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. 

It's a Long Process

 

I love South Korean horror films. I just wish every one wasn't always a good 20 minutes longer than it needs to be.

Quick Plot: Shamans Hwa-rim and Bong-gil are very good at their jobs, but when a wealthy family hires them to help their haunted baby, they need some backup. Hwa-rim calls in acclaimed geomancer Kim Sang-deok and his trusty mortician Yeong-geun to locate the family patriarch's grave and move the body to a consecrated location. 

With bad rain, the group decides to wait out the reburial in a nearby and nearly empty monastery. As they rest up after a wild ritual and satisfying noodle dinner, Yeong-geun's local contact decides to do some grave robbing. Naturally, a very angry, very large demon gets released in the process.

There's a lot more that happens in Exhuma, mostly because this movie is 150+ minutes long. I had been hearing good things about the film but couldn't quite fathom the day where I summoned that time block, so it felt mandatory to watch it when I ended up on a plane with a more robust selection of in-flight entertainment. I had nowhere to go.

I'll say about Exhuma what I said last year about Searching, but for very different reasons: this is indeed the perfect plane movie. Searching worked in that way because it was intended to feel like the POV of a laptop. For Exhuma, it's simply the best way to force yourself to sit down for nearly three hours and commit to one story.

This isn't to say Exhuma drags. It's more that it simply feels like too much movie. We shift so many times, from cool millenial shamans to Japanese colonial ghosts to suicidal hauntees and so much more. As three separate 45-minute films, Exhuma is deeply enjoyable. But when assembled together, it doesn't feel epic in scale...just very long. 

High Points

I love a mixed-generation genre film, and one of Exhuma's strengths is how the very cool and young Kim Go-eun and the retirement-ready Choi Min-sik play off each other. It's more complex than a father/daughter-ish dynamic, as they represent different eras and angles on how to manage the supernatural. To watch how they work together on it is genuinely fascinating

Low Points

For a movie this long (TWO AND A HALF FULL HOURS) it feels especially frustrating to leave the fate of a character up in the air. Our poor unlucky gravedigger who encounters the human-headed snake and comes down with a debilitating, I don't know, ghost sickness, is last seen struggling to breathe in a dank apartment. The fact that we never return to him or learn of his fate feels either lazy or kind of disrespectful, as if a working class character doesn't need resolution

Lessons Learned

Eerie days call for hot soup

A fox at a gravesite is an ominous sign

No high floor hotel should ever allow for human-sized windows

Rent/Bury/Buy

Exhuma is not a movie I'll go back to, but I'm glad I watched it. It's GOOD, not great, and if sprawling Korean ghost stories interest you, then I can't recommend it enough. But if you see that running time and wince, I can't argue that it justifies taking up that much of your time. Then again, if you happen to be flying cross-country, it's an easy way to keep you busy in between tiny bags of pretzels. 

Presidential Inception

 

I'm sure there's some kind of essay to be written on Dennis Quaid going from trying to prevent a Ronald Reagan stand-in from starting a nuclear war to, 20 years later, playing Ronald Reagan, but we'll leave that for another time. Peacock is streaming 1984's Dreamscape. Let's go.

Quick Plot: Dr. Novotny is running a successful series of studies on dream immersion, sending psychics into patients' REM cycles to help identify underlying problems in their lives. It's great for curing impotency, but Novotny's aims are peanuts compared to government agent Bob Blair, who sees this new technology as a means of far greater things. 

Since Blair is played by Max Von Sydow, you can be pretty sure such things are not exactly related to world peace.

Enter Alex Gardner (Quaid), a former psychic prodigy turned loan shark-owing gambler. Novotny brings Alex back to help develop his studies. While there, Alex falls for Dr. Jane DeVries (Kate Capshaw), a woman who could do a lot better than a jerk who sneaks into her dreams to have sex with her without consent. But it's 1984, they're both attractive, so we move on to them uniting to save the world.

See, there's a very important man having nightmares: the President of the United States. He's plagued with visions of a nuclear wasteland, which worries Blair, who would rather not see his country move to disarmament. Blair's plan is to send his pet psychic Tommy into the President's dream for a sleepy assassination. Alex has some warning from horror novelist Charlie Prince (Norm!) but as bodies begin to pile up, it's clear the only way to save the world is to do some inception.

Dreamscape is a fun little sci-fi horror dripping with its time. The script has multiple writers credited, including Chuck Russell, who would go on to use quite a few small touches from this film into the beloved Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. Director Joseph Ruben was never a stranger to oddness in genre cinema: this is the man who turned a kidnapping film into an alien invasion in The Forgotten, and who I think about every day for the last 30 years because he's responsible for the absolutely bonkers The Good Son. 

We do not talk nearly enough about The Good Son.

Dreamscape doesn't quite reach those heights (and literally, because REMEMBER HOW THIS MOVIE ENDS?)

Sorry, it's hard to ever focus on something that isn't The Good Son when talking adjacently about The Good Son.

AS I WAS SAYING, Dreamscape is neat. It feels of its time in catching that late '70s/early '80s psychological experimental era of The Brood and The Fury, but with more electric music that even bridges the upcoming early '90s with some sexy saxophone magic. Plus, there's even some timely nuclear war politics! Quaid shows the charisma that would make him a star. Capshaw is smart and sexy. The dreams are just weird enough to feel like dreams. It's a good time. 

High Points

By golly this is a good cast

Low Points

Aforementioned ickiness regarding the fuzzy sexual assault question and resolution

Lessons Learned

The best way to get a cad to do something is to invoke the IRS

In our dreams, we're often very racist

The easiest shorthand to imply 'unhinged psychopath' is simply casting David Patrick Kelly

Rent/Bury/Buy

Dreamscape is quite fun. Sure, the visual dream language is basically a karaoke music video filmed in 1992 eastern Europe, but there's a lot to enjoy here. I watched via Peacock, which did occasionally have a weird bug happening where at least two scenes weren't transferring correctly. Not sure if that was simply my connection, but I figured it was worth a warning.

It's Really Coming Down Out There

 

It's never a good thing to watch a horror movie and wonder if the Hallmark Christmas version would be better, but when a film comes loaded with a Hallmark-ready title and Lifetime-budget CGI, it's inevitable. 

Quick Plot: Five college pals head to rich daddy's boy River's remote cabin for a New Year's celebration. As the alcohol flows, the snow comes down hard, quickly trapping them inside and shutting down the power. With no cell service, things look grim.

Thankfully (or not), med student Eden has a big old brain loaded with tricks about how to survive hypothermia. Apparently, such a process is far less fun than death. 

There's no more drinking, sleeping, Twizzlers, or fresh snowcones to be had. Instead, the group must battle their own psyches and paranoia amid the rampant hallucinations that come with, well, no sleeping or Twizzlers. 

It's a good idea for a low budget horror movie, and make no mistake: despite literal phoned (well, Zoomed)-in cameos by Patrick Fabian and hey! Hallmark favorite Jonathan Bennett, Snow Falls is not an expensive film. There's a CGI snowman that makes me wonder if both late '90s incarnations of Jack Frost were ahead of their time. Digital snow that makes Tubi originals look fancy. And so on. 

Written, directed, and co-starring Colton Tran, Snow Falls has the benefit of streaming on Amazon Prime, where I've recently watched some pretty insufferable horror movies from this decade. This one is pretty far from being what anyone would call good, but it feels less offensive than some of its peers. 

The main downside of Snow Falls is that it lacks a certain spark. The first scene suggests we're in for a batch of obnoxious young people who complain about things like seat belts, but quickly, they become less awful and more dull. We've got shy good boy River (The Passenger's Johnny Berchtold), fit Kit (played by Tran), hypochondriac Em, and her boyfriend Andy (whose main defining trait is "boyfriend"). Eden stands out for her medical knowledge and backstory involving a recently deceased mom, the latter of which seems like it's intended to go somewhere spooky or heartfelt and simply...doesn't. 

The setup of Snow Falls gives plenty of opportunity for surprise, but unfortunately, that only seems to work on its characters. The audience is always aware that any moment of hope is a hallucination. That gets old fast, even in just 80 minutes.

High Points

You know what? I learned a lot about hypothermia! That's useful!

Low Points

An 80 minute educational video about hypothermia may have been more suspenseful

Lessons Learned

When you have 11K followers, people expect to hear from you

To survive hypothermia, you have to be very, very lame

There's always a very sharp piece of furniture when tensions rise

Rent/Bury/Buy

Snow Falls is far from the worst little thriller you'll find on Prime, but it's still hard to summon any real reason to recommend it.