Black Comedy

The first I heard about The Blackening (2022) was the tagline: "We can't all die first". That was all I needed to convince me.

It starts with a young black couple coming to a secluded house in Marin (according to the travel montage). They are preparing for a Juneteenth reunion with their college friends group. In the (ominously locked, then unlocked) game room, they find a game called "The Blackening". It features a blackface Sambo caricature that asks black trivia questions. When the guy answers one wrong, he gets a crossbow bolt through the neck. The woman tries to escape, but is pulled back.

Then we meet the rest of the crew driving up. DeWayne Perkins, a typical gay best friend, is driving two of his friends Grace Byers and Antoinette Robinson, who don't want him to know they've invited Byers oft-cheating boyfriend. When Perkins starts asking, "Who all's going to be there?", I get it. Comic Brandi Brown does a bit about always asking this before going to any party or gathering.

X Mayo is driving up separately and meets a very geeky fellow student Jermaine Fowler at a country store. His car broke down, and Mayo very reluctantly drive him up. When they all arrive, they find Melvin Gregg being interrogated by a white park ranger, who didn't expect to see black people in these parts. He came up with Byers' ex(?)-boyfriend, Sinqua Walls.

They settle into house (cabin in the woods), and start the party with some drinks, some smokes, maybe a molly or two, and some cut-throat Spades. Then they find the game room, and The Blackening game. 

The movie is partly based on horror/black horror tropes - Black guy dies first, never split up, don't go down in the basement, etc. They do reluctantly split up, amd one group meets the white ranger. When they tell him they split up, he says, "But you're black!". The Blackening's trivia questions are tests of basic black knowledge: name 25 black inventions, sing all the verses of the Black National Anthem, name the 5 black actors who appeared on Friends. (The correct answer to the last is "I don't watch that white shit.")

But it's also based on the range of black characters: gay friend, successful businesswoman, slightly dangerous bad boy, party girl, African from Africa, and even a geeky loser who voted for Trump. The message is: There's many ways to be black. And none of them are safe from the police.

Maybe I liked this because it was pretty tame, both in scares and racial politics. I got most of the jokes, although I probably missed a bunch too, due to whiteness. Any way, I picked up my copy at the local library book (and DVD) sale, and am proud to have it in my collection 

Floppy Haired Emo Horror

The horror-fest continues! We had an interesting double bill: Insidious: The Red Door (2022) and Suitable Flesh (2023).

I:TRD is the fifth Insidious movie, and it is suppposed to be the final entry (until the next one). It goes back to the story of Patrick Wilson and his son. It starts with them being hypnotized to forget the trauma of those movies, and the whole Further thing. It catches up with the family ten years later, at the funeral for Wilson's mom. He is divorced Rose Byrne, and his son has grown up to be Ty Simpkins, an emo arty type going to college in the next week. He and Wilson don't get along, mostly because Wilson has been physically absent and mentally vacant for a long time. But he does drive him to college.

At college, Wilson encourages his son to join a frat, and finds out that he has been assigned a black woman roommate, a goofy math major played by Sinclair Daniel. She's fun. 

Simpkins' art classes are pretty intense, with cult-leader type Hiam Abbass presiding. To get them to dig deep for creativity, she uses something like a hypnotic induction, which causes him to see and paint "The Red Door", which he must close. To get him to lighten up, Daniel drags him to the frat party, which is pretty funny. It includes frat president Nick the Prick in a diaper talking about letting men be men, excessive drinking etc. After agreeing this is lame, Daniel gets him to go upstairs to look through everyone's shit. But in one room, Simpkins sees a puking ghost, probably of a student who died in the frat from alcohol poisoning. 

So we have Simpkins seeing ghosts, astral projecting (on purpose), and having visions of the ghost world intruding on daily life (while also goofing around with Daniel). Meanwhile, Wilson is only trying to figure out his problems a little bit. He does look up a YouTube made by Specs and Tucker introducing Elise (the best part of these movies, killed off too soon). That's it for them.

It wasn't very good, although I did like Daniel. The only sane one in the movie, I guess. But note the following: floppy haired emo boy, astral projection, hypnotism...

It starts in the psychiatric ward of Miskatonic University. Barbara Crampton is visiting Heather Graham, who is confined to a padded cell. She seems to have killed someone, mangled him beyond recognition. But Crampton is a friend, and wants to know the story...

Graham was a psychiatrist, happy with her life. (By the way, she wrote a book on astral projection.) One day, a young man comes in, shaking with fear. Now, we were positive this was Ty Simpkins, but it turns out he is just the same type (floppy haired emo) and actually Judah Lewis. It turns out he is afraid that his father is trying to take over his life. Graham treats this as a normal abuse situation, but then Lewis gets a call from his father. He has some kind of seizure, and comes to with a completely diffferent personality. He's no longer afraid, cocky and sarcastic. He just leaves.

Graham goes home to her handsome, concerned husband, Jonathan Schaech. That night, when they make love, she imagines he is Lewis. This gets deep under her skin, and she goes to his address, where she finds Lewis' father, Bruce Davidson. He's a gross, very sick man, who almost dies in front of her until she puts his pills in his mouth. 

The next time she meets Lewis, he brings her home and tries to convince her to help him kill Davidson. The deal is, if he chants a spell, it causes a body swap. The third time her does this to you, it's permanent. He wants Lewis' young, healthy body. Lewis wants to kill him, and destroy his brain to stop this. But before he can, there is another body swap. Since Graham still doesn't get it, Lewis (with his father's mind in his body) manages to seduce her. During sex, he swaps bodies with her, and then back.

It gets wilder from there. 

Director Joe Lynch based the movie on an H.P Lovecraft story, and also on the schlocky movies Stuart Gordon made in the 80s. These were also based on Lovecraft, and starred Crampton. Since I haven't seen them, I don't know how close they are. But it was definitely creepy, gory and sexy - maybe a little too much sexy for my taste. But overall, a good horror. And it was fun seeing the modern Miskatonic U. campus.

But it was funny getting two movies, very different, with so many points of congruence. What a coincidence. OR WAS IT?

Hispanic Panic

It's hard to pass up a movie called Satanic Hispanics (2022). I didn't have much information about it other than that it was a Hispanic horror anthology. (Note: I got this from the library, where my phone reception is very poor, so no checking Rotten Tomatoes, etc). But it seemed likely. 

It starts with a massacre scene - a house full of people killed in various bloody ways. There is one survivor, Efren Ramirez. The police take him in for questioning, and he says he'll explain it all, but he has to be out of there in 90 minutes, or something bad will happen. He gives some random explanations, but decides to tell them a story.

This story takes place in a house in Argentina, where a young man, Demian Salomon, is waving his phone flashlight to show a pizza delivery guy something. But he doesn't see it. Salomon turns out to be a professional Rubik's Cuber, living in his deceased grandmother's house. But there is something there that he can only see if he waves the lights in the proper sequence. He brings in a psychic podcaster who doesn't see anything at first, then runs out. And that's before the thing appears in ordinary light.

This story doesn't do much for the police. So he tells another about a Halloween party at a bar, where a real vampire, Hemky Madera, has drained the whole crew. But he gets a phone call from his vampire girlfriend, Patricia Velasquez, reminding him about Daylight Savings Time, and that he needs to get home in a hurry. Since he can't turn into a bat like he used to, he needs a ride. This section is pretty What We Do In the Shadows, and also pretty funny.

The next story takes place in Mexico. Ari Gallegos has been working with the CIA to take down a politician. Now he is being chased by nahuales - traditional shapeshifters. This section is dead serious, and sort of shows an imagined ritual attack, with only a touch of actual magic. 

The last section features, surprise! Jonah Ray, from MST3K! What's he doing here - oh, yeah, he's credited as Jonah Ray Rodriques. He is meeting his ex, Danielle Chaves, at a Mexican restaurant to talk about their trip to Cuba. It seems that they and a group of friends recorded a ritual that she shouldn't have, and they are the last two left alive. So one of them must be possessed by nZambi Mpungu, king of the zombies. The only thing that can kill this creature is - the Hammer of Zanzibar. This section is both gory and hilarious, especially the story of the hammer.

After all this, the police still don't believe that Ramirez must be released, even though he's managed to fritter away his 90 minutes with pointless stories. Then, what he feared shows up.

Each of these stories have different directors and different styles, but tie together very well. I was surprised by how much humor there was - most of these anthology stories have one comic section. This one has two out of four (plus the frame story). We loved the vampire story, even if it was a bit familiar. The nahual story wasn't the strongest for us, probably because it leans on a myth that we weren't familiar with. Jonah Ray's was probably the most fun, but really, all of these are strong. We recommend. 

Lake House

Continuing with Ms. Spenser's early Halloween Spooktacular, we watched What Lies Beneath (2000). Directed by Robert Zemekis, script by Glark Greg (!) and starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer, it looked like it couldn't miss. But for some reason, Amazon Prime wanted to know if we wanted to watch it again - but we were sure we'd never seen it before. 

It starts with Pfeiffer and Harrison sending their daughter off to Princeton. That leaves them in their beautiful lakeside home in Vermont. Harrison is a researcher at a local college, and Pfeiffer looks after the house and lovely gardens. There is a brief scene, showing pictures and news articles hinting at problems in the past - death of a father, car crash, but we were talking over it, trying to remember if we'd seen this before. 

Pfeiffer is all alone in her empty nest, and begins getting a little jumpy. Small things, like doors that don't stay closed, start to unnerve her. The new neighbors are a little creepy - loud sex at night, pitiful crying during the day. It looks like a Rear Window situation, but that turns out to be a red herring. The real problem is closer to home.

This movie has a lot going for it. Zemekis knows how to bring the suspense, and isn't above a little flashy camera work. The script has a nice slow burn and then a wild last act. Pfeiffer does some great acting, and Harrison... well, let's say he fades into the background when he needs to. So I'm not sure why we didn't remember seeing this before. I'm sure we did; I remembered tiny bits here and there. Ms. S didn't remember a thing, so maybe I saw it by myself? 

Anyway, the whole thing didn't really do it for us. Maybe we're immune to the sexiness of Pfeiffer and Harrison in a hot marriage. Maybe the Rear Window fake-out turned us off. Oh well, since I've now blogged it, I'm pretty sure we won't get forget and watch it again.

The New Black

As I mentioned, Halloween season is already starting. Ms. B requested The Blackcoat's Daughter (2015), based on a recommendation from her usual crew of horror writers. I've had it on my radar since Rod Heath's review, so we gave it a try.

It is set in a conservative Catholic girl's school. It's the last day before winter break, and Keirnan Shipka has a dream that her parent's have died in a car crash. In waking life, as all the parents come and go, she is left behind, along with Lucy Boynton, who claims that she told her parent's to come get her the next day by mistake. Shipka is an odd detached girl, who wants the priest who runs the school to come to her recital that day. But he has to go away for a convention, and he reminds her that, ha ha, she "can't live here."

So the two girls will be left in the school overnight with two old nuns.

Meanwhile, Boynton sneaks out of the school to go driving with a boy. When they get back, it seems that she is breaking up with him because she is pregnant. She is clearly a wild child, not like the shy, proper and weird Shipka. Who, by the way, still hasn't heard from her parents. But she does hear strange noises and maybe voices. 

These stories are intertwined with a third girl, Emma Roberts. She is shivering in a cold bus stop out, and James Remar and his wife stop to pick her up. She resembles Shipka enough so I thought she might be the same character, maybe running away from the school. But she seems to be getting closer. Remar does everything he can to avoid looking creepy, and still looks creepy. It turns out that his daughter was killed near the school, and so he wants to help other young women. His wife doesn't want anything to do with this.

Most of this movie is slow and elliptical. There are enough time slips and cutting between characters to keep you off balance a lot of the time. We liked this atmospheric part pretty well. However, in the last act (SPOILER), it becomes a demonic possession slasher. There is even a scene with the killer standing with a dripping knife. 

The movie was written and directed by Osgood Perkins, Tony Perkins' son. He's obviously got a good background in horror. But nobody dies in a shower.

In conclusion, who, exactly, was the blackcoat?