Shocktober Revisited: The V/H/S Series

 editor's note: the following reviews originally appeared during coverage for Horror Fests VII and VIII, along with the 2014 Year End Recap.

 We decided to kick off Horror Fest with something I've been wanting to see for a while now, the "found footage" anthology film V/H/S. Normally the Cap'n isn't a fan of the "found footage" genre - the only two I've really enjoyed were The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield - but I thought the premise sounded interesting and one of the directors involved was Ti West. As you know, as a fan of The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, I'm on board with anything West has a hand in directing. Also, the Cap'n is a sucker for anthologies.

 The film is broken up into five segments, with a wrap around story that actually advances as the film goes on (which isn't often the case in anthology films):

 "Tape 56" - from director Adam Wingard (A Horrible Way to Die), a group of hooligans who like to videotape themselves exposing women and vandalizing property are hired to break into an old man's house and steal a videocassette. The only problem is that once they get there, the old man is dead and they don't know which tape to steal, so they watch the following stories:

 "Amateur Night" - from director Dave Bruckner (The Signal), three friends head out for a night of drunken sex with camera glasses in tow, but when they bring the wrong girl back to their motel room, the party takes a dark and twisted direction.

 "Second Honeymoon" - from Ti West (The Roost), a couple is sightseeing in Colorado and Arizona when a strange woman begins following them around, and eventually visiting them in their motel room, while they sleep...

 "Tuesday the 17th" - from Glenn McQuaid (I Sell the Dead), a young woman brings her friends up to a lake she visited last year, but her plans may not be as innocent as partying and smoking pot...

 "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily when She was Younger" - from Joe Swanberg (LOL), Emily and her husband are separated while he's in medical school, but she's having trouble dealing with noises in her apartment and a strange bump on her arm...

 "10/31/98" - from Radio Silence (Mountain Devil Prank Fails Horribly), a guy dressed as a nannycam bear and his friends arrive at the wrong house for a Halloween party, and instead find something more disturbing in the attic. When they intervene, they realize what they stopped wasn't the worst thing that could happen on Halloween...

 I'd heard positive and negative reactions to V/H/S, and I guess I can understand both. People prone to motion sickness from "found footage" movies may as well steer clear, as you'll be ill from the opening shots and it's not going to get any better. The ways that the stories use videotaped footage are, for the most part, clever, although I'd love to hear anybody's explanation of who would videotape a Skype conversation using a camcorder so that the wraparound story characters could watch it. But, if you're willing to overlook certain logical inconsistencies, I guess that for the most part they work.

 The "video glasses" in "Amateur Night" are probably the most successful because they limit our perspective in such a way that the ending is a surprise and it generally explains the age-old "why don't they just turn the camera off" question. This also works in "Second Honeymoon" and "10/31/98"'s favor, and "Tuesday the 17th" relies on keeping the camera rolling to reveal the killer. It's really just the Skype gimmick in "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She was Younger" that strains logic.

 Like most anthologies, there are a mixture of good segments, weaker sections, and one or two really impressive moments that help others to stand out. The ending of "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily" manages to elevate the story beyond a retread of Paranormal Activity territory. The fact that the characters in "Tape 56" are all loathsome assholes is overcome with the slow realization that watching these tapes are causing them to disappear one by one (although the reason isn't necessarily clear until the end), and great makeup effects and a gonzo ending help "Amateur Night" overcome its otherwise uninteresting protagonists. It will also make you second guess any girl who ever tells you "I like you" after a few drinks...

 I suppose that while I didn't necessarily like how lopsided "Tuesday the 17th" was in setting up the story before becoming an all out gorefest, the way the killer is handled was inventive and made the best use of the "videotaped" gimmick.

 Of all of the segments, "10/31/98" was probably my favorite, which is appropriate as they save it for last, after even "Tape 56" reaches its conclusion. When things move from suggested creepiness to all out special effects bonanza (handled really well considering it needed to be integrated with camcorder level video images), the segment earns the aimless first section, and the conclusion is satisfying and appropriately dark.

 Oddly, while West's "Second Honeymoon" suffers from the least motion-sickness inducing camerawork, it may be the most abrupt story conclusion and compared to the other entries is possibly the least satisfying. The "home invasion" elements are quite creepy, and West builds tension in appropriately slow pace, dropping hints about what's coming, but even more so than in The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, the conclusion is too rushed to be satisfying. I understand what he was trying to do, but the twist comes about so quickly and ends immediately afterward, leaving little time to digest what just happened. It doesn't seem unfair that the guy watching that tape says "what the hell was that?" when it ends.

 Is V/H/S going to be for everybody? Probably not. It is a better-than-average anthology movie, which I count as a plus, and as I said mostly makes the best of the "found footage" gimmick, but not all of the segments are good enough to sustain the runtime, even if some of their conceits help keep audiences engaged. I can't really say that it transcends either the "found footage" or anthology subgenre, and it's going to make some of you feel very queasy well before "Amateur Night" kicks into high gear, so consider this a conditional recommendation.

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V/H/S 2 is a marked improvement on just about every aspect of V/H/S, and this is coming from someone who enjoyed the first film. It’s a weird point of cognitive dissonance for me, because I love anthology films but mostly hate “found footage” films, so V/H/S had to overcome its conceit with interesting segments and succeeded half of the time (I largely prefer the first and last entries in the film – the bat-creature and the haunted house). That said, it was too long, stretched the “frame” story too far, and is something I “liked” more than really “enjoyed.” I haven’t seen it again since last year and don’t know that I will any time soon.

 On the other hand, I've already seen the second film twice this year; V/H/S 2 drops the segments, cuts down on the length, and provides a more satisfying overall experience, which is critical for any anthology. The “frame” story, “Tape 49” is more focused and streamlined while still loosely tying in to the first film, and three out of the four “tapes” are winners, with the other one an inspired effort. Let’s take a look at how the film breaks down:

 “Tape 49” – from Simon Barrett (the writer of You’re Next), follows a dubious private investigator and his assistant as they break into the house of a missing college student, only to find a familiar setup involving VCRs and TVs in the living room. A laptop video from the missing student suggests that playing the tapes “in the right order” will change you, and they seem to be having an odd effect on the investigator’s assistant.

“Phase I Clinical Trials” – Adam Wingard (The ABCs of Death) directs and stars as an accident victim who receives an experimental artificial eye which is, for research purposes, filming everything. Things seem to be going well until he notices strange goings-on in his house, and a stranger turns up to warn him that the longer he can see dead people, the more they can interact with him. How does she know? Her cochlear implant has the same effect, and it may already be too late for both of them…

“A Ride in the Park” – from Eduardo Sánchez and Gregg Hale (The Blair Witch Project), a biker has plans for a nice ride through the woods when he runs into a familiar horror monster, and thanks to his helmet camera, takes us on a first-person journey through the “eyes” of the undead.

“Safe Haven” – from Gareth Evans (The Raid: Redemption) and Timo Tjahjanto (The ABCs of Death), a documentary crew is allowed access to the compound of a cult promising “Paradise on Earth.” Little do they realize that their spy cameras will do more than expose what’s going on behind closed doors – their arrival signals the beginning of the end…

“Alien Abduction Slumber Party” – from Jason Eisener (Hobo with a Shotgun) comes, well, exactly what it promises. Teenagers put up with their obnoxious preteen brothers and friends, until invaders from another world decide they want everybody, including the dog.

 The “frame” story benefits from stripping down the main characters to two (there were too many people in the first film) and keeps the in-between segments shorter and to the point. While you might miss it the first time, there are quite a few references to the first film and the “mythology” behind why somebody would collect these tapes. I would imagine this will expand as the series goes on (it’s hard to see why there wouldn’t be more), so it doesn’t feel intrusive and people who hadn’t seen the first V/H/S didn’t feel lost in the meantime.

 Every one of the entries is an improvement over the first film, not simply because they’re shorter (“Safe Haven” is the longest of the four and deservedly so). While it’s still hard to argue why anybody would transfer this footage tape, let alone circulate bootlegged copies, there’s nothing as credibility straining as the “Skype” segment from V/H/S. “A Ride in the Park” manages to take the overdone (if still wildly popular) zombie story and present it from a perspective you haven’t seen before and mixes in other camera angles in a fairly clever way. “Phase I Clinical Trials” makes good use of a limited perspective “first person” camera and builds some tension with creepy imagery.

 If there’s a weak link in the lot, it’s probably “Alien Abduction Slumber Party”, and mostly because it comes after the truly fantastic “Safe Haven.” Evans and Tjahjanto’s tour-de-force is an almost impossible act to follow, and “Slumber Party” is good, even when you consider that Eisener breaks three cardinal rules of movie-making (don’t work with children, don’t work with animals, and don’t kill either if you do). His novel use of the camera attached to the dog makes the frenetic chases near the end more interesting and explains the “why are they still filming this?” problem inherent to “found footage.”

 The undisputed winner is “Safe Haven,” for reasons I don’t want to spoil for people who haven’t seen V/H/S 2, because you should see the film if for no other reason than this segment. It’s an ominous buildup that turns into a rollercoaster of “holy shit!” with a perfect final line that’ll make you chuckle. I didn’t even realize I’d missed the last line until the second time I saw it, which caps off an already impressive exercise in ratcheting up the stakes for a film crew in far over their heads. The rest of V/H/S 2 is icing on the cake, which is not to diminish Eisener’s effort or the conclusion to “Tape 49,” which is more satisfying than the end of V/H/S.

Before we watched V/H/S 2, the Cap’n screened “Incubator,” a short I saw last year at Nevermore, and “One Last Dive,” another short from Eisener that shows just how much you can do with one minute. While I enjoy Hobo with a Shotgun to a degree, Jason Eisener has to this point really impressed the Cap’n with the short films he’s directed, edited, and produced. Not to bag on his feature length endeavor, but he really knows how to pack a punch in a short film.

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Remember how V/H/S was too long and only had a few good segments, but the frame story was fairly interesting even though why would you tape a Skype conversation and put it on a tape? And then V/H/S 2 was a marked improvement in every way, because it was shorter and the vignettes were more concise and creepier, even if the frame story was kind of a mess? I guess when the time came to make V/H/S Viral - which might as well be "3" based on the end of the movie - everyone involved from the producers to the writers and directors forgot that.

 The wrap around story makes almost no sense until the very end, and aside from an amusing cookout gone wrong, there's nothing but gore for gore's sake until the mysterious van that causes people go turn violent is shoehorned into the V/H/S mythos (such as it is). If clips from the first two films weren't crammed in as cutaways, you wouldn't even know it was supposed to be part of the same series. The "tapes" are abandoned completely, leaving us with a combination documentary / found footage story of a magician whose cape gives him real powers, a trip into another dimension that, initially, looks like ours but really, really isn't, and twenty minutes with the most obnoxious skaters you're likely to meet, who are eventually killed by zombies or eaten by a demon the zombies are summoning.

 Of the segments, the second one - "Parallel Monsters" - by Nacho Vigalondo (Timecrimes) is the only one worth watching. That said, it's so over the top that you're liable to start laughing at the "reveal" of how the alternate universe is structured. The Day of the Dead / Skater video only gets remotely interesting near the end, when it's clear they can't kill the cult members in Tijuana. Everything else is an absolute waste of time, and I worry that trying to turn the series from a Videodrome-like vibe to a "viral video" ending (think The Signal or Pontypool, but much worse) isn't going to serve V/H/S well.

Cap'n Howdy's Best of 2014: Calvary

 Up to this point, I can't name a movie by Martin or John Michael McDonagh that I haven't really enjoyed. Martin transitioned from playwright to filmmaker with the raucous yet melancholic In Bruges, and followed that with Seven Psychopaths, a quasi-Adaptation for crime movies. John Michael's debut was The Guard, which you may remember made my "Best Of" list a few years ago. His newest film, Calvary, is in no way as funny as The Guard, nor should it be: Calvary is a meditation on faith among the faithless, and when the laughs come, they're tinged with bitterness. Like The Guard and, in many ways, In Bruges, McDonagh's latest rests on the mighty shoulders of Brendan Gleeson.

 Gleeson plays Father James, a Catholic priest living in a small, coastal town in Ireland. The film begins as he sits down to take confession, and as seems to be the fashion for McDonagh, the first line is a doozy. I'm not going to tell you what it is, but you might want to have the subtitles turned on, because the thick accent might cause you not to hear the provocative statement from our antagonist. If you really listen, you can make out who it is, but at the outset of the film, we aren't supposed to know the identity of the man who was molested as a child by a Catholic priest. It wasn't Father James, but this man is going to kill him anyway, to make a point. To him, it doesn't matter if someone kills a bad priest, but if you murder a good one, somebody will notice. He gives James seven days to put his affairs in order, and then meet on the beach to be executed.

 Calvary is not so much a mystery about who is going to kill the Father and whether he can stop it - James seems resolved to his fate, and even if we're not sure, I'm reasonably certain he knows who it is immediately*. The rest of Calvary, broken into days, revolves around his (mostly futile) attempts to help the people in the community. Many of them have abandoned God and have no faith in the church anymore - the molestation scandal weighs heavily as a subtext in the film - to the point where they are openly hostile to him. Veronica Brennan (Orla O'Rourke) is cheating on her husband Jack (Chris O'Dowd) with Simon (Isaach De Bankolé), who might be beating her. When James confronts Simon, he threatens the Father, and Veronica rebukes his offer to help. She likes it, and Jack doesn't seem to care at all. Michael Fitzgerald (Dylan Moran) is a wealthy man who likes to flaunt his wealth, and taunts Father James with promises of donations, in the hopes that philanthropy might help with his depression. Father Leary (David Wilmot) makes inappropriate comments, and doesn't seem to understand his role in the church.

 The closest thing James has to friends in the town are Dr. Frank Harte (Aiden Gillen), an Atheist who regales the Father with horrible stories of human suffering, and The Writer (M. Emmet Walsh), an American who lives in a shack near the sea, romanticizing the notion of suicide in his advanced age. Into this mess enters his daughter, Fiona (Kelly Reilly), whose failed suicide brings her to his home for care. James wasn't always a Catholic priest, as we discover, and his decision to take up a calling after the death of his wife is a sore point between father and daughter. Still, she loves him, and he loves her, but James has no intention of sharing with Fiona what's in store for him. He remains stoic about what he feels is inevitable, and will suffer the indifference of the town to his very existence if it means he can reach one person by the end.

 Calvary is not an easy film to watch: it's a cascade of cruelty, a bitterly funny one at times, but nevertheless a downbeat film punctuated with small moments of genuine human emotion. One of the stories that Dr. Harte tells, during a drunken night at the bar, is so dark, so evil that it causes James to angrily exclaim "why did you tell me that?" It's as though the entire town is conspiring to drive him out, to make him crack, to be what they want all of Catholicism to represent. His church is burnt to the ground: was it the mystery assailant, or just someone else trying to get a rise out of James? Why would someone murder his dog? There's a moment between Gleeson and his real life son, Domhnall, playing a murderer in prison who asks to speak to Father James that's chilling. He shows to reticence, no shades of guilt, only a frustration that he can't remember what he did with his last victim.

 There might be a misstep here or there in Calvary, particularly with James, Simon, and a barkeep late in the film that seems gratuitously violent. A drunken Michael pissing on his art collection goes on a little too long, and subplot involving Leo (Owen Sharpe), the lover / john of Inspector Stanton (Gary Lydon) seems superfluous. Father Leary and Milo (Killian Scott) are underdeveloped characters for most of the film, but it's not the sort of thing that really hurts Calvary. The film is particularly interested in the way that Father James weathers this abuse, this distrust, and how he wants to make things better, one way or the other. It's another impressive performance from Brendan Gleeson, who continues to be an actor worth every moment of your attention. Kelly Reilly is also very good, as the one other sympathetic character in the film. This is not to say that the rest of the cast aren't good, but many of their characters are reprehensible in their words and actions that it's hard to like them.

 Calvary is not a film for everyone, even if it is a fine film indeed. You won't laugh the same way you did with The Guard, which is a film you should already be on your way to watching, if you haven't. Calvary is a test, a less explicit but by no means less vicious attack on human decency, the likes of which are reminiscent of a Lars von Trier film. It's a powerful film, but a painful one, not without its flaws, but most definitely an experience worth undertaking. If you're willing to peer into the heart of darkness to see if a glimmer of light even exists.



* Watching the film a second time, and knowing who the killer is, adds an extra layer to how James interacts with the character throughout Calvary, and while he tells his superior that he thinks he knows who it is, I'm positive that's a ruse to prevent the Catholic church from trying to stop it from happening.

Blogorium Review: The Sacrament

 On the off chance you haven't heard about The Sacrament, it's the newest film from Ti West (The House of the Devil) - his first feature in the three years since The Innkeepers. If you've been keeping up with him, watching his features and contributions of V/H/S and The ABCs of Death, this is exciting news. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to temper it a bit for you, because The Sacrament might have been a tense thriller, but it isn't. Instead, it's fraught with bad decisions in the narrative structure, in adapting its source material, and most of all, its central conceit: the dreaded "found footage" subgenre.

 Patrick (Kentucker Audley, Ain't Them Bodies Saints) is a fashion photographer in New York who hasn't seen his sister in a long time. She had serious drug problems, and while cleaning up, she joined a religious community in rural Mississippi. While relaying the story to friends, Sam (AJ Bowen, The Signal), a reporter for an online news site, gets the idea to film their reunion for a story. Patrick's sister Caroline (Amy Seimetz, Upstream Color) sent a letter explaining that they've left the country to create "heaven on Earth" without interference, so Patrick, Sam, and cameraman Jake (Joe Swanberg, Drinking Buddies) land outside of their undisclosed location. After passing through a heavily guarded entrance, they find themselves in Eden Parish, a community that seems too good to be true, where everyone is happy and self sufficient, under the protective watch of Father (Gene Jones, Oz the Great and Powerful). But all is not what it seems in Eden Parish - Caroline is behaving... strangely, and Father has his own plans for the journalists.

 If you know anything about Jim Jones or the Jonestown Massacre*, not only does this synopsis sound very familiar, but I'm sorry to say that you already know exactly how The Sacrament is going to play out. Other than changing the names and moving the time period from the 1970s to the present, there's very little variation on the basic story of what happened to that religious sect, all the way down to their paranoia about the government and even the method by which the Massacre ends. There are hints that something else might be afoot earlier in the film, but those plot threads are abandoned quickly or given more mundane explanations (in particular what Caroline wants with Patrick). If you don't know anything about Jonestown, you might be a little less tuned in to where things are going (unless you watch the trailer, which gives everything away), but the disappointment that West didn't do anything interesting at all with the story is still going to dull the experience.

 West reunites with some of his fellow cast members from You're Next (he has a cameo in the film and SPOILER a pretty good death scene): Bowen, Seimetz, and Swanberg. Beyond the main characters, there isn't much in the way of Eden Parish's faithful that make much of an impression beyond basic "types": the nurse, the old lady, the teenage boys, the little girl who doesn't talk, the suspicious mother. They don't enhance the world West is building, but instead just serve a purpose in moving the story along to its inevitable conclusion. It's a shame, because one of the things I've really enjoyed about West's films are the characters, who you sympathize with and want to spend time around.

 Maybe it makes up for it that The Sacrament is not what we've come to know as a "Ti West" film, at least based on his last two (and generally, much enjoyed) efforts. The hand-held, shaky camerawork brings a sense of immediacy that's a stark contrast to the tracking shots and long takes he employed to such great effect in The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers. It's an admirable step away from what he's known for, an extension of his segment in V/H/S (admittedly, one of my least favorite sections of that anthology), so in some sense it's commendable West is stepping outside of what he's known for in the horror genre. That said, "found footage" may not have been the best choice to branch out into.

 To West's credit, he finds a way to avoid most of the problems with "found footage" by appropriating Vice News (with their permission, I would gather), a media organization that goes into areas of conflict or otherwise "verboten" places to cover news stories that wouldn't be featured otherwise. Their handheld style works well within the "found footage" tropes, and it explains why someone would continue filming well past the point they should. But it's a double-edged sword, because The Sacrament isn't strictly "found footage" - early in the film, it's clear that the footage we're seeing has already been professionally edited with informational text overlaid on the image. While it may not be immediately apparent, you slowly realize that whatever happens to the protagonists, somebody made it out and cobbled this footage into a Vice "report," which robs the second half of the film of much of its tension.

 It also creates a massive plot hole later in the film, when Patrick loses his camera (that he's been shooting B-Roll on) and Father asks Caroline to continue filming ("this is important"). At this point, Jake has been separated from Sam and Patrick, so he has one camera and Caroline now has the other. And yet, as Father begins talking to the people of Eden Parish about their dire circumstances, West begins switching to a shot / reverse shot editing style that Caroline couldn't possibly be filming. Even if she somehow filmed all of Father's speech and then turned around and filmed the community long enough for Jake to later edit it together, it doesn't make sense that she would think to do that in the moment.

 Honestly, I began to wonder if The Sacrament had switched over from "found footage" to a traditional film, because there was no rational explanation for the editing in the last thirty minutes of the film, and that isn't even the biggest plot hole. By necessity, I'm going to have to go into SPOILER territory, but if you already know how the Jonestown Massacre turned out, it's not going to surprise you much. Jake finds Sam, still alive, in Father's cabin, and Patrick's camera is on a table, filming (for some reason). Sam is tied up and Father is blaming them for his decision to kill everybody with the poisoned Kool-Aid, and then Father kills himself. Jake unties Sam, and they leave - without picking up Patrick's camera. Half of the movie was filmed on Patrick's camera - footage we've already seen, and they just leave it there.

 Now, you could argue that they came back to Eden Parish and the camera wasn't somehow confiscated by local authorities or the FBI and that Jake and Sam managed to edit it back together, if not for the fact that the guard who saves them by shooting another guard promises he's going to "burn the whole thing down" once they've left. Since the office is already on fire after Caroline's self-immolation (Jake makes a point of filming the burning building), there's no reason not to take the guard at his word, and the final text on-screen indicates that "Sam and Jake are the only known survivors." So how, exactly, did we watch everything Patrick filmed from the interview with Father until the end of the movie?

 I don't want you to leave this review with an entirely sour taste in your mouth, and it is worth pointing out that West does generate some palpable tension in the middle of The Sacrament. It's largely due to the appearance of Gene Jones - the other half of No Country for Old Men's "friend-o" scene - as Father: he embodies the presence and charisma needed for a "cult leader," one you can feel immediately, and Sam's interview quickly turns into Father's critique of their presence. There's a sense of menace in that sequence that West excels at, and if he could have infused more of The Sacrament with that unease, it might have overcome some of the structural deficiencies. Bowen and Swanberg are pretty good in what are mostly reactive roles, and Seimetz does a good job at masking Caroline's intentions early in the film. It's just that most of it collapses as the story enters its third act.

 The Sacrament isn't my least favorite Ti West movie (that would still be Cabin Fever 2, which I doubt a "director's cut" could salvage), but it's the one I'm the least likely to revisit. That's a shame, because I had high hopes for it, and I'm still a big fan of The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers. It should be interesting to see where he heads next, stylistically and from a narrative perspective, but as somebody who studied Jonestown extensively in college, The Sacrament just didn't work for me. I'm not sure that it will for other West fans, but you might give it a shot if no other new movie sounds appealing. Not much of a recommendation, I know, but it's the best I can give you for this one.



* I'm deliberately not linking to anything related to Jonestown on the off-chance you have no idea what that is and want to watch The Sacrament. I'm starting to think it's the only way this movie might be interesting, from a narrative perspective.

Horror Fest VIII (Day One): V/H/S 2

 V/H/S 2 is a marked improvement on just about every aspect of V/H/S, and this is coming from someone who enjoyed the first film. It’s a weird point of cognitive dissonance for me, because I love anthology films but mostly hate “found footage” films, so V/H/S had to overcome its conceit with interesting segments and succeeded half of the time (I largely prefer the first and last entries in the film – the bat-creature and the haunted house). That said, it was too long, stretched the “frame” story too far, and is something I “liked” more than really “enjoyed.” I haven’t seen it again since last year and don’t know that I will any time soon.

 On the other hand, I've already seen the second film twice this year; V/H/S 2 drops the segments, cuts down on the length, and provides a more satisfying overall experience, which is critical for any anthology. The “frame” story, “Tape 49” is more focused and streamlined while still loosely tying in to the first film, and three out of the four “tapes” are winners, with the other one an inspired effort. Let’s take a look at how the film breaks down:

 “Tape 49” – from Simon Barrett (the writer of You’re Next), follows a dubious private investigator and his assistant as they break into the house of a missing college student, only to find a familiar setup involving VCRs and TVs in the living room. A laptop video from the missing student suggests that playing the tapes “in the right order” will change you, and they seem to be having an odd effect on the investigator’s assistant.

“Phase I Clinical Trials” – Adam Wingard (The ABCs of Death) directs and stars as an accident victim who receives an experimental artificial eye which is, for research purposes, filming everything. Things seem to be going well until he notices strange goings-on in his house, and a stranger turns up to warn him that the longer he can see dead people, the more they can interact with him. How does she know? Her cochlear implant has the same effect, and it may already be too late for both of them…

“A Ride in the Park” – from Eduardo Sánchez and Gregg Hale (The Blair Witch Project), a biker has plans for a nice ride through the woods when he runs into a familiar horror monster, and thanks to his helmet camera, takes us on a first-person journey through the “eyes” of the undead.

“Safe Haven” – from Gareth Evans (The Raid: Redemption) and Timo Tjahjanto (The ABCs of Death), a documentary crew is allowed access to the compound of a cult promising “Paradise on Earth.” Little do they realize that their spy cameras will do more than expose what’s going on behind closed doors – their arrival signals the beginning of the end…

“Alien Abduction Slumber Party” – from Jason Eisener (Hobo with a Shotgun) comes, well, exactly what it promises. Teenagers put up with their obnoxious preteen brothers and friends, until invaders from another world decide they want everybody, including the dog.

 The “frame” story benefits from stripping down the main characters to two (there were too many people in the first film) and keeps the in-between segments shorter and to the point. While you might miss it the first time, there are quite a few references to the first film and the “mythology” behind why somebody would collect these tapes. I would imagine this will expand as the series goes on (it’s hard to see why there wouldn’t be more), so it doesn’t feel intrusive and people who hadn’t seen the first V/H/S didn’t feel lost in the meantime.

 Every one of the entries is an improvement over the first film, not simply because they’re shorter (“Safe Haven” is the longest of the four and deservedly so). While it’s still hard to argue why anybody would transfer this footage tape, let alone circulate bootlegged copies, there’s nothing as credibility straining as the “Skype” segment from V/H/S. “A Ride in the Park” manages to take the overdone (if still wildly popular) zombie story and present it from a perspective you haven’t seen before and mixes in other camera angles in a fairly clever way. “Phase I Clinical Trials” makes good use of a limited perspective “first person” camera and builds some tension with creepy imagery.

 If there’s a weak link in the lot, it’s probably “Alien Abduction Slumber Party”, and mostly because it comes after the truly fantastic “Safe Haven.” Evans and Tjahjanto’s tour-de-force is an almost impossible act to follow, and “Slumber Party” is good, even when you consider that Eisener breaks three cardinal rules of movie-making (don’t work with children, don’t work with animals, and don’t kill either if you do). His novel use of the camera attached to the dog makes the frenetic chases near the end more interesting and explains the “why are they still filming this?” problem inherent to “found footage.”

 The undisputed winner is “Safe Haven,” for reasons I don’t want to spoil for people who haven’t seen V/H/S 2, because you should see the film if for no other reason than this segment. It’s an ominous buildup that turns into a rollercoaster of “holy shit!” with a perfect final line that’ll make you chuckle. I didn’t even realize I’d missed the last line until the second time I saw it, which caps off an already impressive exercise in ratcheting up the stakes for a film crew in far over their heads. The rest of V/H/S 2 is icing on the cake, which is not to diminish Eisener’s effort or the conclusion to “Tape 49,” which is more satisfying than the end of V/H/S.

Before we watched V/H/S 2, the Cap’n screened “Incubator,” a short I saw last year at Nevermore, and “One Last Dive,” another short from Eisener that shows just how much you can do with one minute. While I enjoy Hobo with a Shotgun to a degree, Jason Eisener has to this point really impressed the Cap’n with the short films he’s directed, edited, and produced. Not to bag on his feature length endeavor, but he really knows how to pack a punch in a short film.

Up Next: Lamberto Bava’s Demons, followed by Dario Argento’s Suspiria!

Nevermore Film Festival Recap (Day One)

 Greetings, fright fans! Cap'n Howdy coming to you from the 14th annual Nevermore Film Festival in Durham, where I just spent the last six hours up to my neck in a horror triple feature. As it is the duty of someone who calls himself "Cap'n Howdy" to attend a horror film festival, it seems only fair to report back to you with my findings.

 The Cap'n kicked off this year's Nevermore with a film I hadn't seen or heard anything about, The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh, a cross between "haunted house" and "religious fundamentalism" spook show heavy on atmosphere and tension starring Vanessa Redgrave and Breaking Bad's Aaron Paul look-alike Aaron Poole*.

  To my pleasant surprise, despite first time director Rodrigo Gudiño's inclusion of creepy angel statues (don't blink!), mannequins, broken dolls, and a particularly nasty "monster," The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh avoids "jump" scares for most of the film. Instead, much of the film is built around set-ups and pay-offs, some obvious, some not so, but all designed around the separation between the late mother Rosalind (Redgrave, mostly through narration) and Leon Leigh (Poole), who had a falling out as a result of his father's death. While his parents belonged to a religious group that insisted in eternal souls, angels, and a vengeful God who punished non-believers, Leon turned away when the cult drove his father to suicide.

 That, and the "game of candles" that his mother forced him to play, assuring him that if she blew out all of the candles before he "believed" that the angel would turn his back on him and the "darkness" would consume him. The lasting psychological damage continues to wear at Leon, and when he discovers his estranged mother bought his entire collection of antiques anonymously, he finds himself alone in a house confronted by his past, by members of the religious movement, and something lurking outside.

 Oh, and the angel in Rosalind's "worship" room. The one on a video that does something... unusual.

 While I found myself engaged with the story and drawn in to Gudiño's wandering camera and the rather spooky house, and while Pool and Redgrave are more than able to sell the scares as they increase, I can't help but feel like The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh stumbles a bit at the end. For one thing, there are simply too many lingering plot threads or concepts introduced in the film that don't feel developed or at times even addressed. While the reliance on Redgrave to narrate what isn't clear in the story is understandable, it comes at inopportune times in the film (especially at the end) and breaks up the narrative flow. Despite the story arc of Leon, the ending seems to make the case that this is actually Rosalind's story, which muddles the denouement a bit.

 It's not enough of a stumble to keep me from recommending the film, but I feel the need to give you the head's up that while The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh builds up a good head of steam, it doesn't quite cross the finish line. Still, in a world of "jump" scares, I'll take a little atmosphere in my ghost story when I can get it.

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 Following that, I sat down for Wrath of the Foreign Invaders, the collection of short subjects from around the world. It was a mixed bag of mostly good subjects, with a few really impressive standouts:

 The Plan - I regret that I can't tell you much about this one, other than it involved head-swapping, brain removal, and some existential musings. The digital presentation began to skip and we missed out on most of the short.

 Ocho (8) - this Spanish short, with no dialogue, tells the story of witchcraft (or voodoo), rituals, birthdays, patricide, and quasi-zombies in the vein of Creepshow or Tales from the Crypt. The cast conveys quite a lot without every saying anything, and it's a suitably dark tale with an ending that made me chuckle.

Refuge 115 - a very short film about a group of people hiding during the bombings in 1938 Barcelona, only to discover that this particular tunnel hides something in the darkness, something very keen on taking them one by one.

 She's Having a Baby - a tense, sometimes disturbing short about the lengths to which one woman will go to a child of her own - even if the other party has objections.

A Joke of Too Much - an Italian take on "grindhouse" films, complete with a fake trailer at the beginning for "Invasion of the Space Worms." It has some good laughs, some inventive gore, and was fitfully entertaining.

 La Dame Blanche (The White Lady) -  tells the familiar urban legend of the mysterious hitch-hiker in white, but with a fatalistic twist at the end. This was tied with Ocho as my favorite of the lot until...

 We Will Call Him Bobby - it's easy to see why this was awarded the Jury Prize at Nevermore for "Best Short Film," because the tale of a father, his son, and the beast they accidentally hit after fishing is frequently hilarious. The subtitles may give away some of the best lines in advance of the actors saying them, but it mixes comedy and horror with great aplomb.


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  I closed out the night with The ABCs of Death, an anthology of 26 short films by different directors. Each was given a letter and had free reign to do as they pleased, and it's a mixed bag. Like most anthologies, there are some really good entries ("T," "E", "Q", "N", "W")  some pretty good ones ( "A", "Y", "B", "M", "S", "C"), some that are just there ("O", "G", "I"), and quite a few you can't unsee, like "F", "P", "H", "X", "R", "L", "Z" and "F", which I will go ahead and identify as "Fart."

 The rest of them I'm being a bit coy with because part of watching The ABCs of Death is guessing what the letter stands for or being surprised that it wasn't what you expected it to be.

 Rather than give you too much more information about the shorts themselves, I'll let you know they come from Ti West (The House of the Devil), Angela Bettis (Roman), Srdjan Spasojevic (A Serbian Film), Jason Eisener (Hobo with a Shotgun), Hélène Cattet (Amer), Yoshihiro Nishimura (Tokyo Gore Police), Xavier Gens (Frontiers), Jon Schnepp (Metalocalypse), Marcel Sarmiento (Deadgirl), Adam Wingard (A Horrible Way to Die), Ben Wheatley (Kill List), Kaare Andrews (Altitude), Nacho Vigalondo (Timecrimes), and Noboru Iguchi (Machine Girl), among others.

 That ought to give you some idea how of bizarre or extreme segments can get, and I'm not just talking about the rampant toilet humor. Any semblance of taste or adherence to boundaries are missing from this film. Sensitive folks, be aware that there's some strongly implied animal cruelty, some child abuse, and then there's "X" and "L", which I probably could have done without ever seeing. So just know that there's some rough stuff in The ABCs of Death in addition to the silly and the trivial. I'd recommend it, but know that it might be better to wait for the DVD to come out so you can skip over certain letters. Either way, it's an experience you won't likely forget for a while.

 Tune in tomorrow for more coverage of Nevermore, including a double feature of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead and Don Coscarelli's John Dies at the End. See you then!



 * No offense to Mr. Poole, who does a fine job in the film, but the similar features and sounding name are only going to complicate my ability to convince people that it is NOT, in fact, Jesse Pinkman in the movie.

Retro Double Feature Review: Being John Malkovich and Dogma

 Let's jump back to November of 1999, somewhere in the greater Guilford County area of North Carolina. A young Cap'n was a... sophomore (?) in college*, living on campus in a dorm with like-minded film geeks and friends nearby with similar interests. We had some friends in town, some cars available, and The Janus Theatre not far away. They just so happened to be showing both Being John Malkovich (just opening) and Dogma (out for a few weeks). We had internet access, were acutely aware of both films and the buzz surrounding them.

 One one hand, music video director Spike Jonze's first feature film, dealing with puppeteer John Cusack discovering a tunnel into the head of John Malkovich. On the other, Kevin Smith's fourth film, comparatively epic in scope, about the descendant of Jesus trying to stop two rogue angels from wiping out humanity. The Catholic League had already condemned one of the films, and strangely it wasn't the one about being able to control another person by inhabiting their mind, or even the moment of meta brilliance when Malkovich climbs into the tunnel and enters his own head.

 You already know all of this, because I doubt there's a person reading something called Cap'n Howdy's Blogorium that hasn't seen both films - probably several times. We were a jubilant bunch of college kids ready for a fun time with some pals from out of town, and it only made sense to stick around and watch them in one night. Not everybody stayed, but those of us that did were in for an experience. Want to venture a guess which one we saw first?

  If you guessed Dogma, you would be smart to think that. We weren't so smart, so we watched the decidedly unique, eccentric Malkovich first, and then stumbled into Smith's Dogma, gobsmacked by the fiercely idiosyncratic debut from Jonze. Oops. Looking back on it now, knowing what I know about each film, I would have flipped the order (if not removed Dogma altogether, but we'll get to that), but the reason we went to The Janus in the first place was to see Being John Malkovich. That Dogma was playing there, in such close proximity, scheduling-wise, was an added bonus for Kevin Smith-philes who wanted to stick around. Malkovich was always going to come first, and regardless of how into Kevin Smith you were, there's no comparison.

 Let's say that somehow you knew exactly how Being John Malkovich unfolded, with all of its unexpected turns and "Ma-Sheen" cameos. Even knowing all of that, including how it plays out with Malkovich the puppeteer or the baby with John Cusack trapped inside, you still wouldn't be prepared for how well Jonze and writer Charlie Kaufman unfolds this madness and compounds it as time goes on. It's such a joyfully strange movie, a curio that pays off with repeated viewings and paved the way for Adaptation and the Kaufman / Michel Gondry team-up that produced Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the eventual solo Kaufman magnum opus Synecdoche, New York (not to mention the tonally similar Be Kind, Rewind, Where the Wild Things Are, and even The Science of Sleep).

 After a few friends took off, we went back in to see Dogma, the hotly anticipated, apparently forcefully recut, dropped from one studio because of backlash from religious groups and picked up by another fourth film from Kevin Smith (Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy). To say that we were massive Kevin Smith fans in 1999 is frankly an understatement: I firmly believe we watched Clerks as frequently as we did Army of Darkness and Cannibal! The Musical on weekends and followed any and everything that Smith said online. In fact, during one online chat, young Cap'n managed to get a question in about working with comedians and improvisation to the slacker auteur, and he answered it. It was as close a brush with greatness as when Henry Rollins let a good friend of our grab his butt (true story).

 So anyway, Dogma itself. Oddly, but the thing that sticks out from that screening was seeing the trailer for American Psycho for the first time - I didn't really know who Christian Bale was (sorry, Empire of the Sun fans, the Cap'n was ignorant) and was vaguely aware of Bret Easton Ellis' novel and the film's turbulent production history. And then Dogma started.

  Do you remember how you tried to convince yourself that you liked The Phantom Menace or House of 1000 Corpses even when you secretly understood it sucked? How you couldn't process looking forward to something so much that when it didn't live up to lofty expectations (or even the deliberately lowered expectations that come technically from a Kevin Smith fan in the 1990s)? If you were like me, you probably kept talking about things that were immaterial to the quality of the film itself: like how it was pro-faith without being pro-organized religion. It lampooned Catholicism as an institution but not faith in principle, etc. That's true. It also had a shit monster, Jason Lee shooting people, some hockey playing teenage monsters, more vaguely homophobic comedy, more sex jokes, a contrived and tenuous connection to John Hughes as a means to get Jay and Silent Bob into the film, and a runtime of 130 minutes.

 The longer version that doesn't actually exist because Smith decided he liked keeping the additional deleted footage deleted doesn't necessarily make much of a difference. At two hours and ten minutes, Dogma is too long, to leisurely paced, and not funny or interesting enough to sustain interest. Not that I didn't keep trying for another three or four years after that. It wasn't until a point well after Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back that I went back and realized that between Clerks and Clerks 2, I didn't actually enjoy any of the Kevin Smith films as much as I told myself I did. I've been down this road before so I'll keep it brief, but Dogma was possibly the moment that began the shift in perception. I may have told myself I really liked it, but I can't remember what it was about Dogma that sent me out of the Janus happier than after Being John Malkovich.

 I sure miss The Janus - it's no longer in existence, and while the "Bistro" section of the Carousel tries to replicate it's atmosphere, it's off by a mile. The Screen in Santa Fe came close, and possibly the Colony or Mission Valley are similar, but I do miss that theatre. It split the difference between arthouse theatre and multiplex very well, and we saw some fantastic films there.

 Talking about all of these double features really makes me want to have another one, if I could think of two movies I really wanted to see playing closely enough together. That, and finding friends who have the time to do that (increasingly difficult) or want to spend that much time / money on what can often be seen as a calculated gamble. Seriously - ask anyone who went with us to see Idle Hands.





* Second year for sure, but I'm not positive the credit hours would technically count me. Hrm...

So You Won't Have To: Red State

 This might sound strange, but I really prefer not writing So You Won't Have To reviews. It saves me the time of sitting through some unendurable piece of crap, and generally speaking you wouldn't be seeing it anyway (e.g. Evil Bong 3: The Wrath of Bong and Monsterwolf). However, enough people at work have been asking about Kevin Smith's Red State, a movie I had the misfortune of seeing the other day. Not only is it bad for a film; it's barely coherent as a Kevin Smith movie (one must accordingly lower one's standards for a director who openly admits he won't film action sequences* because it's too hard). Well, I'll save you the trouble of dropping any money on this waste of 88 minutes. If you paid upwards of $60 to see the film earlier this year with Smith in attendance, then I hope it was worth it for you.

 I'm going to try to keep this brief, because just telling you a little bit should go a long way. What starts out as a stupid sex comedy, complete with unlikable protagonists and a teacher that couldn't possibly keep her job for more than a month**, followed by the introduction of a protagonist getting a blowjob on the side of the road (by a guy, because he's shamefully gay. How do we know this? Because when he arrives at the Sheriff's office because he IS the Sheriff, he lies about where he was and cries in front of a picture of his wife). So it's not enough to have to sit through Randy (Ronnie Connell), Jarod (Kyle Gallner), and Billy-Ray (Nicholas Braun) trolling around a Craigslist-esque site in the hopes of having a four-way with a Sarah Cooper (Melissa Leo); they also have to crash into Sheriff Wynan (Stephen Root)'s car before being drugged and hauled away.

 To where, you ask? Thankfully, there's no real question about it after a ham-handed introduction to the Five Points Church, which is unmistakably a proxy for the Westboro Baptist Church (who protest military funerals and proudly carry around signs that say "God Hates Fags." Yeah.) Like most of the heavy-handed commentary in the film (more on that in a bit), Smith wastes no time trashing the Church in order to make the fact that they trap Randy, Jarod, and Billy-Ray in order to kill them for their sins. This is the stage of the film that briefly apes Hostel, down to the execution of a separate character while the others scream. It's the only thing that comes close to the "horror" that people have been misled into believing that Red State might be (constant coverage on horror sites like Bloody Disgusting hasn't helped, nor did Smith's initial suggestions it was his "horror film").

 But worry not, because Red State is more of a clumsy mishmash of fundamentalist criticism, sex comedy, and siege film. As though it weren't enough to spend fifteen minutes on Abin Cooper (Michael Parks) delivering a sermon - and I mean fifteen minutes of nothing but said sermon - Smith then turns his critical gaze towards a Waco-like storming of the compound, led by ATF Agent Keenan (John Goodman). Keenan is given orders to wipe out Five Points, and struggles with the excessive use of force. See? It isn't just the hateful church to blame - the government is also reactionary and violent.

 Ugh. Okay, let's be quick about the rest of this. Much ado has been made about how this doesn't "look" like a Kevin Smith film because he shot it mostly handheld on a RED Camera. It's true that it doesn't look like a Kevin Smith film, but that doesn't make the visual style any better. Instead, I get the impression that Smith is very enamored of the handheld style of television, and he tries to ape it to the best of his ability, resulting in arbitrary camera angles, jagged, pointless edits, and his usual framing subverted by the ability to quickly swerve around. The visually unappealing nature compliments the forced, insipid monologues, and that's not a good thing.

 I'm going to go ahead and spoil the end of the film, because it ALMOST went in a direction audacious enough to salvage the garbage preceding it: after Keenan and his men gun down the last of our heroes, a blaring trumpet fills the air. Cooper and his "family" take it as a sign of the Rapture and drop their weapons, preparing to ascend to Heaven. And for a second there, it seemed like Smith was going to go that way, taking Red State in an entirely different direction***. But he doesn't - instead we get a long debriefing of what happened after Cooper tells Keenan to kill him, which he didn't. The three agents turn off the camera documenting the debriefing and get "real" about their excitement to lock up Cooper and subject him to "coke can dick" prison rape. To really underscore his position, Smith closes the film with another mini-monologue from Abin Cooper, followed by an off-screen voice (Smith's) yelling "Shut up!"

 Thank goodness I didn't have to see this film with Kevin Smith fielding questions afterward, because that's exactly what I would say to him.


* See the SModCast Network live interview with Edgar Wright.
** In addition to cursing and cracking homophobic jokes at the expense of her students, she openly denigrates the Westboro Baptist Church proxy in the classroom. Since the film takes place in our litigious present, you find me a teacher that gets away with what she does in the first ten minutes of the movie that isn't Cameron Diaz.
*** At one point, that WAS the ending, but Smith opted to go with a less interesting denouement.

Spoiler of the Day: The Passion of the Christ

 According to the credits:

 "The characters and events depicted in this photoplay are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental"

 Okay, that was the easy joke. So by now you know how the silly looking Satan and the sillier looking Satan Baby show up to tease Jesus, but do you know how the actual movie ends? Not how the story ends, but the last shot?

 Extreme close up of light shining through stigmata. Yep.


 Tomorrow's Spoiler of the Day: Hannibal

Blogorium Review: The Book of Eli

Welcome to day one of Post-Apocalypto-Rama-Rama at the Blogorium! Today I'll be looking at Albert and Allen Hughes' The Book of Eli, written by Gary Whitta and starring Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman, Mila Kunis, Ray Stevenson, and Jennifer Beals.

Let's do the Post-Apocalyptic Scenario Rundown:

What Caused the Apocalypse: Nuclear War ("they punched a hole in the sky," says Eli [Washington]). Religion is blamed for the war, so following the return of society, all religious texts are burned.

Adverse Effects on the Population: It seems that some of the adults were blinded by the sun's rays, and everybody in post-apocalyptia needs to wear sunglasses at all times. Lack of power, books, and general loss of simple creatures comforts. Money has pretty much disappeared, and trading is based on things like lighters, oil, water, and in one case, a valuable bottle of shampoo. Eli trades with Engineer (Tom Waits) to recharge an iPod, which presumably represents some of the last music available in this world.

How Is Society Adapting: On the roads, there are scavengers, travelers, and people who set up traps, usually involving a woman who pretends to have a broken down shopping cart (this trick appears twice in the film). There are a handful of towns where civilization is slowly rebuilding, such as the one run by Carnegie (Gary Oldman). Elsewhere, there are small dwellings that families have refused to abandon, like the home of George (Michael Gambon) and Martha (Frances de la Tour). You want to avoid the latter, as there's a good chance that kindly old couple might be cannibals.

Our Hero(es): Eli (Denzel Washington), a warrior-monk type traveling from the East coast to the West coast, carrying a book that may or may not be the last surviving copy of the King James Bible, which he protects from any attacker. Something's off about Eli, but it's unclear what until just before the end.

Who's Standing in the Way: Carnegie and his henchmen (including Rome and Punisher: War Zone's Ray Stevenson). When Carnegie gets word about the book from Claudia (Jennifer Beals) and her daughter Solara (Mila Kunis), he wants it to help rebuild society ("This book is a weapon!" he tells his men). Carnegie is well read, cunning, and resourceful, and poses such a threat that he forces Eli and Solara to forge a temporary alliance with George and Martha the cannibals in order to stay alive.

So What's so Important About Where He's Headed: There may or may not be a group of people trying to rebuild society without controlling them through fear that Eli wants to deliver the book to. It's been his life's mission to get there, and Carnegie is only the last obstacle for Eli to clear.

How Well is the Post-Apocalyptic World Conveyed: It's pretty solid. Eli and Solara sleep inside of the cooling tower for a Nuclear Power Plant, the rules of how society operates are conveyed clearly by Eli and Carnegie's town structure makes sense. Cars are used sparingly and with everything at a premium, none of the characters are too wasteful with what they have. Food seems to be in short supply, so the film opens with Eli hunting a feral cat (hairless, presumably as a result of the radiation). (Spoiler) The outpost in Alcatraz designed to collect the remnants of the "old world" from 30 years ago also is appropriate considering how difficult rebuilding must be, and I like little touches about younger survivors asking elders what life was like "before."

Visually, I like that the Hughes brothers went with a sun-bleached palette. It always feels totally appropriate that everyone is wearing sunglasses, as the world seems just a little bit brighter than it ought to be. Even though most of the movie takes place in the desert, I wouldn't be surprised if most of the country looked like the backgrounds of The Book of Eli.

So, Glass Half Full Post-Apocalypse, or Glass Half Empty?: This is definitely a "glass half full" kind of movie, one that embraces a positivist role of religion in society. Without spoiling too much, Carnegie does and doesn't get what he wants, and Eli and Solara make it out west. There's the potential for sequel-izing if they wanted to, based on the very end, but either way it's the kind of movie that reaffirms your faith in mankind to rebuild.

The Hughes brothers have constructed a great looking post-apocalyptic vision of the western U.S., with solid acting across the board and some interesting ideas about where faith fits into a world that forgot it long ago. The Book of Eli is certainly a more action oriented, western-based take on the genre, but that's not such a bad thing at all. In fact, I'd dare say you'll find a lot to enjoy about the movie. Regarding the "twist": I'd rather not spoil it for you, but I will say that I knew what it was going in and was able to follow the visual clues. Save for one scene, I think they kept to it pretty well, but I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Join me tomorrow for The Road.