Wasteland Bites: Run a Dreadfully Rank Monster Food Truck 🚛

Here’s a horror food truck survival simulator we didn’t know we needed in our lives. It just launched on Steam and is by indie developer CosmicDev.

Wasteland Bites is a simulation game (and it’s it’s only £5!). You have to manage the day-to-day running of a very rundown food truck, all whilst you serve an often decapitated, slobbering mass of hungry/maniacal monsters. Think you can handle it?! Well, this one is bags of fun.

Serving and Shotguns in Wasteland Bites

[youtube youtube.com/watch?v=bspSnueOZn…]

This one is like a combination of the Playdate icon Mars After Midnight (2024) meets the icky Space Warlord Organ Simulator (2021). Except in this one you have to be great with timekeeping and food prep (helps if you’ve worked in a bar/pub/restaurant before).

We put our 2008 experience of working in a Manchester city centre Wetherspoons to good effect here.

In Wasteland Bites, you’re the new employee at a food truck. It’s your duty to look after the truck and its many little quirks (shorting circuits, rats, snarling dog packs etc.) whilst prepping food for monsters. The monsters queue up outside the truck like polite British people, but can get nasty on you.

That’s why you have a trusty shotgun handy to sort out any fisticuffs. It all plays out like this.

[youtube youtube.com/watch?v=mJtr6Pv8As…]

There’s a free Wasteland Bites Demo available on Steam if you fancy giving this a go. Well worth it, as we’ve had a lot of fun with this game. You can’t argue with £5 really, especially given how fast-paced the action gets.

If you think you’re in for a boring time of it serving zombies, there’s so much to juggle at once it gets very heated.

For example, you much judge if you’re dealing with a deceptive customer and whether to shoot them dead with a shotgun, all whilst batting away rats on your food, then honking at some stray dogs outside the truck, plus the power might cut off during a making of raw garlic and meat on toast. Your characters gets stressed, too, so make sure he/she gets a cigarette on the go.

The cigarette protrudes out of the screen in classic greasy spoon café fashion, which does flag up the charming nature of the concept, its pixel art, and punchy pace.

Wasteland Bites is lot of fun! Although it can get a little repetitive, across the three hours or so of gameplay that’s not a big deal, as this is perfect pick-up-and-play escapism time.
#Cooking #CosmicDev #Entertainment #Food #Fun #gaming #Horror #IndieGames #Lifestyle #pixelArt #simulation #WastelandBites #Zombies

Professional Moron

2024-04-14 16:00:18

Mars After Midnight: Run a Late-Night Intergalactic Community Support Centre 🪐🌃

Here’s the very first Playdate game we played! Mars After Midnight is from indie game legend Lucas Pope, the man responsible for the likes of the highly inventive The Return of Obra Dinn (2018).

It’s a fantastic coup for Playdate as his latest project is an exclusive for the handheld. And this is a marvel of a game—funny, weird, wonderful, and so much more.

What’s it about? An Off-Colony Community Support Centre simulator for a bunch of aliens that starts at 1am. We can dig that.

Entrant-Screen Support Sessions for Aliens in Mars After Midnight

[youtube youtube.com/watch?v=xRuG9Ooe9h…]

As the player, you run a support group that begins in the early morning. You have to pick what sessions to offer local aliens, such as Cyclops Anger Management and various other things.

You need to promote each session during the day by putting up posters. Plus, you need to pick a tasty snack for the night for your attendees to enjoy.

Once you’ve set that all up, you act as the doorman. Aliens knock on the door, you have to screen them, decide whether to let them in, and clear up their dining experience (if you do let them in).

Every time they eat the bastards make a hell of a mess, so you need to sweep everything up super fast before other arrivals crop up.

Intrigued? Well, here are the first seven minutes in action.

[youtube youtube.com/watch?v=qNSrqCsa0-…]

To help improve your community support, you can buy stuff such as a translation box (the Blab-o-Dex). This helps you work out what aliens are saying.

That’s vital, as you can use its translations to work out if the aliens are actually invited. Or just there to try and cadge some free cake.

All this stuff is similar in theme to Lucas Pope’s famous Papers Please (2013) where players must screen individuals before they can enter a totalitarian state.

Mars After Midnight is much more silly and offbeat than Papers, Please, which is quite the nerve-wracking experience. Instead, here you’ve got a lovable sci-fi sim that doesn’t take itself very seriously.

There’s about three hours of gameplay. Plus, you get a fantastic and crisp visual style alongside a brilliant retro styled soundtrack that works itself into your brain.

Although the looping support sessions may feel a little repetitive from time to time, there are enough fun little embellishments to the experience to make it one of the best Playdate games.

Mars After Midnight’s Use of THE CRANK!

[youtube youtube.com/watch?v=MRjRt4NSfK…]

Behold above the might of THE CRANK!

Okay, so a big (and super epic, like) gimmick with the Playdate is its crank. It’s not super essential to the Mars After Midnight Experience, but its use shakes up proceedings in fun and inventive ways.

Although it’s not a gesture-based game, it does have that feel about it.

You have to clock in for your shift, for example, which requires you to jam in your slot card to a machine. There are a lot of satisfying crunchy moments like that with this title and the Playdate’s retro two button feel.

Retro Gaming Bloops and Bleeps—The Fantastic Sound Design to Mars After Midnight

[youtube youtube.com/watch?v=Q7uQHc4dTz…]

There’s a rather good retro soundtrack to go with Mars After Midnight. It gets into your skull and you feel the urge to listen to.

All very Game Boy, but with modern flourishes. We’re digging it!

A Few of Lucas Pope’s Intriguing Dev Notes on Mars After Midnight

Over on this Itch.io account, Pope ran a dev log for Mars After Midnight.

He provided extensive dev log notes about creating the game. We get the impression it was a fun and engaging experience for him, the technology of the Playdate offering a much different type of experience.

“The Playdate is a lot of fun to work with — fantastic 1-bit Sharp screen, novel crank input, simple development API, and great support from Panic.

I puttered around trying to find a good concept that I felt worked well with the hardware and this is basically where I ended up. Unlike most of my dire last few games I’m gonna try to make this one a little more light-hearted. Something my kids might like.

Right now the concept is still pretty thin. Think Papers Please, -lite, with no border checkpoint, no desk, no paperwork, on Mars. Actually maybe don’t think that. I only have the elements of a game and not the full thing yet, so things are still pretty open-ended.”

One of the reasons for making the game was to entertain his kids. Particularly with the designs of the aliens and their expressive, weird faces.

Notes on the Face Generator

Pope provided a full face generator update in 2023 (you can also refer to making martian faces if you fancy a few more creative details), which has loads of details about how game development works.

Of the aliens, when you’re screen these dudes prior to the support sessions, you really get a good look at their peculiar mugs.

To make them, Pope did the following!

“The face generator is written in Python but in a C-like style that could potentially port to full C. The idea was to eventually move the code to run on-device and generate an infinite number of faces at runtime.

As the game design solidified I realized this runtime generation wasn’t going to happen. For one, it’s not really necessary: I can generate thousands of faces offline and just include them in the game — each face is just a few kb.

Second, the face generator is not quick. Part of the problem is Python’s leisurely pace but even with conversion to C and heavy optimizations it’d never be as quick as loading a small PNG on-device.”

All these intricate details highlight how difficult game development. How time-consuming. They go to all this effort for people’s entertainment and we find it quite the marvel.

Synthesising Martian Speech

In Mars After Midnight, you have to decode alien speech. This is important during pre-support session screenings. They say stuff like that dude above.

Once again, Pope provided fantastic and detailed insights into this. Check out his dev log: synthesizing martian speech.

“Before there were neural networks and machine learnings to do all our computer talking, speech was generally synthesized by modeling the vocal cords and resonant cavities of the mouth. There’s decades of research into this and probably the most well-known classic example is SAM the Software Automatic Mouth from the early 80’s.”

The example on his page will be familiar to all of us. Stephen Hawking used it with his speech-generating device after his ALS progressed.

However, now we have speech synth systems. Pope would announce vowels into the system, before adding crossfading them for an AHYEEYAH sound. However, this didn’t work! So, the plucky developer created some code to transform the voice.

“In-game, the vowel synth keeps track of which formant sets are used in a word, and the game logic can query which one is currently playing. The full voiced list of aeioumr is reduced down to aom for the mouth frame selection. Add a little shake and bob’s your uncle.”

The fantastic amount of effort he went in to here is highly commendable. Not least with the Blab-o-Dex translation device, which turns the alien’s distorted gurgling into understandable English.

Pope has also uploaded sound design processes to his YouTube channel.

[youtube youtube.com/watch?v=hxu8U91ALD…]

It’s quite uncommon to see a dev go to this much detail with their creative process, but we’re doffing our old man caps to him on this one.

Great game. Maximum effort. Ingenuity overload.
#Creativity #Entertainment #Fun #gaming #IndieGames #Lifestyle #LucasPope #MarsAfterMidnight #Playdate #sciFi #ScienceFiction

Mars After Midnight - Launch Trailer

Mars’ citizens need your help! Mars After Midnight is a silly entrant-screening, mess-tidying, session-planning work simulator for Playdate developed by Luca...

^{Panic (YouTube)}

The Sanctuary ⛪ for #spookysaturday

As you open the heavy wooden doors you see incense smoke curl and spiral around the empty pews.
Behind the altar, the wooden statue of Christ begins to weep real blood, his face contorted in agony.
As you walk towards the altar, reaching out to touch it, your legs buckle and crack beneath you as the bones break.
You hear the sound of the heavy oak doors slam shut, locking without a key.
Silence.
Then suddenly, coming from the organ pipes, a droning, rhythmic hum emerges.
Shadows slither out from beneath the pulpit.
"Welcome" they rasp. "We have been waiting for a new vessel".

This is the Basilica di San Francesco and is not actually creepy in real life 😂. Actually, it was a very lovely and sunny day when I took the unedited picture! ✨ (Still haven't figured out how to make good fog though, but we'll get there)

#photography #amateurphotography
#church #basilica #urban #city #cityphotography #composite #spooky #creepy #eerie #horror #architecture #history #paranormal #dark #moody #medieval #gothic #bologna #cityscape #story #writing #fiction

“Our next guest needs no introduction…”

Horror hasn’t been a primary go-to genre for me as I’ve aged, but I’ll check out a given work in just about any genre if it can sink a hook into the elusive target that is my set of aesthetic peculiarities. (And by “hook” I do not mean I award imaginary brownie points for use of the empty “elevated horror” label.) In the wake of the Hollywood-wide restart after last year’s dual WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, some 7,000 new, quick-bake horror flicks will be coming to theaters over the next several months as studios catch up on their precious blockbuster assembly-line schedules. Amid the flood of recent blood-soaked trailers — from high-concept to lowbrow to “the plot is a spoiler!” — one pitch spoke to me from the fray: “Starring David Dastmalchian!”

Ever since his pasty visage caught my eye as a tight-lipped minion in The Dark Knight and belied enough potential depths to make me ask, “So that guy’s the real Joker hiding in plain sight, right?” Dastmalchian has reliably heightened my interest whenever his suspicious, off-kilter characters are invited into the same room as more famous, traditionally bankable actors. This one-man rogues’ gallery stood out in at least three Denis Villeneuve films, the best Suicide Squad film, the two best Ant-Man films, Christopher Nolan’s only film to win Best Picture, and two fun episodes of The Flash before they killed him off and got canceled. Coincidence? Well, yeah, but I enjoy pretending otherwise. Perhaps “good luck charm” is too strong a label for him, but at the very least he’s a walking talisman that wards off ordinary-movie vibes.

He’s probably already starred in much smaller films that I should go track down, but I’d never heard the surefire selling point “Starring David Dastmalchian!” until I was alerted to his latest gig, a largely Australian bit of retro bedlam called Late Night with the Devil. Written and directed by brothers Cameron and Colin Cairnes, it’s a sort of return to ye old “found footage” subgenre that I’ve mostly avoided in recent times. (Chronicle was my favorite film of 2012, but I’ve sat through nary a Paranormal Activity.)

As the faux history goes, once upon a time in the ’70s there was a late-night talk show called Night Owls with Jack Delroy, a wannabe competitor with the juggernaut that was Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show in his prime. Dastmalchian is our man Jack, a contender for the after-hours crown till life got in the way and he lost his onscreen mojo. Whatever persona he’d once kept up for The Viewers at Home, his shtick would become a perpetual fear of failure and irrelevance — much like today’s “influencers”, but obsessed with overnight Nielsen ratings rather than instant clicks. Sometimes he’s still like any other stand-up comic whose writing staff is ordered to feed him topical jokes (Reggie Jackson! Billy Carter!) and sometimes he sinks to new lows as he helplessly watches belligerent guests trade punches, which wasn’t really a thing back then. His little Night Owls program threatened to devolve into a Jerry Springer precursor decades too soon and disrupt the very fabric of the unscripted-programming timeline.

That dire point in his career is where Late Night with the Devil joins his life in progress. A stage-setting documentary prologue recaps the hot-button mood of the era — civil unrest, antiwar protests, disillusionment with authority, and, germane to the incident at hand, America’s fascination with the paranormal. UFOs! ESP! Mass hypnosis! Staged telekinesis! All things scary and spooky and possibly real but more likely frauds! Some of which would be covered in the future in Time-Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown! Not to mention creepy cults, wicked obsessions, and assorted crimes that would one day be filed collectively under the retroactively nicknamed “Satanic panic”. (Dungeons & Dragons was only a few years old at this point and hadn’t yet been swept into the parental paranoia wave.)

Having little left to lose, Delroy ventured into that bizarre minefield on Halloween 1977 with a very special episode that would dance on the fine line between taste and trauma. With the blessing of his money-minded producer (Josh Quong Tart, who was in the Cairnes’ previous film Scare Campaign) and his network bosses at UBC, Delroy invited good friend Dr. June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon from last year’s Foe, faintly echoing talk-show mainstay Dr. Joyce Brothers) to come on the show with a patient named Lilly (Ingrid Torelli) who survived an evil cult’s mass suicide but was feeling slightly better now except for the alleged demon inside her. After a round of the usual polite chitchat, Delroy envisioned this gathering as the perfect opportunity to summon forth the demon and interview a genuine Hell-spawn on live TV. What’s the worst that could happen?

The core of Late Night with the Devil is that “lost” episode in its available entirety as well as behind-the-scenes archival footage taken that night offstage and during commercial breaks. In addition to the good doctor and her charge — an awkward teen who’s uncannily skilled at finding every camera and staring down its glassy abyss — two more guests are billed for the evening and for value-added nostalgic homages, each apropos of unexplained phenomena of the times. Representing the fantastical is Fayssal Bazzi (Apple TV+’s Shantaram) as the mentalist Christou, a send-up of every “psychic” like the Amazing Kreskin or John Edwards who came to your town and kept repeating random syllables until some rube in the back row was vaguely reminded of one phoneme in a dead loved one’s name. From the opposite end of the fact-or-fiction spectrum charges Ian Bliss (the Matrix series) perfectly cranky as the crusading Carmichael Haig, who’s basically world-famous paranormal skeptic James Randi. (I read two of his books back in college, the classic Flim-Flam! and his illuminating prophecy-by-prophecy rebuttal The Mask of Nostradamus.) One purported seer into the spirit world versus one vitriolic debunker, both present for the ostensible summoning — whoever’s right or wrong, Delroy wins. He hopes.

The Cairnes know the subject is hardly groundbreaking and wisely avoid the rookie mistake of pretending this all happens in a vacuum apart from pop culture. (At least one fleeting quip confirms The Exorcist exists in their world.) The novelty format is over half the fun, a faithful recreation that channels interviewers high and low, renowned or short-lived, reminding me of everything from Mike Douglas to David Brenner’s Nightlife and reliving all the hallmarks of such programs. (A belittled sidekick! Cheesy repartee! A totally hep house band! Silly sketches! Smoking on camera! Zookeepers bringing exotic fauna! Musical guests bumped from the end of the show at the last minute!) Though the course of events is easily predictable from its benign inception through the inevitably disastrous outcome (except maybe the final ten minutes, when any lingering formalist trappings dissolve into so much sanguinary psychedelia), the meta conceit helps distinguish this riff from the past 5-10 years’ worth of demonic-possession flicks and series.

Anchoring it all is Dastmalchian, exactly as waaaaay-out-there as one would expect. Jack Delroy nearly drowns in his own flop sweat and knows no shame as he misfires his every attempt at human connection with the sort of graceless prefab charm that can only be acquired by a true showbiz failure. Going from shifty-eyed to wide-eyed and back again, he lurches through the motions from one segment to the next, thriving only on the promise of overseeing A Television First that might buy him a comeback, though he’ll soon regret not looking far enough ahead to glimpse the price tag. At times he’s so out of sync with his guests that I wondered, “How could anyone of sound mind give this man his own talk show?” Then I remembered the same could be said of Tom Green, Chevy Chase, or Jimmy Fallon. Who knows how many guys got their gigs by making deals with the Devil, without even repaying the favor by inviting him on the show?

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Georgina Haig (Fringe, Once Upon a Time) appears in flashbacks as Jack’s wife, whose death from cancer was the pivotal moment in Jack’s life that still haunts him throughout. Steve Mouzakis (Where the Wild Things Are) is the now-deceased head of Lilly’s now-extinct cult. Other Night Owls crew members include Christopher Kirby, who showed up twice in the Matrix series and was slightly in Revenge of the Sith, though poor Senator Giddean Danu has yet to get his own action figure.

The narrator of the documentary prologue is none other than special guest Michael Ironside!

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Late Night with the Devil end credits, but they do lead off with an indigenous land acknowledgment (Australian-style), plead briefly for organ donation, and name-check the “improvisational” theremin player, whose eerie anti-tunes would handily win a “Top Ten ’70s Things About Late Night with the Devil” list.

Black Swan but with slightly less agony.

Horror hasn’t been a primary go-to genre for me as I’ve aged, but I’ll check out a given work in just about any genre if it can sink a hook into the elusive target that is my set of aesthetic peculiarities. (And by “hook” I do not mean I award imaginary brownie points for use of the empty “elevated horror” label.) In the wake of the Hollywood-wide restart after last year’s dual WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, some 7,000 new, quick-bake horror flicks will be coming to theaters over the next several months as studios catch up on their precious blockbuster assembly-line schedules. Amid the flood of recent blood-soaked trailers — from high-concept to lowbrow to “the plot is a spoiler!” — one pitch spoke to me from the fray: “From the directors of the last two Scream movies!”

If the preceding sentences sound familiar, it’s because they’re largely lifted from my previous write-up of Late Night with the Devil. If horror flicks have taught me anything, it’s that recycling is cool. Sometimes old parts can be reused in a new contraption without collapsing. Sometimes the contraption is pretty nifty, like folding a newspaper into a sailboat, or making an omelet with leftover taco filling, or lifting the one-line concept from an old Universal monster movie but throwing away the rest of the movie because no one remembers it anyway.

Hence, directors Matt Bellinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (d/b/a the team “Radio Silence”) present Abigail. The 1936 work that inspired it is a spoiler. Its entire trailer is a spoiler. Fortunately it doesn’t spoil the whole runtime, as more twists abound and a crack ensemble makes up the difference in their performances whenever the writing withholds too much.

Our initial setup seems a fairly basic caper (nowhere near convoluted enough to call it a “heist”) to kidnap a billionaire’s tween daughter (Alisha Weir, of Netflix’s Matilda and the recent Wicked Little Letters) after her evening ballet recital in a weirdly empty theater. A team of strangers has been hired for the job:

• Dan Stevens (differently accented from his recent Godzilla x Kong adventurer) as the cocky leader
• Kathryn Newton (looking to leave Quantumania behind) as the spoiled-rotten thrill-hacker
• Will Catlett (the reluctantly immortal gangster Lala from The CW’s Black Lightning) as the stoic sniper
• Angus Cloud (of HBO’s Euphoria, who died last July) as the stoner wheelman
• Kevin Durand (an experienced Big Bad from Locke and Key and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes) as the brainless muscle
• Last but most, Melissa Barrera (from those last two Scream chapters and infamously not the next one) as the field medic whom we realize is the actual main character when she gazes upon the estranged kiddo on her phone’s lockscreen and shows the slightest empathy toward their target.

Our Antiheroes do the job Reservoir Dogs style — i.e., no names, no backstory sharing, just fake names — except they’re each so doggedly individualized that even a beginner-level people-watcher can predict their baggage. One particular bonding scene explores how nowadays everyone thinks they’re so very different from everyone else, yet it’s easier than ever to reduce someone’s entire persona to a smug Sherlock monologue. Such moments of team interplay afford each actor — nary a dullard in the lineup — quite a few turns to build camaraderie or rivalry in deeper ways beyond the snarky dialogue by screenwriters Stephen Shields and Guy Busick (Radio Silence’s Scream chapters and Ready or Not).

The team absconds to an old mansion at the choosing of their employer (the amazing colossal Giancarlo Esposito!), who promises they’ll earn millions for their service. All they have to do is hold onto the girl and survive the night there, always the biggest catch in every too-good-to-be-true “free one-night mansion stay!” travel deal. Same as every movie caper or heist ever, the plan goes off the rails on both conditions. Their captive is no mere tiny dancer: she’s a double-proficiency vampire ballerina who might be just as old and vicious as Kirsten Dunst in Interview with the Vampire. Worse still, soon as she bares her fangs, all the exits slam shut. IT’S A TRAP.

Apart from a few perfunctory, pointless minutes of red-herring ambiguity about what’s really happening (where’d she go? did someone else abduct and kill her in a closet? is some other killer hiding in the shadows? Is one of the crew pulling a double-cross?), it’s hunter-vs.-hunted except the hunter is disguised as an entry-level Swiftian. She’s all but snarling, “I’m not locked in here with you! You’re locked in here with me!” as she stalks and arbitrarily almost-kills them one by one. If she weren’t outnumbered and her predators-turned-prey were horny teens sans street smarts, this would’ve been a half-hour short, possibly one-third of some themed horror triptych alongside other tales of a zombie violinist or a drama-club mummy or a teen chess champion whose pawns contain the souls of her victims.

As it stands, they do have some professional resources to pool. Wisely, their first priority — examined in the funniest scene — is discerning which kind of pop-culture vampire they might be facing. A traditional one with the classic long list of weaknesses? One of those modern, overpowered, Everything You Know About Vampires Is Wrong hotties who aren’t really vampires so much as they’re just blood-drinking DC supervillains? Or a compromised in-betweener, which means they’ll have to try everything, see what works, and hope any of them live long enough to see the scientific method to the end? And how many other splatter-flicks can they reference along the way without feeling like secondhand characters themselves?

From there, the audience is tasked with betting on how closely the death order will follow the callsheet order. The film tips its hand early to light up Barrera as the Final Gal, but beyond her, anything or anyone goes. Fortunately the ensemble strike up considerable chemistry amongst their differences, enough to mourn the intermittent murders. Yes, there’s the occasional fanging, a minion-turning of sort, and at least one twist neither telegraphed nor spoiled in the trailer. Each vampire looks lovingly creepy, taken a step above the norm in that the makeup team gives every vampire their own individual look, rather than churning them out of the same mold. Gone are the days of Buffy/Angel facial ridges looking like members of the same Klingon troop.

For a good span, though, it gets almost too easy to forget this is a vampire flick. Through several sparring rounds Abigail relies more on her supernatural strength than her creature-of-the-night skill set — admittedly challenging to employ in a mansion where most of the rooms remain fully lit all night long — to the point where the caper-flick switches genres to medium-powered superheroics. Give Barrera some wacky gadgets and this could’ve been a Birds of Prey sequel. I’m not quite complaining, as the action is slickly shot and allows us moments to breathe just long enough till the next surprise jolts us again. By the final act, though, it’s all about the vampirism rift between the survivors and the undead, all drowning in buckets of grime and fountains of blood, perhaps too unsubtle to qualify as Grand Guignol. Sometimes the only difference between vampire movies and superhero movies is the bloodshed, and sometimes not even that. Eventually Abigail remembers.

Among the cast’s VIPs, Barrera bracingly explores her deadbeat-mom/kidnap-abetter dichotomy to confirm why the directors kept her on speed-dial despite the one headline controversy; Stevens adds to his ongoing series of fearlessly flamboyant freaks as if desperate to wipe the name “Matthew Crawley” from any future Q&As forevermore; and the young Ms. Weir shows us a prodigy’s chops — at turns innocent, menacing, scheming, occasionally open to negotiation, and nuanced enough to evince more than one mode of vulnerable, regardless of which side’s ahead on the vamps-v.-mortals scoreboard. A film built around a child-star core can go bravely or broken depending on their talent level and whether the adults can coax the best from them; here, the risk pays off, hopefully in ways that weren’t damaging to her behind the scenes. (After Quiet on the Set, Showbiz Kids, and other works on the subject, it’s getting harder out here not to fear the worst about any NSFW Hollywood production costarring minors.)

As I expect is the case for much of the recent horror-flick streak at theaters, Abigail isn’t aiming for deeper meaning, apart from the morals of Negligent Parents Ought to Do Better, and Every Get-Rich-Quick Scheme Has a Price. It’s a well-buttered popcorn-heavy roller-coaster that arcs upward and into a veritable Red Sea of monster-movie over-the-toppiness. It might’ve qualified as fully classy if they’d added another ballet number or two.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Yes, the vampire daughter’s father shows up with a special guest in that role — an actor who’s been name-checked in four previous MCC entries and technically shares a major IMDb credit with one of the other cast members, though they never shared a scene in that work. His cameo is short, sweet, and scary, and he wears it well.

Otherwise, unless we start exploring the stunt team’s resumes, those named above are literally the entire cast — no other cameos, no other supporters, no crowd scenes, no Concerned Spouses back home, no exposition from newscasters or radio DJs, nary a stray extra wandering by. Far more of the budget went to makeup and VFX than to the thespian head count.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Abigail end credits per se, but the last waves of fine print scroll away accompanied by one last vampire ballerina giggle from the darkness, as if to say ABIGAIL WILL RETURN. If she does, any sequel would have to delete another role or two so they can afford the Marvel de-aging CG they’d need to maintain her immortality at ballet-class age.

Midlife Crisis Crossover!

2024-04-15 02:06:16

“Late Night with the Devil”: Time Now for Stupid Host Tricks

“Our next guest needs no introduction…”

Horror hasn’t been a primary go-to genre for me as I’ve aged, but I’ll check out a given work in just about any genre if it can sink a hook into the elusive target that is my set of aesthetic peculiarities. (And by “hook” I do not mean I award imaginary brownie points for use of the empty “elevated horror” label.) In the wake of the Hollywood-wide restart after last year’s dual WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, some 7,000 new, quick-bake horror flicks will be coming to theaters over the next several months as studios catch up on their precious blockbuster assembly-line schedules. Amid the flood of recent blood-soaked trailers — from high-concept to lowbrow to “the plot is a spoiler!” — one pitch spoke to me from the fray: “Starring David Dastmalchian!”

Ever since his pasty visage caught my eye as a tight-lipped minion in The Dark Knight and belied enough potential depths to make me ask, “So that guy’s the real Joker hiding in plain sight, right?” Dastmalchian has reliably heightened my interest whenever his suspicious, off-kilter characters are invited into the same room as more famous, traditionally bankable actors. This one-man rogues’ gallery stood out in at least three Denis Villeneuve films, the best Suicide Squad film, the two best Ant-Man films, Christopher Nolan’s only film to win Best Picture, and two fun episodes of The Flash before they killed him off and got canceled. Coincidence? Well, yeah, but I enjoy pretending otherwise. Perhaps “good luck charm” is too strong a label for him, but at the very least he’s a walking talisman that wards off ordinary-movie vibes.

He’s probably already starred in much smaller films that I should go track down, but I’d never heard the surefire selling point “Starring David Dastmalchian!” until I was alerted to his latest gig, a largely Australian bit of retro bedlam called Late Night with the Devil. Written and directed by brothers Cameron and Colin Cairnes, it’s a sort of return to ye old “found footage” subgenre that I’ve mostly avoided in recent times. (Chronicle was my favorite film of 2012, but I’ve sat through nary a Paranormal Activity.)

As the faux history goes, once upon a time in the ’70s there was a late-night talk show called Night Owls with Jack Delroy, a wannabe competitor with the juggernaut that was Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show in his prime. Dastmalchian is our man Jack, a contender for the after-hours crown till life got in the way and he lost his onscreen mojo. Whatever persona he’d once kept up for The Viewers at Home, his shtick would become a perpetual fear of failure and irrelevance — much like today’s “influencers”, but obsessed with overnight Nielsen ratings rather than instant clicks. Sometimes he’s still like any other stand-up comic whose writing staff is ordered to feed him topical jokes (Reggie Jackson! Billy Carter!) and sometimes he sinks to new lows as he helplessly watches belligerent guests trade punches, which wasn’t really a thing back then. His little Night Owls program threatened to devolve into a Jerry Springer precursor decades too soon and disrupt the very fabric of the unscripted-programming timeline.

That dire point in his career is where Late Night with the Devil joins his life in progress. A stage-setting documentary prologue recaps the hot-button mood of the era — civil unrest, antiwar protests, disillusionment with authority, and, germane to the incident at hand, America’s fascination with the paranormal. UFOs! ESP! Mass hypnosis! Staged telekinesis! All things scary and spooky and possibly real but more likely frauds! Some of which would be covered in the future in Time-Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown! Not to mention creepy cults, wicked obsessions, and assorted crimes that would one day be filed collectively under the retroactively nicknamed “Satanic panic”. (Dungeons & Dragons was only a few years old at this point and hadn’t yet been swept into the parental paranoia wave.)

Having little left to lose, Delroy ventured into that bizarre minefield on Halloween 1977 with a very special episode that would dance on the fine line between taste and trauma. With the blessing of his money-minded producer (Josh Quong Tart, who was in the Cairnes’ previous film Scare Campaign) and his network bosses at UBC, Delroy invited good friend Dr. June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon from last year’s Foe, faintly echoing talk-show mainstay Dr. Joyce Brothers) to come on the show with a patient named Lilly (Ingrid Torelli) who survived an evil cult’s mass suicide but was feeling slightly better now except for the alleged demon inside her. After a round of the usual polite chitchat, Delroy envisioned this gathering as the perfect opportunity to summon forth the demon and interview a genuine Hell-spawn on live TV. What’s the worst that could happen?

The core of Late Night with the Devil is that “lost” episode in its available entirety as well as behind-the-scenes archival footage taken that night offstage and during commercial breaks. In addition to the good doctor and her charge — an awkward teen who’s uncannily skilled at finding every camera and staring down its glassy abyss — two more guests are billed for the evening and for value-added nostalgic homages, each apropos of unexplained phenomena of the times. Representing the fantastical is Fayssal Bazzi (Apple TV+’s Shantaram) as the mentalist Christou, a send-up of every “psychic” like the Amazing Kreskin or John Edwards who came to your town and kept repeating random syllables until some rube in the back row was vaguely reminded of one phoneme in a dead loved one’s name. From the opposite end of the fact-or-fiction spectrum charges Ian Bliss (the Matrix series) perfectly cranky as the crusading Carmichael Haig, who’s basically world-famous paranormal skeptic James Randi. (I read two of his books back in college, the classic Flim-Flam! and his illuminating prophecy-by-prophecy rebuttal The Mask of Nostradamus.) One purported seer into the spirit world versus one vitriolic debunker, both present for the ostensible summoning — whoever’s right or wrong, Delroy wins. He hopes.

The Cairnes know the subject is hardly groundbreaking and wisely avoid the rookie mistake of pretending this all happens in a vacuum apart from pop culture. (At least one fleeting quip confirms The Exorcist exists in their world.) The novelty format is over half the fun, a faithful recreation that channels interviewers high and low, renowned or short-lived, reminding me of everything from Mike Douglas to David Brenner’s Nightlife and reliving all the hallmarks of such programs. (A belittled sidekick! Cheesy repartee! A totally hep house band! Silly sketches! Smoking on camera! Zookeepers bringing exotic fauna! Musical guests bumped from the end of the show at the last minute!) Though the course of events is easily predictable from its benign inception through the inevitably disastrous outcome (except maybe the final ten minutes, when any lingering formalist trappings dissolve into so much sanguinary psychedelia), the meta conceit helps distinguish this riff from the past 5-10 years’ worth of demonic-possession flicks and series.

Anchoring it all is Dastmalchian, exactly as waaaaay-out-there as one would expect. Jack Delroy nearly drowns in his own flop sweat and knows no shame as he misfires his every attempt at human connection with the sort of graceless prefab charm that can only be acquired by a true showbiz failure. Going from shifty-eyed to wide-eyed and back again, he lurches through the motions from one segment to the next, thriving only on the promise of overseeing A Television First that might buy him a comeback, though he’ll soon regret not looking far enough ahead to glimpse the price tag. At times he’s so out of sync with his guests that I wondered, “How could anyone of sound mind give this man his own talk show?” Then I remembered the same could be said of Tom Green, Chevy Chase, or Jimmy Fallon. Who knows how many guys got their gigs by making deals with the Devil, without even repaying the favor by inviting him on the show?

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Georgina Haig (Fringe, Once Upon a Time) appears in flashbacks as Jack’s wife, whose death from cancer was the pivotal moment in Jack’s life that still haunts him throughout. Steve Mouzakis (Where the Wild Things Are) is the now-deceased head of Lilly’s now-extinct cult. Other Night Owls crew members include Christopher Kirby, who showed up twice in the Matrix series and was slightly in Revenge of the Sith, though poor Senator Giddean Danu has yet to get his own action figure.

The narrator of the documentary prologue is none other than special guest Michael Ironside!

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Late Night with the Devil end credits, but they do lead off with an indigenous land acknowledgment (Australian-style), plead briefly for organ donation, and name-check the “improvisational” theremin player, whose eerie anti-tunes would handily win a “Top Ten ’70s Things About Late Night with the Devil” list.

PROTECT YA NECK, KID!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: with three films writer/director Robert Eggers claimed a neglected niche as an artisanal horror scenographer, creating unique environments with an obsessive fastidiousness that surely frightens and confuses any execs used to funding facsimiles of other films. At first The Witch disoriented the unsuspecting viewer with stylized Puritanical dialect before plunging them into a malevolent maelstrom of what Salem might’ve looked like if the witch-hunters hadn’t been making it all up. The Lighthouse was an intensely claustrophobic, black-and-white duel over Mellvillian obsession and 19th-century on-the-job training. As if those weren’t harrowing enough, The Northman retold the tale of the turn-of-the-ninth-century Jutland prince Amleth (you may recall Shakespeare’s watered-down adaptation called Hamlet) as a visceral, deafening Dolby Cinema experience in which its antihero, a doubt-free rage-monster, waged relentless revenge atop a sonic tsunami of pummeling war drums. Such are the hypperrealities that Eggers, diviner of realms unseen, has dared us to watch.

Whereas The Northman was less a do-over of existing material than a savage interpretation of the historical record, Eggers’ latest is his first total remake — a full-throated cover of the 1922 silent classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, F.W. Murnau’s unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that took on a life of its own despite the ensuing lawsuit. Eggers’ Nosferatu has no subtitle and is twice the runtime, and follows in the footsteps of other movie-monster aficionados-turned-pros such as Guillermo del Toro and Leigh Whannell, but as one might expect, it’s no ordinary Dracula flick to throw on the ever-mounting pile.

Surprisingly, Eggers hews pretty faithfully to the original by Murnau and the original screenwriter Henrik Galeen. Once again we’re transported to 19th-century Germany, except Eggers cunningly lulls us into a complacent non-Eggers state with the tediously BBC version, where not a single word of German is spoken, everyone has British accents, and everyday rhythms feel awfully ponderous behind all those starched collars and corsets, not to mention stretched-out arcs for the other characters who mattered not at all to Murnau.

Nepo-baby Lily-Rose Depp (Yoga Hosers, HBO’s The Idol) is Ellen Hutter, a Concerned Wife who’s still reeling from a bizarre psychic encounter she had years ago as a teen, which has sparked unsettling random dreams ever since. The ubiquitous yet always welcome Nicholas Hoult (whom I’ve seen most recently in Juror #2 and The Menu) is her husband Thomas, a realtor tasked with journeying to faraway Transylvania to close a deal in person with a rich recluse who has designs on moving into their own li’l fictional town of Wisborg. Sure, Thomas will be gone for weeks, but she has friends of equal social standing who’ll look after her, and, as with most period pieces, money seems no object even in his absence. What’s the worst that could happen?

Thomas is soon countries away, surrounded by angry Romani and seemingly superstitious inn employees all shaming him for his business dealings with…with that man. He shrugs off their bug-eyed warnings and arrives at the current residence of the client…whereupon we meet Bill Skarsgård, the biggest monster in such films as Stephen King’s It and John Wick: Chapter 4, as Eggers’ revamp of the notorious Count Orlok. Not merely the bald, spindly, stiff-backed, black-suited demon of pop culture and its countless homages from Salem’s Lot to Spongebob Squarepants and back again, Skarsgard’s Orlok is a hulk lurking in the shadows of his cavernous palace of decrepitude, every utterance a sepulchral rumble in a tar-thick Romanian accent with infernally rolled R’s and a subterranean basso profundo deep enough to reach Hell. Eggers reveals him only incrementally because the viewer needs time to adapt to each inhuman aspect — his mottled skin, his Lurch-like height, and arguably Eggers’ most challenging deviation from the source material, a heinously thick mustache. It’s bigger than any facial hair this side of Sam Elliott or Omniman, and it might be laughable if it weren’t so…so evil.

Same as the original, Thomas is uneasy at first, then tries not to be intimidated in this real estate transaction…but ultimately knows he’s confronting much more than an eccentric hermit, and abject terror ensues. Hoult sells it with every fiber of his being and hits the gradual nuances in Thomas’ arc through its original path from ravaging to recovery, from victim to would-be defender. The film returns from the castle to Wisborg as before, once again seeing Orlok’s voyage of the damned to his would-be new homeland (another subplot extended with extra time allotted for dying sailors) with his full power-set in tow. Rather than devour his victims’ blood through the tender, easily accessible, eminently popular jugular vein favored by average vampires, he has the jaw strength to bore through the breastbone or between the ribs and slurp straight from the heart. He also wields a sorcerer’s might, attacking through dreams and enthralling his prey with a compulsory form of summons some levels above basic vampy hypnosis.

Naturally he’s set his sights upon his ultimate prey Ellen, whose nightmares escalate into creepy sleepwalking fits. Fortunately for her, her mortally wounded man Thomas isn’t alone. Other allies join the fight, including our MVP Willem Dafoe (returned from Eggers’ last two films!) as the local professor with knowledge outside our mortal realm. He rants about humanity’s fatal flaw of being “blinded by the gaseous light of science” and is the only character brave enough to utter the forbidden phrases we know someone has to say sooner or later — “the undead” and “vampyr” and, most emphatically paused of all, “Nosferatu“. At last comes the authority who’ll save the day!

Well, as much as it can be saved per Murnau’s framework, anyway. Along the way, Eggers opts for German Expressionist mode as much as possible within the modern tech at hand, dousing entire scenes in the same silent-era monotones of old and recreating those memorable moments of Orlok working his wiles through sinister shadow-play that’s rarely attempted nowadays outside the end-credits art for Tim Burton projects. He embraces what Murnau accomplished within his contemporaneous boundaries and pays respects in the best ways. He’s atmospherically abetted by The Northman composer Robin Carolan, trading in percussive concussions for subtler melancholy and tragedy befitting the century-length time jump from OG Nos to now.

Surprisingly he also avoids the pitfalls of the common horror-writer urge to romanticize vampires. No two ways about it, Orlok is straight-up hideous. The link between him and Ellen works only supernatural and only between the two of them; no rational viewer will see her position — throughout her recurring torment and especially in the climax — and think to themselves, “Ohhhh, if only that were me!” (Please do not notify me of your Rule 34 exception.)

Eggers makes a few other alterations to the Murnau/Galeen text, but nothing that creates a distracting imbalance. Stoker’s novel is included in the “Based On” section in the end credits, but I didn’t catch a lot of reworking for its sake. Beyond the unnamed Demeter‘s ill-fated course, Orlok’s Renfield-esque evil-sidekick counterpart has been merged with another character in a way that answers a nagging question without overexplaining it. The usual trio of vampire women are each Lady Not Appearing in This Film, another wise storytelling choice that posits Orlok as an even lonelier outlier in desperate search of a singular quarry rather than adding a redundancy to his existing harem. (If you think they’re essential, you can always revisit them in, say, Stephen Sommers’ underrated popcorn-fest-with-extra-cheese Van Helsing or Coppola’s unforgettably outlandish blockbuster, which…uhhh, yeah, I’ll leave you to that one.)

I feared Eggers’ Nosferatu might suffer the drawbacks of other classic-horror remakes of recent vintage. Despite the overwhelming consensus pros and superiors, I’ve come away with lukewarm impressions of del Toro’s remakes in this vein. All of his films are marvels of production and art design (even the earlier, underfunded ones), and of course his visual effects tend toward the impeccable side, but I never quite connected with his last two overhauls The Shape of Water and Nightmare Alley, which tossed most preexisting subtleties out the window in favor of sating the urge to see his childhood favorites writ bloodier and sexier, as if the Hays Code denied past works their true greatness. By no means has Eggers entertained a PG-13 compromise here, but the splatterpunk viscera are selective and seldom, spaced apart for a more meaningfully horrifying shock whenever they do occur at Orlok’s powerful talons.

His Nosferatu saves the most psychologically scarring moments for the climax, when the survivors conspire on a big Hail Mary that requires one final sacrifice. Hoult and Dafoe are their riveting selves throughout as always, but it all comes down to the performance from Ms. Depp herself, who has to transcend several straight scenes of varying levels of victimhood and convey her part of the plan in a way that forces us to realize the full, revolting enormity of what she’s doing to help save the world. A more modern take might see her punching Orlok in the face and engaging him in some bizarre swordfight or whatever, but we’re still in Eggers’ 1838 Germany. He unwaveringly commits to the text, the world, and the tragedy to the very end, inequities and all, whether we cheer or not. You’d have to be some kind of monster to feel like cheering. Eggers has yet to bother with that kind of film. Nosferatu isn’t superheroics with fangs like, say, Abigail. It’s uncompromising horror.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Allies with varying degrees of usefulness include Emma Corrin (The Crown, Deadpool vs Wolverine) as Ellen’s pal Anne, a.k.a. the “Lucy” BFF in the typical Stoker lore; Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Mr. Kraven the Hunter himself, as Anna’s husband (again playing vengeful but much more interesting here than as the jumpy slashy antihero); and Ralph Ineson (The Witch and The Northman) as the requisite doctor of the era who thinks most maladies are caused by too much blood in the body.

Simon McBurney (Apple+’s Hijack, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation) is Hoult’s boss back at the real estate office, who has much more to do here than push papers. Karel Dobrý (Syfy’s Dune miniseries, the first Mission Impossible) is the captain of the ill-fated, unnamed ship.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Nosferatu end credits, but they confirm it was shot in the Czech Republic, thus proving a viable film can be made there despite the last 30-40 years’ worth of zero-budget direct-to-video crap slapped together for budget savings. For those curious about such things, the credits also confirm Emma Corrin still identifies as nonbinary, evidenced by the credit for the “Assistant to Mx. Corrin”, which marks the first time I’ve ever sighted that honorific outside the internet.

Midlife Crisis Crossover!

2024-05-24 02:35:34

“Abigail”: Bunhead of Blood

Black Swan but with slightly less agony.

Horror hasn’t been a primary go-to genre for me as I’ve aged, but I’ll check out a given work in just about any genre if it can sink a hook into the elusive target that is my set of aesthetic peculiarities. (And by “hook” I do not mean I award imaginary brownie points for use of the empty “elevated horror” label.) In the wake of the Hollywood-wide restart after last year’s dual WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, some 7,000 new, quick-bake horror flicks will be coming to theaters over the next several months as studios catch up on their precious blockbuster assembly-line schedules. Amid the flood of recent blood-soaked trailers — from high-concept to lowbrow to “the plot is a spoiler!” — one pitch spoke to me from the fray: “From the directors of the last two Scream movies!”

If the preceding sentences sound familiar, it’s because they’re largely lifted from my previous write-up of Late Night with the Devil. If horror flicks have taught me anything, it’s that recycling is cool. Sometimes old parts can be reused in a new contraption without collapsing. Sometimes the contraption is pretty nifty, like folding a newspaper into a sailboat, or making an omelet with leftover taco filling, or lifting the one-line concept from an old Universal monster movie but throwing away the rest of the movie because no one remembers it anyway.

Hence, directors Matt Bellinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (d/b/a the team “Radio Silence”) present Abigail. The 1936 work that inspired it is a spoiler. Its entire trailer is a spoiler. Fortunately it doesn’t spoil the whole runtime, as more twists abound and a crack ensemble makes up the difference in their performances whenever the writing withholds too much.

Our initial setup seems a fairly basic caper (nowhere near convoluted enough to call it a “heist”) to kidnap a billionaire’s tween daughter (Alisha Weir, of Netflix’s Matilda and the recent Wicked Little Letters) after her evening ballet recital in a weirdly empty theater. A team of strangers has been hired for the job:

• Dan Stevens (differently accented from his recent Godzilla x Kong adventurer) as the cocky leader
• Kathryn Newton (looking to leave Quantumania behind) as the spoiled-rotten thrill-hacker
• Will Catlett (the reluctantly immortal gangster Lala from The CW’s Black Lightning) as the stoic sniper
• Angus Cloud (of HBO’s Euphoria, who died last July) as the stoner wheelman
• Kevin Durand (an experienced Big Bad from Locke and Key and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes) as the brainless muscle
• Last but most, Melissa Barrera (from those last two Scream chapters and infamously not the next one) as the field medic whom we realize is the actual main character when she gazes upon the estranged kiddo on her phone’s lockscreen and shows the slightest empathy toward their target.

Our Antiheroes do the job Reservoir Dogs style — i.e., no names, no backstory sharing, just fake names — except they’re each so doggedly individualized that even a beginner-level people-watcher can predict their baggage. One particular bonding scene explores how nowadays everyone thinks they’re so very different from everyone else, yet it’s easier than ever to reduce someone’s entire persona to a smug Sherlock monologue. Such moments of team interplay afford each actor — nary a dullard in the lineup — quite a few turns to build camaraderie or rivalry in deeper ways beyond the snarky dialogue by screenwriters Stephen Shields and Guy Busick (Radio Silence’s Scream chapters and Ready or Not).

The team absconds to an old mansion at the choosing of their employer (the amazing colossal Giancarlo Esposito!), who promises they’ll earn millions for their service. All they have to do is hold onto the girl and survive the night there, always the biggest catch in every too-good-to-be-true “free one-night mansion stay!” travel deal. Same as every movie caper or heist ever, the plan goes off the rails on both conditions. Their captive is no mere tiny dancer: she’s a double-proficiency vampire ballerina who might be just as old and vicious as Kirsten Dunst in Interview with the Vampire. Worse still, soon as she bares her fangs, all the exits slam shut. IT’S A TRAP.

Apart from a few perfunctory, pointless minutes of red-herring ambiguity about what’s really happening (where’d she go? did someone else abduct and kill her in a closet? is some other killer hiding in the shadows? Is one of the crew pulling a double-cross?), it’s hunter-vs.-hunted except the hunter is disguised as an entry-level Swiftian. She’s all but snarling, “I’m not locked in here with you! You’re locked in here with me!” as she stalks and arbitrarily almost-kills them one by one. If she weren’t outnumbered and her predators-turned-prey were horny teens sans street smarts, this would’ve been a half-hour short, possibly one-third of some themed horror triptych alongside other tales of a zombie violinist or a drama-club mummy or a teen chess champion whose pawns contain the souls of her victims.

As it stands, they do have some professional resources to pool. Wisely, their first priority — examined in the funniest scene — is discerning which kind of pop-culture vampire they might be facing. A traditional one with the classic long list of weaknesses? One of those modern, overpowered, Everything You Know About Vampires Is Wrong hotties who aren’t really vampires so much as they’re just blood-drinking DC supervillains? Or a compromised in-betweener, which means they’ll have to try everything, see what works, and hope any of them live long enough to see the scientific method to the end? And how many other splatter-flicks can they reference along the way without feeling like secondhand characters themselves?

From there, the audience is tasked with betting on how closely the death order will follow the callsheet order. The film tips its hand early to light up Barrera as the Final Gal, but beyond her, anything or anyone goes. Fortunately the ensemble strike up considerable chemistry amongst their differences, enough to mourn the intermittent murders. Yes, there’s the occasional fanging, a minion-turning of sort, and at least one twist neither telegraphed nor spoiled in the trailer. Each vampire looks lovingly creepy, taken a step above the norm in that the makeup team gives every vampire their own individual look, rather than churning them out of the same mold. Gone are the days of Buffy/Angel facial ridges looking like members of the same Klingon troop.

For a good span, though, it gets almost too easy to forget this is a vampire flick. Through several sparring rounds Abigail relies more on her supernatural strength than her creature-of-the-night skill set — admittedly challenging to employ in a mansion where most of the rooms remain fully lit all night long — to the point where the caper-flick switches genres to medium-powered superheroics. Give Barrera some wacky gadgets and this could’ve been a Birds of Prey sequel. I’m not quite complaining, as the action is slickly shot and allows us moments to breathe just long enough till the next surprise jolts us again. By the final act, though, it’s all about the vampirism rift between the survivors and the undead, all drowning in buckets of grime and fountains of blood, perhaps too unsubtle to qualify as Grand Guignol. Sometimes the only difference between vampire movies and superhero movies is the bloodshed, and sometimes not even that. Eventually Abigail remembers.

Among the cast’s VIPs, Barrera bracingly explores her deadbeat-mom/kidnap-abetter dichotomy to confirm why the directors kept her on speed-dial despite the one headline controversy; Stevens adds to his ongoing series of fearlessly flamboyant freaks as if desperate to wipe the name “Matthew Crawley” from any future Q&As forevermore; and the young Ms. Weir shows us a prodigy’s chops — at turns innocent, menacing, scheming, occasionally open to negotiation, and nuanced enough to evince more than one mode of vulnerable, regardless of which side’s ahead on the vamps-v.-mortals scoreboard. A film built around a child-star core can go bravely or broken depending on their talent level and whether the adults can coax the best from them; here, the risk pays off, hopefully in ways that weren’t damaging to her behind the scenes. (After Quiet on the Set, Showbiz Kids, and other works on the subject, it’s getting harder out here not to fear the worst about any NSFW Hollywood production costarring minors.)

As I expect is the case for much of the recent horror-flick streak at theaters, Abigail isn’t aiming for deeper meaning, apart from the morals of Negligent Parents Ought to Do Better, and Every Get-Rich-Quick Scheme Has a Price. It’s a well-buttered popcorn-heavy roller-coaster that arcs upward and into a veritable Red Sea of monster-movie over-the-toppiness. It might’ve qualified as fully classy if they’d added another ballet number or two.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Yes, the vampire daughter’s father shows up with a special guest in that role — an actor who’s been name-checked in four previous MCC entries and technically shares a major IMDb credit with one of the other cast members, though they never shared a scene in that work. His cameo is short, sweet, and scary, and he wears it well.

Otherwise, unless we start exploring the stunt team’s resumes, those named above are literally the entire cast — no other cameos, no other supporters, no crowd scenes, no Concerned Spouses back home, no exposition from newscasters or radio DJs, nary a stray extra wandering by. Far more of the budget went to makeup and VFX than to the thespian head count.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Abigail end credits per se, but the last waves of fine print scroll away accompanied by one last vampire ballerina giggle from the darkness, as if to say ABIGAIL WILL RETURN. If she does, any sequel would have to delete another role or two so they can afford the Marvel de-aging CG they’d need to maintain her immortality at ballet-class age.

yes-there-are-scenes-during-and-after-the-ant-man-and-the-wasp-quantumania-end-credits

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In space, no one complains about eating the same meal rations again and again and again.

I can’t speak for fans of Ghostbusters or of Harry Potter post-Deathly Hallows, but whenever I get attached to an IP, I’m excited whenever that universe shows signs of forward motion or at least simulating it. Granted, when it comes to the Alien movies, my opinions are already warped — James Cameron’s Aliens is one of my Top 5 films ever, which I saw years before I got around to Ridley Scott’s original. I also respected Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s engagingly bonkers Alien Resurrection for pushing the series’ boundaries and actually getting somewhere — anywhere — after edgy pre-auteur David Fincher’s Alien³ ramrodded Ellen Ripley’s story into a literal dead end.

All Alien works since then have treated Resurrection as The End, and/or as a disowned mistake. Directors — not to mention writers of its various transmedia spinoffs — limit themselves to rooting around the limited preceding timeline for unoccupied dance floors where they can twirl in place and try out their freshest moves, never quite distracting from how the club has had the same dusty disco strobe and jukebox since 1997. Double-dates with Predators were one-night stands that no one could maintain eye contact with. When Scott himself barged back in indignantly all, “SEE HERE NOW!” we knew he could make spaceships shinier and creatures slimier, but Prometheus gave us a half-unwritten origin and Alien: Covenant was a cram session to finish the same assignment in as few pages as possible.

27 years later the franchise continues moving nowhere at sub-FTL velocity with Alien: Romulus, a pre-sequel brazenly set between Alien and Aliens in hopes of blending in, in more ways than one. I’ve seen no previous works by Fede Álvarez or his co-writer Rodo Sayagues (though Don’t Breathe is on my extremely long mental to-do list), so I came into this with few preconceptions except a faint awareness that gore is his medium. I saw the first trailer at C2E2 with an exclusive Álvarez intro, which was promising, but the second gave away way too much. I offered benefit of the doubt for as long as I could.

Our Heroes, most of whom are inevitably disposable, are space twentysomethings who might be the softest space miners in the galaxy, possibly space-mine back-office drones who alleviate their everyday ennui by playing space pranks on a Space Dwight. (A more daring film would’ve starred the Russian miners of HBO’s Chernobyl.) They’re contractually stuck in a sunless Weyland-Yutani worksite, where their three square meals a day are probably just Vitamin D horse pills, and dream of a better life or at least some time off. They wanna go where everybody knows their name, but the nearest getaway is light-years beyond and can’t be traveled to without Alien Franchise™ cryo-chambers. If such appliances were commonly sold at Space Best Buys galaxywide, chances are they’re priced far out of these worker-drones’ pay-grades.

A plan is concocted that of course is not run by any authorities or at least reviewed for possible flaws by a grizzled old miner with decades of wisdom to dispense. All those geezers can suck it as Our Heroes leave their mining colony with no resistance whatsoever and fly out to a spooky abandoned spaceship that’s apparently driftin’ in nothingness just down the road a-ways. The place is divided into two halves, each called Romulus and Remus, which never matters. Somewhere aboard are cryo-chambers they plan to pilfer for vacation gear, hopefully still functional and definitely not surrounded by dangers that might explain why perfectly usable, expensive equipment has been left alone to gather space dust. What’s the worst that could happen?

To be fair, the setup looks fantastic, if not entirely original — space blue-collar mining towns and transports are built on dingy, industrial-chic designs straight out of Coruscant’s darkest bowels or Main Street Blade Runner. The acrid smoke and the heavy-metal tonnage are palpable. Off-planet, though, we’re back on familiar turf in more ways than one. The spooky ship has lifeforms on board. A survivor pops up. They run and bleed, and run and run and bleed, run run run, bleed bleed bleed…wait, no, there aren’t that many characters. But you get the idea. If you don’t get it, then you also won’t be driven to distraction by the score by Benjamin Wallfisch (Blade Runner 2049, The Invisible Man). Like Álvarez, though, he’s unabashedly playing the hits, sampling cues from throughout the series. In our household I’m the worst when it comes to identifying instrumental pieces, but I’ve listened to James Horner’s Aliens soundtrack (the old half-hour version) so many times that even I could recognize the Pavlovian cues.

And those “hits” just keep spinning on the turntable. Characters spontaneously quote memorable dialogue from far better films with none of the knowing preciousness of “I have a bad feeling about this.” One classic soundbite is seemingly ruined on purpose, as if daring the audience to seal-clap at it anyway. Aliens‘ pulse rifle tutorial –- the only romantic moment in the entire film, which Sigourney Weaver and Michael Biehn played so subtly and wonderfully — has been adapted in toto but stripped of nuance and reduced to a video-game protagonist having earned five XP in the tutorial and redeemed it for the “Use a Gun” perk. The xenomorph chases stop and start, with the monsters sometimes posing lethal obstacles and sometimes calling time-out for off-screen smoke breaks. They’re same as they ever were, no new evolution to show off, unless you count how the final act is an offensively faithful remake of the final 20 minutes of Resurrection and features a Final Boss who’s mostly recycled, yet bizarrely remodeled to please anyone who loved Azkaban‘s wobbly PG emaciated NBA-draft-pick werewolf.

By then the rockiest of rock-bottoms has already arrived earlier on, when we greet the ship’s lone survivor, whose nature has been so controversial and featured in numerous headlines that I don’t even know why I’m treating it as a spoiler at this late date (it’s been a long couple weeks for me). Suffice it to say this blog has not supported rampant AI use and abuse in the arts over the past several years (especially not by other bloggers), to say nothing of egregious de-aging of now-older actors to resemble their former selves because The Kids These Days might recoil at the idea of recasting. If true, I blame their dead imaginations. But when it’s done to resurrect a character played by a dead actor? For more than a quick cameo? Which could’ve easily been recast or simply replaced by a new character? And when it’s the worst special effect in the entire film? Maybe the attempted deepfaking will look less laughable when Romulus comes to gas-station VHS, but on the Dolby Cinema screen I attended, even Madame Web would’ve pointed and laughed at the shoddiness and the dispelled gravitas.

Rather, the most intriguing character — by which I mean the only one — is the token android assigned to every Alien film. As Andy the android (not to be confused with Marvel’s Andy the Awesome Android), David Jonsson (HBO’s Industry, the upcoming Bonhoeffer) deserved far more space to roam. Andy is an older-model android who’s rather timid, going obsolete and not much use (more of a security blanket than a minion), but he’s an essential tool that Our Heroes need to access the dead ship’s computer using a really old programming language. He’s been his human’s best friend since childhood, and keeps telling dumb Dad-jokes because that’s how he was programmed. Then at a crucial time where everyone’s about to die, a much-needed upgrade serves as a pivot point; suddenly he’s no longer a mere tool…or so he tells himself. A better film would’ve spotlighted his inner conflicts front and center.

Alas, no Alien film ever allows androids to rise above sidekick status. Amid the occasional visual flourish here and there (including a tense set-piece involving zero-G, buckets of acid, and the defeat of physics by its mortal enemy, the unstoppable film-force called “But It Looks Cool!”), Andy’s story is eventually waylaid by further derivative material and his otherwise human companions who add up to six characters in search of a canceled CW series. Fan service and shiny surfaces don’t quite give Alien: Romulus an identity of its own, nor virtually anything else unique for future filmmakers to homage in Alien IP-dust-off sequels 20 years from now. Much as he’s tried to blend in…if Scott and Cameron are fraternally twinned Romulus and Remus, Álvarez is their other brother Rummo.

Thus we end with my version of Every Alien Movie Ranked:

…though if I wanted to be fair (I don’t, but I’m saying if I did), I’d have to rewatch AvP to double-check. It definitely had a better Final Boss Battle.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: For want of a new Ripley, our latest leading humans include previous “stars” Cailee Spaeny (Pacific Rim Uprising, Bad Times at the El Royale) and Isabela Merced (survivor of Madame Web and Transformers: The Last Knight). The token males in the crew are Spike Fearn (Aftersun) as the resident jagweed and Archie Renaux (Netflix’s Shadow and Bone) as a Ken whose job is “Tall”.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Alien: Romulus end credits, though the late, legendary designer H.R. Giger receives a rather prominent name-check. Anyone like me who devoured the Alien Quadrilogy boxed-set extras will recognize Alec Gillis, who was also seminal in previous films and is likewise mentioned. The estate of the deepfaked familiar face offers their seal of approval, and the complete contents of the music section are citations of three previous Alien films and Wagner’s Das Rheingold, which was used in Covenant.

(We get it, end-credits writer, all the other Alien films had SO MUCH AWESOME STUFF in them. You can knock off the tributes now.)

Midlife Crisis Crossover!

2024-02-24 04:33:55

“Madame Web”: O, What A Mangled Web We Grieve

Note the use of classic spider elements, such as webbing, multiple unmatched eyes, and someone falling down a waterspout.

We interrupt our annual Oscar Quest for this breaking announcement:

“If you take on the responsibility, then will come great power.”

Is your mind blown yet? Your life irrevocably changed? Your latent Spider-powers activated? Your craving for scrambled Marvel Easter eggs whetted?

I’d already stifled a few giggle fits before Madame Web served up that hokum to its baffled, baffling headliner when she has her 376th consecutive moment of doubt. They’re so proud of this, it’s declared at least twice. Someone behind the camera thought that line was clever and/or sage — possibly director S.J. Clarkson (a veteran of Marvel’s ex-Netflix shows) or one of the other three credited writers, including the buddy-duo at fault for Morbius. This intentionally inverted callback to Spider-Man’s world-famous tagline took four writers to bang out. It’s a rejected fortune cookie in a film that already gave us actual fortune cookies in an earlier scene. Their fetch-level anti-catchphrase suffers doubly in comparison to the real things, and we suffer for sitting through it.

Sony’s latest installment in the MCU-Tangential Spider-Man Cinematic Pocket Dimension really, really hopes you loved the animated Spider-Verse so deeply that they’re eagerly bringing all their arachnid-based IPs to life in hopes of cashing in before superhero movies go the way of three-hour musicals and Blair Witch knockoffs. The overworked Spider-Verse teams skipped over most of the Spider-ladies in that thick catalog, choosing instead to create their own. The Madame Web team had their choice of leftovers, pushed aside Jessica Drew the O.G. Spider-Woman, and ran with four of her successors, none of whom would exist if she hadn’t been handed Peter Parker’s baton first.

I was 8 years old and had been collecting Amazing Spider-Man for a little over a year when Madame Web debuted at the end of 1980. As drawn, she was a blind, paraplegic, grumpy Aunt May lookalike who could foretell the future and warn Spidey when it suited her. 33 years later she gets an origin story no one requested. Here she’s played by Dakota Johnson from the 50 Shades trilogy (not my thing, but she was solid in The Lost Daughter) as the comic-bookishly named Cassandra Webb, a 30-year-old EMT and antisocial cat lady whose foster-home upbringing apparently left her traumatically awkward, as her interactions with other humans have all the warmth and panache of an 80-year-old great-grandma whose temper ruins every Thanksgiving.

It’s A.D. 2003 and Cassie works and mopes in a New York City that’s totally action-packed with WHIP-PANS! CRASH-ZOOMS! EXTREME SHAKY-CAM! SALAD-SHOOTER EDITING, TAKEN-STYLE! And that’s just in Queens! She’s surrounded by very few period-piece mementos and I only counted two (1) oblique allusions to 9/11, which I understand used to be kind of a big deal ’round there. Parks & Rec‘s Adam Scott is her work-husband Ben Parker, whose girlfriend is not Marisa Tomei but whose sister-in-law Mary (Emma Roberts from Unfabulous and Scream Queens) is eight months pregnant and complaining about the fetus’ jumpiness, implying: (a) the radioactive spider has bitten him sixteen years ahead of schedule; (b) prequel math is the real reason for the 2003 setting, which explains why Clarkson’s bare-minimum nostalgia-pandering feels perfunctory; and (c) NYC had a lot of Spider-superhumans before li’l Petey grew into the scene as just another Spider-poseur rather than the Spider-trailblazer.

As is wont to happen in superhero origin movies, a near-death trauma triggers newfound abilities in Cassie. First and foremost, she can spontaneously see ten to thirty seconds into the future. Stubborn denial wastes any and all net benefits she could’ve gotten from her first several premonitions, even after she has an Uncle Ben-style tragedy on her hands. (Not her pal Ben, mind you — he’s over a dozen years away from becoming that Uncle Ben.) The visions are mostly mishmash; comparing them to the Final Destination series would be an insult to the latter. By the end of the film she’s mastered her powers like Phil Connors in Groundhog Day, predicting and dodging every single obstacle, explosion, and chain-reaction spread pattern before they happen, despite a complete lack of training montage. But perhaps that’s jumping too far ahead here.

Before she can show or feel any real curiosity, a triptych of subway flashes presage the deaths of three teen girls, none of whom know each other but all of whom converge in one place because of The Web that connects everyone in their Earth’s reality through an unseen spider-dimension made entirely of plot-point coincidences. Cassie welcomes her younger costars Sydney Sweeney (Anyone But You, HBO’s Euphoria), Celeste O’Connor (Ghostbusters: Afterlife), and Isabela Merced (Dora and the Lost City of Gold, Transformers: The Last Knight) — one white, one Black, one Hispanic. The STEM geek with divorced parents, the streetwise rebel with rich absentee parents, and the hard-luck loner with a poor single faraway parent. These spunky latchkey kids will one day grow up to be Spider-Man spinoffs sharing a single Spider-Verse timeline, and they’ll all be 14-18 years older than Spider-Man himself if they live to see his debut.

That last clause might be a problem. Their convergence has been foreseen by one Ezekiel Sims (French actor Tahar Rahim from The Mauritanian and Napoleon), a former colleague of Cassie’s mom (Kerry Bishé from Halt and Catch Fire and Argo) who’s had powers for thirty years. He’s used them to become Dark Spider-Man, though he can’t proclaim Dark Spider-Man as his supervillain name because of course pre-Spidey is still a wee placenta-wader. Not only can Ezekiel secrete a lethal Spider-toxin by touch and change into costume in an eye-blink like the Flash, he also has precog powers like Cassie. For years he’s been haunted by a vision of being murdered by a trio of Spider-Women…this same trio of young ladies Cassie has now run into, none of whom has powers yet. He aims to kill them before they can kill him, thus thwarting the prophecy. Beyond that single nightmare, we never, ever see his precog powers again.

But Cassie foresees Ezekiel achieving his evil goal and intervenes. Her story becomes a 2003 Lifetime movie in which a headstrong woman must take innocent girls on the run from an abusive male whose lines have been weirdly dubbed with the sound-mix verisimilitude of a Gamera film. Young Jeane Dixon and three powerless Nickelodeon teens must outwit and evade a very powered Dark Spider-Man who’s had a 30-year head start on Spider-adventuring, who’s gifted with all of the Spider-quickness yet shows none of the Spider-reflexes. So it goes throughout the film as Our Heroines flee from the subway to the New Jersey woods to a motel overnighter to an incomprehensible grand finale inside and atop a Pepsi-Cola™ warehouse filled with fireworks (or possibly unused Navy munitions), for which there’s plenty of room because all the characters took turns chugging NYC’s entire Pepsi-product supply in previous scenes. The “best” part of that chaos is when Cassie uses corrugated sheet metal as a Captain America shield against fireworks that had previously punched holes through brick walls and blown a helicopter out of the sky. Fireworks, mind you, as we are verbally told.

Along the way Cassie, sans any offensive capabilities, struggles to find increasingly larger vehicles to run over Ezekiel with. At one point she flies an ambulance through a building’s second or maybe third story, mostly to look cool. A defibrillator is misused in a “cool” way that should’ve killed one or more cast members. They later flee to a diner that the girls reach by a half-mile walk but for Cassie becomes a harrowing five-mile drive from the same starting point. Naturally a set-piece breaks out, during which all the diner employees vanish, possibly on smoke breaks out back. When Cassie returns to the heavily damaged scene later, it’s abandoned and not even boarded up — just a single strand of crime-scene tape strung across a gaping hole-in-the-wall to keep out trespassers, bugs, and evidence-rinsing rain.

There’s an utterly hilarious scene in which she explains to her charges how the Spider-toxin can cause cardiac arrest, so she spends several minutes earnestly teaching CPR to them and to Viewers Like You, so that everyone will know how to apply this magical Spider-toxin cure, a very special message from the Marvel Heart Association. Granted, CPR does come in handy later, but Chekhov’s First Aid pays off for reasons wholly unrelated to Spider-toxin.

For an intermission, Cassie abandons the girls for a week-long trip to the Peruvian Amazon (put on her EMT MasterCard, one presumes) that encounters no complications or major delays with post-9/11 security at either airport, even though she’s a wanted person of interest making major headlines. But it’s important that she learn slightly more about the source of all these Spider-powers and accept the solemn advice that shall henceforth make her a better person: “If you take on the responsibility, then will come great power.” And with that, a grown Daria clone who couldn’t function as a lunchroom monitor learns how to be a maternal team leader literally overnight. She also sprouts a second whole superpower 100% irrelevant to the Arachnida class as we know it.

Anyone hoping Young Uncle Ben will contribute and display the sort of heroism that he’d one day inspire in his nephew can rest assured he’s a willing impromptu babysitter who asks not nearly enough questions, but may roll their eyes at the scene where this professional EMT’s brain checks out when a pregnant lady’s water breaks. (Did that really never come up on the job?)

Through a full two hours of actors half-heartedly trading stock interactions, it all just keeps going on like this, garnished with The CW/DC-tier visual effects that cost some $80 million because Sony didn’t bring a coupon. If MST3K riffing were taught in schools, Madame Web would be in the beginner curriculum. I haven’t seen a big-budget superhero flick this nitpickable since Superman IV, ranking even farther below X-Men: The Last Stand and Zack Snyder’s wood-duck shooting gallery for hecklers.

I didn’t expect Madame Web to be America’s next Wonder Woman or Black Widow or Ms. Marvel. Frankly, I set my expectations to absolute zero the very first time I read the phrase “Sony Announced Madame Web Will Be a Film”. But I also didn’t expect my least-worst takeaway to be a revised, fractionally mellower opinion of Morbius. That one was Blockbuster Tuesday-rental terrible, but compared to what went wrong here, it kindasorta did try, bless its flimsy heart.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Zosia Mamet (Girls, Mad Men) is Ezekiel’s Lady-in-the-Chair, guiding him remotely as she uses a stolen, early-adopter version of facial-recognition software to hunt for the three youngsters via all the cameras in town. Indianapolis native Mike Epps (The Hangover series, the Resident Evil series) is a generous coworker of Cassie and Ben’s. For a couple of scenes, Law & Order veteran Jill Hennessy is a pretty dumb NSA agent.

José María Yazpik (Narcos) is the leader of a Peruvian Amazon tribe who call themselves The Spiders, but in Spanish so it sounds exotic to uncultured audiences. Their Spider-power source begets Ezekiel’s and Cassie’s respective power sets and begs an awful lot of questions. It also raises an important point: at least the filmmakers didn’t bring up the Spider-Totems from the comics. If you don’t know what those are, don’t look them up. Believe it or not, this flick could’ve been even worse.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Madame Web end credits, and no sign of Venom, Morbius, or Michael Keaton’s displaced Vulture. Either no other Sony filmmakers wanted their future Spider-flicks connected to this one, or no one felt optimistic enough to act as if there’ll be more Sony Spider-films after 2024.

The end credits do reveal the VFX department curiously had more 2-D artists than 3-D artists, and that the climax’s score is more rousing than the rest of the film because they Xeroxed parts of John Debney’s final-battle music from I Know What You Did Last Summer. I presume this was a nod to some obscure South American spider with the ability to sample and reuse other spiders’ music.

OST I Know What You Did Last Summer: 35. Final Confrontation

No CopyRight Intended, All Rights To Original Owners!!Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for ...

^{Classic Soundtracks 📻 (YouTube)}

Funny how wearing lots of bandages always means “scary monster” and not “victim receiving the care they sorely needed”.

It’s that time again! Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

This’ll be my third year diving in and seeing more than just a single entrant. I enjoyed much of what I saw in 2024, though some of my picks have yet to find distribution to this day. Those few that did kinda came and went without much fanfare. The most “prestigious” film I saw, Small Things Like These, at least went well enough for its makers that star Cillian Murphy and director Tim Mielants reunited for Steve, which just hit Netflix earlier this month. (Highly recommended, by the way.) Numerous other Heartland entries showed up on Oscar ballots, but I failed to catch them at the festival proper. (Eventually I saw Heartland veterans Flow and The Seed of the Sacred Fig, to name a couple.) I’ll be curious to see what happens to this year’s alumni in the months ahead.

Heartland’s 34th edition runs October 9-19, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all (Lord willing) — maybe more if time permits. Longtime MCC readers know the rule: every film I see in theaters gets its own entry, no matter how big or little. We kick things off with one of the only three horror films in the lineup (a genre HIFF has only opened up to within the past few years), and among this year’s few Asian ones: The Invisible Half, in which we learn Japanese teenagers are no more well-adjusted than ours are.

The first full-length feature from writer/director/editor Masaki Nishiyama is largely set in an all-girls’ school where nearly all the students are racist bullies, which is bad news for half-Japanese transfer student Elena (Lisa Siera). She’s lived in Japan for a decade, ever since her mom parted ways with her British dad (Sir Not Appearing in This Film), but she’s just moved into town and takes about three seconds to invite the wrath of the Mean Girl supermajority. Only two others fall out of lockstep as well: her kindly new BFF-by-default Akari (Miyu Okuno) and furiously inscrutable quasi-goth Nyan (Runa Hirasawa), who rarely emerges from the protective curtain of her bangs and clutches her phone and earbuds at all times like they’re a service animal. Although two other classmates sneer more loudly than the rest, pretty much everyone treats Nyan like trash because Different Is Bad and Groupthink Is Awesome. I trust this is an accurately searing indictment of Japanese Kids These Days?

Despite Nyan’s below-zero social standings, new girl Elena becomes the runt of the litter and eventually comes to realize the deal with Nyan’s phone obsession: there’s a monster on the loose! After a bizarre encounter under a bridge, Elena figures out she can only see or hear its bandaged visage or its oddly old-timey jacket when she clutches her phone and earbuds at all times. She doesn’t actually have to look through its camera, download a special app or subject it to a rite: its talismanic power comes through easy instant-contact…if she keeps the battery charged, of course, that notorious Achilles heel of every smartphone ever used in a film as a plot device.

Elena has her own fatal flaw to overcome: she’s intensely introverted to such a claustrophobic extreme that she won’t let any of the other characters into her head, which means no arguments, no warnings whenever the monster is coming, and almost no moments to open up and reveal anything inside. Sometimes not even the audience is privy to her thoughts, or any feelings beyond “locked up more brokenly than a McDonald’s ice cream machine”. The mood she sets for all her scenes is realistically stifled and alienated, which is sort of an unusual achievement, but it’s also among the film’s liabilities. Our inner voices end up shouting “LET US IN! SAY SOMETHING! DO ANYTHING!” at top mental volume because she is so frustrating to watch at times. I’m sure folks who’ve been around me at my quietest have thought much the same, but I don’t present my mood swings as two-hour performance-art installations for them to sit through and critique.

When anyone is exchanging noises, among the film’s best aspects is Yusuke Mikado’s creatively detailed sound design, in which the ambient audio quality varies depending on whether or not Elena has both earbuds in; when they’re both out, the nuances are striking if your theater’s speakers are as well equipped as ours were. (We never hear her listen to anything through them, but that’s for the best: cranked up at the wrong moment, iTunes could get her killed.) And with everyone’s silence anti-communicating at cross-purposes, Nishiyama does manage one particularly sharp epiphany: how sometimes one of the most painful sensations for an intense loner is to be scorned by another intense loner.

That implication stands out more than the “duality of man” metaphor promised by The Invisible Half‘s title, which gets lost amid other ambiguities. The monster gets no secret origin, no soliloquy explicating its motive, and…well, it doesn’t talk much more than poor Elena. I’m okay with leaving some questions for the audience to debate later, but I’d be less irritated if Nishiyama didn’t let everything crawl so slowly. Elena’s glacial pauses aren’t the sole cause: some takes linger uncut for interminable lengths, as if waiting for the slowest viewers to feel Emotional Weight before the whole class can move on. If you’re a cineaste intrigued by the notion of “What if Tarkovsky made a Mummy sequel”, here’s a credible simulation.

I was also surprised that, in terms of content, the film was virtually YA-level except for a pile of bloodiness at the end. I’ll admit I jumped in my seat once, and some of Mini-Darkman’s extended approaches were effectively creepy. My son, who’s much more immersed in this area than I am, tagged along for the screening and, while he didn’t mind the languorous pacing as much as I did, he called it “the least disturbing Japanese horror film I’ve ever seen.”

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: It isn’t uncommon for indie or international releases to leave me empty-handed for this section, though I’ve been surprised before. In this case the three young ladies and their characters are the only cast info available online as of tonight. If any of the adults or other teens intersect with my viewing history, I may never know until and unless this earns an official release on either side of the Pacific and prompts IMDb to highlight the crew beyond its poster’s surface. Most of the involved folks who are clickable have uniformly short resumes, though some have worked with Nishiyama on his previous short films, implying a loyal team at hand. We’ll see if any of them go on to future works that’ll have me referring back to this one someday.

(One relative standout: the aforementioned Yusuke Mikado has also been a boom operator on the upcoming Marty Supreme and Apple’s planned Neuromancer series that’s currently in production. Yes, sometimes I’ll drill down to subterranean level on this stuff if the mood strikes.)

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after The Invisible Half end credits, which are mostly Japanese and curiously printed white-on-grey till they reach the Special Thanks section and switch to black-on-grey. The full cast list names seven or eight other actors, so it’s not just the same three teens swapping in different wigs and prosthetic noses to play all the roles.

Midlife Crisis Crossover!

2024-10-22 02:32:05

The Heartland International Film Festival 2024 Season Finale

Woo-hoo! Free pin!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts…

Heartland’s 33rd edition ran October 10-20 — over 100 films, at least seventeen of them with cast/crew Q&As afterward. I took a week’s vacation from my day job and posted for nine consecutive days about the seven films I saw at five theaters in ten days, one virtual screening we’ll get to in a moment, plus a few other overdue, mostly unrelated entries. I doubt anyone out there read every single word, but I’m not even done yet!

For those just joining us, those seven films were, in viewing order:

• ReEntry
• Micro Budget
• Jazzy
• Superboys of Malegaon
• Small Things Like These
• Sheepdog
• We Strangers

Only two of these entrants have distribution deals in place as of this writing. A few may gain higher profiles in the months ahead. Some may continue their nomadic journey on the festival circuit in search of their forever home. Some were more flawed than others. I appreciated the chance to see them all, and I regret the long, long list of my other finalists who didn’t make the cut — some were sold out, some were scheduled opposite each other, and some I missed simply because some responsibilities prevented me from running around town to see three films a day for eleven straight days. As it is, I’m a bit burned out and ready for some homebound rest for a while until the next crappy superhero sequel comes around.

For viewers who wanted to travel less, Heartland also offered a selection of virtual screenings for certain films. My wife Anne and I availed ourselves of one such option last Saturday night: an indie dramedy called Dirty Laundry, made here in Indy. It seemed to garner the most media attention among the Hoosier-born projects on the roster. It also had three theatrical showings throughout the festival, more than most other films got. I was tempted by one novelty screening at the Kan-Kan Cinema that was played on VHS (!!!), but it was held the same night as Superboys.

Mitchell Wray and Charlie Schultz go through several cans of obsolete soft drinks.

The VHS edition was apropos of Laundry‘s period-piece nature — apart from a few flashbacks filmed in or in front of people’s houses, it’s a bottle episode set sometime in the mid-’90s at a laundromat with a pay phone and other bygone novelties (shot in an existing establishment a couple miles from the State Fairgrounds). Two young friends named Kyle and Eric meet weekly for that chore and a “business meeting”; each Thursday they try to come up with some company they’ll form together for the rest of their lives and get rich happily ever after. I’m not usually one for Pavlovian responses to nostalgia prompts, but the handfuls of quarters and laundry-cart shenanigans sent me back to my own laundromat days of yore — sometimes with family, sometimes by myself into the wee hours after closing time at my restaurant job…though even at 2 a.m. I never once managed to have the entire place to myself with no other customers or employees around as the guys do here.

Then comes an unexpected meeting with a mysterious, smiling woman (local storyteller Deborah Asante) who represents an extremely familiar trope that predates the ’90s. She offers cryptic words of wisdom and vanishes before her two listeners suffer a magical side effect: they suddenly find they can no longer lie. This helps us narrow down the exact year: sometime between 1995 (one cites The Shawshank Redemption as his favorite movie, which came out in ’94 but took at least a year before millions of video renters declared it Best Movie Ever) and February 1997, which is the best explanation why neither of them notices the resemblance to Liar Liar. (Or for that matter the Twilight Zone episode “The Whole Truth”. The initially super-expensive DVD sets came out in ’98, and it’s possible these guys missed it in reruns.)

Rather than getting Carrey’d away, writer/director Rocky Walls has another idea to pursue. He lets them have a little fun (though at first they mistake the hex for psychic powers, in a sequence that’s more awkward than funny) before their joint frustration escalates into a harsher exchange. As each realizes the other really can’t lie, they figure this night is the perfect chance to learn some cool secrets, over each other’s protests and without thinking ahead to the potential damage. Eventually emotions run their highest when the Biggest Secret is revealed, which Anne guessed about ten minutes into the film, though it curves slightly into less trod-upon grounds by the end.

At 71 minutes it’s the shortest of the eight films I saw in all, but still could’ve used a tighter edit. Conversations leave in a lot of long pauses for thought before lines are recited, as if a minimum runtime had to be reached, like a student padding a 1000-word essay by preceding every adjective with “very, very, very”. Of our two leads and the assorted smaller parts (including one background player who was once an extra in an episode of Cobra Kai), Mitchell Wray clearly has the most stage experience (including the national touring version of Finding Neverland) and stands out as Kyle, the more jokey and free-spirited of the two, whose tear-jerking confession needed the most dynamic range. If he’s on board for any future Heartland films, I’ll keep an eye out for his name in the catalog.

Emagine Noblesville, nearly an hour from our house, where the two of us saw Sheepdog.

Before we go, here’s a special shout-out to the five places Heartland lured me to for this year’s occasions:

Newfields, the establishment f/k/a the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Anne accompanied me for ReEntry; I returned stag for Small Things Like These. This was coincidentally the closest location to our west-side house.

Anne posing in Newfields’ Tobias Theater lobby like the DreamWorks fishing kid.

Newfields’ annual Harvest Nights were in full swing, which meant gourds everywhere…

…and some killer plants.

Living Room Theaters on Massachusetts Avenue, which showed Micro Budget and We Strangers each Sunday on the exact same screen and time slot.

Street art in the nearby garage. The theater will validate parking after your showing’s over!

The Landmark Glendale, where I had myself a Tuesday night double feature of Jazzy and Superboys of Malegaon, my favorite film of the festival.

I’d been to that Landmark only once before in my entire life, to catch Spielberg’s Munich during my 2006 Oscar Quest.

Special thanks to the kind lady I chatted with before Jazzy, who was literally the only person who struck up a conversation with this graying introvert throughout my entire festival experience other than my own wife. I’m glad she enjoyed the Randy Bachman documentary and I hope my attempts to describe ReEntry weren’t too boring. It was nice to talk about movies in person and out loud for once.

If you’re still here: thanks for that. I’m a nobody locally (or on most other measurable scales, really) and consequently saw most of my Heartland entries fly unobserved into the aether shortly after publishing…except I learned Twitter users will totally brake for mentions of Cillian Murphy, only to back away disappointed if you don’t post any hot pictures of him. Sorry, but it wasn’t that kind of film.

Fun ironic trivia in closing: of all the entries I cranked out during this special nine-day posting marathon, the one that drummed up the most traffic was the one about The Wild Robot. It set a new record over the weekend for MCC’s highest single-day traffic spike in its entire 12-year existence, handily beating out the previous record-holder: this one time a pair of mass murderers preempted one of my TV shows. Frankly, I was really sick of that being my all-time blogging pinnacle. Thanks, DreamWorks!

And thank you for reading! Lord willing and time permitting, we’ll be back next year.

Mitchell Wray Makes His Onstage Return in 'A Streetcar Named Desire'

Next to the distinct privilege of appearing as Pablo Gonzalez in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” a co-production of Magic Thread Cabaret and Catalyst Repertory, is the opportunity I have to perform alongside emerging artist Mitchell

^{On the Aisle With Tom Alvarez}

Hey! I'm Sam, and I'm in the US (don't hold that against me). I use they/she pronouns. Would love to make some new internet friends to share ideas and funny memes with!

Aquarius? I don't really buy into astrology as a sure thing, but I certainly can't deny that we're all made of star dust. Besides, it's fun! Is that very Aquarius of me?

Queer! Late-blooming lesbian? Was in a 15-year relationship with a cis-man and identified as bi until mid-2025. But I believe gender and sexuality are fluid!

Parent! I have a 4-year-old, and he's really cool. Trying to raise him to be a decent human being.

Crafts! Typical ADHD person who tries a new hobby every 5 minutes. I like cross stitch, knitting, crocheting, cardmaking, and most recently have started my first loom weaving project. Very into folk art and what has historically been considered "women's hobbies."

Movies! Love watching movies, reading about them, and analyzing everything in them. Was a video producer/editor in a past life.

Horror fan! I am really into horror, but it's not the ONLY kind of media I'm into. Just started reading more horror last year, so send me your horror book recommendations!

Music! I'm mainly a drummer, but I dabble in other instruments as well. Also love listening to all sorts of genres. I have been really into hyper-pop and death metal lately.

Politics! very left. Fuck ICE. Free Palestine. Eat the rich.

Thanks for reading my novel.

#introduction #newhere #horror #movies #music #craft #queer