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Sé lo que hiciste el verano pasado

August 30, 2023 Hud Leave a comment

killer book club 2023

KILLER BOOK CLUB

2023/89m

A.k.a. El Club de Los Lectores Criminales

Director: Carlos Alonso Ojea / Writer: Carlos Garcia Miranda / Cast: Veki Velilla, Álvaro Mel, Priscilla Delgado, Iván Pellicer, Hamza Zaidi, María Cerezuela, Ane Rot, Carlos Alcaide, Daniel Grao.

Body Count: 8

Six years after a girl burns her mother to death in a pile of torn up books, eight teens who form a college book club engage in a revenge prank against a skeezy professor. After assaulting shy writer Angela in his office, her friends decide a little payback is in order and, having just finished a bool about coulrophobia – fear of clowns – purchase seven identical costumes and scare the crap out of the guy.

Of course, teen pranks never end well, and one of the masked clowns slashes his face, causing him to tumble over a balustrade and become impaled on the university’s statue of Don Quixote. In true Southport style, they swear secrecy, burn the costumes, and become depressed.

killer book club

Soon after, each of the group receive invitations to read an unfolding new novel on a fan fiction, detailing the clown’s revenge on them, casting each in a standard horror role, and publishing a new chapter to coincide with each murder: The clown comes equipped with a blade-ended hammer doodad, which he uses to slash and impale his quarry.

For a script about creating literature, there is literally nothing unexpected in this Netflix original, which owes a truckload of gratitude to the recent Scream movies, all the while stapling them to the standard Prom Night / I Know What You Did Last Summer / Sorority Row secrets-never-stay-secret opus, and occurring on Urban Legend‘s campus.

killer book club 2023

There are, however, several good chase sequences, the best being around the botanical gardens, culminating with Angela hammering against the doors while one of her friends is stuck on the other side, loon approaching.

Everything else balances precariously on coincidence: A horror themed book fair where dozens of attendees wear the same clown costume, characters deciding to pack up and leave campus in the middle of the night and go wait at a secluded bus stop, others falling for clearly bogus texts that lure them into weird inescapable places.

killer book club 2023

Killer Book Club is colourful though (sans Angela’s heinous green sweater/dungarees combo), with nice sets and the always-refreshing alt-perspective of its European setting, adequately bloody, and while a significant part of the revelation was entirely obvious, there was a part that I genuinely didn’t see coming, so extra points for that, even though it made sense in hindsight.

Go in with your expectations in the basement and you’ll get some mileage out of this loveletter to 90s teen horror.

Blurb-of-interest: Daniel Grao was in Julia’s Eyes.

Reviews

All About Evil

April 15, 2022 Hud Leave a comment

KILL GAME

2018/102m

“No one is laughing now.”

Director/Writer: Robert Mearns / Cast: Sari Sanchez, Michael Galante, Joe Adler, Pierson Fode, Tommy Beardmore, Laura Ashley Samuels, Hilary Anderson, Patrick Zielinski.

Body Count: 11

Some spoilers. Five old friends, who plagued their high school with pranks, attend the funeral of another friend and soon after discover that somebody from their past is fucking with them, ordering a stack of pizzas, removing the battery from a car, sending a sex worker over… Which of their old gag victims could it be?

A seventh friend, jittery walking pharmacy Beth, returns to town and is immediately tracked down by hunky Liam, the estranged twin brother of Brendan, who died years before as a result of a prank gone wrong, which had been masterminded by the recently buried friend. Liam wants to know what happened to his brother, but the seven of them never told a soul.

Thanks to horny cop Blake, the group learn their dead friend was most definitely murdered and via the medium of handy flashback we see him hoisted upside down, naked, over a fire pit, which is lit by a cloaked, Marilyn Monroe-masked killer, who looks like they could go to prom with the cherub from Valentine.

The friends start to reach out to old prank victims and apologise, but Marilyn has other ideas and straps one of the gang to a chair, giving her a blood transfusion from a dead stag in payment for a joke where she’d forged a doctor’s note that informed a nerdy girl she was infected with HIV. Another is burned alive, and one has their tummy tuck procedure fatally crashed by the killer, who also offs the surgical staff.

The dwindling group find themselves back at the beach where Brendan died for a big showdown, which is crashed by the cops before we can get answers.

So who is the killer? Well, Kill Game can’t quite seem to make up its mind, though we get a good scene where Beth wakes up in a hospital staffed by several of the prank victims who begin descending on her like zombies. But that’s a dream.

Instead, the actual killer is revealed in the final shot and is someone who has barely appeared in the film at all. Eagle-eyed viewers may recall them from a couple of earlier scenes, but so fleeting are these appearances that it literally may as well have been an old granny or someone who sped by in a car.

And what the hell was supposed to be in that box?

I see what Kill Game was trying to do here, a grand exercise in misdirection, but instead it kinda just trips you up, having lead you down a blind alley to nowhere for the previous 100 minutes. Personally, I didn’t mind, but I can also envision a few bricks being hurled at screens. As far as I Know What You Did Last Summer/At Camp/At High School/At My Cousin’s Barmitzvah/That Day at IHOP opuses go, it’s fine. Shot in 2014.

Blurb-of-interest: Michael Galante was in Frat House Massacre.

Reviews

Sail into danger

February 2, 2022 Hud 3 comments

SNEEKWEEK

2016/113m

A.k.a. Summer Party Massacre; Scream Week

Director: Martijn Heijne / Writer: Alex van Galen / Cast: Carolien Spoor, Jelle de Jong, Jord Knotter, Holly Brood, Yootha Wong-Loi-Sing, Sanne Langelaar, David Lucieer, Jonas De Vuyst, Ferry Doedens, Frank Lammers, Kimberly Klaver, Diederik Ebbinge.

Body Count: 11

So, Sneekweek is actually a real thing: Held in the Netherlands and billed as Europe’s biggest sailing festival, it becomes the rather unlikely backdrop for this Dutch slasher, which was released in two versions during its theatrical run – one of which was edited to attract a younger audience.

Despite a scene in which characters watch Scream on TV (and complaining it has been dubbed), this has more common ground with I Know What You Did Last Summer. Five college kids are hazing a group of young men for a room in their much sought-after house by keeping them in a tub, dumping ice in and seeing who can last the longest with the least amount of genital shrinkage. Down to two guys, the girls’ favourite, Eric, loses consciousness and dies. Anxious for their futures, they cover it up, bribe the surviving pledge, Peter, with an offer of the room if he stays quiet, and call an ambulance once it’s too late and they’ve papered over the evidence.

Two years later, the six roomies hit Sneekweek, which appears more to resemble Spring Break, with lots of EDM-screaming club nights, fairground rides, sexy young folks posing, and a police commissioner clucking around ordering his minimal force to break up fights and keep the peace.

Boarding in an arty, secluded lakeside house, the first sign that something’s off is that none of them own up to being the one who found the rental. Nominal heroine Merel is first to see a figure in a shiny silver mask, but the others think she’s off her face and continue to bed-hop until one of them is attacked outside a club and Peter is arrested when he finds her. The next morning, Merel finds him hanging from the boat’s mast in an apparent suicide. The local cops are keen to flex their investigative muscle, but are sidelined by their boss, and the remaining teens ordered to stick around until the attacker is caught.

Nasty ringleader Boris insists the party go on, so blasts into town with two of the other, leaving Merel and her friend to find the body of a missing girl in the boatshed. Despite commenting on Scream, the girls have learned nothing and decide to split up – one to go to the cops, the other to find their friends.

Another murder occurs and the police arrest Eric’s unhinged mother, who cut and run from her clinic’s day release. They also place the remaining kids on an available yacht for the night in an effort to keep them safe, but ultimately just leave them in a barrel ready to be picked off by the powertool-favouring killer, who leaves a spinning powerdrill in the back of one and engineers another to be sucked into the propellers.

Sneekweek fudges cloaking the identity of the killer effectively enough, giving a little too much away too early on, just leaving a question over who they’ll be to the late Eric that drove them to get power-saw themed vengeance. It also doesn’t deliver much in the way of gruesome demises, with the nastiest character we’ve been waiting to see cark it allocated a rather dull kill scene, although there’s a reason for that revealed during the exposition scene.

A decent enough film with high end production gloss that should set it apart from most of its ilk, despite suffering from predictability and a reliance on some dumb character behaviour (at one point Merel runs away from the safety of the house and into a cornfield). Very similar to Austrian flick Party Hard, Die Young that came along two years later.

Reviews

We don’t care what we did last summer

November 25, 2021 Hud Leave a comment

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER

2021/380m

Directors: Johanna Stokes, Lana Cho, Phoebe Fisher, Sara Goodman, Shay Hatten, Chaconne Martin-Berkowicz, Gary Tieche / Writers: Logan Kibens, Craig William MacNeill, Benjamin Semanoff, Lois Duncan (novel) / Cast: Madison Iseman, Brianne Tju, Ezekiel Goodman, Bill Heck, Ashley Moore, Fiona Rene, Sebastian Amoruso, Cassie Beck, Brooke Bloom, Eric William Morris.

Body Count: 10

Laughter Lines: “What’s with all the screams, Neve Campbell?”

A proposed second adaptation of I Know What You Did Last Summer helmed by Mike Flanagan (of Hush, Oculus, and The Haunting of Hill House notoriety) was floating around for a few years, a script was ready to go, reportedly going at Lois Duncan’s novel from a more traditional perspective. Whatever happened to that, it never seemed to advance and the idea of a teen TV series floated to the top, produced again by Neil H. Moritz.

As with all of these things, Pretty Little Liars always seems to get namechecked as a source of inspiration. I never watched past the first episode of that show so have little context, but those I know who did stick with it groaned that it outstayed its welcome by repeatedly tacking on extra layers to the mystery. Scream – The TV Series was just about okay (and also featured Brianne Tju), but the idea behind I Know… seems more suited to a multi-episode arc than most other slasher ventures.

Come Autumn 2021, Amazon Prime released an episode a week to a rather dismal reaction from most corners. Let’s dive in… Spoilers in the road ahead – careful you don’t run them down.

Episode 1 introduces us to Hawaii and our core teen cast, who are celebrating graduating high school at a lavish party thrown by rich girl Margot’s mother. In attendance is her gay best friend Johnny, intense intellectual type Dylan, drug dealin’ Riley, good time girl Lennon and, lurking, Lennon’s shy identical twin sister Alison. It’s quickly established that the sisters are Yin & Yang, with Lennon popular, liberal with drugs and sexual fluidity. When she screws Alison’s long term crush Dylan, they argue and she storms out. Wait… who storms out?

Clambering into a jeep wasted, the five teens rocket down the freeway and run over Alison, who’s inexplicably in the middle of the road at night. Panicking as Julie, Ray, Helen, and Barry once did, they elect to place the body in a cave that floods to wash it out into the Pacific and tell everybody Alison ran away. The cave was also the scene of a mass cult suicide some years earlier that may or may not have been what killed the twins’ mom. Their grumpy dad, Bruce, isn’t particularly forthcoming, but you know we’ll find out eventually…

One year later, Lennon returns from her first year of college and finds a severed goats head in her closet and ‘I know what you did last summer’ scrawled on the mirror. DUH DUH DUUUUHHHH. And at the end of episode 1, the entirely unsurprising revelation that this is in fact Alison is tossed to us like crumbs. Some blah over a piece of jewellery, taking her sister’s jacket and her nasty words to heart, Alison decided to pretend to try on fun loving, popular Lennon for size.

While Alison continues to pretend she’s Lennon, we learn that her father is in on the secret, something around it being more believable troubled Alison would disappear. She reconnects with her friends and shares the threat. Suspects are quickly slotted in: Riley’s attitude-tastic mom, Courtney, local weirdo Clara, who saw the teens that night, the Sheriff who is screwing Bruce, and dorky deputy Doug, whose investigative skills might jeopardise the killer’s scheme. Dylan, too, has gone understandably weird.

The group begin to receive texts ‘from Alison’ and eventually at the end of the second episode, the killing begins. There’s no fisherman, no cool mask, and in visual scope terms, no killer – they’re completely off-camera, which will clue in seasoned viewers to narrowing their suspect field down a bit.

A few days later, Lennon’s body appears in the ocean in front of the family guesthouse. Considering she’s been dead a year, the corpse is remarkably well preserved, leading Bruce to confront weird Clara, who admits she kept it with her all this time and was treating it for transition into the next life (this part-explains the honey on the poster).

More murders occur, including a grisly double at the memorial service for ‘Alison’, death-by-slushie machine, one poor sod killed on the toilet… All the while, the remaining members of the group can’t get their shit together to investigate cohesively. Questionably, they continue to laugh about stuff, do drugs, hook up, play pranks while snooping around a suspect’s house…

Your friend is dead. People wish you dead. What are you doing?

Crucially, the major black mark against this iteration of the story is that the characters are assholes. Every last one of them. Had there been a decent, believable reason for Alison to become Lennon, it might wash, but she literally just alters her attitude to become bitchy and mean, leading on various suitors and seemingly unfazed by the growing body count. Whereas the 1997 film focused on the damage done to the characters’ lives by their secret, these kids seem to give no fucks whatsoever, extracting any sense of morality or accountability.

Some bloody crime scenes are interesting, but the murder set pieces are minimally allotted any time or tension – no chase scenes are possible given the lengths the camera goes to to keep the killer out of the frame, leaving this a stalk n’ slasher without much stalk and a base level of minimal slash.

Ultimately, the killer’s identity isn’t totally predictable, thanks to some misdirection earlier, but the motive is fuzzy and shallow to the point there’s a tacked on piece to camera by the character at the end revealing how they did it. Although, watch back again and you’d see that they fudged it – the killer reacts in horror at one murder, but nobody else was with them, so why even bother acting shocked? Stranger still is the coda shared by the surviving characters, a sort of cynical “happily ever after” that flies directly in the face of the motive Alison was on the receiving end of one scene prior!?

Reviews

The Truth Hurts

October 6, 2021 Hud Leave a comment

THERE’S SOMEONE INSIDE YOUR HOUSE

2021/96m

“Everyone has a secret to die for.”

Director: Patrick Brice / Writers: Stephanie Perkins (novel), Henry Gayden / Cast: Sydney Park, Theodore Pellerin, Asjha Cooper, Jesse LaTourette, Dale Whibley, Burkely Duffield, Diego Josef, BJ Harrison, Sarah Dugdale, William MacDonald.

Body Count: 7

Laughter Lines: “But now, a moment of silent, unforced, non-denominational prayer.”

Stephanie Perkins’ 2017 YA novel is adapted to film for Netflix as slasher movies become slightly relevant again on the eve of Halloween Kills‘ theatrical release and the incoming fifth Scream movie. It went through a lot of changes from book to film, so some spoilers follow.

Cookie cutter midwestern small town football star Jackson returns to his farmhouse home where nobody is home, finds a ticking egg-timer in the kitchen, ignores it and goes to bed for some rest ahead of a big game. He’s woken by the egg-timer going off next to his head a few hours later and discovers he’s not alone, his truck is gone, and there are photos all over the house showing him beating the crap out of some kid. He’s eventually coerced into a walk-in closet where a hooded killer wearing a mask of Jackson’s face swiftly dispatches him. Shortly before his memorial service, prissy class president Katie is assaulted and killed at the church, a recording of her racist podcast playing in the background.

Transfer student Makani Young (Park, who is great) and her new friends muse on who could be doing it. They casually suspect class misfit Ollie but break the town curfew for a secret party at rich kid Zach’s house, where everyone is coming clean about their pasts to remove themselves from the killer’s hitlist, not a far cry from the Pop Your Cherry party of Cherry Falls. We know from her slowly revealing flashbacks that Makani has something she’s hiding from people, but tonight the killer sets his sights on another friend with a dependency issue.

Makani is attacked next, her secret revealed to everyone by text, but it seems pretty much forgotten by the time the townsfolk hop on down to a corn maze where the killer tries to burn everyone alive. It’s down to the group of friends to rescue their classmates and confront the killer.

Unlike the book, where the killer was revealed uncharacteristically early for one of these tales, they remain a mystery element until the final scenes. The character is different and their motive muddled and confusing, rather than the unsettling rationale of the loon in the book, who just didn’t want other people to have the opportunity to leave the town if he couldn’t get out either.

This change results in the victims going from innocent achievers to the too often featured asshole types the audience won’t care about at all. They’d committed no wrong in the book, which further elevated Makani’s criminal past as worthy of attention. Here, it’s almost taken for granted, whereas the original idea set to imprison the disillusioned teen contingent in lives that go nowhere.

Additionally, the best part of the book – and very meaning of the title! – was the way the killer toyed with the victims’ habitations, which is only recreated during the first murder and Makani’s first encounter with the killer here.

Still, the characterisations of the leads are nicely done, the killer’s identity not too simple to solve, and the early murder set pieces are gruesome and charged with energy.

Blurb-of-interest: William MacDonald was in Hollow Man II.

Reviews

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