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.
CULT OF CHUCKY (2017)
If there's one major compliment you can give the Child's Play / Chucky franchise, it's that these movies are not content to just keep doing the same thing over and over. Each entry is built around the concept of a foul-mouthed killer doll, but the series is always evolving. That keeps things fresh and interesting, but it can also be risky, as not every fan is going to like the changes. I was on board when the darker first three films were followed by the horror comedy of Bride of Chucky, but I wasn't pleased with the goofball Hollywood satire of Seed of Chucky or the stripped-down, reboot-esque Curse of Chucky. A lot of fans weren't on board with Cult of Chucky, which is a descent into madness, and this turned out to be quite a divisive sequel... but for me, Cult of Chucky was much more appealing than Seed or Curse.
Franchise writer Don Mancini made his feature directorial debut with Seed of Chucky, which was a gutsy move given that Ronny Yu had brought such visual flair to Bride of Chucky. I don't think that worked out very well, but Mancini remained at the helm for Curse and Cult - and I find Cult to be quite visually impressive. The film is set in the blank, white, sterile rooms and halls of a remote psychiatric hospital that's surrounded by snow-covered countryside, and Mancini drops some trippy, occasionally beautiful sights into the film, while using tricks like split-screen and split diopters. The movie looks great, and unlike many fans I also really like the story Mancini tells in this one.
Our lead character is Nica Pierce (Fiona Dourif), someone I didn't care about when she was introduced in Curse of Chucky. Four years down the line, she has gotten more interesting. She has spent that time in psychiatric hospitals, accused of committing the murders that were actually carried out by Chucky in the previous films, and through the use of methods like electroshock and hypnosis the scumbag Dr. Foley (Michael Therriault), an even worse shrink than Dr. Crews in Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, has managed to convince Nica that she was guilty. Now she has been transferred to the medium security Harrogate Psychiatric Hospital, where she's surrounded by people who have very serious problems, including a guy (played by Adam Hurtig) she has sex with before finding out his has multiple personalities.
Trouble starts when Chucky dolls start showing up at the hospital. Foley pulls one out during a group therapy session, Chucky's old flame Tiffany Valentine (Jennifer Tilly) - now inhabiting the body of actress Jennifer Tilly thanks to the ridiculous Seed - brings one to the place... and one of these dolls is the actual Chucky, voiced as always by the great Brad Dourif, who immediately sets out to kill Nica, or at least everyone around her.
But there's something very strange here. A scene at the end of Curse of Chucky showed us Chucky arriving at the home of his old target Andy Barclay (played by Alex Vincent, who played the character as a child in Child's Play and Child's Play 2) and being greeted with a shotgun blast to the face. Andy still has Chucky's living, talking head in his home, he hangs out with it and tortures it... so if Chucky is at Andy's, how is he also killing people at Harrogate?
This is the descent into the madness I was talking about, and it's not just because most of the characters are troubled people who can't believe their own eyes. Mancini is changing the rules on us. Not in a small way, like the moment in Curse where Chucky got his head knocked off and was just a plastic doll, when he had been in the doll body long enough that he should have had human blood pumping through him by that point. This is something major. And this rule change is why some fans rejected Cult of Chucky. I understand that, it's quite a shake-up, it totally makes sense that some fans would feel it's going too far. I don't even think it was necessary, but I don't mind it and I like the movie that happens around it too much to be bothered.
Mancini put me off with Seed and didn't win me back with the crowd-pleasing Curse, but he got me with the controversial Cult. That's how it goes with a series that's always evolving - different fans will like and dislike different installments.
THE NIGHT FLIER (1997)
In his novel The Dead Zone, Stephen King had a reporter named Richard Dees pester the psychic lead character about contributing to the tabloid he worked for, Inside View. Years later, King revisited Dees in his short story The Night Flier - and when director Mark Pavia turned The Night Flier into a feature film, the Richard Dees character was brought to life by the great Miguel Ferrer.
Edited by Merton Morrison (Dan Monahan), Inside View is a trashy publication that covers stories about things like alien abduction, amusing animals, attacks on the handicapped, battered wives, bizarre body functions, breast surgery mishaps, messed up celebrities, and demonic possession. So when they catch word that someone calling themselves Dwight Renfield, an homage to the 1931 version of Dracula, is flying their personal plane around between country airfields, landing in the night and draining people of their blood, this sounds like something that would be right up their alley. Merton offers the story to his star reporter Richard Dees, who has been so successful because he never believes what he publishes and never publishes what he believes. Dees turns the story down at first, thinking "the Night Flier" is going to be caught soon... but when the Night Flier strikes again and gets away clean, Dees snatches the story out from new hire Katherine Blair (Julie Entwisle), who he mockingly calls Jimmy (as in Jimmy Olsen). Dees was better suited for the job, since he also has a pilot license and his own plane, but he's still a raging jerk. Don't feel too bad for Blair; Dees has such an awful attitude during calls back to the office, Merton sends her out into the field to conduct her own Night Flier investigation.
The Night Flier had an odd release at the end of 1997 / start of 1998, showing up on HBO three months before it received a small theatrical release, a strategy that didn't result in much success. It deserved better, because I would actually count this as one of the best King adaptations, and it's also among the most underseen and underrated. Pavia and co-writer Jack O'Donnell did a great job of building King's story into a 93 minute feature, and Ferrer is terrific as Dees, one of the least likeable lead characters you could ask for. He's the sort of scumbag who will take pictures of any random corpse he comes across, just in case the next issue of Inside View needs some extra shock and gore. The fact that our lead is so sleazy adds to the unsettling feeling that hangs over the entire film.
The film also shines in its presentation of the vampire pilot Dees is following the trail of. This guy... or this thing... even wears a cape, but Pavia shoots it in such a way that the cape works for it, it doesn't come off as a silly image. The Night Flier and Dees are on a collision course, and what sort of terrible things are going to happen when they meet face-to-face?
Pavia wanted to make a sequel to The Night Flier, and even got King to write the script with him. The movie would have been called Fear of Flying... but since the first movie wasn't a hit, funding couldn't be secured for a follow-up. The idea of so many financiers turning the project down, saying "Nah, we're not in the Stephen King vampire business", that's crazy to me.
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (2007)
"Oren Peli won the lottery" is the main thought that comes into my mind when I watch the writer/director's feature debut Paranormal Activity, which he shot on a home video camera in his own house over the course of a week, with a budget of $15,000. This little found footage movie not only ended up in the hands of Jason Blum, who would go on to become the biggest producer in horror, it was even seen by Steven Spielberg, who wanted to produce a DreamWorks remake of it. Then when DreamWorks saw how effective the movie was when screened with an audience, they had their parent company Paramount just release it - although they did have Peli tinker with the ending a bit, and the new ending they financed somehow cost $200,000. It was money well spent, because Paranormal Activity made almost $200 million at the box office when it was released in October of 2009, two years after its first festival screening.
The story is incredibly simple. A young woman named Katie (Katie Featherston) feels that she's being revisited by a supernatural entity that had previously haunted her when she was a little kid, so her boyfriend Micah (Micah Sloat) buys a new camera and sets out to document the paranormal activity happening in their home. Nothing happens for the majority of the movie. There are strange noises in the house, a door swings open by itself, Katie does some creepy sleepwalking. The activity gradually intensifies, though, and Peli makes the audience worry how bad it's going to get... and which night is going to be the night when everything goes to hell.
Conversations about what this thing might be help build the tension. An expert says it isn't a ghost, it's a demon. What does it want? It wants Katie. While Katie grows more terrified, Micah makes every wrong move because he doesn't take the situation seriously. He shoves the camera in Katie's face all the time, he thinks the paranormal activity is "cool" instead of scary, he goes against Katie's wishes and brings an Ouija board into the house. He wants the notoriety that will come with documenting something like this, and he's a major douche. Katie and Micah are the only characters we have to watch most of the time, and one of them isn't even likeable. But the performances of the two make the movie work as well as it does. Katie Featherston was great in this, and I would like to see her work a lot more outside of the Paranormal Activity franchise. Even when she showed up in the sequels it was just quick cameos, and that's a shame.
I don't think Paranormal Activity is particularly scary, but it is one of the rare found footage movies that I can actually tolerate sitting through.
V/H/S/94 (2021)
After a seven year break, the V/H/S found footage anthology series continues with V/H/S/94, which consists of five segments (including the wrap-around story) from a mixture of franchise veterans and newcomers. The V/H/S movies have always been the sort of anthologies to have different directors handle each segment in the films, and this time around the contributors were Jennifer Reeder (Knives and Skin), short filmmaker Chloe Okuno, Simon Barrett (who contributed to the first two movies and also directed the film Seance), Ryan Prows (Lowlife), and Timo Tjahjanto, who previously co-directed (with Gareth Evans) the Safe Haven segment of V/H/S/2, one of the most popular entries in the franchise.
Reeder took on the unenviable task of directing the wrap-around, and was warned up front that these segments are “notoriously hard” and that people “mostly don’t like the wrap-arounds”. So she came up with a story that’s called Holy Hell and follows a SWAT team that thinks they’re raiding a compound to make a major drug bust. Instead they find a death cult that likes to spend their time watching video tapes of horrific, usually paranormal events – and after they’ve consumed a bunch of this creepy stuff, they remove their eyeballs. The other segments that make up the film are videos being shown on TV sets in the cult’s compound.
The first one we dive into is Okuno’s segment Storm Drain, which starts off as a fun play on that real-life viral news clip about people in Alabama thinking their neighborhood has been invaded by a leprechaun. In Okuno’s take on concept, we find people in a neighborhood thinking a “rat man” is lurking in the local sewer system. This segment really captured my attention and imagination when I realized the setting is Westerville, a suburb of Columbus in my home state of Ohio. So on a personal level, Storm Drain entertained me by telling me there’s a rat monster in a real city that I have spent some time in. But even without that personal connection, Storm Drain is a fine way to get things started, with the amusing elements of the initial news footage quickly being overtaken by a very creepy tone as the reporter and her cameraman venture deeper into the sewer tunnels. This will probably be a lot of viewers’ first time seeing something by Okuno, it was my first time watching anything she has made, and it’s a promising introduction that balances horror and humor very well.
Next is Barrett’s segment Empy Wake, which is set in a funeral home and shot by three cameras that have been set up around a room to record the closed casket wake of a man they say was killed in a terrible accident that destroyed his face and head. One funeral employee is tasked with supervising the wake while her co-workers go home, and from the moment one of departing employees notices that the casket has moved slightly, it’s obvious where this segment is going. It takes its time getting there, though, making us watch several minutes of one person sitting in a room with a casket, waiting for someone… anyone… to stop by for the wake. Once Empty Wake decides to show us what we’ve been expecting, it is fun for a moment. I’m a fan of a lot of Barrett’s work (among other things, he wrote The Guest and You’re Next), but I found this segment to be the weakest part of the film.
Tjahjanto provided V/H/S/2 with its longest segment and he does the same for V/H/S/94, as his segment The Subject takes up 29 minutes of the 103 minute running time. This one finds a mad scientist filming himself as he conducts experiments on human subjects in a dingy underground lab, doing things like sticking a severed head on a mechanical spider body. The guy is interesting to watch, but it takes a while before we’re shown anything other than him tinkering around. In this case, however, the pay-off is absolutely worth the wait. When the authorities come busting into the lab (with a camera of their own, of course), this Frankenstein’s mechanical monsters are unleashed on them and the result is a glorious bloodbath. It’s the most exciting thing in the movie and should have been the end, because you’re never going to be able to top a Tjahjanto massacre packed with insane special effects. There’s some less-than-convincing CGI in there along the way, but that doesn’t take away from the fun too much.
It feels like the film has already reached its rousing climax by the time the segment directed by Prows begins, forcing the viewer to come down a bit to connect with the story he’s telling. But despite its placement, this is a very good stretch of the film that centers on a militia’s plan to carry out a domestic terror attack on a federal building. Whatever they’re doing, it involves “detonating the abomination”, so rest assured that there is a classic horror element in this segment. Prows lays out the story well and it builds to some nice action, but not as much action as The Subject delivers, so this segment, titled Terror, should have been placed before Tjahjanto’s.
Between segments, we get updates on that SWAT raid and see the situation fall apart piece by piece. In an interview with Cinapse, Reeder joked that she hoped her wrap-around wouldn’t be “the most hated wrap-around of all the hated wrap-arounds”, and I think she’s safe from that fate. Holy Hell is fine. It does the job.
I wasn’t on board for a lot of the first V/H/S and felt that V/H/S/2 was a big improvement, then I liked V/H/S: Viral even less than the first one. V/H/S/94 I would rank up there alongside V/H/S/2 – and in fact, would probably even choose to watch this one over part 2. Most of the segments worked really well for me, and even when the movie wasn’t working for me I didn’t think it was bad, just underwhelming. I also feel that setting the entire movie in 1994 was beneficial, because for the first time there’s no questioning why every story plays out on VHS. I know the overall idea of the franchise is that these videos gain some kind of supernatural power when transferred to VHS, but it always felt very strange to me when previous movies would have segments shot through devices like webcams and bionic eyes. Everything was on VHS from the start here, even if the camera happened to be built into a science experiment’s head.
If you had asked me any time in the last seven years if I wanted to see another V/H/S movie I would have had a negative response, but now we do have another V/H/S movie and it’s actually pretty good.
The review of V/H/S/94 originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
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