obvious identity of killer

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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

Mish/Mash

August 12, 2022 Hud 2 comments

THEY/THEM

2022/104m

“Fear doesn’t discriminate.”

Director/Writer: John Logan / Cast: Kevin Bacon, Carrie Preston, Anna Chlumsky, Theo Germaine, Quei Tann, Austin Crute, Anna Lore, Monique Kim, Cooper Koch, Darwin del Fabro, Hayley Griffith, Boone Platt.

Body Count: 7

Laughter Lines: “I keep expecting Jason Voorhees to come out of these woods.” / “Who?”

Some spoilers.

A lone female gets a flat on a backroad and is attacked by a masked psycho. Same old, same old. The aerial shot pans onward and shows us Whistler Camp, a conversion center for non-heterosexual teenagers, a busload of which arrives in the morning to be greeted by head counsellor Kevin Bacon, in a nice throwback to his never-actually-got-to-do-the-job role of Jack in Friday the 13th.

An assorted group of campers are initially divvied up by gender, which is an issue for non-binary Jordan, who is sweet-talked by KB into the boys’ cabin, and later joined by transgender Alex, who is turfed out of the girls’ block when one of the creepy staff spies on her in the shower.

Therapy sessions ensue, both in group and with creepy ‘doctor’ Cora (Carrie Preston, who is perfectly unhinged), the girls bake pies, the boys learn to shoot, hook-ups occur and, after what feels like forever, the masked loon reappears and offs an ancillary staff member. Shortly after, the camp’s thinly-veiled sadistic practices begin to show through. The kids decide they want out, and the killer starts to up their game.

As a slasher movie, They/Them (‘They-slash-them’, geddit?) is a bit of a spectacular failure. The killer is obvious from the moment they’re introduced, and their intent to ‘cleanse’ the camp from continuing to do the damage it does, while admirable, renders them largely unthreatening as the campers are off the hit-list, with only the rather one-dimensional counsellors at risk of being slashed to neatly trimmed ribbons. And they’re hypocritical assholes as it is, so why even care?

The more relative horror in They/Them comes from the invasive in-roads made by the staff to assault their charges: Cora goes through personal belongings to play psychological games with Jordan, all but telling them to kill themself during a session, and the boys are forced to shoot the camp’s ailing hound dog to make them ‘real’ men. It’s disturbing, nicely realised (especially Preston’s leave-the-rest-in-the-dust performance), and sad when you think that such places exist.

The film was hailed as an LGBTQ+ empowerment tale in some places, which makes for some sweet moments between the characters, as they realise their support network is each other, although at times it feels forced within the span of the film and paves the way for a bizarre sing-a-long to Pink’s Fuckin’ Perfect, and some cringe-inducing Drag Race dialogue (I really do not need to hear “Step your pussy up” uttered anymore). It’s as if Logan becomes entangled in the hanging streamers of his plot strands, swinging dangerously close to celebratory musical mode, over to drama, then remembering he’s got a horror film to deliver, so cramming all of the slashing into what little time remains on the clock.

It was probably a commercially wise decision to render the camp a religion-free zone, but, like the lack of threat posed to the campers, is something of a cop out. The persecution of gay folks is largely rooted in such beliefs and it would’ve been brave to call that out, but I can also see why Peacock didn’t want to go down that route given how extreme fundamentalists would probably mail them explosives with ‘groomers’ written all over it.

A tendency to fall back on to slightly stereotypical character attributes and repressed self-loathing means that I can’t wholeheartedly recommend this one, but it’s also hardly the train wreck it’s been made out to be. Probably would have worked better as a miniseries. HellBent needn’t worry about losing it’s gay-slasher crown just yet.

Blurbs-of-interest: Bacon was also the lead in Hollow Man.

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

Five Cream

January 14, 2022 Hud Leave a comment

SCREAM

2022/18/114m

“It’s always someone you know.”

Directors: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett / Writers: James Vanderbilt & Guy Busick / Cast: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Melissa Barrera, Jack Quaid, Marley Shelton, Jenna Ortega, Mikey Madison, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding, Dylan Minnette, Sonia Ammar, Kyle Gallner, Roger L. Jackson (voice).

Body Count: 8

Laughter Lines: “You want me to help you and the host of a morning show to commit murder?”

“Why isn’t it called Scream 5!?!?” people hollered. Well, watch it and this year’s Randy sub – his niece – will explain exactly why. Did you really want a film named 5cream? Some spoilers follow.

OK, I’ll cover a bit of it: It’s like Halloween (2018) being both a sequel and a reboot – a ‘requel’ as the character, Mindy, puts it during a scene where Woodsboro’s endangered teen-populace discusses the Stab movies, now up to their eighth instalment with a film simply titled Stab.

As ever, it wouldn’t be a Scream movie without the obligatory opening kill, and we meet a teenage girl alone in her cutesy home, making some food, texting a gal-pal, when the phone insistently rings. It’s ‘Charlie’ from her mom’s ‘group’, who’s chit-chatty and slowly steers the subject on to scary movies. The Babadook is her answer when asked what her favourite is, and there’s an amusing disagreement over ‘elevated horror’. It’s not long before he has her playing a game and then she’s attacked by Ghostface, who slices and dices, slashing towards the camera as the title thunders on to the screen.

Here’s where Scream 2022 fucks with us. She isn’t dead. The girl – Tara – is recovering in hospital when her estranged big sister, Sam, returns for the first time in some years, her dorky boyfriend, Richie, in tow. Sam has a difficult past, at odds with Sheriff Judy over past troubles, and when she sees a vision of Billy Loomis in a mirror, it’s a big “huh!?” accompanied by a call about her “family secret,” which we’ve pretty much got figured given her age and so the film wastes little time in clueing us in that Sam found out her real daddy was Billy, became a tearaway, and bailed as soon as she hit 18.

When someone is murdered for realz (a “woah!-is-that-really” Kyle Gallner), Sam and Richie visit Dewey for help, who was force-retired, separated from Gale, and living in a trailer. Reluctantly, he joins them in gathering Tara’s friends, as he’s been through enough of these to know the killer will be among them. At the home of Randy’s sister, Martha (Heather Matarazzo joyfully returns for a cameo), Mindy addresses the requel details around legacy characters passing the torch to the next generation, setting up nicely for Gale and Sidney to re-enter the fray, and also explaining why only the events of the original seem to matter (Roman who?).

Given that Courteney Cox had asked to be killed off in Scream 4, you should be worried about the fates of our mainstay trio far more than ever before – Scream ’22 doesn’t shy away from its brutality and it’s genuinely sad to have to say goodbye during a tense showdown in a deserted hospital ward halfway through.

Sam and Richie strive to get Tara out of Woodsboro, but end up waylaid and having to stop at the home of Tara’s BFF Amber, where the obligatory adultless teen party is raging. Despite their knowledge of conventions, characters continue to find reasons to venture off alone until all the main players remain and it’s revealed that Amber’s house is where Stu used to live!

The finale playing out back where things began is a real moment. The zoom out that reveals Sam in the doorway that Dewey staggered out of 25 years earlier with a knife in his back genuinely gave me the chills. It also allows for a revisit to Randy’s “turn around” moment on the couch, being watched in Stab by Mindy, saying the same thing in a fun infinity mirror moment. More interestingly, when Gale and Sidney turn up, they’re so aware of the conventions and deceptions it makes for some excellent dark humour and some great fights between good and evil.

Most fans were weary of a continuation without Wes Craven, and the direction and aesthetic favoured by directors Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin is certainly not a pale imitation; there’s a reduction in gloss, less colour, which gives the film an edge of feeling more dangerous, like it means business where the previous couple of instalments were softer and lightly sugarcoated. Where they’ve had to adhere to Scream lore, they rearrange the cups, hiding the prize in a different place.

What flaws there are are minor at best: There’s not really a high-concept kill scenario that lives up to the inventiveness Drew Barrymore scene, or Sarah Michelle Gellar’s torment in Scream 2, compensated for with harsher, nastier grue instead. The new characters seem slightly less fleshed out, but this is also addressed when Richie addresses them en masse from Gen Y to Gen Z, and the identity of one of the killers seemed quite evident given how little the actor had to do up until that point.

Things are left wide open for further sequels, with enough characters left standing to do it all over again, probably without the need for Campbell and Cox’s characters to be dragged out of retirement once again. It seems like the passing of the baton that Scream 4 flirted with carrying out has actually worked this time.

And for those who were hoping for a Kirby Reed return – look closely at the YouTube videos shown on screen when Richie is watching the review of Stab 8.

Blurbs-of-interest: Courteney Cox had a small cameo in The Tripper, directed by David Arquette; Jack Quaid was in Tragedy Girls; Jenna Ortega was in Ti West’s X; Marley Shelton was in Valentine; Kyle Gallner was in the Nightmare on Elm Street remake.

Reviews

Sisters are drillin’ it for themselves

December 22, 2021 Hud Leave a comment

SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE

2021/87m

“You know the drill.”

Director: Danishka Esterhazy / Writer: Suzanne Keilly / Cast: Hanna Gonera, Frances Sholto-Doulgas, Mila Rayne, Alex McGregor, Reze-Tiana Wessels, Rob Van Vuuren, Jennifer Steyn, Schelaine Bennett, Masali Baduza, Eden Classens, Michael Potter.

Body Count: 13

Laughter Lines: “I can’t believe these dudes are beating us out on being murdered, like honestly, their privilege is ridiculous.”

Another remake? Sigh. Well… yes and no. A cursory overview of the South Africa lensed Slumber Party Massacre would probably have you thinking we’re in for just another go-round of girls in lingerie being drilled, while horny guys peering through windows get it in the back. But there’s more than meets the eye here. Necessary spoilers ensue.

Beginning with a crash course in slasher film cliches, in 1993, gal-pals Trish, Jackie, Diane, and Kim have rented a lakeside cabin at Holly Springs. Trish’s no-good ex Chad turns up, she tells him where to go, he watches the girls dance through the windows and gets power-drilled for his trouble. The killer then enters the building until only Trish remains, and manages to knock him off the dock, where his body sinks into the darkness.

22 years later, Trish’s daughter Dana is off on a weekend roadtrip with her friends Maeve, Breanie, and Ashley, as well as Maeve’s lil sis Alix, who has snuck her way along. The girls break down on route and end up having to rent a local lakeside house for the night while they wait for new car parts. Hmm… the house is on the opposite side of the lake to the cabin of blood in the prologue. Coincidence?

No. Thirty minutes in, when Alix finds a body outside and puts the pieces together, the other girls whip out weapons and declare they intentionally ended up there to attract Russ Thorn and kill him for good. The rug of prediction pulled out from beneath us, SPM ’21 switches up into a flip reverse opus of the expected: The girls go around the lake to warn five boys who have rented the other residence, but Russ is already at work.

After watching the shirtless guys have a slo-mo pillow fight through the window, a literal murder-in-the-dark scatters the group: The guys stomp out without a plan or try to save the day and largely end up drilled to pieces.

By an hour in, the girls succeed in slashing, stabbing, and hacking Russ to pieces, witnessed by the surviving boys, who suspect the girls are hardline feminists, and while they await the police, it seems another killer enters the midst…

A review on IMDb goes:

“A movie on the SyFy channel, which are mostly a male audience, is getting lectured in a bad movie about misogyny.

The killer is a man and this movie makes no sense. Did I fail to mention it has close up shots of men slow motion bathing, which is for feminismgayism empowerment, for a straight male audience?”

Feminismgayism? This guy arrogantly assumes the film (and by extension any film on SyFy) is for straight men. The self-absorbed nature of this comment is pretty much why this movie is the way it is. Idiot.

The reversal of the trends does present the ‘straight male audience’ with an ogle-worthy shower scene where Matt soaps up his rock hard abs before being wasted. It’s a direct reflection of what slasher films of olde served up their female cast members, and probably more confronting in its depiction of a very sculpted physique, rather than anything else.

The emergence of the second killer forces the conventions back on the familiar track after the film merrily skewered them up to that point, with some nifty demises for the remaining characters, but a not-so-surprising revelation around who this character is, which the film kinda treats as a gasp-worthy development, but has been seen before in one of the most famous slasher films around.

SPM ’21 is a great companion piece to the original, and perhaps adheres closely with Rita Mae Brown’s original vision. But there’s also a lot of love, with the girls at the start sharing names with their 1982 counterparts, a victim using a very 80s electric guitar to try and fight off the killer in an homage to SPM II. Rob Van Vuuren also gets Thorn’s unique walk and cranial lilt bang on. This is the film the 2019 Black Christmas reimagining wishes it was.

Reviews

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