Changing the Menu

Considering how ubiquitous fine dining culture has become, it makes perfect sense that we'd get more genre movies set in that world. As someone who will don a s'more suit in full defense of The Menu (but will also wince at the shouting in The Bear) I'm all for this development in horror. Bring on the colorful closeups of rainbow produce I say!

Quick Plot: Finally ready to make it on her own, Chef (Ariana DeBose) leaves her sous position job at an extremely renown New York restaurant to plan the menu for a different type of venue. Located in a small rural upstate town, the new spot is intended as the kind of "experience" that Bon Appetite will put on its cover. 

Chef is working the details out with business partner Andreas, but she's well-aware that she wasn't the first choice for the position. Magnus, a better known chef, left under fuzzy terms. We'll obviously find those out later.

At first Chef is excited by the new locale. It has its own blooming garden and a few nearby local shops that offer the perfect ingredient selection for her first big meal: a tryout with their biggest investor and an uppity food journalist. The morning of, Chef walks into her kitchen and discovers nothing but mold and bugs. Even the garden has shriveled beyond salvage. 

She's able to pivot with a juiced up boxed meal, but the damage is done. Andreas gives her two weeks to come up with a banger menu, while Chef takes a chance to connect more deeply with her new surroundings. The property is filled with touches from the original owner, a mysterious woman deemed a human-sacrificing witch by the locals. That may be, but this human-sacrificing witch also left some pristine recipe books and an exotic garden loaded with the kind of flavor bombing produce that catches food critics' hungry eyes. 

Things are improving as Chef and sous chef Lucia develop their new plan, but Chef gets cold feet when she discovers what actually happened to her predecessor. Was it the workings of the witchy former owner haunting the grounds? 

House of Spoils is an unusual genre film, but to explain why would, pun intended, spoil much of it. Written and directed by the team of Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy, it's a bit of a bait and switch in terms of what kind of story it's telling. 

Oh fine, I'll just do the thing:

No, the other one

Despite the maddening, moldy foreshadowing, House of Spoils is ultimately not trying to scare you. The twist, which comes a bit abruptly, reveals that the mysterious figure with some killer recipes was wrongfully hunted as a witch when she was actually a healer. Her deep connection to the earth and its gifts is ultimately what Chef needs to break through her own hard shell and create something transcendent.

It's a bit jarring when you realize that the giant bonfire Chef is raising in the middle of some very flammable woods is NOT going to become a mass grave for foodies, and that the ghost of a recipe developer isn't molding food out of spite. Considering all of the toxicity of the restaurant world, there's something quite admirable about what Cole and Krudy are trying to do. It's almost as if they're pulling out the weeds to find a way to cultivate something pure.

High Points

Having only seen Ariana DeBose's incredible West Side Story performance and incredible in a very different way BAFTA rap, I knew her as a theater kid with outstanding dance skills. As Chef, she goes for a very different type of performance. It's easy to not actually like the character (who's kind of an a$$hole) but impossible to not believe this person. It makes the ending that much more interesting, as it really does feel like Chef has gone from something of an empty shell to a far more organic substance

Low Points

There's something very interesting going on between Chef and Lucia and how differently they carry themselves as women in this industry, but the film never has the chance to really dig into that. It's deeply frustrating to feel so unresolved

Lessons Learned

All chefs are either addicts or head cases

People from Newark don't garden

Risotto has a better track record in horror than Top Chef

Rent/Bury/Buy

House of Spoils isn't going to scratch the kind of itch served well by The Menu or The Feast, but if you're looking more for a kind of magical realism meal, it's certainly a unique and well-executed tale. Find it on Amazon Prime. 

Organs Ahoy

 

Water horror! What an underrated subgenre. Sure, running from an ax-wielding maniac in the woods may involve cutting up your arms on pointy branches, but the ocean has spiky coral and bitey piranhas and so much more. More water horror I say!

Quick Plot: Kaya is a sad young woman in the Florida Keys trying to keep her family together in the wake of her mother's death. Tessa, her best pal, convinces her to take a day off jet skiing to the Bahamas on a double date with Tessa's Julian and hot friend Xander.

All is fun in bathing suits until Julian takes a dumb risk on his vehicle and ends up adrift. Xander, now in full makeout mode with the finally loosened up Kaya, quickly runs him right over before flipping deep into the water himself. It really all can happen in an instant, eh?

Things are looking like a floating appetizer table for sharks, but luckily, they're spotted by a passing boat steered by Captain Rey. 

Not so lucky. Before you can say "is that a bottle of chloroform that you're pouring on a cloth right in front of me?", Kaya gets, can you believe it, chloroformed. We've got ourselves an organ ring!

With Xander barely breathing and Tessa conscious but dealing with severe injuries, it's on Kaya's swimming champ shoulders to call for help and evade Rey and his doctor partner Curtis (good old Dean Cameron). 

Written and directed by Phil Volken, Dead Sea seems to be channeling the PG13 summer energy of The Shallows. I'll never be mad at the kind of movie that lovingly watches beautiful people swim in blue waters filled with graceful turtles and colorful fish. It's one (of many) reasons that I love A Perfect Getaway so very much. 

Dead Sea is very far down from those aforementioned summer thrillers. That's not to say it's a wash. At just under 90 minutes, it wastes little time in telling a fairly tight tale of a rough 24 hours. Isabel Gravitt makes for a likable protagonist who's easy to root for. While the majority of our time is spent with two attractive young women in 2-piece swimsuits, it never feels like Volken's camera is leering at their bodies. That in itself is a respectable choice. Kaya is smart and resourceful, and her friendship with Tessa feels real and deep.

On the other hand, the actual pacing of the film's second half feels oddly stilted. What should be a taut cat-and-mouse chase on open waters somehow feels like a quick game of hide and seek with too easy a finish. Even the cut to our coda feels weirdly off, as if one more run in the editing booth would have smoothed things over. 

High Points

For all my shoulder shrugging over the end product, the first big twist of Dead Sea really does come out of nowhere in an exciting, shocking way that makes me want to see more of what Volken has up his directorial sleeve

Low Points

Any thriller set in a confined space should be deeply disciplined when it comes to establishing its geography and unfortunately, I never felt I knew my way around Rey's fairly small boat 

Lessons Learned

Pigs are pretty good swimmers

Nothing sterilizes your tools for organ removal more effectively than windy saltwater breezes

Oceans may be big, but you should still keep your eye on the water when jet skiing to avoid running over your best friend

Rent/Bury/Buy

Dead Sea is perfectly passable entertainment. It starts far better than it ends, but it has a solid foundation of a nice look and strong lead. I can't imagine ever revisiting it or even remembering much about it in a few years, but I didn't feel like I wasted my time. Make of that what you will! It's currently streaming on Hulu. 

Light It Up

 

I'm a sucker for a good hat. When you open a film with an outfit like this, complete with sequins that don't quite come across in this still, you've got me:

Quick Plot: Incredibly stylish, woefully sad Maria Jose is considering jumping off a ledge in her small rural town when a mysterious, muddied child appears. Maria pauses her end of life plans to take the girl to the nearest police station but gets pulled over instead. When the cops get physical with her new surrogate mother, the child summons some telekinesis to make one policeman kill the other before bursting into flames.

As babysitting gigs go, it's not the worst job.

See, Maria Jose has had a rough life. Thirteen years earlier, her son Lolo, a dwarf hated by his classmates, died by suicide after severe bullying by the mayor's son. Maria Jose's husband David has since left to start a new family with the much younger (but very sweet) Ari. Teenagers dub her as a witch, and their parents are no better. Even the town's head priest treats her as if she's infected.

The arrival of Lucia, as Maria Jose soon dubs her, changes her mood significantly. Lucia is a dwarf and fits perfectly into Lolo's clothes. She also brings news that she's going to destroy the town and its awful inhabitants. Maria Jose is fully down.

As the locals are struck by unexplained illness and physically impossible suicides, all eyes fall on the outsiders. In doing so, the town's own ugly history (long-term and recent) comes to roost. Chaos ensues, and honestly, I don't know that I can actually explain it.

That's not a spoiler warning. I mean at the 3/4 mark, Everyone Will Burn seems to spin out of control in terms of landing any kind of narrative. Shocking things happen only to be immediately undone. Characters are killed...and then they're not. The credits roll and a coda pops up to nearly take us into a completely different movie.

It's frustrating because despite a good twenty minutes spent watching with my head in full confused head tilt, I still loved this movie. Director/co-writer David Hebrero starts things with a bang and keeps the energy up in ways that are stylish, spooky, funny, and fun. At its core, Everyone Will Burn takes a basic apocalypse and lets us see it from the point of view of one small town dripping in hypocritical Catholicism that might indeed deserve its satanic end. The cast is sharp, the score is grand, and there are acts of violence executed in ways I've never quite seen. I wish I understood the actual story more comfortably, but I can forgive a lot when I'm this entertained.

High Points

Everyone Will Burn probably works despite itself due to the incredibly dynamic performance of Macarena Gómez. With soap opera experience, it's not surprising that she's such a master of her own face. Maria Jose is an interesting character on the page, but in Gómez's hands, she's positively riveting

 

Low Points

I'm kind of smart. I paid close attention. And I still have no idea what actually happened in the last twenty minutes of this film

Lessons Learned

Ginger on a fried tomato is magic

When covering up a murder, never forget the crepes

No matter how classy and high-end your life becomes, you never really grow out of wanting to have sex on the chest freezer in your basement

Rent/Bury/Buy

Everyone Will Burn is obviously far from a perfect film, but I had a fantastic time with it. Find it on Kanopy with the full understanding that it doesn't actually come together...and that's okay.