BITE-SIZED: The Host (Bong Joon-Ho, 2006)

After the American military dumps chemicals into the Han River, a monster is born which grows to the size of a truck and proceeds to make attacks on Seoul. 

On one of these sorties, it kidnaps schoolgirl Hyun-seo (Go Ah-sung). 

As the military moves in to contain the situation, the girl's family come together to try and save her...

Created by Bong Joon-Ho (Memories of Murder, Snowpiercer), The Host is one of the best monster/family drama/black comedies ever made.

This movie is great: It starts like a traditional monster movie, showing us the creature's origin and early appearances, climaxing with its first attack on people.

The initial attack sequence is fantastically visceral. The creative choices made with the creature work for the film's eye-level view of the genre: the monster is about the size of a large car or truck, and instead of an alien monstrosity, it looks like what it is, a mutated version of something earthbound. While it is big and strong, it is also clumsy and lumbering on land, as a water-based creature would be.

During this attack we are introduced to our hero, Gang-du (Song Kang-ho), a clumsy schlub who is ignored or belittled by society.

When the creature kidnaps his daughter, it is a catalyst for him to finally prove his mettle.

But this is where the movie goes to another level. 

Fearing Hyun-seo's death, the family comes together to grieve.

This family are all screw-ups in all their own ways - their reunion at the memorial to the dead is blackly funny, as their shared grieving turns into a childish wrestling match on the ground.

Rather than being a monster movie, The Host turns into a kitchen sink dramedy, as our misfit band figure out their issues while trying to find Hyun-seo.

The film balances these tonal shifts without losing sight of the stakes (with cutaways to Go Ah-Sung in the sewer), or making fun of the family - the film has the empathy to show these characters and their relationships in all their nuance and contradiction.

The film even finds a way to bring its critique of US militarism full circle, when the American military  become an active impediment to the family's search. 

As the family's hunt escalates, the film avoids betraying its eye-level approach to its genre - our heroes do not turn into instant action heroes, and the set pieces do not get so over-the-top that they do not lose a sense of scale or danger.

And as with every narrative turn in the film, its finale is an emotional gut punch. 

A great genre mashup, The Host is worth watching over and over again.

OUT NOW: Halloween Kills and Ends (for now)

The Shape (James Jude Courtney) lives.

After escaping the inferno he was trapped in in Halloween (2018), Michael Myers carves/stabs/crushes a path of destruction through Haddonfield while a mob led by Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall) and other survivors follow in his wake.

Because of contractual obligations, Myers kills everybody and escapes again.

Four years later, Myers is still missing, but Haddonfield has found a new boogeyman: Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), a young man who accidentally killed a kid he was babysitting. 

Still traumatised by the incident, and bullied by those who believe he is a murderer, Corey has been unable to move on.

After some kids assault him, Corey is left for dead. 

Which is where he meets someone who will shape his future - and that of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis)…

This is a review of Halloween Ends, but it will partially be about Kills, which I watched immediately before it.

I lay out that track because it probably informed my impression of Ends more than anything else.

Kills feels narratively unfinished - it begins as a previously on and ends in a way that feels more generic 

There is some attempt at thematic development - the rage of the trauma caused by Michael Myers - but it is dissipated by a story that splits itself too thin, and feels more like connective tissue for elements of its predecessors rather than a complete story. 

The movie is more of a straight slasher movie, but the attempts at commentary (is mob justice bad?) and constant need to fill in narrative gaps means it is never as fun as it could be.

If Kills is the franchise spinning wheels, Ends is the series picking a direction and mostly sticking to it.

From the beginning, Ends feels like it has a sense of direction and purpose. It also feels less interested in tying itself to the franchise.

The lack of familiar story beats gives the story a real sense of tension and surprise.

Michael Myers is not seen for almost half the runtime, and when he is, he comes on like the sum total of his injuries and age. 

 

For the first half of the movie, the story is centred around Corey and his increasing estrangement from society. There is a shift from Michael - a creature seemingly born evil - to Corey, an ordinary person rendered evil through circumstance.

It makes for an interesting change of pace from its predecessor and marks Ends out as the original entry in the franchise since Season of the Witch. 

It is not perfect - the bullies who catalyse Corey’s transformation are cartoons, and feel totally out of step with the muted, autumnal tone of the film. Their presence, along with Michael Myers’ eventual appearance, begins to deflate the sense of psychological realism the film is attempting. The romance between Corey and Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) never really convinces either.

And in the end, unlike the first Halloween III, this movie has to also act as a conclusion to the Laurie-Michael story, which means the Shape has to be wedged back into the story - and means we get two distinct climaxes right after each other.

For a trilogy which is supposedly about Laurie finally triumphing over the Shape, the films still feel stuck in the familiar groove of the unkillable slasher villain.

What is frustrating is that the finale ends on the idea that evil never dies - it changes shape. It feels like you could cut Michael Myers out of this movie and it would still work with the Shape mask as a metaphor for Michael’s evil enabling new variants like Corey.

Back in the eighties, John Carpenter supposedly pitched the idea of a Halloween movie where Michael Myers is dead, but his presence continues to haunt and influence Haddonfield.

A genuinely progressive direction for the franchise would have been to kill Michael in Halloween ‘18, and use the fear he has engendered in the community to explore the ways it affects people, whether through the mob mentality of Kills or the rise of copycats in Ends.

Halloween Ends is more entertaining and involving than it has any right to be, but in the end it highlights the limits of the legacy sequel template.

BITE-SIZED: Memory (Martin Campbell, 2022)

Alex Lewis (Liam Neeson) is a veteran hitman wrestling with the early symptoms of dementia.

As he tries to reckon with this personal transition, Alex’s latest assignment turns out to have a few complications of its own… 

After years in the wilderness, Martin Campbell has been busy making action movies: The Foreigner, The Protoge and now Memory.

They are not blockbusters, and I did not particularly like most of them, but it is good to know a craftsman like Campbell is working. 

Notably, Memory marks Campbell’s entry into the Liam Neeson action hero franchise.

Rather than Taken or The Commuter (my personal favourite), this movie falls closer to Run All Night - a familiar potboiler that tries to bridge genre tropes with more dramatic complications. 

Following The Protege, Memory is a big step up. As a movie on its own, Memory is a slight whiff.

Neeson is on solid form throughout, and he is a good match for Campbell’s slow-boil approach to action. He handles the character’s impairment with subtlety, and it never jars when it interferes with his work.

One wishes the script made more of a choice to focus on the character, because the film’s pitch is really just a subplot in a more expansive narrative that covers illegal activities on the US-Mexico border, and the government corruption which enables these activities to continue.

Guy Pearce co-stars as a veteran American agent who is on the trial of the people who have hired Alex, and the story is more focused on his investigation of a local bigwig (Monica Bellucci) and her involvement in sex trafficing. 

The cast are mostly good but there is some obvious shaky accent work that takes some adjusting to. Sadly, Bellucci struggles with an overly literate role that does not feel like it was written to fit her facility with English. 

Watching Memory after Campbell’s recent work, there is the sense of a stock company coming together. Cast members Ray Fearon and Taj Atwal, who had roles in The Foreigner and The Protege, appear as Pearce’s colleagues.

Overall, Memory is kind of anonymous. The action is solidly executed and the script throws in a few surprises, but nothing about it really sticks in the mind.

Hopefully Campbell and his collaborators find a more interesting vehicle for their talents.

OUT NOW: Don’t Worry Darling

Alice Chambers (Florence Pugh) and her husband Jack (Harry Styles) are a young couple living in the community of Victory. Victory is an isolated community outside of a top secret project where Jack and the other men work.

A series of bizarre events lead Alice to begin to question the community’s purpose, and the motives of its mysterious founder, Frank (Chris Pine)...

It took me so long to figure out how to write this review.

It was even hard to pin down the plot teaser above.

Don’t Worry Darling wants to be a paranoid thriller, with shades of The Stepford Wives.

With its fifties styling and approach to women’s roles, the stage seems to be set for some kind of satire on 

After all the whispers and magic spit theories, Don’t Worry Darling is a bit of a let down.

Neither a triumph or a disaster, Olivia Wilde’s film is a rather bland thriller.

Florence Pugh carries the whole enterprise on her shoulders, but she can only do so much. Harry Styles is dull, Chris Pine has some good moments but 

The movie is never that tense or shocking or mysterious. There are a couple of striking images - the Busby Berkley-style line of chorus dancers which appear throughout as signifiers of Alice’s regimented life in Victory.

What is frustrating about the film is that it never builds to anything.

The reveal of what Victory actually is does not have the ripple effects the filmmakers intend.

Alice realises her life is a lie, but there is no real sense of a building threat or discombobulation. 

Part of it is that Alice and Jack’s relationship is not fleshed out. If Pugh and Styles had good chemistry (and Styles could act), it might have made his betrayal more impactful.

The movie ends in a way that - perhaps - intends ambiguity, but it just feels abrupt and anticlimactic.

Ultimately, it is hard to ignore the feeling that there is just isn’t that much going on, either on or under the surface. 

Like the location it is set in, Don’t Worry Darling feels like a facsimile of a smarter, scarier movie.

BITE-SIZED: Fall (Scott Mann, 2022)

A pair of thrill-seekers get trapped at the top of a 2000 foot (609.6 m) high tower in the middle of the desert.

With few supplies and unable to contact anyone, can the pair survive?

With all the superhero movies crowding out cinemas, it’s time to shine a light on some recent genre movies about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

Fall benefits from a strong sense of verisimilitude - it was shot on a real location, with the actors front and centre.

That sense of realism gives the characters’ peril a real charge. Nothing is more jaw-dropping than watching a real actor, sweating and hair blowing, dangling with terra firma far below.

There is nothing particularly original about the story of Fall, but it is all in the execution.

Lead performers Grace Caroline Currey and Virginia Gardner  have strong chemistry and handle their physical action well. 

Scott Mann’s direction maintains a constant sense of scale - even down to the sound design of the creaking tower. 

I am afraid of heights so this might be personal bias, but the film is constantly ratcheting up tension.

There are no lulls or dead spots.

I have run into a series of films this year with straightforward premises which felt bloated and drained their sense of tension. Fall never out-stays its welcome.

It deserves extra credit for creating a natural sense of escalation. There is no point where it feels like our heroines have an easy out of their predicament, and the obstacles they face are borne out of their situation.

Fall is the kind of tight, nerve-shredding suspense thriller I look forward to.

OUT NOW: Smile

Following a patient’s bizarre death, Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is haunted by her experience - or so she thinks.

Her patient had claimed something was tormenting her, something that smiled.

Now Rose has the same problem.

Everywhere she looks, she sees the same smile - a knowing, evil smirk.

And it turns out she is not the only one who has been haunted by this smile… 

This movie is the perfect example of why I do not watch trailers.

The trailer for Smile has played in front of so many movies I have seen recently that it has been cemented onto my brain.

It is a good trailer with some great jump scares and captures the vibe of the movie.

And that is the problem.

The trailer contains all of the best scares.

It does not ruin the movie but - and this is not an insult - Smile is all about the scares.

The acting varies from fine to wooden, there is no subtext and no sense of humour. Smile’s sole purpose is to make the viewer jump, and it succeeds - for a while, at least.

Writer-director Parker Finn knows how to build and pay off tension, but as the movie progresses, it begins to feel like the film is stuck in one setting. While the scares are strong, there is a building sense of familiarity - like the film only knows one type of joke delivery. 

Because of this, the movie loses steam about 20-30 minutes from the ending, and I left the movie vaguely deflated.

The movie tries to give the main character an arc, but then undercuts it with a last-minute (but predictable) twist of the knife. The character development is pretty clear, and the movie does not overburden its running time, but there was something a bit too rote about her traumatic backstory and how it is 'resolved'.

Its biggest stumbling block is its narrative resolution - the movie was based on the writer-director’s own short story, and it feels like the concept has been extended so far it undermines the story’s sting. And the ‘twist’ at the end is such a cliche at this point that it makes the movie feel predictable - there is something conceptually interesting about providing a clear button and then destroying it, but the execution lacks the simple, nasty punch of the rest of the movie's scares.

While the story leaves a lot to be desired, the movie feels like the kind of genre movie Stephen King wrote about in Danse Macabre: it might not be wholly successful but Smile sticks in the mind thanks to strong selection of scary moments and unsettling images.

The film is built on such a simple, uncanny concept - a visual concept - that it is a pity that it does not quite make the landing as a feature.