‘Obsession’
“It was fine,” my 14-year-old niece, Brianna, recently texted me after seeing “Obsession.” “It was really scary when she ran at Bear and screamed and stuff.”
I couldn’t have said it better. This blockbuster supernatural thriller — which to date has grossed $370 million worldwide on a budget of $750,000 — is a solid scary movie. Written, directed and edited by Curry Barker, it’s a cautionary tale about what happens when a young man named Bear (Michael Johnston) turns his best friend, Nikki (Inde Navarrette, fantastic), into a demonic, clingy, repulsive monster after using a novelty toy that grants him one wish, in this case poor Nikki’s unquestioning affection. That wish becomes their curse.
I wasn’t as taken with “Obsession” as other horror fans were; I just could not get past how Barker’s script queasily blurs lines between victim and villain, abused and abuser, innocent desire and cruel predation. Still, the film is a must-see for how skillfully Barker threads together dread, panic and gore. Flaws and all, the film heralds Barker as a defining raconteur of Gen Z horror.
I really hope that David Lynch has a screening room in heaven or wherever it is that he now calls home. Because he would be tickled pink to see how much he inspired this strange new film from the writer-director Shane Aquino.
It starts when a power outage hits a California suburb, leaving a little girl named Suzanna (Riley Ryan) home alone. A blank-faced “usher” with the voice of a faulty loudspeaker comes to her door and coaxes her away to a house nearby, where she’s forced to make a decision with universe-altering, morally fraught consequences. When Weston (Mike Ferguson), a sheriff, also gets a visit from an usher, the creepypasta weirdness and ethical quandaries restart.
Aquino’s film is a meditation on self-sacrifice and the collective good that doubles as an audacious formal assault on the senses, complete with phantasmagoric creatures, scratchy sounds and glitchy cuts. (At one point I thought my screener was broken.) I wish Aquino hadn’t encouraged Ferguson’s attempts at comedy, a choice that dilutes the film’s macabre tone. Still, I can’t wait to see what this off-center director does next.
In the twisted footsteps of “Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round,” the coming “Buddy” and other horror movies about creepy children’s television shows, comes this inventive supernatural comedy.
The film opens as Miss Shirley (Gordy Cassel), a beloved ventriloquist and hostess of a Sacramento children’s television show, unexpectedly dies. In her will, Miss Shirley asks that three friends — Rose (Rocío de la Grana), Mary (Baylee Toney) and Mick (Dustin Vaught) — gather at her “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”-like home to track down her favorite puppet, the sweet-faced Sunny Smiles.
It takes a too-long 40 minutes for the horror to really kick in. But once it does, the filmmaker-animator Josh Funk serves a visual feast of furry monsters, gnarly low-fi practical effects, stop-motion animation and one disgusting puppet decapitation. In a standout scene, Vaught (who wrote the film with Funk) uses the slapstick chops of a silent movie clown to battle a killer towel and a scared little fuzzball in the toilet. The story ends on a heartbreaking note that covers a fabric face with human sorrow.
Simple sounds are warning sirens in this folk horror fairy tale, the writer-director Bryn Chainey’s feature film debut.
Set in 1976, the story follows Darcy and Daphne (Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen, both great), a married couple who live in an isolated house in the Welsh countryside. It’s an idyllic and eerie spot, the perfect environment for them to make art from tree sounds, animal calls and other sonic natural elements. After they play back unusual audio that Darcy recorded in the woods, a strange child (Jade Croot) shows up at their front door. The stranger slowly becomes a part of the couple’s life, and they mostly don’t seem to mind. But what does this outsider want? And why does this stranger fancy hunting so much?
Chainey’s film is frustratingly opaque, especially in the head-scratching third act. The real pleasures are visual and acoustic, a gift for horror fans who don’t mind a movie that’s more invested in dark-sided atmospherics than a plot. The sound designer Graham Reznick does superb work turning rustling leaves, rumbling echoes and human shrieks into a dark symphony. I recommend watching this with the volume turned up as high as your ears can handle.
On a recent scorching afternoon, I got Christmas in July with the writer-director Mike P. Nelson’s entertaining reimagining of the 1984 slasher film “Silent Night, Deadly Night.”
Scarred by seeing his parents murdered by a killer dressed as Santa, Billy (Rohan Campbell) grows up to be a roving serial killer who marks his Advent calendar with his victims’ blood. Billy’s baleful inner voice (Mark Acheson) guides him through killing sprees over the holiday season, some of which double as acts of social justice, like the Nazi Christmas party that Billy turns into a head-crunching blood bath. When Billy meets Pam (Ruby Modine), whose father owns the Christmas trinket store where Billy works, he’s forced to reconcile blood thirst with romance.
Nelson’s film doesn’t hold a candy cane-scented candle to the lurid original, one of my favorite Christmas-set horror movies. But it’s a better reboot than it has any right to be, thanks to Campbell’s performance, Acheson’s expert narration and torrents of stomach-churning gore. Kudos to Nelson for reusing “Slayrider” and other awesome songs from the original film’s cheese-pop soundtrack.
