As always, January started a bit slow, but that won’t stop us from diving right in.
The Beekeeper
Sometimes you see an advertisement for a movie and hope they plan to deliver exactly what is promised. I went into The Beekeeper hoping to watch Jason Statham beat up some of the worst in our society and got exactly that. After his elderly landlord loses all her money to a phishing scam, Statham, a retired government agent from a group called the Beekeepers, goes after those scam artists. Statham is a force of nature dispensing cathartic justice on sleazy scam artists, money-hungry CEOs, and corrupt politicians. It makes you wish there were Queenslayer agents tasked with taking out the most corrupt among us. If you are looking to fill that fantasy with some cheesy bee puns then The Beekeeper is for you.
Suspiria (1977)
The 1977 film Suspiria is about a young American ballerina named Suzy who travels to Germany to enroll in a ballet academy. After some ghastly horrors and gruesome murders, Suzy learns that a cult of witches runs the academy. Its special effects and spaghetti western lip-syncing have certainly not aged well, but can you blame a film that’s almost fifty years old? I wouldn’t be surprised if Suspiria paved the way for many other witch-inspired projects such as the horror film The Witch (2020) or the light-hearted TV series Sabrina: The Teenage Witch (1996). Yet due to its age, I probably could only recommend it to the truest witch fans out there.
Night Swim
With word of how dreadful Night Swim was, I braced myself for the most common of horror movie sins: flat, generic characters. Surprisingly the characters weren’t the problem for me. Maybe it’s due to my family’s ties with baseball, but I was invested in the Dad’s struggle to return to his Major League Baseball career. However, as the Dad went from walking with a cane to slamming a baseball into the bleacher lights, it soon became obvious that Night Swim is a monkey’s paw curse movie with few new ideas. The mystical pool that healed the Dad soon began conjuring spooky girls straight from The Ring, causing people to hallucinate friends and family outside of the pool, magically becoming bottomless, and mind-controlling people who drink water. Seems like a lot for a standard backyard pool. There’s generally a reason you don’t have werewolves in your alien horror movie: it becomes a disconnected mess. Despite connecting with the character’s struggles, I can’t see myself recommending this film to anyone. The January horror film curse strikes again.
Army of Darkness
Having enjoyed Evil Dead Rise, I knew the previous Evil Dead films had to be in my movie backlog. With a local theater playing the third installment, Army of Darkness, I couldn’t pass the opportunity. I had heard the older Evil Dead movies blur the line between scary and campy, but Army of Darkness is pitching its tent firmly on the campy side. With the series lead, Ash Williams, being transported to medieval times, he must venture into the dark woods to find the Necronomicon to send him home. This task seems to be difficult as Ash forgets the magic words the wizard gave him and accidentally raises the army of the undead. Again, the film isn’t bad, I just prefer my horror movies to make me jump out of my seat rather than falling out laughing.
I.S.S.
As is tradition, the trailer sold me on this one. Aboard the International Space Station, three American scientists and three Russian scientists live together in harmony, but everything changes when the surface of the Earth erupts in explosions and both sides get messages to take over the ISS. The film, I.S.S. was positioning itself to be a tense real-life version of Among Us in space. Unfortunately, the movie completely undermines itself by showing you who was responsible for the first death. As an American scientist ventures out onto the outside of the station to repair their comms, you watch a Russian scientist cut his comms and push him out into space with a mechanical arm. I felt like I was watching Knives Out with the scene revealing who killed Harlen Thrombey right in the middle of the movie. This just feels like a rookie mistake to make for a Whodunit film and there isn’t enough here to claw back from that mistake.
Out of Darkness
I am going to throw out a spoiler warning because I have a bone to pick with this one. Out of Darkness is positioning itself to be a caveman horror film about a group of early humans traveling to a new land they hope to live in. After one of the youngest members is taken in the middle of the night, the group ventures deep into a dark forest hoping to find whatever took the young child. I desperately hoped we would see encounters with Wendigos, especially since the group resorts to eating the flesh of one of their fallen members. To my dismay, it turns out the monster was just a different tribe of humans who were trying to help them out, but our heroine ended up killing them out of fear.
As the credits started to roll, I began to imagine an illustrative representative for the film saying, “Wow they kill those people out of fear for their survival. Good thing this was so long ago. It would just be so sad if we did that today. Oh wait…”
My face red with rage turns to the metaphor and says “That’s not as deep as you think it is.”
Look I am not one of those who believe art shouldn’t say anything. That’s how we get the bland slop of live service games coming out of the video games industry. What annoys me, is when a piece of art thinks it has a take so profound and deep, when it is as shallow as a puddle. We see people killing each other out of fear for survival every day on the news. To say this, and only this, in an hour-and-a-half movie, just makes me furious that you stole that time from me. One day, I’ll find a way to get that time back, until then all I can say is don’t bother with this movie.