Despite an intriguing premise and a major John Carpenter vibe, DISCARNATE (2018) is a hot mess express, though it manages to gain some coherence by the end.

The film begins with Dr. Andre Mason’s (Thomas Kretschmann) child dying, which sets him on the path to find out what happened to him and also to determine if there’s life after death. Fast forward to him receiving a drug from a woman named Maya (the gorgeous Nadine Velazquez) that facilitates contact with the spirit world, and then fast forward to Mason and his group of researchers testing the drug. Of course things are going to go wrong, and I’m looking forward to it. I’m picturing I’m in store for HELL HOUSE meets SILENT HILL, which would have been super cool.

Unfortunately, the wonkiness of the first act’s pacing starts to seep into the characters, dialogue, and everything else. The researchers all take the drug and then wander off to do their own thing. There’s zero scientific protocol to make the experiment seem even remotely authentic. The monitor from the organization funding the experiment plays the jerk seemingly just to be a jerk.

Then things go to hell fast. There’s little contact with spirits but the real threat isn’t them but a formless creature that feeds on the living so as to become mortal again. The more of the drug the researchers take, the more the creature is able to notice and interact with them, putting them all in danger. It’s here the film gains some coherence to come in for a solid landing.

The film has a lot going for it, there are things to like here, and it’s obvious real love and a lot of work went into it. There’s some decent creep factor, the premise is terrific, and the creature is pretty good. But it falls apart with sloppy dialogue, odd pacing, and too much going on in a scientific experiment that doesn’t remotely behave like one. I have to give DISCARNATE a C+, though dedicated horror fans might love it.

Horror movie/art world satire VELVET BUZZSAW (2019, caught on Netflix) works far better as satire than a horror film, but the result is a lot of fun in no small part due to solid performances from a terrific cast.

The film initially introduces us to art critic Morf Vandewalt (Jake Gyllenhaal delivering a unique blend of earnest and smarmy), who at an art convention starts an affair with Josephina (Zawe Ashton), an employee of Rhodora Haze (Renee Russo, rocking it), owner of the lucrative Haze Gallery and formerly a member of a rock band called Velvet Buzzsaw.

When an old man in Josephina’s building dies, she discovers a treasure trove of paintings in his apartment that are disturbingly visceral. Knowing they are bound for the trash, she takes them and cuts a deal with Rhodora to sell them to her rich clients. But the paintings are haunted, and don’t want to be sold, resulting in a trail of death.

The deaths themselves are predictable and not very interesting, though there are some superbly comical elements to it, such as people visiting a museum mistaking a blood-soaked corpse as being part of the exhibit and admiring it. Where VELVET BUZZSAW shines is in its satire of the high-brow art world. The ensemble collection of characters, all played by solid actors from Gyllenhaal and Russo to John Malkovich, are all bullshitting, backstabbing, manipulative, ruthless, and greedy, so there’s a comeuppance aspect to their deaths. The esoteric art dialogue is spot on for the kinds of things you hear in that world, as is the industry insider machinery engaged in building brand and value into artists and art.

Unfortunately, while the satire shines and the characters make the movie a lot of fun, as a horror film, VELVET BUZZSAW is weak and predictable, and even though the characters die “artistically,” let’s say, the two elements of the film never really mesh to its rich potential. An example of a missed opportunity is the paintings exact misery on their owners individually, while I kept hoping for a wholesale massacre at a museum exhibit, which would have made for an amazing climax.

Overall, VELVET BUZZSAW is fun and quirky, and I enjoyed it, though as a horror movie it could have been so much more.

The ad for the original SUSPIRIA (directed by Dario Argento, 1977) completely freaked me out as a kid, so when the 2018 SUSPIRIA remake came out, I resolved to check it out. I found it an overwrought if strangely compelling film that by the end adds up to something more than the sum of its parts.

The film is about a young woman Susie (Dakota Johnson), who abandons her Mennonite family after her mother’s death in 1977 to travel to Berlin and join a dance school led by a group of enigmatic women including Madame Blanc (an understated but intense performance by Tilda Swinton). These women turn out to be witches in the midst of a power struggle between Blanc and the presiding, physically waning matriarch, Madame Markos, who claims to be the incarnation of Mother Suspiriam. They are planning a ritual to place Markos’s spirit into the young body of one of their dancers. Susie’s natural dancing talent and spiritual sensitivity makes her an ideal candidate and culminates in a grisly confrontation.

The film is overwrought in creating tension that isn’t there and by overworking the camera with tilts and zooms that seem to have no purpose. There’s a lot of political subtext, with the Berlin Wall often shown along with newscasts about hijackings and assassinations. The political stuff has been criticized and subjected to its own overwrought interpretations by critics, though to me they’re there just to remind us we’re in Berlin in the year 1977. Critics also spotted numerous big themes in the film, though the only one apparent to me is the matriarchal power struggle. What comes through far more strongly is a reach to celebrate a distinct horror aesthetic.

The SUSPIRIA remake is quite beautiful in its design and becomes increasingly engaging once the director stops celebrating the art of film and starts telling a real story. It’s not very scary, though it has its grisly moments, and the gory ending is quite something. The witches themselves are pretty interesting, and I enjoyed their history more than the real historical subtext to a point I wished there was more of it and less of the other. Overall, I liked it, admittedly a lot, though I can’t say I loved it or that it stuck with me as I thought it might. Definitely recommended for horror aficionados looking for something fresh; for the rest, YMMV.