Worth Mentioning - Evil Has a New Vessel

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. 

Brand new slashing and haunting.

The following reviews originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com

THAT'S A WRAP (2023)

After working together on the stalker film Blind and its sequel Pretty Boy (which I'm still anxiously waiting to see), director Marcel Walz, screenwriter Joe Knetter, and star Sarah French have teamed up once again to launch a production company called Neon Noir. Their first production is That’s a Wrap, a giallo slasher that takes both clear inspiration from the works of Italian filmmakers like Mario Bava and Dario Argento – especially due to the fact that Walz and cinematographer Marcus Friedlander have soaked nearly every shot in colorful lighting – and from the Scream franchise, in that it’s a meta film where the characters work in the horror business.

As Terry Alexander said in George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead, “People got different ideas concerning what they want out of life,” and the That’s a Wrap character Mason Maestro (Robert Donavan) is a prime example of that. He’s a director, and while many would write off his latest movie as just another slasher, he is exceptionally proud of it, saying it’s everything he wants to say a filmmaker. His masterpiece. The investor isn’t so happy with it, feeling ripped off after Mason delivered “horror bullsh-t” rather than the “artistic drama” he was promised, but that doesn’t take any of the wind out of Mason’s sails. He throws a private wrap party (no “plus ones”) for the cast of his movie – which also happens to be called That’s a Wrap – and even confiscates everyone’s phone to make sure they won’t leak the very basic (but amazing, as far as he’s concerned) teaser trailer he screens for them.

But since no one has their phone, they’re not able to call for help when someone dressed like the slasher in Mason’s movie, a character called Mistress, starts knocking off the cast members one-by-one.

Gathered together for this party are an odd bunch of characters. In addition to Mason there’s his wife Lily (Monique Parent), who has some awkward interactions with final girl Harper (Sarah French); Molly (Eve Marlowe), who did a nude scene for Mason’s movie and is very into her own body; Amber (Gigi Gustin), who smuggles in a phone because she has to promote her brand; the reserved Lana (Sarah Polednak), who will only spell out swear words; Carter (Ben Kaplan), who is into Lana; Jamie (Adam Bucci), who purchased his role in Mason’s movie; Richter (Knetter’s co-writer Robert L. Lucas), who honestly isn’t around very long; the appropriately named stoner Stoney (Steve J. Owens); and Troy (Brandon Patricio), who hooks up with Stoney. Cerina Vincent of Cabin Fever is also in the cast, but she doesn’t make it into the party. Her character in Mason’s movie is killed off early (as they say, she’s the Janet Leigh / Drew Barrymore / Amanda Wyss of the project)… and life imitates art. There are also cameos by Tom Savini as her character’s manager, Jed Rowen (Pretty Boy himself) as a photographer, Adam Green as an Amber follower, and Dave Sheridan of Scary Movie as a security guard.

The inclusion of Sheridan in the cast seems very fitting, because while the movie is meta along the lines of a Scream film, there are also moments where it verges into Scary Movie-esque parody territory. There are nods to past horror films, a discussion of what exactly a giallo is, Cerina Vincent is the opening kill in the film and the film within the film, and characters will say things to each other like “time for you to exit the scene” or (when asked about their personal life), “ooh, character development”. But several of the characters are goofball, comedic people, and while they might be aware of the tropes and stereotypes, they also live up to them in a major way. Characters sneak away from the party to have sex. One not only feels the need to take a shower after being on the wrong end of a spit take, she even decides to masturbate while she’s in there. When a character finds a substance that looks, smells, and tastes like blood, he still doesn’t think it’s actually blood. But it might make for a good lube… There are plenty of things in That’s a Wrap that you’d be more likely to see in a Scary Movie than a Scream.

The humor didn’t always click for me, but every member of the cast did strong work in their roles (I should take a moment to note that Lana was my favorite character), I loved the look of the film, and the kill scenes tend to be very cool. So I had a good time watching the movie overall. There’s not much to it – people get together and get killed – but I’m an easy mark for a slasher movie and this was a pretty good one.

That’s a Wrap is a fun, stylish slasher that lets you spend 94 minutes watching people exchange humorous dialogue and get cut up in a colorfully lit location. If that sounds like a good time to you, as it does to me, check it out!

HAUNTING OF THE QUEEN MARY (2023)

The RMS Queen Mary is a ship with a fascinating history. It was built in the 1930s to provide weekly express service between England and the United States – and for more than a decade it held the Blue Riband for being the fastest passenger liner on the sea. During World War II, it became a troopship that carried Allied soldiers. When the war ended, it went back to carrying civilian passengers until it was retired in 1967 and docked in Long Beach, California. For more than fifty years, it has sat in Long Beach, a tourist attraction. As you would expect from something with such an incredible history, the ship is believed to be haunted. Sometimes the reasons given for this haunting are questionable (there’s talk of familicide taking place on board, but it doesn’t seem to have actually happened), while others are based in real-life tragedy (during the war, the ship accidentally sank an escort ship, resulting in 239 deaths). Now, with the film Haunting of the Queen Mary, director Gary Shore – who also crafted the screenplay with Stephen Oliver and Tom Vaughan – has taken on the monumental task of living up to decades of legends.

You can tell Shore wanted to honor the legends as much as possible within the frame of his feature film. Not only does the film have a running time of 125 minutes, but it also tells connected stories that take place at two separate times: Halloween 1938, in the early days of the Queen Mary’s passenger liner era, and in modern day, when the ship is a docked tourist attraction that’s said to be haunted. In addition to this, we get an aside about the many celebrities that spent time on the ship, see a news report about the ship being docked in ‘67, and are told about the World War II-era accident. Shore made sure to pack a whole lot of information into this movie, even though it sometimes feels disruptive.

In ‘38, we follow the Ratch family – Wil Coban and Nell Hudson as David and Gwen, Florrie Wilkinson as their daughter Jackie – as they sneak into a party and cross paths with the likes of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, aiming to make Jackie a movie star. In modern day, we follow another family – Alice Eve and Joel Fry as the troubled Anne and Patrick, Lenny Rush as their son Lukas – as their visit the Queen Mary with big ideas of writing a book about the ship and possibly making it possible for people not in Long Beach to take virtual tours. Unfortunately, dreams don’t come true for these families. Multiple murders take place on the ship in ‘38, committed by a father who primarily uses an axe, because you have to stick to the tradition of axe-wielding fathers that was established by The Amityville Horror and The Shining. In modern day, something happens to Lukas during a tour, and Anne and Patrick return to the ship later to figure out exactly what’s going on there. It’s not a pleasant time for them.

Neither sets of parents are particularly appealing people, it’s difficult to get invested in their stories. The only characters in the film that I really came to care about were the kids. Lukas and Jackie. Rush gives a very engaging performance during his time in the movie, and it’s a shame that he’s largely removed from the film relatively early in the running time. Wilkinson’s Jackie is a fun character who even gets to participate in an extended dance sequence with Fred Astaire, played here by Wesley Alfvin. But the roles the kids play in the story are overshadowed by the adult characters, who are a real drag.

As it makes its way through its overly long 125 minutes, Haunting of the Queen Mary starts to drag as well. Despite telling two stories, there’s not enough substance to sustain that much time and the movie really would have worked better if it were closer to 90 minutes than 120. The way the stories are told can also cause some frustration, jumping back and forth between ‘38 and modern day while also presenting information in a non-linear fashion within the different time periods. Making it more difficult to track all the necessary information is the fact that this is an obnoxiously loud movie, with music and sound effects sometimes drowns out the dialogue, which will already be tough for some viewers to decipher due to thick accents and/or muffled sounds (for example, the David character speaks his lines through a mask). Those viewers will benefit from watching the movie in a format that has subtitles, which the screener I watched wasn’t equipped with.

On a positive note, I did appreciate how the titular haunting was handled. Some movies try to pass off their hauntings with creepy sounds and doors opening by themselves. Shore makes the haunting more intense here. The characters are in physical danger from these ghosts – whether it be because they might get possessed and possibly turned into murderers, or if the ghosts will just try to flat-out kill them. There’s a sequence I really enjoyed that involved a ghost arm reaching through the screen of a cell phone to strangle someone. That’s the kind of haunting I like to see – and the idea kind of reminded me of something you’d see Bruce Campbell have to deal with in an Evil Dead movie or TV episode.

Haunting of the Queen Mary is interesting and has some good moments, it’s just too long and has some off-putting editing and sound design choices. It’s worth checking out, but you might find that it has worn out its welcome by the time the end credits start to roll.