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{"id":10613,"date":"2016-10-08T15:42:47","date_gmt":"2016-10-08T19:42:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?p=10613"},"modified":"2016-10-08T15:42:47","modified_gmt":"2016-10-08T19:42:47","slug":"the-long-halloween-some-quick-movie-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2016\/10\/the-long-halloween-some-quick-movie-reviews.html","title":{"rendered":"The Long Halloween: Some quick movie reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

The House at the End of Time<\/strong><\/em>: Twisty Venezuelan family\/haunted-house horror about an older woman coming out of prison and sorting through what happened on the fateful night when her husband died and her son disappeared. A compassionate priest assigned to visit her (she\u2019s sort of in house arrest in the haunted house) helps her unravel the mystery\u2013and the final twist about the priest\u2019s own history is genuinely moving. This is an emotionally-sincere, spooky film, and its climax is an extended sequence of plot traps snapping shut. Definitely worth checking out if the premise intrigues you. Available on US Netflix streaming, iirc.<\/p>\n

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie<\/strong><\/em>: \u201970s people have an unpleasant \u201970s courtship in the lovely English countryside, and battle agribusiness zombies. I basically still don\u2019t get the \u201970s as a horror era, but if you like this sort of thing, it\u2019s a slow-burner with some startling gore in the final stretch, including a full-on classic flesh feast.<\/p>\n

Charlie Victor Romeo<\/strong><\/em>: \u201cPlease extinguish your cigarettes. We are making an emergency descent.\u201d A straightforward dramatization of several black-box transcripts from real air disasters. Really effective as a portrayal of humans in extremis: their competence, their breakdowns, their gallantry and focus in the face of extended or out-of-nowhere catastrophe. If I have a criticism, it\u2019s that I\u2019m not totally sure why these specific plane crashes were chosen. They do represent a wide range of types of disaster, length of time in which the crew knew they were in mortal danger, and outcome, so that diversity is probably a good enough reason to include each of these.<\/p>\n

Certain lines from this will stick with me: \u201cWe\u2019ve still got ice,\u201d a man says, casual, just reminding you to be aware.<\/p>\n

Peelers<\/strong><\/em>: On the last night of a Canadian strip club\u2019s operations, some local miners stumble in, coated in what seems to be oil. But as the gross-out stripper antics play out onstage, almost-<\/em>as-gross stuff is happening in the men\u2019s room, as the miners turn into homicidal zombie type things.<\/p>\n

So okay, I was probably pretty naive about this movie. What I wanted was a portrayal of a besieged working-class community and institution: a contemporary update of My Bloody Valentine<\/em>, for an even more demoralized working class. But Peelers<\/em> just doesn\u2019t have the emotional insight or maturity of that movie. The opening scene and credits hint that we\u2019ll get a contrast between \u201cperfect\u201d bodies and ravaged ones. Even the gross strip-show stuff (seriously, there\u2019s a girl in a\u2026 lingerie diaper?, whose shtik includes peeing on the front row, a baby-girl look plus boobs and sexy gyrating, just wrong on every possible level) could serve a narrative about how we try to use<\/em> and consume every aspect of life in the flesh, just as we strip-mine and ravage the Earth. But the movie is just not interested in that stuff. It\u2019s more into cliched family dynamics and quips and gore.<\/p>\n

Neither Heaven Nor Hell<\/strong><\/em>: Like Peelers<\/em>, this was part of the DC Spooky Movie Festival, and man, those two films could not be more different. NHNH<\/em> is set among French troops in Afghanistan. The dog disappears, and then the men begin to disappear, and something is out there in the moonscape of the mountains\u2026.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve seen comparisons to Picnic at Hanging Rock<\/em>, another movie explicitly about mystery and the absence of explanation. But the setting and emotional tone of those two movies seem totally different to me (e.g., girls in Picnic<\/em> vs men in NHNH<\/em>) and I\u2019d compare this film more to The Objective<\/a><\/em>, another \u201cweird, weird bad things happening out here in the Graveyard of Empires\u201d flick.<\/p>\n

There is a lot of theology in this film. In general, for fairly obvious reasons, horror films about God are about His power\u2013inscrutable, inescapable, unconquerable\u2013and not His love or mercy. Here, the French captain tries to get a chaplain to reassure his men, and the chaplain openly mocks him: \u201cYou think God is a teddy bear you hold at night?\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t know\u2013tell them God is Love,\u201d the captain says, but the chaplain basically shrugs and says, How is that convincing out here?<\/p>\n

And when he reads the Bible to the troops, the chaplain chooses the singularly unsoothing Job ch 16<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no real distinction in the film between Islam and Christianity\u2013both are just helpless human responses to God\u2019s overwhelming power.<\/p>\n

This is a very<\/em> slow-burn movie. It also has an aggressively unsatisfying ending. That\u2019s on purpose, but I do feel like there\u2019s gotta be a way to make even the humiliation of human knowledge a bit more satisfying to watch.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"