Worth Mentioning - I Know Fear When I See It

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Spooks, maniacs, and Halloween horror.

THE GOOD THINGS DEVILS DO (2020) 

The feature debut of writer/director Jess Norvisgaard, The Good Things Devils Do is a movie that feels like it didn't reach its true potential. While it has a solid set-up to build a horror movie on, it didn't turn out to be as fun as it could have been, despite having an abundance of gore and a quirky sense of humor. This is a situation where the attempts at humor didn't quite work for me - instead of laughing, my reaction to the intentionally humorous moments and lines was usually to think to myself, "Oh, that was supposed to be funny."

The strongest example of the movie not reaching its potential is in the way it handles cast members / genre icons Kane Hodder and Linnea Quigley. It casts Hodder in the role of a foul-mouthed, homicidal maniac (whose intense behavior does, admittedly, make it tougher to notice the humor) then removes him from the action as quickly as possible. Then it gives Quigley the chance to play an awesome looking, blood-soaked vampire - somewhat reminiscent of her possessed character in Night of the Demons - and doesn't give her much to do. These choices could have been budgetary, it's understandable if the production couldn't afford to have Hodder and Quigley on set as much as they would have liked, but the end result makes it feel like the movie was teasing viewers with ideas they'll want to see developed further.

The film does have the perfect setting - it takes place in a suburban neighborhood on Halloween, with trick-or-treaters roaming the streets. Melvin (David Rucker III) likes to entertain the local kids with creepy stories and the gruesome items he's collecting for his Museum of the Macabre, and in the opening scene he gets a cool new delivery: a crate containing the skeletal remains of a woman who was said to be cursed. Problem is, she was cursed with vampirism and comes back to flesh-and-blood life when Melvin's wife Louisie (Quigley) unknowingly removes a stake from her heart. Just as this vampire, called Masquerade and played by Veronika Stoykova, rises from her crate in Melvin and Louisie's home and goes on the attack, the front door is kicked open by a trio of gangsters on a mission to retrieve some loot.

Those gangsters are Richard (Bill Oberst Jr.), who is looking to retire from crime after this job; Richard's partner-in-crime / daughter Mouse (Mary Katherine O'Donnell); and aforementioned madman Percy (Hodder), who has been told to make sure Richard and Mouse are both retired by murdering them at the end of the night. So now Melvin, Louisie, and the gangsters - along with Louisie's daughter Caroline (Kelley Wilson Robinson), who is almost 40 but dresses and acts like a dimwitted teenager - are trapped together in a fight against Masquerade.

The gangster storyline is one aspect of The Good Things Devils Do that brought down my overall enjoyment a bit, as it brings up questions that don't get satisfying answers. It doesn't seem like Melvin is involved with criminal endeavors, so why were the gangsters sent to his house? Is it bad luck, and an address was chosen at random? If this was just a set-up so Percy could kill Richard and Mouse, why does Percy believe the money is in Melvin's house? I really don't know what was going on with this part of the story, Norvisgaard didn't make it clear as far as I'm concerned.

The "trapped in the house by a vampire" scenario fills most of the film's 80 minute running time, but the action never gets as exciting as it could have, or as exciting as most viewers will probably be hoping for. The highlight comes when Richard tapes a knife to one of Mouse's hands and a cleaver to the other. She gets to use them, but I was left wishing she could have had the chance to use them more. That's The Good Things Devils Do in a nutshell: it's great at set-ups, but the payoffs will leave you wanting more.

There's some dodgy acting in the midst of all this, but also the opportunity to see icons and genre regulars at work once again. The gore effects look great, and it's always nice to watch a horror movie that has some Halloween atmosphere to it. I had a fine viewing experience sitting through The Good Things Devils Do, but if the elements that were in place here had been handled just slightly differently, it could have been more entertaining.

The review of The Good Things Devil Do originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com

HOST (2020)

Regardless of whether or not I liked director Rob Savage's film Host, I still would have seen it as an impressive achievement, because this is a movie that was entirely conceived (by Savage and co-writers Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepherd) and produced during the early months of the global pandemic, and it managed to land wide distribution before the pandemic has come to an end. Fortunately, it's a movie that I did enjoy in addition to being impressed by the fact that Savage was able to make it and get it out into the world at this time.

Honestly, I was a bit hesitant to watch Host at first, as I was put off by the fact that it plays out entirely on computer screens, since the characters are interacting with each other through Zoom (which is how the movie was able to be filmed in the first place, everyone was social distancing and quarantining while making it). I was hesitant even though I have already seen and enjoyed another movie that plays out entirely on computer screens, Unfriended. As it turned out, I had no reason to be concerned, because Host managed to be an interesting, occasionally creepy horror movie even with everyone sitting in front of their computers and phones.

Haley Bishop, Jemma Moore, Emma Louise Webb, Radina Drandova, Caroline Ward, Edward Linard, and Seylan Baxter star as a group of characters who have gotten together over Zoom to kill some quarantine time by having a séance, attempting to get in contact with any spirit they can reach. Problem is, one of the girls doesn't take the séance seriously - despite being warned that she should - and inadvertently unleashes a demonic entity on herself and everyone else who was involved with the séance. And that's all there is to it, we watch the characters in their little Zoom windows as this demonic force goes after them and knocks them off.

Host is fast and fun, with a running time of just 56 minutes. There is a whole lot of people getting dragged around by invisible assailants as the characters get picked off, maybe a bit too much of that, but there are also some deaths I was surprised to see this little production pull off. I guess I'm never going to be excited to watch a movie that happens on a computer screen, but so far it has worked out when I've given them a chance.

THE HAUNTING OF BLY MANOR (2020)

Mike Flanagan's ten episode take on the Shirley Jackson novel The Haunting of Hill House wasn't just a standalone mini-series for the Netflix streaming service, it was actually the start of an anthology series that's meant to focus on a different Haunting every season. For the second season of the show, Flanagan and his collaborators drew inspiration from the works of Henry James, mixing the basics of one of the author's most famous stories - The Turn of the Screw - with ideas from several of his other stories. This has been described as a "literary remix", which was definitely a more interesting approach than a straightforward adaptation of The Turn of the Screw would have been, since that story has already been brought to the screen multiple times. (Most notably in 1961's The Innocents.)

Set primarily in 1987, Bly Manor finds American Dani Clayton (Victoria Pedretti) being hired by English businessman Henry Thomas (Henry Wingrave) to take care of his orphaned niece Flora (Amelie Bea Smith) and nephew Miles (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) at their creepy home in the countryside, the haunted titular location. While watching and teaching the kids, Dani works alongside housekeeper Hannah Grose (T'Nia Miller), cook Owen (Rahul Kohli), and gardener Jamie (Amelia Eve).

Dani is troubled before she even gets to Bly Manor, covering mirrors because she sees the spectre of a man wearing shining glasses in reflections, and once she gets to the place she finds that there are things going on there that are so weird that it makes her own ghost look like a minor annoyance. Over the course of nine episodes, we gradually learn exactly what is happening with Dani and at the old mansion, as Mike Flanagan and his fellow writers James Flanagan, Diane Ademu-John, Laurie Penny, Angela LaManna, Rebecca Leigh Klingel, Michael and Paul Clarkson, Leah Fong, and Julia Bicknell unravel a mystery involving faceless spirits, a child's inappropriate behavior, an evil doppelganger, a criminal chauffeur, a rage-filled "lady in the lake", and situations referred to as being "tucked away" and "dream hopping".

While I was totally on board with Bly Manor for the first several episodes, I did find the middle stretch to be a bit bumpy as the story branched off into some strange directions. It got a bit harder to keep track of what was going on as characters drifted between reality, dreams, memories, life, and death... but I held on and found that things became clear as the episodes went on. The story then wrapped up with a couple of my favorite episodes of the whole nine episode run.

People involved with Bly Manor have referred to it as a love story, and it definitely is that by the time all is said and done. There are several love stories at play here, the ones that get the most screen time being a romance between two of the characters previously named (this is focused on in a major, very emotional way in the last episode) and between two people Flora and Miles knew when they were alive and continue to interact with them now that they're ghosts. Those are the shady Peter Quint (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and former au pair Rebecca Jessel (Tahirah Sharif).

Kate Siegel played my favorite character in Hill House and I was somewhat disappointed that she was given a much smaller role in this season (playing a different character; the seasons are not connected to each other), but her small role is a very important one and was at the center of one of my favorite episodes, one which is sort of an origin story for the haunting of Bly Manor and an adaptation of James' The Romance of Certain Old Clothes.

While I was more impressed with Hill House than I was with Bly Manor - in every way; characters, storytelling, emotional content, technical achievements - this season did provide a good viewing experience. It's an interesting, worthy follow-up, and I look forward to seeing more Hauntings in the future.

Flanagan directed all ten episodes of Hill House, but he got some backup on this one. Surprisingly, he only directed the first episode of Bly Manor, handing the other eight over to the likes of Ciaran Foy (Sinister II), Liam Gavin (A Dark Song), Yolanda Ramke and Ben Howling (Cargo), Axelle Carolyn (Tales of Halloween), and E.L. Katz (The ABCs of Death 2).

ALONE (2020/V)

It's a shame that the recent survival thriller from director John Hyams is called Alone, because that title is generic as hell and obviously way overused - if you have to put a V next to the year when listing a film's title, the film should definitely not have that title. I don't like seeing that this movie is just part of a crowd like that, because it deserves to stand out. It is an awesome, intense thriller.

This Alone is based on a 2011 Swedish film I haven't seen, one which also has a very generic title in English: Gone. Gone was directed by Mattias Olsson and Henrik JP Akesson from a screenplay by Olsson, and Olsson returned to write the script for this English-language version of the story as well. It stars Jules Willcox as Jessica, a woman who has decided to hit the road and move to a new place six months after her life was rocked by a major tragedy. Unfortunately, Jessica has picked the wrong day to head out on the road, as she soon has a series of strange encounters with a Man (Marc Menchaca, looking a lot like Jason Sudeikis under his creepy 'stache and glasses) she just can't seem to shake loose.

Alone plays out in a series of chapters, the first chapter being The Road - and this was an especially great one, as Hyams very effectively captured the creepiness of Jessica's drive down dark, lonely roads while she tries to lose the Man. Making this chapter even better is the fact that Jessica handles each encounter with the Man in a very smart way. This isn't a character who gets into a bad situation due to making stupid decisions. She does what the viewer would advise her to do... But she ends up being captured by the Man anyway, taken to a cabin deep in the woods, where he has bad intentions for her. And he tells her she's not the first woman he has taken out there.

Luckily, Jessica is able to escape from the cabin rather quickly, but that's not the end of her ordeal. Now she's lost in the wilderness, desperately trying to reach safety while being pursued by a homicidal maniac who knows the area.

This is a really smart, engaging film that's packed with great moments. It's a shame about the title, but it's worth digging through a pile of Alones to find the one directed by John Hyams.