The Rental is a fun horror film that introduces the world to a new movie slasher, and a new director to watch. Director Dave Franco’s (21 Jump Street, The Disaster Artist) film feels very assured in itself, and it’s because he made wise casting decisions, and teamed up with writer/actor/director/producer Joe Swanberg (Drinking Buddies, You’re Next, Win it All) to write a meat-and-potatoes (AKA refreshingly simple) thriller that limits locations, and maximizes the budget. The beautiful Oregon location provides wonderful production value, and the cinematography by Christian Sprenger (GLOW, Atlanta, The Last Man on Earth) creates claustrophobia, and embraces the vast emptiness of the location.
The Rental revolves around two couples having a horrible weekend at an Airbnb-esque mansion that has a beautiful ocean view and treacherous cliffs surrounding it. The unlucky foursome are the married couple Michelle (Allison Brie) and Charlie (Dan Stevens), and Mina (Sheila Vand) and Josh (Jeremy Allen White). Charlie and Josh are brothers, and Mina works with Charlie at a research facility where they put in long hours and decide they need a weekend to unwind. Since it’s a horror movie, things start off badly as Mina’s application for the rental is turned down, and Charlie’s is accepted. Which causes problems when they arrive and meet homeowner Taylor (Toby Huss), who comes across as less-than-respectable as he denies turning down Mina’s application (which causes more problems later on), and let’s himself inside when they aren’t there to drop off a telescope.
I won’t spoil the fun that follows, just know there’s a lot of violence, drugs, bad decisions, yelling, and fog. The film breezes by, as the 88-minute running time doesn’t allow anything to linger, and prevents viewer fatigue. After the film, it was tough to sleep as the final images lingered and burrowed into my psyche. When you watch as many horror films as I do, it’s always nice when something sticks.
Watch The Rental, and hope that Franco’s follow-up is just as successful.
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The MFF podcast is back, and this week we’re continuing our racing series (Rush, Driven, Ford v Ferrari, Days of Thunder, Speed Racer) by talking about the 2008 film Death Race. Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson (Event Horizon, Alien vs. Predator, Resident Evil) and starring Jason Statham and Joan Allen, this remake is a lot of fun, and features some excellent explosions and fun moments (THE DREADNOUGHT!). In this episode, we discuss sidewalks, catapults and the Statham. Enjoy!
If you are a fan of the podcast, make sure to send in some random listener questions so we can do our best to not answer them correctly. We thank you for listening, and hope you enjoy the episode!
You can download the pod on Apple Podcasts, Tune In, Podbean,or Spreaker.
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Deep Blue Sea – The Podcast – Chapter 5: Animal Brain Stabbing Practice, Science Music, and Punk Rock Doctors
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Chapter 5! This week we’re talking about “One day it’s tomorrow,” the fifth chapter on the Deep Blue Sea DVD. In honor of this most excellent chapter, we brought in the very funny Norbert Morvan (a frequent guest on the MFF podcast), to discuss punk rock doctors, science music, and grabbing/shooting/swimming. Enjoy!
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The Movies, Films and Flix Podcast 294: Mad Max: Fury Road, Mediocre Shenanigans, and Delicious Water
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The MFF podcast is back, and this week we’re talking about the 2015 classic Mad Max: Fury Road. We love this Academy-Award winning film, and think it’s legitimately one of the best action movies ever made. Director George Miller, and stars Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron (and the rest of the crew and actors), deserve a lot of credit for enduring a brutal production that spanned months, and left them exhausted and grumpy (we get it). In this episode, we discuss mediocre shenanigans, insane stunts, and delicious water. Enjoy!
If you are a fan of the podcast, make sure to send in some random listener questions so we can do our best to not answer them correctly. We thank you for listening, and hope you enjoy the episode!
You can download the pod on Apple Podcasts, Tune In, Podbean,or Spreaker.
If you get a chance please make sure to review, rate and share. You are awesome!
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John’s Horror Corner: Blood Vessel (2019), an Australian horror movie about monstrous vampires on a Nazi warship.
MY CALL: The best part of this movie was the poster. Lame acting, lame writing, vampires that talk too much and do too little… but at least the gore and creature effects were good. Overall, this movie is a hard pass. It’s not necessarily terrible, but there’s just too much else out there for you to watch.
Floating on a life raft after their hospital ship was sunk by the Germans, our survivors drift into the path of a Nazi warship… and it’s their only hope for survival.
The opening of this movie is not promising. The CGI has the feel of a stale ScyFy movie-of-the-week and the writing is notably bad. A weak action scene is cobbled together as the survivors simply get on the boat, one of them dies in the ship’s propellers (terribly lame death), and I couldn’t have been more bored than when I suffered through the same scene in Death Ship (1980). Their exploration of the ship is likewise a dragging bore dressed up with way too much needlessly empty dialogue.
But thank the Gods, when they stumble across the first dead body of the ship, the efforts in the gore department are promising. The dead bodies all look very differently mangled, very horrific, and very well done. Further exploration reveals chain-bound sarcophagi with stone etchings of skulls and bones. Of course, expecting gold or some other treasures, they break they chains and open them up to find monsters.
The monstrous bat-hybrid vampires look decent considering the obviously lower budget. However, the more I see them the less I like them. In fact, they quickly go from menacing to lackluster, talking a lot of classic Dracula Old World game they can’t back up. And that’s just it, they talk a lot and do little. These vampires would have been better (given their appearance; think The Descent) if treated as monstrous, animalistic creatures rather than articulate and calculating (and needlessly verbose).
Writer (in part) and director Justin Dix (Crawlspace) must be a major Aliens (1986) fan, because we find several callbacks to the classic. Boarding a seemingly abandoned ship, the discovery of a thick gooey slime on the pipes of a ship maintenance corridor and a lone survivor girl scampering around the nooks and crannies of the ship spying on our survivors (plus other Newt parallels) both strongly echo the 1986 classic. Alas, this World War II “Newt” goes from interesting to yet another writing throwaway the more we watch. It seems there were a lot of good ideas that inspired the screenplay, but then no one knew what to do with those ideas.
Not just their characters, but the actors themselves were casualties of the often dreadful dialogue. Still, there are some familiar faces among them: e.g., Christopher Kirby (Iron Sky, Predestination, Upgrade), Robert Taylor (Rogue, The Meg, Kong: Skull Island) and Nathan Phillips (Wolf Creek, Chernobyl Diaries).
Lame acting, lame writing, lame vampires… but at least the gore was okay. Overall, this movie is a hard pass. It’s not necessarily terrible, but there’s just too much else out there for you to watch.
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John’s Horror Corner: Relic (2020), a geriatric horror about senescence, family duty and human frailty.
MY CALL: This is a thoughtful slow burn with a lot going on. The themes explore hallucinatory madness, real world dementia, and toe the line of the supernatural—with much left to our interpretation. The most powerful element of this film is how grounded it remains in our fragile humanity; our denial and aversion, coupled with our acceptance and compassion. MORE MOVIES LIKE Relic: For more geriatric and senescence horror, try The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014), Bubba Ho-tep (2002), Late Phases (2014) or The Visit (2015).
For additional Australian horror movies, try Razorback (1984), The Howling III: Marsupials (1987), Dark Age (1987), Wolf Creek (2005), Rogue (2007), Black Water (2007), Lake Mungo (2008), Wyrmwood (2014), Charlie’s Farm (2014), Cargo (2017) and Boar (2017; podcast discussion).
We all hope for a long and healthy life. But there remains a terrifying prospect linked to longevity: that our minds may degenerate prematurely to our bodies and that our “self” will be lost in the cruel fog of dementia.
Such is the case when Kay (Emily Mortimer; Shutter Island, Scream 3, The Ghost and the Darkness) and her daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote; The Neon Demon, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) come to the aid of their aging and missing matriarch Edna (Robyn Nevin; The Matrix Reloaded).When Edna eventually reappears in the house, she seems fine but has no account for the days she had been missing. Edna’s waning grip on reality is evident as she very clearly forgets things and believes she is being shadowed by something; something else in the house.
The emotional beats don’t land with the intensity or gut-punching precision of Hereditary (2018), but it still makes its point effectively. There’s no denying the family hardship faced by these three generations of women. The strain is uncomfortable to watch, and we find much sympathy for Edna as her sense of awareness gradually crumbles. Her mind shares the state of disrepair with her home, and she clearly needs help.
As if decaying along with Edna’s mind, black mold slowly spreads about the house. Intriguingly, the images of black mold are quite off-putting (there’s just something about its appearance), much as the mentally off-putting reaction to senescence. Brief visions of the elderly coupled with extreme bodily decay may prove very disturbing.
Things don’t really move as quickly as I’d like, but I certainly remained very intrigued and weirded out until the pace did finally pick up in the third act. The last 20-30 minutes attain some satisfying oddities in visuals, effects and atmosphere. Things even get trippy, and we wander into some unexpectedly interesting special effects in terms of startling injuries, self-mutilation and fleshy latex. But despite some disturbing and horrific scenes, it all comes to a curious, ambiguous, yet still even tender ending.
Written (in part) and directed by Natalie Erika James, this is a tremendous success for her first feature film. This is a bit of a thoughtful slow burn, but there is a lot going on here—much more than I had expected. The themes explore hallucinatory madness, real world dementia, and toe the line of the supernatural—a lot is left to our interpretation. But the most powerful element of this film is how grounded it remains in our fragile humanity; our denial and aversion, coupled with our acceptance and compassion.
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John’s Horror Corner: Lake of Death (2019; aka De dødes tjern), one of the only Scandinavian horror movies I would NOT recommend.
MY CALL: I have not seen the 1958 classic horror film Lake of the Dead, but it must be better than this drivel (inspired by the original). This film begins by lulling you into a false sense of comfort with promising acting, writing, concepts and cinematography. But, oh, just you wait… it will bore you to death and beat you into regret. MORE MOVIES LIKE Lake of Death: For more (and far superior) Norwegian and Scandinavian horror, try Midsommar (2019), The Ritual (2017), Troll Hunter (2010) Thale (2012), Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010), Let the Right One In (2008) and Dead Snow (2009).
REMAKE/REIMAGINING SIDEBAR: For more horror remakes, I strongly favor the following: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), An American Werewolf in London (1981), The Thing (1982), The Fly (1986), The Mummy (1999), The Ring (2002), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), The Hills Have Eyes (2006), Friday the 13th (2009), Let Me In (2010), Evil Dead (2013), Carrie (2013), The Town That Dreaded Sundown (2014), It (2017), Suspiria (2018) and Child’s Play (2019).
Those to avoid include Body Snatchers (1993; the second remake), War of the Worlds (2005), The Invasion (2007; the third remake), Prom Night (2008), Sorority Row (2009), Night of the Demons (2009), Patrick: Evil Awakens (2013), Poltergeist (2015), Martyrs (2015), Cabin Fever (2016), Unhinged (2017) and The Mummy (2017).I’m on the fence about An American Werewolf in Paris (1997), The Grudge (2004), Halloween (2007), It’s Alive (2009), My Bloody Valentine (2009), A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), Fright Night (2011), The Thing (2011; a prequel/remake), Maniac (2012), Viy: Forbidden Empire (2014), Inside (2016), Rabid (2019) and Pet Sematary (2019), which range from bad to so-so (as remakes) but still are entertaining movies on their own.
To toy with the audience, this film begins with a basic notion: that we may cast reflections that are actually different versions of ourselves…
Ready for a carefree getaway, Gabriel (Jonathan Harboe), Bernhard (Jakob Schøyen Andersen), Sonja (Sophia Lie) and Harald (Elias Munk), Lillian (Iben Akerlie; Mortal) and Kai (Ulric von der Esch) are heading to a cabin for the weekend.
Lillian’s twin brother Bjorn (Patrick Walshe McBride; Dracula) disappeared during a solitary hike at this family lake house. Now returning for one final visit to this property before selling it, Lillian finds the very sight of the home jarring, haunting her with memories of her vanished twin. Lillian’s dog Totto (like Dorothy’s Toto) noticeably shares her fear of the house.
Like people in the real world, they joke about horror tropes and reference specific movies (e.g., Misery, NOES, Evil Dead, Cabin Fever). It’s kind of refreshing actually. Despite being a foreign language film this “feels” well-acted, the cinematography is lovely, and the writing is quite smooth. This feels like a proper film and not some horror flick.
We learn that the lake has something of a haunted folklore behind it—wood nymphs, water spirits, lunatic killers. At first the horror manifests largely as visions, dreams and hallucinations… even a mysteriously prepared breakfast. When strange things transpire, the group points the finger at Lillian’s sleepwalking problem or the podcaster (Bernhard) who is investigating the haunted lake for his show.
Honestly, as well made as this film is overall, the scares are weak. Really weak, and really disappointing. Overuse of black liquid (maybe blood?) in visions are intended as frightening but start to feel like a low budget drama club ploy. To be honest, the first act was promising and engaging, but act two has proven very boring. Well, let’s just see what the final act offers… maybe it could turn things around, right?
Nope. The third act was hot garbage. I completely hated the last 30 minutes. I realize that’s a strong word, but this film has earned it. This dumpster fire is dumb, unexciting even with special effects, lacks even one good death scene, and offers stupid plot resolution regarding the long-vanished brother. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Anything about this film that was once promising was undone, squandered, covered in crap and lit on fire by the wretched ending.
The trailer had me expecting Cabin Fever (2002, 2016) meets Evil Dead (1981, 2013). But what I got was… well, just plain bad and nothing of the sort (i.e., nothing at all as advertised). This was a complete uneventful bore. I can’t believe this crap was a remake. I feel badly for everyone involved.
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The Movies, Films and Flix Podcast 293: Desert Islands, Movie Characters and Homemade Catapults
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It’s time for another MFF random draft! Mark and Sean (listen to the Fincher/Comedy Football Draft episode) pick movie characters whom they think could easily survive on a desert island. They also answer very important questions that have never been asked. How would Michael Myers deal with a desert island? Would Hal 9000 be bored? In this episode, they discuss coconut water, catapults and island pizza delivery. Enjoy!
If you are a fan of the podcast, make sure to send in some random listener questions so we can do our best to not answer them correctly. We thank you for listening, and hope you enjoy the episode!
You can download the pod on Apple Podcasts, Tune In, Podbean,or Spreaker.
If you get a chance please make sure to review, rate and share. You are awesome!
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John’s Horror Corner: Vivarium (2019), a quirky couples’ therapy thriller entrapped in suburban purgatory.
MY CALL: Very much like a great episode of Black Mirror (2011-2019), this is a somewhat slow draw of a somewhat uncomplicated mind bender. Not a mind bender in the sense that the threads are pithy and rich (as in Identity), but more like The Voices (2014) in that you follow what’s going on… you just have no clue where this batshit crazy movie is heading. MORE MOVIES LIKE Vivarium: For more couples’ therapy horror, try Possession (1981), Thirst (2009), Antichrist (2009), Spring (2014) or Honeymoon (2014). But this weird film most reminded me of the weird domestic Sci-Horror purgatory of Await Further Instructions (2018).
A youthfully uppety and personable couple, Gemma (Imogen Poots; Green Room, Fright Night) and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg; Cursed, Zombieland) are house-hunting so they can take the next step in their relationship. They find themselves paired with a strangely idiosyncratic realtor who shows them what he proclaims to be a forever home. This realtor (Jonathan Aris) is so delightfully alien in his behavior, as if he was emulating a friendly human but didn’t spend enough time studying human behavior or facial expressions. Gemma and Tom are struck incredulous by his weird charm.
During the showing, their realtor disappears and Gemma and Tom find it somehow impossible to escape this housing community of identical, uninhabited homes in the suburbs. They try and try to find their way out until they run out of gas (literally). Eerily they find themselves… trapped.
No matter what logical method they adopt, they cannot get away from this house. Like an episode of Black Mirror (2011-2019), none of their attempts reveal the mystery of their lonely suburban prison. Yet stranger, parcels are mysteriously delivered containing food and a baby boy with a note that reads “raise this child and be released.” Naturally, begrudgingly rearing this child comes with some resentment. Things grow yet weirder, and our couple’s grip on reality weakens as their surreal nightmare continues and their efforts to escape this purgatory prove fruitless.
Their desperation and realizations of futility transmute to mania. But their mania remains somewhat controlled and rational, as they never fully accept their dream-like prison of a life. As strange as this is, it remains grounded and never quite finds complete lunacy. But it comes close… and we awkwardly giggle at what has become their life.
This film is incredibly interesting and incredibly uneventful, but the story does proceed. You feel the mounting stress of Gemma and Tom, you want to know what’s causing all this and you want to know how to stop it. Writer (in part) and director Lorcan Finnegan (Without Name) seems quite comfortable making us wait, and good at cultivating the viewers’ weirded out brainstorming as to what in the world is going on here.
As much as I like this film, I’d be careful recommending it. It’s quite quirky, the pace is far from swift, and it lacks closure in a way that may irritate some viewers. Not this quirky viewer, though. I dug it.
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Deep Blue Sea – The Podcast – Chapter 4: Scogginnomics, Gliding Monsters and Boat Dancing
You can listen to Deep Blue Sea – The Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spreaker, Spotify, Tunein, Podcast Addict, Google Podcasts, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts. Also, make sure to like our Facebook page!
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Chapter 4! This week we’re covering “Pretty Scary Stuff (I Can See Clearly Now), the fourth chapter on the Deep Blue Sea DVD. In honor of this most excellent chapter, we brought in Doug Jamieson (of The Jam Report), a fantastic movie critic and lover of Deep Blue Sea (read his reviews and follow him on Twitter), to help us breakdown this chapter. In this episode, we discuss scogginomics, tensile strength and boat dancing. Enjoy!
Movies, Films & Flix 