Songs in the Key of Death

Now that we’ve seen Insidious: The Last Key (2018), that wraps up the Elise Quadrilogy. We will miss her.

It starts with a nightmare Elise is having about her childhood. She is woken by a phone call asking her for help with a haunting. She turns the request down (as she so often does) because the house being haunted is her old house!

Of course, she realizes that she will need to go there to get closure, and sets off by bus to her childhood home in New Mexico. The house was next to a prison, where her abusive father worked. He would beat her when young Elise saw ghosts. Her brother was so traumatized that their mother gave him a whistle to blow when he needed help. One time, when her father locked her in the basement, she accidentally released a demon that killed their mother. At this point, Elise fled, leaving the brother and father behind.

Once she starts checking out the house, she finds the whistle, and it leads her to a hidden room, where a girl is chained up. It seems the guy who owns the house is a serial murderer, and now has to kill them. Specs and Tucker save the day, and the police take down the killer.

But that’s not the end of it. Elise still has to lay the demon with keys for fingers that haunts this place. And it all ends with a vision of the start of the first movie.

All of these movies have sort of disjointed, rambling plots. But they are held together by a decent metaphysics, the comic relief of Specs and Tucker (Leigh Wannell and Angus Sampson) and the indomitable Lin Shaye as Elise. We’ll miss her.

Now, what other James Wan movies are worth watching? We won’t be watching Saw, but how about Conjuring?

Bayne in Vain

We queued up Wolvesbayne (2009) for one reason: Marc Dacascos - known to many as the American Iron Chef. But we like him as a martial arts actor. But I have to guess that the reason it was made was an Asylum-like attempt to cash in on Bloodrayne by matching the title.

Jeremy London is a high-powered businessman who wants to buy Christy Carlson Romano's occult bookstore and tear it down for his development. One night on a lonely road, he stops to help a woman with her car and is attacked by a beast - and soon he develops lycanthropy. He goes back to Romano’s shop, and finds out that she is not only truly occult, but a secret werewolf. But she has learned to control and channel her wolf powers, and can teach him.

Because they, and the whole world, are threatened by vampires! Dacascos is the king of the vampires, looking for ancient amulets to revive the queen, Yancy Butler. Also, there is a van Helsing in there somewhere.

This is all pretty silly SyFy channel stuff, and doesn’t even have any good Dacascos fights. But, hey, we’ve seen worse. We haven’t seen it, but I bet Bloodrayne isn’t any better.

Like a Rock

Rampage (2018) is a modern Dwayne Johnson movie. I think we know what that means: An incredibly sweet and heavily muscled man finds himself in the middle of a catastrophe of some sort, and triumphs. Why mess with what works?

It starts in space, with a scientist frantically trying to save her experiment while a beast is killing everyone on the station. She gets into an escape pod, but the mutant beast manages to start tearing it up, and they all go down in a blaze of glory. But pieces of the experiment land on Earth, and infect an alligator, a wolf, and...

The Rock is a primatologist, working with an albino gorilla who knows sign language and likes practical jokes. Note that the gorilla is all CGI - too bad we don’t have a charismatic animal star, but thank god they didn’t subject a noble creature to a film set. Johnson is brilliant, noble, an Special Forces vet and ex-member of an African anti-poaching team. Leading a tour of the facility, you get to see all the girls going gooey-eyed for him, to the annoyance of his buddy PJ Byrne.

And the gorilla gets infected by the mutation from space. He starts going and getting mean. Johnson tries to calm him down, but he goes on a rampage. A government team swoops in and carries him away. Naomi Harris, a disgraced scientist, explains to the Rock about the whole plot, and her plans to reverse the process.

Meanwhile, EvilCorp, who funded this research, tries to lure all the mutants to Chicago by broadcasting a particularly annoying frequency. This technique was developed by Peter Graves to use against giant grasshoppers in The Beginning of the End.

The last act is, of course, a big fight, with Chicago taking a beating, and the Army ready to blow it off the map. There’s some fun stuff where the evil corporate overlord, Malin Akerman, gets fed to the ape. Now that’s justice.

This is pretty disposable stuff, directed by Brad Peyton (San Andreas). But with the Rock providing his super-nice-guy charisma, we don't care. Bring on Skyscraper.

Her

I’ve told you how Ms. Spenser is always asking me to queue up more scary movies, and how my choices don’t always frighten. I was pretty sure Hereditary (2018) would satisfy.

The credits start by showing you a complicated, detailed doll house. It zooms into a boy’s room, and the boy inside wakes up. That’s how you know you’re in an art house kind of horror movie. The family who lives in this house includes Toni Collette (Fright Night), looking very Frances McDormand. She is an artist who creates miniatures, like the doll house in the credits, and she has a lot of problems. Her husband is Gabriel Byrne, a bit of a nobody. They have a teen son who mostly likes to get quietly high, and a younger daughter named Charlie (Millie Shapiro) who is a bit odd. She draws all the time and prefers to stay in the treehouse.

They are going to the funeral of Collette’s mother, who had been living with them. In Collette’s “eulogy”, she talks about how abusive her mentally ill mother had been, and basically says good riddance. But are they rid of her?

I’m going to skip the spoilers for some reason (I don’t think anyone is going to read this) - let’s just say that a horrible event occurs, leaving Collette with more grief and the rest of the family numb. Collette goes to a group grief counseling session, which everyone thinks is about her mother - they can’t keep up with the tragedies. At the session, she meets a woman who might have a way to contact the dead. This might not be a good idea.

From there it gets quite freaky, but maybe the best parts are in the first acts, when the horror comes from the kind of family you can get stuck with, and the things that can happen to your kids and loved ones.

But there are two things going for this movie. First, it is a well-crafted story, directed by first-timer Ari Aster with real artistry. But Toni Collette really carries this movie, and that’s what makes it great.

Streaming Pile

Newsflash: We have dropped Netflix streaming, and will be only doing DVDs. Mainly, we’ve run out of TV shows on Netflix to watch while we’re eating dinner, which was all we used it for. So now we’re on Hulu.

I must say, the Netflix interface is good compared to Hulu, but neither is great. We get Netflix streaming on our DVD player, but we have to use Chromecast for Hulu. Also, I don’t know how the Hulu movie selection holds up, especially for Kung Fu movies, which are about all I used to stream, outside of TV dinners.

Still, I don’t think I’ll miss it much. When we’ve watched everything Hulu has to offer, maybe Netflix will have recharged with content and we’ll go back. On the other hand, it sounds like they are cancelling all the Marvel shows, so maybe not. Maybe we’ll have to pay for the Disney channel to get that.

Shallow Ocean

I’m not a great fan of the “Ocean” franchise (not even the original), but I have enjoyed them. So I was looking forward to Ocean's 8 (2018). It was all right, I guess.

It starts with America’s Sweetheart, Sandra Bullock, getting out of prison. She immediately does a little shoplifting and hotel room scamming, so you can tell she’s not planning to go straight. She goes to her prison pal Cate Blanchett  - looking deliciously butch. The target is a Cartier necklace, and they will need 7 women...

First they get Helena Benham Carter, a ditzy fashion designer with a punk/baroque Vivienne Westwood vibe and serious money problems. They would position her to dress actress Anne Hathaway for the Met Gala - and get Cartier to loan them the necklace. Then they’d need jeweler Mindy Kaling , punk hacker Rhiannon, pickpocket Awkwafina, and suburban mom and fence Sarah Paulson. The plan is to slip Hathaway some barf drops and switch the necklace for a fake while she is in the toilet (the only place not covered by cameras).

Of course, it turns out the job isn’t about the job - it’s about Bullock getting revenge on Richard Armitage, who let her take the fall for a heist that they committed together. So, we have all the ingredients that made the original series. The Met Gala stands in for the glitzy casinos, the team of larcenous, lovable buddies are there, and there are always a few twists to the heist plot.

But I came away kind of underwhelmed. I think I missed the improvised (I guess) banter between the old 11/12/13 crew. Maybe Steven Soderbergh is just a better director than Gary Rosss. On the other hand, it was nice to get cameos from Elliot Gould and Shaobo Qin, but neither was really necessary - I didn’t think, thank God, one of the men.

And Danny Ocean? Why, he’s dead - they go to his tomb and everything.

Infinity Pool

Ok, we’ve seen Avengers: Infinity War (2018). You can tell us spoilers. Actually, there wasn’t anything to spoil in this one, since everyone heard about the Snap - “Mr. Stark, I don’t feel too good”.

It starts in space, with Thanos attacking the Asgardian’s space ark to steal the Tesseract Power Stone. He kills Loki and pretty much everyone else, but sends Hulk to Earth. There, he tells Dr. Strange about the situation, and they get Tony Stark in on the project, who brings along Peter Parker. When Thanos’ goons attack, Dr. Strange and Spider-man wind up on their spaceship.

Meanwhile, the Gaurdians of the Galaxy rescue Thor, who takes them all to a Troll planet so that a giant Peter Dinklage can forge him a battle axe. Also, Vision and the Red Witch go to Wakanda to preserve Vizh’s Soul Gem.

And ... I am relying heavily on the Wikipedia plot summary to get this far. A lot of Marvel movies are overstuffed with character and plot, and this one tops them all. At least I was awake for the whole thing. Ms. Spenser conked out about 10 minutes in.

In the end, what with all the hurly-burly and goings-on, I remember almost nothing about this 2-1/2 hour movie. I enjoyed it, loved watching it, but took almost nothing away. Of course, since I expect most of the movie’s consequences to be reversed in the next one, maybe that’s OK. But I suspect this odd amnesia will only make it more fun to re-watch.

Slash Fic

The Final Girls (2015) is one of those self-aware slasher movie spoofs. One with a heart.

Taissa Farmiga is a young girl whose mother is an aspiring actress, who’s big role was as a scream queen in cult slasher movie Camp Blood Bath. But her mother Malin Akerman is killed in a car crash.  Cut to 3 years later. Obnoxious friend Thomas Middleditch convinces her to go to a midnight screening of Camp Blood Bath as a special guest. She reluctantly goes, along with Middleditch’s (half-)sister, Alia Shawcat, and Farmiga’s maybe-boyfriend, Alexander Ludwig. To her dismay, Ludwig’s ex-girlfriend, Nina Dobrev is also along.

At the theater, some rowdy fans cause a fire, and Farmiga leads her friends through the screen to escape. But through the screen turns out to be into the movie.

They find themselves beside a road, when a van full of camp counselors drives by - the opening scene of the movie. After 92 minutes, the length of the movie, it drives by again. Finally, they pretend to be counselors too and jump on board.

Middleditch, a confirmed horror hound, is very psyched to be in the movie. When Farmiga realizes that her dead mother is now the bubbly, scantily clad girl asleep in the back, she is terrified but filled with a great longing to be with her again.

Soon, the slasher shows up. Middleditch isn’t worried, because he doesn’t get killed in the movie (he isn’t even in it). But it turns out that the rules don’t work that way, and he is bloodily slaughtered. SPOILER- he comes back to life, and is immediately hit by a car.

So we get the usual “What to do if you find yourself in a slasher movie” stuff - mostly they try to keep the teens from having sex. They find themselves in a flashback, which is fun and even comes back as a plot device. Mixed in with this is Farmiga’s chance to get to know her mother as a young woman, as a peer and friend. Also, trying to keep her alive.

This may not be the greatest example of this genre, but it is pretty funny. It’s also pretty generous and has a good ending - SPOILER - it was all a dream, no it wasn’t, but everyone (who wasn’t from movie world) is still alive. And there’s a hook for a sequel.

Two Girls

Night Editor/One Girl's Confession (1946) is another one of those nifty B-movie double features. The theme is "Bad Girls"

Night Editor starts with a framing story. A guy stumbles into a newspaper office after midnight, and sits down with his head in his hands. The night editor and other boys playing cards start telling a story about another guy they knew with problems. It was William Gargen, a policeman with a sweet wife (Jeff Donnell) and son, and a socialite girlfriend (Janis Carter). While making out with the girlfriend in lover's lane, they see a guy in another car bludgeon his girl to death with a tire iron and run off. Since he's in a compromised position, he doesn't try to catch the guy. Carter, meanwhile, is kind of excited by the violence - she wants to see the body. She is a real psycho.

The upshot is that Gargen has to investigate the murder, while hiding the fact that he was a witness - and if they scope his tire tracks, he'll be a suspect. He quickly finds that the victim ran in the same circles as his psycho girlfriend, Carter. One of her men friends looks a lot like the guy they spotted running. But when he calls him in for a statement, his alibi is Carter.

It ends with a moral and the reporter with the problems heads home to his wife and kids with a bounce in his step. But at least we got some really depraved sex and violence in the upper classes on the way.

One Girl's Confession is a different type of story. It stars platinum blonde Cleo Moore, a B-movie Marilyn Monroe. She is waitressing in a low dive run by the man who cheated her father, and who raised her. One night, she steals the money he makes on shady drug deals. When the police come, she confesses freely, but won't let anyone know where the money is.

She does her prison time well, making friends, keeping her nose clean and working the prison garden. As a result, she gets let out after serving only a year. But she's convinced they are still keeping an eye on her so she can't get the money. She gets a waitress job at director Hugo Haas' joint. Haas plays a Balkan wiseguy, who cares more about some complicated Balkan card game than running the restaurant - and maybe his girlfriend Smooch, Helene Stanton.

Things are looking up for Moore. She meets a nice sailor, Glenn Langan (AKA Glen Manning, The Amazing Colossal Man). She even considers giving Langan her money. Then Haas has a bad run of cards and loses everything, including the bar. So she offers the money to him, telling him where to dig it up - she thinks she is still being watched.

But he comes back empty handed, thinking she's playing tricks, and throws her out. She is so distraught at losing the money and her job that she gets holes up in bed for three days. When she comes back, the restaurant has a new owner, but only because Haas has sold it. He is now living in a penthouse and having a big party. Moore goes to confront him, assuming he stole the money and hid it from her. When he drunkenly mashes on her, she hits him with a bottle - and Smooch tells her he is dead. And he got the money from a card game the morning after he lost the bar.

She runs to the hiding place and finds the money under a tree's roots. She is so upset that she gives the money to an orphanage and goes to the police. But when she confesses, they call Haas and he answers the phone - he had just been knocked out - I'm not sure if Smooch was kidding or mistaken, but the police turn her away, and after she kind of tries to get the money back, she winds up with her sailor.

This is a fun movie with a lot of suspense and twists, and a slightly mystifying happy ending. But Cleo Moore is the best part - a down-to-earth beauty, honest to a fault, and open to love. I'd love to see more of her, but there doesn't seem to be any on Netflix.

The Raid

We watched Tomb Raider (2018) mostly out of nostalgia for the 2001 Angelina Jolie version. That felt like it started a new style of action movie. This one feels like just one more - but a pretty good one.

It starts with Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander) as a bike messenger in London. Her father is missing, presumed dead, and she can't access his fortune because she won't accept his death and take control of the firm. She is the usual tough as nails type. When the other messengers declare a "fox hunt", she volunteers to be the fox - she will ride with a dripping can of paint hanging off her bike, and if she can avoid getting caught by the other riders, she wins. It's short but fun, but maybe not as much fun as Premium Rush or Quicksilver.

Vikander finally opens her dad's will and finds some clues that lead her into a secret room under the family vault - yes, in a tomb, but it technically isn't a raid. That sets up the McGuffin, the tomb of Princess Himiko, an ancient Japanese godess who killed everyone she touched. This tomb is hidden on Yametai Island (Japanese for "I want to quit"), so she heads out.

After some goofing around in Hong Kong Harbor (done better in a dozen Jackie Chan movies), she gets Daniel Wu, a washed up drunk, to pilot her to the island - where they immediately wreck. Now, she must spend seven years on this hellish island... Wait, that's the intro to Arrow.

Here she meets the bad guy, Walter Goggins, a Nazi archeologist - wait, not Nazi, that's Indiana Jones - an archeologist searching for the same tomb. She also finds her father, Dominic West (Jigsaw), who has been trapped for seven years on this hellish - sorry, I did it again.

Now we get into some serious tomb raiding, in the underground tunnels. I got a very Lovecraftian, cyclopean, non-Euclidean geometry feel here, which is good and a bit unexpected.

I've skipped over what is the best part of these movies - the action and stunts. They are mostly well-done. although there is obviously plenty of CGI and greenscreen - same as in the game. Vikander is a much more convincing action star than Jolie, who relied a lot on stuntpeople and editing. She is also more realistic. She gets beat up a lot, and she doesn't make every shot she takes. (Of course, Jolie played a more experienced, well-trained Croft.)

In fact, my conclusion is that this movie is not that good, but Vikander is great. She brings immediacy and depth to her role, really more than is in the script. She is so much better than the movie.

Also, the music for the original was great - full of "jock jams", pump-em up grooves. In this version, nothing special.

Half a Movie

Half a Sinner (1940) is a neat little no-name B-movie comedy, directed by Al Christie, who at least directed the Ruggles Charlie’s Aunt. It was based on a Dalton Trumbull story, but that’s about it.

Anne Gladden is a prim and proper school teacher who decides to kick over the traces for one day. She buys a nice outfit and goes to sit out in the park. When a masher tries to get fresh with her, she escapes driving his car. But it turns out he’s a killer, and the corpse in the back seat has evidence in the pocket of his coat that incriminates his boss.

Ms. Gladden feels a little bad about stealing a car, but decides to make the most of it. She passes a John “Dusty” King. who pretends that his car has broken down, and gives him a ride. He seems to be interested in her, but when he notices the corpse in the back, he has second thoughts. She still hasn’t noticed it but when he points it out, she is more philosophical than hysterical. She takes King for a criminal, and decides that she will be a criminal now, too.

They crash the country club, which she fits into because she is fashionably dressed. He fits in because, we are figuring out, he is a member and not a crook. They go to an empty house to hide out (it’s his house, but he doesn’t let on). And so on.

I’m sure you guessed how it all ends: with the crooks caught and King and Gladden a couple. Oh, and SPOILER it was his car that the crooks stole in the first place. That’s why King pretended his car broke down when he saw it.

I wouldn’t call this an unexpected gem, but it was pleasant. Gladden has a nice role, spinsterish but with a sense of fun, willing to go along with the craziness to see where it leads. Dusty King, mainly a singing cowboy, does fine as the male lead, but it is all pretty generic. Still, it was short.

Insidiousest

Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015) is another sequel to the Insidious saga - or prequel rather, since the protagonist dies in the first entry. This entry will be the origin of Specs and Tucker.

Stefanie Scott is a normal teenage girl who’s mother has died. Her father, Dermott Mulroney is coping by working too hard and ignoring everything. Scott starts taking up Ouija and eventualy visits Elise, Lin Shaye, the psychic from the other movies. But Elise’s husband has died and she has quit the business.

But evil spirits are hunting Scott, and she winds up with broken legs and a bad haunting. So her younger brother gets her father to hire YouTube ghostbusters Specs and Tucker. This pair’s comic relief is my second favorite part of the series, next to Shaye’s desolate spiritual strength.

This is where we get Elise’s classic working style, where she goes into the spirit world while Specs and Tucker record her.

Like the second entry, this doesn’t match the intensity of the first - although at least it doesn’t try to use “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” as a scary effect. We’re ready for the final entry.

Running on the Rims

Sorry about the delay in posting. I had keyboard problems - but also a movie that I didn’t have much to say about. Of course we had to see Pacific Rim Uprising (2018) even if Guillermo del Toro wasn’t directing (it is Steven DeKnight’s feature debut). But we didn’t have high hopes.

It starts with John Boyega, son of the mighty Stacker Pentecost from PR1, leading a sketchy group to steal some tech from a Jaeger junkyard. But plucky little Cailee Spaeny got there first. She needs the part for her funky little one-pilot Jaeger. So we get a nice little three-way battle that ends with the police coming done and forcibly inducting them into the Jaeger forces, working with Scott Eastwood and Rinko Kikuichi.

So, only one returning character (Kikuchi). So I was pretty stoked when the two mad scientists, Burn Gorman and Charlie Day, showed up. Smarmy Day is working with some megacorp doing ethically ambiguous work on the kaiju. Gorman, more hunchbacked and lumpy than ever, is still working with the Jaeger forces.

I’m just going to cut to the spoiler and let you know: Day has a bit of kaiju cortex and he’s been having drift-sex with it. In fact, he may be married to it, it isn’t clear. But he’s definitely had his mind taken over.

A lot of the movie is about a plot by megacorp to replace Jaegers with drones, possibly drones with kaiju brains. Since the rift was closed in the last movie, there aren’t a lot of kaiju fights for most of the movie. Then Charlie Day and the kaiju brains start opening rifts everywhere, and then there are some fights.

The first movie was pretty much a fun piece of noise, fluff, and special effects. So is this one. I liked the traitor to humanity stuff, but the rest of the movie was not that original. So we had fun and immediately forgot it. We will probably rewatch and it may even improve with time. But it was better when del Toro did it.