My blog is mostly movie reviews and whatever random story idea I post a chapter at a time. Though sometimes I also talk about politics, my dreams, or anything else on my mind.
To help me
break with some writer’s block I have been suffering from since the large
amount of writing I did for my finals in the middle of May, I am going back to
basics. You might be saying, “you
haven’t updated this blog in months.” To
which I must replay, “yeah, I had other shit going on.”
A large
amount of this blog is just me writing about movies I have seen.For a time I would rank/review all the movies
I had seen from a given year.I stopped
emphasizing movies for whatever reason and now my brain is tired from thinking
bigger thoughts about the world and suffering and how people in power know
exactly how to fix it all, but they don’t.
Today I am
going to write on here something simple, much like how I started simple when I
went back to the gym following Covid.
Lake Mungo (2012)
Written and Directed by Joel Anderson (who is known for
this and that is it)
Currently available on Tubi.
The Premise
This is a fictional-Documentary
about the events surrounding the death of a young woman and the subsequent
haunting of her family by that young woman.
The Good
I found
out after the fact that the actors adlibbed most of their dialogue.The idea being that they would sit down, be
told what the idea of the scene was, and just to act it all out.This strategy sounds like it would be a
fucking disaster but turned out quite well.The reason I found out about this is simply because I found the acting
strong enough that I was intrigued with the behind the scenes.
The
haunting material is solid.The idea of
someone appearing in footage or in pictures is a classic “Ghost” thing in
folklore/media and it is presented well almost every time (there are some
instances in which the ghost is supposed to go unnoticed till a reveal and you
are left going, “I saw that earlier”).
The
mysteries and secrets that get revealed are intriguing and spooky in equal
measure.
The Bad
Um… I mean,
I already mentioned the few instances in which you will see the ghost before
they intend you to.It happens.
It is a
little slow and I think the most interesting bits could fit into a 60 minute
format, but compared to the bloated nightmare that is modern true crime
documentaries on streaming where 1-2 hours of content is spread over 4-12
because god forbid they cut the fluff… “Lake Mungo” is tight as a drum by
comparison.
I guess
the only “complaint” I have is that it is far more sad than scary.It is perhaps the nature of ghost stories
that “grief was the real ghost the whole time”, but this one especially.
Conclusion
“Lake Mungo" is a good, sad, short little ghost story.It is worth watching.
______________________________
If you like or hate this please take
the time to comment, share on Twitter (click that link to
follow me), Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my
opinion to the world. I would appreciate it.
To help me
break with some writer’s block I have been suffering from since the large
amount of writing I did for my finals in the middle of May, I am going back to
basics. You might be saying, “you
haven’t updated this blog in months.” To
which I must replay, “yeah, I had other shit going on.”
A large
amount of this blog is just me writing about movies I have seen.For a time I would rank/review all the movies
I had seen from a given year.I stopped
emphasizing movies for whatever reason and now my brain is tired from thinking
bigger thoughts about the world and suffering and how people in power know
exactly how to fix it all, but they don’t.
Today I am
going to write on here something simple, much like how I started simple when I
went back to the gym following Covid.
After a
cold opening that makes no sense based on the mythology explored later in the
movie and which completely gives the game away on their being some kind of
telekinetic ghost/spirit/demon being in a box… we get a movie about a troubled
family that buys said haunted box from a yard sale.
This movie
is “based on actual events” in that there is a supposedly haunted box
owned by notorious ghost hunter and notable fraud Zak Baggins… maybe that is too
harsh… let’s change it to alleged fraud.The actual object It is one of those things that is obviously bullshit
but it is fun to pretend, we all need a little magic in our lives.
The Good
The child
actors in this work.Kids often have a
hard time putting forth a believable performance, but these kids hit the
mark.I have no complaints about their
performances or their roles in the story.
Jeffery
Dean Morgan is fantastic in this.He is
so much better than the material that I am vexed as to why he is even in this
movie.Just a paycheck?Was he taken in by the “based on actual
events” tagline?Apparently, in an
interview he shared some of the weird events that happened
on set, maybe he is into ghosts?
The use of
moths as the signature animal associated with the demon/ghost is different, and
I appreciate different.There are images
of the monster as seen in an MRI image that is legitimately creepy to point
where I feel a better movie would have used such a scene to elevate itself to “great”.
The Bad
The
previously mentioned opening is crap.I
cannot stress enough that having a ghost/demon that can kill and maim people
while still in its prison undermines the entire point of the story.When the box does the same sort of violence
later in the movie (I have to imagine a producer said, “you need and action
beat”) it again pushes the story away from spooky to goofy.
This is
not hard to fix.In the opening have
someone OPEN THE BOX, and then refusing the demon/ghost’s attempt to possess
them (let us say the person is an adult and knows not to let themselves be
possessed) then the demon uses some kind of power to hurt them. At the midpoint have the person killed by the
demon be killed… BY CHILD WHO IS POSSESSED.That ups the stakes.That the
monster is able to use their power because they are now free and anchored into
a willing host.
Having a third-party
victim killed by the possessed person will make the audience worry more for the
family members, setting up an internal tension for the little girl who is
trying not to hurt her family, but… you know… possessed.You could even have a scene like the one at
the end of “The Exorcist III” where the possessed person fights thru and helps
to defeat the demon.
Another big failure of this movie is how they show you the contents of the box almost immediately and there is very little mystery to the box itself. Weak.
Let’s also
talk about the monster, I am always a little iffy when it comes to
appropriating other cultures to pepper your ghost movie with some exoticism. In this case the demon is a creature of
Jewish folklore that speaks in Yiddish and is defeated by the drafting of a hip
young rabbi who is willing to go outside the rules to help battle the
demon. That is a weird choice. You don’t often see in the movie, “I must
consult with a mystic to battle this evil, gonna have to catch the train to the
Bronx.”
So, here
is an obvious idea to help reform the plot, why not make the family
Jewish?Shocking to realize that the
family is not Jewish (at least not ostensibly) considering the subject
matter.But religion is a thing that can
bring people together or be a wedge in a relationship.You could have the mom be Jewish and she is
trying to reconnect to her roots (maybe in response to a family tragedy, maybe
there used to be three kids, hell the ghost could pretend to be the third kids
ghost making it easier for it to possess the younger sister who is not haling
the death of the sibling well).
This
commitment to her religion in the wake of a family tragedy could be why the mom
and dad broke up.The idea that he no
longer fit with her increasingly conservative outlook fits better than the “we
broke up… for… reasons…” material that is there.As is, the mother being just pointlessly
hostile, petty, and too quick to believe bad things about her ex-husband makes
her real hard to root for.
Then you
have another interesting way to take things.That the dad has to embrace Jewish mysticism to defeat the demon/ghost,
but the mother thinks he is mocking her or trying to get back with her via some
kind of manipulation of her beliefs.That is real drama.Then, just
like the ending to “Signs”
you can have the family come together at the end having had their faith
confirmed and tried by horrific circumstances.
Remember "Signs"? Remember liking Mel Gibson? Is it disrespectful to bring up Gibson when talking about a movie that centers on Jewish mythology?
Really the
ending is weird. I was expecting a super
dark ending, in which the demon jumps to possessing the other daughter; then
kills the mom, younger sister, and rabbi; and then frames the dad for it all. Super downer endings were the family gets
murdered by the demon have been shown to work, look at “Sinister”. As is, the ending peters out on a vaguely
happy ending… BUT OH NO THE DEMON BOX ESCAPED.
Weird and not as fulfilling or scary as it should be, just stuck in the
middle.
To come
back again to the Jewish mysticism angle, this is not the only Jewish exorcism
movie I have seen.“The Unborn” also did this and
these movies are a study in contrasts.I
find “Unborn” has the better thrust, because the ghost in that story is an
unborn twin, and they manage to weave that idea into the Nazi
twin experiments.Using material
from the Holocaust is a lot of borrowed pathos to bring into the movie, which
is crass… but it is also SOMETHING.Maybe I should have made this a double feature to compare and contrast
the two?Jazz up this review.Oh well.
It is cr-ASS on the movie poster for sure. Holy moly is it tasteless to have this be such a selling point for a movie about the specter of the Holocaust.
Conclusion
“The
Possession” is a hacky bit of forgettable flotsam in the ocean of content that
the world has to offer.It is not bad;
it is just typical.The best scenes in
it deserve to be in a better movie, while most of the material is so ‘meh’ you
have to wonder why they bothered.
I cannot
emphasize enough that the “oops, I bought a ghost” premise is fantastic not
just for horror but also comedy.It is
solid gold and if they had chosen to go the route of emphasizing characters
being funny/witty like “Hatchet”
had done for slasher movies, they could have turned this forgettable story into
something interesting.
______________________________
If you like or hate this please take
the time to comment, share on Twitter (click that link to
follow me), Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my
opinion to the world. I would appreciate it.
To help me
break with some writer’s block I have been suffering from since the large
amount of writing I did for my finals in the middle of May, I am going back to
basics. You might be saying, “you haven’t
updated this blog in months.” To which I
must replay, “yeah, I had other shit going on.”
A large
amount of this blog is just me writing about movies I have seen. For a time I would rank/review all the movies
I had seen from a given year.I stopped
emphasizing movies for whatever reason and now my brain is tired from thinking
bigger thoughts about the world and suffering and how people in power know
exactly how to fix it all, but they don’t.
Today I am
going to write on here something simple, much like how I started simple when I
went back to the gym following Covid.
A boat tour of character actors sinks in the swamp near a haunted(?)
cabin and the various colorful characters are killed off in gruesome fashion by
the deformed
revenant that stalks the marshland.
The Good
While not everyone in the movie is a great actor even that
kind of works as it is more of a comedy.The dialogue is frequently good, with quips and acting beats making it
feel true to the various characters in the movie.There is really no conversation or line that
feels like the wrong person is talking.
The make up and gore effects capture the goofy tone that the
dialogue does, and it all fits together quite well.They go for over the top and a few of them
shoot the moon.
Maybe I am shallow in that I consider the presence of Mercedes McNab to be a
highlight.She is gorgeous and has
perhaps the best comedic timing one could hope for in a bimbo character.I loved her as Harmony on “Buffy the Vampire
Slayer” and here she is elevating the dumb bimbo role to an artform.
I am not going to call out all the actors or the
cameos/small roles for horror icons, but they all work well enough for this
movie.Just some are better than others.
Bigger issues come with the shoestring budget, as Saturday
Night Live has more convincing swamp sets.Worse for the horror side of the story, everything is lit to a comical
level… At one point they find a flashlight and its beam is completely drown out
by the lighting they just have as the default.Keep in mind this is supposed to be night, in a foggy swamp, it should
be dark as hell.I can’t help but
imagine how you could light the woods in a way that makes it visually
interesting without completely breaking the conceit, but you would need a
lighting guy who costs money and they don’t have any of that.
As far as acting, unfortunately the worst performance is the
movie’s final girl, played by Tamara Feldman.She is playing this role way too straight and
comes off like someone from a more serious iteration of this material who got
lost.Bad direction?Maybe she just wasn’t into it because she did
not reprise the role for the sequel.Either
way it is the weakest acting on the character with perhaps the 2nd
or 3rd most screen time.
My biggest issue is with the ending, which I guess will be a
spoiled here.The ending feels like a
cheat on the characters.They are clever
earlier in the movie trying to concoct a plan that played on what they knew
about the monster’s origins, “let’s light him on fire, because his tragic
death involved him trying to escape a burning cabin” and their plan is foiled
by rain.This plan is good. And how it is foiled is also good.That should have been the climax and ending of
the movie, but that is instead the end of act two.
The ending comes when the characters have a protracted chase
thru a graveyard and seemingly defeat the monster by stabbing it in the
face.Stabbing in the face is not any
more effective than the myriad of other bullets, stabbings, and other harm they
have visited upon the monster and yet they think they beat it.The characters are surprised when the monster
shows back up and ostensibly kills the remaining characters.Downer ending, perfectly fine for this kind
of movie.BUT, that feels like a
betrayal of the characters who were previously shown to at least be trying to
get a handle on things.
To fix this I would have moved the chase scene to act 2, the
characters realize they can’t get away after being chased in a circle back to
the haunted cabin.They then try to use
the fire plan on the monster back at the haunted cabin, and then their plan is
foiled and they all die.Ramp up the
character’s knowledge and insight in how to fight the monster as time goes on,
make the audience feel like the characters are going thru an arc.Currently their knowledge goes up and then crashes
down.
For an example of how to do this well I have to point to the
first “Nightmare on Elm Street” movie.Nancy
forms a plan on how to defeat Freddy Krueger by pulling him out of the dream
world and into her house full of traps, it ostensibly works… but the twist
ending shows that Freddy was not actually defeated and the characters die.“Elm Street” ramped up to the twist ending,
it felt like a surprise and it doesn’t feel like the characters failed to try
everything they could.
The ending kind of ties into one more issue, there is no
character arc.You usually want to show
your protagonists dealing with some kind of trauma or weakness over the course
of the narrative, and by overcoming the weakness they help to overcome the
monster.In this instance the main
character is dealing with a breakup from a previous relationship and the final
girl is trying to investigate what happened to her brother and father.Logically, neither of these tie into fighting
a revenant… The best I could think is that during some key moment the Final
Girl’s father and brother could rise up as revenants to try and help her
escape?And logically the main guy
getting over his breakup by getting with the final girl would be the other side
of things, you would have to establish that she left him because he was not a
take-charge kind of guy and by the end of the movie he is a take-charge kind of
guy.Just… Something.
Conclusion
I don’t hate this movie, it is watchable.The humor elevates in enough that the
derivative elements and low production values are mostly forgiven.I can’t help but wonder if they could have
done something more creative with the backstory?Maybe if they had the budget to make the presentation
of the setting actually scary?
It is strange that one
of my oldest movie reviews on this blog is for “Phantasm” which was similarly
low budget but was far more creative with the premise… and I still like this
one more because the acting and dialogue is better.Maybe give Adam Green some money to work with
so that he can escape the horror-ghetto his career seems to be in and see what
he could do with something bigger and stranger? I could see him doing episodes of “Creepshow” or other horror
anthology series without breaking a sweat.
This is not the first movie by Adam Green I have seen. “Digging up the
Marrow”, which is sort of a cross between a mockumentary and the movie “Nightbreed” was, and it is
better than “Hatchet”… and better than “Nightbreed”.
(Sidenote on “Phantasm”, I no longer consider it the worst
movie I have ever seen by a long shot.That title went to “Boyhood”.)
______________________________
If you like or hate this please take
the time to comment, share on Twitter (click that link to
follow me), Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my
opinion to the world. I would appreciate it.
I am
writing this a little over 24 hours after President Biden has been sworn into
office and a series of executive actions and policies are being reversed. Criminals previously in control of government
departments are being dismissed and the first of a handful of candidates are
being reviewed for confirmation into cabinet positions.
My mood is
akin to the relief felt by the survivors of a slasher movie just before the
masked killer jumps up from his prone state for another attack on the hapless
sex positive teenagers that think it is all over… Maybe my cynicism is too
much.I know, logically that the future
is marching on, but I am also acutely aware that Donald Trump did not storm the
capital by himself January 6th, which will end up being some sort of
parody holiday in the future akin to 4-20 or May the 5th.
No matter
how orange he is, Donald Trump will not magically turn back into a racist
pumpkin just because the clock struck 12 yesterday. The various crooks and schemers that he gave
power and influence are still skulking in the shadows, they did not turn back
into mice. Things are still bad. Trump was not only a culmination of a great
many awful things in this country, he was just the latest and he will not be the last.
It is
troubling that Joe Biden ran on the “Build Back Better” slogan that is… nakedly
synonymous to the phrase “Make Great Again” and no one seems to care. Both political parties ran on a message of
returning to a prelapsarian past. And
when the restoration of the relatively not-evil political party only takes you
back 4 years to the same paradigm that led to the rise of the fascist pumpkin
to begin with I have to ask why everyone is so relieved.
Why is
everyone so relieved?
There is
so much pageantry and performative “change”.
You would have thought that a young woman reading a poem had cured Covid
for all the people weeping over it. I
get it, I do. It is not for nothing that
the first non-white VP is a thing, a woman likely to be running for President
in 4 years. That is good in the nebulous
way all breaking down of color barriers are good. But that doesn’t actually fix the underlying
alienation and toxic bullshit that gave birth to the QAnon death cult or the
Nazis-in-all-but-name jerk offs like the Proud Boys or the Boogaloos.
I actually
expected worse. I had expected the
capital to be attacked. I had expected
mass shootings in the inner city on election day as a small army of white
nationalists would make the drive to non-white areas and stop voting. I expected assassinations of Democrats and moderate
Republicans. I expected state capitals
to be attacked, the logical escalation of the various “protests” that took
place over Covid last year which I said at the time signaled to white nationalists that they would not be treated harshly by law enforcement.
I am
thankful that many of my doom saying did not happen.But to call back to my horror movie monster
metaphor from earlier, it is not that the masked killer is about to get up for
one last attack, instead the camera is panning from the house full of sobbing
survivors out into the dark of the woods where an entire cadre of masked
killers stands in waiting for some unseen signal at which time to strike.
The sequel
to this horror show is going into pre-production as we speak. And it looks like this franchise will have legs.
______________________________
If you like or hate this please take
the time to comment, share on Twitter (click that link to
follow me), Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my
opinion to the world. I would appreciate it.
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