4 stars

dirs: Jay Cheel, Jordan Downey, Virat Pal, Justin Martinez, Justin & Christian Long, Kate Siegel and probably a few other people from a bus that was just passing through the neighbourhood…

2024

The latest in a long line of V/H/S horrorish anthologies, this is this year’s instalment, I guess. Let’s hope it’s an annual thing.

There is a whole lot of fuckery going on here. Some good, some not so good, but that is the nature of anthologies. If what you’re watching isn’t thrilling you, wait a few minutes, and something else will be playing soon. You’d think this would be the way to capture the attention of people with short attention spans, but let’s be honest none of “the youth” are watching a “movie” or this “movie”: they’d rather be watching 30 two minute vids in a row on Youtube instead.

So, these are presumably made for old horror heads like me. I greeted the new instalment in this series, after having really enjoyed the most recent one V/H/S 1985 with interest, as that one struck me as a strong uptick in quality (compared to earlier instalments).

When you get your hopes up, you’re inevitably setting yourself up for a fall. The moral of the story is, you’re a fool for getting your hopes up, so never get your hopes up, ever. You’re climbing a tree of anticipation and then sawing off branches you settled upon, because the universe remains supremely indifferent to your hopes and dreams.

The tack they took here was about having something more of a sci-fi focus, as in, the boogieman / thing that kills a bunch of people in almost every instance is an alien of some description, or a robot, or both. Not everything is as cut and dried as having a Big Bad that eats people’s faces that happens to be from elsewhere in the cosmos: but in practice it doesn’t amount to that much of a difference.

If something is chomping on your brains, I guess it doesn’t matter much if it’s a dinosaur, an armadillo, a cyborg, a zombie or a grey skinned alien, the end result is pretty much the same.

dir: Matthew Vaughn

2024

Who is this movie for?

Sometimes the (imagined) answer can be illuminating, if you can get close to the movie production’s thinking. Mostly, it’s an excuse for baseless speculation and mean-spirited conjecture on the part of jerks just like me.

If I was to be cynical, and cavalier, which is not a state that comes naturally to me, I would guess that this was kinda sorta aimed at a middle-aged, middle-class ‘white’ female audience. The kind “they” imagine reads trashy thriller / romance novels in a bubble bath while drinking large glasses of wine. There might be the glow of candles present as well.

What I’m getting at is that this is an imagined category, not necessarily by creative people, but by the types of people who work in marketing. They imagine that there’s a market of abundant gin-soaked ladies who would want to burst into a cinema after a boozy afternoon in order to watch the same kind of wish-fulfilment action flicks that usually cater to men who watch in between picking up the remnants of chips or twisties that have fallen onto their chests. Maybe the crumbs fell inside their t-shirts even, which makes them even harder to get at.

Life is a struggle. But the imagined middle-aged woman, who, for some reason still really likes Barry White and all disco music in general, doesn’t like violent action flicks where people get shot in the head or have their limbs sliced off – they want the same kind of action (apparently), just without any blood and with lots and lots of colour.

dir: Zach Snyder

2023

This is pretty ordinary, but it’s ordinary within what I think of as normal parameters. If any other director made this, whoever saw it would have shrugged, farted, and probably rolled over and gone to sleep without ever thinking about it ever again.

It’s like when some average car company comes up with a shitty new car: No-one other than the people dumb enough to buy those cars will care. But when someone bills themselves as a genius comes up with a terribly shitty car, like, say, the so-called Cybertruck, well, then you have to take especial notice and deliver especial insults / criticism.

People, mainly press hacks or PR flacks used to call Zach Snyder a visionary, but they stopped, several films ago, because the extent of his vision involved shitty CGI, slow motion sequences, and terrible scripts. And anyone can make that without being called a visionary. Plus, they (being Warner Brothers) started noticing that nothing he made actually made money, regardless of how much the fanboys slavered over his crap.

And since nature apparently abhors a vacuum, Netflix threw money at him and said “make whatever crap you want, we don’t care, as long as it’s content.” And, here it is, daddy made you some content.

And what content it is… This is rumoured to be pretty much a script Snyder proposed to the Lucasfilm people as a possible R rated Star Wars flick, with all the Star Wars actual references taken out when they rejected it. So what you’re left with is less a new science fiction space opera epic original intellectual property, and more a “new” generic science fiction IP so generic that it looks and sounds like every other science fiction IP you’ve ever seen. It’s so generic I’m amazed that the characters don’t accidentally talk about using the Force or about mining spice on Arrakis. It’s not just that we’re trained to expect these things and see them everywhere, it’s just that anyone working on anything like this knows what tropes to follow and how to make everything look just so everything is so fucking familiar and comfortable for everyone.

So when I tell you that the first part of the flick occurs on a farm, and everyone’s dressed like they’re in a Western, you won’t be that surprised or shocked. You’ll just think “how visionary! It’s only something I’ve seen twenty or more times in science fiction flicks!”

Also, like me, if you watch this, you will feel delighted every time you hear someone say “we’re just simple farmers” or “he’s just a simple farmer”. How surprised will you be when the “simple farmer” rises up and saves the day? You know, which never happens, expect when it does, like, every time?

These salt of the earth simple farmers grow grain, to feed themselves of course, but also to have a little extra, a little something-something for either trade or to use in times of need. They have a community mostly made up of Aryan poster children. You know, mostly Nordic types. But there are a couple of people there with different complexions. One of them clearly isn’t a simple farmer, because she’s as buff as Sarah Conner in Terminator 2. And she is called Kora (Sofia Boutella).

dir: Niki Caro

2023

The Mother is the very necessary sequel to The Father from a couple of years ago. But instead of a senile Anthony Hopkins battling with unseen forces arrayed against him, we have a Jennifer Lopez with perhaps early-onset dementia fighting against the forces of, I dunno, patriarchy maybe?

Otherwise, the nonsense plot makes very little sense. And we need things to make sense this close to Mother’s Day, yeah?

I mean the flick dropped onto vaunted streaming service Netflix just in time for people to be able to honour their mothers by watching a flick specifically called The Mother.

To not watch it is to spit in your own mother’s face, if not the faces of mothers everywhere.

The Mother of the title is only referred to as “the mother”, but I’m pretty sure her name is probably Karen. Very implausibly, she is a highly decorated and highly important special forces sniper for the United States of America. She gets involved with… I still have no fucking idea, and I’ve watched the thing, but for whatever reasons, she gets involved with a corrupt higher up (Joseph fucking Fiennes) AND some Cuban criminal (Gael Garcia Bernal, in a throwaway role), because she wants to know about some weapons they’re smuggling (or maybe it was exclusive Pokemon cards?). But then she finds out that they’re also smuggling some very dirty looking people somewhere.

I don’t know where. To the States maybe? Smuggling people into the Communist paradise that is Cuba, alternatively? To give them the better life they always dreamed of?

Why is she Special Forces, but also patrolling the famous “wall” at Guantanamo Bay, the one which Jack Nicholson’s overacting in A Few Good Men was trying to protect the rest of America from, AND she’s conducting investigations AND getting pregnant to one of those two men?