It must really suck to be a devout Christian. Despite being raised Catholic I don't follow much of it these days (though "Thou Shall Not Kill" is a pretty good idea, I must admit), so if I came home one day and my wife said that God told her to murder our kid, I wouldn't hesitate to grab him and get the hell out of that house as quickly as possible, then call the cops and tell them a crazy person was in my home and please have them removed. But the heroine of The Binding, married to a minister who indeed tells her that God wants him to kill their child, chooses to stick around and try to get him some help, while usually leaving the child right there in the home with them - because the rules of her religion basically tell her to obey the minister and have faith in what he's saying.
Thankfully, the movie is more or less about her growing concern that maybe he's a nut and, furthermore, some of their religious ideas are a little insane, rather than go along with it blindly. But it doesn't change the fact that it's dreadfully dull and hard to get into, because it takes her so long to finally put her foot down; it's one thing to yell at Laurie Strode for dropping the knife at the end of Halloween, because she's been smart up until that point and now you love her and want her to survive. But when the main character (Amy Gumenick, who played young Mary Winchester at one point on Supernatural) is "dropping the knife" (so to speak) for the entire runtime, there's no real "in" to the story. Perhaps to devout Christian viewers this would be more terrifying or at least involving, because they might have trouble reconciling their long-standing faith with an immediate danger they can see with their own two eyes, but I spent 85 minutes rolling my eyes at her for not leaving, calling the cops, etc. I just don't understand the mindset of anyone who'd put religion over their child's well-being; quite frankly I was hoping child services would come and remove the poor girl from both of these morons.
Anyway, the movie is more or less in a loop until the final 10 minutes: the wife has a vision or nightmare of something happening to the child, the husband comes home from work or whatever and says something cryptic, they bicker, they talk to someone (a fellow priest, a shrink, etc) to try to help him, it doesn't take, a truce is called, and the cycle begins anew. She briefly lets her mother take the kid out of the house for a bit, but before long she's back in danger in her own home. For a thriller there isn't a lot of thrills outside of the obvious nightmare scenes, and most sane viewers will have checked out long before the husband finally decides to start acting on the plan he's convinced God has tasked him with. Oh, for those not caught up on Bible stories, the title refers to Isaac, a tale in which God commands Abraham to offer his son (that'd be Isaac) as a sacrifice, to which Abraham complies by binding him to an altar and then murdering him. Luckily, he only gets through the first part - God just wanted to see if he had enough faith to actually go through it, and stops him just in time.
Well (spoiler ahead) the husband chickens out at the last second and stabs himself instead, letting the baby live... but turns out he wasn't crazy after all, and God, apparently pissed off, brings upon the end of days (or at least shuts off all of the electricity in Los Angeles) as punishment for the guy not having more faith, I guess. Had this been the halfway point of the movie they might have been on to something, but why wait until the last 10 seconds to do something interesting and daring? This could have been an indie horror Knowing, instead of a lifeless thriller where most viewers won't be able to connect to its main character. I admire the "he was right all along" approach (shades of the underrated End of the Line), but it's too little too late - a cherry on top of a gross ass salad instead of delicious ice cream. Oh well.
What say you?
P.S. Rare for Scream Factory's modern indie releases, the Blu-ray has commentary and deleted scenes. However, "pile" movies need to be better for me to bother with their supplemental stuff, so I didn't watch any of them. Just letting you know it's a special edition should the above have you thinking it might be worth checking out!
I'll give Devil's Gate this much: I never in a million years could have guessed its final moments from its opening ones, in which a guy's car break down and he is promptly killed by a booby trap on the grounds of an ominous looking farm nearby. This would lead me, you, and anyone else who had ever seen a horror movie before to think they were in some kind of survival horror territory; a mix of Saw and Texas Chainsaw that would pile up the bodies and not have anything else to say or offer, but at least scratch an itch you might have if you were in need of some brainless carnage. However, the plot gets more and more complicated as it goes on, and while I can't spoil the particulars (or even list all of its sub-genres) I can say that at a certain point, the filmmakers switched gears one too many times and lost me.
The farm belongs to Pritchard (Milo Ventimiglia), who doesn't seem to be too concerned about the dead stranger on his property and also has someone/something chained up in his basement. Meanwhile, an FBI agent (Amanda Schull) arrives in this small North Dakotan town to investigate the disappearance of a woman and her son - Pritchard's family, as it turns out. Defying orders from the sheriff to leave him be, she grabs deputy Shawn Ashmore and heads out to the farm, where Pritchard attacks them and force them into cuffing him - at which point things start getting freaky. It's obvious that whatever he has locked up is more of an "I want to protect everyone from this thing" move than a "I'm a crazy man kidnapping innocent people", but that doesn't explain why his family seems to have vanished, so Schull can't fully trust him - only accept that he's not a clear cut villain.
The twists and turns that follow, mostly regarding the nature of what he has in the basement and what he wants to do with it, are hit or miss when it comes to how successful they are. I appreciate that the filmmakers wanted to spin their generic opening into something unexpected, but it's almost like they wanted to keep chasing that high and pulling the wool over our eyes again and again. The problem with that is that it gets hard to really get a firm grasp on the proceedings; it's like getting three serialized movies' worth of information and retcons all at once. One in particular, involving Pritchard's own backstory, comes so out of nowhere (and explained quite awkwardly to boot) that it not only derails most of the rest of the movie, but seemingly renders many of his earlier actions inexplicable as well (which they cover up with a "I didn't realize" kind of hand-waving excuse). It reminded me of that one season of Supernatural where Sam lost his soul in between seasons, but only after we learned that (several episodes in) did he start actually acting soulless, making us wonder why he couldn't keep up the act or why he ever bothered keeping the act in the first place.
But again, at least it was never generic. Milo was clearly embracing the villain/crazy guy kinda role, something he used to get to do often in his earlier career (Gamer!) but not so much these days since he's practically playing God on This is Us (this came out around when Season 2 was kicking off) and scoring other nice guy roles as a result of that show's success. As a fan of it (leave me alone, it's good) I was delighted in seeing him get all bug eyed and holding shotguns on people, something Jack Pearson rarely does (even in Vietnam the dude was all peaceful!). I just can't help but wonder how many middle aged houswives rented this from a Redbox after seeing him on the cover, only to discover it ended up closer to Heroes territory than his current hit. Ironically, an impulse Redbox rental is about all it's good for, and as it's been on disc for almost a year now it's probably not IN those clunky red kiosks anymore, so I'm not sure who this review will be enticing or warning. Oh well.
The problem with most horror franchises is that they need to keep finding ways to resurrect their central boogeyman, but The Conjuring "universe" has found an easy way around that by introducing the Warrens' room of haunted trinkets, and mixing their real life cases with some made-up ones so they can continue introducing things briefly in the mainline Conjuring movies that otherwise focus on other cases. It worked out so well for Annabelle that it got its own prequel (which outgrossed the original, so there's probably a third one coming), so they're trying again with The Nun, based on one of the terrors from Conjuring 2, and if box office estimates are correct it will once again be a lucrative endeavor - but I'm not sure audiences will ultimately be as satisfied this time around.
Unlike Annabelle, which was at least derived from an actual (or "actual") haunted Raggedy Ann doll, there's no basis in reality for this particular story - there's a demon named Valac in the old lore, but it has no relation to "Valak" from Conjuring 2, nor did it ever take the form of a nun, far as I know. And neither of the Nun's primary characters - a priest who is sent to perform investigations on behalf of the church, and a nun-in-training who occasionally has visions - are based on real people either. The only exception is kind of a spoiler, so I can't get into that, except to say that a lot of what we see here is also made up but seems to be leading into the plot for the potential sequel, one that would presumably tie it into the main Conjuring films more than the Annabelle films (or this one) ever managed.
So long story short, they had to make up pretty much everything here, but despite that license they didn't quite flesh it out as much as they did for the Annabelles (and when I say "they" it's not a stretch - it's the same screenwriter and producers as those films). Bizarrely, the movie kind of tells us a lot in its opening sequence: there's an old, isolated abbey in Romania that has some sort of evil force contained within it, and the nuns are the gatekeepers, preventing it from getting out to the rest of the world. But it's one of those movies where we know more than the protagonist, so we spend a lot of time watching Taissa Farmiga's character wander around, getting spooked when the internal Horror Movie Scare Clock demands it, until learning that... there's an evil force in the abbey and the nuns are keeping it from getting out. It's almost like the opening scene wasn't supposed to be there, because it's treated as a big reveal later.
Even weirder (spoilers here, skip to next paragraph if you wish) the same opening has a nun kill herself to prevent the demon from having a vessel (i.e. a living body), which any intelligent viewer can understand to mean that there were no other nuns there, because otherwise it'd be a pretty pointless action to take. So when Farmiga and the priest (Demian Bichir as Father Burke, possibly a reference to Exorcist's Burke Dennings?) arrive and talk to a few nuns, my initial thought was "Oh, the nuns are all ghosts", because - again - the nun killed herself to keep the demon from having a vessel. If there were other nuns there she'd just be dooming one of them to get possessed instead, which isn't very Christian of her. But an hour goes by before they tell us that there are no other nuns there, they are indeed ghosts, and that the one who killed herself was the last one. It's clunky, to say the least.
I was also baffled by the fact that they seem to be hiding Farmiga's character's name, which is Irene - I think they only say it once near the beginning of the film and never again. Given her sister's prominence in this franchise, and their similar looks, I thought it was an intentional bit of subterfuge that she was mostly ever addressed as "Sister", and we'd find out she was actually a young Lorraine Warren or at least her sister (heh) or something, but no. So it's just a weird casting choice; nothing against Taissa but of all the actresses in the world, and given the series' habit (heh, again!) of twists, why would they distract us by putting her in the role? The film's setting (1952) is even perfect for this kind of thing, as Taissa is within a year of the age Lorraine would have been then, but while there is a twist at the end (a pretty good one, too) it has nothing to do with her. Alas, this means that her rather thinly drawn character - which I was assuming throughout most of the runtime was intentional to try to hide her identity from us - was just that, and in a movie with only three characters of note, that kind of hurts.
None of those three characters are the titular Nun, by the way. She doesn't really appear all that much, oddly enough; Burke tells of a botched exorcism that haunts him and so he is menaced by a demonic version of the little boy he failed to save, and I swear he appears just as much as the Nun. "The Nuns" would be a more accurate title, since instead of just the main one (played by Bonnie Aarons again) we just get a lot of anonymous ghost nuns without faces, as anyone who has seen the trailer can tell you (where Taissa turns to see one following her, only to be attacked by a second one from her side). This allows for some of the film's most memorable sequences, like when a character has to make his way through them and they all turn in unison and sort of flock in one direction, but at the end of the film I felt I didn't really get more time with the "character" than I did in Conjuring 2. I mean, with Annabelle they couldn't really do all that much with the doll but managed to give it a full presence in the movies - they don't quite manage the same thing here, which is weird when it can, you know, move.
But that sequence, and a few others, make the movie watchable and even fairly fun for the most part, despite the story's shortcomings. There's a fun "buried alive" bit, an attack on a guy in a cemetery (with a fantastic punchline involving a cross), the scenes in the catacombs are all solid, and - even though it's mostly just exposition - the flashback scene explaining how the evil came to be sealed/released in the abbey is pretty great, to the point where I almost wish it was the main part of the story in the first place (but hey, now they can do a prequel to this prequel to the sequel!). And those are just the highlights; I should stress that the movie didn't have any BAD scenes, and I was never really bored - it just didn't quite all gel together in a fully satisfying way. The plot isn't exactly complicated, and as I said we kind of learn some of the information twice, so there isn't a lot of momentum or build-up to the narrative, so your mileage will vary and exclusively depends on how well the scares work for you. It's fun, but not as involving as I may have hoped.
That said, I am happy to report there aren't as many jump scares as there were in Annabelle: Creation. Director Corin Hardy (whose movie The Hallow is highly recommended) shares producer James Wan's love of fog machines and gives the film a sort of Hammer vibe (a scene where one of our protagonists visits a pub seems straight out of Plague of the Zombies or one of those), so there's more of an emphasis on atmosphere than giving the audience a reason to look up from their phones. It's still got plenty of those jolt moments (the best, alas, is the one from the trailer, which by now didn't even cause a titter in my audience), but Hardy doesn't seemingly feel the need to overload the film with them like it's some sort of competition. For the most part, they happen when they should, and while some work better than others, none of them are "fake", which is always a plus in my book.
They have already announced a movie about Crooked Man (also from C2), plus sequels to all existing branches, so this franchise isn't going away any time soon. But I hope the spinoff folks start realizing that a big part of what made us like the Conjurings was the characters and their loving bond, which made us want to go on those journeys with them. We can debate the accountability of the *actual* Warrens all day long, but the slightly fictionalized versions played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga are winners, and the three spinoffs have yet to come up with anyone as personable as them. And that's not a slight against any of the actors who have played the heroes in these other movies - it's just a side effect of centering them around the demon baddies. But when they're all prequels, we kind of know that the heroes in these films will have short-lived victories (if any), so I wish they spent more time giving us a reason to want to see them succeed, or at least survive. Otherwise they're just kind of like slasher movies without victims, giving us iconic villains who ultimately don't really do anything memorable.
When I was younger and attending Catholic school (for grades 1-8), during Lent we would go to Mass on I think Friday every week and get an abbreviated mass just for the students. Due to the younger crowd, the priest would cater the sermon to us a bit, and one time he delighted me by starting off with "Who has seen Friday the 13th 1, 2, 3, 4...", followed by other franchises (I remember being miffed he went up to 4 for Child's Play, which at the time, 1992 or 1993, didn't exist yet). His point was to explain how the acts of gory violence in those movies were nothing compared to what Jesus went through during his Crucifixion, so I always wondered what he thought of The Passion of the Christ, which is indeed gorier than all those films combined, and all directed at one poor guy (that'd be Jesus).
And I can assume he saw it, because pretty much everyone did in 2004 when it was released. I still remember the entire lobby being jam-packed when the film got out as another crowd waited for the next show, far more people than I had ever seen in the theater (the AMC Boston Common, for the record) even for the likes of Star Wars. The film's North American gross remains the highest for an R rated movie (non-inflated), and it was the worldwide champ until another movie about a guy who rises from the dead took its place (that would be Deadpool). It was a true phenomenon, something no one could have predicted and presumably got a few studio execs fired since every one of them turned Mel Gibson down even though it was a low budget ($30m) production, forcing him to bankroll the movie himself and release it independently. And this was before he was persona non grata, mind you.
Despite that huge success, he went back a year later and recut the film in order to soften the violence and hopefully get a PG-13, for the people who couldn't deal with it in its R-Rated form. This version, however, was a huge bust - just as the original form has box office records, the recut version is still floating high on the charts of worst opening weekends ever. No one wanted to see that version, and for good reason - watching every smack, every lash of the whip, every hammer blow to the nails in his hands and feet, was crucial to the movie's power. And it reinforces what my priest was trying to get across all those years ago - you truly feel the agony this guy went through every step of the way, and every time you feel it can't get much worse or that he couldn't possibly go on any longer, it does, and he does, and you realize you can't really complain about stubbing your toe or whatever ever again.
In a weird way it's also the only real reason to see the movie. The performances are great and it looks very nice (the cinematography got an Oscar nomination, in fact, despite being passed over for any of the more major awards), but as a narrative it's a bit of a misfire, as it requires you to know the story already in order to follow it. The first thing Jesus says in the movie, I think, is scolding Peter for not being able to stay awake for an hour, without informing us what he was referring to, who Peter is, etc. Judas' betrayal comes up shortly thereafter, and again it has almost no on-screen explanation for what is happening - you're just expected to know that Judas was a. one of Jesus' disciples (something we haven't seen or been told) and b. that these assholes weren't sure what he looked like or where he was (let alone why they were looking for him in the first place). And even though I DO know the story I still have no idea what's up with that freaky little baby that looks like the Man from Another Place cosplaying as Stewie Griffin, only that it certainly adds to my justification for making it an HMAD entry today.
Granted, it's a famous story, but a little more context would have gone a long way, especially for those who had trouble with the violence. What little we do get comes in the form of flashbacks, but even those tend to require a passing knowledge of the Bible to understand their significance. Almost no one in the movie is introduced properly (I'm not even sure if Monica Bellucci as Mary Magdalene has more than a line or two); I just checked against a transcription of the film's subtitles and names like Judas, Mary, and John are only spoken once in the entire two hour runtime, and even less time is spent explaining why they are important. The best flashback has nothing to do with a Bible story (at least, not a major one); it's a scene where Mary comes up to Jesus and tries to comfort him, and we are shown a quick scene of a young Jesus, maybe five years old, having taken a tumble or something and Mary cradling him to soothe him - it's heartbreaking to see the contrast. Whatever you choose to believe about the immaculate conception, his ability to turn water into wine, etc - there's no denying that this man went through several hours of grueling torture, and that his mother had to sit on the sidelines and watch, unable to help her child. As anyone with kids can tell you, your child is never too old to avoid being thought of as your baby that you must protect, so Mary's mental anguish is equal to the physical torture Jesus was enduring.
Luckily, I did know the story quite well thanks to the aforementioned Catholic school upbringing. In fact during Lent the mass would include "The Stations of the Cross", which was a reenactment of this story played out around the church, where the fourteen stations were marked with pictures of each event - the sentencing, the carrying of the cross, the nailing, etc. Of course, this is a little "play" put on by Church volunteers, so when you're a kid it's hard to really comprehend the brutality of what really happened when you see a guy being kinda brushed with a small length of rope, carrying a cross that weighed approximately 10 pounds. "This doesn't look so bad," seven or eight year old me would think, assuming that the Church was presenting it exactly as it happened (though I knew they weren't really killing the guy at the end, because I saw him do it a dozen times).
I'm not sure if it ever really clicked until I saw Mel Gibson's take, in fact; somehow I thought whipping just meant he'd get a lot of red abrasions and bruises on his (clothed) back, and that he was more or less undamaged until the nails went in as he was hung on the cross. But if anything it's a wonder he even had any blood left in his body by the time they got to that point, as they whip his BARE back with "cat o nine tails" over and over, and when you think the commanding asshole is about to put a stop to it, he instead asks his men to turn Jesus over so that they can continue ravaging his front as well. Just as my priest suggested, it was indeed more brutal than anything I've ever seen Jason or Michael do - the most horrifying moment being when one of the "tails" wraps around to his face and swipes his eyelid. The power of the weapon is demonstrated on a wooden table, showing chunks of splintered wood being torn away before they turn their attention to this man's skin, and even in the cut form it's agonizing to watch.
On that note, Jim Caviezel was truly robbed of a nomination. Not only was he speaking a foreign (and dead!) language, he also went through plenty of physical trauma (including a dislocated soldier) and sold every second of his agony, something that's even more powerful in the cut version* as it holds on his face rather than cut to the lashings. In the few flashbacks you get the impression he would make a terrific Jesus in a movie about his usual day to day, and even though I was familiar with him already thanks to Frequency and Thin Red Line and such, he completely disappears in the role. Ironically, one of the actors who stole his rightful nomination was Leonardo DiCaprio (for The Aviator), who would ultimately win the award a decade or so later for The Revenant, primarily because he put himself through a lot of physical agony for it. Even the actual Jesus probably would have been like "This is some bullshit".
Long story short, it's a powerful film if you're well versed in the history, otherwise it's just the longest torture scene in film history that only relents to give some flashbacks that may not make total sense to you. Granted, I'm not sure who would be seeing the movie unless they had at least some idea about it (rabid Mel Gibson fans? People who saw "Rated R for sequences of graphic violence" on the trailer or poster and thought it was part of the mid-00s torture horror wave?), but I think Gibson could have at least offered up a few Cliff's notes to bring those who had let their Sunday school lessons retreat to the back of their memories along with algebra and frog dissection. And it's certainly not the kind of film you'd want to watch over and over (I bought the DVD nearly a decade ago and just opened it for this viewing; I hadn't seen the film since opening night, fourteen years ago), but I highly recommend watching or rewatching it now, with so-called Christians delivering messages of intolerance and hate (indeed, our so-called Christian president tweeted "HAPPY EASTER!", then went into a three part rant about how much he hates minorities). Even if you literally know nothing about Jesus, the film shows a guy going through unimaginable torture and yet still showing mercy and forgiveness to those who wronged him, and how it's not helpful to only love those who love you. Maybe some of these people, most of whom have never experienced more than a paper cut, can learn a thing or two about the guy they supposedly follow.
What say you?
*For the record I watched the theatrical one, then went back and watched a couple of key scenes in their "PG-13" form.
Of all the major horror franchises that came along (or at least had their biggest showcase) in the 1980's, Hellraiser was the one I never particularly got into the way I did for the others. I was late to the party in even seeing them; I think I was in high school before I watched the first three, only watching them once or twice before the release of Hellraiser: Bloodline, which was the only one I saw theatrically until Revelations in 2011. And most of the others I only bothered to watch for HMAD entries, having heard nothing good about any of them (and then, adding more negative reviews to their coffers), so now that I'm only updating sporadically I probably wouldn't have exactly rushed to watch the tenth film, Hellraiser: Judgment if not for two things. One is that I was offered a copy, so I could save myself a rental fee or blind buy down the road, and - more importantly - the other is that I heard from a number of people that it was a surprisingly decent entry, not quite hitting the highs of its theatrical releases, but certainly a step up from its DTV brethren.
And they're right! I mean, I wouldn't exactly refer to it as a "good" movie, but it's the only one of the DTV films (and I'm including Revelations in that group, despite its one-week limited release) that feels like a legit addition to the mythology that was established in the first four films. Even the one where Kirsty showed back up didn't really feel like a new chapter in an ongoing story (however loosely it was depicted), but a gimmick used to lure in folks who might be disinterested, like how Marvel (unnecessarily!) threw in Falcon and a setup for Civil War to entice people into seeing Ant-Man. But here, the scenes with Pinhead and some of his fellow Cenobites/demons/angels/whatever almost feel like they could have come from Clive Barker's imagination, and it's a shame the entire movie couldn't revolve around them as these sequences (which make up maybe 25% of the 80 minute film) are clearly where all the budget went, and now that I've seen it for myself, obviously the reason for the film's better-than-average reviews (it's actually got a higher Rotten Tomatoes score than Hellbound as of this writing, insanely enough).
Alas, that other 75% focuses on a trio of cops investigating a Seven-y serial killer who is killing people according to the Ten Commandments, even though "Thou Shall Not Kill" is one of them, the hypocrite. Maybe if we ever really saw him in action and/or the film gave us a few red herrings as to his identity this material would be more enjoyable (if still cliche; how many Biblically minded killers have we seen over the past 20 years or so?), but we mostly only see aftermath. The MO for these scenes is as follows: the detectives arrive on a scene to look at a dead body or some other kind of tableau, talk about this or that clue, then retreat to their wood-paneled office that looks suspiciously like one you might find in a used car lot or construction site. The murder sites are fine, but their office and some of the other sets are so phony looking (again, probably because all the money went into the Pinhead scenes) that it was hard to care much about their (and only their, as no other cops are seen in the film, despite the fact that this killer has seemingly earned a citywide manhunt) investigation into this vaguely defined, rarely seen killer.
It also lacks much in the way of surprises after its first (and best) ten minutes. In the opening scene we see Pinhead lamenting (heh) the advance of technology, and how he is becoming obsolete as people can just go to the internet to have their desires fulfilled instead of going to him (kind of like how we don't really need travel agents anymore when we can just head to Expedia), and I loved that concept. Unfortunately not too much is done with it, but at least it leads into the introduction of The Auditor, who looks like a Cenobite version of Claude Rains as the Invisible Man. His job is to interview would-be victims about their crimes and type them out on a typically monstrous typewriter, at which point the pages will be consumed by the Assessor (played by John Gulager!). He then pukes the results into a funnel where a trio of naked women with their faces ripped off scoop up the gross mixture in their hands and pass judgment. Why they go through all this trouble, I don't know, but I like the idea of them having their own pointless bureaucratic process for what they do.
But then our protagonist Sean (Damon Carney, who I dubbed "Michael Fauxbender" due to his mild resemblance to the actor and that their boring serial killer plot reminded me of the woeful Snowman) follows a couple of clues and ends up in the house, where we see the process again, too soon after the first and more or less spoiling the film's mystery before the halfway point. His "audit" is largely unheard by us, but the lengthy results cause the Assessor to choke during his consumption, and whatever he did has gotten the OK from the higher-ups, who instruct the Auditor to let Sean go. At this point the film starts to resemble one of the later episodes of Supernatural, with angels and demons arguing over jurisdiction and the like, but since it was at least moving away from the serial killer plot I was happy to watch it even if it was largely a repeat of a sequence we just saw 25 minutes or so ago.
In fact, if I had to guess, this sequence (or the earlier one) was added to get Pinhead and the other creations into the movie more. Since 2000's Inferno, the common complaint about these films (besides just kinda sucking in general) is that Pinhead isn't in them enough, even though that's the one thing that they share with the original (where he isn't even named Pinhead yet, but "Lead Cenobite"), so I'm sure there was a push to find a way to include him in more sequences (hilariously, at one point during the serial killer investigation they briefly cut to him spinning a Lament as he sat around waiting, as if to remind us that he was there). And unlike the more expensive Doug Bradley, new actor Paul Taylor (thankfully replacing the guy who played him in Revelations) was probably easier to pay for more days of work, so the reasons to limit his appearance were presumably based more on narrative than money. And Taylor is actually pretty good in the role; his physique is similar to Bradley's, which helps, and he's got a similar enough voice that it's easy enough to accept the transition. Whereas the last guy felt like seeing a kid in a costume, Taylor is someone who could conceivably continue playing the character for future installments and be accepted by the fans, not unlike the initial hesitance/eventual championing of every new James Bond or Batman (remember when everyone cried about Ben Affleck being cast? Some of the same people are now upset he might not come back for more).
Speaking of winning fans over, the makers cast Heather Langenkamp in the film and touted her involvement back when the film was first going into production in 2016, but if you're planning to see it for her, I'd advise against it, as her role can barely even be considered a cameo. She plays the landlord of one of the victims, and her on-screen time is limited to just two shots (one from behind!) as she walks down a flight of stairs, mutters a few things about the tenant, and opens a door. It's the kind of role that would usually be filled by Central Casting and perhaps not even meet the director until the day of shooting, yet she is given fourth billing for this nothing appearance. I'm not even joking when I say that an extra standing behind one of the cops as they wait in line for coffee is actually on-screen more than Ms. Langenkamp, and it's pretty lame of them to use her name/our affinity for "Nancy" to sucker in a few folks who might otherwise have no interest in another (or even their first). I was thinking she'd show up in one of the deleted scenes, but that's not the case. There are only two, and one is just an extension of the opening with the Auditor (played by writer/director Gary Tunnicliffe himself), letting things go on a bit longer but otherwise offering nothing of note. The other is more substantial, showing Sean and the other detective (Egerton, played by Alexandra Harris) talking about God while in a church, which clues us more into Sean's motives and gives Egerton a bit more to do than just ask for or deliver exposition (per Tunnicliffe, she wasn't even in the original story concept, but added at the producers' request, which helps explain why she's fairly extraneous in the narrative). With the the movie being so short I can't say it needed to lose scenes for pacing, but I doubt anyone will watch it and think it should have been in the movie, either. There's also a gag reel which provided some minimal amusement.
Tunnicliffe and his crew should be proud of what they've done here. It's no secret that this film (and the last one) were made quick and cheap by Dimension in order to hang on to their rights to the series (the contracts require them to make a movie within a certain amount of time; failure to do so for the Halloween series is why it ended up at Blumhouse), but he clearly wants to restore the series to its former highs instead of just playing studio lapdog and putting in the bare minimum that they require. The effects are practical, the designs are solid, and the scripts (yes, even Revelations') are far more interesting than the previous entries, where they were rewriting unrelated spec scripts to include Pinhead, which would be fine if the series was more anthological from the start, but there was this cool world opening up (particularly in the 2nd and 4th films) that got unceremoniously dropped when the series went DTV. Even if the results are imperfect, the attempt to get things back on track is admirable, and I hope that Dimension's money woes clear up somehow or (far more likely) the series is handed over to a studio that might realize the potential and give Tunnicliffe (or his replacement, if that was the case) the money to live up to the standards the series set in its initial entries. Until then, at least we have, for the first time since 1996, an entry that is actually worth watching (uneven as it may be), though I should stress that it might take suffering through the likes of Hellworld to really appreciate it.
There aren't a lot of movies about evil children that I dislike (hell, it's hard to even disappoint me), and as Tucker & Dale was one of my favorite movies of the year I saw it (2010, though it was delayed for a bit and didn't come out until the following year if memory serves) I was eagerly looking forward to Eli Craig's followup, Little Evil. The premise seemed like a winner, basically a comedy version of The Omen (or a more supernaturally driven Problem Child) but with the always great Adam Scott in the (step)dad role (bonus, my beloved Evangeline Lilly as the child's mother), with the added bonus of Craig proving that he's able to wring plenty of laughs out of well-worn material while also adding some creative tweaks and even satisfying the "horror" part of the horror-comedy blend. Alas, the film simply didn't work for me; I barely ever laughed and found even less to enjoy about the storyline itself, which despite its R rating (for language only, as it turns out) is shockingly toothless and rarely steps outside of Omen's narrative. So it's The Omen but not scary or funny, basically - what's the point?
I'd be very curious to extend some benefit of the doubt to Craig and read the original script that was sold to Universal a few years back (Uni is not involved with the final version, which was released as a Netflix exclusive), as it seems like they had to chop some things out that maybe their non-Universal budget couldn't handle. For example, the film starts incredibly awkwardly, with a pointless flash-forward and some talk about Scott and Lilly's wedding being a disaster long before we see some brief footage of it from the videographer (Dale himself, Tyler Labine, in one of the film's few good scenes), making it feel like the film's first 20 minutes were excised/reworked. I could be wrong, but either way it puts the audience at a disadvantage for no good reason, and the flashforward spoils one of the film's central mysteries, which is whether or not Lilly's character was evil as well or if she genuinely didn't think anything was wrong with her son. There are other things throughout the movie that feel "off", such as a clown Scott rents for the kid's birthday party - they keep making a big deal about how he did a bad thing by hiring this particular guy, but we don't see him hiring him (when it's too late to care anymore he finally mentions that he just found the guy online), making it all feel like the punchline to a joke with no setup.
The other weird thing is that it keeps building up reveals to certain characters, like the kid's real dad or a hunter named Gozamel who will help them, seemingly setting up some stunt casting for these brief cameos. But no! They're just random guys! I mean nothing against the actors, but when you keep mentioning someone in an irreverent comedy and build up their first appearance, we're kind of trained to expect them to be someone that will make us laugh when we see them. Maybe Will Ferrell is the legendary hunter, or the child's father is an A-list "serious" actor from some previous devil movie having a little fun with his legacy (Gabriel Byrne would have scored the most points from me, obviously). The movie does indeed feature a few notable quickie roles (Sally Field as a child services agent, Clancy Brown as a priest who believes the end of the world is coming), and Scott's stepfather therapy group is rounded out by familiar TV stars like Donald Faison and Chris D'Elia (who scored the film's biggest laugh, in my opinion), but their appearances aren't really built up in any way. Again, it's just kinda "off", like they took the movie out of the oven before it was done baking.
Curiously, the film's wiki page notes that they didn't reshoot anything and it had a fairly brief schedule, so I can't help but wonder if it was one of those things where they rushed it into production to secure a certain actor (Scott has his own show on Fox, so I'm guessing his schedule was packed) and they simply didn't have time to rework things, let the actors fuck around to secure better improv takes, etc. I mean, the movie is definitely a comedy with supernatural elements, not a traditional "horror-comedy", so if it failed as a story that'd be almost forgivable as long as I was laughing a lot. The recent Ghostbusters update is a good example - I laughed a lot at the movie, so I at least enjoyed watching it the one time even though the story/villain were dogshit. Little Evil doesn't benefit from the same thing; I swear I only laughed I think five times throughout the movie, and I'm not exactly hard to please when it comes to comedy, especially this particular kind (irreverent/ironic/random). This is the kind of movie that seems tailor made for my sensibilities (killer kids! Dad stuff! Evangeline Lilly in a sundress!), but it just never came together for me.
Luckily, it did have a few bright spots that kept me from giving up entirely. The aforementioned scene with Labine as the pretentious wedding videographer was pretty funny; his chemistry with Scott was solid and it earned my first real laugh of the movie, where Scott seemed more concerned with the guy's lack of a tripod than the fact that his wedding was destroyed by a tornado that might have been caused by his Antichrist stepson. Craig gets some mileage out of Scott's fellow stepdads treating the whole "Antichrist" thing as yet another common issue stepdads have to deal with, and I liked that Craig worked in nods to other creepy kid moviess (Poltergeist, Children of the Corn, Rosemary's Baby...) without turning it into a ZAZ-style parody film. Plus I was happy that the devil really was involved, and that they didn't go the cop-out route and chalk every weird thing in the movie up to paranoia. Then again, Netflix spoils the happy (and lame, and like most other things in the film, clunkily established) ending with one of the screenshots that accompany the film's page (the ones that scroll past while you're reading the plot info), so it seemed like they didn't even want the audience to be surprised by anything.
Oh well. I watched the trailer a while back and was a bit concerned that there weren't any laughs, but I was hoping it would just be one of those deals where the trailer can't quite sell the movie's tone (and thus laughs) in the traditional way (one of my favorite comedies, Drowning Mona, doesn't have a funny trailer either). Alas, the trailer was dead on - the gags just keep falling flat for a variety of reasons, and while the kid is good there's not enough genuine menace for it to work as a black comedy either. It's just kind of there, leaving talented performers stranded and showing none of the spark that made Tucker and Dale such a winner. Hopefully I'm right and it just wasn't made under the best circumstances, and Craig can come back to my good graces with the next one. Until then, I trust someone can satisfy my evil child itch, comedically or otherwise? I can't just keep watching my Cathy's Curse blu-ray.
