Weekly visions - week 36, 2024

Stoker , directed by Park Chan-wook, written by Wentworth Miller, US, 2013 - ⭐️⭐️⭐️ (down from ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ten years ago)

When I said last week I was ending my Park Chan-wook rewatch period, I had forgotten about his American film, the film that Wentworth ‘Prison Break’ Miller wrote, inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. Basically, the only thing I remembered from my first watch (aside from a personal note to never ever ever trust Matthew Goode) was the scene where Nicole Kidman’s hair becomes a grass field. But I also remember liking the film, while this time around I almost couldn’t stand it. I guess I’ve come to actively dislike characters that are quite open about their nefarious agenda, but are given an easy life by a script that makes them very lucky. In a lot of scenes, Mia Wasikowska looks like she’s still on the set of Alice in Wonderland. As usual with Park, I love the editing and the soundtrack (despite the fact that the editor and composer are not the same ones he’s used to working with in Korea).

The Last Broadcast , written and directed by Stefan Avalos and Lance Weller, US, 1998 - ⭐️⭐️

It’s the turn of the millennium, and three people equipped with cameras take a trip to the woods to investigate a local legend, never to be seen again.
But this is not The Blair Witch Project: it’s his forgotten doppelgänger, also created by two aspiring filmmakers with a small budget who understood that found footage could accommodate their restrictions.
The difference with Mirick and Sánchez film is that The Last Broadcast wraps the found footage into a documentary investigating the filmmakers’ disappearance, and, rather than a horror film, it explicitly turns into an essay about the responsibility of media manipulation and the Internet (in 1998!), in forming public opinions.
The issue with it is that, after a mildly engaging first half-hour, the narrative stops and the film starts repeating the same concepts over and over, by reusing countless times the same short ‘found footage’ bit.
And when at the end it remembers being a film rather than an essay, its resolution is far from what I expected, and even less satisfying.

‎Sick , directed by John Hyams, written by Katelyn Crabb and Kevin Williamson, US, 2022 - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This film was co-written by Kevin Williamson, so it’s very easy to describe it as ‘Pandemic Scream’, and I think that’s also accurate. This could have been Sidney and Tatum’s weekend at Crystal Lake. And the resemblance between a certain actor in the film and another one in a previous film, despite being maybe unintentional, basically gives more than a clue about where things are going.
A bit of unease seeing all the gestures and activities we used to cope with during and after the COVID lockdown.
In any case, this is a fun, tight, relentless slasher, though I might have some reservations about its politics.

‎My Little Eye , directed by Marc Evans, written by David Hilton and James Watkins, US/UK, 2002 - ⭐️⭐️

I’m sorry but everybody in this film is so bland that I couldn’t tell two of the three guys apart. Then “today’s important actor” comes in, the whole thing gets interesting for half a minute or so, then it goes back into ‘and then there were five too many’. Same level of dislike as ‘Haute tension’.

‎Last Shift , directed by Anthony DiBlasi, co-written with Scott Poiley, US, 2014 - ⭐️⭐️⭐️½

A very creepy horror that kept me on the edge all the time, unsure and afraid of what might happen next… but also a bit underdeveloped in terms of story and characters. Now I’m curious about the remake with a higher budget, Malum.