Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)

It’s Halloween, 1968. Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti), a horror-loving outsider with the ambition of becoming a writer, convinces her two friends Auggie (Gabriel Rush) and Chuck (Austin Zajur) to visit the spooky old Bellows mansion at the edge of town, a place connected to more than just one story of a haunting. Well, they’ll have to visits the place after they’ve played a prank on town bully Tommy (Austin Abrams), and have had to hide in the car of hot teenage drifter Ramón (Michael Garza).

That visit to the house, now accompanied by Ramón, who rather hits it off with Stella, doesn’t go too well, and not just because Tommy locks them into the cellar. Turns out the place is at least as haunted as everyone says; and while the kids escape the thing that goes bump in that particular night, things only become worse in the following days and nights, for Stella took a book of handwritten stories from the house, stories that now turn into reality on her and her friends.

Apparently, not everyone loved André Øvredal’s adaptation (as produced and co-written by the great Guillermo del Toro) of the beloved collections of horrific American and British folk tales as retold by Alvin Schwartz as much as I did, but I can’t find any flaw with the film at all, unless one thinks it strictly needed to be an anthology movie. I do appreciate most everything in the film at hand, not just that it is teen-oriented horror that doesn’t try to be so cool it can only ever end up uncool, but that it actually tries to speak to very precise anxieties of very specific kids, using some clichés in the character set-up but from then on out developing these characters and what they are afraid of with all seriousness.

At the same time, the film also grounds the horror in a very specific place and time, as well as the social realities of the characters – including the daily casual racism facing Ramón even from those people who are otherwise not horrible human beings (something that pop-cultural portrayals of racism often avoids showing) – not as the main thrust of the film but as something that can’t help but define parts of a person’s world.

Stories are, after all, connected to the reality they are told in, and the film is all about stories, obviously specifically horror stories, why we tell them, how we tell them, but also, particularly fitting in a film based on folklore retellings, how stories shape our interpretation of the world around us, and may very well shape the world around us in turn, and not always in the best way, as well as the way a creepy story can mask some horrors of the real world instead of revealing them.


But even ignoring this part of the film – even if I’m not sure I’d want to – Scary Stories is pretty wonderful, Øvredal handling the macabre tales in the movie with his usual good timing and sense for creating a creepy mood (turns out that works from Norwegian fjords, to morgues, to Midwestern small towns for him), and a flair for showing just the right amount of the weird stuff. I found myself particularly intrigued by the film’s use of colour, often using traditionally warm colours in connection with the supernatural and the creepy, perhaps suggesting how much more real and alive a story can feel than drab reality.

In short: Hunt To Kill (2010)

In theory, border patrol beefcake Jim Rhodes (Steve Austin) has plans to use the winter break of his daughter Kim (Marie Avgeropoulos) - action movie hero daughters are all called Kim for contractual reasons - for some quality bonding time. There will in fact be bonding time for the two of them but of a rather more violent manner, for the gang of raving lunatics - among them good old Gary Daniels - of a certain Banks (Gil Bellows) has come to the mountains of Montana to hunt down their former boss (Michael Hogan) who absconded with a lot of money and tried to blow them up.

When their paths accidentally cross, the bad guys kidnap Rhodes and Kim because they need a wilderness guide to find their intended target. Whatever happened to paying a shady alcoholic for these things? Of course, seeing as this is a direct-to-DVD action film, violence ensues soon enough.

Ah, the horrors of basic competence. No single element of (direct-to-DVD, but you already knew that) Hunt to Kill is remarkable in any way or form: Keoni Waxman's direction is serviceable if you're not afraid of films on whose frame composition has not been spent a single thought beyond "are the actors in the frame?". The acting is okay in a very okay manner with Bellows doing his best to be a scenery chewing psychopath but unable to ever not come across as a basically nice guy playing a psychopath, Austin glowering a lot (surprise), and everyone else being kinda there. Eric Roberts pops in to die in the pre-credit sequence, for an international superstar of his calibre is clearly too pricey for the film at hand. The script is clichéd and kinda dumb yet not so dumb the film gets ridiculous or interesting, and there's no visible effort to bend any cliché even in the slightest; the only black character is not only the rapey one but also dies first, for Cthulhu's sake. The action is barely okay, with some decent poky-stick-based gore once Austin's character channels his inner serial killer, and hot rock-climbing and ATV racing action as supposed highpoints, but never a moment to actually wow anyone.

These aren't the elements of a film that's horrible in any way, shape, or form, but of a film completely lacking in actual personality, the cheap burger of action movie-dom. At least I learned from Hunt to Kill that to best way for a father and daughter to bond is for her to realize that Daddy is the kind of guy who kills people he has already rendered helpless.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,keoni waxman,steve austin,gary daniels,eric roberts,gil bellows,marie avgeropoulos,action