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.
A hookup gone wrong, bird monsters, and Shelley Duvall's final film.
STRANGE DARLING (2023)
I didn’t know much about writer/director J.T. Mollner’s horror thriller Strange Darling going into it – just that it stars Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner, had actor Giovanni Ribisi as its cinematographer, dealt with “a spontaneous hookup gone terribly wrong,” and was receiving rave reviews from critics who said the film would work better the less you know about it before watching it. So I tried to know very little, and had fun following the twists and turns.
The opening credits describe Strange Darling as “a thriller in six chapters” and the chapters are presented out of order; the first one we’re shown is chapter 3, and we go back and forth from there. This approach could have come off as pretentious and artsy fartsy, but it actually works for the story Mollner is telling here. It allows him to drop us right into an action sequence at the start, then reveal details about the story, characters, and how we got to that point as the 97 minute running time plays out. It’s an interesting way to toy with our perception. The story could have been told in a linear fashion, but it might work even better with the non-linear style.
An opening text crawl that’s reminiscent of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – and that’s not the only thing that’s reminiscent of that movie in this one – tells us this is a dramatization of the last known killings committed by a unique and prolific serial killer. Then we see Fitzgerald’s character, The Lady, being pursued by Gallner’s character, The Demon. They’re the ones who had a hookup go terribly wrong, and soon enough we’ll know exactly what’s going on between them... as well as what’s going on with some other characters who enter the picture, like Ed Begley Jr. and Barbara Hershey as a quirky mountain-dwelling couple who put together one hell of a Sunday breakfast.
Strange Darling is a very cool thriller with great performances – and it turns out that Giovanni Ribisi is a hell of a cinematographer, as it brought an awesome visual style to this movie. If you like horror and thrills, check this one out, but don’t dig up any spoilers before you do.
CUCKOO (2024)
Teenager Gretchen’s mother had just passed away, so she has to go live with her father, stepmother, and younger, non-verbal stepsister... and this means that she also has to leave America and go live in a remote resort in the wilderness of the Bavarian Alps, where her father is working with the place’s owner, Herr König, to build a new hotel. Problem is, there’s something weird and monstrous lurking out in the woods that surround the resort, and Gretchen soon catches this thing’s attention.
Writer/director Tilman Singer works some effectively creepy sequences into this creature feature horror film, with one of those moments feeling like it came straight out of a classic Italian horror movie. Singer has also created a rather unique and gross creature here: a sort of humanoid “bird monster” that has similarities to the cuckoo bird in the way it carries on its ancient species. Like the cuckoo bird lays its eggs in another bird’s nest, this creature impregnates regular human women with its own monstrous offspring. This creature is also able to emit a sound that causes the people who hear it to fall under a sort of spell. From their perception, they’re stuck in a time loop, reliving a moment over and over... but while they’re experiencing this, the bird monster is getting closer and closer.
Because the creature has this ability, I have to warn any prospective viewers: if you’re sound sensitive, you might find this movie irritating to sit through, because it is a noisy-ass flick.
I found it to be an interesting watch, though, despite the aural irritation, and I got wrapped up in the oddball monster story Singer was telling. It helps that Hunter Schafer delivers a great performance in the role of Gretchen, managing to make the character someone we care about more and more as the story goes on. Dan Stevens also took a fascinating approach to his Herr König character, who knows very well that there are bird monsters in the vicinity of his resort.
The following review originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
THE FOREST HILLS (2023)
After being absent from the screen for over twenty years, Shelley Duvall made her return to acting with director Scott Goldberg’s horror film The Forest Hills – and the movie has gotten a good amount of attention for having Duvall in the cast. She was a Texas college student when she basically just fell into an acting career. She happened to meet director Robert Altman at a party while he was in Texas shooting his 1970 movie Brewster McCloud. Intrigued by her “upbeat presence and unique physical appearance,” the director and crew members talked Duvall into taking a role in the film. Suddenly she was an actress who started racking up credits: Nashville, Annie Hall, The Shining, Popeye, Time Bandits, Roxanne, The Portrait of a Lady, and fifty more, including hosting her own TV show, Faerie Tale Theatre. Then she stepped away from acting, as she felt that people in the industry had turned against her. In recent years she was in the news for her struggles with mental illness, including an appearance on the Dr. Phil show in 2016. So it’s nice to see that Duvall overcame the troubles she had been facing to make a return to the screen. As someone who grew up watching Popeye and Faerie Tale Theatre and tends to watch The Shining at least once a year, I find it heartwarming to know that Duvall had the chance to act one more time. Sadly, she passed away before The Forest Hills could make its way out into the world, but at least we have one more performance of hers to see.
That said, she does not play a pleasant character in her return to acting. In this film, she plays Mama, a character who’s introduced with a flashback to the day she decided to lock her young children Rico and Emily inside her car and attempted to gas them with the exhaust fumes. Now Mama has been diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, and reaches out to her estranged son Rico (played as an adult by Chiko Mendez) so he can take care of her in her final days. While there are moments of Duvall scattered throughout the movie, most of her screen time is front-loaded, as the focus soon shifts away from the time Mama and Rico spend together. Rico has other things to deal with, as he’s extremely concerned that there are werewolves lurking in the nearby woods.
The Forest Hills has been marketed as a werewolf movie, and the creatures are a presence in the story. We get glimpses of the things stalking through the woods. But don’t go into this one expecting a straightforward creature feature. This may be the most bizarre head-trip werewolf movie ever made. The official synopsis for the story crafted by Goldberg is “a man is tormented by nightmarish visions after enduring head trauma while camping in the Catskill woods.” That’s the description to keep in mind, because the movie is all about Rico experiencing terrifying hallucinations, losing touch with reality, losing control of himself. The movie trips right along with him, showing us scattered fragments of messed-up moments, so we can never be sure what is actually happening and what is only going on in Rico’s mind. Which is the same problem Rico is having.
Are there werewolves? Is Rico a werewolf? Is he a serial killer? We can’t be sure – but one thing is for sure, and it’s the fact that Chiko Mendez put his all into this performance. We have Shelley Duvall up front and a supporting cast that includes appearances by Sleepaway Camp’s Felissa Rose, The Howling’s Dee Wallace, Halloween III: Season of the Witch’s Stacey Nelkin, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers’ Marianne Hagan, and Terminator 2’s Edward Furlong, but Mendez carries the majority of the film on his shoulders. He has a lot of very intense scenes to play, and he handles it all well, making Rico’s descent into madness completely convincing. His work in this film is quite impressive.
But even though I was impressed by Mendez, had fun spotting familiar faces in the supporting case, and loved seeing Duvall again, I can’t say I found The Forest Hills to be an ideal viewing experience. Trippy, scattered, “is this real or not?” movies just aren’t for me, so this isn’t the sort of movie I would turn to for entertainment. I’m glad I saw it once, but it’s not something I could watch multiple times. Goldberg did a good job of capturing and assembling the images that go with Rico’s mental health crisis, but I would have enjoyed it more if there were a more straightforward approach taken to the storytelling, with a more satisfactory ending. That’s just personal preference, and I’m sure there are plenty of horror fans out there who will be enthralled by the wild ride this movie takes the viewer on.
The Forest Hills is dedicated to the memory of George A. Romero, which was nice to see, since Romero is one of my cinematic heroes. His fellow genre filmmaker John Carpenter also gets a special thanks – and the score Goldberg composed with Mark Nadolski has strong Carpenter vibes at times, even bringing to mind the music Carpenter recently composed (alongside Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies) for Blumhouse’s Halloween sequel trilogy.
This movie is definitely worth checking out to see the actors at work, but if you were expecting a straightforward horror movie about werewolves lurking in the forest, set aside those expectations and prepare for a descent into madness.
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