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.
A trio of genre movies found on Netflix.
Three years ago, it was announced that Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy, the director and screenwriter of the body swap slasher movie Freaky, were reuniting to make another slasher flick; this time, it would be a “Back to the Future meets Scream” time travel slasher called Time Cut, with Landon producing, Kennedy writing, and Hannah MacPherson taking the helm. But somehow, it took Time Cut three years to make it out into the world through the Netflix streaming service – and by the time it was finally made and released, it had been beaten to the “Back to the Future meets Scream” concept! Last year, Prime Video released a really fun time travel slasher called Totally Killer, and given the fact that Totally Killer featured its modern day lead character going back in time to the slasher glory days of the 1980s (also the decade that gave us Back to the Future), Time Cut instantly pales in comparison because it’s modern day lead character only goes back to 2003. And who cares about 2003? As someone who was there for both the ‘80s and 2003, I strongly feel that the ‘80s were better.
I found that Totally Killer provided a more entertaining viewing experience than Time Cut does... but that doesn’t mean Time Cut is without merit. I’m a slasher movie fan, I’ll take the slashing where I can get it. It doesn’t matter much to me that another movie already covered the same concept as long as they’re both fun. And I did find Time Cut to be fun, even though it had some story and pacing issues, and for some reason the decision was made to present the kills as if this was a slasher movie that had been edited for television. MacPherson shies away from showing us the blood and violence in a way that leaves the movie feeling like it has been neutered by the censors, which doesn’t make sense, since it’s a Netflix release, not a network TV movie.
Madison Bailey stars as 2024 teenager Lucy Field, who was conceived after her parents’ first born, Antonia Gentry as Summer Field, was murdered by a masked slasher in 2003. While paying tribute to Summer at the farm where she was killed, Lucy finds that there’s a time machine hidden in a barn and accidentally gets transported back to ‘03. Just in time to meet Summer and her friends in the moments building up to the murders. This could present a major dilemma if Time Cut played by the same time travel rules as Back to the Future did, because saving Summer from the slasher would mean that Lucy herself was never conceived, wiping her out of existence... But this movie doesn’t follow Back to the Future rules, so there’s no huge consequence to whether or not Lucy will be able to save Summer, beyond the fact that Summer will be able to continue living in this new branch of time.
So we have a whodunit slasher with a mystery that’s not too difficult to solve, a time traveling interloper, and underwhelming death scenes. If you’re a slasher movie, it’s a fine way to spend 92 minutes, just don’t expect too much from it.
DON’T MOVE (2024)
As far as I’m concerned, a good, simple thriller is one of the best types of movies you could hope to watch on any given day – and a good, simple thriller is exactly what directors Brian Netto and Adam Schindler delivered with their film Don’t Move, working from a screenplay written by T.J. Cimfel and David White. Produced by the legendary Sam Raimi, Don’t Move is as simple as it gets – and its 92 minute running time is a fun, engaging ride.
Kelsey Asbille stars as Iris, who is mourning the recent accidental death of her son. She goes back to the site of his death in a wilderness area and is about to drop herself off the same cliff he fell from – but then a stranger named Richard (Finn Wittrock) happens along. Through a short conversation, Richard is able to get Iris to change her mind about taking her own life. They walk back to their vehicles together... and once they reach the vehicles, that’s when Richard reveals himself to be a serial killer. He injects Iris with a substance that will leave her conscious but unable to move, with his plan being to take her back to his cabin and spend the weekend torturing and killing her. Iris has twenty minutes until she’ll be completely motionless – and now that she has a renewed determination to live, she does everything she can to get away from Richard while she can still move. Sure enough, Iris is eventually unable to do anything but blink her eyes... but even when she’s that incapacitated, so doesn’t give up.
Iris ruins Richard’s day in a major way, and it’s fun to watch his plans unravel. There are also some great sequences when it looks like help has arrived and the viewer will be hoping Iris will be rescued and Richard will be stopped right then, but we also know that there’s too much running time left for this to be the end already, so we’re also watching to see how things are going to go wrong. Again.
The directors and writers did a great job making sure this simple set-up would sustain an entire film, and the lead actors both turn in terrific performances. Wittrock switches back and forth between making Richard a charming guy and a homicidal douche (who, of course, thinks he's in the right), so it’s a convincing serial killer performance, and Asbille makes Iris a captivating character to watch even when she’s only acting with eye movements. We’re with her, rooting for her, every second of the way.
A MOTHER’S EMBRACE (2024)
Back in 2016, I had the opportunity to visit the set of the Brazilian psychological horror film O Rastro (The Trace We Leave Behind), an awesome experience that I wrote about for Arrow in the Head. You can read the set visit report here. That movie was co-written and produced by André Pereira – and when I saw that a new movie that was co-written and produced by Pereira, the horror film A Mother’s Embrace (or Abraço de Mãe) had shown up on the Netflix streaming service in Brazil, I had to check it out right away... even though it was only available in Portuguese without English subtitles, so I would need blog contributor Priscilla to occasionally provide translations throughout so I wouldn’t miss anything. I can understand some Portuguese and can read a good amount of it, but I don’t have it all down just yet.
The set-up of A Mother's Embrace is fairly straightforward. Ana had a traumatic experience involving her mother and a fire when she was a child, and now she has grown up to be a Rio de Janeiro firefighter, with Marjorie Estiano playing the adult version of the character. It’s February of 1996 and Ana is returning to duty after having to take a break because she suffered a panic attack while on the job... and she has returned to work just in time for a destructive tropical storm to hit Rio. (An event that actually did occur in February of ‘96.) Ana and her co-workers respond to a call about a potential landslide and find that they’ve been drawn to a nursing home of sorts that is fall apart, presenting a safety hazard to its residents. The firefighters decide they need to evacuate the place – but there are very strange things going on in this structure. Especially down in the basement. Most of the movie involves the firefighters dealing with increasingly bizarre situations, which end up including encounters with cultists and tentacled creatures.
There’s definitely something Cthulhu-esque going on in this movie, but as it went on it became more difficult to understand – and not just for me, as the gringo attempting to watch a movie in Portuguese. Priscilla also ended up confused as to what exactly was going on and what it was all supposed to mean.
Pereira and co-writers Cristian Ponce (who also directed the movie) and Gabriela Capello crafted an interesting horror story here and Ponce brought it to the screen as a creepy movie... I just wish I was able to glean a better understanding of it all.
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