The Neon Dreaming

[Content Warning: The following will contain discussions of sexual assault]

As we reach the end of spooky month with the big show tomorrow, I want to end my Halloween coverage with one of my favorite horror movies that is woefully underrated.  A small town girl goes to the big city to make her dreams come true.  It’s the romanticized Hollywood story, one we’ve seen a thousand times before.  But now we know better.  We know what that machine does to people, women in particular, and we know that romanticized times weren’t flawless, we just don’t remember the flaws or exhibit that willful blindness that makes us overlook the problems.  It’s still an easy trap to fall into (like how I think the 80s had the best music and the best TV shows, but that’s just because I watch Miami Vice a lot), but we know better.

Eloise Turner doesn’t.  When we first meet Ellie, played by Thomasin Mckenzie (Jojo Rabbit, The Power of the Dog), she’s listening to 60s music and dancing around in a homemade dress made of what looks like newspapers on the second floor of her grandmother’s house in Cornwall.  She bumps into something, knocking down a photo and causing the record to skip.  As she picks up the photo, a picture of her mother and grandmother, she looks up and sees her mother in mirror.  She asks if it’s good news and her mother just smiles.  It’s at that moment, her grandmother calls up to Ellie that she’s gotten a letter from the London College of Fashion.  She opens it and it’s an acceptance letter to the school; her dream is coming true.  It’s not London in the 60s, which is her dream place and moment in time, but it is London and it is her dream of becoming a fashion designer like her mom.  Close enough, right?  She’s absolutely thrilled and prepares for the train ride from Cornwall to London.

Did I mention that her mom is dead?  Welcome to Last Night in Soho.

The music here really does a lot to sell this naive ingenue thing Ellie has going on and it plays very well into her romanticized views of London.  Ellie very quickly realizes, though, that her idea of London in the 60s and what London is now are most definitely not the same when her cabbie turns out to be a major creep, to the point that she doesn’t want him to let her out in front of her building, so she gets out a couple blocks early and hides in a shop until he drives away.  What’s more, when she does get to her housing, she walks right into a pit of mean girl vipers led by her inconsiderate (to say the least) roommate Jocasta who gets right to that thing mean girls do where they insult someone right to their face, but say it in a way that if they don’t know better, they won’t realize they’re being insulted.  It doesn’t take Ellie too long to catch on, though, and she jumps at the opportunity to move into a bedsit near campus and get away from Jocasta and her gaggle of fiendish fashionistas.  It’s an old room, hardly changed in decades; a harsh contrast from the ultra modern dormitory she was staying in and much more like her grandmother’s house.  She feels at home in the ancient bedsit, bathed in the neon glow of Soho’s signage, and all is well.  Until, of course, she goes to sleep and finds herself in a London night club in the 1960s as she gets a glimpse into the life of Sandie, played by Anya Taylor-Joy (The Gorge, The Witch), an aspiring starlet ready to sing on the big stage and won’t accept anything else.  The glamour is intoxicating for Ellie and the only thing she can think of doing the next morning is going back to sleep so she can get back into Sandie’s world, even turning down invitations in the real world for her to socialize in order to do so (not that I can’t relate to turning down or even cancelling plans so I could stay home and go to sleep).

This first scene with Sandie is one of the most visually arresting things I’ve seen in film in a long time.  In fact, the whole movie is a wondrous to behold visually.  I hated looking down to take notes during this film because I didn’t want to take my eyes off a single frame of the movie.  It is stunning and stylish in a way that most movies just aren’t these days and this initial scene has some of the best direction and editing and choreography I’ve ever seen.  The use of mirrors to show Ellie and Sandie in the same place, the shot composition and the lighting; the movie just grabs your eyes and makes you want to hold them open so you don’t miss a thing.  The most skillful exhibition of this is the scene where Sandie and Jack, the charming but oh-so-sleazy manager of girls, dance with Ellie seamlessly cutting in.  It’s one of the most impressive scenes in a film I can remember watching and it left me with the sense of wide-eyed wonder that Ellie has before she leaves for London.  There are many times while watching this movie that I said out loud to myself “This looks so damn good” and you just don’t get that in movies that often.  And the majority of the film is made using practical effects and great editing, with minimal CGI.  It’s really very impressive and for that alone Last Night in Soho is worth watching.  But there’s so much more

We learn that Sandie is one of the girls who lived in Ellie’s bedsit, apparently ghosts are geolocked.  There’s something called the Stone Tape theory which states that materials, like houses and rocks and other tangible things can house the memories of traumatic events in a form of energy and it seems that the film’s rules for the ghosts are at least informed by that.  You know I’m not much for the paranormal, but I found that to be an interesting touch.  As Sandie’s whirlwind life starts to affect Ellie, she starts feeling Sandie’s influence in her own life.  She starts working on 60s-inspired clothing designs, using Sandie as her model in her drawings, she changes her hair to be closer to Sandie’s, she buys vintage clothes, she becomes more bold.  It’s all going great until she has a creepy encounter with an old man (the late Terence Stamp) who hangs around the pub where she works; it leaves her feeling shaken, but not nearly as shaken as the following nights do.

What started as a ghostly flight of fancy, beautiful dreams of a beautiful dream come true, starts to turn into a nightmare as Ellie quickly discovers that Sandie’s life on stage isn’t nearly as glamorous as it seemed to be at first.  Jack, played by Matt Smith (Doctor Who, Morbius, even though I’m sure he’d like it if we forgot that), wins over Sandie on the night they meet by defending her honor from a boorish degenerate and making promises of headlining at the Rialto right away instead of waiting for her shot at the Cafe De Paris by working as a coat check girl for years.  And as Sandie watches her new reality set in, she sees Jack with an old face that lays bare the betrayal.  Ellie finds herself sat in the audience of men—exclusively men—in sober suits, bathed in alcohol, dripping with lecherous energy.  And she witnesses it firsthand; not only is Sandie not singing, she’s not center stage, and it’s not the kind of show she had envisioned.  Tame by today’s standards, perhaps, but what happens next isn’t.  Her job doesn’t end when she exits the stage, no; Jack is exploiting her exactly in the way you thought he would, promising her great things in return for letting these rich and powerful men use her however they please.  Jack’s not a talent manager, he’s a pimp leveraging the hopes and dreams of young women to force them into sexual servitude.  The film here has so many little details that show you the toll this is taking on Sandie, and Anya Taylor-Joy is absolutely at the top of her game here, which shouldn’t be a surprise because she’s one of the best actresses working today.  From the little glances and looks and the way her body language changes as she weathers the advances of depraved men who fancy themselves a Lothario and yet can only manage encounters with women whose agency has been ripped from them without their consent, to the bruises on her leg that she attempted to cover with makeup that are only exposed when she’s dancing; there is so much visual storytelling here that as the credits rolled, I immediately wanted to start it over and watch it again.

The dreams get more and more intense, more and more violent in nature, and less content to remain in the dream world for Ellie to just visit.  She is being haunted.  From a window into fantasy come to life, her ghostly dreams become a violent nightmare from which she can’t escape.  And through all this, there’s John, the nearly unbelievably sweet fellow fashion student who has a crush on Ellie and unfortunately gets caught up in the chaos.  But he’s up for it and so supportive, I’m really happy that he was a character in the film even if he is solidly tertiary.  John is played by Michael Ajao (Attack the Block) and is not only such a wholesome addition to the movie (but in a different way from Ellie, who is naive, John is a South London boy who managed to not become self-serving and cynical like Jocasta), he also provides some good comic relief as the tension mounts.  Just enough that it gives you a breather from the action, but not so much that it distracts from the stakes.  The movie cascades to a terrifying and dramatic finale with some big twists and turns along the way and even though I’d seen the movie before, I still found myself thoroughly gripped. 

As a film, it is really very well executed.  Edgar Wright’s direction and his whole crew put together such a wildly beautiful film to look at and his writing is truly cutting at times.  I mean, it is Edgar Wright, so my expectations are high because movies like Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead are favorites of mine and his other foray into more serious filmmaking, Baby Driver, despite starring two men I don’t want to talk about anymore, was a triumph of cinema.  And still, for his first true horror movie, he impressed me, sailing over the very high bar he’s already set.  And I cannot say nearly enough about the acting.  Thomasin Mckenzie was perfectly cast as Ellie, she is convincing through every moment of the film, her every emotion felt genuine, and she is so expressive and puts in such a strong performance, it’s worthy of a true superstar.  And that’s while being in a movie with Anya Taylor-Joy, who is already a superstar, and is positively magical in this role, especially in that aforementioned dancing scene with Jack and Ellie and when she sings a downbeat version of “Downtown”; her performance is absolutely magnetic.  They’re two more of the reasons I couldn’t look away, their performances were both so captivating.  And the movie offers some genuinely harrowing moments that are amplified by the strength of their acting.

I have heard some complaints that the movie isn’t scary enough, but I think some of those are missing the mark.  Perhaps the manifestations of the haunting could have been more frightening, but I think the terror of the situation here is the real horror.  Sandie and Ellie are living parallel terrors.  Sandie is living through true real life horror that takes a seriously brutal turn.  Time has shown that the entertainment industry preys on women, as recently as Harvey Weinstein and as far back as I can find.  There is something truly, truly horrifying about the commoditization of women’s bodies; seeing Sandie’s agency stripped from her and what she had to endure with no escape, sexual assault after sexual assault, kept under the thumb of someone who clearly physically harms her if she steps out of line left me slightly sick to my stomach and I think it’s an aspect of this film that wasn’t talked about enough in 2021 when it was first released.  Jack turned her from a human being into a product, from a person into a thing.  The slow loss of hope as Sandie descends further into a life so far from the one she imagined, so far from the one that she came to London to create is heartbreaking and even on repeat viewing, I can’t help but feel her pain. 

And Ellie is witnessing those horrors with an added layer of her own.  Because of her abilities, alignment, her shining, whatever you want to call it if you want to call it anything in particular, her life spirals out of control.  She develops an intense and justified fear of sleep because every time she closes her eyes she’s torn out of her world into one of depravity and broken dreams.  Talk about creating dread in a film, our characters here are going through it and like Ellie, all we can do is witness it powerlessly.  It’s true, the movie is approachable, even for a non-horror fan like me, but I don’t think that detracts from the movie at all.  It’s a serious film with a serious message that is delivered in a way that still gives you hope that the situation will change in the future.  At just under 2 hours, it’s not a short film, but it needed every minute of its length and not a single shot is wasted or overly long or unnecessary.  Last Night in Soho takes its time to tell a deeply realized story and I cannot recommend it enough.  It’s just so, so good and I get more out of it every time I watch it, which to me is a mark of a truly great movie.  As of now, this R-rated movie available for streaming on Prime Video and is a great addition to your Halloween festivities.

Since we’re reaching the end of spooky season I would like to thank all of you for being here and reading along through my increased coverage.  It has been a real joy, stepping outside of my comfort zone and focusing on a genre that I usually avoid and I hope that I was able to highlight the versatility and the heft of storytelling that come with the horror genre and its mechanics.  It feels like ever since Get Out, we’ve had an explosion of art house horror that aims to do more than just terrify or disgust.  And even though horror will likely never become a top genre for me, I’m here for it.  I’ve come to really appreciate what it can do and its role in cinema to tell allegorical stories or engage in social commentary in ways similar to science fiction.  And seeing more horror, I see how the genre’s mechanics can inform some truly great comedies and thrillers as well.  Ironically, I fear I’m becoming a fan.

October also just about marks a full year since I started consistently writing this blog on a weekly basis and I have found some lovely readers who have reached out to me and discussed film and TV shows and even video games and that is something I truly cherish.  And whether you’re one of them or an occasional reader, or someone who checks it out every week or even if this is your first time stumbling across this particular one man show, I value and appreciate each and every one of you.  Have a happy and safe Halloween and I’ll see you next week.

3 Body Problem Child

I may not be a parent, but I’ve had enough parents show me their Google Calendar to know that it’s not always super easy like it seems on TV.  I mean, when I was growing up, I watched this documentary about a rat who lived in a sewer and raised four crime fighting turtles.  If a rat can do it, how hard can it be?  But I’ve since learned that the documentary had been largely debunked and parenting is difficult.  And being a step-parent can present its own challenges that are unique to that situation because you’re stepping into the parent role for or in addition to somebody else.

And being a stepdad is a lot harder when your stepson exhibits some troubling behavior, like getting into trouble at school or dragging you to the backyard and burying you alive under the cover of a rain-soaked night.  Which is exactly the situation that Gary finds himself in with Little Evil.  Gary, played by Adam Scott (Severance, Parks & Rec), is moving in with his new wife, but when we first meet him, he’s under a few feet of dirt and his wife is frantically searching for him while his stepson Lucas gleefully waits for him to run out of air.  When he’s finally rescued, his wife Samantha, played by Evangeline Lilly (Lost, Ant-Man), begs him to say something so she knows he’s okay.  So what does he say?  “I want a divorce.”  It’s a particularly bad day, being buried alive, so I can understand the sentiment. I think I’d feel the same.

Sam kept Gary and her son Lucas, played by Owen Atlas, apart because she’s had some tragic relationships in the past and wanted to make sure that Gary was the one.  But, like any stepdad, Gary is having a little trouble connecting with his stepson.  It’s a hard mountain to climb under normal circumstances, but things are a little tougher when you’re called into your kid’s school because he talked back to a teacher and the principal and the school counselor seem to think it’s your fault that your stepson is acting out.  The day started as any other.  Gary’s making some breakfast for the family, Sam is getting ready for her day, and Lucas is watching some TV before school.  Not light early morning cartoons, mind you, he’s watching Reverend J.D. Gospel, played by Clancy Brown (Starship Troopers, Resident Alien) on the morning news, preaching the end of the world—very specifically, on the 6th day of the 6th month, which also happens to be Lucas’s 6th birthday.  Now, having lived through my fair share of raptures, including the most recent one, you tend to shrug these things off.  That is until the firm and brimstone guy on the TV buys a disused church from you and then you’re sitting in your kid’s principal’s office because he told his teacher to go to hell.  And then she poured lye on her face and jumped through her window.  That’s a tough day; that’s not “getting buried alive” tough, but that’s still not great.  The teacher had a worse day, for sure.  The school counselor suggests therapy for both Lucas and Gary, bringing up Gary’s own unresolved parenting issues with his own father.  Now this isn’t the first time this has come up, as Gary’s friend Al (whom I first thought was his coworker, but I’ve come to believe that Al is not a coworker, but rather works in a shared office space, since Gary is a realtor and Al doesn’t seem to be) who refers to themself as a stepdad and suggests the stepdad therapy group they go to.  Al, played by Bridget Everett (Somebody Somewhere, Wake Up Dead Man), refers to themself as a stepdad and is married to a woman, so I’m not sure if it’s meant to be a play on perceived same-sex relationship dynamics or if they’re supposed to be trans or nonbinary, but one of the things I really like about this movie is that everyone just goes with it.  Suffice it to say, Al is gender-nonconforming and they consider themself to be a stepdad.  It’s not an issue, it’s presented as Al’s preferred way to be addressed and nobody has a problem.

At group, Gary learns that many of the other stepdads feel the same way that he does.  Their step kids are also evil, little monsters who hate them and he’s reassured that there’s nothing really wrong with Lucas and it’s just normal stepdad/stepson dynamics that are hard to navigate, especially at the beginning.  The therapy group has a lot of fun moments to it, with the stepdads getting rather unapologetic as to how they refer to their step kids and it’s stacked with comic actors like Kyle Bornheimer (Worst Week) and Donald Faison (Scrubs). So Gary feels a little bit better about the rocky start he’s got off to with Lucas.  That is, until he gets a call from Karl, his wedding videographer, played by Tyler Labine (Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, Deadbeat) who is very cagey and wants him to come look at Gary’s wedding video.  Apparently, the wedding was a bit of a disaster and despite Gary’s insistence that they just want the video destroyed and to move on, Karl is determined to get him to watch one particular moment.  Not the part where the officiant is speaking in tongues and getting Gary to vow to protect the child from hellfire and what not, but the part where a freak natural disaster strikes the wedding and Lucas simply stands in it, unaffected.  Karl is convinced that Lucas is indeed the Antichrist and sets Gary down that path as well.  I mean, you have to admit that things are a little out of the realm of troubled family dynamics when there’s lye involved.  I don’t even know how to get lye, but movies and TV have also taught me that whenever the lye comes out, bad things are about to happen.  Gary comes to realize that, despite Sam’s insistence that this is all normal kid stuff, something is very, very wrong.

What plays out next is either very silly fun or a surprisingly touching ode to fatherhood, though I won’t rule out that it’s both.  Fatherhood here being defined as anyone who decides to stay and step up to do the work of a father or any father figure.  It doesn’t matter that Gary didn’t name him, didn’t raise him, it’s up to him to decide what that means from every moment from the one after he became his stepdad.  The choice is simple. Grab a couple of mitts and toss a ball around the backyard, take an interest in the kid, expanding his world and yours by bringing the two together or stab him with a consecrated knife on holy ground before he reaches his 6th birthday on the 6th day of the 6th month.  These are the decisions that every parent has to make at some point probably and it’s Gary’s responsibility to step up and do what’s necessary.  I’m going to stop even hinting at anything else that happens in the movie because it’s really a very interesting story that plays out in an exciting fashion and it’s very funny as well and I don’t want to rob you from being able to experience that.  But I am going to talk about some broader concepts that I noticed in the movie.  If you’re a longtime reader you’ve probably picked up that I’m pretty down on the concept of fatherhood and I’m really hard on fathers in movies.  I once even started a post ranking the worst fathers on TV, but it was filled with too many swears than I generally like in these posts and I just had to scrap it.  But Little Evil somehow gave me hope for the idea.  I certainly wasn’t expecting the movie to tug at the heartstrings the way it did nor did I think it would have any affect on my thoughts on fatherhood.  So there you have it.  Now I’m not saying I all of a sudden want children, but I’ve warmed to the concept in general.    

There’s something here that is so wholesome and is about choice and healing and the power of therapy and, yes, the power of friendship, as cheesy as that may be.  The movie isn’t a parody of horror movies like Scary Movie, but rather it’s more like The Blackening which respects the source material from which it draws.  The horrors parts of this film are done with care and composure and they pack in a lot of references to classic horror and classic horror comedy without making it a distraction.  The scares are tense and not cheap and there are proper horror mechanics here.  And the comedy is very good as well.  It is from 2017, so maybe not every joke has aged that well, but it’s close enough that most of it is fine for modern sensibilities.  And it is funny.  I found myself laughing out loud many times which doesn’t always happen when you’re watching something by yourself with a notebook in hand. I know we’ve talked about the cozy murder genre, and I don’t know if this has been done before, but Little Evil might be the first cozy horror movie.  Yes, it’s a horror comedy, but it’s a very different film from the average horror comedy.  The laughs here, while plentiful, are secondary to the movie’s narrative.  It has an arc, it’s surprisingly narrative focused, and it’s just so damn charming.  Okay, a lot of that hinges on Adam Scott, who I’ve always thought is an underrated actor and is just always a delight on screen. When he’s playing a protagonist, I like him and when he’s playing a villain, I like to hate him.  He’s just so good and this movie is a wonderful showcase for him because he’s the main focus of the film and he’s in basically every scene.  He is the movie and he carries it with aplomb. Al is a character who starts off a bit grating at first, but as you get to know them better through the film, they really endear themself to you.  Really, just about every character is likable if they’re meant to be likable and unlikable if they’re meant to be unlikable.

Little Evil doesn’t really tread much new ground and for horror diehards, if you’re looking for genuine scares, you’re not going to get that true feeling of dread (though I would imagine no horror comedy reaches that), but if you’re looking for an any time, sort of feel good horror comedy, this new subgenre of cozy horror, it’s a great choice.  It’s a Netflix Original, so it’s available to stream with them, of course, and it’s rated TV-MA for some reason instead of an MPA rating.  There’s some language, not so much as you’d hear in 15 minutes of playing Call of Duty online, but it might offend the youngest of ears.  The rest of the adult content is at a minimum; were it not for the F-bombs, I could easily see this being rated PG-13 if you’re looking for a family movie for Halloween and that’s something that matters to you.  It’s also a breezy 1 hour and 34 minutes long, right around the 90 minute mark which is great for a comedy of this type.  If you missed this one the first time around, don’t feel bad—the marketing cycle was so short, it was easy to miss, but it’s still out there now and I recommend it.

A Ghost Wanted Man

[Content Warning: The following will contain mentions of suicide and genocide]

Horror is such a versatile genre to blend with others because horror, at its core, is about a very primal part of the human experience.  Baked deep into our DNA is this fear of the unknown; since the first campfire illuminated the night, we have been afraid of what lies beyond that warm glow.  Of course, those things were always there, but having that light and that feeling of safety makes the places where we’re unsafe that much scarier.  So horror taps into that dread that we have locked in the back of our brains that doesn’t get a whole lot of action during a normal, relatively safe day that most people in the modern world have.  Applying dread to other genres and using horror mechanics can lead to some very satisfying mash-ups.  I just wrote about the blend of horror and war, and, of course, you know my affinity for the subversion of the horror-comedy.  But what about the horror-whodunnit?

It’s easy to see why the two would work well together, even though it doesn’t seem like a blend we see often.  If you’re talking about the traditional Agatha Christie-style murder mystery, you have a lot of shared elements.  A group of people together, often in a secluded place (like a cabin in the woods), cut off from help and the rest of the world (often by inclement weather), and then, well, people start dying.  Whether it’s supernatural or human, the end result is the same—people are dead and they need to find out why and stop it from happening again.  And we are talking Agatha Christie here, as we return to Kenneth Branagh’s (Hamlet, Oppenheimer) Hercule Poirot films with A Haunting in Venice, based on Christie’s Hallowe’en Party and streaming on Hulu.

Instead of a cabin in the woods, we have an old house, a palazzo, in Venice, where Poirot has been enticed to join a Halloween party at the behest of his old friend, writer Ariadne Oliver, played by Tina Fey (30 Rock, Saturday Night Live), who wants his help to debunk a medium who seems like the real deal.  The set and setting are excellent, as the house feels haunted when you’re in it and the atmosphere is properly chilling.  Ariadne has made a bit of a career writing mysteries, basing her detective on the world famous Hercule Poirot.  I actually like this lore drop here, because as a whodunnit super fan, I’ve seen a lot of shows and movies about world famous detectives, but I’ve been in the world for a little while now and I can’t name a single detective and I used to work for a judge.  So the idea of a “world famous detective” has always seemed a bit silly to me and this explanation of her books feeding his fame helps to explain that.  Anyway, she’s in a bit of slump.  30 books written, 27 best sellers, but three in a row that have been commercial and critical failures; she needs something to get her out of her rut and Poirot is the perfect person to help pull her up.

Unfortunately for Ariadne, it’s 1947 and we see Poirot as a retired recluse now, uninterested in seeing anyone but his bodyguard and the baker who delivers him fresh pastries by boat twice a day.  A line of people hoping for his help gathers outside his door daily, but no one ever gets through.  He’s lived through two World Wars (having fought in one) and feels the weight of the dead after a career of being surrounded by their mysteries.  He is a man himself haunted; what use does he have for a Halloween party and a woman who claims to speak to the dead?  He’s had enough of ghosts, he lives with them everyday.  But, through a little teasing about him being past it and a great deal more cajoling, she was able to convince him.  A party held at a house haunted in more ways than one.  It was an orphanage at the time of the bubonic plague and, unfortunately, in times of great fear and panic, people make awful decisions.  In this case, the doctors and the nurses locked the children away and left, allowing sickness and starvation to take them all, scared and alone. 

This original sin of the house has led to the Children’s Vendetta, as it’s called, which causes tragedy to befall everyone who lives there.  And they take particular pleasure in causing the demise of medical professionals because they’re the ones who left them to die.  Not the house I’d want to spend the night if I were a doctor.  Or so the story goes; so much falls to myth and legend, I remember being taught that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and used it to build a space skateboard so he could do a sick flip in from of some martians and I’m not entirely sure that happened.  But, at the very least, tragedy has befallen the current resident, former opera singer Rowena Drake, played by Kelly Reilly (Yellowstone, True Detective), whose daughter Alicia fell ill after her fiancé left her and then fell from her bedroom into the canal under suspicious circumstances.  Some say she was so heartbroken she committed suicide, others believe she was so out of sorts with illness that she accidentally fell over, and others still believe it was the children who took her, indiscriminately exacting revenge for the atrocities committed against them.  Either way, Alicia is the one the medium is there to speak with and boy does she put on a show.

She shows up in a small boat, which in itself is unremarkable because it’s Venice and that’s just how you get around, but when boats and docks and shadowy nights are involved, it just makes everything feel more dramatic.  If someone says they have to meet someone, no big deal.  If they say they have to meet someone at night at the docks, that’s immediately intriguing.  I want to know what they’re doing.  And if the person shows up wearing a mask and cloak with two assistants in tow, then, well, all the more intriguing.  She is Joyce Reynolds, played by Michelle Yeoh (Everything Everywhere All At Once), and she insists that she is just like Poirot, someone who speaks for the dead, but in her case, more literally.  Poirot, in his Ralph Anderson level of self-assurance, knows completely that she is a fraud, because like Ralph and like me, he doesn’t believe in any of it, so they must all be frauds.  And so far every single one that Ariadne has come against in her recent stint of proto-Oh No, Ross and Carrie has turned out to be a fraud, so Poirot feels pretty confident. When pushed, Poirot answers plainly and brutally as to why he doesn’t believe.  He has seen too much of the world; the wars, the countless murders, and as he put it, in a way that cut so deeply and poetically that I had to rewind to make sure I heard every word correctly, “the bitter evil of human indifference” to believe that there is any spirit or being that’s steering the ship.

There’s a whole cast of characters here.  Their deeply religious maid, who attended to Alicia as she was sick.  The ex-fiance back for answers after receiving a mysterious invite.  The shell shocked, as it was called back then, family doctor and his creepy son who claims to speak to the ghosts of the house and says they told him Joyce is a fake.  And of course, Reynolds and her half-sibling assistants, Poirot, Ariadne, and Poirot’s bodyguard.  They conduct the seance in Alicia’s room, which was left untouched since her death months ago.  Not even the teacup, half off the edge of the nightstand, was moved.  The seance is properly dramatic, as unlike other mediums, Reynolds uses a typewriter instead of a crystal ball, and it types out responses on its own.  It’s all very convincing until Poirot barges in and exposes the fraud.  And that’s when it gets really interesting.  It‘s kind of a thought exercise; just because someone is lying doesn’t mean they aren’t also telling the truth.  Knowing what theatrics charlatans get up to, Reynolds could be using the trappings of fraudsters to actually contact the dead, which might be a much more subdued experience than people expect.  You know, she’s just jazzing it up a bit.  Either that, or she sandbags the really good stuff for when things get dicey.  The movie keeps things ambiguous, as the seance gets so intense it shakes everyone.  Poirot is steadfast in his skepticism, but he is seemingly alone.  Everyone is convinced, even Ariadne.  “The woman who beat Poirot”, she says, noting that it will put her back on top when she writes it.

Poirot confronts Reynolds and they argue it out, Reynolds doing her bit to explain the theatrical aspect of her particular dog and pony show, ending with her telling Poirot to lighten up—after all, she’s seen the horrors of the world just as he has, but she does her best to find her way through rather than wallow in it.  She tells him to trying bobbing for an apple, like the kids were doing at the party.  I think that’s terrible advice, to be honest.  First of all, bobbing for apples is disgusting, that’s a lot of people sticking their open mouths in a barrel full of water and then you going to do that right after.  No thank you.  I don’t even know why people thought sticking your face in water to grab something with your mouth was supposed to be fun.  And what’s the prize at the end of it all?  Is it a Switch 2?  No, it’s an apple; a readily available piece of fruit.  Hardly worth drowning for.  And drowning is exactly what happens to Poirot, as he is attacked during his attempt and held under.  He was revived by his bodyguard after a brief moment being mostly dead only to come to a grim realization that he wasn’t the target.  But it’s too late and the body drops.  Literally.  Through all the ghost stories, the jump scares, the whispers in the hallway you convince yourself is your mind playing tricks on you, we now have a real live corpse.  And it won’t be the last.

But, if you’re going to have a party with a murder, having the world’s best detective on the guest list seems to be a pretty convenient thing, like falling ill right outside a hospital. Sure, things would be better if that weren’t happening, but if it’s going to happen, there are worse places for it to go down.  The first thing Poirot does is lock them in.  The murderer is in there with them, so no one can leave or enter.  Not that there’s much of a need to lock them in; with the inclement weather causing the waterways to become dangerously choppy, there are no boats that are safe for them to leave on.  So now we have our classic horror setup and our classic whodunnit setup.  A dead body, an isolated group, and one steadfast protagonist, keen to get to the bottom of it all.  He may be rusty, but Poirot is the man for the job.  Or is he?  Is the house getting to him?  Is he losing his grip on reality?  Or are all the stories true?  Poirot wrestles with the mystery as the situation gets stranger and stranger and things become harder to explain.  The doctor’s creepy son even says to him that the dead consider him one of their own now, because he briefly crossed over to their side and he shouldn’t be surprised if they contact him.

It’s always a fun experience for me to watch Branagh go through Poirot’s process because I do really like his approach to the character.  He’s methodical and humorless, that sort of maestro who has given up everything in life to pursue his craft.  When Agatha Christie thought up Poirot, she did a wonderful job.  Even the two previous movies, Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, despite their flaws, were really enjoyable films for me because of Branagh’s performance.  Yeoh also does a great job as the questionable medium, but I will admit the acting is not the main draw of these movies.  The usually reliable Tina Fey plays Ariadne with a kind of flapperish lilt to the way she speaks, which feels less authentic and more Janet Snakehole than anything else, but still, her performance is passable.  Kelly Reilly as the grieving mother does a good enough job, though her accent changes through the film so often that even in my fourth time watching this, I’m unsure whether she’s supposed to be American or English.  Suffice it to say, this isn’t a perfect movie. 

The doctor, though, Dr. Ferrier, played by Jamie Dornan (Belfast, Fifty Shades of Grey), is convincingly traumatized by his time in the war and the things he saw and had to do, as he was one of the first medical personnel to be sent to the horrific concentration camp Bergen-Belsen.  I’ll spare you the details of what went on there (click if you want more information), but I fully understand why he walked away from the war with PTSD.  Even just knowing what happened there is more than troubling enough for me without having witnessed it firsthand.  And that’s really what this movie is about.  There’s a lot going on here and a lot of what we get to see of the characters is interesting, but A Haunting in Venice takes time to tell a story about trauma with these two characters, Poirot and Dr. Ferrier.  When we see Poirot at the beginning of this film, he’s living in seclusion, wondering if he just happens upon death or it follows him around.  He may not show it the same way as the good doctor, but he is also traumatized.  The death of his captain, the death of his fiance, the horrors of trench warfare, the murders that beckon to him; how could he not be carrying something after all that?  By WW2, humanity had found all new ways of killing each other, all the more brutal and in the hands of people willing to be brutal and the horrors that Ferrier saw were even greater than what Poirot endured.  Even Reynolds has her past in the war as well and she deals with it in a different way; whether or not you believe she can communicate with the dead, it certainly feels like more than a charade to her. 

After all, what is a haunting other than trauma that surrounds you like so many specters and phantasms?  Even the palazzo where Rowena lives and her daughter died is haunted by its trauma, the Children’s Vendetta.  And it’s only by working through that trauma that you can get past it.  And there’s no one way to deal with it, for each person it’s different and there are healthier ways than others.  Maybe it’s realizing that getting back to your passion is the way you move forward.  Maybe it is freshly delivered pastries two times a day, I’ve never tried that.  Maybe it’s rigging a typewriter in a masquerade to bring false comfort to the bereaved, since maybe false comfort feels the same as the real thing if you don’t know it’s false.  Maybe it’s ruining the lives and/or murdering people who move into your house after you’ve died tragically there (don’t do this one, this is on the unhealthy side of the scale).  But certainly burying it down and trying to numb the pain isn’t the way forward.  Ghosts have to be exorcised.

The movie has some genuinely spooky moments and some well timed jump scares that complete the horror movie experience, even though as a PG-13 movie, it avoids gore. Which I honestly don’t mind, but if you’re looking for a splatterfest, you’ll be better served with a movie like Abigail than this, but if you want a spooky ghost story, A Haunting in Venice delivers it.  It’s already become one of my go to Halloween movies, this being the third year I’ve watched in the run up to the holiday since its release in 2023.  It really has become a Halloween favorite of mine because it so successfully marries the spooky elements of ghostly horror with the style of the traditional whodunnit that I love so much.  It has flaws, of course, and I’ll not yell at clouds about it deserving an Oscar or anything, but it’s a solid mystery and a solid spooky film rolled into one and it’s definitely worth putting the well-paced 1 hour and 43 minute film in your Halloween rotation.

Tower Rangers

On the eve of the most important military operation in American history, a group of soldiers is tasked with going behind enemy lines to destroy a Nazi radio jammer tower so that the Allied invasion of Normandy will have air support.  Their mission is as critical to D-Day’s success as any other part of the Operation Overlord offensive.  If that jammer isn’t down by 6AM, a lot of people are going to die.

You might be wondering if you’ve blinked and woke up in November and I’ve moved on from spooky coverage, but don’t worry.  2018’s Overlord, streaming on Paramount+, gets plenty spooky, but it starts with a bang.  Several of them, really.

When we meet these soldiers, they’re in a plane above the fleet on their way to Normandy.  The opening scene is not as brutal as Saving Private Ryan, but it is no less unforgiving as the movie takes no time at all to remind you that war is hell.  Gunfire and flak tear planes apart, brave young men are cut down before they get a chance to face the enemy.  It is an extremely visceral first scene to the movie and it sets the tone for the rest of the film.  Scattered in the chaos, the squad’s mission has just begun and it’s already in jeopardy.  The first scenes here on the ground are fantastically composed; there is no question that this kind of violence is sudden, it is vicious, and it is irrevocable.  The night sky is black as space itself, the only light is coming from fires, giving it a hazy orange glow that feels like they’ve crash landed into a hell on Earth.  If we’re following the hero’s journey, this is when our protagonists enter the underworld and have to find their way out.  But not all of them do and even the ones we only get to know for a short time have an impact on you, which is a testament to the writing in this movie.  Though there are some rough lines here and there, the characterization is spot on, largely because they rely on stock war movie characters and then give them individual charm, helped along by the list of underrated actors in this film.

The squad is led by Sergeant Rensin, the no-nonsense soldier who is unfazed by the war around him, played by Bokeem Woodbine (Fargo, Spider-Man: Homecoming), with the mysterious and single-minded Corporal Ford, played by possibly my favorite nepobaby Wyatt Russell (Lodge 49, Thunderbolts*), and Private Boyce, the shaky handed, gentle one that is presented as if he were wearing a red shirt on an away mission from the USS Enterprise, played by the perennially underutilized Jovan Adepo (Jack Ryan, 3 Body Problem).  The squad is rounded out by the pigeonholed John Magaro (Past Lives, First Cow), playing the wise-cracking sniper Private Tibbet, the very much not combat ready photographer Private Chase, played by Iain De Caestecker (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), and Private Dawson, played by Jacob Anderson (Game of Thrones).  Lastly, there’s the petrified Private, played by Dominic Applewhite (The In-Betweeners), who is rightfully afraid of what the Nazis would do to a Jewish soldier like him, considering they were in the middle of committing a genocide against the Jewish people.

As you can imagine, with the squad making it to the ground the way they did, not all of them make it to the rendezvous, but those who do carry forward to complete their mission.  Along the way, they stumble upon French villager Chloe, played in wonderfully expressive fashion by French actress Mathilde Ollivier (1899, Mrs. Davis), who sees bunch of men in uniforms carrying guns and makes a run for it.  It’s not that she doesn’t know that they’re Americans and not Nazis; it’s just that when you know the brutality of war, it doesn’t matter the colors the men with guns wear, because wherever they go, violence follows.  Ford orders them to capture her so she doesn’t give them up to the Nazis.  This is where we start to see the divide between Ford and Boyce.  Ford’s only concern is the mission.  The math is simple for him.  Everything is a trolley problem and the stakes of not flipping the switch in time are pretty high.  Thousands of Allied lives landing at the beachhead in just a few hours, the lives in the occupied nations across Europe should D-Day fail, the lives of the Jewish people in concentration camps; nothing standing in their way could possibly come close to that kind of cost.  So to Ford, there is no line he won’t cross to accomplish his mission.  Boyce doesn’t do the math.  He sees a life in danger and he wants to protect it.  Timid though he may be, he’s unwavering in his view of right and wrong.

Fortunately, Chloe lives in Ciel Blanc, the town where the radio tower is located, so they go to her home to use it as a forward operating base while they figure out an approach.  She lives with her 8 year old brother and her ailing aunt.  We learn that the church where the radio tower is located is also the site of very strange goings-on.  Boyce gets a look at Chloe’s aunt and what he sees is grotesque and only borderline human.  Villagers live in great fear of being taken to the church because the ones who do come back do not come back the same.  At Chloe’s home, we are introduced to Nazi Captain Wafner, a monster in every sense of the word.  He’s played with a quiet and menacing demeanor by Pilou Asbaek (Game of Thrones), who is such an immediately hate-worthy character but who manages to avoid being a campy, over-the-top villain.  His type of evil is very grounded in reality.  When Chloe isn’t receptive to his advances, he is more than happy to threaten to take her brother to the church.  When the sexual assault is imminent, Boyce breaks rank and intervenes.  This is an important moment in everyone’s characterization.  Boyce won’t let it happen, that’s why he’s the one you immediately empathize with; that’s part of his character, he wants to right wrongs or prevent them from happening.  He may not be typically heroic when you first meet him, wouldn’t hurt a mouse and all that, but when he sees a wrong being committed that he can make right, he doesn’t hesitate.  And with Ford, we see that to him the math is still simple; even though it’s happening right in front of him and is one of the worst violations of a person.  But when Boyce makes his move, Ford immediately backs his play.  There is tension in squad, they squabble, and Tibbet especially picks on the people he sees as weak in an effort to be tough (he won’t even have a catch with Chloe’s brother Paul), but when it comes down to it, these men are fiercely loyal to each other and they know right from wrong and they’re in France to do right.  As much as Ford is willing to push up to the line, he has ones he will not cross.  And they will be tested in this film.  And Chloe, we learn, has been enduring this for long enough that she feels like she’s losing herself by what she’s having to survive.  It’s a great setup for some payback for her.

They discover that the tower is also home to a horrific, grotesque laboratory where the Nazis are conducting inhuman experiments.  I’m talking way beyond the realm of science and into science fiction here, with truly disturbing results.  About halfway through the film, the horror elements are on full display after foreshadowing and hint-dropping.  I don’t want to go into details and spoil anything for you, but if you’re thinking at this point that they made Call of Duty: Zombies the movie, you’d be so wrong.  What looks like a low budget action-horror blend is hiding so much depth in its 1 hour, 50 minute runtime.

What makes this movie work is how seriously it takes itself.  Sometimes this can be a negative when a movie takes itself too seriously and doesn’t deliver, but that’s not a problem here.  Instead of calling out genre tropes and trying to get meta about it, they simply play the tropes and execute them well.  Playing it straight down the middle like this really helps sell the blended fiction of the world.  It’s not that far off reality, if you think about it, which makes the transition from war movie to horror movie so seamless.  Hitler and the Nazis did all sorts of experiments, so it’s not too much of a leap to the fiction here of these lab-made monsters.  You don’t expect a movie like this to feel realistic, but it does.  It’s a really good example of historical science fiction and the horror aspects of the movie, even though you have to wait for them to really show themselves, are played very well.  You’re thrilled when you’re supposed to be thrilled, you’re concerned when you’re supposed to be concerned, and you’re scared when you’re supposed to be scared. 

This is another movie where a simple premise is elevated by fantastic character work.  I can see why Wyatt Russell got the role of US Agent in the MCU after this.  He carries himself well as a soldier, even though I will always think of him as slacker surfer Dud from Lodge 49.  I can’t see why Jovan Adepo isn’t a bigger star, he is stellar here and in Jack Ryan.  Well, I can make a few guesses, but I’ll leave that for another day.  I’d also love to see more of Mathilde Ollivier, her commitment to the role here is fantastic and she’s believable from start to finish.  John Magaro’s accent may leave him typecast, but I’ve never seen him in anything where he isn’t terrific.  His performance in Past Lives especially shows off his talent, when he can still stand out in a movie designed to sideline his character (if you’ve never seen Past Lives, I highly recommend it; Greta Lee deserved an Oscar).  Every main character has such a satisfying arc.  Boyce’s kindness gives way to bravery replacing his timidity, Ford’s single-mindedness gives way to selflessness and true leadership that doesn’t come from his relative rank, but, rather, his innate ability to inspire.  Tibbet finds that a tough exterior is less important than Boyce’s kindness.  Chloe is able to find herself again.  And they’re all likable, even though they’re flawed, because they’re all so thoroughly human and when push comes to shove, they are all willing to sacrifice everything to do what’s right.  And that meant stopping the Nazis no matter the cost to themselves.  Because Nazis have to be stopped.  Always.

I don’t often talk about the technical aspects of a film because I’m not really qualified to talk too deeply about it, but there is something special about how this film was put together because I really noticed it watching this time.  The visual composition, especially in the first act, is stunning.  The aforementioned hellscape visuals from the opening few scenes have stood out in my mind since rewatching it.  It’s perhaps not as disturbingly beautiful as the nighttime shots from 1917, but they’re of a kind.  And then the sound engineering here is also noteworthy.  When these people fire a gun, you can feel it.  The pops of bass came through even on my HomePod Minis and really helped bring you into the action. When a gun is fired, you heard the report, you saw the bolt fly back and forth and heard it slam into place.  There’s even a moment where you get foley of the famous M1 Garand ping that was all over Saving Private Ryan.  And a large percentage of the special effects were practical and not CGI, which really makes for a great, visually consistent experience.  You never get a moment where dodgy CGI takes you out of the immersion.

You probably know that horror isn’t really my genre, but the horror movies that really resonate with me are often allegories for grief.  Titles like The Babadook or The Outsider explore the grieving process so humanly, they give you a worthy emotional payoff for the dread you and the characters experienced.  Overlord though, is much more straightforward.  It’s about the seemingly simple concept of right and wrong, good and evil.  Being simple isn’t bad; it’s like on Top Chef, you can win with a simple dish as long as every part of it is executed well.  And that’s Overlord.  The tension and urgency permeate every frame.  It is breathless and panicked and you always feel the deadline they’re up against.  Even in the few calm moments of the film, the weight of the mission hangs heavily in the air.  Time is running out and it has been since they were still on the plane.  When they make the final push to take the tower, they have an hour left to complete the mission or D-Day will be a disaster.  If I have an hour to get ready and meet someone for a drink, I’m probably going to be late because invariably I’ll pick up my phone and get distracted or think to myself “Yeah, yeah, I have time for a little Pokemon ZA”.  These guys have to infiltrate a Nazi facility, plant explosives, and, if there’s enough time, get the hell out of there and to minimum safe distance so they’re not buried along with the jamming equipment.  And also, it’s a horrible laboratory that has monsters in it. Call them zombies if you want, but whatever they are, you can trust they’re going to complicate things.  Five versus forty—at least forty (living) Nazis—and monsters to boot.  It’s a desperate, uphill battle and one which they cannot lose.

The odds of survival are long and they are willing to make them worse to save as many innocent lives as they can.  The right thing is stopping the Nazis and they’re willing to die to do it.  Even if it means going against monsters, because, really, when people act as monstrous as the Nazis, what is the difference between human and monster anyway?  The movie even points out that the Nazis went out of their way to put the jammer tower in a church, perverting religion for the furtherance of fascist authoritarianism.  Anything that is meant to be good is tainted by that kind of evil.  And Overlord is about people who stand up and stand against it.  And because of how successfully this hidden gem blends war, action, and horror, it’s a film that you can slot into your movie night whether you’re in a spooky mood or you want to see some stuff get blown up.  Every time I watch this movie, I’m always surprised at just how good it is when it very easily could have been cheesy and silly.  But this low budget film pulls off the horrors of war and the horrors of the fantastic at the same time so well, it’s hard to believe that JJ Abrams was involved.  Apparently they had flirted with the idea of tying this into the Cloverfield universe, but thank goodness that idea fell through.  As a standalone movie, Overlord sets an example for what lower budget films should look like and what Hollywood should be doing more.  Overlord cost a reported $38 million to make.  The Electric State cost $320 million.  Over eight times the budget and where did it go?  Like Upgrade or Attack the Block, Overlord is a great example of what filmmakers, writers, directors, and actors can do with a limited budget, a good script, and the dedication of everyone involved.  It’s not to be missed.