Author of sci-fi/fantasy, horror and adventure/thriller fiction

BRAIN CANDY (1996)

by Leave a Comment

Produced by and starring the actors in the Canadian comedy sketch show KIDS IN THE HALL, BRAIN CANDY (1996) is an amusing film about Western society’s predication for self-medication to feel happy. It’s amusing–snorts and a few chuckles instead of laughs for me–but is elevated by its effective satire.

The film centers on Chris Cooper, a scientist heading a lab at Roritor Pharmaceuticals. The insufferable CEO is firing people en masse to cut costs, leading to Chris, who is working on an antidepressant, to say his new drug is ready even though it hasn’t been thoroughly tested. Suddenly, he’s rich and famous as the drug cures depression and then gets sold over the counter to anybody wanting to feel good all the time. America is getting high, and Roritor is getting rich, but Chris learns the drug has an unexpected and disastrous side effect.

The film is basically a passable comedy, with the characters largely being silly caricatures, which worked for me as it was layered so thick the silliness took on a logic of its own. The comedy is also appreciably dark. Where the film really shines, however, is in its effective use of satire. How people value happiness like it’s some kind of virtue and sadness as a moral failing, and how they’ll self-medicate to take the edge off, while those peddling the cure reap massive profits regardless of the societal cost. It’s not quite IDIOCRACY, which was incredibly insightful and provocative, but it shoots for IDIOCRACY, and I appreciated that.

PHASMOPHOBIA

by Leave a Comment

Developed by Kinetic Games and offered as an early access game, PHASMOPHOBIA is a single-player or online coop psychological horror game in which you play a paranormal investigator sent to determine whether a given location is haunted and if so by what type of entity. This is one of the most unnerving games I’ve ever played; it’s a real experience.

The game is designed with a heavy atmosphere, limitations, and special tools. The atmosphere is brooding due to it being a rainy night and the ghost effects, and the overall effect is incredibly immersive. Limitations include being fairly slow, a time limit before the entity becomes aggressive, and weak light sources. Tools include EMF readers, a spirit box in which you can interact with the ghost via voice recognition, thermometers, and night vision cameras. The challenge is to use these tools to identify 1) where the entity is in the house and 2) what type of entity it is without angering it to the point where it starts hunting you, because then you are in serious trouble. Psychologically, the time limit, the unpredictability of the entity–including noises, messing with the lights, appearing in a corporeal state, footsteps, moans, moving objects, and slamming doors–builds an incredible amount of tension. Not to mention when you call out to a teammate who doesn’t answer, because he or she is, well, dead.

Do your detective work, record your evidence, and get out alive to reap cash rewards you can use to buy more advanced equipment. Fail, and you join the entity in the spirit realm.

Recommended for horror buffs. Available on Steam.

SHE DIES TOMORROW (2020)

by Leave a Comment

SHE DIES TOMORROW (2020, streaming on Amazon Prime) rolls out as an art house freakout over existential crisis. It’s intriguing, experiential, and interesting, though its slow, almost meditative pace and lack of a payoff may put off some viewers. This is one of those films that scores really high with critics but really low with audiences. Me, I liked it for what it offered.

The film certainly has an intriguing premise. A woman comes home despondent and displaying flip-flopping emotions. It turns out she believes she’s going to die tomorrow. When she tells a friend, her friend becomes similarly obsessed with the belief, which then spreads like a contagion through her entire network of friends and then the city at large.

The film was inspired by its maker’s experiences with anxiety attacks, and so some have interpreted the film to be about mental illness. That’s fair, though I don’t think you need to be mentally ill to regard death as scary and sudden awareness of your mortality as being a terrifying experience. In a way, the contagion is just that, simple death awareness, though its poignancy and threat comes from it happening regardless of your age and with utter certainty you have only one day to live. Anxiety attack, indeed.

What I enjoyed about the film is its raw honesty about human emotions regarding death. Some wrap up unfinished business like overdue breakups, others try to do something constructive, most become filled with regret over the things that previously obsessed them, though they can’t really imagine having done things all that differently; they just thought they had more time. For them, death robs any enjoyment they might feel in their final moments to the point of impotency and rejection of others; they’re in full animal fight or flight mode. This is not like one of those bittersweet apocalyptic films where the asteroid is coming so the bad guys go nuts, the good guys live life to the fullest, they talk about how they wished they’d climbed Mount Everest when they had the chance, and so on. This is real, stunned regret. The film didn’t need to be any more than that, it’s tough enough, and it qualified for me as psychological horror.

So I liked it for that alone. The acting is good thanks to a nice collection of solid actors, and there’s a certain art to the film, but yeah, you just have to connect with the concept and be willing to engage. On the downside, it’s real slow, very little happens, and we don’t quite get a payoff at the end, no definitive answers. So caveat emptor, YMMV, and all that. It’s certainly not for everybody or even most people. But if you’re in the mood for something deep and oddly affecting, you might check it out.

THE EAST (2013)

by Leave a Comment

Another production by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, THE EAST (2013, streaming on STAR on DisneyPlus) is a social-conscience thriller that critiques capitalism, eco-terrorism, and personal responsibility. It’s a very strong film with a powerful message that stops short of preaching.

Jane (Marling), an intelligence operative for a private investigative firm working for big corporate clients, is assigned to go undercover to identify the members of The East, an organization labeled as eco-terrorists for their “jams,” or operations designed to retaliate against, expose, or humiliate the top executives at the worst companies. An oil tycoon who owns a tanker that spills in the ocean gets his house flooded with oil, that sort of thing. Jane discovers and infiltrates the group and does her job but increasingly comes to sympathize with the group’s members (particularly its charismatic leader played by Alexander Skarsgård) and its objectives, though she disagrees with their methods, which teeter on the edge of outright violence.

As Jane continues to question who she works for, and the authorities close in on The East, she has to make the ultimate choice.

This is a terrific movie. It functions both as a nice thriller on its own right and also a social-conscience film about how might may make right but money makes might–makes might but also defines the truths we take for granted as being true. This kind of thing hits close to home in a lifetime of social conditioning about capitalism good, communism bad, etc. etc., so critiquing capitalism can’t be covered in media without propagandizing one way or the other.

A big element of this is that social-conscience films usually can’t make protest sympathetic unless the protesters are perfect. John in the film JOHN Q takes hostages in a hospital to get his kid a transplant after his insurance provider denies coverage, but it can’t be that he’s an average Joe and the private health system is freaking horrific and about to murder his son, no, he has to be basically a saint or else his kid doesn’t deserve the implant because Dad didn’t make all the right choices in life. Because in America, we love to crucify the messenger as a way to criticize a message we don’t like, and while many Americans innately believe government should help, they’ve been conditioned to believe government shouldn’t help them because they don’t deserve it.

In THE EAST, the eco-terrorists aren’t treated as lovable saints or idealistic idiots or hip and cool hackers with a vague revolution against the “system,” they’re just people committed to a cause, with at least one of them outright victimized by the system and shown that this is how he turned into an activist. This allows us to come to our own conclusions about what they’re fighting against and the methods they use to fight, just like Jane does, without being forced to feel one way or the other by the filmmakers and without making every social issue a referendum on the likeability of fictional characters played by good-looking actors.

Overall, THE EAST is a solid grownup thriller for grownups that tackles some very serious subjects and handles them well. There’s no Hollywood ending here, though I did find it a bit optimistic. I think Marling wanted to involve the viewer more directly at that point, basically saying, “Maybe you should get involved, which is a potential cause for optimism.” If you’re interested in something similar in print, check out THE FOUNTAIN AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD by Robert Newman or THE IRON HEEL by Jack London.

THE STAND (2020)

by Leave a Comment

I’m usually not a fan of films and TV shows based on Stephen King’s fiction, finding them emphasizing what I don’t like about King’s work while leaving out the critical atmospheric horror that in my view makes it so deep and penetrating. A few notable exceptions come to mind, such as the new IT, THE MIST, and THE SHINING. When an updated adaptation of THE STAND released from CBS Productions, I’d heard a few bad things, but I decided to give it a shot.

The series is overall faithful to the novel with some innovations and numerous shortcuts for time. One big innovation is time jumps between past and present, which allows the show to explore certain characters with some depth before introducing us to the next. I didn’t mind that at all, and I thought it added something. The production quality is fairly good, and with the first episode, I was somewhat hopeful and thinking it wasn’t all that bad. Unfortunately, for me, the series became progressively sloppier until I gave up on it near the end.

I think the series did a lot of things well, but overall it has a TV sheen to it, with everybody wearing brand-new clothes and driving shiny new cars because ka-ching, you gotta have those product placements. The characters are all one-note and overly familiar archtypes, with zero complexity and almost no back story. Numerous shortcuts from the source material look like, well, shortcuts. Randall Flagg’s Babylon in Vegas doesn’t look evil so much as silly, and many of the horror elements, including Flagg himself, similarly come across as silly rather than scary or menacing. The actors are miscast, with few seeming to feel comfortable in their role, though there were a few notable exceptions, in particular Brad William Henke as Tom Cullen.

Overall, I think if you’re going to adapt a classic horror novel that is highly familiar with your core audience, you should stick with the source material and if you don’t, then you should innovate in a way that improves or adds to the story rather than one that appears as a shortcut. With so much great stuff to work with, this new adaptation of THE STAND had the potential to be extremely dark, fun, and surprising. Instead, it comes across as the usual, with little surprising. Clearly, a lot of effort went into it, and there are again good qualities, but I watched it hoping for something both familiar and unexpected, and ended up bored. It’s a shame, as I think of what somebody like Frank Darabont could have accomplished with this with a budget and the gloves off. It makes me wonder why it’s so hard to adapt Stephen King’s work onto the screen?

SOUND OF MY VOICE (2011)

by Leave a Comment

Continuing on a minor cult tear, I rewatched SOUND OF MY VOICE, another impressive film that shows what one can accomplish with a small budget if one has a great story and direction.

Peter (Christopher Denham) and his girlfriend Lorna (Nicole Vicius) infiltrate a strange cult, which they intend to expose by making a documentary. Peter hates groups like this, as his mother died by following one’s beliefs. Lorna is the product of a neglected, rich, drug-binging upbringing, and wants to do something meaningful. Together, they successfully infiltrate the group led by Maggie (Brit Marling), who claims she’s from the future and has come back in time to save a select few from what’s coming.

It’s a fascinating film. The tension is great, as is Peter slowly breaking down and succumbing to the human desire to believe, while Lorna goes the other way, increasingly alarmed at Maggie taking over their minds. When Maggie asks Peter to do something that is potentially horrible, everyone must make a decision.

Marling is a fascinating woman. She gave up a career in investment banking to pursue acting, and turned down many roles that sought to play her as the female horror or crime victim. Instead, she teamed up with Zal Batmanglij to co-write and star in this film, which lead to other fascinating films and shows such as THE EAST, ANOTHER EARTH, I ORIGINS, and THE OA.

The ending has a nice payoff that asks the reader to participate in Peter’s and Lorna’s journey. Overall, I liked this one a lot. For a low-budget debut, it’s terrific.