Don't Judge an Evil Kid Movie By Its Evil Boy Title

Welcome to The Shortening! For February, we adjust the height on our camera to focus on movies featuring vertically challenged villains. If you have your own blog or podcast and plan to do the same, be sure to leave a note in the comment with your links!

 

WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING TO ME?

I see a movie poster with a silly title. I queue it up expecting a campy good time.

What do I get instead?

An actual decent movie. 

Did I not leave enough crab cakes out for John Waters on Christmas Eve? 

Quick Plot: Polina and Igor are devoted parents to 6-year-old son Vanya, but all it takes is one day playing outside by himself for an accident to leave them shattered. Igor, a doctor, refuses to identify the mangled body as his own, putting his and his wife's lives in limbo as the parents of a missing, not dead child.

Three years pass when Igor convinces the reluctant Polina to visit a countryside orphanage in the hopes of bringing home a child. Instead, they stumble on a grisly crime scene. The manager has been found dead, and the only person that may have seen what happened is a feral child. 

Polina quickly bonds with the boy. A fuzzy adoption grants them custody, with a sympathetic police chief keeping watch on the situation. 

Back home, the boy adapts rather quickly to his surroundings in Vanya's old bedroom. It's so seamless that Polina begins calling him by her son's name (convenient if anything was monogrammed). Igor isn't thrilled, but with his wife finally happy and a poor child in good hands, how can he complain? 

The situation quickly reverses when Polina discovers she's pregnant. Vanya isn't thrilled about big brotherhood, and as anyone who's ever watched an evil child (OR EVIL BOY) movie might guess, Polina's pregnancy just got a whole lot harder. 

Directed by Olga Gorodetskaya, Evil Boy (originally titled the classier Stray) doesn't bring much newness to the dangerous child genre, but for most of its running time, it's an engrossing, haunting watch. Leads Elena Lyadova and Vladimir Vdovichenkov create a believably loving but stressed marriage, and young Sevastian Bugaev toes a fine line with his creepy but sweet Vanya. It's hard not to care about this messy family, even when you know nothing good will come from their union.

Unfortunately, Evil Boy stumbles badly with one of the worst CGI visuals I've seen in years. 

WORSE.

The movie somewhat recovers from this, but ultimately, the ending doesn't quite satisfy. Still, for a good hundred minutes, this is some good stuff. 

High Points

One of the secrets to getting your audience invested in a horror movie is to, you won't believe this, allow your audience to like your characters. From both the perfromances and screenplay, Polina and Igor are incredibly sympathetic, but what really made Evil Boy click for me was how kindly the local police chief was drawn. It's a supporting part that didn't need much backstory, but there's a careful effort to make him a good man. That goes a long way.

Low Points

If you were alive in the '90s, you know all too well the horrors of Ally McBeal's dancing baby nightmare. While that image was indeed terrifying, nobody should ever be reminded of it during the unironic climax of a horror movie

Lessons Learned

Traumatized boys have mental disorders

In any movie with a potentially evil child and a cat, do not, and I repeat, do not ever get attached to the cat

Russians don't know the difference between a pitbull and bull terrier

Rent/Bury/Buy

Save for that tragic final act choice, Evil Boy is quite good. It doesn't offer many surprises, but those looking for a decently made, fairly serious killer kid film shouldn't be too disappointed. Find it on Amazon Prime. 

Monkey Trouble

Welcome to The Shortening! For February, we adjust the height on our camera to focus on movies featuring vertically challenged villains. If you have your own blog or podcast and plan to do the same, be sure to leave a note in the comment with your links!

Final Destination, but with a monkey-topped organ grinder in the Death role? Sign me up!

Quick Plot: Hal is having a hard time being twelve. His father Petey disappeared long ago, leaving his pessimistic mother Lois alone to raise Hal and his cruel twin brother Bill. 

Dad's career as a pilot left the family with a bundle of foreign objects and thingamajigs. While rummaging through his supply, the boys discover an organ grinder featuring a maniacally smiling monkey. They think little of it after turning its key, but later that night, their beloved babysitter dies in a freak accident at a hibachi restaurant. 

Hal quickly connects the dots. After one more round of brutal bullying, he snaps and decides to wind up his monkey again in the hopes that it will claim Bill. Unfortunately, he learns too late that the monkey's targets are out of his hands. Instead of his brother, it's his beloved mother who drops dead.

After a few more rounds of odd deaths, Hal and Bill drop the cursed object in a deep well and move on with their rather unhappy lives. 25 years down the road, Hal works a menial job and has a strained relationship with his teen son Petey, so much so that his ex-wife is starting the process of transferring parentage to her new husband (the delightful but underused Elijah Wood). 

Their plans change when Hal discovers his aunt has died in a bizarre but somewhat familiar freak accident. Bill is convinced the monkey has returned, so Hal heads back to his small Maine hometown to investigate. 

From there, a lot of people die.

In increasingly amusing ways.

I've seen most of Osgood Perkins' filmography (the exception being I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives In the House and the new Keeper) and every time, I've found myself wanting to like them so much more than I could. The Blackcoat's Daughter is beautifully filmed but narratively empty, while Gretal & Hansel never came together for me. I'm in the minority on thinking Longlegs was just dumb, and not in a campy intentional way. My working theory is that Perkins is a much better director than he is writer. 

With all that in mind, I went into The Monkey without too much hope. 

For the second time in a row, it was a joy to be proven wrong.

The Monkey is FUN. It's mean but not cruel, and tonally so clear on what kind of story it's telling and how it must be told. This is a black comedy that establishes itself from the very opening scene and constantly reminds us by having virtually every character that isn't Hal (and even to an extent, Hal) be such an inappropriate weirdo that you wonder if Nicolas Cage's Longlegs villain didn't come from this same town. 

High Points

I really do mean it when I say the tone of The Monkey is consistently bananas in the best way. It starts with a bonkers opening scene with Adam Scott, but really solidifies itself during the most inappropriate eulogy you can imagine at the film's first funeral

Low Points

Playing twins should be an actor's dream, but Theo James never really seems to seize the moment

Lessons Learned

The best way to teach your kids about death is to pair the conversation with ice cream cones

The most surefire way to bond with an adolescent boy is via the art of dance

Nothing cramps your swinger lifestyle faster than guardianship of teen twins

Rent/Bury/Buy

I was genuinely surprised by how much I enjoyed The Monkey. It knows exactly what it wants to be, and achieves it with a wildly high level of camp. Find it on Hulu when you need a nasty laugh.

It's Another Shorten1ng!

 

Welcome to The Shortening! 

For those new around these parts, February is a special month here at the Doll's House. It's a short month that also happens to host the birthday of your short housekeeper (that's me) who, in case it wasn't clear, REALLY ENJOYS MOVIES ABOUT KILLER LITTLE THINGS.

Dolls, children, insects, leprechauns, whatever goobers are supposed to be... anything under 5'2 and murderous.

Over the last 17 years of this website and 44 years of my life, I've watched almost every killer doll movie with a budget of $500 or more ever made. PICKINS ARE GETTING SLIM.

When I first saw the poster for ROB1N (is it supposed to be caps? Unclear.), I worried that I had truly hit rock bottom. A M3GAN ripoff with a studio pedigree less reputable than The Asylum?

What was I getting myself into?

Turns out, a perfectly okay low budget movie. 

Quick Plot: Robin celebrates his 11th birthday in the traditional Welsh way: slaughtering everyone at his party with an axe before being shot.

34 years later, his wealthy father Aiden has retired from a career in military technology to rest in his sprawling countryside mansion with housekeeper Freya and cat Smokey (don't get attached). A car accident has left Aiden something of an amnesiac, but he appears to have maintained enough of his engineering memories to build a robot reminiscent of his late son.

Enter some competition: the newly engaged nephew Leo and Lexi. Leo holds some resentment for his uncle not adopting him after the death of his parents (seemingly NOT connected to the aforementioned bloody birthday; this family has rough luck). He also owes quite a debt to a violent loan shark. Could Uncle Aiden's legendary safe save the day?

Maybe, but first we have a lot of murders to pile up in the estate's barn! Because for whatever reason, that's where Rob1n decides to do his dirty work. 

Written and directed by Lawrence Fowler, ROB1N easily meets its low ambitions. The film is mostly confined to one location, and Fowler seems to know how to stage violence in shadow and amp up the horror without showing us his limitations. The storyline is probably a little more complicated than it needs to be. I spent far too much time in the first twenty minutes trying to unravel the timeline and still don't actually understand, well, what Rob1n is or how much Aiden is at fault. All that said, I needed a killer doll movie, and I found one that kept me interested for a breezy 90 minutes.

High Points

I won't spoil it here, but ROB1N has a decent twist in its last act that offered a nice ripple to where we thought the story was going

Low Points

There are a LOT of hints that ROB1N was made for less money than M3GAN's hair and wardrobe budget, but none more so than the fact that for whatever reason, almost all of the film's violence occurs in an empty, rarely lit barn

Lessons Learned

Never trust your audience to read text, even when it's on the screen long enough for them to wonder, "is the character going to audibly read this out loud?" before you let said character read it out loud

Welsh law requires a warrant to enter a house, but barns are free reign

More Welsh surprises: people will actually answer phonecalls from strangers

Rent/Bury/Buy

I went into ROB1N with the lowest of expectations, so it's hard to know if my middle of the road rating is genuine or just a "could have been so much worse." Fowler clearly knows how to put together a movie with limited resources. I wish this one had a little more umph or personality (especially in its titular villain) but I found myself pretty invested through the brief runtime. It's not a strong recommendation, but if you, like me, have exhausted cinema's homicidal doll output, then maybe this will somewhat work for you too.