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.
The following reviews originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
TOTALLY KILLER (2023)
Working with director Christopher Landon, Blumhouse Productions has brought us a few really fun slasher-with-a-twist horror comedies in recent years: the time loop slasher Happy Death Day (and its sequel) and the body swap slasher Freaky. Landon wasn’t involved with their new release Totally Killer, but the movie really feels like a companion piece to those Landon projects – and if you enjoyed Happy Death Day and Freaky, chances are that you’ll like Totally Killer as well.
The high concept gimmick in this one (which was directed by Nahnatchka Khan from a screenplay by David Matalon, Sasha Perl-Raver, and Jen D'Angelo) is time travel. The story begins on Halloween night 2023 in the small town of Vernon, which is still haunted by the memory of a string of unsolved murders that occurred in October of 1987. Three high school girls were killed by a masked slasher known as the Sweet Sixteen Killer. All of the victims were 16 years old – the first was even killed during her sixteenth birthday party – and each of them were stabbed sixteen times. While locals like Chris Dubasage (Jonathan Potts of Jason X) cash in on the town’s notoriety – Chris himself hosts a podcast about the case and gives tours of the murder sites – others, like Pam Hughes (Julie Bowen) have been traumatized and live in fear that the killer is going to return. Pam’s moody teenage daughter Jamie (Kiernan Shipka) wishes her mom would just get over what happened back in the ‘80s. But when the killer returns, Jamie discovers that her mom was right to be worried.
Since we’re in a small town in 2023, we’re left to wonder for a little while how time travel is going to be worked into the story. The first 13 minutes have a straightforward slasher vibe, with touches of humor and a dose of tragedy. Then Jamie goes to visit her friend Amelia (Kelcey Mawema) at the school science fair, where Amelia seems to be tinkering with a photo booth... but Jamie drops the line, “When are you gonna tell people you’re building a time machine?” And that’s when things get really nuts, in a very entertaining way.
While being attacked by the killer, Jamie activates the time machine and is sent to October 27, 1987. The day of the first murder. So, to change the events of the future, she sets out to try to stop the killing before it even begins. Of course, since this is a slasher movie and therefore needs to have something of a body count, she’s not entirely successful. But it’s fun to watch her try (and occasionally fail). She tries to make friends with the victims – Liana Liberato as Tiffany Clark, Stephie Chin-Salvo as Marisa Song, and Anna Diaz as Heather Hernandez – and finds that the 16-year-old version of her mom Pam (Olivia Holt) is part of the victims’ friend group. In fact, the four girls are known as The Mollys because each one got their fashion sense from a different Molly Ringwald character.
Also in this friend group are Jeremy Monn-Djasgnar as annoying jock Randy (who goes on to become a coach), Ella Choi as oddball future sheriff Kara Lim (daughter of ‘87 sheriff Dennis Lim, played by Randall Park), and Charlie Gillespie as Blake Hughes – who will eventually become Jamie’s father (he’s played in 2023 by Lochlyn Munro of Freddy vs. Jason). On the outside are the teen Chris Dubasage (Nicholas Lloyd), a loner called Lurch (Zach Gibson), the nerdy Doug Summers (Nathaniel Appiah), who will go on to be the school principal, and Amelia’s equally science-minded mother Lauren (Troy L. Johnson).
As a modern kid, Jamie doesn’t fit in very well with the ‘87 kids, which brings a good amount of humor into the film. Also amusing is the fact that the ‘87 teens conduct themselves like they’re right out of a typical ‘80s slasher. While Jamie her does her best to protect them and get them to make sensible choices, it’s like they’re determined to do everything wrong and put themselves in danger. Like when they decide to get away from the dangers of being in Vernon... by going to an isolated cabin in the woods.
The character interactions are a lot of fun to watch, and when the Sweet Sixteen Killer strikes this slasher proves to be surprisingly intense and badass. They may be at the center of a horror comedy, but they’re not messing around. There’s a palpable danger when the killer is confronting our teenage heroes.
‘80s slashers rank highly among my favorite kinds of movies to watch, and this time travel slasher that goes back to the ‘80s was an entertaining and clever way to revisit the glory days of slashers with a modern approach. I had a great time watching Totally Killer, and I think many of my fellow slasher fans will as well.
PET SEMATARY: BLOODLINES (2023)
If you’re reading this review, you’re probably aware that the Stephen King novel Pet Sematary deals with an ancient Miꞌkmaq Tribe burial ground in the wilderness surrounding the town of Ludlow, Maine. Any dead animal or human that gets buried in this ground will be resurrected – but they don’t come back quite right. In the book, lifelong Ludlow resident Jud Crandall tells the story of Timmy Baterman, a local boy who died in World War II and was buried in the resurrecting ground by his father. That didn’t turn out well. Now, following a 1989 adaptation of Pet Sematary, a sequel to that adaptation, and a 2019 remake / re-adaptation of Pet Sematary, director Lindsey Anderson Beer brings us Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, which expands the Timmy Baterman story into feature length… but as King warned when he gave this movie his stamp of approval, this version of the Baterman story “takes liberties”.
The first change is the setting, because Bloodlines is meant to function as a prequel to the 2019 film – which, unlike the ‘89 film, didn’t actually feature Jud telling the Baterman story. The story was told in a separate, companion short film called The Tale of Timmy Baterman, though. Due to this connection to Pet Sematary ‘19, the prequel shifts the setting over from World War II to the Vietnam era, 1969. Jackson White plays Jud as a young man who is about to leave town and join the Peace Corps with his girlfriend Norma (Natalie Alyn Lind)… but their plans are derailed when Norma is attached by the usually friendly dog that belongs to Jud’s childhood friend Timmy Baterman (Jack Mulhern), who has just returned to town after seeing combat in Vietnam.
Beer and co-writer Jeff Buhler (who also worked on the script for the 2019 version of Pet Sematary) made some odd choices in their approach to telling this story. First is the decision to abandon any attempt at a mysterious build-up: we see in the very first scene that Timmy’s dad Bill (David Duchovny) is burying Timmy in the ancient burial ground, and we see Timmy attack the dog as he emerges from the ground. So we know the whole time that Timmy and the dog are both reanimated corpses, while it takes the people of Ludlow a while to figure this out. Sure, plenty of us already know the set-up for the Timmy Baterman story, but it didn’t mean the movie had to be so obvious about it. There are also some filmmaking choices that might leave you shaking your head. For example, when Jud takes Norma to the hospital immediately after she’s attacked by the dog, why show flashbacks to the attack while he sits beside her hospital bed? We just saw this stuff twenty seconds ago!
Jud has always been a tragic character who makes a stupid mistake. In Pet Sematary, he tells his new neighbor about the burial ground even though he knows the dead don’t come back the same. He experienced this with his own dog when he was a child. He experienced it with Timmy Baterman. But he figures it might be okay if the neighbor brings back their child’s cat. Things go downhill from there. Jud couldn’t have known how bad it would get, but he should have known the burial ground was a secret to keep to himself. The information Beer and Buhler add to the story in Pet Sematary: Bloodlines makes Jud look like a complete idiot who bungles his life’s work by telling anyone about the burial ground. While trying to figure out what’s going on with Timmy, he unearths a secret the town’s most prominent families have been keeping for three hundred years so they can stop evil from spreading across the land. There’s even a prequel within the prequel to get this information across, giving us a glimpse at something that happened in the 1600s. Showing us that Jud had all of this knowledge but still lets people mess around with that burial ground makes the character look very bad.
But really, we shouldn’t hold anything that happens in Pet Sematary: Bloodlines against the older versions of the Jud character, because the movie doesn’t properly connect to any other entry in the franchise. It may be on the record as being a prequel to the 2019 film, but in that movie Jud talks about his dog Biffer being resurrected when he was 11 and having to be put down (again) because it came back mean. The Jud in Bloodlines wouldn’t be many years down the line from the Biffer situation, but he seems to have no clue about the burial ground or its power of resurrection. The only nod to Biffer is a shot of his grave. Maybe there were pieces of story lost in the editing.
Bloodlines doesn’t work as a Pet Sematary prequel… but taken on its own merits, it’s a serviceable little horror movie. White does a fine job of playing the lead character, and he has a solid supporting cast. Beyond Lind, Duchovny, and Mulhern – who is effective in making Timmy quite creepy – there’s also Henry Thomas as Jud’s father and Pam Grier as a postal worker who knows Ludlow’s secrets. Samatha Mathis is woefully underused in the role of Jud’s mother, but Forrest Goodluck and Isabella Star LaBlanc do some strong work. It was a nice move to finally include Native American characters in a Pet Sematary story, and Beer and Buhler made them good characters. Goodluck’s Manny – who grew up with Jud and Timmy – was my favorite character in the movie, and LaBlanc’s Donna, Manny’s older sister, is likeable as well.
There are some nice moments with the resurrected dead, and some that stray too close to becoming your average zombie movie – especially when characters take up guns and advise that the only way to kill these creatures is to aim for their eyes. The title isn’t the only thing that’s generic about this movie. And once night falls, you might as well look away from the screen, because the picture is so dark that it’s difficult to see whatever action may be going on.
It’s not likely that any other Pet Sematary film will ever be as creepy or disturbing as the ‘89 movie, but Pet Sematary: Bloodlines could have been a lot better if different choices had been made while it was being put together. As it is, it’s okay on its own, but doesn’t fit into the big picture. While it can add 87 minutes of living dead creepiness into your October, it’s not likely to stick with you for very long beyond those 87 minutes.
15 CAMERAS (2023)
In the 2015 film 13 Cameras, writer/director Victor Zarcoff and actor Neville Archambault introduced viewers to one of the most repugnant characters ever put on the screen: slack-jawed, perverted, homicidal slumlord Gerald. That film had one hell of a downer ending, so thankfully it received a sequel three years later – 14 Cameras, with Archambault reprising the role of Gerald and Zarcoff writing the screenplay for Scott Hussion and Seth Fuller to direct. Again, the door was left wide open for a sequel, with Gerald still up to his woman-capturing ways. So it’s good that, five years later, 15 Cameras has finally come along to wrap up the trilogy. But this final chapter comes with a sad edge to it: in the years since 14 Cameras, Archambault unexpectedly passed away. Zarcoff is an executive producer on 15 Cameras, but here it was left to writer PJ McCabe (who played one of Gerald’s victims in 13 Cameras) and director Danny Madden to wrap up Gerald’s story without Archambault... and they did it in a clever way.
15 Cameras picks up some years down the line from the events of the previous films, by which time the crimes depicted in those films have become the subject of a streaming docu-series called The Slumlord Tapes. That’s definitely something that would happen in the times we’re living in, and the title is a nice nod to the fact that the working title for 13 Cameras was Slumlord. The docu-series is filled with footage from the cameras Gerald had placed around his rental properties – and when we see this footage, it’s a mix of stock footage from the previous films, allowing Archambault to appear in the movie posthumously, and newly filmed scenes where the role of Gerald (credited in this one as Slumlord) is filled by James Babson. It’s impossible to exactly replicate the look and movements Archambault brought to the role, as he was a very unique individual, but Babson is a fine replacement.
The Slumlord Tapes has become an obsession for a young woman named Sky (Angela Wong Carbone), who has just moved into one of the slumlord’s former properties with her husband Cam (Will Madden). The place is a nice duplex that doesn’t seem to have any cameras installed in it, and the couple feels relatively safe because the authorities and the docu-series claim Gerald was killed in a fire pretty much right after the end credits started rolling on 14 Cameras. Soon after Sky and Cam get settled in, Sky’s sister Carolyn (Hilty Bowen) shows up, needing a place to stay during a break-up. When Carolyn goes to take a shower, Cam goes downstairs to make sure the hot water heater is working properly... and discovers the slumlord had built a hidden room beside the hot water heater where he could monitor the cameras that are indeed placed in various locations throughout the duplex. Including in the shower his sister-in-law is using.
Much of 15 Cameras’ 89 minute running time centers on Cam as he follows in Gerald’s perverted footsteps: attempting to creep on his sister-in-law, watching footage of himself having sex with his wife, convincing Sky they should rent out the other half of the duplex... not telling her about the cameras or the fact that he intends to spy on their tenants. The people he chooses to rent to: college girls Wren (Shirley Chen) and Amber (Hannah McKechnie). He’s obsessed with watching these girls. He has inappropriate interactions with them. We wonder how far he’s going to go down the slumlord path... And while all of this is going on, Cam and Sky both begin to suspect the slumlord might actually be alive.
Since this movie doesn’t focus on Gerald or what he’s doing to people, and since the story is years removed from what happened in 13 and 14 Cameras, it will be accessible to viewers who haven’t seen the previous films. In fact, without the disgusting things Gerald would do, this might be the most accessible film in the series. It could easily be watched as a standalone film. But if you have been following the slumlord films as closely as Sky follows The Slumlord Tapes, you’ll find that it’s a respectful follow-up (for a Slumlord Tapes interview, Brianne Moncrief even reprises the role of Claire, the character she played in the previous films) and a satisfying conclusion to the story. It’s a shame Archambault wasn’t able to be in it, but I’m glad this entry was added to the franchise. Gerald may not have much screen time, but he’s still a major presence in the film, with Sky becoming obsessed with his story while Cam copies his behavior.
Will Madden does a great job playing the increasingly sleazy and absurd Cam, and Angela Wong Carbone puts in a strong heroine performance as Sky, who has to deal with her husband’s weirdness while trying to get to the bottom of what really happened to the slumlord.
If you’re a 13 and/or 14 Cameras fan, 15 Cameras provides a welcome wrap-up to the trilogy. If you’re not familiar with the other movies, this one can still work on its own as a voyeurism thriller. I recommend checking it out.
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