Horror

dir: Parker Finn

2022

Smile, despite being extremely mediocre, has been one of the most successful films of 2022. Not just horror films, but, like, all films. And I mean in terms of return on investment versus overall box office returns.

I know, you’re right, no sane person who isn’t paid to worry about these kinds of things would expend any energy thinking about them let alone writing about them.

But then I never claimed to be that sane.

The reason why it makes me shake my head in wonderment is a) it’s mediocre even by the standards of mediocre horror flicks b) it’s quite generic and c) it was 100 times more successful than the main horror flick it rips off, being It Follows.

It Follows, which is a much better horror flick, was made for a fraction of Smile’s budget ($1.3 mill versus $17mill), but made $23.3mill at the box office, versus the $200mill plus that Smile made.

That seems so unfair, but that is the way of the cinematic world. Some films, no matter their dopiness, just hit audiences differently.

This has such a simple premise. People, or some kind of entity, smiling creepily. That’s it, that’s all you need. Much easier to create creepy posters and creepier advertising with people smiling in a manner that would make the Joker uncomfortable.

And before anyone actually emails me after crunching the above numbers, yes, I ran the calculations as well, and it turns out the ROI on It Follows was actually higher than Smile’s, despite it earning 10 times more. So I have no idea what point I was trying to make.

Oh yeah, this shitty film. That’s not fair; it’s not a shitty flick, it’s just not that good.

It does have an interesting premise, to an extent. The main character Dr Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is a psychiatrist who works at a psych hospital, and I don’t think she’s very good at her job. We never actually see her, throughout the flick, do anything to indicate she’s good at her job.

But at least we get the sense that she cares about patients in general, that’s a good start. She sees one patient, doesn’t really do anything for him. But the next one that comes in, whose smile graces all the posters for this flick, well, she’s a real peach.

dir: Ti West

2022

I had mostly been either ill-informed or indifferent to the works of Ti West, up until this year, this fateful year in which a little flick called X came out. From my perspective, it was only a couple of months ago that I was stunned by that flick, made by Americans on a tiny budget in New Zealand during the covid lockdowns.

I was blown away, and thought that was a keen horror flick that was also saying something else, something more, something funnier than I was expecting.

When it was announced that West was making it all into a trilogy, like most movie fans, my heart sank, because I was sure it meant 1 good film and two mediocre retreads, like most film trilogies, but also subsequent films that would make me like the 1st flick even less.

I should not have been so foolish: Pearl is the perfect companion piece to X. I don’t know that anyone left the very enjoyable X saying “I really would love to watch a prequel sent in 1918 about the early days of the crazy old woman who kills bunches of people because she ain’t getting any”, but that’s what we’ve blessed with.

Mia Goth played dual roles in X as both the young Maxine and the wizened and murderous Pearl. Here she’s only playing a young Pearl, but she’s playing her with a full range of emotions and hopes and dreams, and at the amped up level that only youth and sociopathic rage can summon.

The entire performance is at 11. This amp goes to 11. Even in her quiet moments Pearl is suffused with a passion that’s at odds with the world around her. She is, after all, just a simple country Texan girl, living on the farm with her completely paralyzed father (Matthew Sunderland) and a stern and dictatorial German mother (Tandi Wright), dreaming of leaving home and becoming some kind of star on the recently invented silver screen.

The nearby town does have a playhouse that plays movies even. Moving pictures, the kinds with women dancing in cancan lines, it’s enough to give a girl hopes and dreams.

Of course Pearl is not a kid: she’s actually married to Howard, who’s gone off to fight in the war, hopefully on the German side. And she’s trapped on this farm because she has no money, and she doesn’t seem that well educated, and plus whatever her mother says goes, because her word is law.

Until it isn’t anymore. If X had a theme it was that someone being forced to stifle their desires long term, both sexual and otherwise, would result in literal heartbreak for others. If Pearl has a theme it’s that Pearl’s desire to be loved, desire to be a star, will not be repressed. She just wants it too badly.

Even though cinema has barely existed for very long, this one mule town has a cinema, and a projectionist (David Corenswet), and somehow plays movies with sound before such a thing has been invented yet. The kind of movie Pearl loves has girls dancing, like in Palace Follies.

dir: Halina Reijn

2022

Hmm. Horror comedy about what paranoid and fragile simpletons contemporary too-online Gen Zs are… Sounds like a box office juggernaut…

I wonder at why people feel the urge to try to make generational statements about cohorts of people, unless it’s for the purposes of humour, in which case go for it. It’s just so lazy, and makes the people ‘making’ the statement seem like old reactionaries better placed to yell at clouds instead in their spare time.

I don’t really know what the motivations or impulses were for the people making this: I doubt it’s just a desire to get revenge on some group they despise. Though of course it’s still possible.

There isn’t really anything that specific about it that requires the people to be of a certain age in order to point out some of the annoying things people do these days. People of any age do them. And so this premise, of a bunch of paranoid people trapped in a mansion during a storm, as they slowly get picked off one by one, doesn’t really have anything that novel or witty to say about Insta or filters or identity politics or anything in fact: all it says is that in a harrowing situation, people will do dumb things.

And that’s okay. Instead of making this the kind of flick that would have starred, I dunno, Donald Sutherland, Jude Law, Angela Lansbury, Robert Mitchum, Joan Collins, Kylie Minogue and maybe a wrestler painstakingly working their way through the cast until And Then There Were None…, we have Pete Davidson.

What is a Pete Davidson? Well, he’s not quite a Dean Martin, and not quite a wrestler, but maybe he’s a twitchy meth head in between the two? His character of David doesn’t even own the house these people are partying in: It’s his parents’ mansion.

How emasculating. So he is a trust fund kiddie, and most of the rest of his friends are similarly trust fund kiddies. But only one of them has turned up to the party, with a newish girlfriend in tow, without actually being invited.

Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) has brought her girlfriend Bee (Maria Bakalova) to where neither of them is wanted, only to have the party go seriously south when a hurricane hits.

Ew, maybe they’re in Florida? How gross.

No, they’re not in Florida: Hurricanes happen everywhere now thanks to climate change. What’s important is that they’re trapped, they can’t get out, and most of them will be dead by dawn. That’s how these things work, that’s how they have to go. I don’t make the rules, I just abide by them like the drone that I am.

dir: Alex Garland

2022

Men. Manly men. Doing manly things, in manly ways, mostly at Manly beach, the manliest of all beaches.

I have to admit I really didn’t get this flick. I don’t think I understood it, but that’s okay, because understanding is overrated. I enjoyed it, it was well filmed, it had a weird, ominous atmosphere without generally being that horrific. At least until the last section…

There is a woman who is the main character in this flick (so, false advertising, right there). She has recently lost her husband after he struck her and then threw himself off the building they lived in. All because she wanted out of what was clearly not a healthy relationship.

She, being Harper (the great Jessie Buckley), needs some time away, and so rents a stately country manor, in the country somewhere. The landlord (Rory Kinnear) is an odd enough chap, but nothing too worrying just yet. It’s some hick town, very green. No problems here.

If there is a problem, it’s that a naked guy (Rory Kinnear) starts following her about, tries to get into the place she’s staying, and no-one, including the cops, really gives a damn. There’s a male cop (Rory Kinnear), and a female cop, but, confirming the old adage that All Cops Are Bastards, she gives even less of a shit.

Seeking solace in the arms of the church? Well, the vicar (Rory Kinnear) is a right prick as well, blaming her for her husband’s suicide, telling her all the ways in which her wickedness taunts all men.

It’s not for nothing that Harper eats a red apple that falls from a tree outside. For some reason the image keeps reoccurring, not sure why. True, Eve is the first scapegoat in the Bible, but it’s not her fault that men are weak and vicious.

Oh no, you can’t blame her for that. Also, even the young boys of the town are already misogynistic pricks, one of them (Rory Kinnear) calling her a stupid bitch because she didn’t want to play hide and seek with him.

Hang on, in the church, why was there the image of the Green Man from folklore on the font, and why do they keep showing us the image of a Sheela Na Gig, a female gargoyle – grotesque, doing her thing?

What do these pagan symbols of the monstrous masculine and the monstrous feminine have to do either with the price of fish or this film, thematically speaking?

I…have no idea.