Worth Mentioning - One Blow from Caving In

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. 

Overlooked horror, a drive-in hit, and some comedy.

SWEETHEART (2019)

Sweetheart is a low budget, 82 minute creature feature that went straight onto VOD back in October of 2019. It came and went without anyone saying much about it, and the VOD release made it seem like Universal Pictures and Blumhouse Productions were just tossing it aside and burying it. So when I got around to watching it within the last week, I didn't have high hopes for it. And then I found out that having low expectations for Sweetheart just allowed the film to be all that more impressive to me. This is a really cool, well-crafted movie.

Kiersey Clemons stars as Jenn, who washes up onto a deserted island with a friend who is dying of an injury to the abdomen. That friend is gone within minutes, leaving Jenn to fend for herself on this island in the middle of nowhere. There's no land in the distance, no boats going by, just the occasional plane flying overhead to give Jenn a sliver of hope that she might be rescued. If being a castaway wasn't bad enough, Jenn also has to deal with the fact that some kind of voracious creature lives in the water near the island, and every night this thing comes wading up onto the beach to see what it can eat - whether that be a fish that Jenn has caught, or the corpse of her dead friend. And it really seems interested in chowing down on Jenn herself.

Directed by J.D. Dillard from a screenplay he wrote with Alex Hyner and Alex Theurer, Sweetheart is a fascinating film that Clemons carries almost entirely by herself, even when she's being rather quiet for long stretches of time. It's very interesting to see how Dillard and his collaborators lay out the information in the film, the way we learn exactly how Jenn ended up on this island, who she was at sea with, even why the movie is called Sweetheart. The viewer will be wondering these things, and will find out the answers, but they don't come immediately.

Dillard also did a good job with the way he presented the creature. This thing is brought to life with both a man in a suit and with CGI effects that are used when it moves in a way a man in a suit wouldn't be able to. We see a good amount of the creature, but it's also concealed a lot of the time, and there's a jaw-dropping early tease of it where it's backlit by the glow of a flare. 

This is a movie that deserves a lot more attention than it has gotten so far. I would recommend it to any fan of horror movies and creature features.

THE WRETCHED (2019)

There are a lot of movies I was hoping to have seen on the big screen by this point in the year. Marvel's Black Widow. The sequel to A Quiet Place. The latest James Bond movie, No Time to Die. But due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all of those movies got delayed and the theatres were closed. And then a seemingly outdated venue started experiencing a resurgence. Brick and mortar theatres had to close, but drive-in theatres were able to open, since their patrons are social distancing by sitting in different cars. I was very glad to see that some drive-ins were able to thrive during the pandemic, because I love the drive-in movie-going experience and really want to see drive-ins make a big time comeback.

It was thanks to drive-ins that The Wretched, a low budget horror movie written and directed by Brett Pierce and Drew T. Pierce, was able to become a notable success at the U.S. box office. The Invisible Man and The Hunt have been showing at drive-ins for months, and then The Wretched arrived on May 1st and did much better than it would have been expected to if it had been released into theatres that were also showing Black Widow, A Quiet Place Part II, and No Time to Die.

The film stars John-Paul Howard as Ben, a teenager who has been sent to spend some time with his father Liam (Jamison Jones) after getting in trouble that involved breaking and entering, theft, drugs, and a broken arm. While staying with his dad, Ben works a job at a marina, and from what we see of his job it seems like this would have been the perfect job for the lead in an '80s teen comedy to have. At the marina, Ben meets Mallory (Piper Curda), who becomes his potential love interest. 

But this isn't a comedy or a teenage romance, and things enter a territory reminiscent of Fright Night when Ben begins to suspect that his next door neighbor Abbie (Zarah Mahler) is a forest-dwelling, mind-controlling, shape-shifting witch who devours children. Ben is correct about that, that is exactly what Abbie is.

The Wretched is a really good horror movie with an admirable focus on character. We get to care about Ben over the course of the film, and get emotionally invested in his mission to try to stop Abbie and save the children she has abducted. The movie also has a very cool tie back to one of my favorite films, Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead. Brett and Drew Pierce are the sons of Bart Pierce, who did effects work on The Evil Dead; in fact, the disgusting meltdowns at the end of that movie were shot in the Pierce family basement soon after Brett and Drew were born. If you watch The Wretched with that in mind, you can kind of see a bit of Evil Dead DNA in there, with the woodsy aspect of the witch, the fact that a cellar is important to the story, and a certain sound in the musical score composed by Devin Burrows that sounds very much like Joseph LoDuca's Evil Dead score.

I had a good time watching The Wretched, and I'm glad so many people have had the chance to see it at the drive-in.

THE LOVEBIRDS (2020)

I have been a fan of Michael Showalter ever since MTV began airing the sketch show he was a part of, The State, back in 1993. The humor of The State has been described as "extremely bizarre", but even though I was just a little kid when it was on, I thought it was brilliant. I loved that show and was disappointed that it ended after just a couple years. Thankfully, most of the people who were involved with The State have gone on to great success, and I have been following their careers all this time. So when I saw that Showalter had directed The Lovebirds, the movie became a must-watch for me. Blog contributor Priscilla, who I have been riding out the virus lockdown with, wanted to watch it as well, so I got to check out The Lovebirds just a few days after it arrived on the Netflix streaming service.

The Lovebirds stars Kumail Nanjiani, who I have seen in a couple things before, as Jibran, and Issa Rae, who I haven't seen in anything before even though she even has her own HBO series called Insecure, as Leilani. Jibran and Leilani have been dating for four years, and their relationship crumbles right at the start of the film, during an argument in their car. But before they can part ways, a man claiming to be a cop commandeers the vehicle and uses it to run over a man on a bicycle. Multiple times. Clearly he's not out for justice.

Afraid they're going to take the blame for the murder, Jibran and Leilani go on the run and take it upon themselves to figure out who the fake cop was and why he wanted to kill the guy on the bicycle so they can clear their names and get the real murderer captured. While on this quest, they cross paths with Anna Camp as a threatening woman, an apartment packed with blackmailing frat bros, and some people who think plague doctor masks are the height of fashion. Much like Jibran and Leilani, I didn't know what was going on here, but unlike them I thoroughly enjoyed the ride.

The story crafted by Aaron Abrams, Brendan Gall, and Martin Gero isn't exactly breaking new ground, there are a lot of movies about couples reviving their relationships by enduring extraordinary circumstances, but originality doesn't matter here, all that matters is whether or not the movie brings the laughs, and I found The Lovebirds to be quite amusing. The situations Jibran and Leilani find themselves in are interesting, things move along at a nice pace, and Nanjiani and Rae are both very funny in their roles. I'm not that familiar with them, but I'm a fan of both of them after seeing them in this.

COUNTDOWN (2019)

When you describe the basic concept of writer/director Justin Dec's film Countdown, it sounds like it's going to be ridiculous. It's about people who download an app called Countdown to their smartphones when they hear it will tell them the exact moment of their deaths, down to the seconds. The app tells many users that they're going to live long lives - but some young people are shocked to see that the app only expects them to live a few more days. It's easy to brush this app's death predictions aside as nonsense, but then the people who were told they would be dying soon really do end up dying exactly when Countdown said they would, and it's clearly some kind of evil supernatural force that's knocking them off.

A killer app. Ridiculous. And yet I enjoyed this movie. I'm not saying it's great, but I found it to be entertaining, and there were two cast members who greatly enhanced my enjoyment.

Elizabeth Lail stars as nurse Quinn Harris, who downloads the app out of curiosity when a patient says it told him he would die soon, and he believes it because his girlfriend died exactly when Countdown said she would. Quinn is one of the unlucky ones that is only given a few days, and so is her younger sister Jordan (Talitha Batemen), who is predicted to die a few minutes before Quinn. So once Quinn is convinced that Countdown is real - and the scary visions she starts having help her come to this conclusion - she has to figure out how to stop the app not just for her own safety, but for her sister's as well. Along the way, Quinn is joined in this endeavor by Matt (Jordan Calloway), a young man who has also been given a short time to live by the app.

Quinn and Matt's quest leads them to a man of science and a man of faith - Tom Segura as cell phone store owner Derek, who has rude interactions with customers and tries to hack the app, and P.J. Byrne as Father John, who is able to tie this cursed app to a mythological story and is quite enthusiastic about getting the chance to thwart a demon. Segura and Byrne are both hilarious in their roles, and livened up a film that could have been another run-of-the-mill PG-13 supernatural horror movie. Countdown was Dec's feature debut, and after seeing how he wrote the Derek and Father John characters and worked with Segura and Byrne, I'm convinced that he could deliver a really fun comedy in the future.