Three Bad Films Make A Post: Be careful what you pray for.

We Summon the Darkness (2019): When the best thing a script has going for it is the “ingenious” (ha!) twist of its three girl villain crew not being murderous Satanists but televangelist Christians faking the Satanism of their murders so their televangelist boss/father can win more money for his bank account, which is to say, something painfully contrived and pretty stupid, it’s pretty fair to call the resulting film forgettable.

Well, at least the cast – apart from Johnny Knoxville as miscast as a said televangelist as any time he is asked to act – is game, but their efforts can’t win out against a script that’s really not as clever as it apparently thinks it is, and a general air of my old enemy, boring competence on the filmmaking side (as provided by director Marc Meyers).

The Turning (2020): Of course, compared to music video director Floria Sigismondi’s attempt at yet another version of Henry James’s “Turn of the Screw”, Meyers’s film is an absolute masterpiece by the sheer virtue of at least knowing what it wants to be about. Sigismondi’s film sure is pretty to look at, but even the striking production design and the technical high standard of the production don’t add up to actual atmosphere, thanks to a script by the guys responsible for the Conjuring movies that’s – as expected with this writing pedigree - full of badly placed jump scares, clichéd and soulless other scares, characters who strictly act the way they do because it’s in the script and ends in a total clusterfuck of plot twist nonsense you have to see to believe.

It’s too bad, for actual writers and a director using style as substance instead as an attempt to hide the vacuum could have made quite an interesting modern interpretation of the material here. Well, I say modern, but for reasons the film never gets around to make clear, this is also a period piece set in the 1990s. Oh, well.


Fantasy Island (2020): But hey, I’m pretty sure Sigismondi at least had some kind of ambitions for her film, whereas Jeff Wadlow’s (also responsible for the atrocious second Kick-Ass) attempt at turning the old TV chestnut “Fantasy Island” into an anthology horror movie never even managed to convince me that it at least had the mandatory ambition to simply entertain its audience. There’s really nothing on screen here that suggests any talent or effort having gone into the thing at all. The cast is either acting far below their abilities (Maggie Q and Lucy Hale, Michael Rooker) or floundering in roles they are utterly miscast in (Michael Peña as Mr Roarke being the most obvious example here); the plots are like Twilight Zone episodes from the 80s version of that show, but written by idiots; jokes flounder, plot lines meander, nothing of interest or import happens; horror has left the building; somewhere, a dozen reviewers fall asleep.

Three Films Make A Post: The lucky ones freeze to death.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011): One of the many fascinating aspects of Sean Durkin’s film about a woman, Martha, (Elizabeth Olsen) who has freshly escaped from a cult to the home of her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and Lucy’s husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) is how it manages to be enigmatic and precise at the same time. But then, it uses its precision exactly to (re)create the imprecision of memory, inducing in its audience the same confusing floating sense of reality, identity and memory its titular character is existing in. There’s great clarity to Durkin’s portrayal of things not being clear at all, so to speak.

Beetlejuice (1988): Ah, remember the time when Tim Burton was young, his aesthetic still fresh to the audience’s eyes, and critics weren’t complaining this auteur was exactly doing what auteur theory asks of him? This is very much prime Burton, in the weirdness of his preoccupations as well as in the sweetness of said preoccupations (Burton always being the nicest weirdo in any given room), as it is in the accomplished and peculiar way the director presents them here. Sometimes, I do believe that his falling out of critical favour has less to do with his films as with their general lack of cynicism. These are films made by a guy who loves the macabre, but who also wants the characters in his movies to end up happy (as a rule).

If we just forget about Ed Wood for a second, Beetlejuice may very well be the director’s best film, with nary a second on screen that isn’t meant to still pop eyes and open minds, or turn the viewer into a child again.

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018): Speaking of sweetness, Peyton Reed’s lovely bit of Marvel superhero comedy is a prime example of how far a film can get on a mix of likeableness and technical accomplishment. Very much directly into my heart, that is.


There’s nothing at all world-changing about this entry into the Marvel universe, but the chemistry between the actors, the light touch of the script (and if you’re a comics nerd like me, also the clever way it uses elements from actual comics), and the general joyfulness and imagination of the film’s shrinking and growing business come together into the perfect shape of a popcorn movie that may theoretically only be made to take your money, but is really working very very hard to make you smile.