Stranger Things 4

Ex-stranging
The Experience

Stranger Things 4
USA May - July 2022
Nine episodes

Warning: Some spoilers running right up that hill at you.

Okay, it has to be said that series four of hit show Stranger Things was a little bit hit and miss for me. I didn’t like it as much as the second and third series, for sure but, I still liked it a lot better than the first. That being said, there’s lots of good stuff within it too so... let’s take a little look.

Okay, plot...  it’s Spring Break and various characters are reunited, after the close of the last season meant that some of them had to move away from the sleepy town of Hawkins. Something, though, is killing high school kids in Hawkins, making them see dark visions for a week or so in advance... before levitating them into the air, breaking their bones and then sucking their eyeballs back into their head. However, as with other seasons, the plot strands are split both globally and in terms of character threads, into three or four different groups, which merge and then diverge over the series. You have one lot trying to figure out what’s going on with the bizarre murders that look very much like they come from the Upside Down (the physical manifestation of the alternate, dark version of Hawkins where all the dark things dwell), you have Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) being retrained (through ordeal) to recover her superpowers by both Mathew Modine and Paul Reiser, themselves pursued by an army splinter group, because they believe Eleven is the only way to stop what is coming to Hawkins. You also have three of the kids trying to recover Eleven (along with new stoner character Argyle) and we have Joyce (Winona Ryder) finding out that Hopper (David Harbour) may still be alive after the events of the last series finale but, needs assistance to help break him out of a Russian security prison in Alaska. And, of course, the series concludes with all the characters reuniting but, things go a little differently this time around.

Okay, so lots to like here. The playing of a Dungeons And Dragons game crosscut with a basketball game is pretty well done. There’s a nod to the famous real life Hellfire Club (although mostly just in the name used for a D&D group) and, being as it’s set in 1986, the usual pop culture artefacts such as an Elvira poster, a Halloween mask and, in a series of moments which surprised everyone in terms of the spin off benefits... using the Kate Bush song Running Up That Hill as Max’s (Sadie Sink) favourite song, used to save her life and pull her away from the clutches of the creature at one point midway through the season, resulting in it being number one in the world charts for weeks (and still counting at time of writing). I remember when this song came out in 1985... it turned me on to Kate Bush big time and within the space of about six weeks I’d saved up enough money to purchase all of her albums, of which there were then five in total. Of course, in those days they were vinyl albums but they were certainly among the first non-soundtrack titles I upgraded to CD when the format was introduced.

Another great pop culture moment is when the kids are trying to find a drug supplier by only his first name. The two who work in a video store run it into their computer and narrow it down to about seven people in the area before checking the rental records... when they find the one who keeps renting out all the Cheech And Chong videos, they know they’ve got their man. And Dustin quoting Han Solo in normal conversation (Never tell me the odds!) was a nice touch. Not to mention the casting of Freddy himself, Robert Englund (from the Nightmare On Elm Street films... which don’t really appeal to me, I remember him best in V), as a key character in one episode.

Another thing I liked about the show was that the main villain turns out to be someone from Eleven’s past (she’s repressed the memory for so long) and, not only that, it turns out he’s the prime mover for the villains in all three previous seasons. I also liked that, although it seems for a little while that the day has been saved by the usual suspects... there’s one important character left in a coma and, as the Upside Down has ruptured Hawkins in various multidimensional rifts... well, it starts snowing that kind of ash that is in the air in the Upside Down... it’s clear the kids aren’t out of the woods yet...

Although I really thought they would be because, well, I was under the impression that the fourth series was the final one for the show but, no, it turns out that there’s going to be a fifth and final season at some point and, all I will say about that is, they’d better get their skates on. Those kids are growing up fast and when you compare them to flashback footage from previous iterations, it’s really noticeable. The other thing about that is... usually a year has gone by with each new show but... I just don’t see how they’re going to be able to pick up the storyline again without carrying on from exactly where they left it this time around. Which makes getting it in the can even more urgent, I would have thought.

Talking about the music though... there’s a thing about the needle drop of pre-existing tracks that I really didn’t like. Namely the way they’ve been cut up and looped about. For example, would it have killed them to cut the big Kate Bush scene (out of the many in the show using that song) to the actual track as it exists rather than keep chopping it about like that? And in one long scene where the villain is monologuing for quite a while, the music seems to start off with the last track from Philip Glass’ Koyaanisqatsi score before, bizarrely, jumping into his opera Akhnaten midway through. Not quite sure what’s going on there.

All in all, though, like I said, I still appreciated Stranger Things 4 more than the first season and I have the two volumes of score CD (not the stupid song compilations) on pre-order (which at two discs each makes it the most music we’ve had from a season in one hit). So if you liked the other three seasons you should probably be okay with this one. I’m kind of hoping that Season 5 will be a marked improvement though... and I hope they continue to bring Kate Bush along for the ride.

Stranger Things 2

Mazes and Monsters

Stranger Things 2
2018 USA

Okay so... people who read my review of Stranger Things (which can be found here) will know that I... well I didn’t hate it, I was just mostly not impressed with it in any way. Well, all that changed when I finally got access, via a friend, to Series 2 recently. It’s a real change of pace for the show, I felt and it almost feels like the clichés were all gotten out of the way in the first season so we hit the ground running on this one, immediately picking up from the loose end that Will Byer’s was left with ‘something’ from his experiences in the ‘upside down’.

This season won me over very quickly and it was great when you see the montage in the first episode as the four friends (minus Eleven) are seen making preparations for Halloween and go as the lead characters from Ghostbusters. This one felt a little more like the 1980s as I remembered it... in that rose-tinted nostalgia vision we all have for the decades we are growing up in and it was especially nice seeing the kids saving (and stealing) all their money to go down to their local amusement arcade to try and beat the new ‘animated video game’ sensation Dragon’s Lair. For those too young to remember, this was kind of an experimental game using proper cartoon footage which, if I recall correctly, cost about 5 or 10 times more to play than any of the other video games in the arcades, was way too expensive for me to play more than once and... always seemed to have a queue next to it.

Things like this heroic fantasy themed game would be important to those kinds of kids though and I appreciated the nostalgia hit here.

So, onto the plot and... it’s one of those again where you have a few different ends of ‘this season’s problem’ being solved by different sets of regular characters. This one involves a super intelligence, the mind flayer (named after a character from the Dungeons And Dragons manual), who has an army of growing demogorgons (the kids only had one to deal with last season) who are inhabiting an offshoot of the ‘upside down’ which has manifested and grown under the town of Hawkins and who the kids have to find a way of stopping... both helped and hindered by Will Byers, who has the intelligence of the mind flayer sitting inside him, using his mind and body as a host organism. We also have Eleven, who has been secretly living with the Sheriff of Hawkins, who runs off to pursue her own issues and has adventures in the big city, before finally reuniting with everyone at the end of the penultimate episode like the cavalry as she turns up to... if they’re lucky... kick some demogorgon butt by closing down the gateway to the ‘upside down’.

So... lots of things going on and, as you might guess, it’s riddled with loads of 1980s references and even the music, which is usually somewhat inspired by the sound of John Carpenter’s scores anyway, it seems to me, has a couple of moments in Eleven’s big city adventures with her soul sister who also exhibits special powers, where it either goes into a cover version or, more than likely, is straight needle-dropped in from one of my favourite cues from the score to Escape From New York. So, yeah... very much more my kind of thing, this series.

There’s even a new bully character... since the class heavy from last season turned out to be one of the nice guys after all and is now a protector for the main protagonists... and this new guy, who’s sister is the new love interest of one of the kids, is seriously channeling the vibe of Judd Nelson from The Breakfast Club, including looking just like him.

And yeah, good acting from all around including  Caleb McLaughlin, David Harbour, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, Millie Bobby Brown, Winona Ryder and Noah Schnapp  but, also, a couple of new characters played by Sean Astin (presumably here because he was in The Goonies, a film I’ve never seen) and Paul Reiser... who seems to be both channeling and also atoning for his role in James Cameron’s ALIENS here. And talking of the A L I E N universe, there are an awful lot of references to various films in the franchise here... or at least the first two... with a particular Harry Dean Stanton skin shedding scene coming to mind at one point in the narrative.

So yeah, I was all over this one and watched it through fairly quickly... although I’m already a season behind again and am not sure when I’ll get access to the third series. This one also has a kick ass final shot which, more or less, has been seen all over the show in the form of a sketch, as the writers revisit some of the tropes from the first series... such as a new bully character and, instead of Christmas tree lights being used as a communication device, we have gazillions of abstract sketches which, when taped up all over the house, give a map of where the creatures of the ‘upside down’ are living. And tonally it plays out exactly like the first series, with the same ‘will they, won’t they’ romance beats and concerns of the main characters. I was surprised at one of the scenes of bloody aftermath when one of the new characters is feasted on by a few demogorgons because, I dunno, we’d already seen it happen once and for some reason the camera decides to back to the carnage, perhaps to explain to the audience that, yes, this character you all worked so hard to accept and started to like has now been shredded but, I dunno, the style of the content choice on that moment seemed a little out of place here.

Still, other than that, Stranger Things 2 is a much better incarnation of the show and, like the series itself, this review is a little short, I’m afraid. Looking to see how the series progresses now and kind of hoping we don’t just get more of the same in the third one because, yeah, this particular set of manifestations of the ‘upside down’ has been a little done to death now, I think. Check this one out if you have the time to binge.

The Darkness

Five Little Indians

The Darkness
2016 USA Directed by Greg McLean
UK cinema release print.

Okay. Yeah... kinda liked this one.

The Darkness is one of those entertainments that you can add to the recent list of horror films which are not absolutely great movies or classics of the genre but, at the same time, are skilled enough with the clichés and shorthand of their archetype to be able to deliver an enjoyable and competent addition to the list of similar films being made. Where The Darkness really wins some respect from me is with the addition of the Native American demons and their hostile attempt to return from the dimension that they were trapped in many years ago by their own people. Don’t quite remember that kind of mythology being tapped before (although I’m sure somebody must have already covered it at some point).

The film starts off with Peter and Bonny, played as well as you would expect by Kevin Bacon and Radha Mitchell, and their two children, on a vacation with their friends near the Grand Canyon. The youngest of the two, the boy, is autistic and, when he’s left alone for a minute by his sister who’s supposed to be watching him, he falls through into a cavern and finds five pebbles inscribed with icons and which he removes from their specific, ritualistic place in the cave, taking them home in his ruck sack. This, of course, opens the household up to various ‘haunting’ phenomena, which the boy is usually blamed for, as this has allowed the all powerful demons something to anchor themselves onto, so they can begin to free themselves from the confines of their prison. Of course, because the boy Michael (played by Gotham’s young Bruce Wayne, David Mazouz), is autistic, he can see what ‘the sky people’ are doing and even tries to help them for most of the picture.

It’s nothing particularly special as a movie, for sure, but it does have that mythological edge to it in the Indian legend. In terms of the story and the eventual ‘final solution’ of the movie, it does at least stick with the rules and back story it sets up for itself... something which some horror movies seem to have trouble doing, these days, for some reason. So I was pretty glad when we had some follow through on this stuff beyond the point of... this is how the spooky, sinister force came to be here and now we’re just going to do our own thing with it, without referring to the origins again.

The film is fairly well shot and, though it doesn’t exactly go nuts on the intensity of the scares along the way, it does get quite suspenseful at some points in the movie. The use of black dirt handprints as a signature that a ghostly and demonic presence is at work is used quite well a lot of the time and these are used to build tension throughout as they are manifested in various places, including being imprinted on a couple of the characters themselves, when they face their supernatural opposition.

The performances in this are all pretty good, too. Bacon is always cool, as is Radha Mitchell... who really needs to get more lead roles. David Mazouz is very good as the autistic son and his character’s sister, Stephanie, played by Lucy Fry, also does well at portraying an angry and troubled teenager. It was nice seeing Paul Reiser back on the big screen, playing an even bigger and annoying idiot than he did in ALIENS but it was the character of his wife who I really sat up and took note of. She’s not in it that much but it was nice seeing the beautiful Ming-Na Wen, aka Agent May from Marvel’s Agents Of SHIELD on the big screen. We need more of her in Hollywoodland too, me thinks.

So not much more to say about this one except we have another nice touch in the fact that the person (or people) who the family go to in order to fight back against their supernatural threat are actually of some help in this case (as those kinds of ‘Van Helsing’ figures were in the Insidious series too, I guess)... although, at the end of the day, any salvation in the final act comes from a different avenue. In fact that, for me, was the one weak point of the film... in the last ten minutes I was at a place where I started thinking... “Oh, really. They’re going to do that, now?” However, it does at least fit in with the stuff we know about the antagonist demons from their back story so, I wasn’t too upset by the place the ending went to. Although, it did feel a little anti-climactic, if truth be told.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say on this one. The score by Johnny Klimek was pretty good and perhaps just a little more subtle and less ‘stinger led’ than a lot of modern horrors have been. I’d probably buy the score if it was available but... so far, there seems to be nothing released on CD for this one. Maybe we’ll get something released later, though, if the film does well enough at the box office?

So there you have it. A pretty short review and, for some reason, I don’t have much to say about this one. If you’re into horror movies then you probably won’t be blown away by The Darkness but it’s certainly well put together and good enough to go on your ‘to watch’ list, I would have thought. If you’re not that used to horror movies then this will probably scare you enough into watching some more of them... or avoiding them. Not sure which but it is fairly effective in certain sequences, at any rate. Not one I’d go out of my way for but certainly worth spending a little time with, I think. So maybe give this one a go.