Don't Bet On It

 

 
I should know better by now.

It's not that I shouldn't take a chance on newish horror movies with dumb premises that are streaming on Amazon Prime. It's that I should know better than to dare watch them on a cell phone at the gym because virtually every newish horror movie with a dumb premise streaming on Amazon Prime will inevitably be dimly lit, and I'll spend a solid chunk of said film trying to find the right angle to see...anything.

Anyhoo, Odds Are... you won't watch this film anyway, but if you do give it a spin, avoid the elliptical.

Quick Plot: Tracy and Ryan are a hot college couple whose dates keep getting crashed by Kelly, Ryan's ex. The trio spend a fun day at a beachside amusement park, but Kelly and Ryan (DAMNIT WHY COULDN'T TRACY BE NAMED REGIS?) keep falling into their own obnoxious games, namely, "Odds Are."

Combine Truth or Dare with Pick a Number and that's basically it. One person issues a dare (or rather, just a rude thing to do to a perfect stranger) and if the other player guesses the same number between 1 and 10, that player has to do it.

A few rounds in, Ryan plays a pretty cruel trick on Tracy, heading into icy waters for a swim and faking drowning so she runs in after. In 58 degree weather.

Ryan is what we nice people like to call "an asshole."

The trio agrees to one more game: knock on a random stranger's door and enter. Kelly gets inside and disappears, and Tracy and Ryan quickly discover they picked the wrong doorway.

Directed by TV veteran Peter Markle, Odds Are... is one of the strangest paced direct-to-streaming-dimly-lit genre films I'm seen in some time. Once our leads are in the house, it seems as though we're in for a Don't Breathe meets Saw medley. We get something of it, before the story takes a slightly different turn.

For better and worse, Odds Are... is not your standard "attractive people trapped in a house and hunted by a brilliant sociopath" tale. Based loosely on a real-life murder (Wikipedia lists it as happening in "Eastern Europe," so the details are scarce), it takes a bit of a turn that's both interesting in theory and disappointing in its result.

I won't spoil the twist (though you'll probably figure it out fairly easily) because hey, maybe you'll want to watch Odds Are... It's decently put together with an adequate enough young cast, and some might find its direction to be surprising in a good way. I don't know how anybody could stand these characters for more than 10 minutes (much less the overlong 100 that is Odds Are...), particularly with their texting style:

Look, I get that at 39, I'm of a different generation than these kids, and nothing is more dull than a person complaining about today's youth, but, does NO ONE born after 1995 know how to use words? Was there a side effect of also vaccinating against punctuation marks when they got their chicken pox shot?

Thank you for your time. If you'll excuse me, I have to run to make sure I get a dinner spot at the early bird special.

High Points
It goes without saying that the scariest part of Odds Are... is the fate of the beautiful chocolate lab puppy, and I'm pleased to report that not only does Choco-Latte make it, he also gets bonus likability points to Tracy for taking the time to return him to his mother

Low Points
Of course, Choco-Latte's male owner is, without question, the only pleasant character in the film, so the fact that he meets such a sad fate and the rest of these jerks get to swim another day is pretty disappointing

Lessons Learned
Nothing tastes better after millennial murder than a fresh fireside s'more

The colder the water, the better your hair will look after an impromptu swim

Checkhov's Law of Breath Holding Techniques will obviously pay off (meaning if a character discusses holding their breath for 14 minutes in the first act, it shall indeed be held somewhere around the third)

Rent/Bury/Buy

If you're itching for a good horror film on Amazon Prime about attractive young people who invade the wrong house, watch Crush the Skull. If you want a mediocre version that turns into a dull mystery, here's Odds Are... 

Black Mirror Revisit: Striking Vipers

 

Last year, I compiled a non-definitive ranking of Black Mirror episodes. Once a month, I revisit an episode, starting from the bottom. Herein lies #15.

The Talent: Showrunner Charlie Brooker wrote the script, while veteran television director Owen Harris helmed the episode. Harris is no stranger to the Black Mirror universe, having directed two of its most celebrated (and not just by me) episodes: the Emmy-winning San Junipero and my personal favorite, Be Right Back.

The Setup: We start with a sort of softer Crocodile-style intro to Danny, Theo, and Karl's carefree 20s. Danny and Karl are besties and roommates who pass many an evening playing a Mortal Kombat-ish video game called Striking Vipers, but time moves on and ten years later, they've grown up.

Danny and Theo are now a married suburban couple with a young son, putting a whole lot of effort into conceiving number 2. Karl is still living the wealthy music producer bachelor life, finding his younger dates via apps and spending awkward dinners trying to explain his '90s references.

Life gets complicated for both men when they decide to play the new, far more advanced version of Striking Vipers, which lets its players enter a realistic virtual space and try out a whole set of new moves without consequences. Before you can throw in a high kick, Karl's avatar Roxette and Danny's Ryu-ish Lance give up on street fighting and begin, well, you know.

The Ending: After testing out their relationship IRL (as the kids say), Danny and Karl confirm that they're not attracted to one another but still, the game sex is better than anything they've seemed to experience in real life (as the adults say). Danny tells a now very pregnant Theo the truth and the credits-filled coda tells us their future: once a year, they're allowed a respective dalliance. For Danny, that means logging on and summoning Lance for a date with Roxette. For Theo, going to a bar and meeting a stranger for sex.

The Theme: Satisfaction comes in many forms, and for our Striking Vipers trio, it means occasionally looking outside your marriage (and physical body).

The Verdict: I still maintain that Striking Vipers isn't quite as adventurous as it thinks it is, mostly because the coda's resolution feels rather strict. Clearly, Lance/Roxette sex is more satisfying to Danny (and obviously Karl) than anything in real life, and the tradeoff that means an annual virtual trip for Danny and a one-night-only one night stand for Theo feels, well, disappointing for all parties involved. Perhaps that's the point?

That being said, Striking Vipers is certainly fun to watch, particularly if you have any connection to '90s era fighting video games (Street Fighter 2 champion talking here). Anthony Mackie shows a different side than anything we've seen him do onscreen, while pre-Watchman Yahya Abdul-Mateen II manages to convey so much stifled unhappiness hiding behind his playboy persona in limited screentime. It's a solid hour of television, but just one with bigger ideas that deserve a deeper dive.

Technology Tip: All those fantasies you had as a teenager with a SEGA Genesis are even hotter in your adult future

The Black Mirror Grade
Cruelty Scale: 2/10 No one is actually hurt, and while Danny and Theo's marriage hits a bump, it ends up far stronger than it started (at least for now). The 2 really all falls on Karl, who is clearly longing for. whole lot more.

Quality Scale: 7/10; like most of the series, this is a beautiful looking episode, with quality actors giving performances that we haven't quite seen before. And anyone who grew up learning the button codes for character-specific moves and experiencing extreme '90s joy at defeating their opponent in an exotic 2D backdrop will appreciate the game design.

Enjoyment Scale: 6/10; seriously, I count Chun-Li among my childhood heroes, so I can't say I'm immune to the charms of Striking Vipers. This might be the sexiest episode in the series, but I still, on second viewing, just find it missing something.

Up Next (Month): Yet another video game, albeit one of a whole different genre with Playtest

The Sorta Newlywed Game

 

Continuing the accidental marathon of recent-but-pre-pandemic-films-that-all-too-well-apply-to-the-pandemic-era, here's a mangled love story fitting for our times!

Quick Plot: Eve and Tom are a happily engaged young couple with finance woes. British Eve is still waiting on her American visa, while Tom is determined to make it as a novelist (cue my gag here). 

Eve comes across a classified ad that is naturally too good to be true: a psychological institute is looking for newlyweds to take part in a month-long study for a grand payment of $50K. The goal is to disseminate the titular honeymoon phase, and to learn exactly what it is that turns once-amorous couples into bitter divorcees. 

Faking a month-long marriage, the Jacobs are moved into a high-tech apartment where their only communication to the outside world comes in the form of their hologram study check-ins. They can request anything they need to be instantly deposited in their kitchen (think Alexa meets those cool bank teller drive-thru depositories). Eve figures it will give Tom the perfect opportunity to write that novel (cue my stifled laughter) and they're off to a nice start. 

Or are they? Upon their first round at sex in their new setup, Eve is shaken by Tom's unusually aggressive style. He's not writing (obviously) and worst of all, seems to be newly obsessed with having a baby. 

After taking LSD one night, Eve witnesses an older participating couple in an act of violence. Tom sees nothing, nor does the study's director or any of his cameras. Was it just a bad trip, or have the gaslights been primed?

The Honeymoon Phase is the feature debut of writer/director Phillip G. Carroll Jr. and was apparently filmed on a shoestring budget with some intrepid use of Airbnb. On that note, it's incredibly impressive. While the limitations show their head a bit when the action moves outside its primary setting, The Honeymoon Phase is sharply put together, both in its visuals and performances. 

I wish I could say the same about the story, which has grand ambitions but feels a bit muddled, particularly in its rushed final act. Watching The Honeymoon Phase, it was hard to not think about Vivarium, my favorite new film of last year (and one also streaming on Amazon). It's also a tale of a young, happy but not yet experienced couple trapped in a home designed to meet their basic needs, but one clearly after a far more sinister agenda.

I don't think The Honeymoon Phase reaches the bar Vivarium set, but it makes for an interesting pairing, and one appropriately fit for our seemingly endless pandemic quarantine. There's a lot to be explored in the nature of millennial relationships, with power dynamics quite different than they were in older generations. Eve serves as our point of view, but Carroll does play with her reliability. There's always the chance that everything is operating exactly as it should.

I didn't love The Honeymoon Phase, and I doubt I'll revisit it anytime soon, but it certainly held my attention and felt extremely fresh (even if I was a tad distracted thinking of somewhat similar films). I wish the screenplay had another draft or two, and I don't know that I loved where it left me, but it was successful for what it was. 

High Points

Any woman can tell you that no words are more offensive and dismissive than "calm down," and The Honeymoon Phase subtly uses things to s to growing effect

Low Points

I can forgive budgetary challenges that made The Honeymoon Phase's climax a bit, well, anticlimactic, but the explanation surrounding the reveal AND the coda left me feeling pretty unsatisfied, which is never a good way to walk away from a film

Lessons Learned

The more closeups of a crimson curling iron, the stronger the payoff for said crimson curling iron being used in an act of violence

Wannabe writers who want to be writers just to say they're writers will always find excuses not to write

If the psychologist in charge of the Dharma Initiative is the guy running your experiment, consider reading the fine print 

Rent/Bury/Buy

In the realm of low budget, minimalist sci-fi horror, The Honeymoon Phase is something new. There are more accomplished tellings of this out there (the aforementioned Vivarium, for one), but there's plenty to pull out of this one. Give it a spin. 

All Hunts Matter

Like many a genre film fan, I love nothing more than a good hunting humans flick. Battle Royale, The Human Race, The Belko Experiment, Surviving the Game, The Hunger Games for the kiddos. No year passes by without me watching The Running Man, only to immediately search for any new genre films like it that I might have missed.

No one would miss The Hunt this year. In any other time, this dark comedy would probably have fought to make back its budget in theaters, maybe garnering a loyal fandom once it hit streaming sites. Instead, the Blumhouse original infamously became another chip in political debates and later, the first major American release to be directly affected by COVID-19.

It's a weird journey for a genre film. 

Quick Plot: A fancy private jet filled with wealthy snobs gets a shake when a man who was clearly supposed to be in a deep sleep awakens in terror. One of the passengers kills him, much to the annoyance of his fellow passengers.

We shift to an open field and a crate full of some confused and gagged deplorables. Before we even learn their names, most of them are gunned down or, preferably, blown up.

Maybe I'm just a simple, simple woman, but I have a very hard time not finding self explosions very, very funny.

Very quickly, our batch of unsuspecting prey gets whittled down to a small handful. They seek shelter in a roadside convenience store only to finally learn the game they're playing: it's a hunt, set somewhere in eastern Europe, and the rules are...well, the rules are simply that there are some angry, wealthy Americans trying to kill you.

The sharpest of the scant batch of survivors is Snowball, or at least, that's the name bestowed up on her by the team of wealthy liberals hunting her. Snowball (the perfection that is fellow Fordham University alumni Betty Gilpin) is a tough talking southerner with skills that would make the most experienced marine envious.

By now, you probably know quite a bit about The Hunt, or at least, have heard the title thrown around in a whole lot of news stories over the past year. Written by Damon Lindelof and his Lost co-writer Carlon Cuse's son Nick Cuse and directed by Compliance's Craig Zobel, The Hunt's initial theatrical release was famously delayed because its marketing campaign and subject matter seemed in poor taste following a pair of mass shootings. It went on to open just as the rest of the country was closing, making it instead of the first big screen releases to have a VOD showing while it was in theaters.

There's something very interesting about how The Hunt became such a hot potato of American cultural debate, particularly because as a film, it's aggressively committed to being so politically apolical. Using the South Park school of making anyone with extreme views look like a buffoon, it's almost as if the writers kept a scoreboard to make sure that liberal and conservatives were being equally skewered at all times.

I was hesitant to watch The Hunt not because of its politics (or lack thereof) but because I couldn't imagine not being distracted by the pile of baggage that came with the film. I rather liked Zobel's Compliance, but some of megaproducer Jason Blum's comments during the frenzied press calls came off as smug in a way that I assumed would be fitting to the film.

Thankfully, The Hunt is - and I realize this is an odd thing to say about a movie with this history - a really good time. Yes, some of the attempts at coating its red vs. blue characters in silly hypocrisy comes across as forced, but the action moves so swiftly that you barely have time to roll your eyes before someone's head is being blown off.

Most importantly, it cannot be overstated how much Betty Gilpin brings to this movie. There's something to be said when you watch a performance and realize no other actor would have played it the same way. Whether she's telling her favorite childhood fable or being unimpressed with Hilary Swank's culinary advice, she just brings such a fresh energy that elevates the entire film.

High Points
Give. Betty. Gilpin. An. Action. Franchise. Now.

Low Points
Much like South Park, there's something a bit exhausting and unsatisfying in the nature of a film being so committed to not committing to anything. It's important for The Hunt, and truthfully, I'd probably be even harder on it had it swung any further right OR left, but there's still something a bit hard to swallow with that school of attitude

Lessons Learned
If you know you're crazy, you're just really mad

The only way to properly slice tomatoes is with a bread knife

Always ask before eating the cookies

Rent/Bury/Buy

If you can unhear all the arguments that erupted during The Hunt's heavy press days, head to Hulu and have a watch. This is a fun movie made with some wildly goofy energy, and while its broad characterizations can be a little much at times, its humor overcomes most of the flaws. It's a good, weird time.