Willing to Overlook

We watched Doctor Sleep (2019), based on Stephen King’s sequel to The Shining. Even though I still haven’t seen the Kubrick movie, I really liked this.

It starts with little Danny Torrance, haunted by the naked old bathtub lady from the Overlook Hotel. The ghost of Not-Scatman-Crothers (Carl Lumbly) teaches Danny how to lock these spirits into spirit boxes, which helps quite a bit.

However, at a campground, Rebecca Ferguson, as Rose the Hat, lures a little girl into her clutches, then spirits her away with a flock of campers.

Now, in present day, we meet Ewan McGregor as Danny. We find him in bed with a coke whore with a sick hangover. She has also stolen his money, so he steals her - even though she has a hungry little girl. Even Lumbly tells him this is going too far, and he’s dead. So he spends the money on a ticket as far as he can go and winds up in a little town in New Hampshire - with a little model of the town in the town square. This is an odd little detail that I don’t think pays off, but lets director Mike Flanagan include a shot where the foreground buildings turn out to be tiny, due to perspective. No pay off, but weird.

He meets a nice guy, Cliff Curtis, who helps him find a place to live and an AA meeting. He gets a job in a nursing home. When the death cat (you know about death cats?) predicts someone will die, he uses his psychic powers to calm then before the big sleep. This earns him the name in the title.

Meanwhile, a young girl named Abra Stone (Kayleigh Curran) is discovering that she has psychic powers, very powerful powers. Rose the Hat and her gang, who feed off of the fear and death of Shiners, are noticing her too. So does McGregor. This movie has a lot of balls in the air, but that’s the basic setup: Rose and her gang torture and kill kids who have the Shining. Stone and Torrance will have to keep them from eating them.

One of the fun things about this movie is that the protagonists are as powerful, smart and aggressive as the bad guys. Little Abra gets more than a few licks in, and Danny and his AA sponsor go from zero to mass murder (of the enemy) in the time it takes to drive to Iowa (I think they passed the Children of the Corn on the way). And it all ends up back at the Overlook Hotel, which has been closed, but is still super haunted.

I liked that there was so much going on, but this movie is two-and-a-half to three hours long. One of the most striking scenes is when Rose the Hat astral projects and goes looking for Abra. I sort of fell asleep a little way into this scene, then woke up to find that it was still going on. After a while, I dozed off again, then woke up, and yup, still astrally projecting. I’m saying, they could have trimmed this.

So, I guess I should watch The Shining, right?

You’re No Fun Anymore, Rocketman

It makes sense that we’re watching Rocketman (2019). After all, we watched Bohemian Rhapsody and Blinded by the Light. We’re just trying to cover all the Dad Rock angles of 2019.

In fact, Rocketman and Rhapsody have a lot in common - gay and talented kid from a repressive home gets fame and fortune, but almost loses everything to drugs, alcohol, and sexual excess. The main diffference is that Rhapsody tells the story straight, but Rocketman gets a little crazy.

It starts with Taron Edgerton as John in a wild, horned and winged devil costume, stomping into a group therapy session and telling the story of his life. His mother was a loose woman who didn’t care for him, his father was a cold military man who seemed to hate him, but his granny was lovely. His talent on the piano got him into the Royal Conservatory. When is parents split up, his mom took up with a fun guy who got him interested in rock. He started playing in the pub - “Saturday’s All Right for Fighting”. And it took off from there, playing piano in a touring backup band.

A record company puts him in touch with Bernie Taupin (Jamie Bell) and they start making hits. Soon, they are off to LA to play the Troubador. Just as one example, when he starts playing, he levitates and time stands still - then he crashes out “Crocodile Rock”. Then booze, gay and straight sex, bad management, drugs, and more and more music. Some of it is fantastical, some heartfelt, and Edgerton sings it all. Which is pretty impressive.

We liked the whole fantasy musical thing, although there are some parts that I wish were more historically accurate. Like the backup band he worked with was headed by Long John Baldry, once much beloved by British blues fans, but pretty obscure. The movie implied that Elton chose his last name for John Lennon, but it was actually Baldry. They wrote him out of the picture completely. And Elton got a big boost on his first trip to America from Leon Russell. I had hoped he’d get into the show, but was only mentioned at the Troubador: “Neal Diamond, Leon Russell and half of The Beach Boys are out there!”

That aside, we liked what director Dexter Fletcher did with this. Parts were a little clunky - we got hit over the head in some scenes, but I guess Elton John isn’t exactly subtle. Since Fletcher also took over Bohemian Rhapsody when Bryan Singer left, it’s interesting to compare and contrast.

In conclusion, I’m not really a big Elton John fan (or Queen fan, either), but boy did this make me appreciate him. Also, I’ve always felt Bernie Taupin didn’t get enough credit, and he comes across well here, just a solid, steady, working songwriter. No complaints.

Ed Asner Per Aspirin

Ad Astra (2019) is another movie Ms. Spenser saw on a plane and wanted to see on the bigger screen. I wanted to see it too, even against mixed reviews.

It starts with a great set piece: a group of astronauts working on a large structure in low Earth orbit - or so it seems. Something happens and all hell breaks lows - sparks, explosions and chunks falling off. One of them knocks star Brad Pitt off his perch and sends him spinning towards Earth. Here we see that the structure isn’t in orbit: It’s a beanstalk, a space antenna anchored on Earth. And although Brad Pitt is going to have a rough trip down, he also has a parachute, and lands safely. SPOILER for first 10 minutes.

Now we get to meet Pitt with his suit off. He is offered a new mission. First, they talk about what a cool and competent astronaut he is, which is too bad, because I sort of saw him as a blue-collar worker up on the tower - a space lineman. But anyway, it turns out that the power surge that caused the antenna accident is part of a series, originating from around Neptune. They think it is caused by the antimatter drive of the ship that went out there years ago - under the command of Pitt’s father, Tommy Lee Jones.

Throughout the movie, we learn that Pitt’s father was always away on missions, and cared more about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence than his own family. But Pitt is a stone-cold astronaut, who got divorced from Liv Tyler for similar reasons. He has no emotional response.

So it’s off the moon on a Virgin Galactic flight. This seems to be a cute ref to 2001. On the moon, they fight off moon buggy pirates, in a scene that is well-filmed, exciting and pretty much useless to the story. Form the moon, they take off for Mars, stopping on the way to answer a distress call for a research ship. This winds up with them having to fight killer space monkeys (shades of Venom and Rampage). This scene is also redundant.

When Pitt gets to Mars, he sends a message to his father, but gets too emotional. He is pulled off the mission. Project leader Ruth Negga tells him confidentially that the crew off the Neptune mission mutinied in order to get home, and Jones killed them all - including Negga’s parents. So she will help him stowaway on the Neptune flight. This goes spectacularly wrong.

I’ll just mention that this is another case where one side kills their own team, like in DeepStar Six or Ready or Not. This is a handy way for script writers to include a lot of mayhem without making the main character a monster.

This takes us up to the last act, which I’ll pretty much skip, except to say that papa Jones is an unrepentant monster who learns nothing. Pitt doesn’t do that great either, but does better. And there’s a great scene with him surfing a panel through Neptune’s rings like the guy at the end of Dark Star.

I’m not sure that’s an actual homage, but I did say to Ms. Spenser that this was like a mix of 2001 and Apocalypse Now. This is apparently exactly what director James Gray was going for, so point all around.

Truly Magnificent

Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve watched The Magnificent Seven (1960), but considering how little I actually remembered, it must be the first time in a long time.

It opens with an army of banditos lead by Eli Wallach raid a Mexican village and tell them that he will be back for the rest of the harvest. In desperation, they gather everything they have of value and head to the city to buy guns to defend themselves.

In the city, they come across a funeral director refusing to bury a man because he isn’t white. So Yul Brynner steps up and agrees to drive the hearse to Boot Hill. Steve McQueen offers to ride shotgun. They handily dispatch the mob trying to keep them out, and the town rallies to bury the man. Bystander Horst Buchholz is so impressed he starts following these guys. I had forgotten that Brynner and McQueen were introduced on a note of racial tolerance.

The Mexicans approach Brynner to ask him where they can buy guns, and he says that they can get men with guns just as cheap. So he gathers five other men, including McQueen, Brad Dexter, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, and Robert Vaughan. Buchholz tries to join but Brynner dismisses him as a kid.

So the magnificent six ride off, with Buchholz following. Now, I guess I don’t remember Magnificent Seven all that well, but I remember its inspiration, Seven Samurai, well enough to watch it in Japanese and recite chunks of the English translation (I don’t understand Japanese that well, either). I was surprised at how closely Buchholz’s fishing scene matches Mifune’s version. They have a very different style - Mifune-San plays like a monkey, squatting on his haunches and leaping around, where Buchholz is more puppy-like. But in both versions, his fish fry gets him included in the seven.

It just occurred to me that maybe Brynner got the job as leader because of his bald head, like Shimura-san in Seven Samurai.

This version really doesn’t live up to Kurosawa-san’s original, especially the final battle. But director John Sturges does give it a beautiful sweeping grandeur, and the cast is excellent. Brynner, in particular, is iconic. And the Marlboro theme, by Elmer Bernstein, is pretty catchy.

We will not even mention the 2016 remake.

Haunt If You Want

I heard about Haunt (2019) on Illeana Douglas’ podcast. She was interviewing Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who wrote the script for A Quiet Place. They barely mention that they have directed a movie about an “extreme” haunted house attraction. So I queued it up.

It’s Halloween. College student Katie Stevens has an abusive boyfriend, who is ignoring her texts and (possibly) throwing pumpkins at her house. Her housemate, Lauryn McClaine, convinces her to go out for drinks with two other friends. There, she meets fellow student Will Brittain and his obnoxious pal. Said pal convinces them to all drive out to a haunted house he found a flyer for.

Before they leave, Stevens sees a mysterious figure in a red hooded robe (matching her red hoodie?), and tell Brittain that she lived in a haunted house - haunted by her alcoholic abusive father. Which explains some of her brokenness.

They find the haunted house deep in the woods, in some kind of abandoned industrial building. The masked clown at the door demands that they sign waivers and put their cellphones in a lockbox. Then they head in. The first scare is behind chain link fencing. A masked man is torturing and killing a woman with a hot poker. The lights go out and they disappear. Boy, this sure is realistic.

The group separates at a sign pointing “Safe” in one direction, “Not Safe” in the other. They are still yucking it up, although they are getting uneasy. One group comes to three coffins propped up along the wall. They realize that a door in the back of the coffin will open if they get in and close the lid. I think I would have backed out here, but I might not have made it this far.

Even after a number of very bad experiences (but no kills yet), they still have hope that this is just a very extreme (and maybe inadvertently dangerous) amusement. Some of them meet an masked figure who says his name is Mitch and he’ll lead them out to where the rest of the group is probably waiting. Just go a little further in...

It doesn’t take too long to get to the real bloody kills. Stevens gets very freaked out - she didn’t want to come anyway. But she also has the strength to survive, and even give a little back. Also, her drunken boyfriend has tracked her phone, and is coming - to the rescue? Honestly, I thought he was behind the whole thing.

I’ll just go ahead and semi-spoil the ending: it all works out, except for the kids who got killed.

This is pretty much a slasher film. The bad guys are just demented villains, with no plan or reason. The kills are extreme and gory. But it was also pretty well done - the maze-like space, the “Is it real or is it Memorex” effect in the first half, and the way they wrapped it up. It wasn’t exactly funny, but clever. I guess Beck and Woods are pretty good at this.

In conclusion, they use a nail-through-the-foot trauma that they used in A Quiet Place too. That’s because they wrote the two scripts at the same time and figured they’d sell one at most, and nobody would notice.

Black to the Future

We skipped BlacKkKlansman (2019) a number of times, ordering the disc, not watching and sending it back. Partly because Ms. Spenser is sick of Adam Driver - he’s in everything! But we finally watched it.

Set in the late 70s, it stars John David Washington as Ron Stallsworth, the real-life first black police officer in Colorado Springs. When assigned to infiltrate a Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) rally, he meets and is attracted to political activist Laura Harrier. Soon, they are dating.

Looking for a meatier role, Washington calls a KKK recruitment ad. With his mastery of “white voice”, he talks his way into an invitation. Since he won’t be able to attend in person, he convinces officer Adam Driver into doing that part of the undercover job. And it works - Driver winds up meeting the scary and sometimes dopey local klan, while Washington works his way up to talking to David Duke.

Most of this movie is just a good tale well told. Politics are kept to “racists are stupid and bad, tolerance is hard but wins in the end.” Washington plays Stallworth as a fairly conservative black man - he had always wanted to be a policeman. He doesn’t think Ture and Harrier should be persecuted, but he doesn’t want to see any race war or revolution. Even his accent is basic midwestern aw-shucks. And in the end, the good guys win. The klan is embarrassed and prevented from blowing up enemies and burning crosses, and the racist cop is caught and punished.

And then Stallworth is taken off the case, and the files are ordered destroyed. Then there is a short epilogue, showing the current state of race relations. This includes Black Lives Matter and the murder of a counter-protester at the Unite the Right rally. So, a fun comedy, as long as you don’t think about it too much. But director Spike Lee makes you think.

In conclusion, after this and The Dead Don’t Die, Ms. Spenser now likes Adam Driver.

Super Freaks

Due to Netflix’s queue management (sending/withholding “Short Wait” movies), we watched Brightburn (2019) and Freaks (2019) on consecutive nights. These two movies are very similar - and part of a new genre: low(ish) budget, grounded indie movies about superheroes, usually kids. See Fast Color, et al.

The elevator pitch for Brightburn is simple: Superboy, but evil. It starts with a farm couple in Smallville (ish) trying to get pregnant. A meteor lands on their land, and guess what is inside? Cut to ~10 years later. The couple (Elizabeth Banks and David Denman) have adopted the baby, who has grown into a nice, smart young boy. He likes playing in the barn (which his parents don’t allow) and talking about predatory wasps in class. Some of the kids bully him, but one smart girl likes him.

Then on his 12th birthday, he starts hearing alien voices, and starts getting powers. When he tests them by slowly feeding his hand into a running lawnmower, you understand that this is tending toward horror more than a little. He sneaks into the little smart girl’s room - just trying to be friends - and freaks her out. Soon, there will be a lot more freak outs.

In Freaks, our protagonist is a seven-year-old girl. Her father (Emile Hirsch) keeps her in a creepy house with windows all covered over. She is a sweet kid and very obedient, but when her dad is away, she does like to look out the window. She wants ice cream. But when her dad goes out for supplies, he comes back with a bullet wound (and no ice cream).

There’s an ice cream truck that parks outside the window with old man Bruce Dern creepily enticing her to get a cone. She doesn’t go out but does psychically will the neighbor girl to bring her some. Hirsch puts a stop to that. But now you see the problem. She has powers, and this world doesn’t like kids with powers.

We enjoyed Freaks more than Brightburn. For one thing, the little girl was a more sympathetic character than the older boy. She didn’t really turn to the dark side, either, although she could get angry. There’s even a scene in Freaks where she tries to join the normal family across the street and the neighbor girl is frightened because her attempts at being friends comes off as creepy - just like Brightburn, but without the sexual awakening stuff.

Because Brightburn seems to be a metaphor for puberty turning kids into monsters, while Freaks is more about acceptance. And I guess we just liked that more. Or maybe I just preferred the movie with fewer horror movie themes.

In conclusion, the barn in Brightburn sort of played the same as the barn in Ready or Not. Huh.

Interstella by Startlight

Ms. Spenser found Interstella 5555 (2003), I don’t know how. It is a feature length (barely) animation by Matsumoto Reiji (Leiji?) with a score by Daft Punk. Now, I don’t know much about the two dome heads, and what I do know I’m kind of neutral on. But Matsumoto-san is pretty much our favorite animator/manga artist. We saw his space-pirate movie My Youth in Arcadia the first week of our visit to Japan and loved him ever since.

This movie also takes place in space, with a nameless, blue skinned alien band rocking it up on an alien planet. I didn’t recognize the tune (“One More Time”) but Ms. Spenser had heard it innumerable times in gyms and workout classes. It was not one of her favorites. Then a spaceship attacks the planet and kidnaps the band.

The band are taken to Earth, where they are stripped of their memories and have their skin de-blued. They are packaged as a human band and kept docile by mind control sunglasses and the pleasures of the flesh. In space, a friend senses their plight and comes to their rescue, but is killed in the process.

And their you have the usual Matsumoto plot - characters lose their memories and wills, and someone is killed and mourned. This is a Gnostic story: Sophia (knowledge) falls to Earth, loses memory of her godly origin, until awakened (anamnesis) by a hero who must fall to death.

On the other hand, it’s kind of funny that the robotic, soulless music they make while under mind control is pretty much just Daft Punk as usual. I was surprised by how much rock guitar sound they used, but they definitely go in for repetitive loops (“One More Time”!). Like the minimalists say, if repeating something 8 times is boring, try 16. If 16 times is boring, repeat it 64 times.

In conclusion, this is an hour and five minutes. So if you don’t like it, it isn’t much of a waste of time.

Zoning Out

I had heard a lot about The Dead Zone (1983) on blogs and podcasts and things, but I hadn’t caught on to one important fact - Christopher Walken stars. Once I realized that I queued it right up. So we’re sort of having a not-very-good Stephen King film festival.

It starts out with Walken teaching school - he’s reading Poe and assigning “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” to his class, then going out on an amusement park date with his girlfriend Brooke Adams. Afterwards, she invites him to stay the night, but he declines - waiting until after they are married. I am sure at this point that she is a goner, but it turns out worse.

On the way home, he hits a milk truck that had jack-knifed on the road - Milk and blood on the highway. What is it with King and trucks? Was he prescient? Anyway, when he comes to in the hospital, Dr. Herbert Lim lets him know he’s been in a coma for five years. His religious mother tells him that Adams is married with a child. Bet he wishes he’d stayed the night now.

Then he takes a nurse’s hand and sees a vision of her daughter in a fire. He urges her to rush home, and she makes it in time to save her. Word gets around about his gift, but he can’t control it, and it seems to be draining him. He is called in to help the police track down the Castle Rock killer (this version of Castle Rock is in New Hampshire, I think). He catches him, but gets shot. So now he’s psychically drained and wounded in the leg. Then he has a serious vision and needs to do something radical.

This is directed by David Cronenberg, but there is really no body horror - very little gore at all. It has a nice rural Northeast flavor to it, almost like Something Wicked This Way Comes. Some of the creepiest parts were in the beginning, where Christopher Walken is smiling and relaxed. [Shiver.] Once he gets all tortured and twitchy, he’s much easier to take.

Do the Hustle

Hustlers (2019) is Lorene Scafaria’s stripper crime movie. I went in expecting a caper film, like maybe Widows or Ocean’s 8. But it was more of a relationship movie, a found family film.

Constance Wu is a stripper, supporting her Chinese grandmother. She’s not very good at it - she’s kind of shy and clearly hates the job. One day she sees star stripper Jennifer Lopez, and like everyone else, she’s hooked. Lopez mentors her, and they make a lot of money. One night, Usher shows up, even.

Then, 2008. The money dries up. The finance boys are stingier and there aren’t as many of them. They need to up their game. So Lopez decides they should dope the marks drinks and max out their credit cards. The guys could be convinced that they just overdid it on booze, coke and pills, and besides, they would have to come clean about the strippers if they went to the authorities.

So they have a nice little crime family, with Lopez as the mommy. The gang includes Cardi B and Lizzo, for some extra fun. But Wu is never really comfortable with fleecing the marks. She wants to make sure they only hit assholes, but at least one guy got really hurt. Then there’s some jealousy over a new girl. When the police start nosing around, it gets ugly.

This hustle was not exactly an elaborate caper. So if you like clever plots, forget that. It’s about the Wu’s ambiguous relation with stripping (degrading, but well-paying) and her feelings for J-Lo. It’s well done, but not so much my thing.

J-Lo, by the way, is amazing, and seeing her workout on the pole is breathtaking. But that’s another thing that didn’t quite grab me about the movie - I love strippers and all, but in the world of this movie, it is like the only thing women can do. I guess I just don’t love them that much.

Ready Steady Go

We almost missed Ready or Not (2019) because I had it confused with all the other Game Night type movies going around. This one is a stronger brew.

It starts with two boys playing a game of hide and seek in a mansion with the grownups. Right away, the movie tips it’s hand - this is the most dangerous game, and if the hider is caught, he dies.

Years later, Samara Weaving is marrying wealthy Mark O’Brien, one of the boys all grown up. He is taking her to the family mansion to play the family game. The family fortune is based on board games, and anyone who joins the family has to play a game, chosen at random. What she doesn’t know is that if hide and seek comes up, the new family member must be sacrificed.

So there’s a lot of fun running around as Weaving slowly figures out the stakes for this game. The family seeking her is a bunch of upper-class twits. Our favorite was Melanie Scrofano, who tended to be more dangerous to her own side than to Weaving. Oddly, this reminded us of Miguel Ferrer from DeepStar Six. In another odd coincidence, someone is bisected by door in this movie too.

This isn’t just a comedy-thriller - it gets into horror territory. Maybe not quite as far as Midsommar, which has a similar philosophy. Semi-spoiler, Weaving gets shot through the hand, falls into a pits of fresh goat carcasses and old human bones, then hangs from a nail through the hole in her hand - it’s pretty intense. There’s also a few she’s-getting-away-oops-they-got-her-back moments.

But, like Midsommar, it all ends happily. Enjoy!

More like DerpStar

DeepStar Six (1989) is one of those underwater creature features, like The Abyss. In fact, it was made the same your as Abyss, probably to cash in. We’re watching to round out our underwater portfolio. This version has a nice low-budget traditional monster movie feel.

DeepStar Six is an underwater mining platform, currently under contract to the DoD to do something with nukes. Marius Weyers, a stiff and distant European-ish scientist, is the leader, and he’s worried about being behind schedule. When a cavern shows up on a survey, he decides to just blow it up and remove any possible instability. They send a probe into the open cavern and it gets lost. They send a mini-sub in to retrieve it (probes aren’t cheap), and they don’t come back. There’s something down there.

They do the sensible thing and decide to get out of there. But before they do, the creature (which we still haven’t seen) attacks DeepStar Six. The captain, Taurean Blacque (great stage name!), gets stuck in a wonky pressure door, and in one of the best kills in the movie, is bisected.

Meanwhile, Miguel Ferrer is a sort of Army fuck-up, who does everything by the book, but wrong. Before they can leave, they need to secure the nuke. In case of hostile action, the procedure is to set it off, which he does without really warning anyone or thinking around the blast zone. This isn’t the last time he’ll put the whole thing in jeopardy.

By the way, the monster is some kind of crab creature, and we do get to see it eventually. It’s pretty clearly a guy in a crab suit, but not bad.

In fact, that’s what’s endearing about this movie. The exteriors are clearly models and the monster is a guy in a suit. It doesn’t break suspension of disbelief but it isn’t trying to get points for special effects. And there’s a couple of good kills. And it doesn’t have a ridiculous ending like, say, Sphere.

The Wild, the Innocent and the Luton Shuffle

Blinded by the Light (2019) is kind of like another one of Gurinda Chadha’s films, Bend It Like Beckham. East Indian in England feels out of place, finds some aspect of popular culture to love against the wishes of family, and finds meaning and way to fit in. In Beckham, it was football. Here, it’s Springsteen.

Viveik Kalra is a Pakistani teenager growing up in suburban Luton. He’s a bit of an introvert, writing lyrics for his best friend’s band. The funny thing about a movie about Springsteen is, it is set in 1987, so he starts out into Pet Shop Boys and a-ha. But he meets Sikh at high school who turns him onto the Boss. His friend thinks Springsteen is for his dad’s generation, but Karla listens to the lyrics and and it opens up his world.

The rest is pretty predictable, but sweet - and it’s filled with Springsteen’s music. It’s based on a true story, and I guess Springsteen was touched enough to license a big chunk of his catalog. Now, I’m going to drop any pretense of reviewing the film and just talk about my love for the Boss.

The summer of 1974, when I graduated from high school, was defined for me by two songs: Little Feat’s “Dixie Chicken” and Springsteen’s “Rosalita”. The next year, he played my college, and I got to see him for the first (and sadly, only) time. This was just before he got on the covers of Time and Newsweek (the Time article was written by the uncle of the woman who is now Ms. Spenser - hope that isn’t a conflict of interest). That summer, every dorm and frat had at least one speaker in an open window playing one of his albums, usually “Born to Run”. That was pretty annoying - you know how it is when the obscure artist you love gets popular. Then “Darkness on the Edge of Town” came out, and I just preferred his faster, more snappy stuff. So I mostly like the first three albums.

But I never felt like he lost it, or sold out (although “Dancing in the Dark” has some pretty corny 80s electronic drums). He might not have inspired me the way he did that Pakistani kid in Luton, but I know how he feels. Tramps like us, baby we were born to run.

Midsummer’s Night Sex Tragedy

Midsommar (2019) is sort of the horror smash of the season, Ari Aster’s follow-up to Hereditary. It’s also a kind of gender switched Wicker Man.

It starts with Florence Pugh trying to get in touch with her sister - who isn’t returning calls because she has killed herself and her parents. So Pugh is a little low. Her boyfriend, Jack Reynor, isn’t helping much. He’s kind of withholding, and he spends a lot of time with his student friends, who want him to dump her. He doesn’t even mention that one of the friends has invited the crew to his village in Sweden for the Midsommar festival. But she winds up going along.

The village is a sort of pagan cult commune and the rituals and games seem like fun - at first. One of the rituals involves making the old people jump off a cliff, and crushing them with hammers if they survive. It’s the Trondheim Hammer Dance. This puts the visitors off the whole thing a bit. But Pugh gets elected May Queen, and her boyfriend gets a sexy prize as well. And then things get really hairy.

The relationships between Pugh and Reynor is classic - her clingy, him withholding. The other students with their rivalries and academic misdemeanors are fun too. The beauty of the setting, mountains and flowers and homespun clothes is relaxing, making the horror all the more gruesome. And best of all, you don’t have Nic Cage shouting about bees.