You Look Familiar...

Please tell me these kinds of things happen to others:

I've spent the last 23 years of my life assuming I'd seen 1995's Copycat, though in fairness, I also spent a lot of those years saying "I can never remember the difference between Copycat and In Dreams." Both were post-Silence of the Lambs mid-budget studio releases about serial killers and their relationships with Oscar-nominated actresses. Both were...well, that might be where the similarities end. Turns out, I'd never seen Copycat! And also, as I discovered today, all I remember of In Dreams (aside from APPLES) is that I always confused it with Copycat.

Who knew my brain had created a Highlander-esque situation for '90s serial killer thrillers?

Quick Plot: Dr. Helen Hudson (the always perfect Sigourney Weaver) is a well-known criminal psychologist with a lucrative writing and speaking career that focuses on her insights into murderers, including the recently escaped convicted monster Daryll Lee Cullum, played by Harry Connick Jr. in a way that makes you wonder how the same charm can make Christmas carols sound like butter.

Cullum tracks Helen down on a college campus lecture, cornering her in the ladies room after brutally killing her security guard. He comes a few breaths away from hanging Helen to death before being caught, leaving our heroine with a severe, understandable case of PTSD.

13 months later, Helen has rebuilt her life, The Net-style. She connects with fellow trauma victims over dial-up internet and gets her deliveries via a good pal clearly marked for death, especially when a new intrepid serial killer begins a tour in Helen's local San Francisco neighborhood. The investigating detectives (the delightfully capable Holly Hunter as MJ and "I always confuse him for Harry Connick Jr." Dermont Mulroney as Rueben) enlist her expertise and by golly, we've got ourselves a mystery.

Written by Ann Biderman and David Madsen and directed by Jon Amiel, Copycat is the kind of grown-up thriller that flourished in the early '90s and for whatever reason, seemed to have gone extinct. Maybe it was the influence of David Fincher's Se7en, which came out to shocked theatergoers just a few weeks earlier in the fall of 1995. The films share a subgenre and valid R-rating, yet they feel like such polar opposites in terms of their filmmaking: gritty and cruel in one, crisp and plucky in the other.

This isn't to imply that Copycat is light-hearted romp. While the post-Halloween 2018 years have made many of us wince when we hear the word "trauma", Copycat addresses the challenges of surviving a horrific experience with intelligence. The very casting of Sigourney Weaver, a bonafide action star who immediately suggests competent, intelligent strength, makes Helen's position that much more interesting. Here's an actress we associate with power put in the vulnerable, human position of processing something that has nearly destroyed her. The journey is fascinating. 

Add to that the absolute perfection that is Holly Hunter's MJ and some ahead-of-its-time understanding of male rage and. Hunter is always a fun performer to watch, especially when she gets to dig into the grit of a character. The plucky female copy would go on to be something of a standard in procedural stories, but her MJ is fresh, complicated, and fantastic. 

It's all the more interesting because our villain...is not. And that's a good thing! I won't go too deep into the details (how dare I spoil a movie old enough to now attend its own 10-year high school reunion) but the actual identity of our copycat killer is brilliant in its blandness. As Helen tells us in her opening lecture, these are men who are "quiet, unassuming, nice." Later, Helen finds better adjectives: sad, second rate, boring, and impotent. No one leaves Copycat remembering the killer: it's the women who hunt him worth watching. 

High Points

By golly, is there anything more satisfying than watching two great actresses interact with each other when playing rich, fully developed characters?

Low Points

This is no real fault of Copycat, but watching Holly Hunter down cheeseburgers made me wonder if this is the origin of the now-trite "hot working woman in a man's world who eats junk food" trope

Lessons Learned

A vibrator is a tool of survival

The upside of having a nervous breakdown is not giving a f$ck

Bullet-proof vests don't fit well under Miracle Bras

Rent/Bury/Buy

Time has been extremely kind to Copycat. I found this to be an incredibly enjoyable ride, and not just for its early Photoshop '90s nostalgia. Give it a go via Hulu. 

Whistle While You Weaver

Here's something you have to understand about teenage Emily in the late '90s: she was hungry for things just not being served. The box office failures of late '80s fantasies left a void in cinema. No studio wanted to invest the necessary millions in such a risky genre, leading movies like Snow White: A Tale of Terror doomed to die in the straight-to-video dumps. 

I craved this kind of content, and eagerly recorded the Showtime premiere on an empty VHS. It's probably been a good twenty years since I rewound that rickety tape, but when this popped up on the Roku Channel, I figured a rich velvet gown-drenched stroll through memory lane was in order. 

Quick Plot: German Nobleman Frederick Hoffman is traveling with his very pregnant wife over rocky, snowy terrain when their carriage flips over and the driver is mauled by wolves. Thankfully, Frederick is fully armed with exactly what you needed for an emergency C-section in the 15th century: a big knife. 

Not surprisingly, Frederick becomes the single father to the somewhat rebellious Lilli, who turns full brat when he remarries the beautiful Claudia. After pranking her new stepmother on the wedding night, Lilli flees to Claudia's bedroom only to watch her beloved nanny die in fright at the sight of Claudia's mysterious heirloom mirror set. 

Nine years pass and Claudia is finally pregnant, while the teenage Lilli yearns to explore the world beyond her family's sprawling estate. One more act of stepdaughter rebellion coincides with Claudia delivering a stillborn son. Despite an earnest attempt at apology, Lilli's fate is sealed: Claudia orders her mute brother Gustav to murder her in the woods. A pig heart later and everything seems in order in the now roomier Hoffman household. 

Lilli finds refuge with a group of forest-dwelling miners, beaten up men who have angered the authorities for one reason or another. Back home, Claudia tries various spells to kill Lilli from afar before taking things into her own glamour'd hands. 

Snow White: A Tale of Terror was a missed opportunity for its studio, being dumped on video and Showtime without an in-theaters release (the kiss of death in the '90s, the norm now). Director Michael Cohn's career suffered, and the film found a tiny audience in that very small faction of dark fantasy-craving loving girls. We were treated one year later to another Sam Neill fantasy foray with NBC's Merlin miniseries, but for the most part, it wasn't considered a profitable genre.

It's a shame. Snow White isn't, say, Pan's Labyrinth, but give me a world where it performed well enough for us to have had copycats. The Grimm Brothers' fairy tales are notoriously grisly stories and while we've always had plenty of Angela Carter-esque fiction and a horror film adaptation here and there, the kind of earnest embrace that Cohn brings to the style is what so many people (and I'd argue particularly women) crave. On its own, Snow White is entertaining, but it's the overall feel (or vibe, as I understand the kids these days to say) that feels so rich. 

Two decades later, we'd get a few rounds of Snow White and the Huntsman and Maleficent, franchises led by the kind of Oscar-winning actresses tapping into their inner fantasy drag queen with relish. Sigourney Weaver's Claudia is right up there, and it's a minor shame that it didn't break through at a time that could have led to more of these kinds of projects. Maybe the film's main issue was that it didn't quite nail its tone in a way to make it easily identifiable to a broad audience. The tone is dark, but there's a slight hesitancy to go into full horror territory. We're probably right in the middle of a hard PG-13/soft R, which, I'd wager, might have then cast the film as a tricky sell. 

High Points

Seriously, praise an actress like Sigourney Weaver who just GOES for it. Her Claudia is a genuine well-thought out character: a sympathetic woman who might have started with a touch of the dark side in her trunk, but who so understandably crosses the line. Weaver clearly came to the role knowing she wasn't going to play a stock Disney monster, and she balances the pathos of a sad woman who's experienced deep loss with the naughty possibilities of one willing to go dark with her power. Without question, it's the reason to watch the movie. 

Low Points

It's not uncommon for the villain to outshine the ingenue in this kind of film, but Snow White is particularly criminal in this regard. Lilli is a spoiled brat on paper, and Monica Keena doesn't find a way to elevate her and further

Lessons Learned

Never interrupt a pregnant woman's aria

C-sections are pretty intuitive operations for non-medical professionals, even in the middle of a forest during a blizzard

The way to a stepdaughter's heart is an adorable puppy

Rent/Bury/Buy

I have a nostalgic fondness for Snow White: A Tale of Terror, but I think I can objectively say that anyone with an interest in this kind of horror fantasy will find something worthwhile here. Sigourney Weaver brings everything you wanted and more to her role, all while wearing soem pretty fabulous period costume. The Czecholslovakian locations standing in for the Black Forest are as beautifully scenic, and our castle interiors complete the package. Sure, our heroine is a dud, but this is a movie with plagues! And mine collapses! And Sigourney Weaver trying desperately to make Sam Neill eat the heart of his daughter! 

I think I love this movie?

I've Seen the Future, & It Has Very Big Eyes

The scariest moment in Rodrigo Cortez’s Red Lights involves no horror of the traditional sense. There is no leaping cat or spooky apparition, no herd of tarantulas or masked madman.

There is only the cheekbones of Cillian Murphy.

Oh pah you say, those are MARVELOUS cheekbones, resting ever so high upon the side of that slender yet sexy face, matched only by the man's handball sized eyeballs overflowing with an ocean of blue. Sure, smitten readers, Cillian Murphy is indeed an unusually handsome man, but when you put his head in the physical hands of a blind man who is feeling the structure in the way blind people handshake, the worrywart in me can only think, "Oh! Those bones have got to be sharp!"

But onto the movie. The movie with the cheekbones.

Quick Plot: Meet Margaret and Tom, a platonic pair of academics who travel the country to disprove paranormal phenomena. Tom is a physics wizard with aforementioned killer cheekbones, while Margaret is played by Sigourney Weaver as that intelligent and no-nonsense-yet-great-sense-of-humor-holding career woman that only Sigourney Weaver can actually play. As they face losing funding for their research, Tom urges Margaret to go after the big fish that is Simon Silver.

How big a fish is he? Are you talkin' to me? Are you askin' ME how big a fish--

Man, I never thought it would be that hard to impersonate Robert Dinero in blog form. They don't teach you that at antiparanormal investigations university.

Yes folks, that's Travis Bickle in the flesh as a John Edward style psychic who wowed the world then retired after a skeptic had a heart attack during one of his performances. Margaret had an unsettling run-in with the man some years earlier, but Tom is undeterred. On his side is the always lovely Elizabeth Olsen as a student in his antiparanormal university class--

Oh. Maybe I should try to explain.

Like many white collar intellectuals with a high education but lack of worldly skills, Tom and Margaret moonlight as, I think, college professors at the same university where Toby Jones works as a professor trying to find evidence supporting the existence of psychic phenomena. Or something. It's confusing, but I think the point is that in this country, there are indeed high level universities that offer majors in both Psychic Studies and Psychic Studies Are Bullshit. It's nice to know young people still have choices in this economy.

I know I should be getting back to the mystery of Simon Silver, but there's something far more distracting to discuss:

Seriously. They play a couple. It's disturbing for so many reasons.

Remember how Jennifer Garner's first marriage to her RA on Felicity was kind of creepy because in addition to both being pretty, the couple could essentially pass for siblings? 

That's part of the case here, as Cillian Murphy and Elizabeth Olsen are both unusual looking people, making it strange (or fitting?) that they would end up being attracted to one another. We can imagine their hauntingly Skeletor-like baby with a mixture of fear and fascination, but pause to consider how incredibly round their offspring's baby blues would be.

Now try to get to sleep tonight.

The idea of an Olsemurphy superbaby taking over the world is far scarier than anything in Red Lights, especially since this film is less thriller than drama. None of that is clear until about 2/3rds of the way in, as the mixed tone takes its time deciding what type of movie to be. That’s something of a problem.

High Points

As Cortes proved with a coffin-trapped Ryan Reynolds in Buried, he's a director fully capable of generating suspense. Even when the story becomes lackluster, there is some genuine tension watching a few grad students (at the School For And Against the Paranormal) try to solve the mystery of Simon Silver's secret (and yes, maybe I did just write that sentence to annoy those with lisps)

Low Points

Had Red Lights been billed a little clearer as a drama, I think most of my (and I assume, may other viewers’) problems would have been much smaller. The film remains rather confused, but a good deal of that perception might be my own

Lessons Learned

Blind people wear watches too

Bug-eyed beauties are naturally attracted to other bug-eyed beauties. We can only assume that when they reproduce, their progeny will quickly ascend to Super Mother Bug status and leave us brown-eyed bores at the bottom of the food chain

The average man dreams 27 times a night

Rent/Bury/Buy

So long as you don't approach Red Lights expecting a tense horror movie, you might find it enjoyable as a bit of a mystery. The cast is better than the material deserves while also being blander than it should be, but there are some fun moments of tension. Think of it like a sort of poor man's Prestige if The Prestige was already on discount. As a quick Netflix stream, one could do worse.