Weekly Watchlist: October 1st to 7th, 2017 [Pt. 2]

Watching movies this first week of October was not only interrupted by the various television shows I was bingeing (on top of my normal duties as a stay at home dad) but also a free HBO weekend on Hulu. Once I discovered that HBO had made their library free to all Hulu customers until Monday morning, that became all I watched. I knew I wouldn't be able to get through a series, but I watched as many movies as I could, focusing primarily on the Oscar nominated films I had not yet been able to catch. Of course a horror film or two snuck in there, but it just wasn't my priority over that weekend, meaning the 1st, and part of the 2nd, contained very little in the way of seasonal viewing. What follows below is the complete list of what I watched this week, and some brief discussion about a few of the more noteworthy films.

The Films:

Circle (2015) This one hopped to the top of my Netflix queue due to a very loose connection I have to it. Or should I say, my wife has. One of her coworkers is dating an actress who appeared in the film, and my wife said it had sounded interesting. She was right; it did sound interesting. A group of 30-some people awake to find themselves standing in a completely black room, circled around a podium where an orb sits and occasionally crackles with electric energy. The people are standing shoulder to shoulder, each in their own red circle. If they step out of the circle, the orb in the center of the room shoots out some lightning and kills them. If they try to touch another person, the orb kills them. Every two minutes someone is killed by the orb, and the people in the circle quickly conclude that they can vote for each other, and the person with the most votes gets killed off. Circle is one of those high-concept sci-fi films full of psychological hokum that I almost always enjoy, like Cube, Coherence, After, or the similarly premised Belko Experiment. Circle is also a film I happened to not enjoy.

I think my main problem with it was the pacing, and the speed at which the story moves before it slows down a bit towards the end. The characters all figure everything out way too quickly, within the first ten minutes, in order to get to what the filmmakers probably considered the meat of the story: how groups of people will turn on each other to survive. The problem is that this removes any real mystery or sense of discovery from the beginning of the film, as we're presented with the rules very early on and then just have to watch increasingly shrill and awful people decide to kill the weakest among them. This also leads to some groan-worthy exposition and leaps of logic as people figure out how to control who gets killed with no real effort, just some quickly babbled nonsense. At first I thought this implied a mole in the group, but (spoiler alert) no, it was just lazy writing There was also a problem with the pacing of the film, as I said. The orb kills someone every two minutes, no more no less, and so the dwindling group of survivors has two minutes to talk and try to discover a way out of their predicament once somebody is killed. The film is presented in real time, yet for the first 20 minutes of the film the orb often gives the group much less than 2 minutes, while by the end it's giving more than that amount. A small quibble, maybe, but it was annoying.

The Purge: Election Year (2016) My second year working at Halloween Horror Nights the theme was The Purge, and it was decidedly un-Halloween. Guests would walk around a corner and someone in an intentionally cheap mask (mimicking the masks in the film, of course) wearing a tuxedo would walk up and point a gun at their heads. Sometimes people with chainsaws would lunge at them, too. I was disappointed all season long, because nothing about it seemed appropriate, or in the proper spirit. Personally, I would not consider the Purge films to be horror, or at least I would consider them horror in only the loosest sense. I'm not trying to be a pedant here, but the films have just never been scary, and don't really seem interested in scaring people beyond a couple obligatory jump scares. The only thing that causes the films to be filed under horror are their general aesthetic and focus on gore. I would actually consider the films to be grimier-than-most action flicks. But these films are categorized as horror, and labels can be so slippery when discussing genre films anyway, so I'll go ahead and add it to the scorecard for my Halloween viewing.

Or perhaps I should be more forgiving to the Purge films. Certainly they do what all great horror movies do by tapping into a prevalent fear of the day. These days, when we have more mass shootings then there are days in the year, when every large gathering brings with it the fear that some madman with a gun will choose to cut down dozens of civilians, when every parent worries about not whether their child will fit in at school, but whether one of their classmates came to school with their parent's gun, and our elected politicians respond to the largest mass shooting we've seen by explaining to us why we can't do anything about gun violence, the Purge films do tap into something. It certainly seems in this country that we've become resigned to random mass shootings, and it's beginning to feel like the victims of those shootings are our sacrificial offerings in order to live in America. In that light, a film about an annual culling of the poor and helpless orchestrated by wealthy politicians seems like the perfect vehicle for exploring very real anxieties. It's so obvious that you can't even call it a metaphor; the films directly address the world we live in today. The problem is, the Purge films just aren't very good.

The original Purge was a forgettable home invasion film that introduced the concept of an annual murder-fest in a film that never actually revolved around said murder-fest. It was decent enough, bolstered mainly by Ethan Hawke giving it his all in a film that did not deserve it, and the reliable thrills of vicariously watching characters mount a makeshift defense of their home. I had a lot of issues with both the plot and also the general world building of the film, as the purge did not make sense to me. Not only could I not see it actually becoming the law of the land, but I had serious questions about how the rules of that society as presented would function. Putting that aside, the biggest flaw was that The Purge never became about the purge, it was a standard home invasion flick with some lip service towards dystopian horror. The second film, The Purge: Anarchy, was a massive improvement over the first, and while not a film I've ever felt driven to revisit, it was one I actually enjoyed. It took the major problems of the first film and seemed to address them all. The world was fleshed out significantly by shifting the focus from one family being stalked by rich kids to an ensemble piece focusing on several characters over the night in question. The film's varied locales and multiple points of view pointed a way towards the Purge films becoming almost an anthology series of desperate characters struggling against a violent dystopian society.

At first glance Purge: Election Year continues to make good on the promise of the second film. It expands our knowledge of the world by shifting the focus to politics, and also to the groups of people who try to fight the purge (a pair of women who drive around in a fortified ambulance and help victims when they find them, an underground resistance movement focused on more violent means of governmental overthrow). In practice, however, the film represents a marked step backwards. Not only is Election Year the cheapest looking of the Purge films by far, it features some of the weakest acting in the series, and definitely the worst dialogue. Five minutes in I had lost count of how many times various characters had used the word 'cunt' in casual conversation.

By the end of the film I had quite lost interest in any of the events, and lost track of the plot for awhile as my mind drifted off to more engaging things. I realized I am probably done with The Purge, though I see a fourth film is in development for release next year, and I have to admit I'll probably watch it eventually.

A Ghost Story (2017) Lest you think I watched nothing but shitty movies all week, I did watch at least one film I believe is destined to become a classic. A Ghost Story's release came and went with generally positive, but also pretty divisive critical reactions. Myself I'm going to have to watch the film again and spend some time pondering it's dreamlike conception of our place within the vastness of time, but I do want to list it here as a recommendation. The film has a deliberate and elliptical pace that may not be for everyone, and certainly its level of pretension is higher than that of your average blockbuster, but I've always been a fan of pretension, and of unconventional chronology in films. A Ghost Story is definitely not a horror film, despite its title and the fact that it is about a literal ghost, but it is a very moving and engaging piece of work. The central image, of a ghost that is actually just the old Halloween standby of a sheet with eyeholes cut into it, may strike some as amusing at first, but it evolves to become a strikingly evocative and expressive figure. Worth your time.

The Incident (2014) This is the feature length debut from Isaac Ezban, who seems eager to make a name as the Mexican Rod Serling. I'd seen his second feature, The Similars, previously, and his contribution to the Mexican horror anthology Mexico Barbaro, and while neither film exactly set my world on fire, they did intrigue me enough to check this one out. At the time I said about The Similars that it was an odd, funny movie, but that I wasn't sure how in on the joke the filmmakers were. It was such a ridiculous concept with such ridiculous visuals (while sheltering in a bus station during a near-apocalyptic storm a group of strangers all begin transorming into the same bearded man), but also treated completely seriously. It was as if the film had no real sense of humor about itself. It was not a great film, but it appealed to me for many of the reasons I cited above when discussing Circle. It also explicitly acknowledged its debt to The Twilight Zone through some voiceover and distressed visual style meant to evoke an older lost film.

The Incident is very much more of the same. The film follows to parallel storylines, one in the present day, and on in the mid-eighties. The first storyline follows two criminal brothers and the cop that is chasing them. After trying to escape through their apartment's stairwell, one of the brothers is shot by the cop, and they find the stairwell has become an eternal loop. Going down to the first floor takes them back to the 9th, and going up takes them to the 1st. In the second storyline, set 35 years earlier, a married couple and two children embark on a roadtrip to take the children to visit their biological father. On a deserted stretch of highway the daughter begins suffering an asthma attack, and when they turn around to race back home and get her inhaler, the family discovers the highway has become... an eternal loop. Are the two stories connected? I think you can figure that part out on your own.

I enjoyed The Incident at about the same level, and for many of the same reasons, as The Similars. In fact I was ready to say that The Incident was the superior film, as it seemed to have a firmer grasp on the message it was trying to convey. The film has some interesting things to say about how violence can be almost like a physical illness, passed on from perpretator to victim to witness, creating an endless chain going on to the end of time. It ruined that, however, in a silly ending that tries to hard to explain what was already obvious, and by bringing in some really ridiculous metaphysical elements that were not even hinted at in the preceding film. Anyone who's read this far will probably have a good idea of whether they'd want to see it or not, but I would call it a qualified recommendation for those looking for a little Twilight Zone weirdness.

Elsewhere in the week I also watched The Attic (2007), a horror film from Mary Lambert, director of Pet Sematary, and starring  Mad Men's Elizabeth Moss. It's a film that is almost inconcievably bad, considering it was made by an experienced director who has done good work in the past. It's not just a creative misfire, but a laughably amateurish production that should be expunged from her record. In response to wasting time on The Attic, I lost any urge to watch something new and so popped in a movie I knew I would enjoy: It Follows (2014). This is my first rewatch of the year, and it will be my unending shame that I had tickets to the AFI Festival screening of this film in 2014, and skipped out on going because I was too tired after a long day of work. It Follows is a genuine masterpiece, and even on second viewing had me on the edge of my seat.

I watched a Godzilla flick with my daughter: Godzilla Vs. King Ghidorah. My daughter is an emerging Godzilla fan, and I was happy to revisit one of the Heisei films, featuring one of my favorite running exchanges about peoples inability to grasp that a spaceship is actually a time machine (a gag ruined by the fact that I originally watched this film dubbed, and the subtitling, which is probably more accurate, simplifies the exchanges). Through Shout Factory's website I streamed Bad Moon (1996), a werewolf film I had somehow never watched. It was fairly mediocre, but I always enjoy a monster. I also thought that, for the time, the digital composite effects used to create the transformation, while nowhere near as good as something practical like American Werewolf in London, were still surprisingly solid. Also on Scream Factory I checked out Nomads (1986), which I only knew about from seeing the cover in the video store as a kid. It was surprisingly dull and convoluted, with Pierce Brosnan trying out the worst and most inconsistent French accent I think I've ever heard.

It Comes at Night (2017) was an artful post-apocalypse of the killer virus variety. The film never explains exactly what is going on, but relies in part on our overfamiliarity with the genre to dispense with the boring expositionary scenes and get straight to the dramatic struggle between the survivors in their isolated refuge. I found it a handsomely staged production on all accounts that still never quite wowed me. And finally, Long Weekend (1978) was the most surprising film of the week. A nature run amok film from Australia, Long Weekend follows a truly despicable married couple as they go on a weekend camping trip, seemingly to save their marriage. Along the way they casually kills a variety of animals and destroy their environment by throwing their waste everywhere, until the very earth itself seems to rise up in revolt. I went in expecting a gonzo horror film with animals attacking and maybe some shocking gore, but ended up watching a surprisingly eerie film about two people being swallowed by nature. It was truly creepy, and more haunting than horrific. One that I'll definitely be returning to.

To see my numerical ratings, and follow along with everything else I'm watching, you can check out my letterboxd profile here: https://letterboxd.com/theworkingdead/