoe box’ looking DIY cardboard boxes of the style you can buy at stationery stores and places like IKEA is revealed and, with it, twists the way the audience are perceiving the entire situation. It’s a nice reveal (especially for a director who obviously has an affinity with certain horror tropes) and I was fully appreciative of not figuring it out before hand. So she gets a big round of applause from me on that count too.

And, yeah, that’s me done with Glorious... other than a quick shout out to some nice sound design (which also even adds to the humour of some of the jokes relying on the edit in one particular scene). If you’re into low budget, quirky horror movies with a nice line in dialogue and some acting which can put that stuff over in a gripping way, which is actually done quite well without spilling its secrets too quickly... one which you may find yourself laughing with a fair bit... then this one is definitely worth a look, for sure. 

The Snowman

We’re Stalking In The Air...

The Snowman
2017 UK/USA/Sweden
Directed by Tomas Alfredson
UK cinema release print.

The Snowman is set and shot in Norway... being, in some ways, an example of what is popularly becoming known as Nordic Noir. It’s based on a novel by Norweigan writer Jo Nesbø and I saw another, quite good movie based on a novel by him a few years back called Headhunters (reviewed here). This one... well it’s not so good, to be honest... although it does have a nice visual quirk that makes it kinda interesting at times. The trailer was pretty good, however (better than the film and I’ll come back to the trailer) and, since the movie stars the always brilliant Michael Fassbender, this was one of the movies I was looking forward to seeing this winter.

That being said, I’ve read or heard of reviews which have been tearing this to pieces, saying that the movie is incoherent and makes no sense. Well, that one I can certainly put to rest and say that, yes, the movie is certainly coherent and, yes, it makes complete sense... to the point where the identity of the killer might be fairly obvious to the audience, alas. However, to some of the more ‘high profile’ newspaper reviewers of this film I would say that they should maybe concentrate more on what is said when people open their mouths to talk as, you know, the storyline and connections made in this really aren’t rocket science. Or, you know, familiarise yourself with the language of cinema by maybe going out and watching more films... if you really are finding this stuff confusing.

However, what this film does suffer from, I would say, is a lack of on-screen content to allow for the more leisurely pacing that the director brings to this. I’ll get back to that in a minute but I’ll talk about some of the positive things in this first.

The number one positive is the acting in this is all nicely done. Not many duds here. Fassbender’s portrayal of Nesbø regular Harry Hole is pretty great and even though not everything is spelled out for us, we get a real sense that there’s an interesting history to this character (this is a number of books into the series, apparently, so I’m sure there certainly is). The character is pretty much on the rocks, drinking and trying to cope with, at the very least, being dumped by his girlfriend but still maintaining a friendship with her son and also, to an extent, with the son’s ‘new dad’. The way Fassbender plays him shows everything with his body language... you get the feeling that this man is completely out of shape but that he once used to be a brilliant detective and his previous career is briefly alluded to by his new partner, played pretty nicely by Rebecca Ferguson. They’re both ably backed up by an incredible bunch of actors including Chloë Sevigny, Val Kilmer (playing someone who you totally wouldn’t expect Val Kilmer to be playing and making it very different to some of his other work), J. K. Simmons (ditto, he’s certainly not typecasting himself here), Toby Jones and the always utterly compelling Charlotte Gainsbourg as Harry’s friendly ex-girlfriend Rakel.

And the story beats are good too. Once you get into the idea that the scenes with Val Kilmer are flashbacks and slowly start to sew them together in your head with the case Harry is working on, the more sense they make. I did not see the relationship between Kilmer and one of the characters in the modern timeline until it was pretty much revealed, so that’s a good thing. However, this also leads me onto some of the bad stuff like... no matter how stupidly coincidental all of the puzzle pieces are when they fit together, the unlikeliness of them does not detract you from being able to spot the killer a good long while before that identity is made known. So that’s not so good.

Another bad thing is that, when we have the final denouement between Harry and the killer, Harry is competely powerless to do anything much and the demise of said killer is competely coincidental. A serendipitous moment which seems really stupid... ironically poetic given the film’s pre-credit sequence, sure but... yeah, it’s not the smartest ending it could have had. It probably works much better, I suspect, in a novel than it does for an audience when confronted with the irony in a visual manner but, there you go.

Back to my thing about pacing versus content. Yeah, it feels like the film is being rushed and severely edited. For such languid pacing I would have expected something more like a three hour film which takes its time to build up more depth to the characters and the causes of the story they find themselves in. This seems a bit choppy and... this kinda makes sense actually, in terms of the end result. It wasn’t until I was leaving the cinema that I realised that there were a lot more things happening in the trailer than you actually see in the final release print of the movie. So... I might be wrong here but... I suspect the studio shortened it to tighten it somehow when, quite possibly, it would have worked much better as a longer piece. I obviously can’t ever do more than guess at that one but... that’s my very best guess.

Like I said though... some nice things too.

One of them being the director's seeming visual obsession of people looking at things through windows. Most of the characters seem to be constantly putting themselves in situations where they are either outside and showing the audience what’s going on from looking in through a window into a scene or, the reverse... where something’s going on outside and the audience are looking at a character looking outside the window. It’s a really bizarre thing because I’ve not noticed anyone doing this kind of thing quite so often in a movie before and it became fairly amusing waiting for the next ‘through the glass’ shot to pop up.

Also, the murders themselves are quite inventively grizzly. They mostly involve people being cut up into pieces with decapitation clearly a favourite of the killer. The antagonist’s trademark is to build a snowman nearby and, quite often he will either leave a snowman’s head in the bloody neck stump of his victim or, vice versa, plop the victims head onto the body of one of his snowmen. So some interestingly gruesome visuals in this thing, for sure, although the director plumps to not focus on them for very long. There’s a nice moment when someone’s head is blown clean off with a shotgun, too, which is not telegraphed in any fashion and comes as a surprise. So some interesting artistic decisions made around violence and its aftermath in this film, I would say.

And finally we have  Marco Beltrami’s excellent score which nicely captures the languid pacing in the way Harry Hole proceeds about his daily life. It kinda sounds like a spy movie score from the mid to late 1970s in its tone at some points. Not as strident or highly stylised as, say, a John Barry score from that era and more like the kind of ‘softer but definitely a distant cousin’ of that kind of cold war music that you were getting a decade later. It’s a good one and I’m pleased that the score is scheduled to get a proper CD release later in the month. Looking forward to giving this one a few spins away from the movie.

So there you have it. The Snowman is not the terrible movie that some of the critics have been saying, I think but... it is quite disappointing in that it’s not a great movie either. Fassbender and Gainsbourg are absolutely marvellous in these characters and I’d like to see them both return to play them again. Alas, I suspect the box office on this one won’t be so great either so I suspect that’s not a prospect I can look forward to in the near future. This one isn’t essential viewing but it’s okay if there’s nothing else on at your local that you want to see. Maybe give it a go.

Jennifer's Body

Body Of Every Dense

Jennifer's Body
USA 2009 Directed by Karyn Kusama
20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone B/C

Yeah, okay. This is a much unsung gem of a movie as far as I’m concerned. I literally put this on because I didn’t need to watch anything further for a while where I’d have to write another review of it... the list is long enough at the moment. I just wanted to put on something to relax with and I remembered unexpectedly liking this a lot when I saw it on its initial cinema run. However... this is what happens when you get old and cranky, folks. After I finished the movie I went to have a look at what I had to say about it at the time and... it turns out it’s actually older than my blog and I hadn’t actually reviewed it before, after all. Since this is such a great little movie though, and something you don’t hear much of from people at present, I figured I should at least try and do it some justice on this column so... here we all are.

Jennifer's Body is writer Diabolo Cody’s next script to be filmed and released after her breakthrough script for Juno and... I have to wonder why it’s not more well shouted out by enthusiasts of the horror genre. It stars Megan Fox as the titular character, coming out soon after her second and final Transformers movie and, although she plays exactly the kind of ‘high school prom queen’ stereotype you almost expect her to be playing, she’s actually not the main protagonist of the film... that part is played by the amazing Amanda Seyfried as Jennifer’s ‘best friend forever’, Needy. The story starts with a framing device of Needy telling us her sad story as to why she is locked in a mental hospital with a reputation of being a violent ‘patient/prisoner’. Megan Fox is actually the main ‘antagonist’ of the movie and, frankly, she also does a great job of hitting all the beats you’d possibly expect her to as a credible movie villain and, although she is kinda overshadowed by Seyfried’s absolutely blistering performance as the cute nerd turned psycho avenger... Fox deserves a lot of credit for her turn here too and the chemistry between the two of them here is a testament to both them, I think.

The story tells of a small time rock band who play a concert at Jennifer and Needy’s hometown of Devil’s Kettle, with the real agenda of making off with one of the local virgins and sacrificing her in a bloody ritual to Satan as an exchange for rock n’ roll fame and fortune. However, when they burn the place down and make off with Jennifer, thinking she’s a virgin, they make a big mistake because, it turns out, if you sacrifice a non-virgin to the Devil, then the corpse later returns to life hosting the powers of a succubus but retaining the basic personality of the original host. That means she becomes a superpowered demon who has to seduce and kill men in order to keep her vitality. That being said, this version is a little toned down from the traditional succubus of legends in that, instead of killing men by taking their sexual energy (constantly draining them of semen etc), it’s more of a Hollywood demon style of deal, with lots of vampiric goriness, gut ripping and innards munching, on the part of Jennifer.

So of course, when Needy finally figures out what’s going on, thanks to a mostly unexplained, semi-psychic link she seems to have with Jennifer (as a lot of best friends seem to have, methinks),  she then has to read up on the occult and become a kick ass femme fatale in order to stop the evil that Jennifer has become. However, will she have worked it out in time to save her own boyfriend from becoming the next in Jennifer’s long list of tasty morsels?

The film is a great character piece with some wonderfully self aware dialogue and a strong shot of black humour running through it. If you want to see deadpan comedy masquerading as one of the many community victims of tragedy, then you have to see J. K Simmon’s performance as Mr. Wroblewski, which becomes even funnier when you realise that he has a hook for a hand at the end of his first scene. I don’t know why this detail amuses but the timing is impeccable and the irony of the reactions to the situations some of the teacher and parental figures in this movie find themselves in are bound to bring a smile to the face of even the most humourless audience members. I’ve said it about just a few films over the last 5 years on this blog but this movie is very much a Heathers or even Harold And Maude for the generation of moviegoers it’s aimed at. A smart and ironic black comedy which doesn’t back down from being just a little edgy in the majority of the places where that would matter. I think Diablo Cody’s screenplay is hitting the cross genre high school/horror/comedy nail right on the head with this one and, thankfully, the performances and direction on it really live up to the quality of the script.

And I don’t really have much else to say about Jennifer’s Body, I’m afraid. Can’t think of any real problems to highlight here and, although the shot design isn’t all that flashy, it’s very clean and leads the eye in nicely to where the director wants you to focus in the film. Definitely one for fans of horror and/or the teen comedy genre (which is a genre I usually like to stay away from, truth be told). Despite it’s sharp dialogue, it’s a bit of a switch your brain off and relax movie, really... but that does nothing to diminish the fact that it’s a tremendous amount of fun and well worth your time if your fun quotient isn’t already in overload. This is not the film it looks like it's going to be if you're one to judge a book by its cover (or a film by its advertising promotion) but you won’t go too far wrong with this one, it has to be said, and most people will find themselves ‘in’ on the joke for the running time of this movie, I would suspect. Definitely worth some time.

Dark Skies

Dark Grey

Dark Skies
USA 2013
Directed by Scott Stewart
Playing at cinemas now.

Non-warning: 
Any spoilers in here are those which are already in the trailer. 

It was well over twenty years ago that I first heard of Whitley Streiber in something other than the context of his early career as a horror writer. I read a report, I think online, about him having been seen going around the area he lived in and spending a small fortune buying all kinds of alarm equipment and firearms etc to make his home as unbreachable as he could to any kind of hostile invaders. The article took a slightly patronising tone, reminded people that he’d just written the “autobiographical” novel Communion, and metaphorically patting him on the arm as if to say, “There, there. We believe you.”

The thing is, and the thing that stuck in my mind when I read that small snippet of an article, was that, well why would you go out of your way spending all that money and taking all that time to fix up and install all these different devices, if you didn’t at least believe something was out to get you?

So I read the book and saw the movie and, frankly, what I read in the book chilled me to the marrow. And so, a few years before TV shows like The X Files and, um, Dark Skies, popularised this kind of stuff big time, I started doing some research in my spare time on the subject myself. I got the librarians at the place where I worked to get out inter-library loans on various of the more respected accounts of the phenomenon of... well...alien abduction, and began to really read up on it.

About the same time, a British guy named Nick Pope was working for the Ministry Of Defence and was assigned the task of investigating various UFO related reports which had piled up over the years and ascertaining if any of them had any interest or, indeed, posed a threat to the military. My understanding is that Pope didn’t believe in such hogwash and went at it with a very cynical attitude. The attitude didn’t last too long though because he found that a small percentage of the things he investigated really didn’t have any explanation, from what I gather, other than what he was trying to debunk, and he resigned and the MOD shut the project down. He carries on investigatng, somewhat less cynically, in a private capacity today, from what I can gather.

And, again, around the same time, someone came to work at the same place as me for a while and one of his previous jobs had been air traffic control. He “believed” totally and said after the kinds of things that you routinely see and get reported in that job, you have to sign the official secrets act.

So I carried on reading and two things came out of my personal research into extraterrestrial visitors.

One of the things I noticed is that the people who firmly believe this stuff and investigate it do tend to be the most cynical people going. They distrust everything but solid evidence and, sometimes, that evidence is there to be found (and ignored or covered up by any kind of government sanctioned body).

Secondly, I believed this stuff so much, because the cases made from various methods of research were so airtight, to be honest, that I had about three years of sleepless nights (that’s okay, I was younger and could handle that... but it was fear that kept me awake). I mostly, deliberately stay away from this kind of stuff now. I believe the matching accounts of groups of people on crowded streets (mayors, police officers and passers by) who all collectively witnessed single incidents of the most amazing and unbelievable kind and all independently reported these things... as much as I believe the aliens can be categorised and identified by most people involved in these encounters, even those who have come from small tribes cut off from the rest of the planet and who are “totally” unpolluted by anything happening in Western culture. They all draw the same drawings.

So yeah, I leave that stuff alone now because, frankly, I’m getting on now and I need my sleep.

And that’s exactly why competently put together movies like this one called Dark Skies (which has no ties with the similarly themed TV show from a couple of decades ago) work so well on me.

Now I saw a trailer for this movie and it looked pretty much like a standard haunted house meets Greys scare movie, Greys being a specific and most widely seen alien type (if you believe that kind of thing, but that’s exactly why they’re mined so much in modern popular culture). Well I have to say, this movie does pretty much everything as advertised. There are no twists, just scary visitations from our little grey friends (Zeta Reticulans, for the record) interwoven with a few other phenomena to spice up the scare factor and neatly summarised by the “Van-Helsing-but-only-in-an-advisory-capacity” alien researcher played so credibly by the always watchable J.K. Simmons.

The whole film is full of standard scare tactics and cliché ridden horror tropes but, that’s okay, because it is really all quite well put together and it certainly had my heart beating faster (but then again, as I have taken time to explain here, I’m prone to that kind of extra-terrestrial implied threat anyway). The music, by composer Joseph Bishara, is well put together and delivers all the modern atonal nightmarish quality you’d need in a score like this, sci-fi’d up with a bit of subsonic synthesizery stuff which kicks in when required. The direction and shot design are all pretty much adequate/competent and the performances are all fine too.

The writing is a bit patchwork in its sources, to be truthful, and the obvious attempt at misdirecting you away from the actual target of the extraterrestrial antagonists is both obvious and quickly guessed, so the ending is of no real surprise and it really could have done without the “beat you over the head with stuff you were more than aware of at the time” flashbacks in the little epilogue sequence... although the very last 30 seconds or so was a nice touch.

But, all said and done, the film is still quite scary (it veers from various research accounts at times to quite deliberately justify why it is trying to scare the audience at one point) and certainly, although nowhere near the best film made on this kind of subject material, it does still manage to be quite grippng and suspensful througout a fair few of the set pieces, despite the number of familiar “horror moments” which are piled on. So, yeah, if you like this kind of stuff then you certainly shouldn’t find yourself too dissapointed in this one. It’s a scary night out at the pictures.

And if you find yourself dweling on the dubious nature of the story and the presence of a malevalent extra terrestrial force on earth which "first" appeared on the scene during the age of science, ask yourself this... Why are elves, pixies, faeries and whatever other small creatures always popping up in various countries’ cultural mythologies?

And why do churches have gargoyles?