Site for Sore Eyes

As we enter Spooktober, I try to find more scary movies for Ms. Spenser. I thought Black Site (2018) looked interesting, mixing John Carpenter with Lovecraftian horror. In fact, it starts with some narration, explaining that humanity was troubled by entities called the Elder Gods, but found a way to "deport" them to a dungeon dimension. These days, that function is provided by a black site called Project Artemis.

We meet a couple in bed. She gets up to get some water, gets it from an unseen monster. He follows, telling their little daughter to stay in her bed, which is protected by sigils. He's quickly killed offscreen. The kid grows up to be Lauren Ashley Carter, an Artemis agent like her parents. 

She is heading to the black site with a "deportation agent", someone who has memorized the mantras that will send an Elder God away. He is kind of whiny - complains a lot that his girlfriend left him because he's boring. He is, and he talks too much. Carter puts his head in a bag to keep the black site a secret. (I think this is Mike Beckingham, Simon Pegg's brother, but don't quote me.)

Throughout, Carter has flashbacks of her parents being beamed up somewhere, a planet, and a murky image of a bat-winged tentacle creature. Premature SPOILER: we will see these same shots over and over, and that one image is all we'll see of the Elder Gods.

That's because life in the other dimension has eroded the gods' power. Now they can only exist in our world in the body of humans. That apparently means they can be tortured. So they are torturing this one guy before they deport him, and he turns out to be the god who grabbed Carter's parents. These scenes have the god making grandiloquent threats about puny humans, and the humans going "Ah, get fucked." kind of cute.

Until the site is overrun by Elder-God-affiliated cultists. So we get some fight scenes, and two interesting antagonists: One is a woman who pulls her turtleneck up over her mouth and fights with two samurai swords. Another might be the leader, who takes over the security setup and runs the fight from there. She looks like a college coed, which is sort of funny.

I'll skip over all the fights and drama to the end. The deportation agent says his chant, the Elder God goes away, everyone who is still alive goes, "Phew, that was rough. Not much rougher than usual, I guess. Oh well, Mondays, you know?" Which is kind of Carpenter, I guess.

Ms. Spenser was not happy with this offering. I thought it was pretty funny, but I guess she didn't ask for a comedy. The acting was generally pretty bad - like a woman walks into a fight with a joke: "You guys don't know where the girl's room is, do you?" Except she delivered it like, "You idiots don't even know where the girl's room is, do you?", not the faux-innocent "Excuse me, do you know where the girl's room is?" Is bad acting Carpenterian?

In conclusion, the 80s/90s feel was Carpenterian. So was the cheesy synth score.