Author of adventure/thriller and horror fiction

ELVES

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In ELVES (Netflix), a Danish family vacations on an island that harbors a deadly secret. I ended up fairly torn by this one, as it’s an interesting story surprisingly well told, though the story it tells becomes insanely frustrating. Let me explain. Note this review is a bit spoilerly.

The family–Mom, Dad and their teenage children Kasper and Josefine–venture to a remote island, where they rented a house to spend Christmas. The locals aren’t exactly welcoming and warn them to avoid the inland road and to respect the natural environment. Of course, the family does neither, running over something on the road near an electrified fence. Angry at Mom for not allowing her to have a pet, Josefine bikes back to the spot from their cabin, discovers a wounded creature, and brings it to a barn near her family’s cabin, where she nurses it back to health.

Beyond the fence, the creatures are not happy about this, and horror ensues.

The elves themselves are fairly well done, though I found them scarier by what they did off camera than what they did on. The acting is pretty good, and the family dynamics and tension with the locals feels lived in and engaging. The horror element is fine. There is an environmental message about sustainability that is solid.

The main problem is Josefine makes maddeningly frustrating choices. It’s almost like she’s in a personal remake of Spielberg’s ET while everybody else is in a horror film. She’s a child, yes, and made a terrible mistake despite repeated warnings. Once people start getting killed, she’s confronted with the consequences of her choices, and for a short time she appears to acknowledge responsibility. But instead of changing and maturing and trying to make things right, she keeps stubbornly doubling down on the mistake regardless of the consequences, and at the end, the only regret she seems to have is she couldn’t keep her pet. This threw the entire story out of whack for me. This could have been a story about losing innocence and growing up the hard way, but instead the story winds up fighting this own message with an opposing message: Don’t grow up, act like a privileged human wrecking ball, and the grownups will take care of it.

This series has taken a lot of flak from reviewers primarily for this reason. I didn’t hate it. It has a lot of great qualities, and overall, I enjoyed it. But be warned, if you watch it, you might end up rooting for the elves.

HELLBOUND

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From director Yeon Sang-ho (TRAIN TO BUSAN) and based on a popular webtoon of the same name, HELLBOUND is Netflix’s latest Korean series that shows what can be accomplished with great characters, bold ideas, and a challenging story. Hollywood, take note.

The story rolls out a bit like a loose mosaic focused around a bizarre, horrifying phenomenon and how humanity reacts to it, with multiple characters and a three-year jump into the future halfway through the six-part series. The phenomenon is simple: various people are visited by a spirit that tells them the time and date of their death and that they are bound for Hell. At the appointed time, monstrous creatures arrive to smash them to a pulp before whisking them off to the infernal realm.

As the phenomenon becomes widely known, various groups arise saying it is God’s judgment for sins, creating a new worldwide religion based around analyzing the judged sinners and interpreting their sins as pronouncements about God’s will. This new church seems far more concerned with power than truth, however, and its violent adherents go to extreme lengths to shame and attack sinners and their families. If you’re on God’s side and helping with His will, anything becomes justified, including the worst sins. While the judgments and terrible monsters are horrifying enough, particularly the waiting for them to show, the real horror is in how people start to do evil thinking they’re doing good.

Thematically, HELLBOUND reminded me of THE LEFTOVERS, where humanity is faced with an impossible change that stubbornly and maddeningly remains unexplained, and then struggles to project meaning onto it, with varying results. It plays on the idea that the divine isn’t all unconditional love but instead fertile ground for cosmic horror. The show goes so much farther, though, with its powerful intellectual ideas about meaning, religion, what constitutes sin, what role humans have in judging it, and so on.

I absolutely loved this one for its sheer intellectual audacity, challenging ideas, and utterly new take on cosmic horror. Highly recommended.

SQUID GAME

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In SQUID GAME (Netflix, Korean), a group of financially desperate people are recruited to participate in a series of games for a cash prize worth billions. I absolutely loved this gripping, violent, and emotionally devastating show, with a few reservations.

The first episode introduces us to Seong Gi-hun, a divorced chauffeur heavily in debt, who dips into his mother’s savings to gamble. In the opening, we see him as a boy playing a children’s game called the Squid Game, how when he won he felt on top of the world. Years later, he’s not as good at the game of life and gambles to get above water financially and hopefully reclaim that feeling of winning from long ago. True to the best South Korean films, we have a protagonist who is a heavily flawed loser but also eminently relatable and likeable.

When a mysterious organization invites him to participate in various games for cash prizes, he volunteers. Suddenly, he’s competing along with 455 other people in a series of children’s games. It looks like fun, only the trick is the losers die, and with each death, the cash prize for the winners goes up. The games break them down into smaller groups until it’s basically every person for themselves, and they realize they’re not only betting their lives, they’re selling their souls and very humanity, showing what they’re all truly made of. Along the way, we meet and sympathize with other terrific characters, each with their own personal reason for competing, making this their story as much as Seong Gi-hun’s.

The show has been compared to ALICE IN BORDERLAND, a similar Japanese series, but I personally found SQUID GAME far superior and more compelling, as it goes far deeper into character and theme, which invested me so much more heavily such that I found it emotionally devastating while I found ALICE only titillating. The games are just brutal, absolutely riveting stuff, and the stakes are devastating, with plenty of physical challenges and psychological twists. The sets and costumes in the game world are terrific. The theme is pretty simple: Capitalism brutalizes people, resulting in a boredom among the rich and a desperation among the poor uniting them in psychopathy.

I had two criticisms. One is that a side plot produces a terrific perspective on what’s going on but doesn’t really go anywhere except possibly to influence the events in a second season. The second is the ending, which I found pretty disappointing as it chose a resolution that didn’t resonate with me.

Overall, SQUID GAME is just great storytelling: people you care about challenged and absolutely brutalized by games with the highest stakes–your life and more money you could spend in a lifetime.

MIDNIGHT MASS

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Just finished MIDNIGHT MASS on Netflix, and WOW. If you’re looking for a brilliant horror story that also serves up a powerful analysis of religious belief, you should stop reading this dumb review and start binge-watching now.

If you’re still with me, here goes: MIDNIGHT MASS is the creation of Mike Flanagan, one of the creators of THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, which I also enjoyed. In this story, a mysterious priest arrives at a declining fishing island to take over a Catholic church, but he’s not alone. Soon, miracles and deaths start occurring, forcing the ensemble cast of locals to choose sides in what some seems as a spiritual war and others as a threat to the entire world.

Flanagan gets pretty much everything about this miniseries right. As a creator, he often leans heavily on theme, and MIDNIGHT MASS is no exception. The theme here is the search for meaning in life when all things die, how this affects people differently in good and bad ways, and the struggle to know an all-powerful God that seems to be unknowable. I tackled a lot of these themes in my novel THE CHILDREN OF RED PEAK, and while I went for it and produced something I believe is at least thoughtful, Flanagan utterly dominated it. His script contains these long, wonderful monologues that are really meditations and shaded views on purpose, meaning, life after death, and more. He overdoes the expository dialogue at times, but I didn’t mind as it’s good stuff.

I’ve always been fascinated by this theme, which is a tough one to tackle right: the question of whether life has any inherent meaning if death is final, and the question of whether a higher power is guiding us to a higher purpose. I’ve always felt if you strip out the human longing and projection, take out the idea that God has a paternal love for each and every one of us, God is actually a source of cosmic horror, an all-powerful being that inflicts great suffering and occasionally helps us based on its plan and that maybe can be appeased with the right behavior and sacrifices. Flanagan shows us all this and makes us feel it while being respectful to all sides of the conversation. Flanagan asks the question, and the characters provide a multitude of answers.

Back to the show… The acting is terrific, with some familiar faces from previous Flanagan works like Kate Siegel, and led by Hamish Linklater, whom I’d only seen previously in THE BIG SHORT. Playing Father Paul, he chews the scenery and absolutely dominates every scene he’s in. Paul is such a greater character, a deeply spiritual and religious man who is at heart good but who deludes himself into interpreting a great evil into something miraculous and Godly. Bev is another great character, a very religious and proper lady who uses her religion to justify her prejudices and spite, and who has a Bible verse to rationalize pretty much anything she wants to do. All the characters are great, in fact, all of them feeling real without the usual “small town stock” cast. The show has been compared to Stephen King’s work, which is justifiable as we have a small town of good, plain folks encountering and seduced by a great evil, but Flanagan goes so much farther with character and theme that in my view he comes out ahead in a league entirely his own.

I could go on, the terrific horror element, the absolutely terrific bloody climax, the organic and realistic pacing, etc. Suffice to say, I thought MIDNIGHT MASS was brilliant and loved it, another example of the golden age of television we’re currently in.

RAISED BY WOLVES

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In the sci-fi series RAISED BY WOLVES (HBO), two androids are sent to a wild planet to start a new civilization after religious wars turn Earth into a dying planet. I loved this one, though it could have been shorter, and it ends on a PROMETHEUS-style note that left me a little wanting.

The series focuses on two androids who are raising a small colony of human children. Their creators’ goal is to restart human civilization without religion, as it was religious war–between atheists and followers of Mithraism–that destroyed Earth. Mother is a necromancer, a war machine the Mithraists built from their ancient texts but don’t fully understand, reprogrammed by an atheist scientist to be a caregiver. Father is a service robot. Together, they work to raise the children, though they have conflicting parenting styles and are learning that humans are difficult, most of all difficult to control. When a Mithraist ark spaceship appears in orbit, they face the potential challenge that the old divisions will follow them to this new world.

At first, I wasn’t sure about it, as the androids are initially stiff and the costume and tech designs fairly generic. Then it grew on me, and it grew on me some more until I was utterly plugged in. Ridley Scott directed the first two episodes, setting the tone for the look, feel, and pacing, and it works. The acting is terrific, particularly the androids and some of the Mithraists, particularly Travis Fimmel (best known before this for his role in THE VIKINGS). The necromancer is utterly badass when in war mode, making for some of the most exciting scenes in the show. I enjoyed the religious conflict element and the various conflicts related to parenting. Overall, I greatly enjoyed how immersive and engaging it was based on multiple strengths.

I had some issues with it, though. The pacing drags at times, as the primary conflict plays itself out and then regenerates to try again. The main characters appear unkillable. There’s so much human drama going on it makes you think the human race will die on this planet in about two years. There’s a “god” like element, something messing with everybody’s head, that goes unexplained. The biggest sour note for me, however, was the ending, where little is resolved, way too much is dumped into the second season, and there seems to be a giant nod to Scott’s PROMETHEUS franchise–which I decidedly did not enjoy at all and eventually gave up on.

So yeah, I had some issues with the show, particularly the unsatisfying PROMETHEUS-style ending, but overall, I have to say I loved it for its overall quality, heavy immersion, and engaging characters.

BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR

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BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR is one of those rare gems that finds the exact right Venn point between horror, comedy, and gonzo/cool without overplaying any of them. Telling the story of a curse and the power struggle between a young woman and a witch, it’s a hell of a good time, though its lack of a stronger resolution (with no sign of a second season) may disappoint some.

Based on the 1996 novel by Todd Grimson (which, bizarrely, you can only get in audiobook unless you’re in the UK, somewhere there’s an author and publisher crying over a major lost opportunity), this limited Netflix series follows Lisa Nova, a young filmmaker newly arrived in Los Angeles with a short horror film she recently shot at a house, where something bad happened. She gains the attention of Lou Burke, a powerful producer who hasn’t had a hit in years and wants to get her film made. Hollywood happens, leading to a confrontation in which Lisa contracts a witch to lay a powerful curse. But of course, all such services have a price.

Damn, this was a lot of fun. Almost everything about it works–the hipsters rolling with the weirdness until it gets too dark, the power dynamics of Hollywood, the tit for tat power struggle between the three major players, Boro’s confident charm and weird magic, and the way the storytelling slides effortlessly between Hollywood, magic, horror, and comedy. I also enjoyed the way none of the players are truly evil or innocent, they’re simply bound to a bad end with everybody else roadkill if they get in the way. The casting is terrific, notably Rosa Salazar (fast becoming one of my favorite actresses if not my favorite) as Lisa, Eric Lange as Lou, and Catherine Keener as Boro.

The only downer for me is the ending, which promised a stronger resolution in the climax as it’s presented as a limited series (no season 2). The more I think about it, the more it makes sense, but it breaks a bit too neatly and messily at the same time. No matter, though. BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR is a hell of a lot of fun.