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That’s what happened 37 years ago today (February 16, 1986), when Mr. Mom was shown on network television for the first time.
The movie was originally released in the cinemas in 1983. This was a time when a.) many Baby Boomer women were becoming working moms, and b.) male employment had been battered by the recession of the early 1980s. Both themes are present in the movie. Continue reading “The network premiere of ‘Mr. Mom’”
You know you’re getting old when someone born when you were a teenager would now be in early middle age.
And yes, all you Millennial readers: 38 qualifies as “early middle age”.
But I wasn’t born in 1985 myself. I was almost 17 years old on February 15, 1985, when The Breakfast Club hit the cinemas for the first time. I was a member of this movie’s teenage target demographic.
I wrote an essay about this movie a few years ago, which gets a fair amount of traffic. Rather than rehash it all again, I’ll just let you know that you can find that piece here, if you’re interested in reading it.
Spoiler alert: The Breakfast Club was a good (if not a great) movie; but it encouraged an entitled, self-absorbed view of one’s youthful world. This was a film that tried way too hard to suck up to its target audience, of which I was then a part.
Though I certainly do remember Christmas, 1984, I can’t claim to remember the above cover of Time magazine. But as the magazine cover proclaims, VCRs were a big deal back then.
My parents had purchased a VCR a few years earlier…probably in 1982. It was my favorite device in our household, and my parents loved it, too.
If you’re too young to remember the world before the VCR, then you don’t remember the days of fitting your schedule around your favorite TV programs. Continue reading “The VCR revolution: December 24, 1984”
Actress Kirstie Alley has passed away following a long battle with cancer, according to the late actress’s spokespersons.
I remember Kirstie Alley as Saavik in The Wrath of Khan, the 1982 Star Trek movie. But my fondest onscreen memories of her are from her long role (1987-93) as Rebecca Howe on Cheers. Alley joined Cheers after the situation comedy had already been running for five years. She replaced Shelley Long as the show’s female lead.
Cheers was already the best sitcom on television, and Kirstie Alley made it even better. Many of her scenes opposite Ted Danson can still make me guffaw.
A great actress who leaves behind some memorable performances. Some of television comedy’s best, in fact.
Kirstie Alley, 71, R.I.P.
I’m a fan of Gillian Flynn’s novels, and I enjoyed the film adaptation of Gone Girl (2014). So I thought: why not give Dark Places (2015) a try? Although I had read the 2009 novel, enough years had passed that much of the plot had seeped out of my mind. (That happens more and more often, the older I get.)
First, the acting. The two female leads in this movie (Charlize Theron, Chloë Grace Moretz) were perfect choices. Charlize Theron has proven herself willing to downplay her physical beauty for the sake of a dramatically challenging antihero role. (See her performance as Aileen Wuornos in Monster (2003).) And the lead role of Libby Day, the tragic but unlikable protagonist of Dark Places, forced her to make the most of these skills.
Chloë Grace Moretz, meanwhile, played the teenage femme fatale, Diondra Wertzner, in the backstory scenes (which comprise a significant portion of the movie). Moretz provided just the right blend of sex appeal and darkness that this character required, more or less what I imagined while reading the novel.
I’ve been following Moretz’s career since her breakout role as a child vampire in Let Me In (2010). Now in her twenties, Moretz seems almost typecast as a dark/horror movie actress; but she always manages to pull off the perfect creepy female character. (Note: Be sure to watch Let Me In if you haven’t seen it yet.)
Dark Places kept me glued to the screen. As I was watching the film, the plot of the book came back to me. Dark Places remained faithful to its literary source material, but in a way that moved the plot along more smoothly than the novel did. (This might be one of those rare cases in which the movie is actually a little better than the novel, which—despite being good—drags in places.)
As alluded to above, Dark Places is primarily set in the twenty-first century, with a significant portion concerning flashback events of 1985, when the adult characters were children or teenagers.
I was 17 in 1985, and I remember that era well. Much of this part of the story revolves around rumors of teenage “devil worship”, and the influence of “satanic” heavy metal: Dio, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne. This is an old controversy that I hadn’t thought about much in decades. Dark Places brought some of those long-ago debates back to me.
I listened to plenty of heavy metal back in the 1980s. (I still do). The heavy metal of Ronnie James Dio, Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne and Iron Maiden does not encourage satanism, any more than films like The Exorcist encourage satanism. But like The Exorcist, some ‘80s heavy metal does dwell excessively on dark themes. And here is where the source of the confusion lies.
I never had the urge to draw a pentagram on my bedroom wall or sacrifice goats while listening to Blizzard of Oz or Piece of Mind. Nor did I detect any dark exhortations in the lyrics, whether overt or subliminal.
Since the 1980s, Ozzy Osbourne has become a reality TV star. Iron Maiden’s lead singer, Bruce Dickinson, has emerged as a polymath who writes books and flies commercial airliners when not on tour.
Ozzy strikes me as one of the most gentle people you might ever meet. Dickinson, meanwhile, is a conservative (in the British context of that political label) and a eurosceptic. Neither man fits the profile of the devil-worshipping maniac.
I will admit, though, that some 80s metal music became a bit cumbersome to listen to on a regular basis. I eventually moved on to more light-hearted, commercial rock like Def Leppard. I still listen to a lot more Def Leppard than Ozzy Osbourne or Iron Maiden. But I digress.
The 1980s fear-mongering over heavy metal turned out to be just that: fear-mongering. Although I’m sure there were isolated real-life horror stories, I didn’t know a single kid in the 1980s who was into satanism. The teenage satanists of the 1980s existed almost entirely within the fevered imaginations of a few evangelical preachers and their followers.
Back to Dark Places. The problem (with both the book and the movie) is that it is a fundamentally depressing story, without any characters that the reader/viewer can wholeheartedly root for. While there is a reasonable conclusion, there is nothing approaching a happy ending, or even a satisfying ending. That is a central flaw that no acting or directing talent can rectify.
This doesn’t mean that the movie isn’t worth watching. It is. But make sure you schedule a feel-good comedy film shortly thereafter. You’ll need it. And don’t watch Dark Places if you’re already feeling gloomy or depressed.
Given that 1980s nostalgia is a frequent topic here, some of you have asked me how I feel about the upcoming sequel to Top Gun, which has been titled, Top Gun: Maverick.
I should probably first say a bit about my experience of the first one. Top Gun was released to theaters in May of 1986, now 36 years ago. I was just getting out of high school then.
I have always had a liking for action movies, so of course I saw it. I enjoyed Top Gun, but (let’s be honest here), I also found it somewhat lightweight and forgettable.
Top Gun was conceived, written, and produced at the height of the Reagan era, when triumphalist Cold War films were all the rage. This was also the era of Rambo, Red Dawn, and a Rocky film that sent Rocky Balboa to Moscow to face down a Soviet boxer.
Don’t get me wrong, here: I would have voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984 had I been old enough. So if you’re looking for any whining about healthy patriotism or a strong defense policy, you’ve come to the wrong place.
But that same schtick gets boring, film after film. Top Gun, for me, was never much more than a predictable date movie. Another war movie of 1986, Platoon, struck me as far more thoughtful and serious…much as I came to disagree with Oliver Stone on other matters in later years.
The first Top Gun seemed to have had the biggest impact on younger GenXers who were in grade school or junior high when it came out. One of my former work colleagues, who is eight years my junior, was ten years old in the summer of 1986. He has told me that Top Gun became a virtual obsession for him that year.
What about the sequel? Based on the trailers, I actually think that it might turn out to be better than the first one. I miss the 1980s, in many ways; but the 80s were not, on the whole, a great decade in film.
It has also been noted that Top Gun: Maverick includes at least one female fighter pilot role, that of Phoenix, played by Monica Barbaro.
Speaking again of my high school years: at least two women from my class served in the US Armed Forces after graduation. I did not. So women fighter pilots in the Top Gun sequel are okay with me.
On the whole, I’m looking forward to seeing the new Top Gun movie, which will hit theaters on May 24. Should be a fun time.
The Black Phone stars Ethan Hawke, whom you’ve seen in many other films over the years. Based on the trailer and what I’ve read online, this seems to be a supernatural serial killer film set in 1978.
I was 10 years old in 1978. That was an age before cell phones and helicopter parenting. An era of suburban kids disappearing for hours at a time on their bikes. Much of the time, nobody knew exactly where you were. Your parents certainly couldn’t track your whereabouts on an “app”.
This wasn’t parental negligence. It was just the way things were then.
The 1970s was also the heyday of the serial killer. Growing up in that era, we were taught to be on the constant lookout for “stranger danger”. Especially male strangers driving vans.
This movie seems to tap into a lot of generational fears for people of a certain age (my age).
If the movie is as good as the trailer, I expect it to be a big hit with horror fans over the age of 40…or anyone interested in the fears of that increasingly receding time, the late 1970s.
The Black Phone will hit the movie theaters in June. Count me in!
I have at times struggled to get into alternative history, à la Harry Turtledove. Since history is one of my first loves, I often find it difficult to suspend my disbelief when an author decides to inject time travel into the American Civil War, or to continue that conflict well into the twentieth century. (Harry Turtledove has done both.)
But the 2021 neo-western film Old Henry involves a more subtle reimagining of a key element of Wild West lore. (I won’t tell you, lest I risk a spoiler that will ruin the movie for you. And—trust me on this—you don’t want that.)
Old Henry begins with an ambiguous shootout, and an older man living in Oklahoma in 1906 with his restless, ungrateful teenage son. Then things get really tense, really fast. Old Henry is a mystery as much as a typical western; and fans of both genres will be pleased.
By virtue of the particular storyline, Old Henry doesn’t have any female characters. Nor does it have a leading man studmuffin of the Chris Pratt variety. The star of the film, Tim Blake Nelson, is what Hollywood politely calls a “character actor”. This basically means that he’s a brilliant thespian who is not conventionally handsome enough to be a traditional leading man.
But Nelson is perfect for the lead role in this film. The other supporting actors—Scott Haze, Gavin Lewis, Trace Adkins, and Steven Dorff—perform admirably as well.
Old Henry is a claustrophobic film that pulls you in. For me, Old Henry recalled Hitchcock films like Rear Window.
The final twist is complex, and not necessarily one that you will see coming. In historical terms, the twist is just large enough to be a mind-bender, but still within the realm of believability. (I.e., there are no time travelers.)
I enjoyed this movie, and I think you will, too. Highly recommended.
Thirty-five years ago yesterday, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors hit the theaters.
Five Nightmare on Elm Street movies were made in the 1980s, with two more in the 1990s. Oh…and one more (Freddy vs. Jason) in the early 21st century.
The first movie in the franchise, released in 1984, was brilliant. As far as the subsequent ones go….Well, this may have been yet another case of Hollywood trying to ride out a profitable concept for a bit too long.
Kind of like The Walking Dead in more recent times…which is now in its 11th season. The Walking Dead stopped being really good about seven seasons ago, IMHO.
I am an unabashed purist when it comes to the film adaptations of books. Numerous novels have been butchered in Hollywood’s hands. Stephen King hated Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining (1980) so much, that he all but disavowed the project.
Although the movie is now almost 30 years old, I wanted to see Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) for a handful of reasons.
First of all, I had read that the movie closely follows Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. Secondly, Francis Ford Coppola directed the movie; and I’m an extreme devotee of The Godfather trilogy. (I can quote entire sections of all three Godfather films from memory.)
Finally, with a cast consisting of Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu Reeves, and Gary Oldman, it couldn’t go wrong. Or so I thought.
I’ve read Bram Stoker’s iconic novel at least three times, so I know it very, very well. Suffice it to say that Francis Ford Coppola’s interpretation of the book does hit most of the major characters and plot points. (The character of Renfield, however, is seriously underplayed—practically nonexistent in the movie.) But Coppola made some major blunders, in my estimation.
First: way too much sex and romance for a horror movie. In the movie, Coppola attempted to reproduce the prudish Victorian sexual tensions hinted at in the book. (The sexual mores of the 1890s were anachronistic even in the 1990s, of course.) But in doing so, Coppola wildly exaggerated the erotic element between Dracula (Gary Oldman) and Mina Harker (Winona Ryder). The result is a series of plodding, old-fashioned love scenes that don’t really go anywhere, and deviate significantly from the book. (This is one of the elements that Coppola added in, which isn’t in the book.)
Secondly: flawed style and realism. The movie is very atmospheric, employing visual cinematic techniques that (once again) were anachronistic even in 1992. This creates a movie that has a lot of atmosphere, but lacks the realism necessary to bring about a suspension of disbelief.
Thirdly, the pacing is more than a little off. And at 128 minutes, this is a fairly long movie.
My advice: You might enjoy Bram Stoker’s Dracula if you’re a fan of the original novel, as I am. If you haven’t read the 1897 source material, however, you can safely skip this one. I kind of wish I had.
The other day, one of you emailed me to get my take on an age-old debate in writing, filmmaking, and storytelling circles:
Which matters more…the big, highly original idea, or the execution of the story, regardless of its originality?
Many writers fret constantly about people “stealing their ideas”. They put off writing because they “don’t have any original ideas”. They worry about forgetting ideas.
So which is more important? There is evidence for both.
Star Wars took off in 1977 partly because it was such an original idea. Here we had the rough equivalents of cowboys and samurai warriors in space. There had never been anything like that before.
In 2013, I first read about The Americans in the television and movie review section of a magazine. The highly original premise of The Americans— deep undercover Russian spies in Reagan-era America—instantly intrigued me.
The Americans intrigued a lot of people. The Americans ran from 2013 to 2018. During that time, the Cold War period drama received high marks from reviewers and viewers alike. The series has a 96% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The Google composite review score is 4.8 out of 5. That’s pretty close to unanimity, at a time when people widely disagree about almost everything.
Nevertheless, it is easy to imagine The Americans having become nothing more than a Tom Clancy-esque knock-off for cable television. Why didn’t that happen?
The Americans is, indeed, based on a highly innovative “big idea”, what movie and fiction folks like to call “high concept”. But it is in the execution that The Americans really shines: the depth and arc of the characters, the nuts and bolts of each episode.
Plenty of stories succeed in the world of books and film without being very “high concept” at all. Consider the success of Downton Abbey. There is no high concept in Downton Abbey. It is little more than a soap opera set in Edwardian England, in fact.
When I watched the first episode of Downton Abbey, I didn’t know what I was going to think of it. But I was blown away. Not because of the “big idea” (there was none), but because of the execution: characters and individual episodes. The success of Downton Abbey is all in the execution.
An example in the book world would be Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Jonathan Franzen is inconsistent as a writer. (He takes an average of about 6 years to write each book.) He is eccentric as an individual. But he scored a home run with The Corrections in 2001.
I remember getting my hands on this book over the Christmas holiday of 2001. I sat down and read it cover-to-cover, over a period of about 48 hours.
There is no high concept in The Corrections, either. A highly autobiographical novel, The Corrections is a fictionalized adaptation of people and events from the author’s life. But the world that Franzen creates in this book, while mundane, pulls you in. It pulled me in, and it pulled in millions of other readers, too.
***
On the opposite side of this coin are the high concept stories that fall flat because of poor execution.
We have all been bored by stories with incredibly high stakes: literally the end of humanity, in some cases. They bore us because of flaws in characterization, pacing, or depth.
This shows up in a lot of 2- and 3-three star Amazon reviews, that begin with phrases like, “I really wanted to like this book, but…”. Others outright say, “Great idea, but poor execution.”
For me, The Expanse fell into this category. This was true of both the book(s) and the Syfy series.
The premise of The Expanse did intrigue me: neither a near-future alien encounter tale, nor a space opera set in deep space, The Expanse is set a few centuries from the present, within our solar system.
But when I actually dug into the first book, it left me cold. The characters were flat, and there were too many of them. The narrative was unfocused. I had the same reaction a few years later, when I tried the Syfy series. I just couldn’t get into it.
Some of you will disagree with me, of course, but I’m not the only one who found the execution of The Expanse lacking. And I am not someone who dislikes science fiction. I loved the original version of Battlestar Galactica in the 1970s, as well as the “reimagined version” in the 2000s (though with some reservations).
Battlestar Galactica, whether in the hands of Glen A. Larson in the 1970s, or SyFy in the 00s, featured good execution.
But was Battlestar Galactica high concept? Highly original?
20th Century Fox certainly didn’t think so. In 1978, 20th Century Fox sued Universal Studios for allegedly ripping off Star Wars. The lawsuit claimed that Battlestar Galactica had filched more than thirty distinct ideas from Star Wars.
Whether you accept this notion or not, there is no doubt that the original BSG rode the coattails of Star Wars, which was then a monolithic phenomenon of popular culture.
And the rebooted BSG wasn’t original at all. It was based on the 1978 series, which owed much to Star Wars.
***
I’m therefore going to come down on the side of execution over big, original idea.
There are so many stories that we’ve all seen time and time again:
The rough-edged police detective who chafes against “the brass”, but will go to any length to catch a criminal…
Nevertheless, both novelists and filmmakers continue to find fresh new angles on these old ideas…new ways to execute them.
***
For example: I recently enjoyed the final season of Bosch on Amazon Prime Video.
Bosch is based on Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels. The Harry Bosch novels are about a big-city homicide detective, Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch.
I don’t think that Michael Connelly would mind me saying: that’s a very old idea. Nothing original at all in the “concept”! But the Harry Bosch novels represent some of the best genre fiction out there.
Why? Because Michael Connelly’s execution of the character of Harry Bosch, of the murder cases, is so darn good.
Originality, in other words, might be overrated. To be sure, there is a place for it. (It is also a bad idea to jump on literary bandwagons; but that’s a separate topic for another day).
It is probably better to focus on the superlative execution of a “good” story idea—even if it’s been done before—versus waiting around for one superlative idea to come the writer’s way.
On Halloween 1986, three young people lose their lives in a series of supernatural events at an abandoned house. The house becomes an urban legend. In the present day (circa 2017), a group of teenagers accidentally awaken the house’s dormant powers. The forces inside the house take the young people down, one-by-one.
That’s the setup for the Syfy original film, Neverknock.
When viewing (or reviewing) any “Syfy original” movie, one is wise to set the bar low. That’s what I did when I sat down to watch Neverknock.
The urban legend is an inexhaustible source of horror film and fiction. I can’t fault the premise of Neverknock, but there are some issues with the execution.
The opening incident involves some over-the-top phenomena, making it difficult for the viewer to suspend his sense of disbelief. It only gets worse from there. There is a monster that appears repeatedly throughout the film that looks like a leftover from a 1980s horror film.
The cheesy special effects are a big part of the problem with this movie. Watch A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) today, and the special effects will look amateurish by today’s standards. But A Nightmare on Elm Street was made almost 40 years ago. Viewer expectations have changed since then. (That’s even true of older viewers like me, who can remember A Nightmare on Elm Street when it first debuted at the cinema.
The bottom line is this: If a filmmaker doesn’t have the budget for modern special effects, the best option is to not attempt them.
And this is quite possible. Sometimes the best horror is found in what is left unseen, to the imagination. But Neverknock shoves it in all your face, and what it shoves at you simply isn’t credible. As I watched the movie, I could not help noticing the figurative zipper in the figurative monster suit.
The acting was decent, given that this was a movie about mostly vapid teenagers who are killed off in rapid succession in gruesome ways. I especially appreciated the performance of Dominique Provost-Chalkley (of Wynonna Earp fame). Hers was the only character with any real depth.
Some movies linger with you for days, for reasons both good and bad. This is a movie that you’ll forget within a few hours of watching it.
I remember sitting in a cinema one day in the early summer of 1977. I was just shy of nine years old, so I was there with my dad.
My dad wanted to see this new movie called Star Wars.
I didn’t really know what to expect, but my dad (then barely in his thirties) was excited about it. So I went along, too. My mom had no interest the movie. (My mom liked very few movies that didn’t involve horses.)
I remember watching the opening scenes. The big spaceships on the big screen. Oh, man, I was immediately hooked.
I know: this essay has already veered into cliché. By this point, everyone has seen those scenes in the original Star Wars movie. The CGI effects in 21st-century movies like Avatar, moreover, have since surpassed our collective ability to be visually amazed.
But keep in mind: in 1977, the average feature film was a Burt Reynolds movie that relied on conventional car chases. (In fact, one such movie—Smokey and the Bandit—was released within a few weeks of Star Wars.)
Most of the available science fiction in 1977 was campy and already a decade old. There was Star Trek, of course. But Star Trek was made in the 1960s, and it showed in the production values.
There was also Lost in Space, which had its original prime-time run between 1965 and 1968. (Oh, and the first season of Lost in Space was in black and white.)
I won’t tell you about Star Wars and how it was different because well…you already know. But you might not know what it was like to be part of the first Star Wars generation.
To truly get that, you have to have been there.
America in the 1970s was an unsettled place. The country was on a hangover from Vietnam, the counterculture, the 1960s, Watergate.
Many of the Baby Boomers, then at the peak of their childbearing years, were trying to reconcile parenthood with all the Me Generation stuff.
I should note that my parents were the exception in this regard. I had wonderful parents and—on the whole—an idyllic childhood. But my childhood was the exception. This was an era of small families, divorce, and adults working in parenthood as an afterthought. The 1970s was not a child-focused decade, on the whole.
This showed up in the marketplace. Corporate America didn’t put out much entertainment for children, because the demand wasn’t there, like it was from the mid-1980s onward. For most children, circa 1976, Saturday morning cartoons (mostly reruns from the 1960s) were the highlight of the week.
But then there was Star Wars. If you were a kid in that era, Star Wars was not just a movie, but a way of life…or a way of play, anyway.
Publishers cranked out Star Wars trading cards and comics. Toy manufacturers rushed light sabers and action figures to market. There was always something new to buy…or to beg your parents to buy.
Burger Chef, a now defunct fast food chain, issued a set of Star Wars posters in 1977. Each one was given away with the purchase of a double hamburger meal, or something like that. I talked my parents into acquiring all of them.
My bedroom became a shrine to Star Wars. My room contained not just the posters, but all the paraphernalia I could acquire.
I’ve watched the more recent Star Wars movies. I know that the last few have been controversial among longtime fans. I’m not interested in wading into that debate. For me, the first three movies—Star Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983) are the only three “canonical” ones, anyway.
These three films traced the end of my childhood, effectively. I was nine when the first one came out. When Return of the Jedi hit the local cinema, I had completed a year of high school.
But this is about more than mere nostalgia. In recent years, the culture wars have invaded science fiction, superhero comics, and whatnot. There was little appetite for that in the late 1970s and 1980s.
Why? That era was already full of gloomy, abstruse movies that were overloaded with “message” and “issues”. And in the 1970s, the issue du jour was the Vietnam War, which was still very much in recent memory.
And so we got turgid, barely watchable films like The Deer Hunter (1978), Taxi Driver (1976), and Apocalypse Now (1979). In 1978, I remember hearing a news story about a Vietnam vet shooting himself at a screening of The Deer Hunter. That movie is incredibly gloomy and depressing to watch, as are the other two. (And the Jodie Foster scenes in Taxi Driver, in which she plays a child prostitute, are downright bizarre by today’s standards.)
Star Wars offered a break from all that. Star Wars was a movie about a war in space that didn’t ask you to think about Vietnam. Nor did it ask you to think about the nuclear arms race—another big “issue” of that time.
The original Star Wars trilogy had a relatively diverse cast. It wasn’t all white males in the spotlight. Who can imagine Star Wars without Carrie Fisher, after all? And the third movie of the original trilogy made a major star of Billy Dee Williams.
And yet, Star Wars didn’t ask audiences to engage in endless navel-gazing about race and gender. (These matters now greatly preoccupy the fandom of science fiction publishing, but that’s another “issue” for another time.)
The original three Star Wars movies were simply fun. They weren’t controversial. They didn’t try to change your worldview or your politics. Practically everyone liked them. (Even my mother relented and saw the second and third Star Wars movies, despite their lack of horses.)
And if you were a kid in the late 1970s, Star Wars was larger than life.
I’ll close with a blunt assertion: I think it’s high time for the film and comics industries to retire the franchise. To put this in perspective: I was not quite nine when the first movie came out. I’ll soon be fifty-three, and they’re still riding the Star Wars wagon, trying to squeeze a few more million out of the original story concept.
But who cares what I think? Maybe I’ll see the next Star Wars movie, and maybe I won’t. It’s not like I’m boycotting them. But like I said: for me, the first three are the only ones that really count.
Just a quick horror movie entry. The other day I finally got around to watching Don’t Breathe (2016).
This is a combination of a heist film, and a “monster in the house” horror movie.
Don’t Breathe is a very accessible, fast-paced film. Not one that is going to change your entire worldview or anything, but quite entertaining.
And according to the Internet, a sequel, Don’t Breathe 2, will hit the cinemas in August.
Curiously, the villain of the first film, Norman Nordstrom (played by Stephen Lang), seems to be cast as a kind of antihero vigilante in the next movie. (Note: This is based on what I’ve seen in the available previews.)
It is unclear, then, if Don’t Breathe 2 will really be a Don’t Breathe 2, or a twenty-first-century version of Death Wish. (For younger readers: I’m referring to the vigilante films that Charles Bronson starred in during the 1970s and early 1980s.)
When I read the Amazon and IMDB reviews for Don’t Breathe, I noticed something: many viewers tended to sympathize with the villain of the film.
This is not entirely unexpected. The premise of the heist portion of the movie is three young criminals robbing an older blind man who has suffered multiple tragedies. One of the criminals (the one who dies first) is extremely unlikable. The other two are morally ambiguous at best.
The villain, Norman Nordstrom, certainly has his character flaws. But the bottom line is: He would never have crossed paths with the three young burglars had they not broken into his home, with the intention of robbing him.
I recently watched two horror movies of relatively recent vintage: The Unholy (2021) and Hereditary (2018).
What follows are two (very) brief reviews.
The Unholy is a film about a hearing-impaired teenage girl who appears to be channeling the Virgin Mary. What she is actually channeling, however, is not Mary, but a malevolent spiritual force.
This film, starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan (“Negan” on The Walking Dead) and newcomer Crickett Brown, was excellent.
Anyone familiar with Catholic-Protestant differences regarding saints and religious imagery will appreciate the “what if?” scenario here. This film explores a key question of the Reformation from a fully modern, supernatural perspective. (The film even quotes Martin Luther.)
I was raised Roman Catholic, and—with all due respect to the Protestants in the room—that’s the way I roll. No thank you, I am not interested in attending your non-denominational church. (But thanks, again, for the invitation.)
Nevertheless, I am also not above taking a critical approach to some aspects of my Roman Catholic faith. Roman Catholicism does, indeed, include a cult of saints, and a cult of the Virgin Mary. Protestants who point out the pagan similarities here are not completely in left field.
The Unholy is well-paced and entertaining. That said, this is not a movie for someone looking for a simple monster flick with jump scares. If you don’t like ideas in your horror, skip this one.
I would give The Unholy high marks for the acting, story, script, and concept. The special effects, however, were right out of the 1980s. The early 1980s.
The fake fire, in particular, looks like fire from a B-movie, circa 1983. Given everything else that the filmmakers did right, they shouldn’t have cut corners on the special effects. And they definitely did cut corners.
Grandma is dead, but grandma was a satanist. That’s the setup behind Hereditary.
The movie starts on the day of the grandmother’s funeral. The surviving family of four (the parents and two kids) slowly fall prey to a curse that involves (spoiler alert) a satanist plot.
Hereditary is a disturbing movie. I am by no means a sensitive viewer. But even I required a good 24 hours to fully purge this movie from my mind.
Hereditary contains plenty of otherworldly events and phenomena. But it also contains graphic and realistic depictions of extreme family turmoil, corpse mutilation, and (in one scene) the accidental beheading of a child.
(Yes, really. Graphic violence against children is a line that movies usually don’t cross; but this one did.)
Many horror movies take us to dark places. That is a part of the horror movie experience, and a part of the ride. The real problem with Hereditary is not its darkness, but its complete lack of redemption, or even a glimmer of hope. I won’t tell you what the ending is, but suffice it to say that this movie ends on a very down note.
Several of the characters in the movie are sympathetic. None of them, however, could be properly described as heroic, or even proactive. They all sort of drift along, waiting for the next bad thing to happen. And as noted above, plenty of bad things do happen.
Hereditary is a technically competent film. The movie was shot in Utah, and the movie makes good use of the inherent otherworldliness of the Utah landscape. Hereditary is well-paced, despite its length of more than two hours. You won’t be tempted to look at your phone while you’re watching it.
Nevertheless, I’m not sure that you will emerge from Hereditary with any new insights, or even any provocative questions. And while there are some creepy moments, Hereditary isn’t an especially terrifying movie. This is no thrill ride. Mostly, it is simply disturbing.
***
Anyway, those are two of the horror films that I’ve watched recently. In summary, I highly recommend The Unholy (with a minor qualification regarding the amateurish special effects). As for Hereditary, well…proceed with caution.
