Sam Levinson directs Odessa Young, Hari Nef and Suki Waterhouse in this violent high school satire where the town of Salem have their digital histories hacked and released to the world, revealing secrets that destroy lives and whipping up a hysteria that incites a lynch mob. 

5 minutes in: Buzzwords bombard us, style overwhelms, this is trying way too hard.

25 minutes in: “Probably jacks off to Fight Club in his mom’s basement like every night.” The pot calls the kettle black.

35 minutes in: Among all the hubris we have had two emotionally complex moments following a one night stand and a decent man that ring true. 

45 minutes in: OK… so its overblown but prescient. A kinda Heathers meets A Clockwork Orange. It empowers young women and skewers male attitudes… it is not a product aimed at me but I’m going to cut its try hard aspects a break and focus on the visual daring of new young female filmmaker. It looks great and is taking scattershot sideswipes at a lot of big, current issues. That should be lauded.

55 minutes in: Ultraviolence. The Stars and Stripes frame a wronged woman. A cheerleader. A baseball bat. Vengeance. She is treated like a hero by her classmates. She is treated like a hero by the director. She is treated like a hero by us. Those involved aren’t even any of the main characters. Not that the lead four girls have been that fantastic acting-wise. But…

75 minutes in: Although it is straining not to be to exploitative, this is working best as an exploitation flick. The visual sensibility is striking now it has settled, we are in sustained sequence of suspense that is masterfully filmed. So it is The Purge for Woke Girls. An intersectional Straw Dogs. A Instagram The Crucible. I can dig it. I’m down with the kids.

95 minutes in: It is getting a bit stretched out and scrappy again but it has won me over… Girls and gun. Reality has left the building. Not sure about the ultimate message. Can you churn a fuckton of push button modern ills then solve them with a shootout? But it has won me over. Can’t wait to catch this exciting new voice’s next film. Must make a note of her name…

105 minutes in: “Directed by Sam Levinson” Sam… Sam?… She’s chosen a gender neutral name. I wonder if she is related to Barry… Quick Goo… SAM LEVINSON IS A 40 SOMETHING WHITE MAN! THE GODDAMN PATRIARCHY! I don’t need no famous director’s nepotistic, dick driven spawn to tell me how tough teenage girls in revealing costumes have it. I can come up with that fantasy myself. I’m almost a 40 something white man. Wasn’t there a Liam Neeson film he could direct instead? Ugh… I feel exploited. Hoodwinked! Shenanigans!!!

6

Harold Ramis directs Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield and Bill Murray in the golf comedy where random shit happens on a golf course.

I hated this as a kid. Why is Bill Murray playing an idiot?! Why does Rodney Dangerfield look so awkward (he goes at it a mile a minute to cover any nerves and his “zingers” disappear in the frenzy)? Only Chevy Chase leaves with his arrogant, self absorbed head held high. He transcends the lowest common denominator, cheap, tackiness of it all. Happy Gilmore smashes laughs out of this world with more heart, while any 1980s frat / academy / patrol farce has more titties and a less frustratingly wasteful casting. Revisit only if dancing furry puppets are your thing.

3

Rodman Flender directs Devon Sawa, Seth Green and Elden Henson in this horror comedy about a stoner who cuts off his demonically possessed killer hand and hangs out with the reanimated buddies he killed. 

Absolute dreck, venal and compromised. Only a familiar pop punk soundtrack and a vapid but almost offensively voluptuous debut by Jessica Alba make this worthy of any note. I laughed at how dated, clunky and awkward this all was quite a few times, rarely am I slave to schadenfreude. Some good FX shots live incongruously within a lot of lacklustre ones.

2

Gareth Evans directs Dan Stevens, Martin Sheen and Lucy Boynton in this period folk horror mystery about a haunted older brother who infiltrates an island of cult worshippers who have kidnapped his sister.

Possibly the best film to spin out from the impressive cult wake left after The Wicker Man, easily far superior to the “official” remakes and sequels. While Evans doesn’t exploit his cast particularly well (the charismatic male leads bring more to the film in providence than it gives them to do) he makes sure we are never without an image that shocks or disgusts or fills us with dread. This and Private Life prove Netflix’s worth more than their recent obvious awards bait releases. The Coen Brothers and Alfonso Cuarón will always find a green light. Solid, rewatchable films like this are struggling for finance and distribution in the arthouses and multiplexes. The streaming giant has gifted us two of the best original films of the year within quick succession. One was mature and witty, the other gory and suspenseful. And I got to watch both in nothing but my underpants. Kudos.

8

Robert Zemeckis directs Michelle Pfeiffer, Harrison Ford and James Remar in this supernatural thriller where a housewife is distracted from her empty nest by the strange goings on of her new neighbours and the ghost trying to unveil a dark secret closer to home. 

A slickly sheen shining exercise in stylish homage breathing in unashamed guffs of Hitchcock, Cluzout and an 1980’s blockbuster which I won’t mention aloud for fear of spoiling the best surprise. This was a side project, made in the downtime while filming Cast Away, when Robert Zemeckis got a few months off while Tom Hanks lost weight and grew dreads. It gave Zemeckis the chance to work with two major stars, Pfeiffer and Ford. Both of whom deliver career highlights here and their last respective hits of their peak periods. And the always cutting edge director does playfully exciting stuff with CGI and well designed sets in the elongated grand finale. The potboiler is equally fun in the first act when getting lost in a barrel of red herrings. But it does grow repetitive before the true peril emerges, long before. Something so simple really shouldn’t be exhausting for big swathes. As a one watch experience this glossy thriller justifies itself. You get a barrage of twists, cliffhangers and classy leads. Our Saturday night revisit 18 years later didn’t help its fond legacy much though.

6

Terrence Malick directs Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek and Warren Oates in this lovers on the run romance about a teenage girl who falls for a violent but friendly sociopath. 

God, the sky looks grand in this. An expanse of blue and white that looks like hope and eternity. The folksy blanket under which sleeps an amoral classic, slight and meandering but undistracted from its own beauty. The movie is hazily dreamlike with a ragged ambling pace. Malick is still finding his voice here as a director and while it is confidently ethereal and bold in its blank humanity, it is also easily his most accessible work. You get the feeling the confident end product betrays an auteur finding his feet. There are burst action and seduction and play that feel there more for the audience than for their artistic or thematic noodling. Who is holding whose hand in this debut? It is hard to tell.

Natalie and I have been having an accidental ‘Sissy Spacek Season’ this month. Unintentional but she is a fascinating screen presence, both childlike yet utterly enigmatic. Her narration is playfully obtuse – you are never sure if she truly is as innocent as her naive narration posits, or if she is lying to herself… or us… or putting words into Kit Carruthers mouth… and if she is, are we hearing her defence of her complicity? Or that defence lawyer who is part of her happy ending? For a role that on first watch comes across cute yet detached, there are complexities therein. The question crops up again… Who is holding whose hand?

Let’s take Martin Sheen’s twitchy but charming Kit Carruthers. A boy who treats his crimes as an unavoidable adventure. He is interested in creating his own legend, building a monument for the site of his own arrest and handing out souvenirs to his pursuers. For him fame and infamy, atrocity and necessity are a blurred line he doesn’t understand. But he ends up caught and doomed, but Spacek’s Holly is lifted away in a helicopter, takes magical flight, to a new life. One has a future, the other survives only in gossip, a forgotten monster of the headlines. Badlands is scrappily formed, perfectly filmed fairy tale of freedom and adventure… the lovers on the run  sub genre was born here. The superior True Romance steals liberally from it, just about every modern “Southern” film owes it deference.

8

Michael Apted directs Sissy Spacek, Tommy Lee Jones and Beverly D’Angelo in the musical biopic of Loretta Lynn. 

The rags to riches form of this life story might go through what we now consider “the motions” but it does so with a lot of grit and charm. One benefit it has over its antecedents is we spend a long old time getting to know Loretta Webb, child bride born into sheltered poverty, before she even shows signs of becoming Loretta Lynn the country superstar. Her rise to fame almost feels like an accidental by-product of the chaotic but affectionate marriage she has with Tommy Lee Jones’ Mooney Doo. And though this romance takes in rough patches of infidelity, assaults, pill popping and bruised male ego, Apted is generous enough to tell the tragedy with a lack of terminal judgement, never making an easy monster of the ne’er do well lad. Their tumultuous relationship is told with such unvarnished frankness and warm humour you forgive him his transgressions because he is presented as just as fragile a human as our eponymous hero. Sissy Spacek is superb here, ably supported by a smaller but powerfully seductive turn by Beverly D’Angelo as Patsy Cline.

8

Lasse Hallström and Joe Johnston direct Mackenzie Foy, Keira Knightley and Jayden Fowora-Knight in this fantasy adventure about an inventive lass who enters the saccharine but declining world of her dead mother’s childhood imagination.

Better than its troubled production (the syrupy Hallström was replaced by the more FX minded but hacky Johnston midshoot) and slow box office suggest. It is a high fantasy adventure in the form of an Oz movie or Labyrinth but strained through the winsome visual palette of Disney’s current brand of winsome and fluttery live action !!!PRINCESS!!! remakes. Foy makes for a far less toothy and twiglike protagonist than her counterparts in Beauty and the Beast or Cinderella. The story, though beholden to playing homage to Marius Petipa’s ballet suite, allows for more deviation and “surprises”. I say surprises as if there are shocks… it is all thoroughly predictable but at least less constricted to a well worn tale as its stable mates often unsexily are. I want to talk about the villian, who puts in a brilliant pantomime worthy turn, but don’t want to ruin the twist for any 8 year olds reading this. There are bursts of visual invention; a swarm of mice forming a gigantic mouse king, a cracked exile queen living in a working puppet fortress shaped like herself, a laboratory of cogs and megascopes that brings toy armies to life. Enough of such bursts that I begrudgingly enjoyed this unwanted blockbuster for what it is, a childish lark, more than what it has become on the hit-centric studio’s account ledger: an expensive fail.

6

Julius Avery directs Jovan Adepo, Wyatt Russell and Mathilde Ollivier in this WWII sci-fi horror where US G.I.s take on Nazi zombie super soldiers.

By no means a perfect film. The plot idles in a village attic for far too long and there probably should be twice as many Nazi Zombies. Yet if this were released in 1992 and I watched it at 13 it would probably be a firm favourite. The action is impactful and chaotic, chunkily violent. The setting convincing and well realised. It leans into some of the hokey-er but effective tropes of your Grandad’s Black And White War flicks nicely. All four leads do attractive work, you want to see their next projects… especially Ollivier and Pilou Asbæk’s imposing enemy officer. Overlord offers slick, heroic thrills that never outstay their welcome. By the time a hip-hop mash-up of Mannish Boy blasts over the end credits you are left putting on your coat and walking out into the multiplex lobby with a broad, satisfied smile on your face.

7

Robert Wise directs Julie Harris, Claire Bloom and Richard Johnson in this ghost story classic where a fragile psychic joins a group to investigate a stately home with a dark past. 

One of the finest horror films ever made, getting by on a classy mixture of hysteria and dread. The B-movie performances hide characters with disturbing depth. The walls and furnishings of the off kilter house maintains a constant fear. The booming, drafty sound design is perfect. The whole dreadful affair has the austere air of a curse set in stone. We know this house dooms its inhabitants. Wise has rattling good fun leading us to the inevitable tragedies and shocks.

10

My Top 10 Haunted House Movies

1. The Shining (1980)
2. The Haunting (1963)
3. Rebecca (1940)
4. The Conjuring (2013)
5. The Woman in Black (1989)
6. 3 Iron (2004)
7. Ghost Watch (1992)
8. The Devil’s Backbone (2001)
9. The Innocents (1961)
10. Ghost (1990)