Eating Family Is Evil

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.

Sherlock Holmes, Dexter, and Halle Berry.

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES (1959)

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about the detective character Sherlock Holmes and his friend / biographer Dr. John H. Watson in four novels and fifty-six short stories, but the one I’m most familiar with, the one I have always been drawn to, is The Hound of the Baskervilles – because, of course, as an obsessive horror fan, I would be most interested in a story that involves a curse and a demonic beast. It makes sense that The Hound of the Baskervilles is also the story that most appealed to the folks at Hammer Films, a company that started building itself up into one of the most popular genre companies of all time after the success of their 1955 release The Quatermass Xperiment – and when they made their adaptation of the story, they were also wise enough to cast their two biggest stars, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

Directed by Terence Fisher, who also worked with Cushing and/or Lee on Dracula and Frankenstein movies (among other things), from a screenplay by Peter Bryan, the film begins with a flashback to show us that Sir Hugo Baskerville was a very bad man. So bad, he absolutely deserved his death, which is said to have come at the fangs and claws of a hound from Hell... and so bad that his family was cursed, forever to suffer misfortune, and always to be in danger if they were to go out into the moor surrounding the Baskerville mansion at the wrong time. Because the hound is still out there.

The legend of the hound is brought to the attention of Sherlock Holmes (Cushing) when the latest Baskerville family member, Sir Charles, was found dead, seemingly of a heart attack, near the mansion – and it’s apparent that he was running for his life when he dropped dead. Now Sir Henry (Lee) has inherited the Baskerville estate, and Sherlock thinks his life is in danger. So he and Watson (André Morell) set out to get to the bottom of what’s going on in the moor. There’s something dangerous out there – but since the Baskerville estate is worth a million pounds, chances are that the danger has something to do with someone’s desire for that wealth rather than a curse on the bloodline.

The Hound of the Baskervilles isn’t exactly a horror story; it’s a mystery that happens to have some weird, creepy stuff going on in it. Hammer and Fisher brought the story with some of the horror style they were establishing at the time, having fun with the idea of a demonic dog running around in the dark of night and moments like the one where Sir Henry is shown to have a tarantula crawling on his arm, or where Sherlock goes down into an old mine. The story moves along at a good pace, the mystery is intriguing, the movie has a nice sense of humor, and Sherlock, Watson, and Sir Henry have some interesting characters to interact with along the way. Of course, we also get to see some terrific performances from the cast.

Ever since I first made my way through Hammer’s Dracula franchise, I’ve felt it was a shame that they didn’t build more of a franchise around Cushing’s Van Helsing. After watching The Hound of the Baskervilles, I also feel it’s a shame that Hammer didn’t end up making a series of Sherlock Holmes movies with Cushing in the lead. This was Hammer’s only Sherlock Holmes movie... but three years later, for a different company, Terence Fisher directed the movie Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, which starred Christopher Lee as the detective. Lee would go on to play Sherlock a couple more times – and so did Cushing, but not for Hammer. He played the character on TV in 1968’s The Sign of Four and 1984’s The Masks of Death. I have never seen any of those other Cushing or Lee Sherlock projects, but I look forward to checking them out.

NEVER LET GO (2024)

Back in 2001, director Bill Paxton and screenwriter Brent Hanley brought the world Frailty, an excellent horror thriller about a single father and his two young sons. One day, the father sees what he believes to be a vision from God. He says an angel visited him and informed him that the devil has set loose demons into the world, and he has been tasked with destroying these demons. Problem is, these "demons" look just like normal  people - but Dad says he can see the evil deeds these demons have committed when he puts his hands on them, and one of his sons says he can see these things, too. The other son doesn't see any of this stuff. He believes his father has gone insane and brainwashed his brother into being complicit in murders. Directed by Alexandre Aja from a screenplay by KC Coughlin and Ryan Grassby, the horror film Never Let Go is quite different from Frailty overall... but while watching it, I couldn’t help thinking about Frailty throughout. At their core, the two movies are similar.

This one stars Halle Berry as Momma, who lives in a cabin in the woods with her two young sons, Nolan (Percy Daggs IV) and Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins). The two kids have never seen the outside world beyond the woods, and Momma tells them that the world has been overtaken by Evil. They’re only safe where they are, and when they go out into the woods to find food, they have to wear ropes that keep them securely tied to the cabin. If they ever let go of the rope, they can be taken by the Evil, which is often represented by zombie-like beings that only Momma seems to be able to see.

Even though they have no proof that what Momma tells them is true, Samuel believes it wholeheartedly. Nolan, on the other hand, is starting to have doubts... and this movie is the story of how everything falls apart in that cabin in the woods.

I tend to side with the skeptics in stories like this, so I was fully on Nolan’s side, wanting to find out the truth and getting irritated with Momma and Samuel any time they would hold him back or give him grief. The movie was a bit too long at over 101 minutes, but I was interested and invested the whole way. (While also comparing the movie to Frailty again and again.) 

Unfortunately, the ending didn’t work very well for me, so I can’t say this was an entirely satisfying viewing experience, but it was pretty good up until the final moments.

I highly recommend that any fan of horror movies or thrillers check out Frailty. Never Let Go is worth a look, but it’s a much weaker recommendation.

DEXTER SEASON SIX (2011)

I have seen some fans of the Showtime series Dexter say that season 6 was the worst season of the show – and now that I have watched it, I can wholeheartedly agree that this was the worst batch of episodes so far... and I really hope that I won’t find any of the following seasons to be worse than this one.

New showrunner Scott Buck took over as of this season (and would remain at the head of the writers room for the next two seasons), and something is off about it from the start. The tone is weird, with some really goofy scenes popping up here and there, and there are multiple occasions throughout the season’s twelve episodes where the title character does things that are completely out of character for him – so much so, it’s a bit surprising that the actor, Michael C. Hall, even agreed to go along with some of these things.

Dexter Morgan is a blood spatter analyst for the Miami Metro Police Department who also happens to be a serial killer, but he was raised by his foster father, the late Detective Harry Morgan (played by James Remar) to direct his homicidal urges not toward innocent people, but toward the deserving: murderers who don’t live by this code of not harming the innocent. So he could be considered a vigilante. While Dexter will kill people here and there throughout seasons, he’s usually tracking one major serial killer along the way, and the focus of this season is a guy called the Doomsday Killer. Colin Hanks plays Travis Marshall, a young man who does some terrible things under the guidance of Professor Gellar (Edward James Olmos), the idea being that they’ll somehow be able to bring about the Biblical end of the world just by killing some people and creating tableaus that represent moments in the book of Revelation. It’s not the most interesting serial killer Dexter has gone up against, not even close, but that storyline works well enough and causes plenty of trouble for Dexter. The most problematic moments don’t involve the Doomsday Killer, but some of the scenarios Dexter finds himself in – and, as mentioned, the way Dexter behaves in some moments.

The religious aspect of the season is increased by the fact that Dexter ends up befriending a reformed murderer called Brother Sam (Mos), a friendship that has an interesting impact on him.

Another questionable element of this season involves Dexter’s foster sister Debra Morgan (Jennifer Carpenter), a homicide detective who is promoted to Lieutenant. That’s an interesting turn of events – the questionable scenes come when Debra starts attending therapy sessions with Dr. Michelle Ross (Rya Kihlstedt), who encourages some things I would think most therapists would discourage.

Dexter season 6 is fine overall, but there are enough missteps that it ends up paling in comparison to the seasons that came before.