Worth Mentioning - A Nightmare of Illusion

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. 

Cody starts the year with his favorite genre, horror.

SPELLBINDER (1988)

I have watched a whole lot of '80s horror movies, but director Janet Greek's 1988 film Spellbinder wasn't on my radar until star Kelly Preston passed away in July of 2020. Blog contributor Priscilla and I had a memorial marathon of Preston movies soon after hearing the sad news, and since my managing editor at ArrowintheHead.com had brought Spellbinder to my attention when I was writing an article on Preston's passing, I decided to include the movie in the line-up. I was glad I did, because it turned out to be a really good, interesting supernatural horror movie.

Written by Tracy Torme, the film stars Tim Daly as Jeff Mills, a character who is said to be from Seneca County in Ohio, which is very close to where I grew up. Now he's living in Los Angeles, and while out with friends one night he witnesses an argument between Miranda Reed (Preston) and her boyfriend Aldys (Anthony Crivello). When things get too heated and physical, Jeff and his buddy Derek (Rick Rossovich) step in and chase Aldys off. Since Miranda lives with Aldys, she now has nowhere to go. So Jeff takes her back to his place. Then she demonstrates both psychic abilities - she knows most of Jeff's history just by reading his palm - and the power to extract pain from a person's body. She fixes Jeff's lower back, and from that point they're in a relationship.

There are some people who would run screaming if someone they were interested in turned out to have psychic and magical abilities, and things would've gone more smoothly for Jeff if he had refrained from becoming intimate with Miranda. Soon he's receiving threats from a woman played by Audra Lindley from Three's Company and being confronted by Aldys, who has a whole lot of lackeys. Aldys also reveals that he has magic powers of his own, and can even make Jeff's car levitate just by gesturing at it. If he had used these powers that night Jeff and Derek stopped his fight with Miranda, she wouldn't have gotten away from him in the first place.

What's going on here? How do Aldys and his cohorts have supernatural abilities? Could it be... Satan? Yes, it could be. It is. But can a Satanic cult penetrate the defenses of Jeff's client Brock, who's played by M.C. Gainey and has a compound equipped with steel-reinforced walls, barbed wire fences, heat sensors, and some major firepower? I won't answer that question, but I will say Torme and Greek don't deliver the action that set-up leads you to expect.

Spellbinder could have been a bit cooler, but it is still cool as it is. The story plays out in an intriguing way, there are some great moments, and yes, the Seneca County shout-out definitely earned it some extra points. This is another movie to add to the long list of awesome '80s horror.

GHOST KILLERS VS. BLOODY MARY (2018)

Danilo Gentili is a popular comedian in Brazil who first came to my attention with his role in the romantic comedy The Dognapper (Mato Sem Cachorro), which was from the writer/producer of a horror movie I visited the set of, The Trace We Leave Behind (O Rastro). Gentili now hosts a late night talk show called The Noite, so the fact that he stars in, produced, and co-wrote the horror comedy Ghost Killers vs. Bloody Mary (Exterminadores do Além Contra a Loira do Banheiro) is sort of the equivalent of Jimmy Kimmel or Jimmy Fallon making a horror comedy. But if they did so, I get the feeling that it wouldn't be nearly as outrageous as Gentili's movie is.

Directed by Fabrício Bittar from a script he wrote with Gentili and Andre Catarinacho, Ghost Killers vs. Bloody Mary gets laughs from inappropriate dialogue and extreme gross-out gags. There is something in here to shock, disgust, and possibly offend pretty much everyone... which is exactly why certain viewers will find it to be highly entertaining and amusing.

Gentili stars as Jackson, part of a ghost hunting trio that isn't having much success uploading their videos to YouTube. His fellow ghost hunters are Fred (Léo Lins) and Caroline (Dani Calabresa), and then there's their behind-the-scenes pal Túlio (Murilo Couto), who fakes the paranormal activity seen in their videos. Lins, Calabresa, and Couto are all, like Gentili, known for their work in comedy; all three of them have done stand-up, and Calabresa is even a silly stage name, because calabresa is a type of sausage. At the recommendation of a student who happens to be a fan (even though he torments the group with his comments), these Caça-Assombrações are called to help out at Isaac Newton High, which they claim is haunted by the Brazilian urban legend loira do banheiro, or "the Blonde in the Bathroom". She's not exactly Bloody Mary, which is why a kid is shown summoning her by the name Catarina at the start of the film, but she's a version thereof.

The ghost hunters think they're going to be faking another video and plan for Túlio to run around the place disguised as the blonde - but this turns out to be quite the real, hardcore haunting. This little blonde makes things happen that are almost on the level of the Deadite forces in The Evil Dead. Although there are only the ghost hunters, a few faculty members, and their young fan "Legendary Thanos" (Matheus Ueta) in the building, the rooms and hallways still end up coated in blood, and there are moments that are nearly as disgusting as the grossest scenes from the Ash vs. Evil Dead series. The movie probably didn't need to be 109 minutes long, but it's a good time nonetheless.

COME PLAY (2020)

My expectations for writer/director Jacob Chase's horror movie Come Play were as low as they can get. The story is about a monster that is able to use modern technology like smartphones, smart TVs, and tablets to enter our world and mess with people, a concept that didn't sound all that promising to me. But Chase, who first brought the idea to the screen with a 2017 short film, made it into something interesting. I wouldn't call it a new classic or rank its monster - which is called Larry - as anything special, but I was entertained and invested throughout the 96 minute running time.

Come Play centers on non-verbal autistic boy named Oliver, and the movie wouldn't work as well as it does if Chase hadn't cast that role perfectly. Azhy Robertson did a great job playing this character. Gillian Jacobs of the Fear Street films and John Gallagher Jr. of 10 Cloverfield Lane also do fine work as Oliver's mother Sarah and his worthless dad Marty. I also have to say that Winslow Fegley was awesome in the role of Byron, a bullying classmate of Oliver's who turns out to have some depth once the horror kicks in.

Oliver accidentally summons Larry into his life by clicking on an app called Misunderstood Monsters, which starts telling the story of this monster Larry who's looking for a kid to be his friend. As soon as this app tells Oliver about Larry, Larry is lurking around, trying to make him his friend. And being friends with Larry is not a good thing to be.

Chase tells this tech-based story in a much better way than I imagined it would be told, and he and his cast are able to make us care about the characters while we watch Larry give them all sorts of trouble. Come Play sounded like something that could be easily missed when I first heard about it, but it's actually a decent flick.