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.
This week we have shark thrills, a Stephen King documentary, and a horror anthology.
THE REEF (2010)
Written and directed by Andrew Traucki, The Reef starts out looking like it could be a pleasant little movie. Luke (Damian Walshe-Howling) has been hired to deliver a yacht to its owner by sailing it from Australia to Indonesia, and he’s joined on this journey by his pal Matt (Gyton Grantley), Matt's girlfriend Suzie (Adrienne Pickering), and Matt's sister Kate (Zoe Naylor) – who also happens to be Luke’s ex-girlfriend. But while Kate has said she needed a break from their relationship, it looks like that break might be coming to an end. Luke and Kate quickly start reconnecting during the yachting trip. And if Traucki had wanted to, he could have made this a movie about love being rekindled during a nice ride across the sea.
But that’s not what The Reef is. 17 minutes into the movie, the yacht hits the titular reef and springs a leak. In just two minutes, it has flipped upside down, leaving Luke, Matt, Suzie, Kate, and crew member Warren (Kieran Darcy-Smith) to ride on the bottom of the badly damaged boat and hope it won’t sink any further. Most of the characters decide they need to be proactive. Help is probably not going to come for them, they’re in the middle of nowhere. So Luke suggests they swim ten or twelve miles to a place called Turtle Island. His friends are open to the idea, but Warren is not. He has fished in these waters. He knows they’re in shark territory.
But Luke and his cohorts are undeterred. Warren stays on the flipped yacht while the other four start swimming for Turtle Island. And sure enough, they catch the attention of a shark that proceeds to relentlessly stalk them for the duration of their long swim, occasionally coming close enough to strike.
There have been a lot of shark thrillers made over the years, and most of them aren’t very effective. The Reef is. It is quite creepy to watch Luke, Matt, Suzie, and Kate make their way through the water, never knowing when the shark is going to take its chance to start tearing into their flesh. The situation starts to seem hopeless, the movie actually ends up feeling quite bleak. This is not a very pleasant watch... which is why I didn’t write it up when I first watched it a few years ago. It was a bit too dark for me. Rewatching it now, it still makes for an intense viewing experience, and I have to give Traucki credit. He made an effective shark movie. If you want to watch a shark thriller, this is definitely a thrilling one.
The following reviews originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
PENNYWISE: THE STORY OF IT (2021)
With their documentary Pennywise: The Story of It, directors John Campopiano and Chris Griffiths have (along with Gary Smart, who is credited as writer with Campopiano) delivered a great treat for die-hard fans of the 1990 mini-series adaptation of Stephen King’s epic horror novel It. Well, given the film’s 126 minute running time, it’s more than just a treat. It’s more like a feast.
Pennywise is packed with information, interviews with cast members, comments from crew members, behind-the-scenes footage. Stephen King didn’t sit down for a new interview with the filmmakers, but you do get to hear from him through archival footage. Fans who absolutely love the 1990 version of It will probably be enraptured for every minute of Pennywise, getting a chance to peek behind the curtain to see and hear what went into the making of the mini-series and to catch up with the cast all these years later. More casual fans might want to break their viewing up over multiple sessions (and the documentary is already broken up into chapters, so that’s helpful), otherwise you might experience information overload. And possibly start to find that spending so much time behind-the-scenes of It can get a bit dull.
Campopiano, Griffiths, and Smart clearly did their best to cover everything someone could possibly want to know about It. The documentary starts with footage of King telling a crowd about the moment that inspired him to start building the story of It, and it goes from there, letting us know step-by-step how the mini-series came to be. Lawrence D. Cohen discusses writing the adaptation, at first working with director George A. Romero to craft a mini-series that was originally going to be at least twice as long as the one we got. When ABC decided they wanted the mini-series to be shorter, Romero left and was replaced by Tommy Lee Wallace. It ended up being four hours, split over two nights. And when Cohen had to move on to another project, Wallace was left having to rewrite the Night 2 script by himself. To this day, he’s still not as satisfied with Night 2 as he is with Night 1 (which he calls a masterpiece).
The filmmakers are so enamored with every aspect of It, they even dedicate an entire chapter to coulrophobia and try to figure out why so many people are afraid of clowns. That seemed like a largely unnecessary 9 minute tangent that could have been lifted out, and the documentary could have benefited from trims here and there to get it to a shorter running time. Thankfully, all of the documentary’s other chapters are more directly focused on the mini-series. We hear about the casting, learn who was considered for the Pennywise role before Tim Curry signed on, get all the info on assembling the actors that play our heroes as children and adults. We’re told how the child and adult actors got along and how filming went in Vancouver. And we get some insight into how the special effects were brought to the screen.
Much of the behind-the-scenes footage comes from the FX crew, and some of the most interesting moments of the documentary deal with the effects they created. Including how they found the look of Pennywise himself. It was even interesting to hear how the sewer pipe was prepared for the Deadlights scene. Yes, the disappointment of the infamous spider ending is addressed along the way, and this documentary lets us see exactly how that controversial spider worked and how the cast interacted with it on set.
Sadly, we’ve lost a few prominent members of the cast over the years and their absence is felt in the documentary. Most of the surviving cast members are present to share their memories of their experiences working on the mini-series and to pay tribute to the ones who aren’t with us any longer.
If you’re not a fan of It, there is some chance that this documentary could sell you on the merits of the mini-series, especially if you watch it as a series of featurettes rather than one long feature. If you’re a casual fan, you’ll probably appreciate hearing the cast and crew reminisce. A good portion of the information is quite interesting, but the documentary does get a bit tough to continue sitting through at a point. If you love the Tommy Lee Wallace version of It, you’re going to love this documentary. Pennywise: The Story of It is for you. A two hour celebration.
ALLEGORIA (2022)
About twenty years after his brother Rob Zombie made his feature directorial debut, and eleven years after he was credited for “conceiving” the short-lived horror comedy TV show Death Valley, Powerman 5000 frontman Spider One has made his own feature directorial debut with the horror anthology Allegoria. It’s a clever way to get a career started, because Spider One really shot five separate short films, each of them primarily filmed in just one location, then was able to assemble them into one feature-length movie. Unlike most other anthology movies, there is no host to guide us through this one. The movie just bounces from one segment to the next. But the short segments fit together because they reference each other and all follow the same theme: each one deals with the arts in some way. And in each one, art goes terribly wrong for the characters.
Allegoria gets off to a jarring start. The opening segment largely consists of John Ennis – playing acting teacher Robert Anderson Wright – screaming lines at his students, speaking at an ear-splitting volume. It’s instantly irritating, and the only way to get through it is to focus on the amount of spit that flies out of Ennis’s mouth with every word he speaks. This flying spittle is perfectly captured in the lighting, the air is filled with his mouth juice. It brought to mind the advice Gary Oldman gives in an episode of Friends, “(Spitting) is what real actors do! Enunciating is the mark of a good actor, and when you enunciate, you spit!” Judging by that, Robert Anderson Wright is clearly the greatest actor who ever lived. Being an acting coach is therefore the perfect vocation for him. And thankfully, he’s the first artist to get horror shoved in his face.
The next artist is a painter named Marcus (Bryce Johnson). There’s not much to his segment other than a couple phone calls, but it does feature an unnerving special makeup effect. Then we move on to another artist, Eddie Park (Edward Hong), who is introduced just as he’s finishing the first draft of his slasher movie screenplay. He’ll be left wishing he had written about some lighter subject matter. At this point, it was starting to feel to me like Allegoria was improving with each new segment. The first had been annoying, the second was underwhelming, the third was slightly more interesting… and then things really started to work for me with the fourth segment.
The fourth segment is when Spider One brings in Scout Taylor-Compton, the star of his brother’s movies Halloween and Halloween II. Her character is a sculptor named Ivy, who is on a date with a guy named John (Adam Busch), even though she is admittedly out of his league. Taylor-Compton and Busch had a lot of bantering to do in this segment, and the chance to watch them bounce dialogue off of each other was like a breath of fresh air this far into Allegoria. You can see early on where this segment is going to end up, but it’s a pleasant ride to get there nonetheless.
It isn’t until the fifth (and longest) segment that we reach the art you would most expect Spider One to cover: music. His partner Krsy Fox (lead singer of the band Knee High Fox) and Josephine Chang play Brody and Hope, but Chang’s character is the one who’s the lead singer in a band. Brody’s focus is on acting. One of Hope’s bandmates says he has discovered the six notes that can manifest evil, and even though it would be a terrible idea to play those notes, they do get played. Of course. This segment kind of just sputters out in the end, but along the way Fox – who got into acting when she was a child – gets the chance to deliver a mind-blowing performance, and Chang perfectly plays the awkward comedic side of their interaction.
Allegoria is a tolerable time killer. Other than a few of the performances and the fact that it was directed by Spider One, there’s not a lot here to make it particularly noteworthy. But if Spider One does intend to pursue a directing career like Rob Zombie, this gets his career off to a simple start and hopefully we’ll get to see bigger and better things from him in the future. This is a curiosity that’s worth taking a look at, and it only takes up 69 minutes of your time.
If Spider One is pondering future feature ideas, I have to let it be known: I’d gladly watch a feature version of Big Baby, the goofy, dirt cheap slasher that Brody and Hope are shown watching. If that scene leaves you wanting to see the full Big Baby footage, minus cutaways or comments from Brody and Hope, stick around through the credits. Spider One kindly tagged all of the Big Baby footage onto the end of the movie.
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