The Banshees of Inisherin - A response

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On a remote island off the coast of Ireland, Pádraic is devastated when his buddy Colm suddenly puts an end to their lifelong friendship. With help from his sister and a troubled young islander, Pádraic sets out to repair the damaged relationship by any means necessary. However, as Colm's resolve only strengthens, he soon delivers an ultimatum that leads to shocking consequences.

​Release date: 21 October 2022 
Director: Martin McDonagh
Distributed by: Searchlight Pictures

A Horror Movie Review by Kit Power 

Massive spoilers. I’m going to assume you’ve seen it. If you haven't, go see it. It’s brilliant.


Let’s start here; The Banshees of Inisherin is a fucking horror movie.


At the core of the movie sits isolation, alienation, the brutality of mortality, and the crawling, miserable hell that is other people. It may be the most misanthropic movie I’ve ever seen (which I mean as a great compliment, to be clear) and ranks amongst the most nihilistic, come to that. There’s a bleak hopelessness here, a sense of grim inevitability and the crushing weight of time that wouldn’t be out of place in a Ligotti essay. This fucker is dark.


It’s also, at moments, painfully funny. It’s also a tale that is quintessentially Irish; one that really could only be told in the time and place it’s set, yet one that deals with universal matters of the human experience.


Yeah, I dug the hell out of this one.


There’s genuinely too much to chew on here, so I’m going to focus just on the central relationship; the inciting event that sets the dominoes of the narrative falling in a manner not dissimilar to a Shaksperian tragedy. Pádraic (Colin Farrell) calls on his drinking buddy, Colm (Brendan Gleeson), to join him for a pint. Colm initially doesn’t respond. Eventually, after a bit of painful back and forth, Colm admits the truth; he simply doesn’t want to be Pádraic’s friend anymore.


This is the first ten minutes of the film, and I found it totally devastating. The movie conveys so much without words; the smallness of the setting, the close knit, insular nature of the island. As I’ve covered at arguably too much length, I grew up small town Devon, and this movie brought back an immediate, powerful feeling of claustrophobia that didn’t let up for the entire runtime. It’s not the same, exactly, but it’s close enough. That kind of environment, you’ll put up with a lot to get along with the people you’re stuck getting along with, due to a curse of geography. Options are limited. So it’s not hard to empathize with someone who has finally snapped; someone who, as Colm articulates, is suddenly feeling the pressure of mortality, realizes that creativity is the only thing likely to provide anything resembling a legacy; and who also, simply, cannot imagine spending any more time stuck in the company of a man he simply doesn’t enjoy, or even like very much.


As the kids might say, highly relatable content.


At exactly the same time, it’s hard - practically impossible, in fact - not to empathize with Pádraic. From his perspective, a decade’s long friendship has evaporated overnight, with no explanation. It’s not just the immediate loss; not even mainly that. It’s the loss of what was. Pádraic is forced to reexamine the whole relationship, to try and wrestle with and make sense of the fact that, not only does his best friend no longer want to be with him, he likely never enjoyed his company overmuch. It’s devastating, watching this essentially harmless and relatively blameless man trying to make sense of something that must have been years coming, yet from his perspective has dropped out of the clear blue sky.


And it’s brilliant because I’ve been on both sides of this one, and I’ll bet you have too. I’ve have acquaintances who I’ve come to realize have considerably more invested in the relationship than I do. Ah, fuck it, I’ll go one deeper; there are people who like me that I plain don’t like, and who I have no good reason to dislike, at that. I’d die before telling them, partly because I know it ultimately says nothing about them and everything about me, and partly because it would be unforgivably cruel and serve no purpose, and I’m just not in that particular game. But, it’s a real thing in my life, and always has been, and I bet (or maybe I just hope) you’ve been there too.


So, in that sense, there’s something shadow-self about Colm, and his articulation of something I’m wagering most if not all of us have felt and so very, very few of us would ever say. Back when I was writing A Song For The End, this was one of the things I was worrying at, I think; well, The Banshees of Inisherin doesn't so much worry as commit a live autopsy on the subject, ignoring the screams as it lays bare the internal organs, before silently asking you to take a good long look, and see what you can see.


At the same time, then, as we can identify, likely to our shame, with Colm, I’m willing to bet we’ve also all been Pádraic, at some point. Is there a more miserable feeling in the world than the creeping realization that someone you like, admire, care for, adore, cherish, sees you as, at best, as an occasionally diverting presence, and, at worse, an actual irritant? I mean, that’s hyperbole, of course there is… but it’d maybe be hard to put your finger on what, when you’re in the middle of it. It’s certainly a very particular and pointed kind of misery, I think; one that can't help but eat at your sense of self esteem, self worth. We’re often attracted to people with qualities we find admirable; how deep can it cut, when those same people find little if anything to admire in you?


And as soon as I write that, I want to flip the coin again, to ask who among us has not found themselves sat next to the bore at the office party who's had too much to drink, or the irritatingly chatty person on public transport; they're not necessarily being rude or impolite, but all of a sudden you’re a little too aware of the confines of the situation you’ve found yourself in, and somehow, that fact that manners prevent you from just telling them to shut up, or even just to walk away yourself, turn a merely irritating situation into one close to intolerable? And now imagine decades of it, trapped by sheer circumstance and geography an inertia; feeling the weight of your own mortality creeping in, day by day, the mundanity becoming a bludgeon; thinking about the hours and hours of time spend in drink and mindless conversation, with a creative drive unsatisfied and the shadow of the reaper moving ever closer to your door… at what point, I found myself asking, is the greater ill to not speak up, before it’s too late?


And there it is, the horror at the heart of this simple, brilliant tale. Neither of these men is evil, or wrong. Neither is acting out of malice. And yet, each driven by their own needs (Colm for creative solitude, Pádraic for companionship) will by the movie's end have committed horrific acts. Pádraic will go again and again against the wishes of his friend, pushing to find the magic formula that will somehow return things to The Way They Were (telling, and brilliant, I think, that it’s a state we, the audience, never get to see; for us, it’s always been unhappy Colm and mystified Pádraic), and Colm will commit acts of self mutilation so awful he’s no longer even able to play his beloved fiddle.


It’s the kind of truth so brutal and total that I have to remind myself there are other ways to human; that relationships can flourish where foibles are either forgiven or celebrated, where space and intimacy coexist. It’s both true that kindness is deeply important and that your own time is short and you should, fairly ruthlessly, spend it in ways that bring you joy.


But I also think most, if not all of us will, at some point in our life, find ourselves as both Pádraic and as Colm. And that pain is an intrinsic part of the human condition.


It feels like something we never, ever talk about. I’m therefore profoundly grateful that The Banshees of Inisherin exists, if only to facilitate the conversation.


KP
24/1/23

Project Wolf Hunting

A group of police officers fights against dangerous criminals being transferred on a cargo ship bound for Busan, South Korea.

Release date: 3 March 2023 (UK)
Director: KIM Hong-seon
Screenplay: KIM Hong-seon


A Horror Movie Review by Brandon Thomas

South Korean filmmakers have never been shy about putting carnage on screen. From I Saw the Devil to Train to Busan, South Korean cinema often runs gloriously blood red. With Project Wolf Hunting, the ante has been upped considerably as geysers of gore are jettisoned out of every original – and disgustingly created – human orifice. Dead Alive this ain’t, but it’s not for lack of trying.

In Project Wolf Hunting, a cargo ship has been chartered to transport a group of South Korean prisoners back home from the Philippines. Along for the ride is a small unit of Korean police, a two-person medical team, and the ship’s crew. However, unbeknownst to them, there’s also a small group stowed away in the bowels of the ship protecting an undead creature that has ties to Japanese experimentation during World War 2.

Large-scale horror movies on boats petered out in the late 90s with films like Deep Rising (a good one!) and Virus (a bad one!), all but killing this particular subgenre. The isolation the open ocean provides is second only to deep space when it comes to a great horror movie setting. Project Wolf Hunting taps into that fear that naturally comes from battling the elements. The fact that there’s also a creature and a dozen psychotic felons only adds to the mounting anxiety.

No one is going to go out of their way to congratulate Project Wolf Hunting for its originality. The film proudly wears its influences on its sleeve with Con Air and Overlord being the most obvious. We’ve seen a lot of these beats and eventual reveals dozens of times before, but this film’s infectious energy makes all of that an afterthought. Even at two hours, Project Wolf Hunting never drags and, at times, keeps layering new craziness to an already bonkers film.

Director Kim Hong-sun must have challenged himself to use every kind of action beat imaginable in this movie. There are fantastic shootouts in confined spaces, brutal knife fights, and a few truly gnarly hand-to-hand combat scenes. However, the real star is the gore effects. A movie this wet and goopy hasn’t been seen in a while – and boy, does it make an impression. The gore never feels overly realistic but fits perfectly into the over-the-top approach the filmmakers establish early on. 

With no desire to reinvent the genre wheel, and a solid handle on action and gore, Project Wolf Hunting is a bloody bit of South Korean fun that’s well worth your time.

Cocaine Bear 

After a 500-pound black bear consumes a significant amount of cocaine and embarks on a drug-fueled rampage, an eccentric gathering of cops, criminals, tourists, and teenagers assemble in a Georgia forest.
Release date: 24 February 2023 (UK)

Director: Elizabeth Banks
Producers: Elizabeth Banks, Max Handelman, Phil Lord, Aditya Sood, Brian Duffield, Chris Miller

A Horror Movie Review by Hope Madden 

As misbehaving bears go, Elizabeth Banks’s Cocaine Bear puts Winnie the Pooh to shame. The laughs are intentional, for one thing, but the outright carnage outstrips anything I’ve seen in a genre film this year. And it’s not even a horror movie!

The year is 1985, from what I can piece together from an inspired soundtrack of pop hits spilling out of speakers, and one Jefferson Starship fan is about to make a jump from his plane with an awful lot of coke. Things don’t go well, and next thing you know, drug kingpin Syd (Ray Liotta in his final screen performance) is sending his reluctant son (Alden Ehrenreich) and best guy (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) to Blood Mountain to retrieve $14 million in missing blow.

As you may have guessed from the title, a bear found it first.

It’s barely accurate to say that Jimmy Warden’s screenplay is based on true events. In fact, a smallish black bear overdosed on drugs dropped into a Tennessee wilderness, only to be stuffed and displayed in a mall. That’s just sad no matter how you look at it. So, Warden says to himself, what if the bear was like three times bigger? All hell might break looks.

We meet an assortment of folks trying to stay out of the bear’s way, as well as those trying to track down the cocaine. One mom (Keri Russell) is looking for her errant daughter (Brooklynn Prince) and her buddy, Henry (Christian Convery, scene larcenist).

The great Margo Martindale as Ranger Liz is hysterically deadpan opposite three skate punks (Aaron Holliday, J.B. Moore and Leo Hanna, all superb). And even with as little time as we get to spend with the paramedics (Scott Seiss and Kahyun Kim of the badass blue eyeshadow), you’ll miss them.

That’s really Banks’s trick. The film offers little more than a loose assortment of national park visitors/bear meat, but the filmmaker and her comedically able cast invest enough in each character that you like them. You root for them, despite the fact that most of them are bad people. And bound to die.

For a very dark comedy, Cocaine Bear is light entertainment. It’s hard to imagine expecting anything more.
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Not every animal lover is going to appreciate the comedy in this film, FYI. An enormous black bear is high out of her mind for 90 minutes and, in that deranged state, does some funny things but mostly tears humans to pieces to the delight of the crowd. If this doesn’t sound entertaining to you, maybe don’t see Cocaine Bear.
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Hope Madden is a writer and award-winning filmmaker living with her husband George and cat Velma in Columbus, Ohio. She writes what scares her, which worked out fine until she became a filmmaker and had to live what scared her for the duration of a shoot. Terrible decision. Her novella, Roost, was published in 2022 by Off Limits Press and her first feature film releases in late 2022.

Huesera: The Bone Woman

Valeria's joy at becoming a first-time mother is quickly taken away when she's cursed by a sinister entity. As danger closes in, she's forced deeper into a chilling world of dark magic that threatens to consume her.

Initial release: 9 June 2022
Director: Michelle Garza Cervera
Cinematography: Nur Rubio Sherwell
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A Horror Movie Review by Hope Madden
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As Huesera: The Bone Woman opens, women climb the 640 steps leading to the world’s largest statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, located in Ocuilan, Mexico. Valeria (Natalia Solián) and her mother are among the pilgrims, their goal: a blessing leading to Valeria’s fruitful womb.
As writer/director Michelle Garza Cervera’s camera pulls back and back and back, suddenly the 108’ virgin looms like a serene-faced golden Godzilla above a woman who no longer looks so certain about her prayer.

It’s a confident opening to the entirely assured feature debut from Cervera. Her maternal nightmare is bright and decisive, pulling in common genre tropes only long enough to grant entrance to the territory of a central metaphor before casting them aside for something sinister, honest and honestly terrifying.

While it toes certain familiar ground – the gaslighting of Rosemary’s Baby, for instance – what sets Huesera apart from other maternal horror is its deliberate untidiness. Cervera refuses to embrace the good mother/bad mother dichotomy and disregards the common cinematic journey of convincing a woman that all she really wants is to be a mom. 

There’s complexity and subtlety in the various relationships as well, elevating the material above standard horror fare. Valeria has real, joyous chemistry with husband Raúl (Alfonso Dosal). And if he’s weak in the face of his mother’s wishes, Valeria is hardly standing up to her own mother or sister. The ways in which we all dodge family conflict feed into the writing, helping ground the larger metaphor in reality.

Solián’s performance weaves effortlessly and authentically from one family dynamic to the next, each presenting only opportunities to submit, to accept or to be ostracized and rejected. Huesera’s metaphor is brave and timely. Brave not only because of its LGBTQ themes but because of its motherhood themes. It’s a melancholy and necessary look at what you give up, what you kill.

Next Exit (2022)

Two unhappy strangers find themselves on a road trip across the U.S. to partake in a scientist's radical experiment with the afterlife in Mali Elfman's poignant sci-fi debut. ​

Written and directed by Mali Elfman

NEXT EXIT follows Rose (Katie Parker) and Teddy (Rahul Kohli) on a final road trip across America as they are thrown together by fate on their way to volunteer for Dr Stevensen’s (Karen Gillan) research exploring life after death. As the film opens, we learn that it is not necessarily the end when you die and some ghosts are still hanging around. Dr Stevensen is investigating ways to communicate with these ghosts and needs volunteers to die for her and act as her guinea pigs in the thereafter. (Which does beg the question whether there are guinea pig ghosts as well **makes notes – Horror Version of G-Force**.)

As someone who works in medical research, I am not sure how that would fare getting through an ethics committee, but the focus of NEXT EXIT isn’t really the act of death or the research itself. Indeed Karen is definitely on “doing a mate a favour” duties here as her screen time is less than 5 minutes all told. It’s always great to see Karen onscreen, but if you are a fan and coming here for her performance, you may be disappointed; not because it is bad, its just VERY short.

Anyway, as I said, this isn’t really the focus. The main focus of the film is the people who would volunteer for this research and what would drive them to wilfully give up their lives to help science.

Enter Teddy and Rose, two troubled death-seekers who end up travelling together because of a mix up with their car rentals. They are seemingly very different people at first, Teddy being very buoyant and witty, while Rose is dour and closed off – one would be forgiven that these two would ever spend time together outside of the rental car.


But, as the journey continues, and they force each other to confront their pasts and their reasons for dying, they grow to like each other and then….

…well, that’s all you get, I don’t want to spoil anything.

NEXT EXIT takes a sometimes light-hearted, look at death, at pain and trauma through its twin protagonists and slowly builds up the emotion until, at the end of the film you are invested in Teddy and Rose’s story. The light-hearted nature of the film distracts at little from the seriousness of the decision the pair have made, making the final act all the more powerful. Teddy and Rose are very different at the start of the film and almost too “polar opposite” to work at first – classic Rom-Com set-up. But the two leads’ performances work well off each other and any concerns I had about caricature at the beginning were soon forgotten


The film doesn’t really get into an in-depth, psychological discussion of the meaning of life, skirting around the subject, but is all the better for it. The story works on a level that doesn’t need to be too deep, but acts as a catalyst for the discussions you are likely to have with friends and family after you watch it. I certainly did with my wife as we considered why you might feel this way and what might drive you to “gift” your life to science – leaving your body to medical science AFTER you die is one thing, NEXT EXIT takes it to the next level. Ultimately, I found it to be a well-balanced, thought-provoking film with some interesting themes for discussion.
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I did find myself wondering if Next Exit was really right for Ginger Nuts to be honest, it certainly isn’t an out and out horror and IMDB has it as COMEDY/MYSTERY/ROMANCE but, before Jim revokes my honorary Gingerhood, I would say it definitely edges into Sci-Fi and there are morbid elements to the story that revolve around death, abuse and trauma, it’s just more implied than explicit.
For some people, the very act of deciding to end your own life because of what you see as a failed life constitute horror!


NEXT EXIT is currently on IMDB with a score of 5.6. I don’t normally score films, but I think this is a bit low and would be at least a 7 for me. I would not necessarily go higher as it’s definitely not a film for everyone. The story unfolds slowly and with limited action, it just isn’t that sort of film. But if you are in the mood for something a little more intellectual, but which doesn’t get too bogged down in the metaphysical and with two well-acted lead characters, then you could find a lot worse.

Orchestrator of Storms: The Fantastique World of Jean Rollin
by Hope Madden
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Who is Jean Rollin? He was an underappreciated French genre filmmaker of the 70s, 80s and 90s – kind of the Jess Franco of France.

Who is Jess Franco? A horror filmmaker known primarily for lurid, colorful B-pictures, often featuring hot, naked lesbian vampires. He’s the Jean Rollin of Spain.

You’ll be better able to tell them apart if you watch Orchestrator of Storms: The Fantastique World of Jean Rollin. Documentarians Dima Ballin and Kat Ellinger want to make sure the world remembers and recognizes Rollin’s contribution to film. Changing the smarmy discourse among those of us who do know his work is a second-tier goal.

That’s not to say that the filmmakers shy away from Rollin’s poor critical reception or comparisons to Franco. Indeed, Rollin stepped in to complete two films Franco started, including Zombie Lake, a film so terrible it nearly ended Rollin’s career.

Talking with several of Rollin’s colleagues, a couple of the actresses best known for his films, and writers who’ve championed his work, Orchestrator of Storms tells the tale of an artist who loved what he did and struggled to make a career out of filmmaking regardless of the challenges. He even directed a load of hard-core porn titles to keep the lights on.

Fascinatingly, one of the challenges was France itself, which, in the 70s and 80s, was hardly a hot spot for genre filmmaking. Being a contemporary of New Wave artists, Rollin faced backlash for his fanciful, decidedly unpolitical output.

A lot of the struggle could also have been that many of Rollin’s films are just plain terrible, a possibility mostly unexplored in the doc. But what’s most intriguing is the image you get of Rollin as a person, mainly from actors Brigitte Lahaie and Francoise Pascal, as well as former film festival programmer Kier-La Janisse, who also produces.

They build a picture of a humble, kind man driven to exercise his imagination. And, as the film rightly points out, there are times when that imagination delivered amazing product. Fascination, The Iron Rose and Living Dead Girl are more than macabre dances among the nubile nude, although they certainly are that as well. With these films, Rollin’s evocative imagery details gruesome stories unlike anything else.
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Orchestrator of Storms would have benefitted from more of Rollin’s work. Though Vallin and Ellinger do a fine job of enlivening talking head footage, no one’s movies looked like Rollin’s. Talking about his aesthetic doesn’t do them justice. You need to look at them.

That aside, this is a film that deeply appreciates a filmmaker who rarely received such love. The conversations are candid and often moving. The film leans a little too close to mash note, but there is something undeniable in the work of Jean Rollin that probably deserves this kind of love.

Out of horror’s many facets the one that frightens me the most is when the mundane is made strange and uncanny.  The chair-stacking scene in Poltergeist, for example, chills me far more than the eventual manifestation of the entity that’s been tormenting the Freeling family. The sense of vulnerability created when the things we rely on as part of our daily lives start to turn against us is, for me, a far deeper form of fear than inexplicable events or indescribably monsters and, for better or worse, the list of those things is only getting longer. Longer and, crucially, more pervasive. There used to be a clear line between the animate and the inanimate but the tools we use today have their own form of agency and awareness, albeit a limited one. At least for now. Equally, the tools that used to be held quite literally at arm’s length are now worn on our bodies or, in the case of medical technology, implanted deep inside them. The mundane is now simultaneously and persistently uncanny as the division between us and our tools starts to blur and collapse. Even the language we use to describe modern technology has an eerie tinge to it; “the internet of things” implies that there are predatory, unknowable beings lurking in the noospheric mist that envelopes us all. We are haunted by the ghosts of digital presences and stalked by disembodied eyes that monitor our every move.

Horror, almost uniquely, has the ability to examine this strange and unsettling world we live in and ask questions that cut to the centre of how we experience it. What happens when we rely on our tools to such a degree that the boundary between tool and tool-wielder breaks down completely? How do we co-exist and communicate with other consciousnesses, other ways of being? What rights should creations enjoy and, going back to the question that Frankenstein raises in science fiction’s earliest days, what duty do creators have to their creations?

M3GAN, however, asks a different question. M3GAN asks “what if a robot had a knife?”


Admittedly, that’s a bit unfair to the film. M3GAN certainly wants us to think about our codependency with the things we create and how that relationship can sour. When eight-year-old Cady loses her parents in a freak snowplough incident she moves to live with her aunt Gemma who, in traditional IT genius fashion, is unable to manage the emotional turmoil bubbling inside both her and her niece. Luckily, Gemma as been working after-hours to develop M3GAN - a “Mark 3 Generative Android” that houses an advanced machine intelligence inside a doll-like body - who Cady can be paired with and, it is strongly implied, palmed off onto. The relationship between grief-stricken Cady and the eerily manipulative robot quickly spirals out of control and, like HAL9000 before her, M3GAN almost immediately decides that the most efficient way to protect Cady is to proactively eliminate any threat to her, no matter how slight. Mayhem ensues.

Or, more correctly, it doesn’t. It takes a good hour for M3GAN to really get into gear and, even when it does, it’s due to a sequence whose effectiveness is somewhat blunted by having been shown, almost in its entirety, in every advert for the film. In fact, the whole film feels blunted, watered down from a more spirited original, and here lies one of the core problems in a film which has a lot of problems; it’s often quite boring. Characters interrupt the narrative flow to explain what’s happening as we watch it happening - in an excruciating scene a child psychologist explains, at length, how Cady’s emotional bond with a lifelike doll might actually be a bad idea - and the film’s pacing is all over the place, leaking tension at every turn. Attempts to flesh out supporting characters comes across as clumsy - sycophantic PA Kurt is shown stealing highly confidential corporate secrets, simply by copying them from one folder to another, purely so M3GAN can taunt him about it - and even M3GAN’s inherent strangeness is repeatedly enforced by little more than having her stare into the middle-distance, gears whining quietly. Which brings us to the second core problem with the film; M3GAN herself simply isn’t that convincing. Ignoring the way in which the child-in-a-suit and animatronic/CGI versions of M3GAN are easily distinguishable she is neither near enough a real human to be truly uncanny nor inhuman enough to be outright disturbing. Even when she is given a few moments to shine - contorting her body into impossible shapes or triumphantly revealed as a heartless machine in the Hardware-inspired finale - they’re drowned out by her uninspired GlaDOS-meets-SHODAN vocal inflections and, I can hardly bring myself to remember it, an ear-mangling a capella performance of David Guetta’s ‘Titanium’. Even worse than this, in some ways, is that being a robot doesn’t really change the fact she’s just another petty and vindictive knife-wielding maniac in a genre over-saturated with knife-wielding maniacs. Even her genuinely remarkable abilities are used in wearisome ways; her wireless access to the sum of human knowledge allows her to show off and belittle rather than exercise any genuinely superhuman omniscience that might set her apart from the humans she comes to hate. Her robot-ness is reduced to little more than a gimmick, just another mask for a killer to hide behind.

Nothing about M3GAN is truly bad - the marketing sequence that replicates Boston Dynamic’s ad campaigns, for example, offers an amusingly self-aware nod to films like RoboCop and more of that absurd humour would’ve lifted the film massively - but as a whole it’s just not good enough. Not funny enough, not exciting enough, not scary enough. Its influences are too obvious and throughout the film’s overlong 100 minute duration there’s the lingering sense that the filmmakers wanted to do more with the concepts derived from those influences but, for unidentified reasons, pulled their punches. The film’s PG-13 rating (15 in the UK) reflects this and, rumour suggests, cuts were made to specifically achieve that rating after M3GAN’s dance routine went viral amongst teen viewers. Maybe my disappointment with M3GAN lies in that disconnect and I expected too much from what is ultimately a kids’ popcorn movie.
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That said, M3GAN has been spectacularly successful for a kids’ popcorn movie, already recouping its modest $12million budget tenfold. A sequel, with the predictably uninspired title of M3GAN 2.0, is already in production and, now we know what happens when a robot has a knife, maybe the next film will delve deeper and ask “what if a robot had a gun?”

Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey
by Hope Madden
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Leaving the screening of Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, I overheard another viewer say, “So many questions.” I, too, have a lot of questions. Why do Pooh and Piglet have man hands? Where do they get their clothes? When did they learn to drive? What am I doing at this movie?

No, that last one’s not real. There was no question I was going to see this movie. Like most people, I grew up with Winnie the Pooh and all his friends in the 100 Acre Wood. I loved the illustrations in A.A. Milne’s books. I loved the Disney cartoons. That live-action kids’ show, though, with people in suits – that freaked me out. That was just wrong, and it was the kind of wrong I was hoping for with the film.

Nope.

Though the sound mix is often muddy, the film does boast some technical qualities: production values, set design, lighting – writer/director Rhys Frake-Waterfield gathered a competent crew. The problem is the writing. There’s about enough script for a 30-minute film, and even that would not have been very good.

First, Christopher Robin (Nikolai Leon) returns to his old stomping ground to introduce his beloved to his oldest, dearest friends, only to find that Pooh and the gang have not exactly thrived in his absence.

Meanwhile, Maria (Maria Taylor) follows her therapist’s suggestion to take a break, unplug and relax with her girlfriends. She and her besties head to the same stretch of forest for a quiet weekend of grisly, man-bear related slaughter.

The acting throughout is awful, but it’s hard to slight the actors themselves when each of their scenes is stretched to 4 minutes longer than it should be and they have to just find a way to take up the time. This leads to a lot of inaction when action would be reasonable, and an awful lot of repeated, “Why are you doing this?”
Plus, there’s a gun that appears and disappears scene to scene, and a laugh-out-loud car sequence. But any intentional humor is woefully absent.

Whatever the film’s many – almost countless – flaws, Frake-Waterfield deserves tremendous credit for seeing an opportunity and seizing it. Milne’s catalog fell into the public domain last year, a fact Frake-Waterfield met with an idea. What if Pooh and the gang went feral?  

And the world was in. I know I was.

When I was young, six or maybe seven years old, I used to wake up in the night, convinced something was in the room with me. I say “something” because whatever it was never felt like a person and I say “felt like” because I never actually saw anything there. Even “thing” is too full a word for the strange sense of absence that hovered in the corner of my room. By the window. Looking at me. A hole that hovered there, waiting for me to turn my head and open my eyes. Even though that was absolutely the last thing I wanted to do. It didn’t come every night, not even often, but when it did I lay awake in the dark, absolutely terrified of nothing. Worse than nothing; a shadow where nothing should’ve been.
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Eventually it stopped coming or, at least, I never noticed it again. A deeply human fear of the dark amplified by an only child’s over-active imagination. I still remember the sense of heart-stopping terror, though, and of feeling unsafe in my own home, in my own bed. In my own head.

I mention this cheerful little anecdote only because this abyssal, suffocating terror is exactly how Skinamarink made me feel.


Skinamarink is a very curious film. It’s arguable whether it’s even truly a film at all; the characters are vague sketches, there is often simply nothing to see on the screen and to say that the plot is implied rather than stated is generous to say the least. Yet the gravity of this absence, these gaps where the muscles and machinery of a film should be, pulled me in until I realised, with a sharp gasp of claustrophobia, that I couldn’t get out. After its achingly retro opening titles, Skinamarink starts as it means to go on with a series of static shots depicting the various corners and corridors of a nondescript house at night, all filmed through a murky and near-impenetrable gauze of grain and fuzz. Curtains and skirting boards, door frames and light switches. Everything is rendered down to abstract forms as indistinct sounds that might be voices mutter in the background. It’s not long before faces begins to leer out of the darkness, as pareidolia demands our minds find patterns in randomness, only to resolve themselves into a fireplace or pile of toys. We’re introduced to two young siblings, Kevin and Kaylee, who wake in the night to find that their father has disappeared. Kevin wonders, in a hushed whisper, that “maybe he went with Mom”. After a pause, uncomfortably long, Kaylee replies that “I don’t want to talk about Mom”.

This inability to talk is, for me, exactly what the film is about. One of the few scraps of exposition in the film comes when a faltering voice, we assume it must be the the father’s, explains how Kevin recently hurt his head while falling down the stairs so the film may simply be a concussed child’s nightmare, replayed like an old home movie on a tattered backdrop. It could be an attempt to render a child’s experience of trauma or abuse; the hyper-focus on bright toys and slapstick cartoons feels like a way to ignore the house’s otherwise claustrophobic and oppressive surroundings. Or perhaps Kevin and Kaylee have indeed fallen into the clutches of some snickering entity, slowly fading into incoherence and white noise. Maybe all of them are true, in their own way, but whether that’s the case just doesn’t matter. Skinamarink is not about explanations but the things we don’t want explained, can’t even bear talking about. It is about those gaps of comprehension that yawn into chasms when we stare into them for too long. Skinamarink isn’t concerned about the fears we can articulate, even if only vaguely, but the deeper emotional states - loss, grief, despair - that cannot be spoken about because there is nothing there to speak of. The concept of loss, and the realisation that one is becoming lost, permeates this film as the fabric of the children’s home starts to fail and disappear, slowly falling into the eerily lymphatic gaps between the truly real.

Critics of the film have argued that almost nothing of note happens over Skinamarink’s 100 minute duration and this is perhaps true but, for me, the long periods of near-silence and immobility serve only to heighten the brief moments of activity. The extended, unchanging shots of inconsequential house-fittings start to feel like a form of sleep-paralysis and there is a queasy lurch in the stomach when the camera angle changes, flicking to another part of the house or panning slowly through the gloom. I can see entirely how this might feel like nothing to someone looking for a more traditional piece of film with a plot and a script but this scrutiny of the mundane makes the film’s internal world become ever more strange and unfathomable. The same critics also argue that the film simply isn’t frightening and this, however, is an opinion I can’t agree with. Granted, there is no obvious source of fear - no monster or axe-murderer - and I strongly believe that the few jump-scares scattered through its run-time actually harm the film, serving to relieve the otherwise inescapable and distressing sense of dread, but the sequence after a burbling half-voice is subtitled as asking Kaylee to “come upstairs” is one of the most horrible episodes I can think of witnessing in film. It’s up there with Eleanor frantically demanding to know “whose hand was I holding” in The Haunting or the click of the TV turning itself on at the end of Ring. It made me seize up, choking, precisely because the terror comes not from being explicitly shown what is happening but from being forced to relive the childlike confusion of not knowing what might yet happen. We witness events locked into Kaylee’s own viewpoint as she looks cautiously around her parents’ bedroom and when a voice, close and whispering, calls her name the camera’s reluctance to turn to its source echoes Kaylee’s own fear of seeing a presence which should be absent. Kaylee isn’t threatened physically but she suffers a deeper harm in that the certainties she holds about how the world works are unraveled in front of her eyes.

Skinamarink upset me deeply, in a way that still lingers even days after watching it and I think a lot of criticisms of the film stem from the fact that it is fundamentally not enjoyable to watch but only functions when the viewer understands that it is a horrible, abhorrent experience to endure. There is nothing here that’s fun or technically impressive, no action to follow and no soundtrack to cue our emotions into what we should expect. It denies even the gruesome theatre of what we might expect from a horror film in favour of whispers and suggestions. There is, crucially, no narrative resolution; the film simply stops.

Skinamarink is an experimental film in multiple ways and it is an experiment which isn’t always completely successful but in the depths of its murky innards lurk some dark and shining gems of a beauty that not everyone will appreciate or even dive deep enough to witness.

Blood

When a bite from the family dog gives her son a horrific infection, a woman's morals get put to the test when the only cure to keep him alive proves deadly.
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Release date: 27 January 2023 (USA)
Director: Brad Anderson
Distributed by: Vertical Entertainment
Production companies: Hercules Film Fund; H2L Media Group; Rhea Films; 1821 Studios

A Horror Movie Review by Hope Madden

Back in 2001, Brad Anderson scared the living shit out of us with the ingenious institutional horror, Session 9. He followed this up with the utterly remarkable The Machinist, and a few years later, the mind-bending thriller, Transsiberian.

Things began to peter out for Anderson as a filmmaker by 2010’s Vanishing on 7th Street, and as he found more success with episodic programming, he more or less stayed there, popping over to film every few years with routinely middling results.

Such is the case with his latest, the supernatural family drama, Blood.

Michelle Monaghan is Jess, a recently sober, recently divorced, harried nurse settling her pre-teen children into their new home, an isolated farmhouse owned by her aunt before she passed. But Pippin, the golden lab, knows something’s wrong out in them woods.

Whatever’s out there ends up in Pippin and then, shortly, in Jess’s 8-year-old, Owen (Finlay Wojtak-Hissong). The obvious tension is amplified by the fact that Jess is desperately afraid to lose custody of her children, so she is loath to admit there’s anything seriously wrong. But things are seriously, seriously wrong with Owen.

Writer Will Honley hits on a topic that was really popular in the genre maybe five years ago (The Hole, The Prodigy, Brahms: The Boy 2, Z, Brightburn ).  His updates actually recall slightly older films – Grace (2009), It’s Alive (the 2009 remake), even 1990’s nutty Baby Blood to a degree. What Blood is saying is not original at all, so to make it relevant, Anderson will need to mine Honley’s script for some real relevance.

The family dysfunction and addiction angle could be it. There’s an undercooked metaphor here concerning addiction and heredity. Owen’s bratty behavior buoys the film’s darker qualities, and that business down the basement is especially gruesome (as “down the basement business” so often is). But none of it pans out. In fact, some of it – the least forgettable bits – are forgotten entirely as the film delivers a kind of final grace that is wildly unearned.

Had that moral ambiguity felt intentional the film would have been at least provocative. The fact that it does not is alarming, but not in a way that makes the film more enjoyable.

All the performances are solid. Monaghan and June B. Wilde spar beautifully with each other. Meanwhile, Skeet Ulrich (nice to see you!) and young Skylar Morgan Jones fill out the problematic family well. They just won’t help you remember the movie.