(Cult) Family First

 

I don't expect much from a horror movie I've never heard of streaming on Peacock, but low expectations have never kept me from watching a horror movie I've never heard of so here we go!

Quick Plot: A mean little prologue gives us the POV, Michael Meyers-style of a man entering his family's house in order to murder his parents and little sister. Considering this movie's runtime is all of 86 minutes, I'll throw out a theory here that our prologue may have been a last minute "we need more minutes" move.

Next, we meet the Powells at their remote cabin. Mom Kathy (the ever feline Debra Kara Unger) is good with granddaughter Zoey and even better with a glass of white wine, while divorced husband Andrew (Masters of Horror alum Johnathon Schaech) has a different task at hand: donning a mask and kidnapping eldest son Justin with the help of deprogrammer Jeff (Stephen Dorff) for a weekend of tough love. 

Also in tow is Samantha, Justin's suffering girlfriend, and Campbell, the estranged brother who didn't get along with Justin even before he joined a violent satanic cult. As soon as the sun sets, the intervention takes a turn as Justin's "real" family shows up in animal masks and black leather outerwear to take him back.

It didn't surprise me to see the first bit of IMDB trivia describing Jackals as a 15-day shoot. Despite a surprisingly recognizable cast, there's something exceedingly quick and small about the production. That's not always a bad thing: director Kevin Greutert spent years editing and eventually directing in the Saw franchise, which infamously began down and dirty. There's certainly plenty of precedent. 

Unfortunately, Jackals clearly didn't have the time or means (or maybe even desire?) to find much meat in the material. It's a perfectly fine concept for a horror movie, and with better-than-average performances from the more seasoned cast, we end up with an adequately made cheap horror film. 

It's hard to know how good Greutert is as a filmmaker: he's responsible for both the best (Saw VI) and worst (Saw 3D) outputs in the Saw series, and Jackals demonstrates some skill but ultimately feels more like an exercise than real attempt at tension. I'm rooting for him to show us more.

High Points

It would be easy for the family at the heart of Jackals to turn into a screaming mess of dysfunction, so credit goes to the cast and Jared Rivet's script for making each Powell their own person with clearly defined feelings on the Justin situation. I wish there was more of it! 

Low Points

There's a predictable line five minutes in about how the cabin gets no reception. This is obviously a requirement for a movie like this, though in this case, the characters are referring to the antenna on the television set. It wasn't until I started looking up information on Jackals that I realized it was set in 1983. 

Why is this a low point, you ask? It's twofold: 1) the fact that nothing in the film in any way indicates it's taking place 40 years ago is telling to the style and production design, and 2) it has a subtle suggestion that the Satanic Panic was justified, which just feels offensive at this point in time. Do better, incredibly quickly made horror film no one's ever heard of.

Lessons Learned

Maybe you're crazy, or maybe you're just a mom

Guns are powerful, but have you ever tried just heating up a bottle of vegetable oil?

Masks might limit your human hunting visibility, but if you have them made from the right material, they also just might protect you from hot bottles of vegetable oil

Rent/Bury/Buy

I can't really recommend Jackals. It's, well, not that good. But it's better than any less-than-3-week movie should be, and has enough good performances to hold things together. Find it on Peacock, which somehow makes perfect sense. 

I'm Really More of a Morning Apocalypse Person

Apocalypse cults are a lot less charming than they used to be than back in our days of optimism, but that doesn't mean I don't welcome movies about them!

Quick Plot: New York-based Grace is excited to finally have a possible clue into her mysterious past. Having grown up in foster care, she's never met a biological family member, but a South Carolinian private investigator may have a lead. 

After a not-on-the-way-at-all side trip to the Hamptons to meet her boyfriend Jack's family, the pair heads down south to the investigator's sprawling plantation for answers. He's not home, but by nightfall, they're far from alone: a cloak-clad death cult has assembled outside, demanding Grace fulfill her apocalyptic destiny. 

There's not much more to The Long Night. Jeff Fahey pops by for a few minutes, Debra Kara Unger for a few more. Director Rich Ragsdale establishes some grand home invasion-by-way-of-folk horror energy, but if there's one adjective to describe Mark Young and Robert Sheppe's story, it's "unambitious."

Everything basically unfolds how you would expect from reading a one-sentence synopsis and glancing at the poster. Bad cellular reception, blood drinking rituals, goat masked murderers with no discernible identity, and so on.

The only real surprise The Long Night packs is its absolute lack of surprises. I'll spoil a plot detail to illustrate (so skip the next two paragraphs if you have any interest in watching). Early on, Jack is established as a WASPy legacy brat who oozes old money snobbery. When the cultists quietly offer him a way out in exchange for Grace, we spend the next twenty minutes eagerly waiting for him to make his heel turn. It's truthfully the most suspenseful part of the movie. 

And...it doesn't pay off. Jack plays the loyal boyfriend to the end, never really showing any of the conflict of conscience we were expecting to find. Sure, it's nice (I guess?) that not EVERY well-off white guy in a horror film has to be a jerk, but ... well... it would have at least given the movie a pop. 

Instead, everything flows the way a movie about a couple being hunted by a folk doomsday cult would. Sure, the ending has neat possibilities, but not surprisingly, it seems content to merely suggest something bigger than quietly walk away. 

High Points

Scout Taylor-Compton seems to have made a successful career out of the high end of low budget horror, and The Long Night makes a good case for it. She has the perfect kind of screen presence for this kind of movie

Low Points

... and yet, even with Compton's likable performance, we don't know a single detail about Grace that gives us any insight into who she might be

Lessons Learned (The American South Edition)

Being polite is a southern thing

The Klan kills people, not cats 

They don't teach southern rituals at Princeton

Rent/Bury/Buy

Like most new acquisitions on Shudder, The Long Night is a good-looking genre film. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have much on its agenda. You could do worse than give it your eyeballs for 100 minutes, but six months from now, you probably won't remember a thing about it. 

Sh! I Can't Hear In the Dark!

The last time I took a chance on an early '90s sultry thriller airing on HBO my reward was Faye Dunaway shouting "cookies!" in Tom Holland's The Temp. Twas a glorious day.

With that in mind, I went back to the cable well for 1992's Whispers In the Dark. 

Let's just say we can't all be winners.

Quick Plot: We open on blurry lovemaking, which is basically a bunch of pinkish shapes melding into each other like the finale of Society. Instead of butthead jokes and face melting, we simply get Annabella Sciorra as Ann awaking from a dream and heading to her office, where she gets hit on by Jamey Sheridan, provides counseling to a very well-dressed John Leguizamo, and hears the sexual exploits of Debra Kara Unger's Eve.

Sheridan is Doug, a nice guy pilot eager to whisk the workaholic Ann off her sensibly shoe'd feet.Their first plane ride date culminates in that kind of instrumentally scored sex scene the '90s loved, with Ann declaring Doug "the gentlest man she's ever met".

This being an early '90s sexytime thriller, Doug is more than meets the eye. We're less than 20 minutes in when Ann discovers the mystery man from Eve's detailed stories is none other than her new squeeze. Eve reacts with fury, stealing some of Ann's files before hanging herself...allegedly.

Enter Anthony "Whatever Nationality You Need" LaPaglia as brash detective Morgenstern, a man with a very specific hatred of the psychiatric profession. The suspect list begins to mount as Morgenstern interrogates everyone around Ann, including her mentor/pal/therapist Alan Alda.

Checkhov's Law of Name Actors In Small Parts should answer a lot of your questions, but Whispers In the Dark doesn't seem to have the best handle on how to ask them in the first place. Sciorra is fine in the lead, but writer/director Christopher Crowe (penner of 1996's roller coaster game changer Fear) doesn't really have a great handle on how to put the steam in what's supposed to be an erotic thriller. He gets a lot of help from the always-reliable-to-ooze-sensuality Unger, but her character's gone too soon, leaving us instead with such riveting scenes as Ann hanging out with Doug's conservative Iowan mom as she drives around town to show off the local bank.

Basic Instinct, this ain't. Heck, Whispers In the Dark makes Body of Evidence and Sliver look like bonafide classics, and trust me: that's not easy. 

High Points

If you make it through Whispers In the Dark long enough, you will ultimately be rewarded with one of the more bonkers endings of the '90s involving a beachfront confrontation that culminates in a hook to the face of a beloved sweater-clad character actor, so there's that?

Low Points

A goofy erotic thriller that's neither sexy nor fun is a bland, bland thing to behold

Lessons Learned

Being a detective might be considered low, working class, and unjewish

When hiding evidence, consider a place slightly less exposed than the living room shelf

Nothing says "not guilty" like hogtying up your therapist

'90s era police glass was incredibly breakable

Rent/Bury/Buy

Look, I love the stupid subgenre that is the sexy '90s thriller, but there are dozens of better choices out there. Watch one of those instead.