The Black Phone (2021)

I can't keep up with all the new horror movies coming out these days - I just don't watch 'em like I used to. But I had a spontaneous opportunity to take a couple teenagers to see Black Phone 2, and so I wanted to watch the first movie first. My patience for the all-too common low effort formula of cheap jump scares punctuated by an audio crescendo (yawn) has seriously flat-lined. Life's too short to waste time watching those kinds of movies. But that's why I loved The Black Phone so much. This is how you do horror - mystery, tension, characters you care about, just the right amount of straight-faced humor, with a creepy premise that touches on some flavor of unsettling horror (pick your poison), in a movie where the bottom line isn't getting girls to jump into their dates' arms while spilling popcorn all over the floor. The pacing was excellent. The soundtrack was excellent. I loved the commitment to the 1970s setting. The characters were interesting. The kids were great. Ethan Hawke was fantastic as the antagonist. Figuring out what was going on with the black phone, and then watching to find out if the protagonist would find a way to escape made the movie enjoyable, without any need for cheap theatrics. It pays when creators take the horror genre seriously, and not treat it as schlock designed to turn a quick buck. I applaud the filmmakers who made The Black Phone, and I look forward to seeing the sequel.

Split (2016) & Glass (2019)

I remember being hesitant to see this movie when it came out. Not because of the controversial reputation of its director (M. Night Shyamalan has had some hits and some misses, but I respect his talent and creativity), but because dissociative identity disorder is such a tricky subject, that hasn't had the best representation in the past. But here, James McAvoy sells it (keeping in mind that this is fiction, not a psychological documentary). And Anya Taylor-Joy is radiant as always.

I really liked how M. Night effectively turned what is, on its surface, a horror movie about three girls who are abducted by a maniac with a split personality into (ending spoilers!) an origin story for a new supervillain in the Unbreakable universe. I thought that was really clever. The only thing I could have done without is the lazy molestation back story. But other than that, I enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to watching Glass next.

---

I'm not the biggest fan of conventional superhero movies. It makes me sound like a hipster, but the MCU doesn't thrill me - and that was true even before they began to bore the public with a never-ending stream of cookie-cutter blockbusters. I prefer movies that deconstruct the concept of superheros. I liked Kick-Ass, and I liked The Watchmen. It wasn't, "what would a world with superheros be like", it was "what would superheros be like in the real world we inhabit?" I think that's why Batman is my favorite conventional superhero - he doesn't even have superpowers, just a lot of money. Well, that and the gothic atmosphere. But that's what I liked about Unbreakable. What if a real person, in the real world, found out he was indestructible?

Split was good because it functioned well as a horror movie, while also expanding the universe of Unbreakable by adding a crucial new element. Going into Glass, I was hoping to see what M. Night Shyamalan's take on a "conventional" superhero movie would look like. Instead, it spends entirely too much time trying to convince us (itself?) that these superheroes/villains are just delusional. I mean, it's an interesting concept - one of my favorite episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was the controversial one that successfully argued the posibillity that Buffy was a mental patient and everything was going on in her head. I suppose it could have made for an interesting movie if I wasn't hoping for something different.

Knowing that it's almost certainly part of M. Night's M.O. to bait and switch the audience prevents you from committing to the conceit (it's not one of his more successful deceptions). At this point in the trilogy, I've already signed on to these characters being actual superheros - let them loose! For a filmmaker who has made unpredictability his signature, perhaps the biggest twist of all would have been to do something conventional for a change. And that's what I wanted to see. But, even if I didn't love it, I'll still give M. Night credit for trying to be original. When you chew somebody up and spit them out just for going out on a limb and falling, it discourages them from daring to do it again. And that leads to an industry that runs on stale predictability.

13/14 Cameras (2015/2018)

I noticed a movie titled 14 Cameras on Netflix, and I thought the voyeuristic premise sounded interesting. Luckily, I did my research first, and found out that it's actually a sequel to an earlier movie titled 13 Cameras, also available on Netflix. So I watched them both, in order, on two separate nights.

Preying on the fear cultivated by a growing spy cam industry, both of these movies focus on a particular slumlord who likes to outfit the properties he rents with lots of hidden cameras - for purposes that start out perverted, and quickly escalate to much worse. As someone who spends time defending voyeurism as a sexual fetish, I was at first very frustrated with these films. Not because they depict voyeurism as the appetizer to kidnapping and even murder (although perhaps that should frustrate me more), because I guess I'm used to that.

Rather, I thought the portrayal of the slumlord was so ridiculously over-the-top, that it didn't even have a hint of verisimilitude. Compared to, for example, a documentary I recently watched on Netflix (simply titled Voyeur) about a guy who built a motel specifically designed to enable spying on its inhabitants (whose first name curiously matches the villain in 13/14 Cameras). Sure, this guy's enterprise was morally dubious, but I consider him to be a sympathetic person (and, true to the voyeur's code, he never physically assaulted anyone, let alone anything worse than that).

The slumlord in these two movies, however, is a different story altogether. Played to devastating effect by a man named Neville Archambault (comparisons to the slimy worm at the center of The Human Centipede II are apt, in the sense that you can't fathom how the casting department managed to dredge up such a revolting example of humanity), his look and (apparently) smell inspire one renter in the first movie to apply such colorful phrases as "dirty diapers" and "spoiled mayonnaise" to describe him. Meanwhile, he can barely string a full sentence together, leaving you to wonder how somebody so disgusting, and so socially inept, could possibly run a successful business, renting properties out to more or less normal people.

And then when he sits in front of his 13 or 14 monitors unblinking (wearing his glasses perpetually the way a state trooper wears his hat), with his mouth hanging open, you have to ask yourself, does this guy not know about the treasure trove that is internet pornography, that he has to go to such trouble, putting himself at great personal risk for relatively limited gains? By the end of the second movie, though, I began to realize that the creators aren't taking him completely seriously, and there is a little bit of [dark] humor to his character. So as a creation of pure fiction, designed precisely to be so outrageous, I have to concede that it is kind of interesting to watch him in action.

Now, I'm not going to say these two movies are anything other than the cheap horror smut the premise makes them out to be, but if that's the kind of bad movie you like to watch, you could do a lot worse. Considering the subject matter, these movies actually don't go too far with the explicit violence, and there's actually very little sexuality (mostly implied - to wit, I can't even say for certain that this guy rapes his victims; he's so developmentally stunted, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that he doesn't actually know what to do with his...erm, equipment) - especially compared to the waste-of-celluloid that was The Human Centipede.

As for the other characters in these movies - a dysfunctional young married couple in the first one, and a vacationing family with three [twenty-something] teenagers in the second one - nobody's going to be winning any awards for acting (or likability, for that matter), but they do an adequate job of creating some unfolding drama to distract from the central theme of voyeurism, even if it's nearly always present in the form of a multi-view hidden camera perspective (kind of like Paranormal Activity without the paranormal activity), accented by heavy breathing.

There's a point in the second movie where the subject of the dark web comes up - when the slumlord starts live streaming his feed, and a group of bottom feeders spontaneously start bidding on one of the girls (the slumlord's unconvincing response: "not for sale"). This isn't the movie to explore the ramifications of that kind of behavior (and how likely it really is), but I appreciate a movie that's willing to go there without getting super preachy about it. This is horror, after all, and a total work of fiction. And as long as you're viewing it as such, you just might be able to get some twisted entertainment out of it.

The X-Files - S8:E5 "Invocation"

[ S8:E4 "Roadrunners" <<< Season 8 >>> S8:E6 "Redrum" ]

File this one under "creepy kid cases", like season 2's The Calusari, which also opened on a carnival. But this episode plays out more like a second pass of season 4's Paper Hearts. Either way, this show is having the feeling of classic X-Files lately, the likes of which we haven't seen this consistently in years, Mulder be damned. In this one, a little boy vanishes into thin air, only to reappear just as mysteriously ten years later, not having aged a day. Moreover, he won't speak a word, and he wears the most world-wearied expression I've ever seen on a 7 year old. For that note, it must be weird for the other kid to all of a sudden have a little brother who's really his older brother. The events of this case hint at a tragic event in Doggett's past, but subtlety is the name of the game here. In fact, there's a part where Scully goes off on Doggett for trying to question the kid, but this is not a portrait of a man out of control. Rather, he displays tasteful restraint and sensitivity. I have to say that I'm with Agent Doggett on this one (horrors, I know!), and Scully comes off as being unduly influenced by her irrational mothering instincts (possibly exacerbated by recent revelations in the mythology). Anyway, a little psychic mumbo jumbo involving backward masking in real time isn't enough to seriously hamper this episode, nor does the fact that you'll likely see the conclusion coming make it any less haunting. This is another very good episode - surprisingly so.

Somebody's been watching Paper Hearts...

Memorable quotes:

Scully: Well, what we've got here is a healthy seven year old boy who was born seventeen years ago.

Doggett: You know, these words - anomalous, supernatural, paranormal - they purport to explain something by not explaining it. It's lazy.

(It's a crazy world where Scully is the one introducing alien abduction as a hypothesis, only to be naysayed by a more skeptical mind).

Psychic: Is this going to happen?
Doggett: Shouldn't you be telling us that?

The X-Files - S7:E10 "Sein und Zeit"

[ S7:E9 "Signs & Wonders" <<< Season 7 >>> S7:E11 "Closure" ]

Spoiler Warning: I think this is supposed to be a mythology episode, and in any case, it's the first part of a two-parter, so beware of spoilers.

I'm having a very hard time contextualizing this episode, as I don't remember watching it before - which means we may finally be coming to the point where I originally dropped The X-Files (unless I'm just blocking this episode out of my mind). So I'm not sure how this story thread is going to be resolved, nor where it will ultimately stand in the lasting record of the show's mythology. Any comments I make in this review should be tempered by that realization. But I've been reading in interviews from around this time that this season was tentatively intended to be the show's last, hence the wrapping-up of mythology-based story threads that began in the last season (with the Syndicate's send-off in Two Fathers/One Son). Therefore, this episode, which appears to be addressing an explanation for the disappearance of Mulder's sister, could turn out to be the final resolution for that plot thread. But therein lies the problem, because instead of alien abductions or government experiments, this episode is hinting at the hokey concept of "walk-ins" (a throwaway idea from Red Museum - not one of the series' best mythology episodes).

There was a time on this show when providing a non-extraterrestrial explanation for as significant a plot point as Samantha's abduction would not have been unwelcome. Particularly in the fifth season, Chris Carter played around with the idea that the whole alien conspiracy was an elaborately constructed hoax. In fact, much of the mythology in the preceding years hinted at that possibility - with secret government experiments, human testing, classified technology, and the like. But this partly worked because it was a stall before the late game revelations that we were all waiting for. It may be true that the mythology was simply better in those stages, before the Truth was laid out on the table - because as frustrating as the unanswered questions sometimes were, they were better than being given unsatisfying answers - but no fan would have been satisfied had the series ended before detailing the specifics of Deep Throat's boast in the second episode that aliens are among us - and have been for a long, long time.

Now, Paper Hearts was a great episode. It posited an alternative possible explanation for the abduction of Mulder's sister. It was effective both because that explanation was plausible - so that the episode's very concept didn't seem silly, or inconsequential - but at the same time, you knew that it wasn't going to turn out to be the truth. It was a thrilling exercise in "what if?" You could let yourself enjoy it, because you knew that somewhere later on down the line, you would get a more emotionally satisfying explanation for Samantha's disappearance and current whereabouts - the one that the series had been hinting at since the pilot. Now, imagine if Paper Hearts had been written by Chris Carter (and Frank Spotnitz), near the intended close of the series, not as a one-off freak-of-the-week episode, but as a mytharc intending to ultimately close the X-File on Samantha Mulder. You'd be pretty frustrated, wouldn't you?

Well, that's the direction Sein und Zeit would appear to be heading in. On the other hand, it's possible that Chris Carter is just jerking us off yet again, like he's been doing since season 2's Colony/End Game, where Samantha showed up, only to be revealed to be a clone. But if he's still giving us false answers even at this late stage of the game, then I'm going to be pissed off all the same. Quite simply, this episode has written itself into a corner, and I'm very curious to see if it will be able to find a way to redeem itself in the next hour. It's kind of too bad, too, because, taken on its own - without the potentially sobering ramifications of the mythology developments - this is otherwise a pretty decent episode.

It starts with a captivating opener, which effectively captures the atmosphere of suburban home life just before things take a drastic turn for the worse. There are some quietly unsettling moments - like when the Mrs. suddenly seems possessed of the urge to write a ransom note for the kidnapping of her own daughter, still safely sleeping in her bed. Or when the man of the house gets up from watching TV (where Chris Carter bitterly - though forgivably so - plugs his prematurely-canceled Harsh Realm series) to check on his daughter, and sees a vision of her death. Then, when he leaves the room, the door slams behind him, and by the time he's able to break it down, the girl has vanished without a trace...

This isn't the first time (though it may turn out to be the last) Mulder has taken a personal interest in a case involving a young girl's abduction - for obvious reasons. He goes charging down the halls of the FBI building at three in the morning with purpose in his stride, in order to demand that Skinner put him on the case, not even yet realizing that it will turn out to be an X-File. He's not the only one interested, however. For better or worse, when a little girl goes missing, its bound to turn into a media circus. Everyone wants a piece of it, although I doubt they all care about the girl - they're just there for the story. Mulder is different, of course, although this case seems to be making him unusually contemplative, and there doesn't look to be much hope of a positive resolution.

His mother tries to contact him, apparently aware of his involvement in the case, and possibly concerned that it will lead him to some truths about Samantha's disappearance. After so many years of playing dumb, she finally seems ready to talk - like Mulder's dad was just before he was shot. If that doesn't make you feel uncomfortable, then you're probably too invested in getting answers to see the writing on the wall - like Mulder is; and like I was, watching the episode. Sure enough, Mrs. Mulder turns up dead, before she's able to spill the beans. It's an apparent suicide, but Mulder is convinced that she was executed to hide the truth; however, Scully determines that she was suffering from an incurable and disfiguring disease, and concludes that she no longer wanted to live. Once again, we are given two different plausible and contradictory explanations, without any hint as to which one is the truth (nice to meet you, Chris Carter).

Meanwhile, Mulder links the current kidnapping case to an X-File where a similar event occurred many years ago, resulting in the conviction of a mother whose son disappeared. With a little coaxing, she admits the weirdness of the case, and explains her theory involving "walk-ins", of which Mulder is convinced Samantha was one. It doesn't make a lot of sense at this stage in the story, and for once in this series, you really start to feel like Mulder is buying into the delusions of a madwoman. It's probably helped by the fact that you don't want this theory to turn out to be true, because of how unsatisfying that would be. So you're left to side with Scully, who is convinced that Mulder is taking the case too personally, and reading just what he wants to find into it.

But just when it looks like the current case will remain unsolved, the agents (with Skinner in tow for once) catch a break at the eleventh hour, and follow a clue, leading them to a creepy Santa-themed daycare where a paunchy man has been taking voyeuristic videos of children for decades. Mulder steels himself for what he thinks will be the inevitable outcome - finding his sister among those tapes - but they are interrupted by the arrival of the suspect in question. Skinner takes him down, and the episode leaves off on a stomach-turning cliffhanger in which the camera pans out to reveal a plethora of shallow graves out back. We'll have to wait until next week to see how the story is resolved - just how that happens will be of critical importance.

To be continued...

Memorable quotes:

Skinner: This is a kidnapping, Agent Mulder. A little girl snatched from her bedroom. Basic, missionary style FBI work - it's not an X-File.

Billy LaPierre: Agent Mulder, do you think they will find her?
Mulder (pensive): I hope so. Yeah. I really do.

Scully: Is it the media, or just their own morbid fascination with the killing of an innocent?

Scully: You're personalizing this case. You're identifying with your sister.
Mulder: My sister was taken by aliens. Did I say anything about aliens, Scully?

Scully: Don't go looking for something you don't wanna find.

(If this turns out to be Chris Carter's response to fans asking, "what really happened to Samantha?", I'm going to be pissed).

Mulder: Doesn't make sense. It's incomprehensible in any kind of a real world way.
Skinner: I deal in the real world, Agent Mulder.

(Of course, when Mulder says "real world", he means his real world, the world of The X-Files, which is not the same world Skinner is referring to, albeit it's the same world Skinner exists in. Once again, investigators are bending over backwards to find conventional explanations, even when they don't fit the facts, and Mulder's the only one willing to connect the dots. I've been saying this for years).

Mulder: She was trying to tell me something.
Scully: She was trying to tell you to stop. To stop looking for your sister. She was just trying to take away your pain.

(You mean our purpose. If this is your answer, Chris Carter, I'm gonna be mighty pissed. And if it's not, I'm still gonna be pissed for being jerked around this late in the game. It's a no-win scenario, as far as I can tell).

Mulder: You can't see a ghost and still hope to find her alive. Both things can't be true.

(Depressing - but a fascinating bit of psychology. It makes perfect sense).

The X-Files - S4:E4 "Unruhe"

[ S4:E3 "Teliko" <<< Season 4 >>> S4:E5 "The Field Where I Died" ]

I gave up keeping track of all these foreign episode titles after the second season. It's too easy to drown in them, and their significance is not always explained. For example, Piper Maru was the name of a submarine in that episode, but it's also the name Gillian Anderson gave her daughter. The meaning of Talitha Cumi (or Herrenvolk, for that matter) - a phrase that isn't actually used in the course of the episode - is left as an exercise for the academic viewer. Unruhe, on the other hand, is explained. Like Die Hand die Verletzt, it is German; and it means "unrest".

This episode is a prime example of how the writers on this show could take some weird sci-fi phenomenon - in this case, a neat parlor trick from the psychic's handbook - and then incorporate it into a gruesome case of murder (or kidnapping), for Mulder and Scully to investigate. Like, it's not enough that someone has the power to project his thoughts onto photographs - he has to be a killer, too! But then, that's the kind of show we're watching, isn't it?

Of all the things a kidnapper could want to do to an innocent victim, though, giving her an amateur transorbital lobotomy (which involves a spike through the eye socket - shudder) is not exactly what you'd expect. But then this perp, played by the imminently recognizable Pruitt Taylor Vince, is no garden variety madman. His interrogation, in which he - pretty convincingly, at first - claims ignorance, is unsettling, and the episode's climax is unusually tense. It looks like Vince Gilligan (who also wrote last season's Pusher, as well as season 2's Soft Light) is shaping up to be a talented writer.

Memorable quotes:

Mulder: In the sixties, a bellhop named Ted Serios became kinda famous for taking what he called 'thoughtographs'. He claimed that by concentrating on an unexposed film negative, he could create a photographic representation of what he saw in his mind. He did landscapes, cathedrals, the Queen of England.
Scully: Thoughtographs.
Mulder: Also known as 'scotographs'. Literature on thought photography dates back almost to Louis Daguerre.
Scully: So that makes it legitimate?

Mulder: What if someone had this ability? An image like this would be a peek into that person's mind.
Scully: Into their darkest fantasies.
Mulder: The fantasy of a killer.

Mulder: What else happened in 1980, Gerry?
Gerry: Well, John Lennon got shot. Where the hell are you going with this? What are you, Sigmund Freud? Why don't you cut the BS?

Scully: It's over, Mulder.
Mulder: Well, then, that photo wouldn't be his fantasy. It would be his nightmare.
Scully: What the hell does it matter?
Mulder: Because I wanna know.
Scully: I don't.

(Scully's a tough chick, but she always seems to take the consequences of the actions the criminals she assists in apprehending more personally than Mulder. That's not a strike against her - certainly, it demonstrates her humanity, and you could criticize Mulder for being too detached at times. But it does seem a little unprofessional. Especially when her gut reaction to "nail the fucker to the wall" gets in the way of carefully examining all the evidence. Personally, I have to say I relate more to Mulder's usually cool approach to detective work. And, certainly, his desire to understand the criminal's mindset - no matter how unappealing that is - contributes to his crack talent in profiling, and being able to predict a criminal's next move - critical in preventing further abominable acts from being committed. Scully learns this lesson the hard way in this episode).

Scully: My captivity forced me to understand and even empathize with Gerry Schnauz; my survival depended on it. I see now the value of such insight. For truly to pursue monsters, we must understand them. We must venture into their minds. Only in doing so, do we risk letting them venture into ours.

The X-Files - S3:E8 "Oubliette"

[ S3:E7 "The Walk" <<< Season 3 >>> S3:E9 "Nisei" ]

This is a bit of a frustrating episode. The subject is abductions - but not the alien kind. It starts out in a Washington state high school. A photographer's assistant gazes at a pretty teenage girl (the radiant Jewel Staite) for a moment too long, as if to let the audience know that he's a creep (groan). And, sure enough, he proceeds to kidnap the 15 year old little girl (make sure you say "little" a few times so the audience gets the point -ed) from her bed at night, right in front of her terrified younger sister.

Mulder joins the case when a previous kidnapping victim starts experiencing "empathic transference", linking her to the most recent abduction. For once, he is more sensitive than Scully towards the plight of a woman in a man's world. But when Scully brings up the issue of Mulder's sister (in a perfect example of writing that's "too on the nose"), he rightly argues that it's a bit of a leap in this case. This is a rare example of Mulder and Scully being out of phase - not just disagreeing about what conclusion the evidence points to; they're nearly at each other's throats here. It's not fun to watch.

Neither are the episode's protagonist, nor its antagonist. The kidnapper is an uncommunicative subhuman with no clear motive (beyond animal instinct - except all he does is keep girls locked up in his basement) who serves only to put an innocent girl in jeopardy. The previous survivor has the potential to be a morally complicated character, as Mulder has to balance his sensitivity toward the victim of a serious trauma, with the possibility that if he pushes her a little, she might be able to rescue another girl from harm. But her reticence to help goes largely unexplored, and so she comes off rather unsympathetically, as a textbook definition of "damaged goods".

The episode has some creepy moments, but altogether it feels too contrived, like a case of forced sensitivity to the issue of kidnapping, almost as an apology for the show's questionable approach toward the issue of rape in last season's Excelsis Dei. In conclusion, Oubliette is best forgotten.

Memorable quotes:

Kidnapper: Nobody's gonna spoil us.

Lucy: So what's your point?  All of us kidnap victims gotta stick together?
Mulder: No.

(Actually, I'm pretty sure that's exactly what the script is saying).

Scully: I hate to say this Mulder, but I think you just ran out of credibility.

Scully: You don't see what you're doing, do you, Mulder? You are so close to this that you just don't see it.
Mulder: What don't I see?
Scully: The extreme rationalization that's going on. Your personal identification with the victim - or in this case, the suspect. You're becoming some kind of an empath yourself, Mulder. You are so sympathetic to Lucy as the victim - like your sister - that you can't see her as a person who's capable of committing this crime.
Mulder: You don't think I've thought of that? I have, and not everything I do and say and think and feel goes back to my sister. You of all people should realize that sometimes motivations for behavior can be more complex and mysterious than tracing them back to one single childhood experience.