October Film Freak Out Week 2

Winner, C Grade, Flop and Mid.

I wanted to have a more intense experience this week, so I went after films that have some modern popularity, and I decided to go back and visit one of the first horror movies I ever watched.

This week I only managed 4 films, it was a busy week, filled with conflict between me and my real estate agent, who is insisting that I pay fees to pay my rent.

ANYWAY!

In this article I will be reviewing; Pearl, Jeepers Creepers, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and Smile.

Movie 7: Pearl

Dude Pearl is amazing and I have like no notes.

We follow a young woman by the name of Pearl, who lives on a rural property in 1918 America. Pearl dreams of becoming a dancing star, and fantasises about being on stage, but her traditional and strict mother dismisses her desires as selfish distractions from taking care of the farm and her family.

Despite her good intentions, something is very wrong with Pearl, she’s not all there exactly.

What lengths will Pearl go to in order to achieve stardom?

There will be no Spoiler review for this, I loved every aspect of this film.

From the aesthetic, to the cinematography, to the character Pearl herself, this is a comedic and sad story of a young woman trapped by obligation and motivated by murderous instict.

I will probably write a whole article on Pearl itself, because there is so much I adore about it.

But for now?

5/5 stars.

Movie 8: Jeepers Creepers

How DID he get those peepers?

But seriously, this movie is filled with plot issues, comedic execution, with some truly messed up concepts tying it all together in a neat little bow of stupid.

Its not THAT bad, but my notes are mostly screaming.

I actually watched this as a teen, it was one of the first horror movies I had ever seen and I’m pretty sure I didn’t even see the end. I was only 14 and it TERRIFIED ME.

The concept is as follows.

Two siblings are heading across the country to visit their parents for the first time in a while, the brother and sister clearly have a good relationship, playfully dissing each other at any turn.

As we drive along, a truck comes speeding up behind the car, coming bumper to bumper with it.

The siblings freak, attempting to move to the side to let him pass, but he just swerves behind them again, its as if he’s scaring them on purpose.

The vehicle eventually pulls in front of them and speeds into the distance.

Only the truck and its bumper plate stay in the minds of the brother and sister.

As an Australian, you share the main roads with truck drivers a lot, as a learner driver, you encounter aggressive truck drivers too often.

One time I was actually run off the road onto the dirty side area because a truck wouldn’t slow down and I was going the max speed limit I could as a learner driver.

I regained control of the vehicle and got back on the road but it was really scary, not to mention my mum was freaking out in the passenger’s seat.

This is a fear I can absolutely relate to, and it’s a fear that was amplified for sure when I watched this film.

Later the two siblings drive past an old property where none other than the creepy truck is parked, they observe the driver hurling what looks to be dead bodies wrapped in sheets down a massive shoot below the building.

When the guy see’s them, he gives chase again, and they barely make it out alive.

Which is when our dipshit brother decides they simply must go back and investigate.

The sister at some point mentions how if this was a horror movie people would be screaming at the tv how stupid they are. Which is exactly what I was doing and no, hearing them say this did not ease my rage at the situation.

One of the more interesting parts of this film is the creature’s visibility.

The siblings end up calling for help in many scenarios across the film, each at first not really believing them until they see evidence of it themselves. Everyone attempts to fight it but the nature of its regeneration proves difficult to combat.

This movie was a lot of things, it was kinda exhausting keeping up with it all.

The ending left me frustrated, the actions of the characters at times infuriating.

Overall, I rate this a 3/5 stars.

It had some good comedic moments, specifically a scene where they keep trying to run down the creature with their car, but he keeps running up the car. It repeats for like 3 moments, like a looney toons skit, I actually laughed at this and it’s the reason I’m giving it 3 and not 2 stars.

I think it’s a funny film to watch with older kids, maybe older than 14 though.

Movie 9: The Killing of a Sacred Deer

From the get go this film has a very hectic aesthetic, a warning to anyone triggered by medical procedures, as the very first sequence we witness is some kind of open heart surgery close up, gradually panning away.

The tone is thick, stiff, suffocating. There’s something very ominous at play and we as an audience are unsure what that is yet.

Our protagonist appears to be a middle aged surgeon, he’s quiet and somewhat robotic in his dialogue, except the same becomes true of most people he interacts with.

Our first proper interaction is between him and a teen male, its unsure what the relationship is here, they meet privately, they don’t exchange real information all the time with outsiders, and there appears to be clear boundaries established between them, such as this boy not just turning up at the hospital to talk but instead calling ahead of time.

At first I assume this is a child of another relationship or affair, but that is eventually debunked.

Eventually our protagonist has to change course when his children start to show strange symptoms, weakness in the legs and eventually an inability to walk at all, followed by a lack of apatite and a refusal to eat.

The doctor has to scramble to figure out what is happening, and why it begins and ends with this young man he’s befriended.

1/5 stars.

Ok, I’m ready for everyone to come after me for this one.

Yes, this is a film about god complexes.

Yes, this is a film about a family not truly recognizing what life is or how to live authentically.

I watched the spaghetti scene, I see the symbolism, I feel everything that was intended to be felt by this film.

All the way up to the end, where the characters act so extraordinarily alien that you almost don’t care what happens anymore. Except for the youngest child.

The atmosphere and aesthetic are extremely tense, so tense you find yourself gripped to the tv so you don’t miss any clue of what’s going on. There are no clues though, or if there are, it doesn’t matter.

This film is just over 2 hours long, and its excruciating to get through.

The reason for random illness and ultimately the ending left me annoyed, confused, and exhausted.

There is some kind of lore at play here, but I do not understand it.

Nor should I, the film does not care if you do not understand this ending, its founded in an old fable, its founded in possible religious myths, and none of this is really made clear to the audience.

We get some “hint” that the young man may have powers, but it is also speculated that it is not him but rather fate.

Being completely honest, I think the actors and directors and any other creators of this film had their heads stuck so far up their asses that to them this was their poetry, their art.

But the nature of a story is for the story to be told. People have to pick up queues, recognise tone, see what you want them to see for the purpose of the story.

Had I watched this with other friends, I know they would have been just as confused as me.

And I don’t need to check because I already spoke to my friend about this film, he didn’t have two hours so instead he read the film synopsis on Wikipedia and watched a breakdown of the film with me.

He too was confused about the exact “forces” at play here, while his experience of religion provided him some insight as to what might be going on, he too felt that the way the characters handled the situation was emersion breaking, stiff, unrealistic, and honestly, just weird.

I will explain further in the spoiler review below.

And if you’re mad at my review, I’m sorry to shit on the art you love, but I’m here for a frikin movie.

Eraser Head made more sense than this and I didn’t feel exhausted afterwards.

• Spoiler Review

  omg spoilers look out

  Protagonist had been drinking the night of a surgery he performed, that surgery failed and the patient died. The son of that patient is the young man we watch get closer throughout the film. His name is Martin.

  Protagonist invites Martin over for dinner, and spends the day with the family.

  He then wants our protagonist to do the same, come to his house, have dinner with him and his mum and watch his favourite movie. Once Martin is too tired to stay up he heads to bed, and his mother attempts to begin an affair with protagonist.

  This disturbs Protagonist, and he begins distancing himself from Martin afterwards.

  Once he distances himself from Martin, Martin becomes upset.

  Suddenly, protagonists son cannot stand up. Followed by his sister who also loses control of her legs in choir practice.

  Martin makes one last visit to our protagonist and tells him, as is the nature of the universe, because protagonist killed one of his family members, now one of the protagonist family members has to die.

  He explains they will all get sick and die, or if protagonist kills one person, everyone else will get better and live.

  He doesn't explain how this works really, or if he did I did not catch it in the words he mumbles to protagonist.

  So, the next major thing we see is the teen daughter, who also stuck in bed at hospital gets a call from Martin.

  She says she can't stand up to see him out the window because she can't walk, he tells her just to do it and miraculously she is able to walk. Only until the conversation ends, when her legs return to numbness and she collapses back into bed.

  This moment suggests Martin is somehow controlling the situation.

  Lets put all that aside.

  You invite this guy over, suddenly your family is sick. These two things mean only Martin's involvement can explain why they are ill.

  As the protagonist, I'd report him to the police, repeat exactly what he said, and immediately order anyone and everyone to check my kids and wife for needle injection points, toxicology reports and immediate research on any substance that won't show up with testing.

  But no, as Nicole Kidman's character says "well we won't be reporting it to the authorities", or what ever it is she says. Because apparently they won't do anything, or its useless. Fucking what??

  Getting back to the main issue, Martin says they will die, Martin tells them to do stuff, Martin is clearly a wizard.

  Or at least that would be my next guess.

  To make things clear, this family does not care about murdering people.

  Gotta do a murder? No one cares, this is established later.

  Eventually protagonist kidnaps Martin, holding him hostage and roughing him up in an attempt to intimidate him into...stopping his wizardry??

  You know what I do? Shoot the little shit. Once he's dead we can see what actually happens. All mercy goes out the door once your whole family's life is at stake.

  So, I'd kill Martin, see what happens. If I still have to kill a family member? Its gonna be the wife yo!

  If I knew for sure killing myself would work at that point, you bet I'd do it.

  Because its a member of the family. Should still work right?

  But no, they keep him alive, hold him hostage, and wait. They just wait.

  The son gets sick first, therefore he obviously shows the ending symptoms first.

  When protagonist notices this, he panics. He decides "fuck it!" ties up all his kids and his wife, puts em all on varying places in the living room.

  And get this.

  He fucking twirls around with a rifle in his hands, shooting off randomly, missing like 3 times, before finally shooting his youngest kid, his son. The sickest of all of them.

  The next scene, they're all sitting in a diner, minus innocent son who is murdered, Martin enters diner, they family watches him, the family gets up and leaves diner.

  Problems:

  1. How the heck do you not see that this kid has messed with your entire family by poisoning one. First thought.

  2. If this is a guy with magical powers, or "the power of god" or what ever the heck you want to see it as, the obvious choice is to kill him and see what happens.

  3. If this is God, punishing protagonist for this one crime, I have major issues with God's reasoning. This is where my friend explained his idea of what could be happening. He mentioned the story of Jobe, the man who lost all his wives in a bet between God and the Devil that his faith would remain in tact. Ok. Sure lets go with that. If that's the case, then this God is a devil. I would rather lose all my children to a plague, relentlessly trying to help them. Leaving my youngest with the memory of being murdered by me, someone he should trust is far more a pathetic sin.

  4. An Act of God, non Jobe. If this truly is God acting through Martin, siding with Martin, than God has missed a lot of details hasn't he. For example, he keeps himself clean, he is respectful to his neighbour, when he is presented with an opportunity for affair he bails and strengthens his bond with his family. He looks out for Martin, providing him with gifts, support, emotional padding. Does God overlook all of this, punish his wife and children, just to punish him for an act that happened months and months ago? Once again, if God were here and told me yeah man that's the gist of it, I'd spit in his face and tell him he is no god, no matter what he can do. He's a joke.

  Even if you argue, that they didn't go to cops because of ego, that they didn't kill him because of their ego, that they chose the weak option because of ego. I don't care.

  This is this man's breaking point, yet they force him to remain robotic. Which I just don't think makes sense.

  I had no reason to root for this family, other than the fact the kids are innocent in all this and deserve a life. The way only the child boy acts human towards the end is bothersome, if he too had been totally numb and mechanical maybe it would have kept its flow for me, and I could separate this as a shitty family that made a shitty choice.

  But I can't.

  Why the heck did I watch all this if no one learns and no one cares?

  As the wife says "I can always have more kids."

  The only thing that would have truly made a difference for me, was if Martin was properly killed, and still lived.

  If Martin lives no matter what, this is an act of God. If it is an act of God, it becomes fate.

  I will always wonder if it was actually fate or just stupidity. And maybe that's what the creators want, but I think they believe from the beginning that its God or God's Will through Martin.

  What I was left with was a story about a family who did not care and did not love, and they maintained that throughout the film to the end.

  I was left with "welp we killed our son and now we chill".

  Take away all the symbolism, all the metaphors, the camera angles and loud bursts of music. I don't care about Kim singing Burn, I don't care about how isolating and mechanical and awkward everything was, I don't care about the fucking legendary spaghetti scene.

  Did I enjoy much of these things? Sure. Means nothing with characters who have no urgency, and an empty ending

  Martin gets mad, Martin seeks revenge, Protagonist is stupid enough to believe its an act of God. Martin fools everyone.

  The end.

Movie 10: Smile

An emergency ward psychologist has her whole life uplifted after a patient complaining of very specific hullucinations kills herself in the presence of the psychologist.

Obviously this would be traumatic for anyone, and no one could blame a psychologist for having trauma after the incident, but for this psychologist, her mental illness since the incident is completely unplausible.

The psychologist goes on leave, and starts experiencing increasing levels of distress.

We learn that this patient did not really kill herself, it was something else within her that forced her to kill herself. And now its coming for our protagonist.

Trigger warning: the cat does not survive and it is a bit messed up.

3.5/5 stars.

The mood and vibes were great, the characters were well played, except I have issues with our protagonist.

As a psychologist she makes several errors in judgement, and when she does start realising what’s going on, she refuses to act like a normal person and speak to others with any kind of tact. The more she tries to explain what’s happening to her, the more people distance themselves from her, because she’s truly acting crazy.

I may sound harsh but if you knew the examples I think you’d be right there with me.

The ending also left me irritated, because I predicted it 30 minutes in, and watched this concept go back to the same repetitive stupid ending that most mediocre horror movies follow.

What I did love about this film was the aesthetic, the monster, and the trail the monster left.

What I would have loved would have been an exploration of how to defeat this creature, but it didn’t really get there.

We also have the problem of our one friend on board this crazy train completely ignoring the warning given to him, despite following along practically the whole journey of how this beast operates.

• Spoiler Review

  fjgkjk

My favourite film this week without a doubt is Pearl, it was everything I was looking for in its genre of horror. A fantastic and likeable protagonist, comedic scenes twisted in with emotional senses, everything felt calculated down to the top hat.

Definitely watch out for an in depth essay on that one.

As for the others, only one of them ended up feeling like a total waste of time and I’m surprised it wasn’t Jeepers Creepers.

Check out the below link for a video of Jeepers Creepers walking over a moving car.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXXY48jjLtw

Watch from 30 seconds in to 1:26 for the hilarious running, watch the rest to watch him get run over a bunch. Happy viewing!