We're Not Going to Talk About It

A '90s horror film I hadn't heard of? Bring it!

Quick Plot: Billy is an American makeup artist working hard on a film shoot in Moscow with her costume designer sister Karen. It's Karen's boyfriend Andy's big break, even if everyone seems to agree that this slasher isn't about to change the industry. 

One night, Billy gets locked on set and catches a show: the camera crew have been pulling a Dracula, only instead of making a superior version of the same film being made in daylight hours, they're producing snuff. Billy barely escapes and manages to bring the police to the scene of the crime, but communicating what she witnessed is pretty tough in a second language. 

Or third, as it were. See, as you might have guessed from the title, Billy can't speak, though her hearing is clear. Karen believes her sister, while obnoxious Andy seems more miffed that the evening's exploits ruined his definitely-would-have-been-terrible dinner. The killers manage to cover their tracks with some tape swapping, but the night is just getting started. 

I don't know that I had ever even heard of Mute Witness until it showed up on Shudder. Like so many horror-adjacent films of mid-90s, it probably felt a bit underwhelming at the time. Nearly 30 years after its release, I found it to be a joy. 

In a lot of ways, Mute Witness is a strange film. It has the dressings of a slasher, but the actual story follows more of a crime thriller narrative with some effective cat-and-mouse hunts. Sprinkled all around it is some clever comedy, usually in the form of bumbling Americans Andy and Karen. Did I mention there's also a Russian crime ring of snuff film production?

Seriously, there's a LOT here in just 90 minutes, and on paper, probably too much. Thankfully, writer/director Anthony Waller has a great hold of all his tools. He stages the violence well, tackles the humor just right, and directs a confident cast. For me, this wasn't in any way what I expected from the two sentence description, but boy did it leave me satisfied.

High Points

As Billy, Russian stage actress Marina Zudina is not only incredibly likable, but also has outstanding chemistry with every one of her costars, right down to the perfect sisterly dynamics with Fay Ripley's very funny Karen

Low Points

While the comedic and almost cartoonish asides worked for me, I can see them grating a bit on some audiences

Lessons Learned

Pockets can hold things your hands will drop, so if your sweaty fingers keep losing a very important key, PUT IT IN YOUR DAMN POCKET

When it comes to self-defense, the hair dryer is mightier than the disposable razor

Chekhov is child's play compared to dying in a low budget slasher

Rent/Bury/Buy

Mute Witness isn't the scariest or funniest movie you'll find on Shudder, but it's such a uniquely balanced ride that you'll find yourself thoroughly entertained. Have a go when you're looking for something fresh (even if it's 30 years old). 

The Wife of (the Devil's) Bath

Horror comes in many forms. Masked giants wielding sharp objects. Shuffling reanimated corpses with a taste for your flesh. Homicidal dolls that share your bed. Ventriloquist dummies that simply exist. There are many, many ways to approach the genre, but setting your story in a time period before indoor plumbing, women's autonomy, and Tylenol might be the most reliable way to keep your modern audience on edge. 

Quick Plot: In one of the cheeriest prologues this side of the millennium, a woman drops her baby down a waterfall, then turns herself into the authorities to be beheaded. Welcome to Europe!

Somewhere nearby, we meet peasant Agnes on her wedding day to Wolf, a pleasant enough fellow who borrows a little more money than Agnes would like to purchase their isolated, roomy forest home. It's the perfect place to raise a family, though Wolf doesn't seem overly interested in the mechanics needed to make that happen (at least with a woman). 

Poor Agnes glumly deals with her new life: sorting out fish, washing what looks to be very itchy clothes, and constantly dodging her mother-in-law's criticisms about how to store cast iron cookware. Not surprisingly, it becomes pretty unbearable. This being the 1700s, the therapy and antidepressants that might improve the day to day come in the form of prayer and leeches. Agnes can't bear it. 

The Devil's Bath is written and directed by the team of Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz of Goodnight Mommy and The Lodge, equally tragic stories that also explore the idea of women who can't seem to exist comfortably in their realities. The style is much more akin to The VVitch and Hagazussa, only even less of a straightforward genre movie. While there are some extreme acts of violence, The Devil's Bath unfolds more as slice-of-life human drama than cover-your-eyes horror.

Still, being a poor farmer's wife in 18th century Austria was absolutely a horror movie in itself. We can complain about the grossness of something like reality TV dating competitions all day long, but if a pre-Bachelor world meant entertainment came from public beheadings and blood-drinking afterparties, maybe we should feel a little comfort. Life is hard, and it's always been so, but at least our prescription for feeling that way isn't to have a hole cut into the back of our necks so we can run early dental floss through the wound to raise our spirits.

As they've demonstrated with the earlier films, Fiala and Franz have a bleak, but kind of beautiful view of the world. It's a terrible place filled with people capable of terrible acts, but there's also a certain victory in how they let their unstable characters make their own choices. Said decisions often lead to painful death, but there's a strange sense of satisfaction for the tortured leads. 

High Points

The Devil's Bath is almost entirely seen from Agnes's point of view, and without a compelling performer in the role, it simply wouldn't work. Anja Plaschg doesn't get to say much as Agnes, but her face is that of a silent film star, and it makes every scene scream. Plaschg also composed the film's haunting score, so double points to her.

Low Points

Aforementioned Hagazussa and The VVitch have similar styles of slow-mounting tension in a harsher time period, but the very fact that they share so many similarities to The Devil's Bath makes some of the latter's weaknesses more apparent. The pacing of those films feels necessary. In The Devil's Bath, there's something a bit too inconsistent in the storytelling that makes the two hour runtime feel even longer

Lessons Learned, the 18th Century Edition

Traditional wedding gifts included the timeless apron, but if you REALLY cared about the bride to be, you brought her the severed finger of an executed murderer

Mother-in-laws know best, then and now

Pin the tail on the donkey's origins involved a lot more chicken blood

Rent/Bury/Buy

I don't know that anyone is going to have a great time with The Devil's Bath (and if you do, I don't know that I'm picking you as my next badminton doubles partner). This is a dark, cruel film. That said, it's a very well-made dark, cruel film, and it has more on its mind than simple shock value (even though that's certainly there in spades). If you're in the mood to get brought down a few pegs, find this one on Shudder.

She'll Fill You Up (On Blueberry Pancakes)

As we begin the slow and sad goodbye to summer, it only feels right to end the season with (another) shark attack. Dive in!

Quick Plot: A ridiculously quick prologue shows us a diver getting eaten, only to cut to a credits montage that might have actually been a recycled commercial for a Hawaiian cruise. Hot bodies in water, hot bodies diving for volleyballs, and all the usual activities that involve hot bodies in bikinis.

Elsewhere on the island, a young surfer heads out early to catch some waves, only to quickly be devoured by a very large shark. Her father, Captain Harlan, is furious at how the local authorities are doing nothing to hunt down the creature and serve it vengeance. Apparently, much like Under Paris, it's the scientists and animal rights activists who are now in control, leaving anyone who dares to set their toe in the ocean to become potential fish food.

Cue the disposables! A batch of adult friends (to be clear, they're NOT couples) enjoy a private cruise when, guess what? They meet a hungry shark. Down goes the captain, his partner, and all of final girl Jessie's pals. That includes Shane West, who must have committed some pretty heinous Hollywood crimes for this to be his 2022 resume. 

Ever watch an enjoyably terrible movie only to realize, in between giggles, that it actually has very dangerous opinions? Sure, many a zombie flick plays like a 90-minute commercial for the NRA and the some of your collection basket money at any given Catholic church surely goes to the funding of the demonic possession genre, but sometimes, there are other ominous signs that your filmmaker might have something of an agenda that involves more than attempting to scare you out of the water. 

Harlon, Maneater's hero, is played by country star Trace Adkins, a whiter than mayonnaise man who butts heads with the people of color around him, one of whom happens to be the island's ineffectual police chief. Heroine Jessie is a blond-haired-blue-eyed beauty medical student who takes care of her sick mother and quickly pivots into action lead when the moment calls (the fact that she can't administer year one Girl Scout level first aid on any of her dying friends seems to bother no one). When peace is restored and Jessie sits in shock in Sheriff Kula's office, his suggestion that she speak to a therapist is rebuffed by Harlan's more scientific approach: to overcome trauma, one just needs a big pile of blueberry pancakes. Our traumatized heroine agrees. 

I don't know writer/director Justin Lee's politics, so it's certainly possible that Maneater's anger comes more from innocently awkward storytelling than anger at  strides in mental health and environmental activism. To be clear, Maneater is wildly terrible and even more wildly entertaining. Montages are deployed more frequently than a Hallmark Christmas movie. CGI sharks hunt in knee-high water. Shotguns defy physics. It's very, very dumb.

High Points

About 25 minutes into Maneater, there's a blink-and-you-miss-it shot where a confident young man leaps off a cliff and lands in the jaws of a shark. It's random, never acknowledged, and honestly? A perfect shot.

Low Points

Many a good movie stumbles in its ending. Maneater (not a good movie) stumbles, tries to hold on, then slips on its other foot, goes down, starts to get up, then simply forgets how its limbs actually work. The action finishes, leaving us a good ten minutes of denouement. It's a weird pacing decision, sure, but now understand that said denouement is put into the fuzzy acting skills of Trace Adkins, a "why am I doing this sh*t" Jeff Fahey, and a young actor that I have to imagine was simply the only guy that came into the audition room wearing pants. It's a seemingly endless dialogue scene done to set up a sequel, and written with the mandate to culminate with a poorly worded Jaws reference. It's mind-bogglingly bad. 

I kind of loved it.

Lessons Learned

Tragic deaths involve car accidents or drug overdoses, not shark meals

Dolphins are a good time

The best way to decipher whether a creature is a devil or a fish is to see if it bleeds

The later in life you graduate pre-med, the worse you'll be at helping anyone in a medical emergency

Rent/Bury/Buy

Let's be clear: Maneater is a bad movie. It also might be a bit, well, dumbly conservative, if that makes sense. Still, if you're the kind of idiot like me who relishes this kind of swing, it will likely entertain you. Find it on Hulu and pour on the maple syrup. 

Gravitron > Delorean

 

When the plot of Totally Killer was announced, much of the horror internet was aghast at just how similar it compared to The Final Girls (a film I love dearly). Such coincidences happen, and it helps no one to harp on the similarities when you have the freedom to, you know, sit back and enjoy good movies. 

Quick Plot: In 1987, a trio of high schoolers were brutally murdered by the Sweet Sixteen Killer. By 2023, the crime remains unsolved in the small town of Vernon, which now celebrates some of its notoriety with true crime podcasts and walking tours. 

16-year-old Jamie Hughes is your typical sullen suburbanite. Her life is quickly turned upside down when mom Pam is stabbed to death by a mysterious figure sporting the same mask popularized by the same man who slayed her three best friends. Jamie is inconsolable, especially after the killer hunts her down. The only escape? Her best friend Amelia's time machine prototype, which promptly sends her from school science fair to 1987.

Armed with 36 years of knowledge about the future, Jamie attempts to prevent the murders. Along the way, she befriends Amelia's genius mom Lauren, her own high school principal, bullying gym teacher, and Vernon's version of the Heathers (in this case, Mollys) headed by a sniping Pam. 

Thankfully, Back to the Future is still fresh in most of the young people's memories, while others are easily convinced that Jamie's psychic powers are up there with Miss Cleo. Still, solving a crime before and while it's happening proves to be much harder than Jamie anticipates, especially when she also has to contend with messing up her parents' delayed courtship and getting home before her cell phone battery dies. 

Let's deal with the elephant in the room first: no, Totally Killer is not on the same level as The Final Girls, a movie that charms you with its cleverness than shoves itself down your throat to tear your heart apart with some of the most emotional mother/daughter relationship drama I've ever seen in on film, let alone a horror comedy sold on a meta gimmick. The Final Girls is a masterpiece. Totally Killer is totally fun.

Directed by Nahnatchka Khan, Totally Killer finds its horror comedy tone immediately. Aces like Julie Bowen help tremendously, and Kiernan Shipka serves as the right north star through both the light and heavy. Marty McFly references aside, Totally Killer has a certain Scream-quality in its blend that respects the fact that young people are being murdered as tragedy while finding humor around its corners.

High Points

A growing trend I love in cinema about young people is how it's managed to maintain some of its high school character tropes (mean girl, nerd, and so on) but takes just enough time to make them human along the way. Jamie is quick to call out the many behaviors of her mom's era that are problematic to her 21st century eyes, but there's a sense of believability about the way they interact that's both funny and somewhat honest

Low Points

I can't necessarily pinpoint what needed to be cut, but overall, Totally Killer just feels a tad too long, as if a few scenes just have to hold on to throw out an extra, unnecessary joke

Lessons Learned

Gen-Z does not knock

You can't try to invent time travel without the full expectation that you'll meet people from the future

You don't observe Halloween in the manufacturing industry

Rent/Bury/Buy

Totally Killer is streaming on Amazon, and it's a joyful little way to spend 100 minutes. Have at it.

Is It Camp?

 

We can't let summer end without visiting camp! Even a terribly run, cheaply funded one! (or maybe, ESPECIALLY a terribly run and cheaply funded one)

Quick Plot: Doing some backwards math, our story begins around a campfire in 1987, when a few counselors tell slasher stories about burn victim-groundskeeper-turned-murderer Warren Copper, only for one (or maybe more?) to quickly be hacked up to bits. Now 1991, the camp is once again host to tragedy when young camper Mason dies on a hike. 

Don't ask me how, as the film never actually explains it. 

Mysterious dead Mason is none other than Mason Copper, son of Warren, who, UNDERSTANDABLY, doesn't take things well. Camp director Linnea Krug is adamant that the show will go on, since Camp Silverlake was founded by her father (a painted cameo by the great Tom Atkisn) and they have, apparently, weathered MANY such disasters over their decades in business. 

No, we don't get any more details, and yes, we are essentially led to believe that this camp has a higher body count than the state of New Jersey. Don't think too hard about it because two scenes later, Krug returns to explain how this IS the end of Camp Silverlake, which has been sold to developers. The remaining young staff must pack it all up and end their summer early.

As night falls, the counselors laze around the incredibly disgusting pool, lining themselves up for an axe attack by a mysterious masked man. Final girl-in-the-making Lexi must also contend with her own inner demons, as a few years earlier, her little brother was killed under her watch.

Again, I think? Final Summer isn't what you'd call a detail-oriented film. Written, directed, and (most unfortunately) shot by John Isberg, it desperately wants to evoke Friday the 13th vibes. The slasher spirit is strong, and the refreshingly diverse young cast is sufficiently dumb to be slaughtered quickly.

And yet somehow, despite barely nudging over the 80 minute mark, Final Summer seems to go on forever. Part of it might be viewer exhaustion in trying to decipher what they're seeing (both from a story point of view and a 'what is actually going on here?' one). Motives are fuzzy, death scenes cut oddly, and character choices continuously escalate in their stupidity. 

It's not good. That being said, Final Summer is clearly made with enthusiasm. The young cast varies in skill, but some show nice sparks of charisma under fairly dull writing. The pacing is weird, but also generally fast, with a few decently executed bursts of violence (usually followed by characters making incredibly dumb decisions). This won't particularly satisfy most horror fans, but at least it feels like it was made by one.

High Points

There's a fun sequence right as the carnage begins where the whole group of counselors approach the killer, unaware of its identity or plans, that almost called to mind The Burning in its burst of fast kills. It's far, far away from The Burning, but I appreciate the somewhat fresh approach 

Low Points

I was fine with the rather silly, but also inevitable climax reveal, but then this 82 minute movie had the nerve to keep going, tossing in a completely undefined continuation that made less sense, and THEN, a post-credits teaser for goodness sake

Lessons Learned

A trophy is not necessarily the one-shot weapon you expect it to be

Once your identity is revealed, you could save a lot of aggravation by NOT wearing your slasher mask that impedes peripheral vision

The last day of camp is the perfect time to ruin a friendship

Rent/Bury/Buy

If you're desperately craving a camp-set slasher and have run through the okay to good ones, Final Summer is probably near the top of the not good pile. It's on Amazon Prime for those that just can't resist.

Night of the Senior Living

 

Following the string of hot but horrible twentysomethings-in-terror movies I've watched as of late, nothing was more welcome than a story about seniors. Sadly the selection is slim, but thankfully, also very mighty. 

Quick Plot: Retired ballet instructor Judith (the always splendid Barbara Hershey) celebrates her 70th birthday surrounded by family and former students, happily embracing her golden years only to collapse. Though mentally and physically fit, Parkinson's is beginning to take a toll, leaving the widowed Judith to book herself new residency at a senior living facility.

Her distant daughter supports the move, though teen grandson Josh is devastated. Judith practically raised the boy, and their connection runs deep. 

At first, Judith's new digs seem less than ideal, but livable. Her roommate is nearly catatonic, but a pleasant nurse helps lead her to the in-crowd: sassy Ruth (the late Fran Bennett) and Trish (The Taking of Deborah Logan's Jill Larson), and catch of the nursing home, Roland (my silver fox Bruce Davison). Much like a college theater department, an available, viable straight male probably does well in a nursing home environment. 

It's not quite enough to please Judith, especially as residents seem to start dying off in rapid succession. Judith begins to have wild incidences at night, brushed off as nightmares that can be cured with sedatives by the staff. Even her beloved Josh has a hard time believing her when the facility's doctor shows evidence of Judith's own health declining.

This being a horror movie, we all side with Judith, and it's nearly impossible not to with Hershey's performance. How divine to see an actor like her in this role. Judith is, and the script acknowledges, far more spry than most of her age bracket, but this is still a story that embraces what it means to age. 

The Manor is written and directed by Axelle Carolyn, someone who has steadily been building a career in the genre. I haven't loved some of her output (her flashback episode of The Haunting of Bly Manor felt like a big tonal misfire) but The Manor is genuinely excellent, and a hugely exciting sign of what she can do. Despite being about senior citizens, it feels incredibly fresh in its approach and deeply satisfying in execution. What a pleasure. 

High Points

I won't spoil the delicious ending, but it was incredibly satisfying in a way I didn't see coming

Low Points

The Manor has a very small scale, which makes sense once you understand it was part of Amazon's "Welcome to the Blumhouse" series. Much like Hulu's Into the Dark, these are lower-budget, shorter running length films. I get the sense that The Manor could have been even more effective in terms of its gothic tone with a few more bucks behind it

Lessons Learned

I'm a cat person and can't imagine life without the feline monsters, but maybe, just MAYBE, they're not the best animals to have on staff at a nursing home

One must earn the ability to use bad language

No one can live long enough to deserve the horrors of a children's choir

Rent/Bury/Buy

At a spry 90 minutes, The Manor is the perfect Sunday morning spooky watch. It won't necessarily give you nightmares, but it taps into something very deep regarding aging, while also maintaining a grand sense of fun. Have a watch on Amazon Prime.