The Conjuring

★★★★

Mild Spoilers

Directed by James Wan
Written by Chad Hayes and Carey W. Hayes

Loosely based on real-life experts on the occult Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), who assist in authenticating cases before calling in the Vatican-sanctioned exorcists. The movie is about one of their most difficult assignments back in 1971, concerning the Perron family who encountered strange occurrences in their new home. It’s the one that also inspired the making of the Amityville movies.

No matter how much I see myself as a proponent of science, horror movies still scares me. A lot. Specifically, the supernatural ones. Science horrors like The Thing, Alien, The Fly I can take. But when it comes to the metaphysical, I’m a scaredy cat. I think Ringu might be the most frightening one for me. Goes without saying that I have a large stack of horror movie Blurays that are still left unwatched.

Back to The Conjuring. I like how the movie plays like a procedural and actually opens with a B case, in which they will quickly resolve before the end of the opening sequence. There is no doubt that the supernatural exists in the movie’s universe, but even so the Warrens’ investigations were methodical, sensible and even compelling. They didn’t just aimlessly flick holy water everywhere and call it a day.

Performances are strong across the board. I was surprised to see familiar faces like Joey King, Mackenzie Foy and Lili Taylor. Ron Livingston was the weakest link here, whom I thought didn’t sell his desperation convincingly enough. The standout was Farmiga, who exudes gravitas in everything she does. Wilson is good as the supporting and reliable husband and ghost-busting partner.

I noticed some influences from Asian horror cinema, e.g., women in white nightgowns, spirits latching on the backs of people, etc., probably coming from Australian director James Wan’s roots. (He grew up in Malaysia.) There are also nods to the classics like Poltergeist and The Exorcist. The Conjuring is really an amalgamation of several genres: a detective mystery, a haunted house story, and a possession flick rolled into one. It makes it unique from the never-ending slew of generic horror films, and I can see why a lot of people loved it.

It’s a good one; I’d recommend it. Now I just need to muster up enough courage to watch Part II, which some are already telling me is scarier than the first! Hopefully, I’d be done watching it before Halloween 2024!

Cocaine Bear

★★

Directed by Elizabeth Banks

Written by Jimmy Warden

Cocaine Bear is very, VERY loosely based on an actual incident in 1985 when a drug dealer tried to dump his stash of cocaine from an airplane, only to end up dead from a parachute malfunction, and his loot gobbled up by a wild bear who subsequently overdosed and died from its exotic meal. In the movie, the bear fictitiously went about tearing people to shreds in search for more of the white powder scattered across a forestry to sate its addiction. With the boffo box office that it’s doing (relative to its production costs), don’t be surprised to see more cheap bearsploitation films being released within a week.

I felt guilty for not defending M3GAN when people were deriding it for being silly and dumb. At least M3GAN had something to say, and that “audition” scene with the board of directors was absolutely riveting. Cocaine Bear had none of those. Outside of the cheap thrills of seeing a wild animal gratuitously dismember human beings, the majority of the movie was really dreary, with barely anything of interest to keep you engaged until the next bear rampage, while a number of other things even annoyed and frustrated. And speaking of bear rampages, the best and biggest set piece actually occurs in the middle section of the movie, which leaves the ending with a disappointingly unremarkable finish.

I did enjoy Aaron Holliday’s performance, who played one of the three smalltime crooks, and I did want to know if the bear survived by the end. (But not the humans, though.) The bear VFX wasn’t too bad.

If you enjoy B-movie schlock, go for it. For me, this felt like a waste of time. I doubt I’d ever revisit this movie again.

M3GAN

★★★★

Directed by Gerard Johnstone

Written by Akela Cooper and James Wan

Box up your toys and delete your AI apps, boys and girls, because if you’ve always been creeped out by life-like dolls and super-smart AI, this latest amalgamation of the two isn’t going to make things better! Allison Williams of Get Out fame plays Gemma, the creator of a sophisticated robot doll called M.3.G.A.N., whom she uses as a surrogate parent to her niece Cady (Violet McGraw) while she works overtime to keep her demanding boss David (Malaysian comedian Ronny Chieng!) from firing her. Stupidly, she forgot to put Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics into M3GAN’s programming, and the android begins to test its boundaries, and eventually crosses them.

Predictably, with robots-gone-berserk movies like this one, the robot does go berserk. And no, there are no Shyamalan-worthy twists here, sorry. But what’s not predictable though is the execution, which was way better than expected in terms of how it beautifully set up its premise and the relationships between the core characters, and that includes the robot itself. I respect that they took the effort to do this when everyone was just pre-judging this to be another shoddily put-together horror cash grab that is only all about the violent pay-offs. It’s really something that the movie could make me feel relieved when certain peripheral characters survived till the end of the film, because it made me care. They even managed to squeeze in a commentary about the use of devices and gadgets to babysit our children.

This certainly isn’t a reinvention of the wheel, but it gave it new treads and a sleek, shiny new hubcap, and I have to give credit where credit’s due. Williams, McGraw and Chieng were all great here, especially McGraw.

A lot of people would compare this with the Chucky/ Child’s Play films, but I think M3GAN has more similarities with the Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell. You’ll know it when you see it.

Barbarian

★★★★1/2

Mild spoilers

That’s it. No more AirBnB for me.

That’s all the synopsis I’m going to reveal, because they’re right about us needing to see this one for ourselves.

So, what’s good? It’s not really about the story, which is good, but the execution was better. And it’s refreshing to see someone finding different ways to tackle the horror genre and keep it (mostly) unpredictable.

My only complaint is that it still relies on people doing stupid things, because if not the movie would have been a lot shorter. But that’s genre conventions for ya. Also, the AirBnB lady, what the hell?? Did she even know??? Plot hole!!!

Still, good stuff.

The Wolf Man

★★★★1/2

Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.) returns to England to help his father Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains) run the family estate after learning about the death of his brother. There he woos Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers) by taking her to visit a travelling group of Gypsies one evening, and guess which mythical creature he would come across that very night?

Thus, poor Larry becomes the titular Wolf Man and goes on a killing rampage. Or, was that all just in his head? Curt Siodmak’s screenplay was originally written to be a psychological thriller that was ambiguous about whether the werewolf was actually real or just a figment of Larry’s imagination. Of course, the end product turned out quite differently and literally, but the elements of that original screenplay remained. There are deliberate inconsistencies like the unexplained difference between Talbot’s hybrid form and the wolf form of his predecessor. Because Talbot could not remember the events that transpired during his transformed state, he suspects that he is the werewolf that he killed all those people but could never be sure. I never expected these from what I thought would just be a cheesy, unsophisticated horror movie from the 1940s.

The performances were very good. Apart from Bela Lugosi (doing a cameo as one of the Gypsies) who rightly played his part a little more unhinged, everyone else took the subject matter seriously and gave a grounded, subtle performance. Even Maria Ouspenskaya’s Maleva didn’t take the expected wide-eyed eccentric ethnic character route. Of course it’s still all a little tame compared to how we would do it nowadays, but it was a different time then, with different sensibilities.

The werewolf effects, albeit dated, are still fairly creepy and unnerving. The wolf man has also become a very famous and iconic horror figure, and was recently homaged in Marvel’s special short feature Werewolf By Night. There were some goofy moments with Chaney Jr’s performance as the wolf man that were unintentionally funny. There was one instance where he let out a dog-like bark. But the violence, though not explicit, was surprising brutal, and helped maintained a serious tone throughout the movie.

Overall, I really enjoyed the movie for being more sophisticated than I expected it to be.

Interesting trivia:

• A lot of the werewolf lore that we assumed were based on existing myths, like the transference of the curse through bites and the pentagrams being the mark of a werewolf were actually made up by Siodmak for this film, including the “even a man who is pure at heart” Gypsy quote.

• Not sure if this is mere observation or directly from Siodmak himself, but the film is said to have parallels to Siodmak’s first-hand experiences of Nazi Germany, with the werewolf being a metaphor of Nazis attacking people who carry the mark of the pentagram.

• Both Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, who played the original Universal Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster respectively, were considered for the role of Larry Talbot/ The Wolf Man.

• This one’s from me, but I may be wrong: this might be the first and last time Lugosi ever played a werewolf.

• Lon Chaney Jr’s father, Lon Chaney Sr played the Phantom of the Opera in the 1925 film. His onscreen father, Claude Rains also played the Phantom in the 1943 one.

• Apparently, Lon Chaney Jr. was giving his co-star Evelyn Anker a hard time on-set because he was upset that his dressing room was given to Anker as punishment for vandalizing studio property while being drunk. He was calling her names and sneaking up on her with his full wolf man makeup on.

Poltergeist

★★★★1/2

Mild spoilers

The 1982 horror classic tells a familiar tale of a suburban America family encountering strange ongoings in their new home. When their daughter mysteriously disappeared one night, they believed it has something to do with the house, and reached out to a parapsychologist to help them recover their missing child.

Poltergeist isn’t a typical haunted house flick. For example, house owners Diane and Steve Freeling were pretty quick in realizing that their house was haunted. The “ghosts” here do not conveniently disappear whenever someone else walks into the room. Even the paranormal investigators were skeptical and at one point considered if the occurrences were rigged. Pretty impressive to see a 40-year-old film subverting genre tropes and letting its characters behave intelligently.

As for the cast, they were great - solid performances all around. I was disappointed to learn that none of them were nominated for Oscars. Mr. Incredible himself, Craig T. Nelson, plays the dad, and it’s amusing how much the Parrs resemble the Freelings. The amazing JoBeth Williams, playing Diane, is the lead of the film. Zelda Rubinstein as medium Tangina Barrons delivered the film’s standout performance, a mesmerizing monologue scene within the film’s third act. Network’s Beatrice Straight played the parapsychologist and she was also good. Carol Anne, the girl in the iconic poster, was played by Heather O’Rourke, whose burgeoning career was sadly cut short by her untimely passing just a few years after the film premiered.*

I almost forgotten to mention the instantly recognizable, Oscar-nominated score by Jerry Goldsmith, a very hummable tune with eerie undertones, and I love how that fits the movie perfectly.

If I had to nitpick on something, it’d be the fact that the movie wasn’t frightening enough. It’s more sci-fi/horror than traditional horror. I can see why some horror fans may find it underwhelming and off-flavor. Nevertheless, Poltergeist remains a surprisingly innovative take on the horror genre that has also inspired many films and TV shows like Stranger Things, and is certainly worth checking out.

Side note: You may have heard of the rumour that producer Steven Spielberg forcefully relinquished directorial reins from Tobe Hooper due to some on-set conflict. Hooper was famous for directing movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Salem’s Lot and Lifeforce, and they couldn’t be more different than Poltergeist, a film that is more E.T. than Eaten Alive (also a Hooper film). You can see why there were such speculations. According to what I’ve read, at the very least Spielberg did have creative influence over the film, and he edited the film, and supervised the special effects and the musical score without Hooper’s involvement. Nothing unusual about directors not getting final cut though. One famous example would be Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and I think he was locked out of the editing room at one point.

* Apparently, there is this thing called the Poltergeist Curse that purportedly caused the untimely deaths of five actors who were involved in the Poltergeist series of films. I was shocked to find out that the actor who played Carol Anne’s older sister, Dominique Dunne, tragically died in the same year the movie was released. Lou Perryman, who played Pugsley/Bluto in the first film, was murdered in 2009. Three other cast members including O’Rourke died of illnesses within the same decade.

Nope

★★★★1/2

Some spoilers; come back later if you wish to watch this film cold.

Sorry for being late to the party. For whatever reason, they decided to show Nope two weeks after the major film markets of the world had already seen it. So, this is going to be very old news to you, but Nope… is dope.

Horse trainer O.J. (Daniel Kaaluya) discovers some of his horses are missing, and suspects that UFOs are involved. O.J.’s sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) suggests that they try to capitalize on their problem by capturing high-quality footages of the UFO. Little did they know of the danger that they’re putting themselves on until the true nature of the UFO is revealed. Directed by Jordan Peele, who made the Oscar-winning film “Get Out” and also “Us”.

This is a very entertaining movie, in the way horror movies are. There are several scenes where bad things are about to happen to a large number of people. There’s also this one scene involving the lights in O.J.’s barn that was nail-bitingly creepy. The movie is also pretty funny, like how they made good use of its title in some tense situations. The first half was a little slow and quiet, but that’s just the filmmakers lulling you and bringing your defenses down so that the shocks land harder later on.

The UFOs: I thought I was going to see yet another generic UFO in a Hollywood flick, but Nope actually has an original take on that topic. It was very eerie to see the UFO darting across the sky, even in the daytime. I like how it also has unique interactions with everything on the ground that you may not have seen in other alien encounters films before.

Initially, I didn’t understand the point of Steven Yeun’s character’s subplot, but that’s because I didn’t realize that Yeun’s character already knew about the alien long before O.J. did. It did feel like they dispensed very crucial plot information a bit too quickly, resulting in me and a few other people literally missing the plot. Perhaps it’d no longer be a problem after a second viewing. Yeun’s story is also one of the few places Peele sprinkled some social commentary on, which has become his trademark.

Overall, “Nope” is a great retooling of the alien encounters genre, has quite a few tense and horrific moments, and is one of the more original films you can find out there. One of my favourites of the year.

Originally published on my Facebook Page, here.

Overlord

★★★★

No spoilers, but the movie doesn’t really have any twists

During World War II, a group of paratroopers are on a mission behind enemy lines to blow up a German radio tower, unbeknownst that the Nazis are conducting strange experiments in a secret lab below it.

Overlord is a good war movie. It takes itself pretty seriously on that front. If this had been based on true accounts of the experiences of paratroopers during the war, this would have been a very decent one. But since this was marketed as a horror movie, it’s no spoiler that our heroes will face off a few monstrosities conjured up by the aforementioned laboratory. The problem with this movie is that there were too little of the horror elements. This isn’t the Wolfenstein movie adaptation you were waiting for. If you removed that element entirely from the film, it still works perfectly as a war film. According to IMDb, the original script actually had more horror action, but they toned it down in the script rewrite.

Don’t get me wrong, the film is really well put together, even the horror parts. Nice VFX and practical effects. It is relentlessly thrilling and nerve-wrecking. There are a few really cool long takes that predates Sam Mendes’ 1917. The acting performances were pretty good, and you can tell that director Julius Avery knows what he’s doing. My big gripe was that the pay-off in the end wasn’t satisfying enough and felt too small-scale.

After the movie ended, I was wondering who the “overlord” was because he never appears or was mentioned about. Thanks to IMDb trivia, it’s actually the real-life code name for the Battle of Normandy. Sorry, spoilers if you haven’t seen world history.

Some familiar faces here. Wyatt Russell plays the co-lead and leader of the squad. You’ve seen him as John Walker in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Bokeem Woodbine is a character actor that you’ve seen in a lot of movies like The Rock and Spider-Man: Homecoming and he has a small role here. I was surprised to see Joseph “Eddie Munson” Quinn from Stranger Things 4, but don’t too excited as he only has a few lines. Pilou Asbæk, who is Batou in the live action Ghost in the Shell, is the big baddie. The protagonist is actually played by Jovan Adepo, who has been in Denzel Washington’s Fences, the Watchmen series and the recent mini series adaptation of The Stand. I read that there were other actors from Game of Thrones, but I haven’t seen that show, so I don’t know who they are.

Originally published on my Facebook page, here.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

★★★1/2

Medium-level spoilers

Directed by Sam Raimi
Written by Michael Waldron

For those who were complaining about Moon Knight being meandering, fret not, because the MCU theatrical division is back with its 28th outing that is jam-packed with all the razzle dazzle that you’ve been missing from its more contemplative and episodic brethren from Disney+. But is that a good thing? Straight out of the gate, we are plunged into a multiversal action set piece involving new MCU character America Chavez, Doctor Strange and… the monster from Edge of Tomorrow? There is a mysterious and powerful threat at play, so Strange seeks help from incumbent Sorcerer Supreme Wong, and also Wanda Maximoff, who may be the only person powerful enough to stop it.

Overall, it was a bit of a muddle. It doesn’t know whether it wants to be a Strange-Christine romance, a buddy-sorcerer movie with America, or Wandavision 2. With only a two hour runtime, they should have picked one story thread to focus on. As a result, none of the major plot threads have a satisfying enough of a conclusion, especially Wanda’s.

As a Sam Raimi joint, this felt too reined in. I was anticipating cackling demons, Dutch angles and morbid humour sometimes involving his brother Ted, but there were only very rudimentary Evil Dead-ish references that were oddly sapped of his trademark cheesy humour. His Spider-Man films were way more Raimi-esque in comparison. I don’t understand why you’d hire someone like Raimi and then shackle him.

What about the multiverse parts, you say? They did have some good fun with it. Those who have been speculating some things about the movie is going to enjoy what they see. Exciting though the implications may be, but this is the multiverse we’re talking about here. Things can still very much change if you think about it. But I was surprised by how little they did with it. At the end, I was like, is that it? Five movies in and still no signs of Kang, or Mephisto.

Don’t get me wrong, this is still a fairly enjoyable flick. The first Doctor Strange film remains his best outing to date, and I really loved how innovative and clever that one was. I like Multiverse of Madness more than Black Widow and Eternals, but No Way Home and Shang-Chi remain the best of the Phase 4 films.

Originally published on my Facebook Page, here.

Required viewings: Doctor Strange and Wandavision. There are mentions of events from Infinity War, Endgame, and No Way Home, but they aren’t as integral to the main story as the other two.

An American Werewolf in London

★★★★1/2

Super-synopsis: Two American backpackers wander into the Yorkshire moors and gets attacked by a werewolf. One of them survives, but becomes a werewolf himself and starts eating unsuspecting Londoners whenever the Blue Moon song plays in the background.

When I was a kid in the 80s, this movie was shown repeatedly on TV, albeit censored. What they didn’t cut though was the werewolf transformation. Of course, it was one of the most incredible movies I’ve ever seen, and stoked my imagination in a way Teen Wolf was never able to. Throughout the decades, for some reason I’ve never revisited the film, until Arrow Video released their beautiful 4K set, so I guess it was time to return to The Slaughtered Lamb.

As a werewolf flick, it was an evolutionary leap, providing a visceral, literal view of the werewolf transformation that haven’t been seen in any other film in the genre before. They also ditched the hybrid man-wolf design and went with a giant hound beast on all fours as the final form, which actually made the werewolf scarier. The movie also added to the mythology with its own original ideas, such as the victims coming back to haunt David but in their mauled and decomposing states, which ensured that the film continues to deliver on the horror in between the werewolf bits and kept the film interesting and engaging throughout. The nightmare sequences were also a nice touch.

I wished there was a little more characterization for the main characters . The trio of David Naughton, Jenny Agutter and Griffin Dunne were charming as hell, but David seemed only mildly troubled by the brutal death of his good friend Jack, and was mostly cheery and goofing around throughout. I guess they needed to sell the romance with Agutter’s Nurse Price, and a troubled and traumatized lead wouldn’t be a very fun person to fall in love with. It also felt that Price was the real protagonist of the film, but she also didn’t get enough screen time to establish her character a little better. For example, the whole subplot of the doctor investigating David and Jack’s attack could have been given to Agutter’s character instead. John Woodvine did a good job playing the doctor, but his character was unnecessary. It felt a little bit like a set up for a Van Helsing or Dr. Loomis-like character for possible future installments, but that never materialized, which made the character even more pointless in hindsight.

Another minor gripe would be the final reveal of the creature. Rick Baker’s work was fantastic, but he was working with a small budget and the technological limitations of that time, so any time the beast is in full reveal, it looks like a puppet with one static expression. I would have kept him in shadows at all times, but again this is just a minor nitpick. Rick Baker is still an incredible talent - my favourite of his work here is Jack’s gnarly face and neck wounds.

Since my last experience with the film was with the truncated TV version, I was surprised to hear the f-bombs and see the sexy, sexy stuff involving Naughton and Agutter, and that scene in the cinema, which only now did I realise was showing a skin flick all along. Luckily I was using my headphones or my neighbours would have thought I was having a very good time that night.

And a good time it was. A solid werewolf flick that has yet to be surpassed even till this day. I enjoyed Benicio del Toro’s The Wolf Man but An American Werewolf in London still edges over it. Highly recommended.

Originally published on my Facebook Page, here.