Tag film

Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)

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The Fantastic 4 First Steps (2025)

I had planned to see this in the theater, and my regular movie watching partner was on board, but life got in the way, films don’t stick around the the theater as long as they used and the second run cinemas are almost all gone, which is a shame because as gorgeous as the 4K HDR copy I watched was, some movies just benefit from seeing it on a huge screen with immersive sound. It makes the experience more Amazing, more Incredible, more… well you get the point.

I loved the movie. There have been many attempts at bringing Marvel’s first family to the big screen with varying degrees of success and I think a lot of the failures were due to the people behind the projects not understanding the characters and turning it into a generic action movie. This time, they got it. I don’t know if it’s all down to Kevin Feige, the director Matt Shakman, the writers or having the right combination of all of them, but everyone was making all the right decisions when it came to this project.

Let’s start with the overall look and feel. The retro-futuristic styling isn’t just something I personally love, but it fits these characters and their early years perfectly. Toning down the dumb blonde hothead Johnny Storm other filmmakers gravitated to and making him a real member of a scientific team was great and makes the character more interesting and useful. Setting Sue as the team leader is… the way it is the comics. It’s only misogyny and a failure to learn about the characters that put Reed at the center of previous versions. As in the comics the Mister Fantastic here is a genius, but too easily distracted by scientific puzzles.

Confession time, after watching Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness I was really looking forward to John Krasinski as Reed Richards, he seemed perfect and I could not see Pedro Pascal in the role when the official casting decisions were announced, but I was wrong. There’s a reason he keeps getting roles as a father, and he’s shown us why again here. He was great and they even managed to make his powers not look goofy. Stretchy powers are hard to translate into a live action setting without looking cartoony, and I’m sure that was the reason the people on Ms, Marvel changed her power set, but the Netflix live action version of One Piece showed it could be done and the folks at Marvel appear to have learned from that.

Ebon Moss-Bachrach was an interesting choice for Ben Grimm. I only knew him as the bombastic Richie on The Bear, but he does the quiet solid strength needed for The Thing equally as well. I have only two quibbles about the movie though and the first involves him. It’s not a complaint, really, I thought his performance was excellent, but it’s his voice, it was just… his voice and I felt it should have been deeper, stronger somehow, more gravelly, no pun intended (okay maybe a little intended). I have to compare it to the performances of Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel in Guardians. I cannot imagine ANYONE topping Bradley’s Rocket, who, in my opinion, stole the show in all three films, but if his name hadn’t been in the credits, I wouldn’t have known it was him. There’s no mistaking Ebon’s voice for anyone but him though. Maybe he tried different versions that just didn’t work, or maybe the director just always envisioned him sounding like that from the start, I don’t know, I just feel like it didn’t project the strength of a man made of solid stone to me.

My second quibble is Natasha Lyonne, when her character of Rachel was introduced, I did a double take, because I didn’t realize it was her at first, but I loved her, it was a very different character compared to what she’s been playing recently and I was looking forward seeing what would happen between her and Ben, but nothing did happen, it felt like that part of the movie might have gotten cut. Hopefully we see more of her in the next one.

They did such a good job with this movie, they even made Galactus work, and the visuals are beautiful. Franklin had that slightly unnatural look that CGI humans often have, and I think that’s why they had him being held by The Thing so often, but aside from that, the effects people deserve a lot of praise.

I don’t want to leave out Juila Garner’s Silver Surfer. Even through the CGI, you can see the emotional changes she goes through in the film and that’s all down to the actor and the animators, and I truly hope this isn’t the last we see of her.

This is one I want to add to my collection, I think it works for comic books fans, Marvel fans and even casual sci-fi fans.

Excelsior!

Candyman (1992)

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Night 29 of 31 Nights of Horror

Candyman (1992)

Clive Barker neither wrote, nor directed this film, but it is based on one of his short stories from the Books of Blood collection (Volume 5, “The Forbidden” if you want to read it yourself). Bernard Rose is both writer and director, and the movie stars Tony Todd and Virginia Madsen.

So the story starts out amazing. It is moody, atmospheric, lots of benign jump scares to get your heart going. They set up the characters and their relationships, It’s a cool premise, with two PhD candidates working on their theses about urban legends, when they hear the tale of “Candyman” and begin investigating it. Not believing it to be real, they naturally perform the ritual to summon him. Well, Virgina Madsen’s Helen does. Her colleague Bernadette (played by Kasi Lemmons) only says his name four of the required five times, while standing in front of the mirror and of course, nothing happens… or does it.

*SPOILER ZONE*

So this for me is where the movie takes a turn and wastes potential for a really amazing story. Helen is later walking through a parking garage and hears a voice calling her name. She turns around and sees the silhouette of someone who looks like Candyman, then she passes out. When she wakes up, she’s in a bathroom that’s not hers, she’s covered in blood and there’s a woman screaming on the other side of the door. So of course, Helen gets arrested for murdering a dog and child abduction (because the baby from the apartment is missing). This sets up a fantastic premise, they could have made this a much better horror mystery. Was Helen framed by the gang member she identified to the police earlier? Did the spirit of Candyman do it? Was it really Helen, who did it while she had blacked out? Was she possessed? That’s a great story, but it doesn’t last long.

Bernadette is killed in Helen’s apartment and Helen is taken to a psychiatric hospital. So at this point, the criminal framing her theory is out the window, but it might still be Helen who’s the real killer. Nope, we are quickly disabused of that notion when her psychiatrist is killed, while she’s strapped to a chair in front of him. It’s impossible for her to have done the deed. So they took what could have been a fantastically told mystery and turned it into a standard supernatural killer movie.

Now, I will say, Tony Todd is amazing. The man has a presence and charisma that carry this movie. I firmly believe it would not have been as successful a franchise without him, because the “lore” of Candyman makes no sense.

First, why is he called Candyman? The legend is about a black artist who is murdered for falling in love with and getting pregnant a wealthy white woman, and is then mutilated and murdered by hired thugs. Where’s the candy? And why would the murderers cut off his hand and attach a hook to it, only to then kill him with bees (random) and burn the body? The whole thing SOUNDS made up, like a tale that is exaggerated and built upon by different tellers over generations, which many urban legends are, and that’s an idea worth exploring. It could have been about how legends are exploited by people to control others (like the gang leader) or how the stories can inspire people consciously or unconsciously to mimic them (Helen is the killer all along), instead we have a ghost who can do almost anything, has a hook for a hand and is covered in bees because it looks cool.

I may be overly harsh with this, but I think it’s because they took what could have been a psychological horror masterpiece and turned it into a standard supernatural slasher flick that is saved from obscurity only by Virginia Madsen and the aura of Tony Todd. I don’t know anything about the films production, but the feeling I get, and it is just a feeling, is that the studio saw the first half of the film and said, “Naw, we need more blood and more Candyman. Oh, and add in a lot of bees. Bees are scary.”

From Hell (2001)

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Night 23 of 31 Nights of Horror

From Hell (2001)

Remember how I said Stephen King didn’t like Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining? Yeah, that’s mild compared to how Allan Moore feels about ALL of the movies based on his works. Given how often people have taken his ideas and characters and stripped all the meaning out of his graphic novels, I’m not surprised by his reaction, and From Hell is no exception, but it is a really good Jack The Ripper story.

This is probably the most beautiful serial killer movie I’ve ever watched, and I mean beautiful in the filthiest way. This film looks, sounds and feels exactly the way I imagine London’s East End did in 1888. It’s obvious how much time and care went into the costuming, set design and all the extras to make Whitechapel look like the densely populated slum it was. It all makes the city look alive and real, but do NOT mistake this tale for historical re-telling of the world most famous serial killer.

This is more of a Hollywood telling of a conspiracy theory than a serious attempt to portray the facts of the killings. A lot is omitted and many ‘facts’ are fabricated entirely. It’s a good story, and is entertaining, but it probably pissed off serious true crime aficionados almost as much as it did Moore. I’m not sure how I feel about that, personally. On the one hand, it’s a movie, it should be looked at purely as fiction, but when it’s told so well, you KNOW there is a significant percentage of the population that is going to believe everything in it is true, like so many people who’s beliefs about the Kennedy assassination were informed entirely by the Oliver Stone movie.

The acting is great. Johnny Depp, Heather Graham, Robbie Coltrane (I always love when he’s in a movie and will not watch anything HP related if he isn’t playing Hagrid), Ian Richardson, Sir Ian Holm (there are scenes were you can see the foreshadowing of a ring influenced Bilbo at the end), the cast is absolutely stacked and everyone does a great job, but Heather Graham is seriously mis-cast. Don’t get me wrong, she did a great job, and I think she’s a wonderful actress, she just didn’t fit the setting and the character. I know why they cast her, when they decided to fabricate a love story between Inspector Abberline and Mary Kelly, they needed an actor as beautiful as Johnny Depp to pair him with, it’s just that she doesn’t blend in with the other victims, or even the city itself. I’ll let the actual Brits comment on how convincing her and Depp’s accents are.

As a movie, I loved it. As someone deeply interested in the Ripper murders, there are more accurate tellings out there. I’m on a Johnny Depp kick, should I watch Sleepy Hollow next? Probably not, I don’t remember enjoying it. Maybe Sweeney Todd? Does a movie from 2007 fit within the time-frame of the challenge? Oh wait, I know the perfect movie…

Scanners (1981)

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Night 17 of 31 Nights of Horror

Scanners (1981)

For the longest time, I thought this was a Stephen King story. There’s just something about it that made me associate it with him. Probably the similarity between the “The Shop” and the company in Scanners that was producing a drug that gave people mental abilities. That’s not a spoiler by the way, it’s pretty much explained right at the beginning.

This movie is all David Cronenberg though, well, Cronenberg inspired by William S. Burroughs. It’s not as strange as Naked Lunch or eXistenZ and I’m not really sure why it’s considered a horror. The movie is more unsettling than it is scary, but it’s still really good.

It has been a long time since I‘ve watched Scanners and I had forgotten most of it, except the imagery of the people using their powers. I think that’s the thing about David Cronenberg’s movies, the vivid mental pictures that get burned into your memory and haunt you.

I’ve been a comic book nerd most of my life and this film is one of the few times I can recall mental telepathy being shown as an almost physical act, both the scanner and victims emote and struggle. It’s also not a passive thing, it’s an act they have to wilfully engage, which I guess is why two gunmen are able to get the drop on a literal room full of psychics.

Michael Ironside takes a lot of the credit for this movie staying with me for so long. His performance is fantastic. Actually, I’m trying to think of a movie with him in it that I didn’t enjoy and am coming up blank. There probably is one or two, nobody has a perfect track record of picking their projects, but I think it says a lot about the man’s talent and charisma that I only remember the good ones.

It’s not a perfect movie by any stretch, I feel Cronenberg is a lot like early William Gibson in not knowing how computers work and just making things up because it sounds good. I’ve worked in telecom for thirty years and I can guarantee, that even with psychic powers, there is no way a pay phone will explode like that unless you pack it with C4.

For an older movie, the effects hold up really well. The story has some pretty big holes if you start thinking about it, so it’s best not to get too analytical and just enjoy the ride.

Possession (1981)

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Night 16 of 31 Nights of Horror

Possession (1981)

In 52 years, I have watched a lot of movies. Some of them have been very bizarre. I’ve seen The Forbidden Zone, A Clockwork Orange, Killer Klownz from Outer Space and most everything David Cronenberg has directed. Possession is right up there as one of the weirdest movies I’ve ever watched.

The people in this movie act weird, they stand too close, they don’t look at each other when they talk, they flail against the walls, they say the most bizarre stuff that nobody else in the scene reacts to, their characters are inconsistent from one scene to the next and I’ve watched Sam Neil sit in a chair in plenty of other movies, so I know he can do it without looking so manic, so this all must be intentional on the part of the director.

It has to be an art style I’m unfamiliar with. A film student could probably tell us it’s part of the neo-brutalist-hyper-realism school or something, but it just confused the hell out of me. Judging from the high ratings on almost every platform, 74% on The Movie Database, 7.2 on IMDB, 85% on Rotten Tomatoes, I’m one of the few viewers who didn’t understand it.

The blurb for this movie describes it like this “A woman starts exhibiting increasingly disturbing behavior after asking her husband for a divorce. Suspicions of infidelity soon give way to something much more sinister.” So you’re probably thinking what I was. She’s possessed. It’s going to be a film about demonic possession (I mean it’s in the title, right?) that sounds cool. No. That’s not what it’s about at all. I’m still not sure what it WAS about. The closest I can come is that it is an allegory for the possessiveness we feel towards people we are in a relationship with. Maybe. I don’t know, I’ve been thinking about it most of the night and I’m still baffled by what I watched.

I just spent about ten minutes trying to explain to my wife all the strange and incomprehensible weirdness that is Possession, but I’m not going to do that here. Why? Because despite everything I’ve said so far, I didn’t hate this movie. I’m not going to say I liked it, or that I’ll watch it again, but I also don’t want to deprive anyone else of the experience of watching it unspoiled. It is bizarre and hideous in a fashion that makes you unable to look away.

The Howling (1981)

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Night 13 of 31 Nights of Horror

The Howling (1981)

A product of the Roger Corman factory that produced incredibly successful directors, Joe Dante has made some of my most loved movies. Gremlins, Innerspace, Explorers and the underrated Tom Hanks masterpiece, The Burbs. Until now though, I had never watched The Howling.

I don’t think it’s giving away anything to say this is a werewolf film. I mean, the title is The Howling and just look at that poster. What’s cool about this movie is that it starts off making you think it’s about one thing, but transforms (like a werewolf, get it?) as it goes into being something else. Bottom line is I enjoyed The Howling, but I can’t discuss it more without spoiling things sooooo.

SPOILERS BELOW

Things I loved. Reporters. A lot of monster movies are about people in their teens and early twenties who inadvertently wind up victims of atrocities no one would ever believe. The main characters in The Howling are journalists who actively seek out the facts. That was a nice change.

I also like that it begins leading you to believe the story is about a werewolf serial killer, when it was more about a serial killer who just happens to be a werewolf, and part of a larger community of wolves.

My biggest complaint about the film is that I wish it had been longer, as I have a lot of questions that either weren’t answered, or maybe I just didn’t understand. The killer, for instance. How did the community feel about him? Was he an anomaly? Were they upset that he drew so much scrutiny down on them? His actions are never really discussed. You get a small glimpse that there is a schism developing between the traditionalists and “The Doctor’s” way of thinking, but it’s very brief and we aren’t shown much of their way of life. Why did the old man want to throw himself on the fire? Was he lamenting the loss of their traditional way of life? Was it dementia? Was he just a drunk who seeks attention by doing this all the time? Why did Patrick Macnee’s character bring Karen and Bill there in the first place? Was it to convert them, because they later plan to just kill Karen and make it look like an accident. I know that theatres didn’t like long movies back then, but I would have loved another thirty minutes to really flesh out the wolves and their story.

The special effects were good, but… An American Werewolf in London came out that same year and their werewolf transformation scene was mind blowing in comparison.

The ending was fantastic. I know I put a spoiler warning up already, but if you really haven’t seen the movie yet… no, you know what, I was going to tell you to stop reading and instead I’m just going to end the review. Go watch the movie.

The Evil Dead (1981)

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Night 10 of 31 Nights of Horror

The Evil Dead (1981)

It’s interesting to me how many huge directors got their start in horror films. James Cameron’s first was Piranha Part Two, Peter Jackson made Bad Taste, Dead Alive and Meet the Feebles (while that one’s not strictly a horror, it’s got the same feel) Guillermo del Toro is still making horror movies, even after winning three Academy Awards for The Shape of Water and before resurrecting Spider-man from obscurity, Sam Raimi wrote and directed The Evil Dead, which spawned six feature films and a tv series.

I’ll admit, for a franchise that has become so iconic over the years, I’ve never watched one of the movies all the way through. I’d catch it when it was on tv occasionally, but only in bits and pieces, so this was my first experience of seeing it from start to finish.

It works. Despite the tiny cast of unknowns with little to no acting experience, the minuscule budget, the (how do I say this generously uh, inexpert?) makeup and almost non existent visual continuity, the movie just works.

The film is nowhere near perfect. The face makeup is fine, but instead of body paint and prosthetics on the hands, it looks like they went with what seem to be rubber gloves that actually look like they came from a Halloween store. They even rip at one point with the actors fingers poking through. A movie with a larger budget would have a continuity coordinator. Evil Dead has actors drowning in blood in one scene and then the camera moves and their faces are suddenly clean. Holes in doors become spots of dark paint in wide shots and change shape depending on which side of the door we are looking at, but it just doesn’t matter. Once the action starts, it doesn’t let up until the credits roll.

I think the camera work is impressive. Not the camera equipment itself, it’s obvious there was no room in the budget for a steadicam, as the shaking at one point was almost enough to give me motion sickness, I’m talking about the way shots are framed and the cameras moved. When I listened to the directors commentary on Mallrats, it was pretty clear that critic’s complaints about the static camera shots in Clerks bothered Kevin Smith a lot. No-one can make those claims of Evil Dead. The camera almost never stays in one place, it is dynamic and constantly moving in interesting and unusual ways. Some don’t work, but it is never boring.

Another thing that stands out in my mind is the tone of the film. It’s almost the inverse of what you expect in this genre. So, most movies of this type will start out light and comedic and then grow darker and more menacing as people start dying. Raimi does almost the opposite here. It starts off fairly sombre and gets suspenseful and terrifying early, but then as the violence increases, it grows wilder, crazier and wackier until almost everything is drenched in blood and gore. Sooooo much blood. If I actually believed they put a lot of thought into it, I’d say they wanted to mirror Ashe’s descent into madness visually, but it’s probably just coincidence.

One more way this movie stands out is the departure from the ‘silent killer’ standard. With the exception of Freddy, most well known horror monsters like Jason, Micheal and the others make almost no noise, let alone talk. The demons in Evil Dead almost never shut up. When Linda gets possessed, she laughs more than The Joker and that makes it almost more disturbing.

I think I’ll watch the sequel tonight, if for no other reason than because I’m curious to see how Raimi and Tapert’s film-making evolved in the seven years between them, and given a larger budget. Hopefully the lighting is more natural because everything in this one was unnaturally bright. I mean, it’s good that we can see everything well, but a cabin in the woods shouldn’t look like it’s illuminated by flood lights from a football stadium.

April Fool’s Day (1986)

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Night 8 of 31 Nights of Horror

April Fool's Day (1986)

Now THAT was a horror movie worth watching. In my quest to find a movie I only half remember from my childhood, I took to Reddit because Google was no help. The first suggestion I was offered was April Fool’s Day, another box I passed by in the video store but had never watched myself and honestly, can’t remember anyone renting, which is a shame because it’s great.

This movie illustrates exactly what my problems with Night of the Demons were. Both films were about a small group of friends who get together in a remote location when bodies start dropping, but April Fools Day does it so much better.

First off, the casting, you can tell right away that these are more established actors. Amy Steel had been in about 14 other productions before this, including Friday the 13th Part 2, Ken Olandt had done a pile of TV shows and one of my brother’s favourite films Summer School and Tom Wilson will probably be called Biff until the day he dies. All that experience shows. The performances are natural and believable. A polished script helps a lot too. The characters, their backstories, their relationships, all are laid out well in the first half of the story, without slowing it down or boring you. The premise aids here as well. They don’t need to fill the time with murders to keep your heart rate up, because filmmakers pepper the beginning of the movie with April Fools trick to surprise you, and I have to admit, as corny as some of them are, they made me jump and brought a smile to my face. I even laughed at the whoopee cushion.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I was just in the right mood for this movie, or maybe it’s that it was the polar opposite in quality to the film I’d watched the night before, but I’m surprised this one doesn’t get talked about more. Even when I was looking it up on IMDB, I had to scroll to the next page to find it, in spite of the fact that the average rating is much higher than most of the movies I’ve watched so far this month. There isn’t a lot of gore or blood, so it should be easier to edit for broadcast (maybe trim down the shots with the severed heads).

Most of the holiday-as-a-horror-title movies that tried to ride Halloween’s coat tails are pretty lame, but this and maybe Black Christmas are instances where it works. Also the recent Thanksgiving from Eli Roth was a lot of fun.

I was unable to find anywhere you can stream this for free without a subscription, but I feel this one is well worth the rental price.

Sleepaway Camp II (1988)

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Night 2 of 31 Nights of Horror

Sleepaway Camp 2 : Unhappy Campers (1988)

Messy. While watching this movie, my first reaction was ‘disappointing’, but after thinking on it for some time, I think messy is a better description.

This article was difficult to start, my thoughts are kind of all over the place, but so is this movie. I think it lacked focus, it COULD have gone in a bunch of different directions, but didn’t. As a horror movie, it wasn’t very scary, there was no suspense, no shock, as a slasher movie, there was very little blood or gore and the kills were mostly unimaginative. There were times when I thought it was going to be a parody of ’80s horror movies, but it never quite seemed to lean fully in that direction either, and it wasn’t funny. I would have said it felt rushed or underfunded, if there hadn’t been a 5 year gap between the original film and this one and the budget weren’t almost double.

The absolute biggest problem, in my opinion, is on the audio side. I forget if it was in an interview, an article or director’s commentary, but I remember learning that the original Halloween movie by John Carpenter tested very poorly with audiences until he went back and added that now iconic musical score. Sleepaway Camp II proves just how important the soundscape is to the feel of a movie, because it doesn’t have one. There are a few rock songs peppered around the place, but the majority of the 80 minute runtime is devoid of atmosphere, except for one solitary chase scene towards the end that has a low key, almost too quiet background track that doesn’t add much to the suspense. Remember how I liked the first movie because it felt like a real living camp? That’s gone. This one has a good number of extras and background people (though not as many as the first) but you don’t hear them. In crowd scenes, you don’t have that hum of human activity that would naturally be present. You hear bugs though. All of the forest and nighttime scenes had normal, natural environmental noise, but anything with people didn’t.

Fixing all that would have helped with the feel of the movie, but that probably would have only elevated it to mediocre. To be at least a more memorable experience, all they needed to do was pick a lane and stick to it. Since they weren’t going for mystery (they show who the killer is within the first five minutes) they could have focused on Angela’s backstory, shown her experiences after the first film, why she was obsessed enough with camp to murder anyone she thought didn’t belong. They could have made one of the campers or other counsellors the lead and done a Columbo style story where the audiences know who the perp is, but the protagonist slowly pieces the clues together, or they could have really set themselves apart from the other movies of the time by doing a full send-up of the kings of this genre. When Angela is walking around the cabin trying to figure out the best thing to murder Demi with, I thought that’s where they were going, but as a comedy, the jokes just didn’t land.

I paid attention to the credits. There was a stunt coordinator, but no stunt performers. They took mostly inexperienced actors and had them do their own stunts and it shows. The action is boring, the single chase scene of the film is at low speed and you even have a fall that literally just cuts from the actress stepping off a rock to her lying on the ground.

This part may just be me nitpicking, but the ages of the “campers” skewed way too high. In the first movie a lot of the cast were believable as teen summer camp attendees. If you need adult actors because you’ve decided to crank the nudity dial up to eleven, then at least make them counsellors. Sorry, I’m not buying these 18-20 somethings as kids spending their holidays there because their parents made them.

Do I need to talk about the ending? There wasn’t one, the movie just… ends. Was that a cliffhanger? Are they forcing me to watch the third movie? No, I’m not going to and they can’t make me. If you want to, then be my guest, this movie, the first and the third are all available to stream for free with ads on Tubi, or without if you have an Amazon Prime sub.

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

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Night 1 of 31 Nights of Horror

When I worked at the video store (after walking 40 miles uphill in the snow to get there, fighting off dinosaurs all the way) I remember passing by the box for this movie in the horror section a lot. I dismissed it as a cheap knock off trying to cash in on the success of Friday the 13th. I shouldn’t have. It’s better than I thought it would be.

Like the first movie in the franchise that made Jason more famous than a Golden Fleece could, Sleepaway Camp is a mystery/horror. The antagonist is not known, the murders are all shown in shadow, off camera or from the killers point of view, so you don’t find out who’s doing it until the end and there is more suspense than gore. Unlike Friday the 13th, this felt like a real camp. There are a lot of extras of all ages giving the camp itself a life that Crystal Lake didn’t have.

The acting is a little uneven, some performers are great, others over the top. Side note, Felissa Rose’s blank stare is fantastic. Given that their budget was $200,000 LESS than Friday’s, It’s a surprisingly well made film and the handful of makeup shots were excellent, except for that cops moustache, it looks super fake in high definition. Hats off to Ed French who eventually went on to get an Oscar nomination for his work on Star Trek VI.

If you want to watch the movie yourself before being spoiled, it is (at the moment) streaming for free (in Canada at least) on Tubi, or commercial free if you subscribe to Amazon Prime

SPOILERS BELOW

I watched an excellent documentary a few years ago about the history and representation of trans people in film and television called Disclosure. One of the things that stuck with me was when they pointed out how often being trans was used as a twist when exposing the villain, like in Ace Ventura or Soap Dish, so with the reveal at the end of Angela being the killer and actually a boy… it seems like another example of a trans character being used as a “shocking twist!”, except Angela isn’t trans, he’s Peter, forced to live as “Angela” by a batshit crazy aunt. You could say that being forced to present as a gender that is not who you really are is unfortunately a too common experience for trans people, but it doesn’t turn them into serial killers.

I guess you can tell, I’m not a fan of the ending and not just for the villain-is-a-trans-person-shock-twist but what was with that weird banshee scream at the end? And did they rip that kids head off? I didn’t see any weapons, so that’s what it looked like. All the other kills were done with mundane items, but suddenly the killer (a young teen) is strong enough to decapitate someone with their bare hands? And then it just ends?

Maybe the sequel explains things a little better. I’ll find out tomorrow.