Three Films Make A Post: Don't let the holidays eat you alive

Black Friday (2021): This horror comedy by Casey Tebo about an alien parasite type of zombie outbreak in a giant toyshop recommends itself with a lot of nice gooey effects (and a truly adorably bad looking kaiju), fun and snarky performances by Devon Sawa, Ivana Baquero, Bruce Campbell, and the rest of the cast. The script is more competent and effective than great, but its practical realization is fast and fun enough to make this a properly entertaining ninety minutes in the tradition of your favourite pieces of fun horror from the 80s or 90s.

Which does make for a nice change from all the ghost movies about demons as well as all those earnest and slow horror movies about grief.

The Shadow Side aka La Parte Oscura (2020): Speaking of demons and an entertaining time (though it’s not even an hour here), this quarantine zoom conference POV horror movie from Argentina as directed by Max Coronel features the former as well as the latter.

The film is just as long as it needs and should be. It quickly and highly efficiently establishes characters and situation and then goes through a series of escalating and equally efficient horror set pieces, generally staged and shot as nicely as its production circumstances allow. Clara Kovacic makes a fine main characters/victim of your usual evil occult powers, and the rest of the cast is doing exactly what (and as much of it) as they need to.

Mad God (2021): Unlike these other two films, film Tippett’s insanely creative and capital-W weird feature-length stop motion animation isn’t efficient or simple yet effective genre work. Instead, this is a deeply strange trip into aesthetic netherworlds that feel intensely personal, lacking in explanation, plot, and character to make room for incredible, and sometimes deeply disturbing, visual worldbuilding.

I’ve honestly never seen anything quite like it, and certainly not in a shape that actually manages to keep up aesthetic thrills and intensity for nearly ninety minutes like this does.

Hunter Hunter (2020)

Warning: even though I am avoiding quite a few obvious spoilers here, some structural spoilage is unavoidable!

Joseph (Devon Sawa), his wife Anne (Camille Sullivan) and their daughter Renee (Summer H. Howell) live somewhere in the deepest American wilderness, existing on the proceeds of trapping, hunting and gathering, selling furs in the closest town to buy necessities they can’t get in their own private middle of nowhere. Apparently, this is how Joseph’s family has lived for at least three generations, and Anne has entered into this cruel and hard existence with open eyes out of love.

Things are getting even harder for the family these days, though, for the fur prizes are dropping, and the world is changing ever further from a place that would allow for their kind of marginal existence. In Anne’s eyes, it’s time to move on and change their way of living, if only for Renee’s sake. Joseph clearly won’t be easy to talk around to her point of view. The problem will need to take a backseat anyway. The family has even more dire problems right now, for a wolf has decided to use their trap lines as easy sources of food. Joseph won’t accept any help from the outside world (which won’t be all too willing to provide it when push comes to shove anyway), so he starts hunting the wolf on his own. Eventually, he will not only find the wolf, but other, even more dangerous things, and Anne will be the one having to protect her daughter from them.

That’s about as much as I want to delve into plot spoiler territory when it comes to Shawn Linden’s impressive Hunter Hunter. I am going to add that this is indeed a horror movie and not the survivalist backwoods drama the description might suggest, with a final couple of scenes of immense harshness.

Most of the film’s virtues are easily praised without detailing too much of its sparse (that’s a descriptor, not a judgement) plot anyway, for, even though said plot is indeed well constructed, the film really lives from its strong sense of characterisation and its mood of isolation, dread, and the sadness of people who realize their lives have ended up in a dead end.

Linden – with help from his strong cast, certain beside the family also including excellent performances by Nick Stahl, Gabriel Daniels and Lauren Cochrane – is very, very good at creating depth of character out of pretty sparse dialogue, telling visual details he doesn’t need to point out to the audience directly, facial expressions, and body language, drawing the characters (and these goes for some of the minor characters as well) and their relationships precisely without explaining them, trusting the audience to understand the cues he provides, and lets his actors provide.

The film works the same way at creating its mood, giving cues, showing things, never expositing what the filmmakers are so good at showing. Up until the very end, the film shows this deep trust in its actors and its audience, so that the latter will follow it into a finale that goes full French 00s horror on us, with a gore set piece that has to be seen to believed, just after it has rightly shied away from showing something just as horrible through anything but Sullivan’s face. Unlike a lot of those French movies, the film has worked for its freak-out by its calmness before it, and therefor doesn’t end up in cartoon territory, ending as well judged as it began.

In short: Idle Hands (1999)

Teenage stoner Anton Tobias (Devon Sawa) has a little problem: a demon in the habit of possessing the body of the laziest sod it can find has taken possession of one of his hands, murdering people – including his parents but don’t you worry our hero will be more interested in his dating life than dead close relatives – while he’s sleeping the sleep of the stoned. Soon, his best stoner friends Mick (Seth Green) and Pnub (Elden Henson) are dead too but return as undead because they couldn’t be bothered to step into the light, sometimes assisting Anton in a fight better left to the Ashs of this world. On the plus side, the whole affair also finally scores Anton the sexual attention of his big crush, neighbour Molly (Jessica Alba).

The teenage horror comedy is an intriguing little sub-genre, seeing how it has the potential to dig into elements of your usual coming-of-age stories from a different perspective. In reality, it’s the same mix of stoner jokes and underdeveloped female characters as most of the – typically guy-centric – non-horror teen comedies feature, just with more blood. That doesn’t mean these films are necessary all not worth watching: they just practically never do anything that’s even mildly deep or really interesting. Case in point is Rodman Flender’s Idle Hands with actors playing characters very much like the ones they play in all other teen comedies, and a romance that is pure teenage male wishfulfilment and only suggests Jessica Alba’s character to have anything even vaguely amounting to agency (or truthfully, a brain) when she’s turning into something of a badass for five minutes just before the script turns her into the prize to be rescued by Devon Sawa’s dubious prince completely.

However, if you’re okay with the total lack of depth, empathy and originality the film displays, there are some redeeming qualities to it: while Sawa isn’t a Bruce Campbell (or even a Michael Cain) in the hand fighting business he displays good comic timing and is generally funny in the splatstick lite sequences the film features, as is most of the rest of the cast in one way or the other. Well, there’s Seth Green, but my (probably unfair) complete antipathy to his apathetic acting style isn’t the problem of my imaginary readers (or his). On the feminist side, Vivica A. Fox’s demon hunter character does have a bit more to do than Alba, though her scenes usually feel like filler more than anything else.


And while most of the humour is pretty misanthropic and low-brow, the jokes tend to be timed well enough they still work on a guy like me who isn’t at all into this style of humour.