Movies |

ANNIHILATION (2018)

June 8, 2018 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

While it appears to aim for the gravitas of ARRIVAL, ANNIHILATION (2018) doesn’t quite make it, but overall, it’s a solid sci-fi film I enjoyed quite a bit.

Based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer but having more in common with HP Lovecraft’s story “The Colour Out of Space,” ANNIHILATION presents us with a terrific mystery. An extraterrestrial object fell from the sky and struck a lighthouse, producing a psychedelic shimmering haze that is expanding across the landscape. Among the expeditions that went in, there were no apparent survivors until the husband of a biologist named Lena (Natalie Portman) surfaces at their home after being missing a year. After he collapses into a coma, Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) recruits her and three other women to journey into the shimmer to try to discover its source. As the shimmer is steadily expanding, a lot is at stake for the world, but for Lena, she wants to know what happened to her husband and make up for a betrayal.

The women’s trek through the corrupted wilderness is great, with plenty of weirdness that is eventually explained with an engaging reason. The creatures and bizarre landscapes they encounter, and the steady degradation of their minds and bodies, are convincing and compelling–most of all the fact the ET appears to be more a mindless phenomenon than an intelligence. Where the film falls flat for me is in the characterization. The women are all broken in some way, mirroring the corruption of the shimmer, but none of them are particularly likeable except possibly for Dr. Ventress, whose monotone coldness oddly makes her the most interesting of the group. Lena’s husband is strangely miscast. He’s a fine actor, but he and Portman offered up zero chemistry. If he’d been jolly and less cold, their relationship would have been far more interesting, and it would have offered up a great contrast against the current coldness among all the characters.

The ending is particularly fun. The mystery of what happened to Lena’s husband, the confrontation with the source, the bizarre landscape, Lena confronting the “alien,” all of it was done in an intelligent way. The final reveal is typical Hollywood, but it didn’t detract from my enjoyment. Overall, it’s a top-notch sci-fi film.

WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS (2014)

June 1, 2018 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

I put off watching WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS after seeing the trailer, as I thought the conceit was funny but would be hard to sustain for an entire movie. Boy, was I wrong. They pulled it off and then some. It’s damn funny almost throughout.

This New Zealand film is a mockumentary about vampire housemates (Jemaine Clement of FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS, Taika Waititi, Jonathan Brugh) dealing with immortality and being a vampire in modern times. When they befriend a human and turn a hipster into a vampire, they deal with the disruption.

The vampires are all tropes–you’ve got Nosferatu, Dracul, an Anne Rice vampire, and the new kid who sees himself as a TWILIGHT vampire. The intersection of these tropes and the mundane modern world is unexpectedly hilarious, charming, and never phoned in. The film plays it all with heart, subtlety, and a lot of fun.

If you like the movie, FX just signed up 10 episodes of a series based on it.

RAVENOUS (2017)

February 12, 2018 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

RAVENOUS (2017) is a Canadian horror film (Canada Netflix, I hear coming to U.S. Netflix March 2018) about a zombie-like plague that has devastated a small town in rural Quebec. Essentially, it is basic survival horror, with a disparate group of people who band together to try to survive.

While observing many traditional conventions and effectively building tension throughout, the film stands out by focusing on the emotional connections between the characters, and there’s a real cinematic flair to it, an artistry that overcomes its relatively low budget. An old man who fled his infected wife and sons tells another survivor, “It’s crazy, but the whole time I was running, I wanted to turn around and tell them I loved them.” A “perfect wife” loses her family and becomes a killing machine. A misfit and a big city woman bond over keeping a little girl safe.

There are plenty of incredibly tense moments in the film, such as a desperate running battle in the woods at night, noise traps going off by the dozen as a horde of infected draw near, and more. The infected do creepy things reminiscent of CELL, such as building bizarre constructions of household objects and staring at them in a trance.

Now to my two criticisms. First, the characters do a lot of dumb things. Noise at night? Let’s walk into the woods alone to check it out. The zombies have a way of popping out of nowhere, George Romero style, to deliver a perfect bite. These elements threaten to make it just another indie zombie movie, but the overall effort and attention to character and cinematography elevate it anyway.

So overall, I don’t see it as one of my favorites, but I enjoyed it, and it got me, so I’d recommend it, though of course YMMV. Be sure to watch a small scene after the credits. I rarely watch until after the credits but did this time because I had a feeling we’d get to see two of the characters again.

THE RITUAL (2017)

February 10, 2018 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

In THE RITUAL (2017), a Netflix movie based on the fine book of the same title by Adam Neville, a group of men who’d gone to school together decide to go hiking in Sweden as a vacation to honor a friend who’d passed away. Wet, cold, and unfit for this type of trip, they decide to take a shortcut through a forest and end up terrorized by a malevolent creature. The result is a very simple horror movie that got everything just right for me–story, pacing, direction, character, monster element, and the menacing desolate Scandinavian forest setting.

The characters are likeable, and their reactions are genuine; when they’re being hunted, they go from denial to terror to complete helplessness. Along the way, you see them all transform from men in civilization to exciting vacation to discomfort to crisis to hopelessness and confronting death. There’s a strong theme of how far you should go to put your life on the line for others and your own self worth. The last act of the movie deviates from the book, but in a streamlining way that makes sense of the medium and wraps up the theme nicely.

And wow, that monster. Very similar to what I pictured reading the book but even weirder and creepier. I found it incredible. Everything about that thing was terrific for me to watch.

Happy to recommend this one.

IT (2017)

January 31, 2018 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

I wasn’t looking forward to the new film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel IT, expecting to choke on saccharine, and still feeling full of a similar vibe from binging on STRANGER THINGS. What a terrific surprise. IT is top-notch horror, one of the best adaptations of King’s work.

In the town of Derry, children go missing every 27 years. An enterprising group of kids band together to save themselves and each other from “it,” a creature that appears in the guise of Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Pennywise enjoys feeding on their terror, plaguing them with horrific visions, as if seasoning them before doing some very real eating. To fight back, the children must stick together and face their worst fears.

The horror element is powerful, the acting and pacing are terrific, it’s more sweet than saccharine, and the portrayal of Pennywise in particular is incredible.

So yeah, it was terrific, and I’m looking forward to the second movie.

HAPPY DEATH DAY (2017)

January 20, 2018 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

In HAPPY DEATH DAY (2017), Theresa, a beautiful college student who is cruel to her classmates, is brutally murdered on her birthday by a hooded figure wearing a campus mascot mask. She instantly wakes up and starts the day over, only to be murdered again and again. The only way to stop it is to figure out who the murderer is and stop them, and hopefully in the process learn how to be a person worth surviving.

It’s GROUNDHOG DAY meets SCREAM, as fun as the first and as lightly scary as the second. I didn’t expect anything earthshaking going into it. By the end, I enjoyed it quite a bit as a basic fun movie that’s competently written, directed, and acted.