Modern Culture - Monster Balls, Vampire Weak Ends & Paradoxical Paradoxes

This is full of spoilers because everything discussed is old.

Not What it Says on the Tin

Don't be fooled by the title or the trailers, the last ever 20th Century Fox movie is not what you think it is; not by a long chalk. The Empty Man is pitched to the same audiences that watch teen slasher/horror films, but this is not a rip off of The Slender Man, the Boogeyman or It Follows, it's considerably more cerebral than that, even if you're not sure at times what you are actually watching. 

This is a film that defies typical horror film tropes, while cashing in on them at the same time. It starts with an almost 25 minute 'prologue' about four people who go to Bhutan to experience the Himalayas and the culture, but end up in some tragic situation that is both creepy and slightly understated. One of the people - Aaron Poole - falls down a crevasse and when he is found he's sitting catatonic in front of a fucking weird looking skeleton of some kind of human hybrid monster with many ribs and fingers. What follows is almost typical, yet atypical, slasher material and results in his three companions all dying, leaving him still catatonic atop a mountain in the snow. 

Switch to James Badge Dale's former cop, working in a home security shop who gets roped into the disappearance of his neighbour's daughter - someone we meet briefly when she visits Dale at his home to see if he's okay. It seems he's recovering from some tragedy where his wife and son were killed. The neighbour's daughter's disappearance is a bit fishy, there's a message scrawled on the mirror in her bathroom in animal blood and it's all looking a bit dodgy. Our ex-cop protagonist starts doing his own investigation, interviewing the girl's friends and it suddenly becomes a bog standard creepy bogeyman slasher movie with kids on bridges blowing into bottles while thinking about some entity called the Empty Man. The next thing you know, all the kids, bar the neighbour, are found dead, hanging under the bridge. 

It's now things start going a bit weird and when I say weird, I mean well weird. There's this secret organisation full of young people who are all obsessed with the Empty Man, there's riddles and encounters that make little or no sense and the feeling that is it Dale who is going mad or is it something to do with the secret society or the Empty Man himself. I've seen the film described as cosmic horror and others suggesting there's an element of HP Lovecraft and Cthulhu in it and that might be the case, but what is both clever and interesting about it is how it's wrapped up and concluded. It might leave you with questions or with the feeling you've been conned and that's okay because in an ingenious way you have been conned; what you thought was a bog standard horror movie is much more than that, it's almost mind-blowing in its concept and it's extremely well executed even down to the denouement, which you wouldn't have seen coming.

Don't be put off by this film and its description, it defies description in many ways, it is disturbing and at times is very creepy and disconcerting, even if some of these scenes don't make much sense to the narrative, but, in the end, you'll either understand what it all means or you'll think it's smoke and mirrors with a soupcon of Rosemary's Baby-styled obfuscation. It's worth watching and is probably the best thing I've seen this week.

Mummy Dearest

What was Tom Cruise thinking when he looked at the script for The Mummy - Universal Picture's Dark Universe 'reboot'? Was it the slightly comedic, almost slapstick approach or maybe the fact that it was so full of half-arsed badly executed ideas he figured at least he'd look okay even if everybody else didn't? Whatever it was it must be a true nadir in his movie career; one he hopes people won't remember when he's dead.

It's a remarkably awful movie almost from the word go and as much as I'd like to go into some detail about what was wrong about it, I find myself compelled to keep this as brief as possible because I might lose the will to live. Obviously I can't ignore Russell Crowe's Doctor Henry Jekyll - yes, that Dr Jekyll - and his famous alter ego's brief and unnecessary appearance or the fact that his crack SAS-like team were about as effective as an ice teapot. Or Jack Johnson's homage to Griffin Dunne in An American Werewolf in London, possibly the two lady actors who literally couldn't find a stage with either of their arses and a number of torches. But I'm not going to because it will remind me that I sat through about 100 minutes of the stinkiest* arse droppings imaginable...

* Did you know that 'stinkiest' is a superlative adjective?

Vampire Weekend

Good God, speaking of stinkiest arsedroppings, hasn't dramatic television improved so much over the last 25 years? It has become sophisticated; the scripts have matured; the acting is much better and TV we loved and admired from the 20th century needs to be re-evaluated and condemned to fond memories and/or septic tanks, because when you dip your nostalgic toe in those murky far off waters of time you might find yourself wondering what drugs you were on...

The wife and I were both big fans of Ultraviolet, the British vampire series with Jack Davenport, Susannah Harker (yes, really) and a young Idris Elba. Over the years, we've often pondered why it never got a second series because to our knowledge it was very successful and was critically liked. It even has a high score on IMDB, but time hasn't aged it at all well. In fact, after watching the first episode all I could think of was how can I get out of watching the next five without killing myself or letting the wife down?

Ultraviolet is the story of a government/Vatican funded police squad charged with ridding London of its vampire infestation - depicted as blood drinking parasites with barely a fang in sight. Davenport's best friend and police partner is mixed up with them and ends up becoming a vampire to avoid the consequences he'll face if the police force he works for finds out he's as crooked as Stephen Hawking's spine. Oddly enough, this character is played by Stephen Moyer, an actor who I've only ever seen in one other TV series - True Blood. 

Unfortunately, the wife put episode two on without me being able to protest. It doesn't get any better. Neither was episode three which dealt with the thorny issue of abortion in a 'what if the baby you're carrying is actually a vampire wrapped in a human embryo' or something like that. It was terribly overwrought, with terrible acting and yet somehow it was still more enjoyable than some other vampiric things I've been discussing recently.

However, it gets even more overwrought and badly acted, but this time with an appalling script that perpetuates a stereotypical lie about gay men, paedophiles and public toilets. There are moments in this series where Jack Davenport really looks like he can't believe he signed up for this shit and I can't believe that we thought this was cutting edge stuff 25 years ago...

The most spectacular thing about the penultimate episode was seeing the price of petrol and diesel in 1998 - it was 66p a litre for diesel and 77p a litre for petrol. This also had Corin Redgrave in it as a vampiric guest star and more really bad acting and I've yet to see a fang in nearly five hours of boredom.

Oddly enough I remembered bits of the finale; especially the bridge setting, however it and the thing in general was just a very poor attempt at doing a vampire ecology thing. I now understand why a second season was never commissioned because 25 years after seeing it I can't believe how our tastes have changed. Two things I took away from the series was that Idris Elba was really the only team player in the series but he was misunderstood from the word go and that Stephen Moyer's Jack must have moved to the Deep South of the USA, changed his name to Bill and invented some ludicrous story about being in the American Civil War...

Classic Teen Angst

Nope. Still none the wiser.

22 years since last watching Donnie Darko and being a huge fan of time travel and paradox stories, I can honestly say that this film has me flummoxed. It's really a great film, with a fantastic cast and yet the only thing I could think of, after I'd finished watching it again, was Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder, although I can say quite assuredly that it's nothing like that film, only probably considerably more confusing.

Watching the director's cut apparently makes the film easier to understand because of the use of Roberta Sparrow's book The Philosophy of Time Travel, which doesn't feature as prominently in the theatrical release, but in the Director's cut suggests that Jake Gyllenhaal's Donnie is in some kind of tangent universe that is physically connected to the wormhole that leads to the aircraft engine - the artifact - that destroys Donnie's bedroom and that Donnie is the Living Receiver who must somehow ensure that he is in his bedroom when the vortex throws the engine - from the airplane his mother and younger sister are in - through the wormhole, onto the Darko home and thus killing Donnie. There are also the Manipulated Living - the characters closest to Donnie who play their part in facilitating the paradox and the Manipulated Dead - such as Frank the bunny - whose job it is to ensure the paradox within a paradox happens... And if you understand that previous paragraph you're doing better than me.

So, if I understand this correctly, the Donnie who has visions of the bunny man Frank and strange events taking place and the perpetrator of a number of interconnecting crimes is actually the Donnie from the original reality who somehow transfers himself into alternate reality to ensure events happen and he dies in an event that no longer can happen because none of the events that lead up to it will occur, thus creating a paradoxical paradox... It's fucking mind-blowing because just trying to get your head around it makes your head hurt. No wonder it has such a cult following with all manner of different interpretations.

Like I said, it's a great film; it doesn't really ever make a lot of sense and for large periods of the film - with the exception of the jet engine - I thought it was all in the mind of a truly fucked up, possibly schizophrenic teenager, but, of course, that was completely wrong and couldn't be what it was about because of the jet engine that could not have happened because the event that causes it will probably not happen because of the things that won't happen because of Donnie's death - such as Donnie not killing Frank who will then somehow travel backwards in time to attempt to ensure Donnie does all the right things to ensure he dies when he should have. For fuck's sake...

Underpants 2: It Needed to Stop Here!

I don't want to give you all the impression that the wife likes shit TV and film, but the wife likes shit TV and film... Well, it's more a case of memories distort with age and she clearly thought the Underworld films wouldn't deteriorate as badly as they have with time.

Underpants: Evolution is the sequel to the dreadful film reviewed last week and while I was watching this I was trying to come up with a witty and humorous way of describing what a heinous crime against filmmaking it was, unfortunately I was unable because like vampires drain the blood of their victims, this vampire franchise has drained me of all my flare, panache and ability to write cutting edge appraisals. What you're left with is me going 'Oh for fuck's sake' a lot and wondering what poor old Richard Beckinsale would have thought of his quite sumptuous daughter almost getting her kit off in yet another ludicrous piece of celluloid garbage.

I think they were making it up as they went along because frankly if someone had actually sat down and written the plots and dialogue down on paper they would have been burned alive by the most benign priest in existence. This film was so awful I almost lost the ability to write coherentz\skjcHOG SH...

Tomb Stoned

After watching the 2018 reboot of Tomb Raider I realised why computer game adaptations don't work on film - other than they're usually rubbish. It's because there's no sense of jeopardy; no real risk; no likelihood that the main protagonist will die despite whatever situation they find themselves in.

However, to be fair, this was a far more enjoyable version of Lara Croft, because I felt the two early noughties versions suffered from a number of things, mainly Angelina Jolie being massively miscast and the fact they were crap. This felt more Indiana Jones and rolled along at a fast pace which meant that some of the logic which was missing was overlooked.

Two times in the film Lara acquiesced - first time to Nick Frost and then to Walton "I'm a villain in everything I'm in" Coggins, when using a bit of logic would have worked better for the film and would have made more sense. I'm not going to bother telling you what they are because if you haven't seen the film it would be a bit out of context, but I think I'm becoming hyper-critical of films to a) have noticed them in the first place and b) for it to be bothering me a few hours later enough to mention it in a review.

Anyhow, it was okay. It was clearly setting us up for a sequel that never happened so in many ways the way it ended left us hanging in a state of (I'd like to say suspense, but it didn't really have any) anti-climax, well almost, but not quite that good. It was an origin story and most of the first hour was introducing us to Lara and the people around her, who never appeared again and could easily have not been in the film at all. The historical narrative was also all over the place and had it not been tied up you would have thought that the bike-riding MMA fighting Deliveroo employee Lara was only about 14 years old. Again I could go into detail, but all I'll say is Dominic West, who plays her father, looked older when Lara was 7 than he did when she was about 13 and despite living wild on a desert island for the last seven years didn't look that bad at all.

Butterflies

Virtually every week I make the point of how little we remember films we've seen less than five years ago, and how 20 year old films now feel as though we maybe only thought we'd watched them or maybe our memories are so buggered that we remember nothing at all, apart from the title and who was in it. This was very much the case with The Butterfly Effect, the Ashton Kutcher time travel film that we absolutely might as well have been watching for the first time.

Not that this is a bad thing, because it was considerably better than we thought it was going to be; in fact it's probably much better than most people will remember. Kutcher discovers that he has the ability to travel back in time to events that were so traumatic for him he blacked out and never remembered what happened. Once he works this out there's no stopping him going back and trying to right wrongs that were caused, only whenever he does that one of two things happen - there's always a consequence and it's slowly destroying his brain.

There are some really quite shocking elements of this film, such as Eric Stoltz playing the paedophile father of siblings the younger Kutcher befriends or the scenes within the State Penitentiary when he has to do some extreme things just to survive. There is the slight logical dilemma that any change to the past of someone is likely to have far reaching consequences - hence the title The Butterfly Effect - so when he goes back in time to try and prove a point his then present should be different, but that would have upset the narrative and made the film confusing. The writer tries to convey the fact that it's only the major events in the protagonist's life that have consequences - which, of course, is the principal for the concept of the Multiverse - and minor things have no bearing; but any aficionado of time travel stories and paradoxes will tell you that even a sneeze where one wasn't originally will have consequences and alter the future. Everything is basically the Grandfather Paradox.

One thing about this film that I was impressed with was how tragic it was, almost all the way through and I mean 'tragic' in that it is littered with tragedies from almost the word go and ends with what could be described as the greatest tragedy and sacrifice of them all. It's a remarkably compelling and emotive film and the cast do a great job of playing the same characters in different realities. It's worth a watch (or a re-watch, especially if you can't remember it).

And Monsters of a Different Persuasion Entirely...

We rounded the week off with something completely different, or was it? If there's one thing you can safely say about Sicario is that it is full of monsters, more than capable of doing evil that supposed real monsters are incapable of.

It's a brutal, relentless movie that starts off horrendously and just keeps the horror coming. Emily Blunt and Daniel Kaluuya play two FBI agents seconded to the DoD to aid in the supposed capture of a high ranking Mexican drug cartel leader, except it's really a CIA operation that has one thing in its mind and that's putting an end to the cartel and it's bosses in the most extreme ways possible. This isn't a good guys versus bad guys film, this is a bad guys versus really bad but legal guys film with Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro as the good guys not afraid to blow anyone away to achieve their goal, even if that means the FBI's top field officers.

There's an almost documentary feel about it at times, which is what makes it all the more horrifying because what you witness on screen you can believe happens in real life and worse. It's without a doubt del Toro's finest film, even better than The Usual Suspects and Josh Brolin is about as far removed from Thanos as possible, yet you'd probably argue that the Titan has more integrity and is probably more trustworthy. This is an awesome film that simultaneously feels like two hours in Hell and given this week there's been a real theme running through it, this is by far and away the closest thing to a proper horror movie out of all of them.

Next Time...

More of the same probably as I can't imagine any new television coming along to distract us from the Flash Drive of Doom. On a related note, I will say that we purchased a Soundbar and after four days of fiddling and tweaking we finally have it working with the TV and the set top box, although you have to use it in two different modes. It's not really a patch on surround sound but that seems to have gone out of fashion.

Expect more time travel as a theme next week unless the wife puts her foot down and insists on more Underpants. We might venture into No Hard Feelings or Asteroid City as there's A list full frontal nudity in both and the priapic teenager in my head is intrigued, while the prudish 60-something is dreading it.