If You Have to Have a Blackout, Best to Have It During This Movie

 

I love the horror genre. It has the potential to do things to an audience that no other type of film can. A great horror film may change the way we think, feel, and process. 

A terrible one makes you question a lot of your life choices.

Quick Plot: Stop me if you've heard this one: a batch of attractive strangers awakens in a dirty but highly secure locked down warehouse with no memory of how any of them got there. The brick walls and bolted doors are impossible to break, even with the handful of rusted weapons scattered about. A sad little television set is their sole connection to the outside.

The only channel it shows comes courtesy of the mysterious Dr. Kasuma, a calmly deranged scientist who informs them that they're now part of her experiment. When the television shows a timer countdown, one subject has 15 minutes to kill a person in the room or risk someone they love being gassed to death onscreen. 

The rules are fairly simple. Unless you're an idiot. 

Surprise! EVERYONE in this movie is, indeed, an idiot. Sure, you can forgive the first contestant for doubting the validity of, you know, murder, but by the third cycle, it's really on you. Even if, spoiler alert for a movie you should absolutely not see, Dr. Kusama doesn't keep her word. 

What IS this? Or rather, why, in 2021, 17 years after the first Saw gave birth to an easily-executable-on-a-small-budget subgenre, do you decide to make a movie like this? We've seen some fun takes: Saw with a shark, Saw as a plea to fund high school musicals, Saw reality TV, and so on. The problem with a bad Saw ripoff is that it reminds you just how empty the genre can be.

There is nothing of value to be found in The Blackout Experiment. The inexperienced actors try (at times too hard) but have no real support behind them to make anything register. The look is bland. The actual sound, garbled (though the dialogue gives you nothing of value, so perhaps it's not a loss). Our villain has no spark nor clear motivation. None of the characters do a thing to warrant our sympathy, though one comes somewhat close only for the film to scream at us that he deserves to die. We don't even have exciting violence. Every attack happens during the blackout, despite the rules being VERY clear that kills have to happen before. 

I guess what I'm really saying is that it's unfair that the characters in The Blackout Experiment didn't have to actually watch The Blackout Experiment. Then again, no one really deserves that kind of fate. 

High Points

It makes dreadful use of all of its 81 minutes, but hey! At least it's only 81 minutes!

Low Points

Aforementioned 81 minutes

Lessons Learned

It takes more than killing a hot chick trying to hack you down with an axe to know what it means to survive

Even if you steal all her boyfriends and her money, a good little sister will love you til the end (even if that end is entirely your fault)

You have to do what a girl holding a gun tells you to do

Rent/Bury/Buy

Oof. Unless you're a completist for these kinds of films (aka the masochist that is me) there is no value of any kind to be found in The Blackout Experiment. Skip it on Amazon Prime. 

Mother is Smothering

It's always exciting to discover a new genre filmmaker with a fresh voice and style. I adored Aneesh Chaganty's Searching, so when I finally realized the straight-to-Hulu 2020 thriller was also one of this (along with co-writer Sev Ohanian) it seemed like the right time to finally dive in (four years after the rest of the world, as is my style).

Quick Plot: Diane is more than ready to send daughter Chloe to college. Born with a bundle of health issues (diabetes, paralysis, asthma, arrhythmia, and a few more syllables explained in the opening credits), Chloe has grown into an incredibly capable young woman who manages her body in between homeschooling and the dozens of daily medication doses issued by her mom.

As Chloe anxiously awaits her college acceptance, she begins to notice certain aspects of her daily routine not adding up. Could her mother be tampering with her medication? Hiding university mail? Building an entire life on a lie?

Obviously, going too much further would spoil much of Run so I'll stop there, though it's not terribly difficult to guess its turns (including a late-breaking reveal that many will call early on). While not packed with narrative surprises, Run does have a few other key factors in its favor.

Sarah Paulson has a lot of fun crafting a homeschooling, organically-grown tomato-eating monster mom, but it's Kiera Allen who holds Run together. The script doesn't quite justify some of her obliviousness, but Allen does an incredible job of pulling us into her character's body and headspace. 

Chaganty has a very different job here than he did on Searching. Where that film wove a mystery out of pure story, Run is all action. Well, not necessarily the kind you probably associate with that word, but it's characters locking doors before others can get there and trying to ask for help while stifled with tubes down their throats. It's a different style, and Changanty does it well.

Run didn't fully grab me, mostly because the script just isn't nearly as clever as it probably needed to be to really click. But this is still an engrossing little film that made for a sufficiently satisfying watch.

High Points

It's an obvious Hitchcock/Bernard Herrmann homage, but it works: Torin Borrowdale's score uses angry strings to great effect

Low Points

The cast helps overcome a lot of this, but as a viewer, it's a bit hard to get past some of the details. How exactly DOES Chloe, a very bright if sheltered person, go 18 years without actually seeing a regular doctor or having a conversation without someone that isn't her mother or mailman?

High Points

Pacific Northwesterners are incredibly patient when it comes to waiting in line

The way to a pharmacist's heart is a challenging scavenger hunt

A stranger is just a google search assistant you haven't met

Rent/Bury/Buy

Run doesn't quite add up to a great movie, but it achieves plenty of tension and stays entertaining all the way through. Worth a glance on Hulu.

Leaving Las Vegas

 

I like to run. Well, "like" and "run" are very loose verbs in this scenario. I enjoy exercise and the outdoors, and adulthood with schedule restrictions being what it is, I have accepted that trotting is the best way to maintain some form of health. I'm a chubby 42 year old woman with the legs of an enthusiastic corgi. My version of "running" is probably significantly slower than, say, an Olympian with a stomach flu who fell out a three story window (and by Olympian, I mean a senior citizen living in Washington's capital city).

I bring this up not to brag about my incredible athleticism, but to say that today's feature understands a fundamental truth about the importance endurance training: you don't have to be fast. You just have to be slightly faster than a resurrected corpse.

Quick Plot: Molly and Nick are the kind of couple you do not want to be driving next to when leaving Las Vegas. Drinking, fighting, and generally awful, they run into car trouble on a desert highway en route to an airfield where their pal is fixing up a plane to get out of the country. Why, you ask? A zombie apocalypse of course!

Nick is armed, but seems to have little experience actually using a gun. It only takes one rotting but well-dressed shambler to take him down, leaving the frantic Molly to trek 36 miles in the hot Nevada sun (and chunky boots with an unreasonable heel).

At least she's not alone. The same zombie who chomped on Nick is hot on her tail, but thankfully, this is more Romero-verse than Snyder-verse. All Molly has to do is figure out the exact pace needed to keep him a few feet back, scramble up a low rock to sleep, and continue on her journey. At least he's a good listener!

Like many a walking dead story, this one dives into the question of who the real monsters are, but it does so in quite an interesting way. I won't spoil the beats, but for its first 2/3rds or so, It Stains the Sand Red is the exact kind of zombie movie I love. It takes a premise we know well and finds an incredibly specific angle to explore a story we haven't quite seen in this context.

It helps that the movie rests on the very capable shoulders of Brittany Allen, who would go on to another great role (and composing credit) for Colin Minihan's followup, What Keeps You Alive. Her roles in the two movies couldn't really be any more different, save for how much they show two very different women tapping into some deep and clever survival skills. 

Not every final girl comes loaded with the engineering skills of a Nancy Thompson or perfect aim of Sarah Polley. Sometimes, the last woman standing is a cocaine-sniffing deadbeat mom who knows she's made mistakes, and has just enough perseverance to put everything she has together and soldier on. 

Colin Minihan has a very good track record to my personal tastes. He was one half of the team behind the great Grave Encounters and the full talent behind the thrilling What Keeps You Alive. It Stains the Sand Red came somewhere in between, and while it has a lot of the same features that make those two films so good (clear and specific characters, slight twists on familiar stories) the actual structure of the film falls a bit short. The movie feels like it's over at least twice before the last act, which makes things drag even with a brief 90 minute running time. I understand the importance of getting to that final beat (no spoilers), but the energy just doesn't sustain it. 

That aside, I still had a very good time with It Stains the Sand Red. There's a lot to enjoy, and the actual arc and conclusion are satisfying. I just wish it all fit together a little more cleanly.

High Points

Brittany Allen does not have an easy job in crafting Molly, a woman who can probably best be described as a hot mess and that's on a good day, but who also comes loaded with brains to adjust to the situation as it unfolds. The movie relies on her performance

Low Points

Aforementioned structural flow

Lessons Learned

Zombies are tempted, but not taken by the game of fetch...unless it involves tampons

Convertibles are not the best choice of vehicle during a zombie apocalypse

Cocaine is an excellent appetite suppressant 

Rent/Bury/Buy

I had a very good (not quite great) time with this movie. It's almost more drama/comedy than horror, so don't necessarily expect to be scared. That being said, this is definitely made for the horror fan, and I think most will find a lot here. As of this posting, it's streamable on Peacock. 

Hail the Pumpkin Thing

People who start playing Christmas music in April are monsters.

People who watch Halloween movies in April are, well, me.

Quick Plot: It's 1963 in Bastion, an isolated Illinois hamlet filled with cornfields and boredom. The town's big excitement for the teenage male population comes on Halloween night, when a vicious pumpkin-headed scarecrow named Sawtooth Jack is unleashed for a battle to the autumnal death. The boy who successfully defeats the monster is celebrated as a hero of the harvest and rewarded with the newest edition of a sports car  (in this case, a 1963 Corvette), ticket out of town, and home for his family, while the rest of the town breathes easy knowing their crops will thrive another season.

One year after his older golden boy brother Jim wins, moody Richie Shepard is so angry at his small-town existence that he decides to enter the hunt, even though he's technically exempt. Along the way, he falls for new-girl-in town Kelly, who also decides to break the rules and join in. 

Though we were only given a quick glimpse at the previous hunt, it seems as though this Halloween is far more brutal. The boys are locked up and starved for three days before the big night, presumably to amp up their aggression. This year, a lot of that gets spread past Sawtooth Jack to the local shop proprietors trying to defend their stores from looting. Sawtooth Jack is equally hungry and takes out dozens of teens, all as Richie and Kelly begin to piece together the details behind the tradition.

Most viewers will likely get there first. Dark Harvest is based on a novel by Norman Partridge, and probably has a richer feel on the page. I assumed that the 1960s setting was a sham, some sort of added The Village-esque touch to keep the population under certain restrictions, but nope: it's simply that director David Slade (whose work I generally enjoy) didn't get his young actors to channel any kind of past.

Dark Harvest is the KIND of movie I love, and I can easily say that I enjoyed watching it even as I found myself groaning at most of its choices. The bones of the actual story are good enough to make me want to read the source material, and I was never bored. But what do we actually have here? There's a dull romance that goes nowhere, an over-the-top villain choking on the scenery he's chewing, and a general feeling of kids playing dress-up. Every actor seems to be in a different film, which makes the rare moments of human loss fall pretty flat. 

David Slade has had a fascinating career behind the camera. While he's never quite made a truly great genre film, he's come close with Hard Candy, the better-than-it-could-have-been 30 Days of Night, and one of the best (and certainly best-directed) episodes of Black Mirror. Heck, even his Twilight entry manages to rise above what it could have been. 

That's probably what makes Dark Harvest such a letdown for me. This concept with a better script, and perhaps more time or a more experienced pool of younger actors that could tap into the time period, could have been something genuinely special. Instead, it's a missed opportunity. 

High Points

The actual concept and design of Sawtooth Jack is pretty neat, especially once you see him as the perfectly gangly teenage version of Trick R Treat's Sam

Low Points

It's hard enough to tell the generically slick-back haired boys apart in their Grease knockoff leather jackets, so throwing Purge-esque masks over their faces doesn't help ground any of the action

Lessons Learned

You won't find Jujubees in a small town

Nothing will put a teenage boy into beast mode more efficiently than three days without food

Your fighting aim will generally not be improved by wearing a rubber mask that limits peripheral vision

Rent/Bury/Buy

If you're craving an enthusiastically autumnal horror movie, Dark Harvest certainly checks a few boxes. I was entertained, but also extremely frustrated. Perhaps low expectations will help? Give it a shot via Amazon Prime. 

Thank You For Flying Delta

 

Sometimes, timelines align in such a way that you get to watch a film under the absolute perfect circumstances. I'm thinking of how I had just moved into a probably haunted apartment when I first sat down to be terrified by Pulse, or how I had to watch a (perfectly legally) downloaded version of The Descent on a laptop in such a way that I had my face pressed against the screen. I got to see the horrid Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on the big screen in Moscow but with a British speaker dubbing over all of the actors' dialogue. It made a bad movie perfectly enjoyable in the most bizarre of all ways.

Searching was a thriller I had on my watch list forever, but it never seemed to land on any streaming site. Instead, something better happened: Delta Airlines had it on its list, and as I settled in for a six hour flight, watching a movie set on a laptop on a screen just slightly smaller than that seemed all too right.

Quick Plot: Remember how Pixar's Up opened with a beautifully tragic montage that followed the full cycle of a marriage? Searching does something similar, as we dive into David and Pamela Kim's laptop screen and watch their happy years raising baby Margot, scary ones battling Pamela's lymphoma, elation over her remission, and devastation when cancer returns.

Now a moody high school senior, Margot grows distant from David, who seems to bury his head in his project management career to avoid talking about Pamela. One day, Margot doesn't come home. David waits a little longer than he probably should to contact the police, but that's what happens when you don't really know your daughter anymore. 

Like The Den or that Modern Family episode set on Claire's laptop, Searching's point of view is David's screen. That can mean Facebook windows, cam communities, Skype calls, or occasionally, news reports. Through it all, John Cho creates a truly natural dad at the end of his rope acting straight to a computer monitor. 

Written by Sev Ohanian and Aneesh Chaganty (the latter of whom also directed), Searching is a tight thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat (safely buckled in, in my case). It's a mystery that by its very limitations, can only give you so many clues at a time, forcing you to be in step with David's investigation. Even when you think you're smarter than the movie, it packs a few more tricks to throw you off the trail. 

High Points

Having now seen several movies in the computer POV style, I know that it's not easy to keep the visuals engaging (I still don't understand the adoration for the stiff Host). Whether it's Cho's skills in front of the camera, Chaganty's behind, or the editing team of Will Merrick and NIcholas D. Johnson, Searching remains riveting.

Low Points

I had ONE detail gnawing at me from about 45 minutes in, but Searching's finale reveals that plot point to be an integral part of the reveal so you know what? I've got nothing. This is an excellently put together film

Lessons Learned

See, all you people who look at my computer screen and wince, SEE: having dozens of tabs open rather than clicking and backtracking is MUCH MORE USEFUL AN EXPERIENCE FOR EVERYONE INVOLVED THANK YOU VERY MUCH

Rent/Bury/Buy

I don't know that I'd say Searching is worth an expensive 3+ hour Delta plane ride, but it IS an incredibly engrossing and satisfying little watch. Maybe one day it will stream somewhere on land. When such a time comes, hop on.