Three Films Make A Post: There's a monster in all of u

Offerings (1989): At the tail end of the slasher cycle, one Christopher Reynolds apparently set out to make a film that contained all other slasher films. At least in so far as any given scene in his film is a more or less blatant rip-off of a scene from another, mostly better, slasher, shot with no sense of style and taste, and with actors who can’t – act, that is. While this may sound rather tiresome, the resulting film is a surprisingly entertaining concoction featuring nary a boring second. When you’re not gasping in disbelief at the film’s utter shamelessness in its borrowings (even Mattei/Fracasso would have balked at some of the stuff going on here, like the not-Halloween parts of the score), you’re giggling about dialogue that starts awkward and ends up really funny, or laughing about Sheriff “That Doesn’t Look Like Sausage To me” Chism, some sort of overweight Wil Wheaton who spends his on-screen time with things like stealing a kid’s porn magazine collection. This may sound as if I’m mostly laughing at the movie, but when a film brings – even unintentionally – so much joy, there’s only laughing with it.

Aaron’s Blood (2016): It’s certainly not a bad basic idea to connect vampirism and a father’s reaction to a child’s terrible illness, but in practice, Tommy Stovall’s treatment of the theme here just doesn’t work at all for me. Unfortunately, the film handles the situation with a sledgehammer, seemingly expecting that the whole “a father will do anything to protect his child” cliché can stand in for the rest of the characterisation needed to make the narrative actually work. Plot-wise, the film is full of improbable coincidences – like the kid’s school caretaker and a local barkeep just happening to be Fearless Vampire Hunters – and characters whose actions often feel highly improbable. The film is otherwise competently shot and decently acted, mind you, but it never did manage to convince me of the characters at its core at all.

68 Kill (2017): Trent Haaga’s adaptation of a Bryan Smith novel (probably one of his best, if you can stomach his stuff) as a dark comedy, on the other hand, managed to convince me of much more improbable characters doing much more improbable things rather well. It does help that leads Matthew Gray Gubler and AnnaLynne McCord are diving into absurdity and violence with the best of them.


Haaga softens Smith’s book a little in so far as he doesn’t show quite as much of the sex, the violence and the general depravity but he does so in a way that makes the film feel more focussed on its sad sack penis-piloted (like all men in Smith’s stuff, unless they are pure psychos) protagonist’s plight with various murderous, sexy, dominating, evil women (like all women in Smith’s stuff), like noir gone a bit explicit. The film doesn’t really critique Smith’s rather basic (and certainly problematic in more than just contemporary parlance) concept of humanity as a whole and women in particular, but as a caustic expression of it, it is pretty successful.