Spiral (2019) - Shudder
I watched this as an escape Friday night from the political dread I was experiencing given RBG's death. Probably wasn't a good idea to turn to a horror movie featuring two gay men and their daughter who move into a rural town which seems to have a bad history with couples like them and maybe a cult living next door? The movie is overstuffed with ideas about trauma, mental health, bigotry, and the occult, but feels oddly toothless in how the latter thing fits in with the rest. Like, the central couple is a black man, our hero, and his white partner, but as far as I could see their races never played a role in the terror they were experiencing, which rings extremely hollow to me given how intersectional identities are. If there is a cult next door, why are they only obsessed with this couple's sexual identities and not their skin color? It doesn't fit with the film's obvious political message.
It's things like this that ruin the film's chances at real relevance, and its manic jumping from idea to idea that ruins its power to really poke at the audience's horror buttons. Shadowy occult figures, or symptoms of a nervous breakdown? It's a tried and true formula, for sure, but it's also like 1/4th of what this film is trying to do at any given moment and it all feels too underdeveloped to really make any kind of intellectual or emotional impact. There's one truly terrifying image here, and it does come at the climax, so that's nice, but it doesn't make up for the mess of the rest of the film. I hope that there's more in our future from this creative team because there's a lot there, it just never coheres into something that lives up to its ambitions.
C+
- Slightly Scary
Howl (2015) - Shudder
If Spiral was too many ideas crammed into too messy a package, this is too few ideas stretched out for too long. To be fair, it isn't until the last half-hour or so that things get too repetitive for my taste, so you could watch the film's pretty great opening 2/3rds and call it a day. Those parts of the film work because they involve manipulating the premise, small set of characters, and setting to maximum effect. The plot, a train in England breaks down between towns where it is then preyed upon by a werewolf who lives in the forest outside the train track's small open area, is a clever one. The characters are lightly sketched but mostly (more on that mostly later) not too annoying or one-dimensional to grate before they inevitably get picked off one by one. And the attacks are fun in the early and middle going, too. Following the Jaws rule of limiting the monster, they get a lot out of spooky shadows and silhouettes, glimpses of hairy, inhuman body parts from fun perspectives, and your standard sound design. This movie isn't afraid to get bloody either, as one attack inside a tiny train bathroom ends in just a flood of blood, which is always fun. But that's about where the fun stops too. Once the werewolf gets on board the train it becomes much less hidden and much more obvious what is going to happen. The design of the werewolf is pretty solid, actually, at least as long as you don't look too long at it. And it's pretty scary, at least at first.
But then the movie has an additional half an hour instead of 5 minutes and, while there is one worthwhile twist in there, it isn't enough to sustain narrative momentum nor the thrills that the first parts of the movie had set up. The more you look at the werewolf, too, the more questions you start to have about it. It feels at first like a pretty traditional werewolf, but then you start to see more of something like the monsters from The Descent in its design and you start to wonder why it looks like that. And it stops being scary and starts being kinda silly. You never want silly werewolves unless you're specifically going for silly werewolves. Werewolves are, for my money, one of the top scary monsters, but not this one! No, this one was, ultimately quite dumb. A shame.
But an even greater shame was the film's insistence on doing the selfish-member-of-the-party-is-more-dangerous-than-the-monsters thing, and honestly? I'm tired of it. This one is a corporate bro, who it turns out had once almost hired one of the other passengers until she refused to sleep with him for the honor of the job. I get it, men are like wolves, but you're not doing anything new with this idea, and so it definitely shouldn't be the center of your climactic action. Ugh. This movie had such promise and then pissed it all away. Just watch the first hour or so. You'll know when to turn it off, it'll be when you start laughing at the sight of the werewolf.
C-
- Scary until it becomes - Slightly Scary
and ultimately becomes quite silly.