The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Shining (1980)

the shining

Though I keep saying that I love making these monthly movie themes and writing about them, I find it easy to slip out of that routine (especially in the writing department) and then quite difficult to slip back in. This time I have a pretty good excuse with Covid, but I’ve felt (more or less) well the last couple of days and yet have not had the energy to write any more Frozen in January reviews, despite having watched several more and (at least in theory) the desire to write about them.

Here’s hoping this Friday Night Horror Movie write-up will get me back in the spirit.

There is a documentary from 2012 called Room 237 which posits a number of theories about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). Or rather it features a number of talking heads who all seem to think they know what The Shining is all about. What it all really means.

These range from the somewhat plausible – it’s about the assimilation of Native Americans and the destruction of their culture by rich white Americans – to the crack-pot – it is Kubrick’s apology for helping with the faking of the moon landing.

It is an interesting documentary, but what I really love about it is how it indicates just how malleable Kubrick’s film is. It is as if the director took Stephen King’s novel, and turned it into his own thing, and then when people ask what it all means, his answer is akin to:

It means what you want it to mean. Or it has no meaning. Or I don’t know what it means.

For those who don’t know The Shining is based on the Stephen King novel of the same name. Kubrick did make some significant changes to the book and King famously hates it. It tells the story of Jack Torrence (Jack Nicolson), a wannabe writer who is also an alcoholic, and abusive husband/father. After being fired from a teaching job he lands a job as the winter caretaker at the Overlook Hotel – a beautiful resort nestled deep within the Rocky Mountains. The long, meandering road into the hotel becomes too covered with snow to make it financially viable to stay open for five months in the winter so they hire someone to live there and keep it maintained.

Jack brings his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and young son Danny (Danny Lloyd) who has some psychic ability (known as the Shining). The total isolation, the freezing cold (a huge blizzard traps them even further and isolates them more by knocking out the phone lines), and the ghosts push an already fragile Jack into psychotic territory.

The Overlook catered to the rich, powerful, and famous. People who make important decisions and devour depravity. Terrible things have happened there. Things the hotel is all too happy to cover up. In his initial meeting with the hotel manager, Jack is told of a previous caretaker whose cabin fever led him to murder his wife and two young daughters with an axe.

This violence and debauchery has left a psychic impressions on the hotel. Or perhaps, the hotel is a place of evil and it has left an impression on vulnerable people causing them to engage in horrible deeds. The film never gives an answer, it is a movie that wants you to come up with your own.

Kubrick films it in his usual technically proficient, yet emotionally detached way. His use of Steadicam (a fairly new technology) is masterful. Though the camera slowly wanders about the landscape of the hotel (truly making the setting a character unto itself) the geography of the place is disorienting. There are windows where there could feasibly be no windows, and doors that could only lead to nowhere. All of which makes the film deeply unsettling.

The performances while unanimously good, are cold and strange. Early in the film serious conversations are strangely monotone. Kubrick used many multiple takes (the scene in which Wendy swings her bat at Jack reported was shot over 100 times) to intentionally exhaust and unnerve the actors. The music is eerie and avant-garde.

It is nothing like a traditional horror film. While there are images of violence and horror – every character, especially Danny, flash on scenes from the hotel’s horrible past – the film unnerves you with its mood and calculating camera.

I love it. It is one of my favorite horror movies. I’m not alone in that assessment, and I’m sure many of you enjoy it as well. It works perfectly with this Frozen in January theme and I was happy to revisit it tonight.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Thing (1982)

the thing movie poster

When I was first thinking about this month’s theme – Frozen in January – it was John Carpenter’s The Thing that came to mind. It is the perfect encapsulation of what I was going for. Its characters are trapped in an isolated place covered in snow and ice. An external force causes an already tense situation into turmoil. The weather and the cold, frozen setting aren’t just window dressing, they help inform the story. I actually didn’t love the movie the first time I watched it, but with each subsequent viewing, I like it more and more. Now I think it is just about perfect.

The Thing is based upon a novella by John W. Campbell entitled Who Goes There?. It was previously adapted into the pretty great film in 1951, The Thing From Another World.

Set in an American research station in Antarctica The Thing stars Kurt Russell (and Wilford Brimley, and Keith David, and T.K. Carter and others, it really is a great cast) as a group of men who are already pushed beyond their limits. The isolation and the freezing weather are getting to them.

This is why, when a helicopter from the Norwegian station flies in shooting at some dog, and then at our heroes, they don’t initially think something is really wrong. They just chalk it up to those guys going stir-crazy.

I’ve seen this movie several times and I always forget how long it takes to get to the scenes I remember. The scenes in which the shape-shifting alien starts wiping everybody out. But before that, there are long, tension-building scenes, in which they try to figure out what’s going on at the Norwegian base. You’d think I’d remember them finding an alien spacecraft but I never do.

I think that is a testament to just how incredible the back half of this movie is. One of the many things I love about The Thing is that, unlike most of the films I’ve watched in this series, it really uses the freezing, isolated setting to help build the tension. As things ratchet up with the alien, we fully understand how there is no escape. Nowhere to go. No one will come to their rescue.

The alien is a shape-shifter so it can look like any one of them. No one knows who is human or something else. Carpenter makes us feel every moment of that horror.

The practical effects do look a bit unreal. I think that’s a big part of what I didn’t like about it on my first watch. They aren’t natural or realistic looking and that can take you out of the moment. Now I find that part of the film’s charm. The alien isn’t supposed to look real, not when it’s shifting into a chest cavity that can chop your hands off. It is supposed to look, well, alien. And cool. They look so cool. I’d love to see a behind-the-scenes look at how they made them.

John Carpenter really was a master of horror for so many years. The more I watch his classic films (and I’ve seen most of them several times) the more I think he’s one of the best who ever did it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Devil’s Honey (1986)

the devils honey

One of the things I miss about the old video rental stores is the ability to walk in and find something you’ve never heard of, that was completely obscure and weird. You’d take it home not knowing what to expect. Sometimes it was crap, but every now and then you’d find a real gem.

Sure, you can do that with streaming, but it just isn’t the same.

Growing up, we had this wonderful video store. It had previously been a Burger King, and when it closed down a place called Mega Movies moved in. They removed the kitchen providing a huge space for videos. I used to wander around that place for hours. I loved digging into the bowels of that place looking for something really weird.

As a virile teenage boy something really weird sometimes meant something with a scantily clad lady on the cover. I have this very distinct memory of a single scene from one of these movies. A beautiful woman was wearing nothing but a pair of pantyhose. A man stood nearby watching. She is repairing a run in her tights with some red nail polish which turns the man on, and soon enough she’s rubbing the polish in places nail polish should never go.

I couldn’t ever remember anything else about the movie. I’ve often wondered what that movie was, but I wasn’t about to go Googling “woman masturbates with nail polish” so it remained a mystery.

Until tonight. I have a list of unwatched horror movies and digging through it tonight for something to watch I landed on this movie, The Devil’s Honey by Lucio Fulci.

I’ve written about Fulcio before, he’s a guy who made a lot of movies – most of them low-budget, a lot of them full of blood and gore. They aren’t always great, but they are usually interesting.

I went into this movie expecting some good old-fashioned violence. I was not expecting a half-naked woman with nail polish. Certainly not the half-naked woman with nail polish locked inside my memory banks for going on three decades.

That particular scene happens within fifteen minutes of the opening credits. Before that, there is a scene in which a man gets a woman off by placing the end of a saxophone on her crotch and playing her a song.

This isn’t the Lucio Fulci the Godfather of Gore, this is Fulci’s erotic thriller. Except, that it isn’t particularly erotic or thrilling, but it is amazingly weird and I’m always down for that.

The saxophonist is Johnny (Stefano Madia) and the girl is Jessica (Blanca Marsillach). They are tempestuous lovers. He’s obsessed with sex (as one might suspect from the display with the sax). She wants something more than that, usually protests at his fondling, but usually gives in.

There’s also a surgeon, Dr. Wendell Simpson (Brett Halsey), who is uninterested in sex with his wife but likes to go out with prostitutes (one of whom is the girl with the nail polish).

One day Johnny takes a tumble and bangs his head on a rock. At first, he seems fine, but later he collapses and is rushed to the hospital where Dr. Simpson tries to save him. Tries, but fails.

Awash in grief Jessica begins calling the Dr. on the regular, asking him why he let Johnny die. Eventually, she kidnaps the man and does a little sadomasochistic torture on him while periodically flashing back to more idyllic times with Johnny.

Though I’ve seen 16 of his films and written about him at least five times, I’ve never thought Fulci was that particularly great a director. He can create some interesting imagery, and he’s a wizard with low-budget gore effects, but his stories are usually a mess and his camerawork is nothing special. A film like this where the gore is minuscule and the violence, no matter how psycho-sexual, is mostly sidelined or at least restrained (for a Fulci film) finds itself with not much of interest to say.

There is enormous amounts of gratuitous nudity, loads of misogyny, and the whole thing is ridiculously dopey. Yet I kind of dug it. It is so wild and weird in a way that only Lucio Fulci can be that I had to sit back and marvel at it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

the masque of the read death

As I mentioned in my very first Friday Night Horror post I started watching horror movies on Friday night because my wife and daughter made a habit of watching silly Youtube videos upstairs in our bedroom. I’d go downstairs and put on a movie, and because it was late at night and because my wife wasn’t around to complain, I’d often put on a horror movie. Then it became a habit. Then I started writing about them each week.

My daughter is getting older. We still watch Doctor Who on most Friday nights, but it is often downstairs while eating our dinner. Then she wanders off to do her own thing and my wife winds up watching Youtube by herself while I find a horror movie to watch.

Lately, the daughter has often been invited over to a friend’s house for sleepovers on a Friday night leaving me and the wife home alone. This is not a problem as we enjoy spending time alone together.

But me being me I still want to get my Friday Night Horror movie in. I feel obligated to watch a movie and write about it no matter what (with few exceptions, including one that will likely happen in a couple of weeks). She doesn’t like horror movies so we compromise.

Vincent Price is a very nice compromise. (Also, as I write this I realize I’ve written some similar thoughts this past summer when my daughter was spending a Friday night at a friend’s).

I think I first came to know Vincent Price as that voice in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” although I think at that point he was just one of those celebrities that everybody knew about, even dumb little kids who had never seen one of his movies. I think he showed up pretty regularly on game shows or as a special guest in various dramas and mysteries. I also enjoyed him in Edward Scissorhands.

It has only been in the last decade or so that I’ve really dug into his body of work and come to love him. He was a wonderful dramatic actor for many years, but of course, he eventually became beloved as an icon of horror movies. He is always a delight.

He certainly is in tonight’s film, The Masque of the Red Death, the penultimate film in director Roger Corman’s cycle of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations.

Price plays Prospero an evil prince living in medieval Italy. When a bout of a plague known as the Red Death is discovered Prospero invites various rich and noble folk into his castle for safety while allowing the common folk (or those who have offended him in some way) to suffer a long and horrible death (when he’s not outright killing them himself for pleasure).

He does allow three peasants inside his castle walls. Two men (played by David Weston and Nigel Green) dared to call him out on his evil deeds, and are now prisoners to be tortured. Francesca (Jane Asher) the daughter and fiancee of the men, begs for their lives and is invited to the castle to be Prospero’s plaything.

Turns out Prospero is a Satanist and his evil deeds are in service to the Dark Lord. Francesca is a devout Christian and he figures if he can turn her away from her faith it will prove his own dedication to Satan.

Things get a little bit crazy before Prospero gets his comeuppance and realizes that no matter what you believe it is death that comes for us all in the end.

Like a lot of Hammer Horror films The Masque of the Red Death mostly bores me with its plotting. There is a lot of plotting and talking and while it isn’t bad, it isn’t all that exciting either. Price (and everybody else, really) mostly plays it straight. He’s still a delightful screen presence, but there’s just a lot of exposition to get through, and I find myself drifting away while watching.

But what I absolutely adore about the film are the sets, the costumes, and the overall production design. It looks absolutely amazing. While watching my wife and I decided if we were rich we’d buy us an old gothic mansion and I’d wear nothing but satin dressing gowns and she’d don only long, flowing dresses. It doesn’t hurt that it was shot by Nicola Roeg who would go on to make some wonderful films himself.

So not a great movie, but one I still loved looking at.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Hereditary (2018)

hereditary

This week I watched exactly one movie, Beau is Afraid the new horror film by Ari Aster. Honestly, I’m not sure what I think of it. It isn’t a bad film, exactly, but it did take me three days to complete it. There was just only so much of it I could take in one setting. It is a film with a particular point of view, and that POV is rather unsettling.

Joaquin Phoenix plays a man with intense anxiety. He is the sort of person who always imagines the absolute worst thing possible is going to happen. The film essentially stays in his point of view and so I was never sure what was real and what was just in his head. Critic Matt Singer has a very good review of the film and he explains it much better than I am.

I finished Beau is Afraid yesterday and so it is not the Friday Night Horror Movie, but watching that film made me want to return to Ari Aster’s first full-length feature film, Hereditary. And that is the FNHM.

Like Beau is Afraid, Hereditary is a strange, unsettling film and I’m not entirely sure what it all means, but I connected to it much more strongly than I did with Beau.

Like so many modern horror films Hereditary is about grief. It begins with the death of a matriarch, or rather the funeral of the matriarch. She was a complicated, sometimes difficult woman as we’ll learn by listening to her daughter, Annie (Toni Collette) give her eulogy. Mother and daughter had a strained relationship. The family has a long history of mental illness that ends in tragedy.

Later another terrible tragedy will strike sending the family spiraling. Annie begins having visions of the dead. Her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) tries to hold the family together but his own grief envelops him. The son, Peter (Alex Wolff) blames himself for the accident.

The film goes to unexpected and weird places, almost none of it is believable, and yet I was completely carried away by it. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot as to avoid spoilers but if you like horror that find a unique way to terrify then this is a movie worth checking out.

Collette gives an absolutely riveting performance. Ann Dowd shows up too as a, well, again I won’t spoil it, but she’s always worth watching.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Royal Hotel (2023)

the royal hotel

Hannah (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) are backpacking in Australia. When they run out of money they go to an employment agency that specializes in finding gigs for travellers. They are sent to a remote mining town where they are employed as bartenders at a dirty, rundown pub/hotel.

It is run by a drunken bastard of a man who has clearly seen better days (a glorious Hugo Weaving), and it is patronized by a motley crew of miners who are as rowdy as they are misogynistic. They constantly harass with come-ons and sexist jokes.

Writer/director Kitty Green (along with co-writer Oscar Redding) fills The Royal Hotel with an unending sense of dread. From the moment Hannah and Liv arrive in town there is a feeling that something terrible is going to happen to them.

But this isn’t a movie filled with knife-wilding maniacs or skeezy rapists, or cannibals. It is more realistic than that. The men, for the most part, seem like decent blokes – hard-working, blue-collar, rough-around-the-edges blokes for sure, but not necessarily evil men.

But that’s the thing, that’s the point the film is trying to make. A couple of young women, out-of-towers, like these girls are, will inevitably face a litany of potential dangers in a place like this. And there is no way for them to tell who is essentially harmless, and who might cause them real horror.

Hannah is the one who recognizes the potential danger they face every night, while Liv seems more oblivious. She’s willing to accept the overt sexism as a cultural difference. It is up to Hannah then, to constantly steer Liv away from danger.

One of the locals, Matty (Toby Wallace) takes a shine to Hannah. He seems nice so the girls allow him to take them to a watering hole for a swim. They have a good time and get a little drunk. That night he puts a few moves on Matty. She rebuffs. Gently at first, but he persists. She tells him straight up “no” but he pushes back. Eventually, she has to get tough and yell at him. But at that moment it isn’t clear if he will leave.

Another customer, Dolly (Daniel Henshall) is seen lingering upstairs in the hall near their room. On another night he gets aggressively rude with Matty. But he’s sweet to Liv, especially when she’s drunk. On at least a couple of times, he steers her towards his car when she’s completely loaded.

It is a slow burn of a film. There isn’t a lot of incident. Not a lot happens. For most of the film’s run time, I felt myself waiting for something to happen. Something horrible. That’s not a knock on the film at all, I found it rather exhilarating. So many horror films go running straight to the jump scares and the violence, that it was rather pleasing to watch a film so willing to take its time.

I hesitated to make this my Friday Night Horror film because, well, to be honest, the horror never really comes. It doesn’t end in a bloodbath. Not to spoil things but it does end with a bit of violence, but not in the traditional horror movie sense. There are some tonal shifts moving the film between horror, thriller, and something like a workplace-from-hell drama that the film doesn’t quite pull off. But mostly it really worked for me.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Knock at the Cabin (2023)

knock at the cabin

A young family is vacationing at a remote cabin in the woods. Seven-year-old Wen (Kristen Cui) is outside catching grasshoppers. A huge, hulking man slowly approaches. He says his name is Leonard (Dave Bautista) and despite his size, he’s gentle and kind. We’ll later learn he is an elementary teacher and we can believe that in his demeanor and actions.

But while he is being nice to Wen, engaging in her grasshopper collecting, he keeps looking over his shoulder as if something menacing is going to approach.

Moments later three people do appear. Leonard tells Wen that they are going to have to come into the cabin and that she should tell her dads.

Wen panics at this and then rushes to the cabin, and screams at her Dads – Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge) to come inside and lock the door. They try to calm her down but when they see Leonard, and all his girth, standing at the door they get worried. When they see the other three carrying what appear to be makeshift weapons, they panic.

Leonard tries to explain that they need to come inside. He does so in his school teacher’s voice. The film makes great use of Bautista’s size juxtaposed against his kindly demeanor. But he also says they will force themselves in if the men don’t unlock the doors.

The doors remain locked and these strangers do force themselves in. After a brief fight, where Eric sustains a concussion, Eric and Andrew are tied up.

The strangers, which also include a nurse, Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), a cook Adriane (Abby Quinn), and a violent redneck Redmond (Rupert Grint) tell a strange tale about how each of them has been having visions about the end of the world. About how Eric and Andrew must make a decision – a grave decision to stop it. They must choose one member of their family to sacrifice – to kill, to murder – to stop the oncoming apocalypse.

That’s completely mad. No one would believe a few nutters barging into their house spouting that nonsense. And our heroes don’t believe it. But then the film starts to make us, and them believe.

I won’t spoil the details but the film uses the isolated setting and a few other tricks to make this scenario plausible. Director M. Night Shyamalan is an expert in creating tension out of fantastical settings and stories.

Still, I never quite bought into the premise. The thing about a film like this is that you spend all your time wondering what the film is going to do in the end. Will the apocalypse come? Or will it be averted by someone being sacrificed? Or will they sacrifice someone only to realize that the strangers were in fact crazy and nothing actually happened on the outside? Or will it have an oblique ending, will we never know if the apocalypse was real or not?

Apparently, the movie ends differently than the book, and most people seem pretty upset with the changes they made. I’ve not read the book, but the ending definitely was not satisfying. But I’m not sure it could have done anything to really satisfy. As I said, I never quite bought into what the story was selling.

Still, I quite liked the film. Shyalaman is a very good director and a master of camera placement and movement. I was enthralled with the filmmaking even when the story let me down.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

10 cloverfield lane poster

The MCU has ruined cinema in so many ways. I mean I’m a fan of many of their films but the way that they essentially steamrolled Hollywood has created numerous problems. Listen to Martin Scorsese for the details, but one of those issues was that it made every movie try to become part of its own cinematic universe.

10 Cloverfield Lane is the perfect example of this. Cloverfield was a JJ Abrams film in which…actually, you know what? I’m not going to spoil what Cloverfield was about. If you haven’t seen that film, if you haven’t even heard of it then I’m gonna let you exist in ignorance. It isn’t a bad film, but staying in the dark on that film is a very good thing when it comes to watching this one.

10 Cloverfield Lane is a movie that was developed on its own. It was only later when they actually moved forward into the process of making it that they decided to make it part of the Cloverfield Cinematic Universe and tacked on an ending to fit that sequence, and well, that was a dumb idea.

Anyway, Mary Elizabeth Winstead stars as Michelle, a woman who as the film begins is running away from her fiancé. They’ve had a fight and she can’t handle it.

Out on the road, in the middle of nowhere Louisiana, she has a terrible accident that renders her unconscious. Sometime later she awakes inside a bare, cinderblock bunker. There is an IV connected to her arm and a brace connected to her leg. She’s also chained to the wall. Terrified she tries to escape, but to no avail.

Then in walks a massive, hulking man. His name is Howard (John Goodman). He tells her she can’t escape, tosses her a key to her chains, and then shuts and locks the door. Eventually, he lets her out and shows her around his rather large, and fully accommodated underground bunker. He tells her a story about how he rescued her from that car wreck and brought her down there to escape…something. Something bad. An attack of some sort. He thinks it was Russians or possibly aliens but they’ve made the air poisonous. Only they survived and they are stuck down there for at least a year.

The they also includes Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.) Howard’s neighbor who helped build the bunker and is a believer in the invasion story. He saw it with his own eyes. Michelle is skeptical. Howard is clearly unstable. One minute he’s a kindly, country farmer, the next he’s grabbing onto her shoulders and screaming. He built this bunker expecting something terrible and now he’s imagined it.

The screenplay wavers. There are moments when it seems as if Howard is crazy, that the outside terrors are just his imagination. And then a moment later we’ll see something that makes us believe. As the film moves forward Michelle begins to realize that the horrors inside might just be worse than the horrors outside.

It is an incredibly well-constructed, tension-filled, little horror-thriller. I love films that are set entirely inside a single setting and the bunker is a fantastic place for this movie. It is small and claustrophobic while still having enough rooms and crannies to keep things interesting. The film twists and turns in the most fascinating ways. When she first finds herself chained up in that little room we expect the worst. We expect what horror movies usually give us in those scenarios. But the film doesn’t give us that, it gives us something else.

The ending does tie itself to the Cloverfield universe and I don’t really love that, but also it is surprisingly tense. Giving us an answer to the question as to what is going on outside was always going to be a letdown, and yet again it worked for me on a beat-for-beat cellular level. I mean it was scary.

Goodman gives an absolutely fantastic performance. I wish he’d been given more opportunities like this. Winstead and Gallagher are likewise superb. It isn’t a perfect movie, but it’s a really good one.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Deep Red (1975)

deep red poster

I’ve mentioned Dario Argento several times before on this blog. He’s one of my favorite directors – certainly my favorite horror director. He didn’t invent the Giallo, but he definitely popularized it and perfected it. Deep Red is one of, it not my actual favorite films of his and possibly the best Giallo ever made.

The plot is deceptively simple – it is a relatively straightforward murder mystery – and yet also a convoluted mess. David Hemmings stars as a jazz pianist who witnesses his downstairs neighbor get brutally murdered. He teams up with a journalist played by Daria Nicolodi and tries to figure out what happened.

I’ve seen this film at least five different times, and I’m still not sure I understand everything that happens in the film or the real motivation of the killer.

And I don’t care in the least that I don’t.

Argento was a master of style and it is on full display here. It is full of dark, bold colors (especially red) and disturbing imagery. The camera moves and slides across corridors, it is filled with extreme closeups and wondrously stylized violence.

There is a scene about halfway through the film in which a character sits in his office. The camera and the music let us know that something scary is about to happen. That the killer is there. The character knows it. We hear the killer whisper. Then something happens, I won’t spoil it here, but it is one of the most surprising and terrifying things I’ve ever witnessed at the cinema.

When my heart slows down I realize that this moment makes absolutely no logical sense, especially given who the killer turns out to be, but again I just don’t care.

The score by progressive rock band Goblin is kinetic, percussive, and heart-pounding. They wrote the scores for several other Argento films and they are all terrific. The director uses the music to great effect – stopping and starting it at crucial moments creating small, but effective adrenaline rushes.

If you are a horror fan I absolutely recommend Deep Red to you.

Like a lot of Italian productions at the time the film was shot without sync sound. All of the dialog was dubbed in post-production in both English and Italian. In previous watches I was always confused because periodically some characters would start speaking Italian without warning and then a moment later they would switch back to English. Bilingual people can, and often do this in real life, but there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it in this film.

Pulling out my Arrow Vidoe Blu-ray tonight I discovered why. They edited out several scenes (and snippets of scenes) for the exported cut of the film (which presumably means the copies sent to English-speaking countries) and thus they did not record English language tracks for those scenes. Or if they did the English tracks were lost at some point. Those scenes have since been added back into the English language version of the film but there are no English language audio for the new scenes. In some ways this adds to the already disjointedness of the film.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: A Haunting In Venice (2023)

a haunting in venice poster

I follow a lot of film critics and culture writers on various social media platforms. Most of them like to periodically complain about the state of the movies. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has created a seismic change in movies, and more specifically the way movies are shown in theaters. Or rather how many movies are no longer shown in theaters.

The MCU has made billions upon billions of dollars. Their method of interconnecting their films into one giant universe (and making piles of cash in the process) has made every other studio chase those billions. In doing so they are no longer satisfied with smaller movies, where they can only make millions of dollars instead of billions, virtually erasing mid-budget films in the process.

These film critics complain and complain about how adult-oriented dramas, mysteries, and romances simply don’t exist at the movies anymore. They wax nostalgic about times in the past, two or three decades ago, when they could go to the movies and watch something that wasn’t based upon a comic book or a part of a larger franchise.

Yet, when those types of films do get made and do get shown in the theaters, these same critics tend to pan them and encourage others not to go see them.

Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot films are a good example of this. Based upon the novels of Agatha Christie, Branaugh has directed and starred in three films in which he plays the famous Belgian detective. I won’t claim that they are great films by any stretch, but they aren’t big-budget superhero films either. They are well-told mysteries with terrific casts and are made for adults. In a word they are exactly the sort of films that these types of critics complain don’t get made anymore. Yet when the movies come out, those same critics do nothing but grouse about them.

And that’s enough grousing from me. The latest Poirot film is probably the best one. As the title implies there is a supernatural element to it, and while it isn’t a straight horror it certainly contains elements of horror and that means I get to talk about it tonight. It also means that my daughter is having a sleepover and me and the wife had a much-needed date night and this is as close to horror as she’d let me get.

Hercule Poirot has retired into seclusion in Venice, Italy. There has been too much death and misery in his life and he simply cannot stand to tackle another mystery.

When his friend, Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), a novelist who writes thinly veiled Poirot mysteries, invites him to a seance he at first declines but her friendship wins him over.

The seance takes place on Halloween night in an old, decaying palazzo. It is being held by Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly) who hopes to speak to her daughter who mysteriously killed herself in the palazzo one year prior. Also at the seance are an assortment of interesting people all of whom have a connection to Rowena and her daughter and, it will be found out, had a reason to murder her.

Poirot quickly exposes the psychic (Michelle Yeoh) as a fraud and is ready to leave, but when the psychic is murdered and someone tries to drown him in an apple bobbing bowl, he locks everyone inside the palazzo and finds himself once again back on a case.

This one is based on a much less famous book (Hallowe’en Party) than the other two films (Murder on the Orient Express & Death on the Nile). Apparently, it’s quite loosely based as well, which allows it to surprise you with its story rather than retell one that is quite familiar to casual fans.

The palazzo is reminiscent of all those gothic castles in those old haunted house movies that I love so much. It allows for plenty of creepy, atmospheric shots down long corridors, and shadowy rooms. The film has a lot of fun toying with whether or not the supernatural aspects are real or not, making it great fun to watch.

Kenneth Branagh clearly enjoys himself playing the famous detective and he’s become quite good at it. He’ll never replace David Suchet (who played Poirot in the long-running British television series) but he’s still quite entertaining. I love that he’s able to make these lavish adaptations with large, wonderful, casts. I hope he gets to make a dozen more.