Three Films Make A Post: If you have to scream, cover your mouth

Sick (2022): I’ve seen this sometimes pretty brutal home invasion movie directed by John Hyams described as some kind of comeback for writer Kevin Williamson – who co-wrote with Katelyn Crabb – but I can only see it as a much weaker follow-up to Hyams’s brilliant Alone that’s failing mostly because of Williamson’s and Crabb’s limp script. As a director, Hyams is still fantastic at directing classical suspense and thriller scenes, but where Alone’s deceptively straightforward script earthed these scenes in great character writing and tense plotting, the film at hand falters at creating characters whose destiny you’d actually be interested in and can only understand suspense scenes as set-pieces instead of intricate parts of a greater whole. That the killer’s motivation come right out of the wet dreams of an anti-vaxxer forum doesn’t make things any better either.

There’s Something Wrong with the Children (2022): To continue grumping about movies, this Evil Children affair by Roxanne Benjamin is just not a terribly interesting film for most of its running time. Benjamin is clearly a competent filmmaker, but not one so good – or simply so experienced, this being her second feature – she can work around the fact the child actors she has to depend on can’t consistently hit the notes of required creepiness, which is pretty much the death knell in a film about kids acting creepy. The script can’t quite seem to decide if it wants to do something clever with shifting the usual role of the “woman who realized early on there’s bad shit going on, but nobody believes her because she’s mentally ill” on a man, or somehow talk about female scepticism of becoming a mother, tries both at once, and manages to do neither in a satisfying way.

It’s not a terrible movie, just one that’s perfectly forgettable.

Baghead (2008): As I have repeated ad nauseam in the past, I am not an admirer of the mumblecore canon as a whole (mostly not even in particular), with an aesthetic that never convinced me this is more than film school grad wank of the highest degree. Having said that, I do have a small place in my heart for this horror/hapless indie filmmaker comedy by the Duplass brothers. Mostly because this, like their other films, doesn’t feel trapped in its aesthetics like too much mumblecore does for me, but actually uses them intelligently. Even the – most probably in large parts improvised – dialogue comes to sensible points and shapes emotional beats instead of simply stumbling around, amounting to nothing.

Quite a bit of this is obviously thanks to the cast – Steve Zissis, Ross Partridge, Greta Gerwig and Elise Muller – as well as what I assume is judicious editing, but there’s also a pleasantly non-wanky sense of self-irony, as well as an abundance of heart (the genuine kind sometimes found on sleeves) on display that makes the film impossible to dislike for me.

In short: Alone (2020)

Warning: there are mild spoilers ahead!

After her husband has committed suicide, Jessica (Jules Willcox) has decided to escape her feelings of guilt and grief by moving to the other side of the USA. She’s making the move on her own, carting a U-Haul trailer around country roads and lonely streets.

Apart from the emotional pain, things start out okay enough on her travels, but a strange and dangerous encounter with another car does leave her a bit insecure and understandably nervous. Something that’s not going to get better once she starts meeting the driver (Marc Menchaca) of this car again and again, as if he were stalking her. Which he will indeed turn out to do, eventually kidnapping Jessica for a bit of emotional torture in his cabin in the wilderness, with the promise of eventual death.

Jessica manages to escape though, and now has to find her way to safety through forest wilderness, with little but the clothes on her back, followed by her kidnapper.

I was a bit disappointed by the last eight years or so of director Jack Hyams’s output, when he left behind low budget movies for the greener pastures of TV and particularly streaming series work. It’s not his fault I really don’t need another (or two) zombie apocalypse shows in my life, obviously.

Alone isn’t a return to highly weird and awesome action movies like the fourth Universal Soldier film, but a thriller working from a script (by Mattias Olsson) that is built from very well-known blocks. However, despite certainly not being in the market for originality prices, this is still a very strong film. The script’s sequence of chases and escapes is very tightly arranged, written with sharp focus on what makes a situation threatening as well as an eye for the telling quotidian detail that makes a thriller situation feel less constructed than it by rights should feel. The characterisation of Jessica as a woman burdened by grief and a feeling of terrible guilt is sharp and tight too. Hyams’s careful direction, Willcox’s wonderfully emotionally controlled performance and the script’s attention to the right details, really come together to make Jessica believable as well as easy to root for.

Menchaca’s performance, on the other hand, is wonderfully creepy without turning his character into some mythological being. The film treats its serial killer as a human being, as terrible a one as he is, actually making him more threatening through his fallibility than many a movie about the superhumanly competent variation of the serial killer manages.

Hyams, it turns out, is as great a director of this sort of horror thriller as he is of crazier action stuff, using his experience with action scenes whenever it is appropriate, but spending just as much of his energy on creating a threatening – and generally unpleasantly wet – mood through landscape, and on assisting his performers.

Past Misdeeds: Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012)

aka Universal Soldier IV

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Even after the positive buzz by people whose opinions I respect, I did expect this new addition to the Universal Soldier franchise to be at best a decent bit of cheap-o US action cinema with one or two hints that director John Hyams has seen Apocalypse Now in it. However, what I actually got was so much more.

This is another movie with themes quite close to the spirit of Philip K. Dick. One should probably wish filmmakers to be inspired by more contemporary SF too, but then I'm already happy when filmmakers read anything at all. It's an amnesiac's (Scott Adkins, stuntman/martial artist turned actually rather good actor) attempt to understand why a certain Luc Devereaux (Jean-Claude Van Damme at his most disquieting) brutally murdered his wife and kid during a home invasion, and his subsequent quest to take vengeance. This rather typical plotline is permanently enhanced and deconstructed by twists, turns, and ideas concerning the nature of our hero, free will, the uses of memory, and the killing of fathers/gods, all told in a visual style that reminded me most of Beyond the Black Rainbow and Driver (films this one does actually see eye to eye with) in the way it suggests wrongness and disturbed subjectivity with every colour and framing choice.

The whole film has the feel of a paranoid's nightmare full of bleak colours, grimy instead of adrenaline-pushing violence, and a feeling of claustrophobia - all not exactly things you'd expect in an US action movie belonging to a mildly successful franchise that generally always avoided to actually delve into the thematic mire of conspiracy theory and identity horror its basic ideas are so ideally suited to. Reckoning, on the other hand, delves in without ever looking back, pulling the part of its audience willing to go into nasty and confusing places with it, and leaving the kind of people who need to have the plot explained to them afterwards behind on the IMDB where they belong.

It's not only Hyams's ambition to go where Universal Soldier hasn't gone before I admire here, it's that he actually fulfils it, making one of the most off-beat and unexpectedly disturbing action films with a side-line in existential horror I've ever seen.