Worth Mentioning - Poise Under Pressure

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.

Thrills, kills, and tiny dinosaurs.

BURN (2019)

Kevin Smith got his feature filmmaking career started with Clerks, a comedic look at the day in the life of a convenience store clerk and his friend who works at the next-door video store. The first feature from writer/director Mike Gan, Burn centers on a clerk who’s working the night shift at a gas station... but this is no comedy. It’s a thriller where the clerk in question, Tilda Cobham-Hervey as Melinda, isn’t just going to experience some disturbing things by the time her shift is over, she’s also going to be responsible for some of those things.

It’s clear from the start that Melinda is a strange person. She’ll take any attention she can get from anyone around her, will gladly put herself into potentially dangerous situations, and is low-key stalking the cop that comes in regularly, Harry Shum Jr. as Officer Liu. She doesn’t get along with her co-worker, the pretty and popular Sheila (Suki Waterhouse), who mocks her odd behavior. Things take a turn for the worse when Josh Hutcherson enters the picture as a guy named Billy, who has decided to rob the gas station because he has found himself on the wrong side of a biker gang. Melinda is happy to help Billy steal every bit of money at hand, but is upset when he won’t let her go on the run with him. 

Before you know it, Sheila has been attacked, Melinda has Billy tied to a chair, bikers are lurking around, and Officer Liu is out searching for Billy, not aware that he’s still at the gas station.

Burn is an 88 minute ride of weirdness that’s carried by the perfectly off-kilter performance Cobham-Hervey delivers as Melinda. Gan might have been able to trim it down a little bit, as I wasn’t fully engaged for the entirety of the movie’s 88 minute running time, but I had a good time watching it overall, waiting to see just how bad things were going to get... and how much worse Melinda might manage to make them.

PREHYSTERIA! 3 (1995)

Elderly farmer Mr. Cranston (played by Owen Bush) is the worst pet sitter of all time. After the Taylor found themselves taking care of five miniature dinosaurs - Elvis the Tyrannosaurus, Paula the Brachiosaurus, Jagger the Stegosaurus, Hammer the Chasmosaurus, and Madonna the Geosternbergia – in the movie Prehysteria!, they had Mr. Cranston take care of the dinosaurs while they were on vacation. As seen in Prehysteria! 2, Mr. Cranston quickly lost track of the little creatures and they ended up in the home of a rich kid named Brendan J. Wellington. Word got back to Mr. Cranston, and he picked the dinosaurs up at the end of that film. Now Prehysteria! 3 begins with  Mr. Cranston giving the dinosaurs a ride in his truck, possibly immediately after the events of part 2... and when his truck breaks down outside of a golf course, the dinosaurs get loose again.

This time around, the dinosaurs befriend a young girl named Ella MacGregor (Whitney Anderson), who is very proud of her Scottish heritage and is in the middle of a rivalry between her uncle Hal (Bruce Weitz), who runs the golf course, and her dad Thomas (Fred Willard), who turned his back on golf and let his mini-golf course go to ruin after he lost a tournament to his brother. Thomas is having financial issues, so it’s likely that Hal will soon be taking ownership of the mini-golf course so he can bulldoze it and work with a Japanese business partner to turn the entire property into a golf course / resort / spa... But when the dinosaurs come into the lives of Ella and her father, they inspire the MacGregors to fix up the mini-golf course and re-open it as the dinosaur-themed Dino Putt! A turn of events that doesn’t sit well with Hal.

Directed by David DeCoteau from a script by Michael Davis and Neil Ruttenberg, who were working from a story by Brent V. Friedman, Prehysteria! 3 is a goofy little family friendly comedy that doesn’t make much use of the tiny dinosaurs, indicating that it had an even smaller budget than both of its predecessors, but still manages to be entertaining. 

The Prehysteria! movies were from Moonbeam, the kids’ movie branch of the horror and sci-fi company Full Moon, and the third movie was released just as Full Moon’s production and distribution deal with the major studio Paramount was falling apart, explaining why there weren’t any further entries in the franchise. But I think there’s still a lot of potential in the concept of kid-friendly movies featuring miniature dinosaurs. To me, Prehysteria! seems like a prime candidate for a reboot of some sort – either a legacy sequel that shows what the Taylor family and the dinosaurs are up to these days, or just a remake of the original film. Full Moon founder Charles Band might even be able to loan Prehysteria! out to another company that would make a new movie with a bigger budget, because the idea of tiny dinosaurs has always seemed like a winner to me. The three movies we got out of the concept are fun, and it could be taken further.

SPREE (2020)

Despite his best efforts, DJ and rideshare driver Kurt Kunkle is not a social media influencer like Bobby (Josh Ovalle), the kid he used to babysit. So when he installs multiple cameras inside his car and starts a livestream he calls The Lesson because he intends it to be a how-to on how to go viral, it seems like a ridiculous movie, since he has never gone viral himself. But Kurt is so starved for attention from the internet-scrolling masses, he has gone off the deep end and decided to start murdering people he picks up for rides while streaming the whole thing. Sure enough, this murder spree does eventually lead to Kurt’s stream going viral, as director Eugene Kotlyarenko’s horror thriller Spree works as both a satire and a condemnation of the current age of social media.

Kurt is played by Joe Keery, who plays the fan favorite role of Steve on the hit Netflix series Stranger Things. Kurt is a very different character from Steve, but Keery does a great job of bringing this completely insane character to life.

Spree deals with some very dark subject matter and has moments that are extremely disturbing, but it also has its moments of levity, and also gives us a character to latch onto, since we can’t exactly root for Kurt: Sasheer Zamata as Jessie Adams, a comedian who crosses paths with Kurt early on and ends up becoming his focus as his spree goes on.

The film goes off in some unexpected, occasionally wild directions, but it’s an interesting watch and serves as a great showcase for Keery. Going into this movie, I honestly thought I wasn’t going to like it at all, since the basic idea is so objectionable, but I ended up thinking it worked pretty well.

The following review originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com

STREAM (2024)

Directed by Terrifier cast member Michael Leavy, the slasher movie Stream has two major selling points going for it: Terrifier franchise director Damien Leone provided the bloody special effects, and the cast list reads like the Expendables or the Avengers of horror. The line-up includes Jeffrey Combs, Danielle Harris, Felissa Rose, Dee Wallace, Mark Holton, Daniel Roebuck, Dave Sheridan, Terry Alexander, David Howard Thornton, Tim Reid, Charles Edwin Powell, Tony Todd, Bill Moseley, Terry Kiser, Bob Adrian, Sydney Malakeh, Wesley Holloway, Jadon Cal, Phuong Kubacki, Damian Maffei, and Tim Curry.

So we’ll address these points up front. The body count in Stream is quite high, and while some of the kills take place off screen in typical slasher movie fashion, there are several kills that are brought to the screen with impressive gore effects, including one that is drawn out like Terrifier kills sometimes are. So viewers who come looking for some cool Leone bloodshed will probably be satisfied. As for the genre icons in the cast – of course, when you’re dealing with this many known names, most of them are not going to have substantial screen time. Many of the horror stars only show up for cameos… and for a few of them, the scenes they show up in didn’t even seem necessary. They just seemed like an excuse to stick a few more familiar faces into the movie. So some fans might be let down by that. Some of the icons do have substantial roles, though, and I will admit that I was surprised at just how much Jeffrey Combs is in the movie.

Powell and Harris play Roy and Elaine Keenan, who have decided to take their kids Taylor (Malakeh) and Kevin (Holloway) on a family vacation – and while they’re on this vacation, they’ll be staying at a quaint Pennsylvania inn called The Pines, where Combs’ character Lockwood works the front desk. The family hasn’t been at The Pines for very long before it becomes apparent that there’s something very strange going on here. The guest Wi-Fi is down, no one can get a cell phone signal, and all the exits are locked. That’s because the cameras that are set up throughout the building are broadcasting a livestream on the dark web, where viewers can be entertained by the sight of the inn’s guests being knocked off by the four masked killers stalking the halls. These killers never remove their masks, but their unique personalities and styles come through anyway. There’s the more low-key Player 1 (Jason Leavy, who had roles in Terrifier and Terrifier 2), the flamboyant brother and sister duo of Players 2 and 3, played by Thornton (a.k.a. Art the Clown) and Liana Pirraglia, earning her first horror feature credit, and the hulking Player 4 (Mark Haynes, who was Dave Bautista’s double on the set of Knock at the Cabin).

The broadcast stalk and slash takes up most of the movie’s running time, and since there are plenty of halls and rooms to run around in, several guests to slash through, and some character moments interspersed throughout, this does take up a whole lot of time. Stream ends up being 123 minutes, which feels like a good 20 minutes longer than it should have been. The movie could have been whittled down a bit, some moments dropped here and there… and some of those cameo scenes are superfluous, but it’s cool to see the cameos anyway. Sure, the movie could have done without, for example, the monologue delivered by Todd – but who doesn’t want to see Todd deliver a monologue? He’s awesome. Aside from Combs and Harris, who have prominent roles, standouts among the familiar faces include Reid, playing a retired cop who has heard about situations like this; Sheridan, who just wants to get a high score on an arcade game; and Roebuck’s drunken character, who has a hilarious moment of bickering with his wife, played by Rose.

One of the complaints you often hear about slasher movies is that the characters make dumb decisions, and Stream does not avoid that pitfall. There are at least three or four moments where viewers will be shouting at the screen because characters in dangerous situations act like total morons and pay the price for being stupid. For fans, characters making dumb decisions can sometimes be part of the charm of these movies, but a couple of these characters are ridiculously dim.

Despite moments of characters being stupid, a bit of questionable acting here and there, and the movie being too long for its own good, Stream is an entertaining movie with some cool stalk and slash sequences and a nice chase or two. The masked killers do a fine job of cutting their way through the cast, there’s some nice twists and turns along the way, and there’s some good emotional content in there, thanks to the characters in the Keenan family. The movie didn’t quite live up to the hopes I had for it after seeing the cast list, but I had a good time watching it nonetheless.

So if you’re a slasher fan, check out Stream and have some fun watching the masked killers make a mess out of the guests at The Pines. Just don’t make your viewing decision based on the presence of any one particular genre icon (unless it’s one mentioned as having a prominent role), because you may be disappointed by how quick their appearance is.