She Dies Tomorrow

Some Time To Die

She Dies Tomorrow
USA 2020
Directed by Amy Seimetz
Blue Finch Films

Warning: This film has been called spoiler proof by angry reviewers, it seems to me but, I think it’s fair to say this review has light spoilers.

Okay, I’ll say up front that I have mixed feelings about She Dies Tomorrow. I sought it out on a recommendation from someone and so it does have its fans but, it seems there’s a heck of a lot of negative criticism for this film too and I can kinda see why. That being said there’s very little in the film not to like, except for the lack of clarity on the central premise... but it’s a great hook.

We start off with a character called Amy (played by Kate Lyn Sheil from the great Brigsby Bear, reviewed here). Clearly something is wrong with her and then we flash to someone who we later find out was in a relationship with her... he is in a room and starts going mad thinking he’s going to die tomorrow. Then Amy wakes up from a nightmare and returns to her empty house. She rings a friend because she’s anxious... she keeps stopping and starting as a realisation hits her every now and again. At some point the title of the movie is suddenly flashed on the screen for two seconds, blaring music like a jump scare... and then we continue to watch Amy slowly becoming disjointed from reality. Is a sequence showing blood cells interacting, a hint that she has a virus? She starts exploring textures with her sense of touch and looking at things... caressing flat surfaces as something which sounded a bit like Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater (it’s probably not but that’s what it reminded me of) plays over and over on her vinyl record turntable. 

Her friend Jane (played by Jane Adams) comes and Amy tells her the thing which has been bothering her. She knows for a fact that she is going to die tomorrow... or at least she believes she will. Jane thinks she is having an alcoholic relapse (which technically she also is because, she’s drinking like there’s no tomorrow... because she believes that’s the case) and goes off. However, when we follow Jane home, she also gets the same idea that she, herself, is going to die tomorrow.

While Amy checks out the best cremation urns on the internet and decides she wants to be turned into a leather jacket after she dies, we follow the ‘also coming unhinged’ as she crashes her brother’s wife’s small birthday party... and tells them she’s going to die. Not long after she leaves them, the four people there also believe they will die the next day. 

And so it goes as we follow, primarily, Amy and Jane (and a few others but to a lesser degree) as they go about the evening contemplating their existence and getting into encounters with people they also infect with.... I dunno... an idea. 

At some point, the flashbacks from Amy’s very recent past, which eventually dovetails back into the start of the movie, show us how she came to be ‘infected’ but doesn’t show how the chain starts and, I’m sad to say, doesn’t clue us in to what’s happening. Now, that might have been okay... like a good zombie movie, the cause of the effect is rarely discussed but, in this case, there’s no actual pay off either and I think that’s why people may be having a problem with it (at least, some of the appalling reviews I’ve read). I also normally don’t mind when a movie doesn’t have a traditional closure moment but, frankly, with a mystery concept and leaving us with no idea if any of the people in this do, actually, die tomorrow... it feels a little off.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the fact that this film is basically taking an idea... if you think about it, it’s very much an M. R. James pass the curse story variation on Casting The Runes, found in such as movies like Ringu, Drag Me To Hell and It Follows (except there’s no getting rid of it so it’s a little more like a virus in some ways)... and then exploring the responses and reactions of the people who have been hit by this growing pandemic of certainty that they are going to meet their own demise the next day. And, yeah, I do appreciate the emotional areas into which this film strays and the way in which it explores humanity’s reaction to the prospect of its near demise... but the hook could have had just a little more back up to it, I felt. 

That being said, the director has an eye for interesting visuals. So some nice shot compositions where, for instance, Amy is framed by an upright rectangle formed by an alcove-like space into another room. And she certainly demonstrates that she’s into textures as much as her namesake protagonist, sometimes using big, vertical solid blocks to split the frame. And there’s also a lot of bright, flashing colour in certain sequences too... during episodes when the ‘victims’ lives are invaded by sudden spurts of enveloping lighting like they just strayed into a David Lynch nightmare and then are suddenly hit by distorted, indecipherable voices in the background (we know from one character that she’s hearing the voices of people long dead in her life)... so, yeah, visually the film is an absolute treat.

And so is the acting. Everyone is great in this and it feels like one of those films where certain things might have been left unscripted and worked on with the actors to build up their characters and scenes. Possibly not but, if this was strictly following the script then that would be a surprise to me, for sure. I suspect there was a lot of improvisation on the film.

So... I got a lot out of the film for sure but Tomorrow She Dies is not something I would recommend to many people (if any) because it sets up and executes such an intriguing prospect... I even thought we were heading into Philip K. Dick ‘reality is not what it seems’ territory at one point... but fails to deliver any hint or clue as to what is really going on. Like the ground zero moment for this ‘infection’ and I get the feeling that this concept must have been explored by the writer but then maybe just deliberately pared back for the audience and it just didn’t quite make it for me. It felt just a little bit thrown away and so, while I appreciated the way the concept was explored and the ideas it threw up as a consequence, I don’t think this is one I’d watch again.

House Of Dracula

Creeping House

House Of Dracula
USA 1945 Directed by Erle C. Kenton
Universal Blu Ray Zone B

Many people regard House Of Dracula as being the final proper entry from this era to feature Universal’s top three horror franchise characters. Don’t worry though... those people are wrong and not being properly respectful of where the franchise went in the next movie in the series.

House Of Dracula took an awful long time to come out on the DVD home video format and, as a result, it took a long time for me to catch up to it again since seeing it as a nipper. It came very late in the game and wasn’t released on Universal's original run of classic monster DVDs until the reissues, some years later. Thankfully, by that time it was here to stay and is now out in a proper Blu Ray transfer. The missing piece of the Universal horror puzzle is now as easy to see as all the others.

I remember when I did finally catch up with it (having remembered nothing of the film from when I was around 5 or 6 years old), I was heavily disappointed with the movie. The big two problems for me with this one are... well, for one thing, it’s supposed to be a direct sequel to the same director’s House Of Frankenstein (reviewed here) from the year before and, indeed, includes the same three main monsters played by the same actors... John Carradine as Dracula, Lon Chaney Jr as The Wolfman and Glenn Strange as the Frankenstein Monster. However, although all three characters met their demise in the last film, the only one who has an explanation of how he survived his death is the Frankenstein monster - who is still clasping the skeletal remains of Boris Karloff’s character from the previous film... although they, quite bizarrely, have been washed up in the mud of an undersea cavern. A cavern which, by a strange coincidence, leads into a secret passage revealing Frankenstein’s old laboratory, below the estate of this film’s scientist character, Dr. Edlemann, played by Onslow Stevens.

Not only that but... the film is once again set in Vissaria, where surely the villagers would remember Lawrence Talbot from that time many years ago (in the last movie) when he was there before. It makes no sense.

The other big problem with the film is that, although the ‘big three’ are in each other’s presence in a scene or two in their normal guises, they never actually get to properly meet up in their full-on monstrous incarnations at any time in the film. Dracula is dead by a certain point in the film (well okay, deader... although has transferred his blood into Edlemann, thus turning him into a vampiric killer with the sole purpose of reviving the Frankenstein monster) and, astonishingly for the franchise, Lawrence Talbot is actually cured of his werewolvery, before the Frankenstein monster is revived for the last five minutes of the film. It turns out that all that was causing his ailment was pressures on the brain from calcium deposits, which fooled his glands into thinking his thoughts of turning into a werewolf were true and caused the body to change in the same way. Um... yeah, that really holds no water at all when you think of the origins of the character in the first film and the ‘man out of time’ nature of Talbot, who by now must be nearly 100 years old in terms of when each film was set (Even though the settings of each film are, somehow, always the 1940s... yeah, let’s just screw the continuity again right Universal? After all, nobody was ever going to see these films again once they’d left the cinema on their original release and they would then be forgotten forever.). So yeah, he’s cured but the treatment makes no sense to the symptoms and, anyway, as we’ll see in the next film in the series... the cure obviously didn’t last that long.

Unfortunately then... a monster mash up with no actual mashing up of the monsters and a sequel which makes no attempt to tie itself into the other movies, not even the same director’s House Of Frankenstein from the year before. Not to mention that, in a similar fashion in this film... well, Dracula’s actual house is nowhere to be seen. Unless you count the coffin in the cellars of Edlemann’s estate.

However, for all that and even excusing the cheapness of the budget on this one, if you can get over the disappointment of the main monsters not having a big fight at the end, you will find that this is actually a pretty good movie. It’s really nicely shot and the other elements that make for a classic Universal horror, even down to the casting of Lionel Atwill playing a similar law enforcement role to others he’s played in the Frankenstein movies, are all present and nicely done. There are some great shot set ups such as one, where Dr. Edlemann goes to open the door of his laboratory, pictured opposite camera and centre screen, which uses the perspective and some beautifully distorted, gothic shadows bending up into the middle to really draw the eye into the focus of the shot.

And talking of focus, when one of Edlemann's assistants looks at the sleeping Dracula, he hypnotises her and the whole right hand side of the screen is like someone has applied vaseline to the lens to fog it up, so only the assistant struggling with consciousness can be focused on. I don’t think it is actually vaseline in this case because the fog seems to move a little later on in the shot but it’s very well done however they did it.

There’s another great moment where the same assistant, played by Jane Adams, witnesses the other assistant (played by Martha O'Driscoll) under Dracula’s thrall and they both walk past a mirror. But no, it must be a window into a replica of the set with another actress behind the frame because, as the two walk in front of it, Dracula casts no reflection. It’s a wonderful shot and this kind of trick always reminds me of the ‘mirror scene’ between Groucho and Harpo dressed as Groucho in Duck Soup. Similarly, the moment where Edlemann finally comes under the transformation of Dracula's blood and he is seen standing in front of a mirror as his reflection slowly disappears is, for 1945, exceptionally well done.

Other things of note would be the fact that his lab assistant, played by Jane Adams, is the latest in the long line of hunchback assistants in the Frankenstein franchise. The fact that the hunchback is a female might well have been a first in movies and, similarly, the fact that she’s quite an intelligent and peaceful character is also a first for the hunchbacks of the franchise. So good for them. This film even has a scene which, finally, gives us what we’ve wanted to see since the first of The Wolfman films. The arrogant ‘doctor of the mind’ telling Lawrence Talbot, who is locked in a jail cell, in front of one of his assistants and Lionel Atwill, that his belief that he turns into a werewolf is really all just in his head. Then, just after he’s said this, the full moon rises and Talbot proves him quite wrong as he changes into his ferocious alter ego and tries to escape his cage.

And that’s about it for this one. Lovers of the Universal horror franchise will recognise a lot of the musical moments in this (correctly or incorrectly credited to Willam Lava) from previous films by the likes of Salter and Skinner and that certainly gives it a more authentic feel than, say, The Mummy’s Curse from the year before (and reviewed here). As I said... it’s a shame the monsters never really got the chance to fight but, even though Universal didn’t renew Lon Chaney Jr's contract after this film (he can also be seen as the Frankenstein Monster in a few shots tracked in from The Ghost Of Frankenstein, reviewed here... in fact, there’s even a dream sequence using shots from the majority of Frankenstein films, including some with Karloff), he would return along with both Dracula and the Frankenstein monster in a movie which, finally, gave us the big monster fight scene audiences were waiting for... and, in the process, the monsters saved and rejuvenated another famous franchise... but I’ll get to that story when I review that movie here.

Brigsby Bear

Bear Foot In The Dark

Brigsby Bear
2017 USA Directed by  Dave McCary
UK cinema release print.

Warning(ish): Because of the nature of the film, to talk about it adequately means there will be some spoilers but, having said that,
the spoilerage is pretty much what you see in the trailer.

Brigsby Bear is an utterly charming movie about a young(ish) man trying to reintegrate into society after a lifetime of not being able to live in it. It’s also quite funny and extremely moving in places.

As the film opens we meet James (played by Kyle Mooney, who also co-wrote this) who is living a life with his parents played by Mark Hamill and Jane Adams. It’s an existence very reminiscent of the life lead by the children in the family of the film Dogtooth (reviewed here) in that James has been shut off from the outside world and any other people for most of his life. He is lead to believe the air in the world is unlivable due to it being contaminated with ‘Skinser’s Disease’ and, as he gazes out of the dome of his family home with his dad, looking at the large, mechanical bees and robotic fox, he wonders if there’s more to life. He’s a bit of a genius due to his family being extremely educated and he spends his life watching, talking and thinking about the 700 plus (and growing) episodes of the TV show Brigsby Bear. He even posts his theories about the show on the Internet forum to the two or three survivors in the world who also watch the show (or who he thinks to be other people but... they’re not). And that’s his life...

Until the FBI, who have been searching for James since he was abducted as a baby, raid the place and reunite James with the real parents he’s never even known, who live in the much larger, real world with rules and conventions he doesn’t even know about. So he meets, and goes to live with, his mother and father (played by Michaela Watkins and Matt Walsh) and his sister Aubrey (played by Ryan Simpkins). As importantly, he gets to know the detective assigned to his case, Detective Vogel (played by Greg Kinnear) along with some of his sister’s friends including Meredith (who is played by an amazing little actress called Alexa Demie) and Spencer (who is also played at total levels of coolness by Jorge Lendeborg Jr). However, the only thing that James is remotely interested in is finding out what happens in the next, upcoming episode of Brigsby Bear.

It’s then that the true nature of James’ screwed up life hits home when he is told that his ‘dad abductor’ was making all those episodes just to keep him entertained... shooting them at a small studio with an actress who was told it was for a local cable channel. James is distraught but, after he goes on a cinema trip with his new, original dad and is suitably impressed, someone tells him that anyone can make a movie. So, much against his original parents’ wishes (not to mention his psychiatrist),  he recruits various new friends and, with the help of Detective Vogel, who harbours dreams of being an actor and has access to some 'impounded evidence' of props and costumes... he slowly begins to make a movie concluding Brigsby Bear’s adventures as a way of dealing with the world around him.

The film is just enchanting, too, as we see James try to interact with the people in this new world and become accepted, not just by the people close to him but, by people all over the world as old episodes of his VHS collection of Brigsby Bear tapes gain popularity over the internet. The performances are absolutely amazing and the way the camera moves and captures the various scenes is very ‘fly-on-the-wall’ and intimate.

It's a work of art filled to the brim with richly astonishing and emotional moments too. My favourite two would be...

The scene where James tracks down Arielle Smiles (played by Kate Lyn Sheil), who is working in a diner and who played the two ‘twins with power’ in the Brigsby Bear show for the money. The scene in the diner between Sheil and Mooney is really quite moving, as Arielle tries to cope with what she now knows to be the truth of the situation. There’s a wonderful pay off towards the end of the film where she returns for another performance.

The other scene which was quite stand out for me, in a movie which is actually chock full of wonderful moments, is where James goes to visit his ‘abductor dad’ in jail. In a wonderfully emotional scene, Mark Hamill conveys the warmth of someone who knows he did wrong but still loves James as his own son. However, all that matters to James is that he, tape recorder in hand, gets his old dad to record the voice-over narrative in the ‘special voice’ for his new Brigsby Bear movie script... and Hamill’s obvious talents as a voice artist (he’s been voicing animated characters like The Joker in Batman cartoons, amongst other things, for years) are quite evident here.

And there’s not much more I can say about this one, I think. Apart from the fact that it’s easily one of the best movies of the year. For something which has a character who doesn’t have too many options which could segue into a fully integrated happy ending, the film finishes absolutely perfectly with a warm and upbeat, ‘feel good’ ending which certainly does nothing to betray the dark set up and leaves you with a sense of hope for people and communities. A really cool movie and, bearing in mind that it turned out I made up exactly half of the audience numbers on my own on its opening night at my local... one which I hope more people will get the opportunity to experience at some point. Absolutely 100% recommended to anyone who loves cinema. Go see it while you can.