The Friday Night Horror Movie: Triangle (2009)

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I don’t know how to write about this without spoiling a main plot point, so reader beware.

I love a good time loop movie. Groundhog Day wasn’t the first one of that type, but it perfected it and popularized it, and now it’s become a genre unto itself. Triangle takes the formula and gives it an interesting twist. Instead of our hero falling asleep and waking up to the same day over and over again (or getting killed and resetting to the beginning of the same day), she stays awake and in the same place while the other characters all die and then get reset and meet her again.

Six people take a sailboat out for a cruise. They mostly don’t know each other but are all connected to Greg (Michael Dorman), who owns the boat. Everybody is excited except Jess (Melissa George), who seems distracted and tired.

Things go well until they don’t. A sudden storm rolls in and capsizes the boat. All but one manage to climb on top of the wreckage. Soon they spot a cruise ship and hail it for help. They climb aboard but find it to be empty. Well, almost empty. They keep getting glimpses of someone, but that person seems to be hiding.

Jess gets increasingly paranoid. She keeps saying she’s been on this boat before. Then people start dying. Someone with a burlap sack over his head starts shooting people. Jess is the only one to survive. As she knocks the killer overboard, the killer says that they’ll be back and the only way to get home is to kill everybody.

Then a song plays over the radio, and Jess sees their capsized boat approaching. Except it isn’t empty; it is full of those original six people, including herself. Now here’s where the movie loses me a little. If it were me, I’d run up to my friends (and myself, I guess) and freak the frack out. I’d probably scare them at first, but I’d try to explain what just happened and let my friends try to figure things out. Jess does not do this. Instead she hides, then slinks around spying on the group. We’re treated to some of the same scenes we just watched but from different angles. She eventually tries to stop her friends from getting murdered. She does manage to change the timeline to varying degrees, but ultimately they all die again.

I know I put a spoiler heading at the top of this, but I don’t want to spoil everything, so I’ll have to let the plot lie right there. In some ways the script is very clever about letting things unfold, and in other ways it is rather stupid. Jess makes some ridiculously bad decisions for no other reason than to let the plot go in the direction the writers wanted it to.

It manages to conclude itself in a very unexpected and yet satisfying manner. It finds a way to do something completely different from all the other time loop movies I’ve seen, and I love that.

In the end I’d call it a good, but somewhat frustrating film, but one well worth watching.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Happy Death Day (2017)

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Groundhog Day meets Scream is a good way to describe Happy Death Day. With maybe a touch of Heathers and Clueless. It doesn’t break any new ground, but it has a great lead performance by Jessica Rothe and I thought it was a lot of fun.

Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) wakes up from a night of partying with a hangover and no idea where she is. There is a boy who says his name is Carter (Israel Broussard) but she doesn’t know who he is. Since she’s in his dorm, sleeping in his bed and she’s not wearing any pants she figures she must have slept with him, but she doesn’t remember that either.

He is polite, if perhaps a bit embarrassed by this ordeal (we’ll find out later he did not sleep with her and he does become a romantic interest), but she wants nothing to do with him. She is, in a word, a bitch. A mean girl. She’s rude to everyone. We’ll discover later it is her birthday and the anniversary of her mother’s death and her meanness is in part a way for her to distance herself from her grief. But like her namesake, she needs to grow up.

Her walk of shame takes her across the campus commons. There she will cross paths with a number of memorable things – a weird goth dude stares at her, an eager woman tries to get her to sign a petition, a car alarm goes off, and some sprinklers spray a couple of picnickers. Etc. These are the types of things that will alert her to the fact that she’s reliving the same day over and over again.

The film nearly winks at the audience during this scene. We know what kind of film we’re getting into. It knows we know and welcomes us with a smile.

She’ll then meet our cast of characters who will become suspects in her murder. There’s the sorority Queen Bee, the put-upon roommate, the married doctor she’s sleeping with, etc. Then on her way to a party that evening, someone wearing a weird baby mask (the school’s mascot is apparently a baby!?) stabs her to death.

Bam. She wakes back up in Carter’s room, reliving the same day all over again. Getting murdered no matter what she does. Groundhog Day wasn’t the first film to put its character into a time loop, but it is probably the best and it is certainly the most popular. Many films have taken that premise and installed it into different genres. Slashers tend to be rather cookie-cutter in similarity so it makes perfect sense to apply the Groundhog Day scenario to it.

One of the interesting additions to the story is how her violent deaths begin taking a toll on her body. She’s stabbed numerous times and they begin to leave internal scars even as her life continues to recycle each day.

Happy Death Day relies more on the murder mystery angle than the horror. It isn’t particularly scary and the violence is decidedly PG-13. But it has fun with its premise and Jessica Rothe is wonderful. She nails the bitchiness, the pathos, and ultimately the warmth of the character.

There is a sequel and I sort-of wrote a little bit about it here.

Sci-Fi in July: Palm Springs (2020)

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I love Groundhog’s Day-type movies. There is something really interesting about watching characters relive the same day over and over again. Ironic, since when our daily lives feel like that, we want to strike out and do something different.

Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, I think that is what makes these films so interesting. Because the characters are literally stuck on the same day, getting a reset whenever they fall asleep or die, they are free to do whatever they want. Knowing everything will go back to normal the next day, they can do all the things they were too afraid to do in real life.

Palm Springs came out in 2020 when many of us were stuck in lockdown. It felt like every day was the same because we couldn’t go anywhere or do anything. It is fun reading reviews of the film when it came out because everyone was feeling like they were stuck in their own time loop.

It does a couple of interesting things with the concept. First, the film is a romantic comedy which I don’t believe has ever been done with this type of film. Second, it brings other people into the time loop with fascinating results.

We suspect something is different from near the start. Niles (Andy Samberg) behaves strangely. He attends a wedding reception in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts. He gives an impromptu speech that seems well-rehearsed. He dances to impress a girl, Sarah (Christin Miloti), but his moves incorporate all the other people at the reception in a way that seems impossible.

Of course, he’s been stuck in the time loop for a long time. That’s something else that’s different about this movie. Normally we enter the loop with our main character, here he’s already been inside it for years.

He starts to hook up with Sarah but before they get too far he’s attacked by a strange man named Roy (J.K. Simmons). Niles runs into a cave and even though he shouts for Sarah not to follow, she does anyway.

Now she’s stuck in the time loop. They are stuck together. They get to know each other. They have fun. They do crazy stuff. She tries to kill herself. It is all the same basic time loop movie stuff, but they make it fun.

Roy is also stuck in the loop. Years ago he and Niles connected at the wedding reception, got drunk, had a lot of fun and Niles took him to the cave. Now Roy hates Niles for putting him into the loop.

One of the interesting things about this film is that it delves a little into what a time loop would do to you psychologically. Niles has become ambivalent about everything. Nothing matters because it will all reset tomorrow. At one point Sarah becomes depressed and tries to kill herself. Later, she’ll become angry and she lashes out violently against some men. Niles stops her because he says, that while those people won’t remember what she did to them, she will. Knowing she is capable of such violence will take its toll on her own mind.

But mostly it is a silly little romantic comedy. The jokes don’t always work for me, they are a little too broad and silly for my tastes, but I still laughed quite a bit. What makes it work in a big way is the chemistry between Samberg and Miloti. Christin Miloti is especially great. I haven’t really seen her in anything, but she deserves to be a star. Together they make it work. I wanted to spend all the time with them living through each day, even though it was the same day.

Foreign Film February: Re/Member (2022)

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By now we all know the Groundhog Day Drill. Someone for some reason gets stuck in a time loop. The same day is played out for them over and over again. To stop it they must do something – make a life change, find a killer, stop a war, etc. whatever. There were time loop films before Groundhog Day, but that film perfected the concept and countless films have tried to repeat its success in various ways.

Re/Memory takes the basic concept and mixes it with a slasher horror film (something that has become something of a sub-sub-genre in itself) and a Japanese high school melodrama. Results are very mixed.

One of the many strange things the film does is that it kind of pushes many of the time loop elements to the side in order to focus on the relationship of its characters.

Set in a typical Japanese high school six students find themselves reliving the same day over and over. Eventually, they realize their task is to find the mutilated body parts of a young girl who was murdered many years ago. The ghost of the girl haunts them every day at midnight, stalking them until they are all dead, and the day resets.

But it only happens after midnight. The day begins in the morning and they each go about their regular day – attending school, having lunch, playing sports, etc. Then at midnight, they are transported to the chapel inside the school where they must find those body parts before getting killed. Apparently, the various arms and legs aren’t available during the day.

It is so strange to see them acting like normal high school kids with all of their romances and social clicks only to find them at night running for their lives. The film never deals with the fact that being murdered every night and watching your friends get killed would be incredibly traumatic for these kids.

These six kids are all lonely in one way or another. Our main protagonist, Asuka (Kanna Hashimoto) is considered a loner. No one at school talks to her and they act like she’s some sort of freak. Some of the others are outcasts as well, but some seem to be popular kids. They have friends, but deep down they are just as lonely.

Through battling a vengeful ghost every night they become a tight group of friends. It is like The Breakfast Club, but with a vengeful, murderous ghost. This is handled fairly poorly. For the first two days, all the other kids still shun Asuka, but suddenly on the third morning, they treat her like a bestie. And she’s suddenly no longer this super shy kid, but outgoing and friendly.

The horror aspects aren’t handled any better. The film tends to skip over the hunting for the body parts scenes. The kids do eventually learn to handle the hunt systematically, but there is very little actual searching for anything. In the same way, it skips over most of the real terror of the situation. There are maybe one or two moments where the kids are hiding from the monster, hoping to escape its clutches, but mostly the film focuses on the capture. There is plenty of violence and (poorly rendered) CGI gore.

I was more interested in the daytime scenes, but I’ve always been a sucker for high school movies. If you are looking for a horror take on the classic Ground Hog Day scenario there are many other better choices. I recommend Happy Death Day.