#ssos

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Speculative concept for a sea of sorrow boss I've been calling the Sea Weaver or Sea Spinner

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Review: Deep Water

Dir. Renny Harlin

In the now 50+ years since Jaws was released to an unwitting public in the summer of 1975, subsequent shark movies have felt the need to up the ante  — quantity over quality, generally speaking  —  in order to entice the public back to the water, as it were. There have been films involving multiple sharks (47 Meters Down, The Requin, Open Water, et al.), prehistoric monster sharks (The Meg 1 & 2), genetically enhanced sharks (Deep Blue Sea), strangely recriminating sharks (Jaws: The Revenge), French sharks (Under Paris), grocery-shopping sharks (Bait), several peculiar weather-stricken sharks (Sharknado 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), and not-nearly-as-bad-as-a-human-serial-killer sharks (Dangerous Animals), to name but a few. 

It is the Ugly American (who, in case it wasn’t clear enough, literally yells “I’m an American!” at one point, as if there were any doubt), who smokes where he’s not supposed to, and jams a large, faulty Lithium battery in with his checked bag because he doesn’t care about your stupid rules, okay! Said battery catches fire, blows up the cargo hold and eventually sends the plane, en route to Shanghai, plummeting somewhere into the Pacific. With a band of hearty survivors, some eventually gathered on one of the remaining sections of floating fuselage, some stuck under water in an air bubble, on hand, it’s up to Emotionally Estranged First Officer (EEFO) to keep everyone together, even as a bevy of ravenous sharks endlessly circle and plot their attacks around them. 

To be fair, the film’s first 30 minutes is at least slightly better than you might expect  —  it certainly doesn’t hurt to have Sir Ben Kingsley on hand, even though his character dies in the first act faster than you can say “Fiji Vacation Home”  —  with a modicum of care put in by Harlin and an army of writers, to give us slightly more than the most basic character beats. Sassy Grandma notes her young seat-mate’s attraction to a comely flight attendant by harshly rating him a “five” on the beauty scale; the technical give-and-take between the flight crew offers a taste of verisimilitude amidst the characters laying out their prickly relationship. But, much like the doomed “Northeastern Airlines” jet itself, the film more or less goes down the longer it goes on. 

There isn’t terribly much shark activity either, for all of the film’s marketing materials suggesting a feeding frenzy of Great Whites. Save for a few big, open-jawed moments (again, depressingly realized through weak-sauce CGI), and the occasional corpse suddenly being plucked down from the waters, the sharks make themselves relatively scarce  —  given the fate of most everyone else in the cast, maybe they were onto something.

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Review: Lee Cronin's The Mummy

How do you suppose Lee Cronin has joined the ranks of the known-commodity director class whose names are integrated into the film’s title (a la Alfred Hitchcock, or John Ford)? This possessory credit, as it is known, is generally afforded to those filmmakers or writers whose individual fame in a given genre is believed to add luster to the production (e.g. Agatha Christie’s Murder On The Orient Express).  To date, the Irish director has only two other features under his belt: The relatively successful Evil Dead Rise, from 2023, which made solid money for Warner Bros., and the heralded indie horror flick The Hole in the Ground, which made certain waves at the festival circuit back in 2019. 

Other than maybe having a hell of an agent, there isn’t much we can speculate on, there, but in his short oeuvre, we can draw one significant conclusion: He has a definite penchant for what we can call ‘Family Intergenerational Mechanics’ horror (the label’s still being workshopped). 

The Hole in the Ground is a classic changeling flick: A sweet, young boy suddenly transforms into a hellish demon-spawn to his young mother’s shock, leading her to believe her actual son is trapped somewhere (perhaps a hole in the ground…?), while this demonic imposter tries to take his place. Cronin’s entry in the reimagined Evil Dead franchise, likewise finds a mother taken over by a demonic force, attempting to kill not only her children, but also her sister before meeting her end (?) in a wood chipper. So, essentially, as Cronin’s cinematic signature, we have family members replaced by demons, and traumatic blood and gore at every turn.

Which, finally, brings us to The Mummy, not a remake of the much-beloved 1999 Brendan Frasier vehicle; nor connected to the much-reviled 2017 Tom Cruise misfire (poorly received to the point that it shut down the fledgling Universal monster “Dark Universe” before it really even began). This film begins, of course, in Cairo, Egypt, where we eventually meet a young American family, including patriarch Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor), an on-the-rise broadcast journalist stationed in Egypt, along with his pregnant RN wife, Larissa (Laia Costa), and their two young children, Katie (Emily Mitchell), and her kid brother, Sebastian (Dean Allen Williams). 

Things seem to be going swimmingly for the couple  —  Charlie has just gotten word that he’s been hired for a huge promotion in New York  —  but on the very day he receives this bit of news, Katie, playing out back in their verdant backyard, is kidnapped by a witch-like wraith (Hayat Kamille) we meet in the film’s opening minutes. Despite the family’s best efforts, and the work of a dedicated Egyptian detective, Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy), the case is unresolved and Katie remains missing. 

Jumping ahead eight years, the family is now back at Larissa’s gloomy ancestral home in Alberquerque, along with her mother, Carmen (Veronica Falcón), Charlie having been regulated to a local TV producer’s role, and his wife working at a local hospital. The mostly grown Sebastian (now played by Shylo Molina), and his parents, are joined by new kid sister, Maud (Billie Cannon), and Katie’s existence is mostly only alluded to, at least up until the couple get a phone call that their daughter has been found alive, back in Egypt. 

The downside is, she seems to have spent the last few years inside a sarcophagus, and has some prominently different features than she had before. Cronin cannily plays this part out, juxtaposing only Katie’s twisted mouth in the foreground of her startled parents. Bound to a wheelchair, unable to speak, and with extended claws for fingernails, Katie is brought by the Cannon clan back home in an attempt to ease her back into regular society, but back in New Mexico, things go from bad to worse. 

Soon, she’s exhibiting possessed Regan MacNeil-esque behaviors (eating bugs, torturing her siblings, vomiting copiously, and scarpering along the ceiling of their home like a water bug), and, worse, young Maud seems to also be under her spell, leaving their miserable parents to settle what seems to be an ancient curse inflicted on them from the realm of hells. 

Cronin is gifted at setting the table, so to speak, giving us enough unsettling visual detail to infuse a spooky scene with enough macabre energy to keep the viewer jumping. He’s also not afraid to take his films well past the usual, easily forgettable, levels of basic gore of the standard horror film. His kills tend to stick in the psyche: In the course of the film’s more than two-hour runtime, we witness a character get impaled through the throat, not once but twice, a young person forcibly pulling out all the teeth out of their jaw, plenty of bloody sputum, a scorpion lasciviously chewed up and devoured, and a character falling out of a window and getting graphically eaten alive by a pack of coyotes. 

Beyond the gross-out bits, Cronin, working from his own script, also seems to delight in setting up his familial groups with slightly cheesy, Hollywood-style group dynamics  — the in-jokes and geniality shared amongst loving parents and their adoring children  — only to subvert the living hell out them when the demons come calling (young Maud, when we first meet her, comes across as a kind of sit-com style kid sister, all smiles and quips, until Katie infuses her with demonic energy, whereby she sits at her school desk snapping a pair of scissors menacingly, and calls her teacher a combination of profanities that would make Tony Soprano blush). 

The film does feel a bit longer than it needs to be, even as the best scenes are taut and gripping, and the story makes certain leaps of logic that don’t make a ton of real-world sense. It’s not a perfect film by any means  —  leading man Reynor has essentially one bug-eyed expression to show his alarm; the climax, while not unearned, isn’t particularly creative  —  but Cronin’s commitment to truly unsettling his audience is a winning approach to a genre that all too often settles for the bland and stultifyingly predictable. Happily, for a film all about familial dynamics, it is decidedly not intended for the whole family. 

[chosokamosgirlfriend]

i just realized they never made robin and will hug youre fucking joking

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Film Review: Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights

Dir. Emerald Fennell

Emerald Fennell’s literary adaptation of the much revered 19th century novel by Emily Brontë begins with a sound, a muffled series of moans and sharp intakes of breath. For all the hype about the film’s ballyhooed sensuality, the implication is immediate, and faintly transgressive, as if the sexual charge of the film comes even before any imagery. It turns out, however, that the moans are being made by a man, not in the throes of passion, but draped with a death hood, in the process of being hanged. 

Fennell, whose reputation as a cinematic provocateur comes from a pair of hotly disputed previous films, Promising Young Woman, and Saltburn, seems to be setting up a kind of punishment for our expectations: If we were imagining one of world’s most endearing tragedies about passion being turned into a sexually frank and explicit drama, Fennell suggests strongly we think again. That more or less holds true for the rest of the film. As much as the trailer suggests an unhinged, psycho-sexual bacchanalia, the actual event is far more tame  —  at least, graphically  —  than what we might have imagined. 

Heathcliff (played as an adolescent by Owen Cooper), a beggar’s child, is brought to Wuthering Heights by its drunken landowner, Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), who takes pity on the child as he’s being cuffed about by his lout of a father. At the venerable, forbidding estate, Heathcliff makes quick friends with Catherine (played as a young girl by Charlotte Mellington), and the two quickly become inseparable. At night, they spy on each other through the warped windows between Catherine’s bedroom, and Heathcliff’s makeshift straw bed across the way in the upstairs of the barn. 

Over time, he becomes thoroughly entranced by Catherine, eventually accepting beatings on her behalf from the emotionally volatile Earnshaw (“I will gladly take this and more every day, if it spares you,” the boy solemnly intones), to the continued consternation of Nelly (as an adult played by Hong Chau), Catherine’s maid, who shares no love for either of them. 

From there, we jump ahead an indeterminate number of years  —  long enough, essentially, for the two adult leads (Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi)  to be safely inserted in their roles. Earnshaw is even more of an ill-tempered sot, having whinnied away his modest fortune on gambling, leaving the family penniless. As financial desperation takes hold, the new arrival of the exuberantly wealthy Edgar (Shazed Latif), and his teen ward, Isabella (Alison Oliver), just down the mountainous hill from the Heights, offers at least the possibility of financial redemption. 

Given the choice between a marriage proposal bequeathed by the rich Edgar, or running away like a pair of vagabonds with Heathcliff, Catherine makes the financially-sound-but-emotionally-devastating choice to make do with the loving Edgar, in his resplendent castle, rather than follow her heart’s desire to be with Heathcliff. Overhearing her choice, as she explains to Nelly (who allows her to go on, even though she’s aware of Heathcliff’s presence outside their door), Heathcliff takes off in the night on a stolen horse, and is gone for several years. 

Upon his return, suddenly wealthy, and wearing the fine garments of a gentleman, with the demeanor and bitter heart of a spitefully jealous demon, Heathcliff pursues Catherine at every turn, until finally they are able to fulfill their undying passion for one another, until things get progressively darker for everyone. 

Curious decisions abound in Fennell’s fitful concoction: Eschewing a sizable racial/class element from Brontë’s novel, where Heathcliff comes from unknown but ethnically diverse roots (it is suggested he is of Spanish/Roman or Middle Eastern descent), adding to his alienation from British society, Elordi, as physically imposing and handsome as he may be, is plainly caucasian as skim milk. Instead, in her retelling, Fennell has cast the partially Pakistani Latif as Edgar, upsetting the racial dynamics considerably, and to an end that seems ambiguous at best. 

Her racial tinkering aside, her more anomalous choices involve the film’s production design, which goes for operatic-level blatancy  —  cutting back and forth between the dark, dirty Heights, with its dingy corners and loosened floorboards, surrounded and caged by peculiar rock obelisks that seem designed to keep the inhabitants in perpetual claustrophobia; and the grandly opulent mansion, all pouring light, bold colors, and enormous great rooms, where Edgar and Catherine abide, is like traveling from a dank plane of hell to Versailles  — but comes across as shamelessly overt as anything from the Zack Snyder canon. 

The other, more understandable misstep comes with Fennell’s casting: As good as Robbie is (and she’s more than fine), the 35-year-old actress simply doesn’t have the means of conveying the vastly more adolescent Catherine, nor does the film make sense out of the casting of Elordi, some seven years younger than Robbie, even though, as children, Heathcliff is at least several years older than Cathy. In fact, the tender emotional depth of the characters are far more successfully rendered by the younger versions of the characters, Cooper and Mellington, whose vulnerability and care for one another seems to emanate far more organically. 

Beyond all of that, we are left with elements of Fennell’s fervent, peculiar sensuality: In place of standard graphic nudity, we are instead given bizarrely tactile references  —  the gelatinous sop of egg yolks on a mattress, say, or (as lovingly depicted in the trailer) the skin-like, flesh-colored padded wall panels of Cathy’s bedroom in Edgar’s manse; and, as always, Heathcliff’s penchant for licking everything from  Heathcliff’s penchant for licking everything from those walls, to Cathy’s fingers, and even her tears. It’s clear to see the vibe Fennell is going for, but the film jitters between elements  —  one minute, playing it more or less straight, the next shooting for Ken Russell-style visual overdrive  — which, in the end, makes it feel almost schizophrenic, or at least, unmoored (as it were). 

For a far better rendition of the novel, that vastly better captures the madness and moodiness of the novel, one only has to go as far back as Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation, a sumptuous and morose work that radiates sharp lyricism. But in this ungodly year of our lord 2026, perhaps Fennell’s bizarre juxtaposition of chaotic style choices is the version we deserve. 

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Film Review: Dracula

The traditional Dracula is, of course, known for draining his victims of blood and life-force. Not a great guy, but still not one you necessarily expect to command you to “suck” his “cock,” especially from numerous horrific A.I. interpretations of the character. As the literal opening line in Radu Jude’s riotous vampiric polemic, the irascible director is giving you a heads-up on what to expect for the rest of the film’s nearly three-hour runtime. 

Jude, now a cagey veteran of such anarchic cinematic subterfuge (see Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, a time-capsule treatise on life in Romania during Covid), is a skilled satirist and sensualist. His approach in this film is less precise than the funny-but-damning Loony Porn, more content to cry havoc and let his freak flag fly wherever his muse dictates.

There are chapters, many of them, in fact. Amongst many digressions  —  including a series of Dracula-based TV ads, offering penis enlargement, family-friendly tours, and a host of other inanities  — we have the film’s “director” (Adonis Tanta), a slight man with a high-pitched delivery, explaining how he tried to incorporate A.I. (the “Dr. A.I. Jude 0.0” to be exact) as much as possible into the sketches laid before us. 

Hilariously, the film does include a great deal of hideous, often pornographic, A.I. imagery, alongside rustic, on-location castles, ridiculous cafe sets (with lighting rigs hanging overhead, visible set-quaking, and populated by life-size cardboard cutouts of extras staring at us from their tables), alongside the various running “storylines” the director has commanded from his A.I. helper. 

In one throughline, a group of dinner theater performers feature an elderly man (Gabriel Spahiu) playing Dracula, alongside his “bride,” Vampira (Oana Maria Zaharia), as an audience of tourists and hecklers look on. Eventually, each performance (with an intermission, allowing paying audience members to have alone-time with the supposed Count), ends with the pair given a chance to run away from the restaurant and hide before the audience is given wooden stakes and flashlights so they can track them down. 

Along the way, Jude considers the famous Romanian who inspired the character in the first place, Vlad the Impaler, a vicious sadist so addicted to torture, he resorted to animal and insect abuse during the brief time he was imprisoned for his horrific crimes. 

In one segment  —  seriously, imagine a kind of Eastern European Kentucky Fried Movie, only with vastly more penis representation  — near the end, Jude plays out a kind of parable of the vampiric nature of capitalism, via a Socialist bent (as you can imagine, in a work setting with Dracula, and a hilarious A.I. golden-toned robot as your management team, things don’t go terribly well for the workers). 

For all its inspired bits, however, there remains a shambling, shaggy dog element to Jude’s vision, the sense that he was having too much fun with his A.I. manipulations and irreverence to really sink his teeth (sorry!) into this project. Sections drag, conceits come and go, and, despite our “director” more or less informing us of his laziness, the film’s unfocussed charm begins to wear thin by hour three. 

Eventually, after a section of “Drac TikTok,” our “director” ends the film on what appears to be a fairly straightforward piece following a garbage man attempting to watch his young daughter perform for a school history pageant. It’s as good a place as any to end the chicanery, I suppose. 

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Film Review: Send Help

Dir. Sam Raimi

Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is the office dweeb. Good with numbers, but terrible at nearly everything else, especially social interaction. Her hair a matted mess, her make-up on the garish side of acceptable. She prefers ill-fitting, long out of date beige sweaters, while sporting a beaten up pair of ‘90s-era mules on her feet. A woman beset with a tragic failure of unselfawareness, and an awful penchant for tuna fish sandwiches that she eats directly out of her desk drawer. 

Jeered, ignored, and cast aside by everyone else at this large, nondescript company, including the smarmy bros of upper management, she runs especially afoul of the new CEO, cocky and vapid Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), having just inherited the company from his deceased father. Linda, whose work we are told is exemplary, was promised a huge promotion from the company patriarch before his passing, but his son, a sockless, golf playing conk, doesn’t see that working out for her. He sneers at her accomplishments, and brushes aside any possibility of her company ascension. 

Letting her down “easy,” Bradley denies her the promotion, but agrees to take her along on the company jet, with a crew of other executive bros (one even in suspenders), on their way to an important meeting in Bangkok giving her a chance to prove him “wrong” about her. 

Along the way, though, the plane encounters catastrophic turbulence and plummets somewhere into the Gulf of Thailand, leaving Linda and Bradley as the only two survivors marooned on a small tropical isle. The CEO and his formerly outcast worker drone, up against elements for which name, title, and Swiss bank account numbers matter not in the least. 

Essentially, that’s the film’s set up, a classic sort of prelude that could follow any one of a number of different genre branches: comedy, horror, satire, drama, romance, the possibilities as endless as the rolling waves on the deserted beach of its setting. 

Especially put in the capable hands of longtime genre maestro Sam Raimi, whose previous body of work includes such high-water geek pinnacles as the original Evil Dead, and Spider-Man trilogies, you can imagine the fun that could be had. Which is why the resulting film comes as such a disappointment: a mish mash of half-baked ideas, and a lack of control over the project’s tone that saps a good deal of enjoyment that might have been. 

Working from a fusty script by writing duo Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, who wrote a previous installment of the Friday the 13th series, Raimi goes deep in his bag of tricks  —  comic fish-eye perspectives; extreme close-ups; POV cameras hurtling through jungle terrain; extreme and ludicrous gore  —  to keep things going, but the indecisive screenplay simply won’t allow for the full Raimi experience. 

To begin with, the character work is deeply suspect: Linda is shown to be the kind of antisocial, undiagnosed-spectrum-dweller who makes everyone deeply uncomfortable. Looking to get a huge boost (as promised to her) up to company VP does indeed seem well beyond her abilities. We might loathe Bradley  —  Raimi, as ever, always happy to send up the kind of rich, entitled jerkwads who always seem to end up in upper management  —  and hate his ill-treatment of her, but his view  —  that she isn’t the kind of person who should be part of front facing management  —  is mostly justified from what we see of her. 

Naturally, Linda, who has a bookshelf full of survivalist titles, happens to be a serious fangirl for “Survivor,” pouring over every season, taking notes, and even producing a high-end audition tape (that the suspenders bros are all laughing at right before the plane hits deadly turbulence). Once on the isle, she is very much in her desired element  —  building impressive huts, fashioning woven baskets out of vines, spearfishing in the ocean, and, in one Raimi showcase, hunting down a frenzied, be-tusked wild boar — while Bradley, his leg badly wounded, his golf shirt dirty and bloodied, can only moan and whinge at her heroic efforts. He’s as lost and helpless in this setting as Linda might be a company cocktail party, but he’s also too vain and stupid to recognize the new dynamic, at least at first.  

Early in their stay, there are some swipes at the pair’s changing hierarchical positions: On the island, Bradkey is forced to be subservient to the far better prepared and adaptable Linda, a fact reinforced shortly after he tries to make an escape by himself on a jury-rigged raft that doesn’t get him much past the breakers. In one of the film’s least convincing scenes, Linda poisons him with a temporary nerve-toxin in order to scare him into thinking she has plans to take drastic steps with his masculinity to keep him in line. 

There are certainly echoes of Kathy Bates’ immortal Annie Wilkes from Misery, the Rob Reiner thriller that took extreme pleasure in emasculating the male condition, but, again, Shannon and Swift don’t seem to have a clear idea of how they want the audience to respond to the characters. Linda certainly could be the can-do heroine who excels despite being written off by the patriarchy, but she’s deeply rooted in her own psychosis  —  in one drunken scene on the island she alludes to the way in which she aided and abided her former abusive husband’s death  —  and the more we learn of her motives the less we want her to succeed. In her way, she’s working the angles on the island as much as one of the suspenders’ bros might have in the office: When, alone and gathering food one morning, she sees a would-be rescue ship circling around the bay, she hides until it passes her by, not ready to let go her idyll. 

It’s easy and obvious to disdain Bradley, whose eventual coming around to his former employee we realize all too well is just duplicitous and self-serving, so we’re left with two deeply disagreeable people setting traps for one another and acting in ways that seem both cruel and sort of pointless. 

Tonally, the film is also off-the-mark, with comic scenes of hyper-gore (in this film, it would seem Raimi is particularly fixated on what happens to eyeballs when subjected to extreme outside pressure), mixed in with such rom-commy standards as a drunken emotional reveal on a brightly starry night. Is it making fun of the genre? Or making a statement about feminist preservation in the era of patriarchy? Or crafting a pitiless anti-love story, a la The War of the Roses? It remains unclear, even after the film’s ending, a sort of Travis Bickle-like fortune turn, leaves even further doubt how we’re meant to feel about the whole thing. 

There’s fun to be had here and there  — an unabashed gross-out vomit scene has some spunky comic verve, for one  — but the characters’ incoherency and the script’s constant equivocating make this an island from which we very much want to be rescued.