Happy-Happy, Joy-Joy...!
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The VVitch (2016): 8/10
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Last Night In Soho (2021): 10/10
With her willowy frame and disconcertingly large, round eyes, Anya Taylor-Joy makes for an arrestingly alien screen presence, as well as ideal casting for a horror movie (she kind of looks like she stepped out of the pages of a Tim Burton sketchbook). Today's twofer looks back at her big screen debut and her latest, currently unspooling in theaters just in time for Halloween treats.
2016's
The VVitch features Joy as Thomasin, eldest daughter of a puritan family, banished from their village due to a stubbornly prideful religious debate. With her father, William (Ralph Ineson), mother, Katherine (Kate Dickie), younger brother Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), the twins, Jonas and Mercy (Lucas Dawson, Ellie Grainger) and newborn Samuel, they eke out a hardscrabble existence in the New England wilds of 1630, managing to construct a humble farm to tend to their needs. But when baby Samuel vanishes -- stolen away literally from under Thomasins nose whilst playing peek-a-boo -- it's just the spark that ignites the mounting flames of religious hysteria, with the disappearance blamed on a witch living in the nearby woods and Thomasin accused of being in thrall to Satan's power.
Writer/director Robert Eggers takes this tale of Salem-era finger-pointing and crafts a film of ravishing, painterly beauty, even in the deepest pits of its human ugliness. Taylor-Joy delivers a star-making turn, perfectly tuning her performance between disbelief that her own family could turn against her and a swelling sense of the toxic allure of giving into her basest, unholy desires, and the rest of the cast impresses in their ability to gradually accelerate their levels of fear and suspicion. The old-timey Thee & Thou dialect can be a bit tough to suss through (it doesn't help that a lot of it is delivered in gravelly whispers), so some might want to keep their finger poised over the subtitle button on their remotes, but it's a minor flaw in an otherwise eerie and atmospheric tale of backwoods madness.
2021's
Last Night In Soho is a much different bird, a heady, engrossing mind-meld of a thriller that stars Thomasin McKenzie as Eloise Turner, a young woman -- obsessed with the clothes, music and overall vibe of the 1960s as handed down to her by her late mother -- who travels to London to study the art of fashion, but becomes whipped up in a mystery from the past. Seems like whenever she goes to sleep, she's haunted by vividly realistic dreams, where she observes -- occasionally
becomes -- a party girl named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) with aspirations to become a famed lounge singer in the swingin' era of go-go boots and Sean Connery 007 movies. Her dream life and waking life become harder and harder to differentiate (right down to Eloise chopping and dying her hair into a facsimile of Sandie's blonde beehive coif), and Eloise falls down a rabbit hole of nightmarish nostalgia leading into a violent catharsis in both the past and present.
Director Edgar Wright (sharing screenwriting credit with Krysty Wilson-Cairns) -- one of our slyest, pre-eminent genre mixmasters -- presents this increasingly lurid and surreal tale with his customary sense of rhythmic style. His camera glides through lusciously-detailed recreations of mid-60s London nightclubs and seedy back alleys as the soundtrack thumps with meticulously-chosen period song cuts, and the crosscutting between eras (courtesy of Wright regular Paul Machliss) keeps the audience in a constant state of snapping puzzle pieces into place. I suspect a lot of people won't "get" this movie the way that didn't get Wright's
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World over a decade ago, but like that film,
Last Night In Soho is destined to be a cult favorite that its fans (count me in) will find more to enjoy with each viewing, and even after just one, I'm already head-over-heels for it. It's bloody brilliant...!
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Cloverfield (2008): 8/10
One of the better uses of the "found footage" gimmick in horror films, 2008's
Cloverfield asks the question, what would it
really be like to be one of those terrified members of the populace scattering for cover between the feet of a giant monster in an old Godzilla movie? A group of twentysomething New Yorkers have a going-away party for a friend interrupted by a massive power loss and inexplicable explosion. Soon, the city finds itself under siege from a gigantic reptilian creature who emerges from the bay (it swats the head off the Statue Of Liberty...hey, just spray some Mood Slime on it, and she'll be fine), who reduces the city to rubble as our core group of survivors (including Lizzy Caplan, Jessica Lucas, Michael Stahl-David and T.J. Miller) have to forge their away across the city in order to save Stahl-David's ex-girlfriend (Odette Yustman).
Directed by Matt Reeves,
Cloverfield has some of the usual flaws of the FF genre (like characters who keep suicidally filming no matter what immediate physical peril they might be in), but it's also terse, exciting and boasts some marvelously enveloping sound design (hell, I got a noise complaint from a neighbor while watching the UHD today). It's not deep, it doesn't reinvent the wheel, but
Cloverfield is great Giant Monster fun taken from a unique perspective.
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Blood Fest (2018): 5/10
Robby Kay stars as Dax Conway, a young man -- obsessed with horror cinema -- who's dying to get into Blood Fest, a horror fan gathering that spreads across multiple acres of fenced-in land, replete with themed sections (zombies, slashers, creepy clowns, etc.). But after the gates lock, he -- and everyone else -- finds themselves dying to get
out, as the sanguinary shindig's master of ceremonies, Anthony Walsh (Owen Egerton, who also wrote and directed), lets them know, in no uncertain terms, that his crew of hired goons is going to kill each and every one of them, and use the footage of the fanboy carnage to create the ULTIMATE horror movie.
This is a nifty concept for a horror movie, especially considering how nerdy fan expos are the lifeblood of the seasoned horror fan, but
Blood Fest is a terminally mild experience, with the gore being rote and the comedy falling prey to the usual fallacy that
referring to cliches and stock situations excuses a filmmaker from filling a movie with cliches and stock situations. Had the film been funner or scarier, this wouldn't be a fatal flaw. It's a painless-enough way to pass ninety minutes, but seasoned fright fans will not find anything to really recommend here.