Ma (2019)

JUNE 5, 2019

GENRE: REVENGE, THRILLER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

First Brightburn, and now Ma - I am really getting tired of trailers that not only give away the best parts, but also focus heavily on things that are meant to be reveals in the narrative itself. To be fair, a couple (literally, two) of Ma's surprises were discovered in the film as opposed to its marketing, but I still spent far too much of my time being ahead of the characters, making it hard to get sucked into the story. And that's kind of a problem for a thriller; these movies are largely designed to only really work once, and yet it felt like I was already on my second viewing since I had already seen Ma do most of the crazy things she does in its 95 or so minutes.

Because, alas, this is not a movie about Octavia Spencer wiping out a group of partying kids like some kind of unmasked Jason Voorhees. There's a bit of a body count, though the R rating mostly comes from the language as opposed to violence (it never gets more extreme than the jogger being run over, which - broken record time - was in the trailer), with one curious exception that the MPAA didn't even really mention. The film's R rating was chalked up to "violent/disturbing material, language throughout, sexual content, and for teen drug and alcohol use", and it should be noted that "sexual content" usually means people discussing sex or maybe implying it, i.e. something that even a PG-13 could have. But one thing a PG-13 definitely can't have is a shot of a male penis, which this offers courtesy of Luke Evans, whose character is Ma's real target.

See, what this movie really is is one of those "outcast gets revenge on classmates who humiliated her" films, albeit a curiously structured one where it takes nearly an hour for the screenplay to inform us just exactly what happened all those years ago, unlike the similar movies that explain it up front before flashing forward. It's a really horrible prank along the lines of Terror Train (albeit without the corpse; young Ma, really named Sue Ann, was once tricked into performing a sex act on what she thought was her crush but was actually his buddy), but the long build up to it suggests it will twist our perspective and have us rooting for Ma. That is certainly not the case, and since her revenge plot makes little sense, it's hard to see the correlation when the reveal finally happens. The guy that she actually performed on isn't even mentioned again, for starters, even though that'd be an easy target (not to mention someone who could pepper in a little action early on). Weirder still, Evans' high school girlfriend, who was of course in on the prank, is still around in the present (played by Missi Pyle as an adult), but when Ma goes after her she chalks it up to defending Juliette Lewis' character, who Pyle had mocked in the present for having to move back home after a messy divorce. So was Lewis's younger self Sue Ann's only friend or something? Nope, we barely see her in the past and later on Ma seems to consider her part the same group of oppressors anyway.

Further, it makes me wonder why the filmmakers felt the need to wait so long to show it; in fact they actually build up to it with a series of flashbacks of young Sue Ann first catching the guy's eye, going to a party with him, etc. By the time we see what exactly happened, we've already learned in the present that Sue Ann is an outcast, has trouble making friends, and has some curious views on teenaged sex, so not only is the payoff kind of anticlimactic, but the movie would have worked better as a whole by seeing this incident up front and letting us sympathize with her a little and even wanting to see her get revenge only for her to take it too far and shift our allegiance. Now it occurs after it's fully established that she's crazy, which is obviously too late for us to start feeling bad for her. It'd be like waiting until Friday the 13th Part 4 to tell us Jason was a little boy who drowned.

Another wonky creative decision concerns the heroine, Maggie (Diana Silvers, one of the cheerleaders in Glass), whose is Lewis' character's daughter. She is new in town and has no friends, and on her first day at school she is eating her packed lunch in the library by herself when a girl named Haley storms in out of nowhere, introduces herself, and puts her number into Maggie's phone, and then the following day invites her to join them for some drinking. It's such a strange way for Maggie to make friends that I thought for sure she - like Sue Ann - was being tricked into doing something embarrassing by people who were only pretending to like her, and thus parallel Ma's story. Hell, there's even a moment where she tells Ma "I'm stronger than you!" or something to that effect, which practically seems left over from a draft of the script where that was indeed the case.

But no, Haley and the others are legit friends to the end, and furthermore Ma is barely interested in her at all, so I had to wonder why the movie even bothered kicking off with her arrival in town since her "new kid" status has no bearing on anything beyond the aforementioned bit about Pyle throwing shade at Lewis for moving back home. Maggie's irrelevance to the majority of the plot is really hammered home with a clumsy runner about Ma apparently taking their jewelry, which kicks off when a girl we've never seen before runs over to Maggie and Haley in the hallway to tell them about her birthday plans and Maggie zeroes in on her new bracelet. Maggie admires it and we get a lengthy closeup of it, and if you've seen a single movie before you'd know that this means later on Maggie will find that very same bracelet in Ma's basement or something, suggesting something happened to the girl. But when the bracelet does come back later, Maggie's not even the one who notices it - Haley does, even though she wasn't the one that was so fixated on it earlier. As for the bracelet's owner? Who knows, they never mention her again.

It's the sort of thing that had me wondering if the movie was re-edited and re-arranged from an earlier cut. Throughout the movie, the kids (not just Maggie) are put off by something weird Ma does, only to seemingly forget about it the next day and hang out with her again. Even after Haley broadcasts "everyone block Ma's number, she's crazy!" to all of her friends (including Ma! Learn how to hide your posts from specific people, Haley!) they all seem fine with each other a day or two later, as if the scenes weren't presented in their intended order. There are also baffling things like Ma using a dog's blood for a transfusion on someone she just kills a few moments later anyway - why? That, along with the go-nowhere subplots about the jewelry (the way the trailer cuts that stuff together actually works better, ironically enough) and Maggie's similarly erratic relationship with her mother makes me wonder if there wasn't some reshaping or a much longer cut that would have shown more naturally why these folks can't seem to make up their minds about anything.

Still, Spencer's performance keeps it watchable, even entertaining at its best. Since I didn't know the trailer had shown me so much until it was over, I was never quite sure what she'd be doing next, and she doesn't even really try to hide her "off"-ness from the kids; the second time they visit she holds one of them at gunpoint and makes him strip (something they all write off as a joke later even though, uh, it's the same sort of sexually driven trauma she was so broken up about, directed at someone who had nothing to do with it - weird decision #23). I also loved the scenes where she was at work as a veterinarian, because she was clearly terrible at her job and constantly berated by her boss, played by the great Allison Janney - even though I came for a horror movie, I probably would have walked out happier if it was just a workplace comedy about these two trying to keep a small town animal clinic afloat despite hating each other. There's also a hilarious bit where Ma is getting a pedicure and starts cussing on the phone, drawing the ire of an old lady next to her - I could have watched the two of them bicker for 90 minutes, easily.

But alas, with so few thrills, the janky pacing, and missed opportunities, it's hard to say I walked out a big fan of what I DID see. It was watchable for sure; the climax was reasonably suspenseful, and the kids were thankfully all likable (even Haley, introduced as a kind of "pretty popular girl" type, is caring about her friends and never seen being mean to anyone), so it's not a "bad movie" in the traditional sense. But it was like the makers couldn't decide if it was a trashy B movie about a psycho or a serious thriller about the long-term effects of adolescent trauma (something the company's The Gift did so quite wonderfully a few years back), and ended up somewhere in the middle, underwhelming on both fronts. Here's hoping the Blu-ray has a longer cut or at least a wealth of deleted scenes that can rectify one or both problems, though after a few years I wouldn't get my hopes up as Blumhouse stuff almost never gets extended versions (Truth or Dare is the only exception that comes to mind) and even when they HAVE deleted scenes they're often missing ones we know about (i.e. Halloween and its original ending). What you see is what you get, and while that's often good enough, here I needed a little more.

What say you?

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Friend Request (2016)

SEPTEMBER 22, 2017

GENRE: GHOST, REVENGE
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

I've seen a couple people make the joke that Friend Request looks like something one might mock up for a film that needed a cheesy horror movie playing in the background (you know, for the two or three movies per decade that don't just use Night of the Living Dead), but for what little it's worth, it's actually the best of this year's crop of college kid-centric horror flicks. Unlike Rings, Bye Bye Man, and Wish Upon, I didn't spend the running time rolling my eyes or trying to keep track of how many plot holes it already racked up - I was actually enjoying it in a low-key, timekiller way until its endless and misguided third act. Props for trying something a little different in one of these things, but it didn't quite work due to not being properly set up, and probably accounts for the film's low grades more than anything else.

And by "one of these things" I mean yet another movie where our heroes get freaked out by a vengeful ghost for an hour or so and then decide that the only way to stop the thing that's been killing their friends is to drive to the old _____ (burnt out commune, here) and put the body to rest or whatever. It's amazing how these places are always a couple hours' drive away from where the protagonists live - just once I want to see one where they discover the old factory/asylum/warehouse/whatever is actually located in another country and they can't find a flight. OR, less jokingly, they discover the place is a full day's drive away, but relatively early in the film, and turn the 2nd half or so into more of a road chase, so that we can at least get a change of scenery and a kind of ticking clock scenario that you don't often get in these sort of movies. But alas, they follow the template of The Ring fairly closely, which might have worked better if we didn't have a genuine (well, technically genuine) Ring movie just six months ago.

Hilariously, like Rings, this one's been on the shelf for a while - it was actually shot in early 2014, and released in Germany last year. Why it took so long to come here is unknown, but oddly enough the movie's approximation of Facebook is a pretty close match to what we have now*, so it didn't feel as dated as you might expect for a nearly four year old production about the internet. They never actually use the name "Facebook" (I call it Fauxbook), but the social media site that the ghost uses to spread her terror is pretty much identical, with little variations in the terminology (like "Spread" instead of "Share") to keep them from being sued I guess. It's a good choice, I think - previous films have built their versions from the ground up, which automatically disconnects the audience its catering to as we instantly recognize it as phony. Here, you might just assume it's the real FB, and so the movie's central concepts - accepting strangers as "friends", the jealous rage one gets when seeing their friends having fun when they weren't invited, etc. - work as intended, without the usual distraction of seeing all the characters being obsessed with a social media app the audience recognizes as fake.

Anyway, for those uninitiated, the central conceit is that a fairly popular college sophomore named Laura accepts a friend request (hey, that's the title!) from Marina, a "weird" girl in her class, feeling sorry for her as she has no other fauxbook friends. Marina's nice at first, but then becomes overly pushy, tagging Laura in all her posts and messaging her nonstop about hanging out, missing her, etc. After Laura has a birthday party that she doesn't invite Marina to, the latter freaks out and kills herself - but she films herself doing it and posts the video on Laura's wall. And then continues doing so, from beyond the graaaaaaaaaave! Or, you know, whatever. Anyway, Laura's social circle starts shrinking as the friends begin dying off one by one in mysterious ways, and videos of their deaths are also posted on her timeline. Because of this, the 800 or so other people start defriending her (after leaving comments like "U R SICK!" and such), and Marina's plan becomes clear - she wants Laura to be "friendless", like her.

It's not the worst concept for a movie, really (plus it's not just a generic online ghost - she's actually a witch!), and if they really dug into the psychology of our obsession with social media and used the ghost-y stuff as more of a backdrop, it might have been a really great little slice of social commentary. The 800+ randoms is something that they don't really explore; we get graphics every now and then showing her declining friend numbers, but who are these people? We only ever see Laura with her five besties and her mom - were the others just complete strangers as well? Does she care that these people, who can't even really be called acquaintances, aren't going to see her statuses anymore? There's a minor subplot about how they can't delete their profiles (Marina's ghost won't let them), but it would have been interesting if she simply WOULDN'T delete hers, because she'd lose all her virtual friends. I myself never take anyone on Facebook that I don't actually know, but I know a number of friends who accept every request they get and somehow notice when one of these folks drop them ("Who unfriended me? I had 895, now I have 894!"), so I wish the movie took more time on the idea that these "friends" aren't actually friends at all and Marina is just one of many who were inadvertently scorned by conflating real life friendship with a virtual one.

But instead we just get the usual shit: someone dies, it looks like an accident, there's a suspicious cop who wonders why our protagonist knows two recent victims of tragedy, then another one dies, lather, rinse, repeat. While I was grateful that their phones had nothing to do with their demises, none of the deaths are particularly interesting (or graphic; the film's R rating is mostly for the six or seven F bombs), and you can easily guess the order in which they occur to boot, so it makes it an even bigger bummer that they didn't spend more time on the online obsession angle. Laura is even enrolled in a psych class that is currently on the topic of social media dependency, and the professor has this John Hurt/Jared Harris kind of authoritative presence, making it seem like he might be a more important character down the road, but he's largely dropped from the proceedings after a while. To be fair she's eventually suspended due to being a seeming liability for the school (even though it happens every few minutes it seems, she never thinks to take out her phone or laptop and show the police that she isn't the one posting snuff films and that her account can't be deleted, so the school thinks she's nuts), but again, it seemed like a missed opportunity not to include this guy on the action, if they wanted to *say* something about the very thing the teenagers in the audience will likely start looking at before the credits roll (the opportunities for a meta sequel are RIPE!).

Now I gotta get into spoilers, so skip the next paragraph if you want more surprises.

All that said it's really not all that bad until the third act, where they make a choice that is laudably unexpected and even somewhat daring (for this brand of horror, I mean), by having one of the friends realize that they can be spared Marina's wrath if Laura isn't alive to be alone. So he tries to kill her, and the finale becomes more of a slasher film chase climax, with Marina just hanging out on the sidelines I guess. I admit I didn't see it coming, but that's largely due to the fact that it's not really set up at all. The would-be killer is her friend-zoned buddy Kobe, who is also the requisite hacker type who offers up exposition like "These posts aren't written with any kind of code that I've ever seen before!", i.e. the kind of shit that means nothing in time that they maybe could have spent hinting at his out of nowhere villain turn. He even kills one of the other friends, which makes even less sense, and this all goes down during an endless climax that has Laura travel to the aforementioned commune, but then to another location after discovering the commune is a dead end. When she's not being pursued by Kobe she's just wandering around dimly lit hallways, with Marina making precious few appearances - so when they have Laura go through these motions again at a different place, I felt my last bit of goodwill toward the movie fade away.

It's not a total failure like its aforementioned peers, however. For starters, they believe in James Wan's rule about fake scares, in that there shouldn't be any - two 'classic' ones are set up (a refrigerator door being held open for an unusually long time, and a fogged mirror about to be wiped away) without the expected BOO! moment after, and there are no sudden doorbell/phone ringing kinda ones, either. In fact, the closest the movie gets to one is not only kind of effective in its carnival funhouse kind of way, but it's also thematically appropriate - Laura watches one of those "Hey look at this cute video" things where the subject (a cat, in this case) suddenly morphs into a possessed demon and shrieks. And then there are a few subtle scare moments without any attention being drawn to them, like when a character turns away from his laptop but his reflection on the screen stays frozen in place. Nothing particularly earth shattering, mind you, but it at least shows they were trying to avoid the pratfalls of so many others, and not wasting the audience's energy on false scare moments. It also makes good use of the fauxbook layout/function to introduce us to all of the primary characters quickly, showing their profiles and an assortment of pics/statuses that inform us what they're like and how they relate to one another in a few seconds of mostly dialogue-free screentime, as opposed to awkward expository dialogue that takes a lot longer. It's a shorthand I've seen in other films, but since this one's actually ABOUT this social media platform, it also works as introduction for how *it* works, for the non-computer types in the crowd who might have little idea what Facebook even is, i.e. the parents that will have to bring their kids to this inexplicably R-rated movie.

So basically it's not a good movie but it's also not as bad as many reviews will have you believe, the ones that will be an unfortunate product of the tendency to grade everything on a "fresh/rotten" scale with no room for the middle ground that it actually occupies. Sure, in the wake of It it might seem like the bottom of the barrel, but comparing this kind of thing to that juggernaut is highly unfair. The film actually belongs in the same class as Bye Bye Man and those others I mentioned, and to my eyes it's an improvement on those (though not quite up to par with the similar Unfriended, which took full advantage of its cyber-scenario and didn't skimp on the death scenes, not to mention fleshed out all of its characters as opposed to just the lead), and after Annabelle: Creation I appreciated something a little quieter that didn't seem to have a mandate to throw a scare at the audience every five minutes. They were putting some effort into making an effective horror film in the vein of the 2002 Ring, so even though they missed the mark I can at least appreciate that I wasn't spending 90 minutes feeling like the filmmakers thought I was an idiot. Much obliged!

What say you?

*Unless they updated it digitally - there was an inordinate number of VFX companies listed in the credits, despite the fact that there aren't a lot of obvious CGI effects for the ghost or kill scenes, which are also very brief anyway. So it's possible they went back and updated the Fauxbook screens to be more timely, as we all know how often they change it.

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