mistressofmuses | Entries tagged with review

Last week we watched the first three of the V/H/S films. We had already seen the first two, though it had been a while, so didn't really remember them terribly well. (There are also a fourth, fifth, and upcoming sixth film, but unfortunately those are all Shudder exclusives. Maybe this will be the year I chuck an extra $6 per month at my TV for a couple months for more horror stuff, but I haven't yet.) We watched them out of order, but I'll review them in order, lol.

These are all anthology films, each featuring a frame story that chains the other short films together. As is fairly typical, this leads to a little bit of variable quality in the segments, but at the same time I really do like anthology films in the broad sense. There are some ideas that really ARE best expressed as short stories, and stretching them into a feature-length film makes them less punchy and more prone to filler, and it's relatively difficult to find an audience for short films outside of anthologies.

V/H/S
The frame story ("Tape 56"), directed by Adam Wingard, is... nothing to write home about, but it serves its purpose of giving the rest of it an excuse to happen.
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"Amateur Night" is pretty good. I like a lot of the feature films this director (David Bruckner) has gone on to do: The Ritual, The Night House, the new Hellraiser... he also did a segment in Southbound which is one of my favorite anthology horror films I've seen.
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This segment was expanded into a full-length film called Siren, but I haven't seen it!

"Second Honeymoon," (directed by Ti West) isn't too bad, but is probably my least favorite of the segments.
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"Tuesday the 17th," directed by Glenn McQuaid is one I enjoyed. It's got a fun "unexplained" angle in my opinion.
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Also, I like the title's reference to Friday the 13th.

"The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger", directed by Joe Swanberg, is one of the least gory, though it's the one that's most disturbing in my opinion, because despite the supernatural element to it, the "real" horror is gaslighting and abuse.
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"10/31/98", directed by the Radio Silence collective, is another one I like. It's probably in the middle of my list in terms of which ones I enjoyed the most. It's not a super complex story, but I feel like it did a simple premise well.
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V/H/S/2
I feel pretty similarly about the first and second films. I think both have some great segments that stand out pretty well, and overall I enjoyed both of them.

The frame story in V/H/S/2, "Tape 49", directed by Simon Barrett, has more of a twist to it than the frame story in the first movie, and is similarly decent in its utility as an excuse to chain the other segments together.
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It's a less subtle spooky than the first film's frame story starts out with, but it does its job!

It's a bit interesting to me that the frame story has more of a twist to it this time around, because the various segments actually rely far LESS on having twists to them as compared to the first film. In general, I feel pretty neutral about that? It was sort of a nice throughline for all the stories in the first set, though as a whole I don't think these feel like they're missing something by comparison.

"Phase I Clinical Trials", directed by Adam Wingard, feels a bit like a Black Mirror episode, and it's one that I could see being a pretty decent longer-form film. Or at least an hour-long Black Mirror episode, ha.
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"A Ride in the Park" was directed by Eduardo Sanchez and Gregg Hale (of The Blair Witch Project fame.) I enjoy this one for being a bit blackly funny.
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"Safe Haven", directed by Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Evans, is another one that I would watch as a longer film, and is definitely my favorite of the segments.
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"Slumber Party Alien Abduction", directed by Jason Eisener, is by far my least favorite segment, which makes it a little sad to me that it was the one that DID get turned into a feature film.
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V/H/S:Viral
This one sucked. Lol, I did discover that was not an unpopular opinion: it is by far the worst-reviewed of any of the franchise. But yeah, I did not like it. That was a bit of a bummer, because I did enjoy the first two, and particularly found segments out of both the first two films that really stuck with me. The third one? Nah.

The frame story this time is "Various Circles", directed by Marcel Sarmiento.
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Dante the Great, directed by Gregg Bishop was... kind of mediocre.
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Parallel Monsters, directed by Nacho Vigalondo was a more interesting idea, but it came across as a bit sillier than I think may have been intended.
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Bonestorm, directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Scott Moorhead is definitely my favorite of the segments, but that's a bit of a low bar this time around.
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As a whole, I think this one lacked the at least sort of cohesive feel that the other two did. As mentioned above, the larger scale frame story felt to me like it changed the tone of the series, and not in a good way.

Well that shit got long and kept getting longer.

I would recommend the first two films, on the strength of their best segments, if nothing else. I would not recommend the third, ha. Be advised that there is absolutely a lot of gore and nudity (including multiple instances of full-frontal female nudity), definitely sometimes falling into the “gratuitous” camp.

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As always, I keep feeling like I *almost* want to go back to reviewing horror stuff, but I know that I don't have the time to devote to it regularly... If I did devote the time, it would take away from something else.

But... Netflix's new version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is actually supposed to be a direct sequel to the original 1974 film, was... not great.

Holy hell, how does this franchise have NINE FILMS and FOUR SEPARATE CONTINUITIES? (This movie is the first new installment of the fourth branch.) The answer is that the rights to the franchise keep changing hands, and every new group that purchases those rights decides to make their own reboot/sequel series to it. But in practicality... I hate it.

I will say that this isn't a franchise I have a deep and abiding love for or anything. I definitely haven't seen all of the films, and I'd be hard pressed to tell you which ones I have, besides the original.

But boy was this one... mediocre.

Slashers definitely always have to sort of tread the line between "Oh no, I'm rooting for these poor victims to somehow make it, despite the fact that they're almost all going to die" and the sort of gleeful carnage of "I'm rooting for this horrible killer to murder almost all of these people." And honestly... I didn't feel either of those things very strongly.

I don't ask *all* my horror movies to be preachy or moralizing or anything... but it's definitely not a genre lacking in social commentary. And I can't say I really... enjoyed what it seemed to be saying?

It definitely seems to be aware of a lot of social issues, and kind of acknowledges them. One of our initial main characters is a black guy, who is understandably nervous about getting pulled over at random by a rural Texas sheriff. Another of the four mains is the survivor of a school shooting, and she's dealing with pretty clear PTSD.

But the plot, in terms of setting off the titular massacre, as well as the earlier pre-massacre conflict is... these young, racially diverse kids are pushing out the nice, (all white) folks who used to live in this now mostly-abandoned Texas town. The black guy literally attempts and fails to pull down a Confederate flag from one of the buildings. Yike.

That may very well be one of those Unintentional Unfortunate Implications things, but it felt sort of... gross, to me.

Another iffy bit - that the school shooting victim's arc is in part learning to overcome her PTSD fear of guns... by getting to be the one firing the gun. In a better movie that could have been an interesting arc, and she was the closest to being a character I kinda cared about, but it came across as a hint of maybe-unintentional "the solution to trauma from gun violence is more guns" or "you're either a victim or a perpetrator."

I am also not a fan of how it treated Sally. :/ (Don't fuck with one of the OG Final Girls, dammit.)

Also, I am all for wildly improbable kills and unlikely quantities of blood and all in a slasher film... but no one is taking a chainsaw through the gut and then getting up to fire parting shots at the villain a few minutes later.

Also also, how damn many times can a gun jam at a critical moment before it stops adding to any real sense of suspense or drama? If there is a line, this movie absolutely crossed it.

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I feel like, having also seen Scream (the OTHER same-title-as-the-first-one-but-actually-a-sequel-entry-in-a-horror-franchise that came out so far in 2022), it's hard not to compare them at least a little bit.

It doesn't improve how Texas Chainsaw Massacre comes across.

Scream, as a franchise, has always been about the meta. While I've definitely bitched before about things that utilize self-awareness in a way that feels self-conscious, in Scream, the characters being very aware of horror tropes and the way horror films play out is the whole point. And the newest incarnation dealt with that really well!

A good portion of the meta within the newest film was about dissatisfied, obsessive fans who believe they should be in control of the franchise they love. [Which doesn't feel that different from yet another rights owner deciding to create their own continuity for the franchise.]

One of the characters points out the rules of a good "requel", including the inclusion of legacy characters. [Like Sally, the only surviving character of the original 1974 Texas Chainsaw Massacre.]

One of the killers points out the necessity of killing off a legacy character, in order to show that this new version is serious business.

Comparing that meta list within Scream to how completely Texas Chainsaw Massacre ticked off those same boxes, yet without anything terribly interesting behind it, just sort of emphasizes how empty it felt.

I realize asking for a soulful, incisive entry into a what-it-says-on-the-tin slasher franchise is a losing prospect, but I really do like when movies feel like they have something to say. Texas Chainsaw Massacre kind of seemed not to really know what it was trying to say, and I didn't feel like much of a fan of what it did.

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Finished a book!

I finished reading Dark Rise by C.S. Pacat last night.

Solid 8/10, imo.

My feelings about it were pretty in line with the other reviews I've seen, and it's hard to talk about the things I really liked without spoilers!

I think the book definitely hit its stride (and grabbed my interest) more strongly in the second half than in the first. The first half is very much devoted to setting up the characters and the conflict. It's necessary work, because I don't think the second half (and the ending, especially) would work without that groundwork... It never really bored me, but parts of it were a little slow. A few parts maybe got a little repetitive, though not enough to have stuck with me. I just remember a few times thinking "okay, yeah, I remember this, let's move on!"

The second half *also* I think showed off what I think of as the author's strengths (and what I most enjoyed about her previous work), where different characters know different things and are also hiding different things. The tension that provides for dialogue and toward the reader is really excellent.

I can absolutely see what the author intended and has spoken about with why she wrote it - the desire to subvert the very specific kind of classic pastoral English fantasy series that a lot of us grew up with.

It's far from the first "subverting classic fantasy tropes" work that I've read, but this one let the subversions unfold in a way that I really enjoyed. It's definitely not as shallow a subversion as "gasp, the heroes are actually kind of jerks!" or "but the bad guys are just misunderstood underdogs."

And the very last few pages provided an emotional gutpunch (in a mingled good and bad and complicated way). I want very much to see where it goes from here!

(C.S. Pacat's previous trilogy has what I consider one of the best book twos I've ever read. Book two of a trilogy is often the most difficult one as a reader, imo. The first book sets up the world and the arc story, the third book gets the big climax and resolution... but book two is usually the one that feels filler-y, even if I enjoy the story. But Prince's Gambit was the strongest second book I think I've ever read. So I have hopes for whatever comes after Dark Rise.)

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I think I'm giving up on writing a truly in-depth review, so I'm just sharing a quicker bit:

River of Teeth was a ton of fun to read! The thing that I keep saying about it is that they was absolute brain candy, and that that is not a complaint!

The writing style was very fast-paced and cinematic, so the whole thing really felt like watching a movie in my head. It has a bit of an action-movie vibe, but with a lot of the typical action/adventure archetypes and tropes skewed into tropes that appeal specifically to me, haha. It reminded me a little bit of reading id-fic: the kind of fic where someone just crams all of their favorite tropes and character types into one work, because why not? It certainly hits on a lot of my faves: characters with grey morality, interesting alternate history setting, ~revenge~, the big bad is a corrupt businessman, and Almost Everyone is Queer. (Heck, there’s even a very specific “there was only one bed” scene.)

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The basic plot of River of Teeth:
The story is set in an alternate 1890s United States in which hippos were previously imported into the American south to be a farmed meat source. The Mississippi River has been dammed to control the flow of water into The Harriet – a specific area set aside for the hippos from the dam to The Gate, which keeps them from going into the Gulf of Mexico.

Unfortunately, some things went wrong. There was an economic crash (The Hippo Bust of 1859), and since, many hippos have roamed wild on the Harriet. These dangerous ferals will eat just about anything, including people, which has made the entire area extraordinarily dangerous.

Our main character, Winslow Houndstooth, has been hired by the US Government to get the ferals out of The Harriet, freeing up the Mississippi as a viable trade route again.

He hires on a crew to help him with this task:
Regina “Archie” Archembault, a professional grifter that he’s worked with before.
Hero, an expert in both poisons and demolitions, though supposedly retired.
Adelia Reyes, a well-known assassin.
Cal Hotchkiss, a hopper (essentially a hippo cowboy) with whom he has a complicated and not-great history.

But Houndstooth has a different motive in mind: revenge against the person he holds responsible for the destruction of his ranch years before.

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Just about everyone is queer (and whether that's a thing you like in a story or not may impact how enjoyable you find the books.) The MC (Winslow Houndstooth, who has the coolest name ever) is bi; Hero, his love interest, is nonbinary; Archie is revealed later in the book to be genderfluid; Adelia is a lesbian; Cal is the token cishet.
I enjoyed it, because I like the kind of big escapist action/adventure, and getting to have it be about a group that looks a lot more like the people I surround myself with is fun. The author is also nonbinary!

I had a few mild complaints in the book:
There were a few moments in which realism was sacrificed for "rule of cool", and some could have been done without, but that's also part of the genre.
I had trouble with the similarity between some of the names: Archie and Adelia, plus Hero's hippo is named Abigail. Two of the other hippos belonging to the team are Ruby and Rosa. It was just a lot to keep track of.
Some of the character developments/relationships would have been more impactful with a longer book and more time spent on them, but honestly "I just wish it was longer" isn't much of a complaint.
One slightly bigger one: there was a plot thing, which I thought was playing out one way... and it did... but that was supposed to be a twist? Still not the worst, just threw me a bit.

The sequel, Taste of Marrow picks up right after the first book leaves off, and I would say is absolutely worth reading if you enjoy the first book (especially as there are a few threads that are left hanging.) While River of Teeth does have a complete arc, Taste of Marrow concludes the rest of the plot quite well.

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I liked this episode a little more than the first one.

I was aiming for (and started doing) a Monday/Thursday schedule for posting, but I think Tuesday/Friday may be more doable for me. We go out on Sunday and Wednesday nights, and generally I'm not up early enough the following mornings to get a post posted.

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