Talking Tolkien

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I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings back in college.  Although I enjoyed them a great deal, they weren’t enough to swing me into high fantasy.  I do sometimes think I should go back and re-read them, but with so many books on my to read list, it’s a matter of time.  In any case, I’d read that the movie Tolkien was a good example of dark academia, cinema-style, so I finally got around to seeing it.  Although I learned quite a bit about Tolkien’s life from it, as a movie it really never soars.  The academia part is pretty straightforward as King Edward’s School and Oxford University play a large role in Tolkien’s life, and in the movie.  As does World War I, which is where the darkness comes from.  That, and being an orphan.  And also a guardian priest who prevents you from being with the girl you love.  The movie stays with Tolkien until he begins writing The Hobbit.

The difficulty with biopics of writers is that trying to portray where they get their ideas is a fraught business.  Those of us who write fiction know that inspiration comes in many forms, from dreams, to real life events, to the visit of an unusual shop.  Travel, intriguing people, and ideas out of the blue can all trigger a story or novel.  How do you capture inspiration on film?  A love story is, believe it or not, somewhat easier.  The film portrays Tolkien’s early fascination with Edith Bratt, whom he would eventually marry.  One thing that I’ve learned from psychology and those who teach storytelling is that certain narratives more or less play automatically in people’s minds.  Now, this cannot be asserted universally, but if you introduce a young woman and a young man in a story, many people’s minds naturally begin to bring them together romantically.  Showing how a writer goes about their craft is different.

Many biopics of writers are considered examples of dark academia.  Probably one of the reasons is that no lives are lived without loss and trauma.  People handled traumatic events differently.  Many writers use their art as a coping mechanism.  I can’t know, but I suspect that such things often lead people to become writers.  Poe, for example, keenly felt the loss of his mother at a young age, a trauma that would lead to a lifetime of writing.  I hadn’t known, until watching this movie, that Tolkien had become an orphan.  I knew little of his life; I’d read his books, and even walked by his house in Oxford, but this movie did provide a bit of context.  I’m glad, for that reason, to have seen it.

Demon Pop

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To be honest, I hadn’t even heard of KPop Demon Hunters.  The places I look for media advice generally don’t cover such fare.  I’m not into K-pop, Manga, or boy/girl bands.  Most of my media tends a bit towards the weightier side.  Now that I’ve sufficiently justified myself, my wife asked if I’d like to see it, pointing out that there were demons in it.  The concept seemed intriguing; Huntrix, a girl-band K-pop trio, hunt demons while building a protective barrier with their songs.  Then Gwi-Ma, the king of the demons agrees to a plan for a demonic boy band, the Saja Boys, to draw attention away from Huntrix, lessening their power and the protective shield they’ve built.  When demons get through they feast on the souls of humans.  Huntrix is hampered by the fact that Rumi, one of the singers, had a demon for a father and her bandmates, Mira and Zoey, do not know this.  When they find out, internal strife leads them to losing the battle of the bands.  Until they accept Rumi for who she is.

The story is well told, even for those of us who wouldn’t normally willingly listen to K-pop.  I appreciate stories of female empowerment.  And there are, after all, demons.  The concept of demons in eastern Asia is quite different from how they’re conceived in Abrahamic religions.  Gwi-Ma is not “the Devil,” although he shares some of those characteristics in this movie.  The demons are portrayed in monstrous form, and they are very numerous.  Since this is an animated film for audiences that include younger ages, they don’t reach horror-movie levels.  All in all, this wasn’t a bad diversion for an evening’s winding down.  It did make me think about the way demons differ not only across time, but across cultures.

As I discuss in Nightmares with the Bible, the concept of demons evolved over time in the western world.  Not all demons were bad in Greek thought, but monotheism made them evil.  Meanwhile further east in Asia, the concept—which may have developed independently—was more ambivalent.  Many years ago, while visiting my brother-in-law on the west coast, we watched an Anime movie about demons, but I’ve unfortunately forgotten the title.  Since this was about two decades ago, hope of recovering that data is minimal.  Still, I remember being affected by seeing it.  Of course, it wasn’t a musical.  Boy bands and girl bands seem not to have enough world-weariness to sing songs that resonate with me.  I guess I have my own demons with which to struggle.

Finding October

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This post is both about and not about a movie.  On a recent weekend I tried to watch The Houses October Built.  I found it on a free streaming service (with commercials) and settled in.  I’ve been looking for good movies to watch in October for many years, and this one seemed to have promise.  Then a couple of things happened.  But first, the idea: a group of friends want to find the most extreme haunted house attraction in the country.  Fine and good.  Their banter is appropriate, and engaging.  But thing one: the backdrop is again in part of the country where the leaves don’t change dramatically.  Like Halloween, it has the Southern California feel.  Not the truly spooky mid-Atlantic, upper Midwest, or New England autumn.  This is, for me, an integral part of the Halloween, or October experience.  It’s one of the reasons I could never move to the south.

Thing two: as a found footage movie, the camera motion made me physically sick.  Now, I don’t want to give up on “found footage” films.  I really liked The Blair Witch Project.  Perhaps because one of the missing campers was a film student, the camera motion wasn’t extreme.  I do remember newspaper reviews when it came out saying that some people left the theater ill because of it.  Since then, however, found footage has become a standard horror trope.  Some of it is quite good.  The Houses October Built joins VHS Viral, Amish Witches, and even Avatar 3D,  as films I could not finish watching because of too much camera motion.  Other movies have come close.  I’m sure the condition I have has a name.  Since it mostly affects me these days when watching movies, I see no reason to go under the knife to fix it.  But the fact is, the nausea after it sets in lasts for more than a day.  The insidious part is that I notice I’ve entered that realm suddenly, usually because a movie, like The Houses October Built, are engrossing.

If enough people read this blog I’d call this a plea to movie makers—the camera does not have to move constantly to make your film scary.  You are, in fact, limiting your viewership by at least one fan by making it utterly unwatchable.  No movie is worth being physically ill into the next day.  I have a friend whose favorite type of horror movie is found footage.  I often can’t discuss this with him because I’m often afraid to watch them.  And really, does anybody else appreciate that the trees are part of what makes the fall spooky?

Tapped Out

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I grew up with rock-n-roll.  Those born in the previous decade to mine can say the same thing, but collectively we are the earliest now adults who never knew life without it.  Extrapolating from that, the longest surviving early rockers are also aging and many of them are still playing.  In a nutshell this was the inspiration for Spinal Tap II, a mockumentary where Tap is legally obligated to perform one more concert.  The band members have been estranged for years, each having taken up a different career.  As with This Is Spinal Tap, their final concert is being documented by an interested director.  The band tries to negotiate all the changes that have taken place since the eighties which, God help me, were forty years ago.  The premise is both funny and sad.  Tensions still exist between Nigel and David, with Derek being the glue that holds them together.

The movie is entertaining and well done but does lack the energy of the 1984 film.  It made me reflective since the nature of fame is no protection against having to work into old age to survive.  Rock stars, like athletes, tend to peak at a young age.  With the improvements in health care and lifestyle, they can live many years beyond the height of their influence and it’s not unusual, if the money wasn’t managed well, for work to continue.  That fact hangs like a pall over the humor.  I still listen to the bands and performers from my youth who’ve continued to rock into their seventies, or in the case of the movie, Paul McCartney in his eighties, and ponder the passage of time and what it means.  As someone aging myself, I know what it’s like to think like a young person but awake with a body shy on the spryness factor.

Although critics mostly liked Spinal Tap II it did poorly at the box office.  I suspect many people my age feel this dilemma keenly.  Those of us who are seniors sometimes aren’t willing to let go and let others eclipse us.  We see this in the world of politics all the time.  Capitalism sets us up so that generally those who are old control the resources, and, rewarding greed, this system doesn’t encourage letting go.  Power, I imagine, creates quite a rush.  Being on stage with thousands of people adoring you must be something almost impossible to let go.  I also listen to some younger artists.  Rock is uniquely fitting for the young.  To me it seems that all is right as long as the music continues and inspired people, often young, continue to make it.

On the Run

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I come down on the side of book.  Usually.  In the book or movie first debate.  I have to confess, however, that I learned about Logan’s Run because of the movie.  It was quite impressionable on a teenage me, thinking that in such a world I’d have less than ten years left.  I bought the movie tie-in book and read it.  It was very different from the film.  I only remembered one scene from the book and so, nostalgia smothering me, I had to read it again.  The book was actually published in 1967, when I was quite young.  The movie came out in 1976, as did the tie-in novel.  The story has been replicated since then but the basic idea is that in the future overpopulation leads to the radical decision that everyone dies after turning twenty-one.  This is a world of the young.  Politics are handled by computer, and Sandmen, like Logan, hunt down and kill runners—those who try to escape their mandatory death.

There are a number of things to say about this.  One is that the two authors, William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, had distinguished writing credits.  Another is that this is good sixties sci-fi, but belles lettres less so.  I still enjoyed reading it again.  It had been literally fifty years.  When this was written a population of six billion was considered unsustainable.  We’re now at over eight billion and it does seem as if we’ve tipped some kind of balance.  Another thing that stood out, one of the dangers of future-projecting sci-fi, is that newspapers are still a thing in the future.  They’re hardly a thing now.  They do make predictions for 2000, so maybe they should’ve pushed things out a bit further before committing.

In real life, the “developed” world actually has a problem of too many of us seniors and falling birth rates.  Nobody to take care of us when we no longer can.  This seems to be true in the United States, Japan, and China, at least.  Hopefully we won’t go to Logan’s solution.  So, as the book title suggests, Logan decides to run.  There’s a fair bit of religion in here.  He runs to find Sanctuary but, until very close to the end, intends to kill Ballard, the guy who helps runners escape.  There’s lots of adventure, several changing scenes, and a fair bit of testosterone.  Still, the story isn’t a bad one.  It’s old enough (ironically) to be a classic.  And yes, it’s still in print.  Part of my childhood has been restored.

Oh Deere

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Strange Harvest seems to have impressed a number of viewers, but for someone attuned to religion and horror it rang false.  The Lovecraftian elements appear with the idea of a serial killer who’s the devotee of an unfamiliar god.  The story is presented as a documentary, interviewing the detectives who resolved the case, intercut with crime scene footage—often quite graphic and gory—and trying to get to the bottom of this case.  So a guy named Leslie Sykes has been killing people in San Bernardino county since 1995.  He took a hiatus in his killing spree to go to Jerusalem, after seeing something in a cave while out hiking and experiencing a religious mania.  From Jerusalem he goes to Damascus and then into Europe, learning about religions, apparently, before stealing a grimoire from a bookshop in Germany.  He’s pretty clearly trying to raise an unorthodox deity, but the police don’t connect the dots.

After his years’ long absence, he starts killing again in order to have his last sacrifice ready when a rare triangular alignment of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn will be visible with the naked eye.  He is stopped from his final murder attempt by the police, but witness cameras captured some strange cosmic event starting to unfold as the final victim is about to be immolated.  I’m not a fan of this kind of movie but what really made it seem less authentic was the stitched together nature of this religion.  It is never spelled out, it is true, but what is shown does not seem to add up to any coherent system.  The movie does an effective job of creating a scary sociopathic killer, but it implies that the religion responsible is real.  A religion of one, however, isn’t really a religion at all.

Again, critics seem to have liked this but I found the actions of the police inscrutable and the grotesque methods of torture and execution unequal to the task of suggesting how these might be connected into even a psychotic religious outlook.  The only thing that seems to connect them is an occult symbol left behind at the crime scenes.  The letters from the killer to the police are read only in part, and that by some kind of synth voice that’s probably meant to make them sound sinister.  This kind of horror can work, but in general, creating new religions is not as easy as it looks.  Lovecraftian isn’t a bad choice, but drawing the threads a little more closely together could’ve helped a lot.

Deception

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It’s not bad for an independent horror film written and directed by the same person.  Who also did the music.  The Ruse is a moody murder-mystery with several elements that are unnerving.  The main problem is that the resolution is overly complicated and relies on too many factors coming together too perfectly.  Still, it’s worth the time.  Olivia Stone is a woman undergoing hospice in her own home in Maine.  She has dementia, but with moments of lucidity.  Her live-in nurse, Tracy, disappears one night and is presumed dead.  Dale, who really needs the work, is called to the house.  She finds Olivia demanding, while sometimes being very cordial.  Tom, a young man with a daughter, the next door neighbor, helps out when he can.  He has anger issues, according to Jacob, the grocery-delivery guy, also young.  Both of them try to make moves on Dale, which she resists.

Dale, whose relief hasn’t come, becomes convinced that Olivia isn’t really bed-ridden as she seems to be.  Somebody has been blocking the live feed from Olivia’s room and Dale thinks it’s her.  Tom, who is under suspicion, has been arrested, so he’s in jail the night of the attack on Olivia.  When Dale’s relief finally arrives, she is stabbed while trying to revive Olivia.  Dale, who escapes from a locked room, accidentally stabs Jacob, who tries to warn her.  Olivia, not dead from the attack, accuses Dale but then she falls and hits her head, which kills her.  Dale is accused of the murder but is cleared because she’s left-handed and the evidence planted against her shows a right-handed perpetrator.  You get the picture.  Complicated.

The premise, however, is pretty scary in its own right.  A dementia patient who is paranoid and demanding.  She also claims her deceased husband’s ghost is in the house, trying to take her with him.  The Maine scenery is wonderful and the set-up, or “ruse” does work if you follow the lengthy explanation the detective gives.  All of the elements shown on screen are in service of the story, so there’s little that’s extraneous.  Dale’s boyfriend Ben, however, doesn’t really have a role and Dale’s lack of using him for a sounding board is a bit unusual.  Some of the character motivations seem a bit off.  Still, even with these issues, the movie holds together and keeps your interest.  It makes me think that Stevan Mena, the writer-director, has some talent.  The Ruse is better than many films I’ve picked up on the fly.  It’s not bad, even if not great.

Substantial

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Body horror isn’t my favorite, but The Substance was so widely acclaimed that I figured I needed to see it.  It’s easy to see why it was so well received—it is not only well done, it also packs a lot of social commentary into the story.  I hadn’t read about the plot before seeing it, and it occurred to me that the theme wasn’t dissimilar from Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson,” but from the point of view of a woman who’s been celebrated for her good looks and finds herself aging out.  Elisabeth Sparkle has had a successful television personal fitness series for years.  When she turns fifty, however, studio executives decide she has to be replaced with someone younger.  The men in the movie are portrayed in an unflattering light, unable to curb their appetites, while Elisabeth has to stay in shape, remain “beautiful,” to find any work at all.

Then a doctor furtively informs her about “the substance.”  It comes with few instructions, but it causes a person to create a new version of themselves—younger, more attractive—but they must swap out their existence every week.  One week the younger body is active while the older body is comatose and then they keep on switching weekly.  The younger Elisabeth, named Sue, takes Sparkle’s job and becomes a hit.  Her fitness show, highly sexualized, quickly gains ratings.  Sue has boyfriends and glamour.  Elisabeth awakes to find the apartment a mess and starts to regret the doubling.  The advertising for the substance repeats the message, the two of you are one.  Then Sue starts to “stay out late,” taking a few extra hours before switching.  This causes Elisabeth to age, in pieces, very rapidly.  She takes her revenge on Sue by overeating and leaving the apartment a mess.

Of course this is building to a big finish, which I won’t describe here.  There are a number of themes the film asks us to ponder.  Women are expected to stay young to be valued by the men who control the money.  The divided self comes to hate itself.  And there is little recourse for those whose careers reward them richly for being young but who will live well beyond that with only the memories and regrets of what they no longer have.  Although the movie is deliberately comic in many respects, it is also a sad story.  Expectations are unreasonable and unrealistic, and women have to play by the rules set by men.   The Substance has depth and pathos.  And pointed social commentary.

Swing Low

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The 1970s were a rare era.  On the cusp of the electronic revolution, we grew up with many old fashioned notions about how things were done and what was possible.  It was a period dominated by both interest in the paranormal and by Hal Lindsey’s Late, Great, Planet Earth, looking for the end of the world.  I was sent scampering to the strange documentary Chariots of the Gods by Gary Rhodes’ Weirdumentary.  I honestly can’t recall whether I saw it growing up.  I know I read Erich van Däniken’s book on which it’s based.  As a kid with little exposure to a truly educated community, I was swayed by the book and that makes me think I may have begged to have been taken to the Drake Theater in Oil City to see the film.  Watching it as an adult, however, is truly an odd experience.

First of all, it’s freely available on multiple streaming services.  All you have to put up with is commercials and, since it’s not a high-demand movie, there aren’t that many of them.  The film, done by a German director and voiced over in English, begins by suggesting religious writings worldwide tell of wisdom from above.  People have always, I expect, felt that there is something divine about the sky.  We still get that impression from our experience of the weather.  The documentary makes the suggestion that Elijah’s fiery chariot was more technologically advanced than supposed.  Same with Ezekiel.  But then it sets out on a worldwide tour of ancient monumental building, stressing how such simple folk could never have built these things all on their own.  Although this doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, there’s nevertheless something compelling about it.

Among the more interesting items are some of the ancient rock carvings.  Without the written context, however, jumping to the conclusion that these were astronauts is foolhardy.  There are legitimate mysteries of history.  We don’t know who built certain structures, or why.  Our own modern fragile skyscrapers raise the same question.  People seem to be compelled to do such things simply because we can.  We don’t need aliens to help us with them.  Placing all of these mysteries together and suggesting a single solution is so 1970s.  Breaking things down and study of them by experts yields quite different results.  No less fascinating, but perhaps with feet more solidly on the ground.  This documentary is a strange period piece of a time I remember well.  And one from which, it seems, an even stranger culture has grown.

Not Too Tired

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It was the choice of reading a very long Stephen King novel or watching a very long movie.  The fact that Doctor Sleep was leaving Netflix soon decided the toss.  I’d heard that this sequel to The Shining wasn’t bad, but not as good as the original.  Stanley Kubrick’s movie is a masterpiece, so trying to follow it up requires more confidence that I would be able to muster.  Still, Doctor Sleep is not bad.  Danny and Wendy survive, but Dan still sees the Overlook entities coming after him.  As an adult he has shut out the shine and become an alcoholic.  He catches a bus to New Hampshire and meets a recovered alcoholic who befriends him.  In recovery himself, he works in a hospice where he uses his shine to help those whose deaths are imminent, earning him the nickname “Doctor Sleep.”

Meanwhile, entities like those at the Overlook are killing and “eating” kids with shine, but they call it steam.  Abra, a girl with very strong shine, contacts Dan because she experienced the creatures’ latest murder.  The creatures’ leader, Rose, is able to project herself anywhere and she finds Abra and becomes intent on “eating” her.  Dan, who realizes he has to use his shine to save her, with the help of his new friend (actually they’ve now known each other for eight years) goes to trap the entities.  One of them, however, kidnaps Abra and when Dan meets her after the kidnapping he knows they have to lure Rose to the Overlook Hotel.  I think I’ll stop summarizing there, but this gives you an idea of just how large a tale this is.

There are plenty of cues for those who want to be reminded of The Shining.  The climax at the Overlook takes viewers back to the original location and brings back some of the characters.  Overall it’s pretty well done but just what these entities, or creatures, are isn’t really explained.  At a number of points the supernatural becomes almost too much.  There’s no Kubrickian reserve here.  The story is much more about addiction and overcoming it.  Jack Torrance, after all, was an alcoholic.  The movie shows this but the novel dwells on it quite a bit more.  Doctor Sleep make alcoholism key to the tension Dan undergoes as an adult, even when he’s back at the Overlook, paralleling his father’s stopping in the bar.  The movie threads the path between The Shining King didn’t like and his vision of what happened after that episode.  Ambitious, but it does keep your attention, for a long movie.

The Queen

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It’s a confused mess of a movie.  I have a fondness for ghost stories, and when I saw Haunting of the Queen Mary on a streaming service I use, I figured why not.  I wish I’d figured differently.  The film does have its charms, but the story is confusing and the confusion gets in the way of any enjoyment of the plot.  What’s more, it isn’t resolved even at the end.  You can tell something’s wrong when a Google search autofills “explained” as a suggestion after typing in the movie title.  Other people have the same issue.  I get that two timelines are slipping into each other, one contemporary and the other from 1938.  I’m not going to worry about spoilers, by the way, since I’m simply trying to figure out how this is supposed to fit together.

The problem seems to have started with a foundation sacrifice.  Back when the vessel was built, a man was sealed alive into a chamber over which a pool was constructed.  This person appears in at least three different characters between the thirties and the present.  In 1938 he appears to have gone insane, killing several people with an axe.  Another plot is that the little girl (apparently his daughter) is trying to get an audition to dance with Fred Astaire, who is a passenger.  Then in the present day, a couple seems to want to pitch a program to help revive interest in the now anchored ship to help save the monument.  A security guard (?) styling himself as the captain, seems to be the foundation sacrifice man, but he also knows that some sort of time slip has occurred.  The modern day people seem to end up in the thirties or the thirties characters show up in the present day.

The lack of clarity seriously detracts from any promise the film may have.  I know when I start looking at my watch during a movie that it has problems.  Added to this, the run time is two hours.  That much time spent only to be confused about everything begins to feel like a real waste.  It did make me interested in the history of the real life RMS Queen Mary.  Some of its history is presented in the movie.  In real life it holds the record for the most people aboard a single vessel at the same time.  Ships make good settings for ghost stories.  If they aren’t too convoluted, they can be quite enjoyable to watch.  In this case, Haunting of Queen Mary is on my not recommended list.

Seasonal Horror

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It was a rare combination: Friday the 13th, Saturday Valentine’s Day, and Monday some federal holiday.  One of our first friends as a couple called unexpectedly on Friday to say she was in the area and that led to an impromptu meeting for a late supper at a diner.  Still, being Friday the 13th a horror movie was prescribed.  So I picked My Bloody Valentine.  I’ve seen it before, of course.  (I had a whole life before this blog, as witness this friend.)  But the confluence of Friday the 13th and Valentine’s Day forced me to realize that I’d never posted about it.  And the fact that Monday is Presidents Day made a horror movie mandatory, given the current denizen of the White House.  Back to My Bloody Valentine.  First of all, there was the question of which to watch.  The original from 1981?  Kids in high school were talking about this, but I didn’t watch it until several years later.  Then there was a reboot, My Bloody Valentine 3D, which wasn’t as highly rated, in 2009.  It nevertheless was well made and, it was streaming for free.  Spoilers follow.

I’d forgotten whodunit, so the movie kept me guessing.  Here’s how the story goes: a coal mine cave-in led Harry Warden to kill his fellow miners to preserve the air to survive.  He went into a coma, but after a year he awoke and massacred the hospital staff and kids partying at the mine on Valentines Day.  He was shot dead.  Ten years later, Tom, the son of the former mine owner, one of the kids at the fateful party, returns to town to sell the mine.  Instead, he becomes Harry Warden in his mind and begins killing again.  Viewers don’t know that it’s him since he wears a miner’s mask.  Suspicion is thrown on the sheriff, Axel, who was also one of the kids at the party.   And Tom and Axel are feuding over Sarah, now Axel’s wife, but formerly Tom’s girlfriend.  The movie effectively keeps you guessing whether Axel (who’s a philanderer) or Tom (who has mental problems) is the killer.

The movie has a Pennsylvania feel to it, having been filmed in my home state.  This is more in the industrial part where I grew up, rather than the Bucks County that features in M. Night Shyamalan movies.  The only thing they got wrong is that it doesn’t seem very cold for February.  (February can be a trickster in this state, with temperatures anywhere from the seventies to zero or below.)  It isn’t a bad horror offering.  The 3D effects are campy, but that only adds to the fun.  It was the right choice, given the confluence of red letter days.

Spells

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I suspect the reason Incantation was recommended to me is that it is an intimate blend of religion and horror.  A Taiwanese horror film, the highest grossing ever for that country, Incantation is in found-footage format.  Fortunately the camera motion isn’t excessive, so I was able to watch it all.  The story involves a woman ghost hunter who accompanies her boyfriend and his cousin to a site with a reputedly haunted tunnel that they plan to film.  The tunnel is on the property of the boyfriend’s great uncle.  The movie, by the way, isn’t presented in chronological order, so piecing it together may take some afterthought.  In any case, the woman is pregnant when she visits the shrine and the family, who perform strange rituals, do not welcome her.  Nevertheless, the young men persist in exploring the tunnel and discover a curse at the end of it that leads those who see it to die by suicide.  There will be spoilers to come.

The movie begins with the woman reclaiming her six-year-old daughter from foster care.  After the event at the shrine, she had herself committed to a psychiatric hospital, but now that she’s recovered, she wants to raise her daughter.  Unfortunately, the curse remains.  The girl sees bad entities and can’t make friends.  The mother grows increasingly distressed and kidnaps her daughter when she is hospitalized.  She then takes her to a different shrine but the religious master is killed by unseen forces.  She then returns her daughter to the hospital and takes the camera back with her to the original shrine.  The idea, like Ringu, is that if you see the video you will be cursed.  The important difference, however, is that if the curse is widely dispersed it will be weakened.  The viewer is, in the diegesis of the movie, cursed.

This film is of interest for a number of reasons.  One is that the deity is malevolent and only by worshipping it and obeying strict rules can anyone who encounters it be safe.  In the western world there are no malevolent deities beyond Satan, and he’s not really a deity.  The family that worships this god want to be freed of it, but the god is in a tunnel on their land.  They inherited it.  There’s an element of possession at play as well.  Those who watch the video kill themselves because the deity possesses them.  There is also no way to completely destroy the curse—it can only be passed on and diluted.  The movie is quite well done although some aspects of it are familiar from other horror offerings.  Its relationship with religions of east Asia make it a particularly intriguing example of T-horror.

Retro Fear

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Maybe I shouldn’t have started.  This was, however, a recommendation from a friend, so I watched Fear Street 1994.  I say maybe I shouldn’t have watched it because I then learned that it’s a trilogy and I’m not sure that I want to watch the other two parts.  Not because the movie was poor, but because of time.  That, and I’m not a slasher fan.  At the same time, this movie does address the issue of class disparity.  The story begins in 1666 (the satanic number is intentional, of course) when a minister became a mass murderer.  This was because he was possessed by a witch and that witch comes back every few years in a new possessed person who kills several people.  In 1994 she possesses a mall worker who kills his friend and several others before being shot dead by the local police.  Class enters into it because the bad stuff takes place in Shadyside, a town right next to Sunnyvale, which is affluent and crime free.  Shadyside is where the poor live, work, and go to school.

A set of five friends band together to try to figure out what’s happening after the dead murderer starts pursuing them.  It turns out that two of the past murders, also undead, have converged on Shadyside to kill a girl who disturbed the witch’s grave, accidentally.  It’s also a love story but it leaves the situation unresolved because, well, part 2.  The problem with this kind of movie is that you don’t know if the unanswered questions you have will be addressed in the other two parts or not without watching them.  Since I’m not really fond of slashers and I’ve got other things to see and do, I’m not sure that I’ll get the answers.  And I don’t want to cheat by reading up on it.

Was Fear Street worth watching?  I’d say yes.  Despite the gaps, perhaps holes, it was nevertheless not a bad film.  It is very full of action and twists.  Some of the tropes are well-trod territory—adults never listen to teens, the killer can’t be stopped, an ancient crime keeps recurring—but there is enough new here to keep a viewer interested, at least through the first installment.  It is a little distressing to see the nineties being referred to as “retro,” but then again, 1994 was over thirty years ago.  And something about watching young people so alive (until they end up dead) does have a way of providing a bit of a thrill to even a guy my age.  But I’m not sure I should’ve started something I may not finish.

Murder in Oxford

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The Oxford Murders isn’t a bad effort as a thriller, but where it works is as dark academia.  This 2008 movie didn’t have significant box office take, so it may be one rather unknown.  Nevertheless, it is erudite, involving considerable debate about logic (including Wittgenstein) and higher math.  So much so that some might get lost.  Set in Oxford (and filmed there), it has the dark academia atmosphere down.  Since it’s so complex there will be spoilers here, so if you intend to watch it, best do that now.

Here’s a spoiler: the elderly widow of a famed mathematician is murdered by her daughter.  The reason for this is that the young woman has fallen in love with an American boarder at their house, but her mother, who has outlived her expectation with cancer—for years—is interfering.  Meanwhile, the border (Martin) is obsessed with Arthur Seldom, a brilliant Oxford mathematician.  Seldom was in love with the girl’s mother and decides to protect her by making the murder look like the work of a serial killer leaving Pythagorean symbols on the murder notes.  Since Seldom isn’t a murderer, he chooses as his “victims” people who’ve already died, making their natural deaths look like murders.  This throws suspicion off of the daughter, but when the code and the motivation is published in the newspaper, a man struggling with sanity because his daughter requires an operation, finishes the Pythagorean sequence by killing ten special needs students in a bus crash.  Seldom didn’t technically kill anyone, but when Martin confronts him Seldom points out that if he hadn’t boarded with the old woman, her daughter wouldn’t have fallen in love with him and killed her.

The movie is a little clunky, but I think it’s been underrated.  There are lots of ideas here that beg to be discussed.  Like many murder-mysteries, it has subplots meant to throw you off, one involving a disgruntled mathematician, and another involving a nurse who hooks up with Martin, but who has previously had an affair with Seldom.  None of this detracts from the movie as dark academia—something has definitely gone wrong in Oxford.  The widow’s murder was a crime of passion, leading to the deaths of innocents, rather like the butterfly effect that the movie discusses.  The problem seems to be with the writing.  It was based on a novel by Guillermo Martínez, which, I suspect will be added to my reading list.  As a movie it’s not great, but it is good for a dark academia fix.