October | 2020 | the m0vie blog

206. se7en – Halloween 2020 (#20)

Posted on October 31, 2020 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, and this week with special guests Doctor Bernice Murphy and Phil Bagnall, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released every Saturday at 6pm GMT.

This week and next week, we are taking a break from our Summer of Scorsese for a Halloween treat. David Fincher’s se7en.

Detective William Somerset is seven days away from retirement, and has just been partnered with a new arrival from outside the city. Detective David Mills has yet to fully adjust to the rules of the urban landscape. However, Somerset’s plans to retire are undercut after a pair of strange deaths point to something sinister simmering below the surface of the city.

At time of recording, it was ranked 20th on the Internet Movie Database‘s list of the best movies of all-time.

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Filed under: The 250 | Tagged: bernice murphy, brad pitt, david fincher, doctor bernice murphy, Gwyneth Paltrow, halloween, horror, kevin spacey, Morgan Freeman, nightmare, phil bagnall, scary, se7en, The 250, urban gothic | Leave a comment »

Non-Review: His House

Posted on October 30, 2020 by Darren

His House is a striking and unsettling piece of piece of work, and an impressive feature debut for director Remi Weekes.

His House focuses on Bol and Rial, a refugee couple who have fled war-torn Sudan and arrived in the United Kingdom. Against all odds, the couple are allowed out of the detention centre and assigned their own living space. It is a rundown old house on an estate. “You must have won the jackpot,” explains their case worker Mark, even as the front door falls off its hinges. It is a big house, one in need of a lot of care and work. However, it all belongs to Bol and Rial – and whatever they have brought with them.

That sinking feeling.

His House works on a number of levels. Most obviously and most importantly, it is genuinely unsettling. Weekes understands the mechanics of horror, and works closely with composer Roque Baños and cinematographer Jo Willems to construct a genuinely creepy horror. Weekes makes excellent use of negative space and framing to make the audience uncomfortable, and generally does an excellent job with mounting tension and dread. His House is an impressive piece of horror, judged simply as a genre piece.

However, the film is also quite pointed and well-observed in its horror. His Horror riffs on the tropes and conventions of the familiar haunted house story, particularly as a metaphor for trauma. What elevates Weekes’ screenplay, from a premise by Felicity Evans and Toby Venables, is an understanding that sometimes the ghosts that fill a haunted house arrive with the owners.

It is certainly a fixer-upper.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: film, his house, horror, immigration, matt smith, Movie, non-review review, refugees, remi weekes, review, sope dirisu, Wunmi Mosaku | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: The Craft – Legacy

Posted on October 30, 2020 by Darren

The Craft: Legacy is, as the title implies, a legacy sequel to The Craft.

The Craft is an interesting film. It received something of a critical drubbing on initial release, but there have since been conscious efforts to reevaluate it. This is not unusual in female-focused horror; Jennifer’s Body has undergone another recent critical reappraisal, and deservedly so. The Craft is an interesting film in this sense; it is certainly a better movie than many critics thought it was, if not quite the hidden masterpiece that its modern defenders would want it to be.

Picture imperfect.

One of the key and enduring strengths of The Craft was that it was a relatively rare example of a female-focused supernatural horror movie when it was released, explicitly engaged with the idea of female empowerment in the context of the mid-nineties, filtered through a teenage perspective. (It arrived a year before Buffy the Vampire Slayer.) The fact that this was an underserved market was perhaps best illustrated by the launch of the similarly-themed television show Charmed two years later, which would quietly run for eight seasons.

The Craft was imperfect, but it scratched a very strong itch. The Craft: Legacy naturally arrives at a very different time. While audiences looking for these sorts of genre stories about young women grappling with supernatural metaphors for empowerment in a hostile world, there are far more options than there were in 1994. The Craft: Legacy needs to do more than just offer a nostalgic reminder of a film that has slowly and surely built up a cult following. Unfortunately, the film can’t even do that.

Getting Coven with Stepdad.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: film, legacy, Movie, non-review review, review, the craft, the craft: legacy | 1 Comment »

New Escapist Column! On “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” and How “Borat” Has Changed Over 14 Years…

Posted on October 30, 2020 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With the release of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm last week, it seemed an interesting opportunity to take a look at the return of the Kazakh caricature, and examine how the character had shifted in the fourteen years since the release of Borat.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is the way in which it offers a much more conventional structure – and even character arc – than the original film. It’s a strange choice, particularly in the context of the film’s mockumentary sensibility and the outlandish nature of the character. However, it also illustrates how much the world has changed since the release of the original film. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm realises that the world has changed, so maybe Borat should as well.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: Amazon, america, Borat, borat subsequent moviefilm, escapist, film, in the frame, Movie, politics, sacha baron cohen | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Video! On “Joker” and the Exhaustion of Outrage Culture…

Posted on October 29, 2020 by Darren

So, as I have mentioned before, I am launching a new video series as a companion piece to In the Frame at The Escapist. The video will typically launch with the Monday article, and be released on the magazine’s YouTube channel the following week. This is kinda cool, because we’re helping relaunch the magazine’s film channel.

With that in mind, here is last week’s episode, covering the anniversary of the outrage over the release of Joker, and how that demonstrates how cheap outrage has become.

Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: escapist, James Gunn, joker, moral outrage, Moral panic, outrage, Todd Phillips | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On the Contemporary Resonance of John Carpenter’s “Apocalypse” Trilogy…

Posted on October 26, 2020 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With Halloween approaching, the column is going to take a little bit of a detour into some spooky stuff, and I’m very excited.

John Carpenter remains one of my favourite horror movie directors. A large part of that is just down to simple craft. Carpenter can make a cheap movie look great. More than that, though, Carpenter’s unique brand of horror has aged very well. This is particularly true of Carpenter’s “Apocalypse” trilogy – The Thing, Prince of Darkness, In The Mouth of Madness. Carpenter imagines the end of the world not with a bang, with the slow and unsettling collapse of the invisible forces holding it together. The world unravels and unspools, and chaos breaks through

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: apocalypse, end of the world, escapist, in the frame, in the mouth of madness, John Carpenter, Prince of Darkness, the thing | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On “The Mummy”, the Most Maligned of Movie Monsters…

Posted on October 25, 2020 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist on Friday. With Halloween approaching, the column is going to take a little bit of a detour into some spooky stuff, and I’m very excited.

I’m thrilled that I got to write this piece about the Mummy, which remains one of the most interesting of the classic movie monsters because it seems to exist at odds with the rest of the classic fiends. There are plenty of classic Dracula and Frankenstein films, the Wolfman and the Invisible Man have been handled well over the years, but the Mummy always seems like the odd creature out of every wave of classic creature feature films. So I was thrilled to do a bit of a deep dive into it to look at how – and why – that is.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: Alex Kurtzman, Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, escapist, hammer horror, in the frame, monster, Movie, movie monsters, steven sommers, the mummy, universal classic monsters | Leave a comment »

New Podcast! The Escapist Movie Podcast – “We Finally Have An Excuse To Re-Watch Willow”

Posted on October 24, 2020 by Darren

The Escapist have launched a movie podcast, and I was thrilled to join Jack Packard for the ninth episode. It was a light enough week for film news, so we talked about Disney’s new content warnings on some its older and more dated classics, the announcement that there was a Willow television series coming, and discussed the latest version of The Witches.

You can listen to the episode here, back episodes of the podcast here, click the link below or even listen directly.

Filed under: Movies, Podcasts! | Tagged: disney, jack packard, podcast, the escapist, the witches, willow | Leave a comment »

205. The Wicker Man – Halloween 2020 (-#73)

Posted on October 24, 2020 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, and this week with special guest Doctor Bernice Murphy, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released every Saturday at 6pm GMT.

This week and next week, we are taking a break from our Summer of Scorsese for a Halloween treat. Neil La Bute’s The Wicker Man.

After a traumatic accident on a desert highway, highway patrolman Edward Malus is contacted by his old fiancée. She is living on a remote matriarchal community known as Summersisle, and her daughter has gone missing. Malus embarks on a journey to the island in the hopes of reuniting the lost child with her mother, only do discover something more sinister is at play.

At time of recording, it was ranked 73rd on the Internet Movie Database‘s list of the worst movies of all-time.

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Filed under: The Bottom 100 | Tagged: bees, bernice murphy, bottom 100, doctor bernice murphy, edward malus, halloween, horror, Misogyny, Neil LaBute, nicolas cage, remake, the wicker man | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: The Witches (2020)

Posted on October 21, 2020 by Darren

The Witches offers a clumsy American update of the classic Roald Dahl novel.

To be fair, there is something potentially interesting in attempting to update The Witches, both for modern audiences and for American viewers. It’s to the credit of director Robert Zemeckis and co-writers Kenya Barris and Guillermo del Toro that they at least understand this. The Witches makes a number of alterations to its source material, and at least some of those reflect a genuine and compelling attempt to update the story to fit in a modern and American context.

Any witch way but loose…

At the same time, The Witches is a mess. Part of this is down to the way in which a lot of the appeal of Dahl’s story is lost in translation, as a wry and arch British story gets filtered through the hypersaturated Americana of one of the defining American directors, an even more exaggerated effect of what happened with Steven Spielberg’s work on The B.F.G. However, some of this is more fundamental, as Zemeckis struggles to balance tone and mood across the film, and finds his attentions drawn more to what his interests desire than what the plot demands.

The Witches is a misfire, but an intriguing one. There are hints of a much more compelling movie to found, sifting between its more misjudged moments.