#and done like they did to ole yeller long ago

[dromaeo-sauridae]

man its sad. most of my followers are here from dsmp. i know it “ended” a thousand times but this one is the real one. its over. the curtain is closed for good. we love you

[cwdcshows]

The Flash - S6 E3 - Dead Man Running

I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark and guess that in spite of what would otherwise have been a perfect title such a story, this episode probably feature the DC character Deadman; and I'm a little disappointed. Are the thugs really debating the finer points of their chain of command and who gets what percentage of the take at the start of the criminal activity; and not say, any point prior to that moment when they're perhaps planning said activity?  

Let's all take a moment to remember Mitch Romero; or as those closes to him knew him, Milkman Mitch.  He didn't amount to much as criminal middle management, but he inspired loyalty in those who worked for him, and that says a lot.  And he sure loved his whole milk - not skim, never skim.  "Skim is for pussies" Mitch would say. To Mitch! Anyone else kind of want to see Ralph's mom and Felicity's mom have some sort of buddy/road trip adventure together?  Like, I don't necessarily want to see it, per se; certainly not an entire episode, but like, I feel like these two should meet and then be....unleashed onto the world.  Reno would never be the same, I think. So what, are they not letting Caitlin out at all?  Not even for important work? Seriously, guns charged with dark matter?  What, is this stuff suddenly available at every corner drug store now?  Because not too long ago it was a little hard to come by. "People are dying out there!" I mean, yeah, statistically that's probably true, but so far you have one incident of this particular person, animal or vegetable killing anyone for dark matter; so how do you know this is going to become a recurring threat?  I'm not saying that whatever's responsible is likely to be innocent, but it's not exactly a spree either.  And if you're county Dr. Coffee-Guy as a second incident, because you're linking the goo you found; Coffee-Guy wasn't killed, which skews the killing average. And how exactly do you know that you've "never seen anything like" the black goo you just found at the other crime scene.  Ostensibly Frost made a beeline over to this guy's lab after learning about the theft of dark matter; meaning you haven't time to take the substance back your lab or Star Labs in order to analyze it. So the best you've been able to do to try and discern what it is, is look at it, smell and maybe lick it.  Given what we about Barry and we'll call his...learning curve, I'm going to say, yeah, he probably licked the goo to try and figure out what it is.  But just because it didn't taste fudge doesn't mean it's beyond anything you've ever personally encountered before. "Please, call me Ramsey." I'm pretty sure I'm just going to keep calling you Dr. Coffee Guy, it's easier to remember. It's about damn time that some iteration of Harrison Wells is injected back into the series.  How has it taken until the third fucking episode; especially when episode two was such fluffy garbage? Also, with all of the different versions of people who look like Harrison Wells running around over the last several years, only one of which are we aware of taking any measures to conceal his identity, that anyone actually bothered to notice "Harrison Wells" - AKA the name and face of the man who confessed to murdering Nora Allen? Come on Allegra, it's not like she's put you on fucking fashion; it's a small paper and you definitely haven't won a Pulitzer, much less earned your stripes as a reporter at this new job of yours. I don't think I've ever heard of anyplace having "undisclosed amounts" of anything.   "How many flavors of ice cream do you have?" "Oh, we have an undisclosed amount of flavors!" "Really?  Do you Rocky Road?" "I can neither confirm nor deny that." Oh, Milk Man, what have they done to ya?? Can they make-up their mind what's happening with Caitlin/Frost?  Last episode they used some Palmer-Bots so Frost's voice and eyes would otherwise look normal, even when she's Frosted-up; yet when she sends ole Mike through the window, her eyes gloss over anyway and then go back to normal immediately afterwards, while her hair stays Frost-ified. This show should never have allowed the main characters to see the newspaper or learned Barry's fate.  Aside from the stupidity of the Savitar storyline, just the whole element of Barry knowing his fate ahead of time kind of takes away from it.  I mean, obviously he's not going end up dying by the end of Crisis; somehow they're going to avert it, but the sacrifice and death of Barry Allen during Crisis on Infinite Earths was arguably one of the most iconic story developments in comic book history.  It was profound; there were few if any true moments in comics like that before that happen, where the status quo was changed for the long term.  It's actually kind of bad enough that it's more than a little likely they're going to side-step that fate, but then to have Barry know it's coming beforehand and under any other circumstance where he likely wouldn't make it out alive, it feels like it undermines the sacrifice; because it feels more like he's just giving into fate - a fate he would definitely try and side-step if he thought he could; rather than being natural decision born out of the circumstances and the willingness in the urgency of the moment to give up his own life to save others. Wait, how many of your mom's boyfriends did you think died, Ralph?  I mean, fuck, you're supposed to have some sort of bullshit meter or "nose for a mystery" and never thought something was up that your mother had more than one dead past lover?  You should have suspected something was up; she was either lying to you about them being dead, or she might have just been a serial killer. Just how fucking invested are you in your mom's romantic interests, Ralph?  This is a weird story. Did Dr. Coffee-Guy really need an invitation to get into Star Labs.  Six seasons in, nobody else has had much of a problem coming and going whenever they wanted.  Is he like, a science vampire? Can he only enter other labs when he's invited?  Do you ward him off with slide rules?  Does his skin burn when doused with hydrochloric acid? So if DR. CG can control this guy, why or how did it ever end up going on a rampage in the first place?  How is this not the first thing he discovered about the guy? This whole thing of Barry leading Mike into the pipeline reminds me that episode of Scooby-Doo, where the Scooby gang used Scooby-Snacks to bribe Scooby to go into the haunted house; before Scooby became rabid and Shaggy had to go Ole Yeller on him and put him down.  I'm like, 75% sure that's a thing that really happened and I defy you to prove to me otherwise. "Get me all the dark matter in Star Labs" 

Poor one out for the Milk Man.   Yeah, I guess Dr. Coffee-Guy is some sort of vampire.   Okay, first off, I'm pretty white - my heritage is Irish, Welsh and German, and a who knows what else - basically if I'm in direct sunlight for more than a minute I just burst into flames.  But seriously, Grant Gustin is the whitest white boy ever.  I'm pretty sure those dance moves can only best be described as extra-virgin vanilla. Man, they're trying really hard to be Infinity War without being Infinity War.  Now we have Nu-Wells using a gauntlet to search of an "Eternium" artifact. What is that, an isotope of Unobtanium?  It's like they wrote "infinity stone" into the script and then just used search and replace all using synonyms like some sort of mad-lib. 

[cripplinganxietyflix]

I saw It Comes At Night

It Comes At Night has been in theaters, at the time of this writing, for about two days, and already it seems to be the most polarizing film of the year thus far. I’m sure anybody who saw the way it was marketed and then watched the film can understand why. I decidedly only watched the initial teaser trailer for this movie, didn’t read about it on the internet other than that Joel Edgerton would be the lead and Trey Edward Shults would be directing. This is, in part, because I did that recently with The Void, and I’m really thankful for it, and I’m trying to make a bigger effort to continue to go into things blind with few or no expectations. 

If you haven’t seen Joel Edgerton’s other fling with the “horror but not like horror horror” genre, The Gift, I highly recommend you do so now. Another film I saw in theaters without seeing literally any promotional material, The Gift is a sadly overlooked gem from 2015 about a childless couple who move into a new house and run into someone from the husband’s past. The husband conveys to the wife that he doesn’t want this stranger (played by Edgerton) hanging around, and it’s basically up to the wife to find out why. It’s an excellent, very fucked up thriller with a pretty shocking end that I certainly didn’t see coming. Edgerton is great as the creepy, stalking stranger, and he’s also a total surprise as the film’s director. I mean it. I didn’t know he directed it until I Google fu’d it a minute ago. 

Another film I would consider “required viewing” going into this is Trey Edward Shults’ first movie, Krisha, which I included on my list of favorite films I watched in 2016. While it’s categorized as a drama/dark comedy, I put it in my horror list- because for those of us with a little dysfunction in our families, it is mind-numbingly, hand-wringingly horrifying. Krisha stars mostly non-actors, including the director’s aunt (IIRC) in the title role. It details a recovering alcoholic’s return to the family she ghosted on for a Thanksgiving dinner. It doesn’t go well. When I say this is required viewing, I mean it. Krisha is as non-traditional as horror films go, and I feel very similarly about It Comes At Night. 

I suppose, based on the trailer, that I expected some kind of supernatural/walking dead aspect to the film going in. Let me take a second to outright demolish that preconception- this is not a monster movie, it’s not a ghost movie, it’s not got anything fantastical or even out of the realm of possibility in it. In fact, it’s a fairly stripped-down, barebones outbreak film. And, for what it is, it’s great.

The film is about Paul, his wife Sarah, and their teenage son Travis. They live with their dog, and Sarah’s father, in a big boarded-up cabin in the woods. Right away it becomes pretty clear that Grampa’s got a potent superbug, because they have to handle him with gloves and respirators, and quite early on, they’ve got to take him out back and shoot him like Ol’ Yeller. Father Paul is utilitarian, practical, a little controlling, and does what needs to be done to avoid infection and ensure survival. When a looter, Will, breaks in, he’s caught and explains himself to Paul- that he also has a family in need of supplies, that he thought the house was abandoned, that he means no harm, and that he’d be happy to trade food for some water. Paul and Sarah reason that they shouldn’t kill him in case he’s got people waiting out, they shouldn’t send him on his way lest he come back with a posse to kill them, and reason that the best option is for Paul to leave with Will and bring Will’s family back to the cabin so that they can share resources and work together. When Paul and Will come back with Will’s wife and son, Kim and Andrew, the real horror of the film unfolds- not the disease that seems to have decimated society, but the nature of humanity itself. 

It Comes At Night is a horror film, but further down the Antichrist end of the spectrum and not remotely close to the land of The Conjuring or Insidious. It’s a psychological thriller that uses muted, dreamy photography and contemplative scenes (long shots of dead bodies lying in a ditch, mundane conversations between normal people) to build dread and tension. Already there is precariously placed trust between Paul’s family and Will’s, and it seems just a matter of circumstance before these people become desperate and murderous. There are very few jump scares (maybe two or three), and they aren’t ones that I think most horror fans will roll their eyes at. Paul’s son Travis has trouble sleeping and lots of nightmares that make it hard to distinguish how much of the fear and distress is real and how much is imagined. He has dreams of his dead grandfather oozing black blood from his dead face and dreams of becoming infected that seem prophetic. Outside of Travis’s dreams, there is nothing that happens on screen that couldn’t happen in real life during a catastrophic epidemic. All of the horrors are real and fully human- murder, betrayal, mercy killing, etc. The film is exceptionally dark- as in, what an old house looks like at night when the power goes out. If you’re uncomfortable wandering around with no light and a germophobe like me, this movie is going to kick your ass. 

I’m about to get into some critical details of the movie and don’t recommend reading further if you’re planning to watch it. 

One aspect of this movie that people are really up in arms about is the matter of the open door(s). Who the fuck opened the door? Shults leaves this completely and utterly up to the imagination of the viewer. The cabin has a “clean room” that has one exterior door, and one interior door into the house, and Paul claims to have the keys to these doors, and that he always keeps them locked. However, they also have sliding bolt latches. Near the end of the film, Travis wakes from a nightmare, walks through the dark house to find that Andrew, who is probably about four or five, has wandered away from the room Will and Kim are sleeping in, and has fallen asleep in the grandpa’s old bedroom. Travis leads Andrew back to his parents, but as he is returning to bed, he sees that the red door that leads into the makeshift clean room is open. The whole house is alerted, and Paul and Will discover the dog, Stanley, is hemorrhaging blood and dying on the floor within the room. Both doors are now open, and there’s no telling who opened them, how the dog got in, or if Andrew or Travis touched the sick dog. This event is what leads to a bloodlessly violent and dour ending for everyone involved, but the question remains- WHO OPENED THE FUCKING DOOR!?

I think, first of all, that we have to assume Paul (probably unintentionally) left both doors unlocked with just the bolt latches secured, if at all. I think it’s likely that Andrew or Travis opened both doors, although I’m leaning toward Travis. I think that, as established throughout the film, Travis was having a nightmare, heard the dog at the exterior door, and let him in. I think it’s likely this is where he became infected, and he then possibly infected Andrew when he found him misplaced and led him back to his room. The other possibility is that Andrew was just barely tall enough to reach the latches and opened the doors while sleepwalking. I think that it’s also possible that Will opened both doors and let the dog in hoping that Paul’s family would become sickened, and his family would be able to take the house and supplies for themselves. After all, they never show that Will’s son Andrew is sick, and his family is in an incredible rush to leave the house shortly after the dog is found. Perhaps they wanted to leave and hide out in the woods until Paul, Sarah and Travis are dead. Even further, it is possible SOMEONE ELSE ENTIRELY got the dog into the house hoping to sabotage the inhabitants. After all, we never actually see what Stanley the dog went running after in the woods and we never see what Travis thinks that he heard. Any one of these things is a possibility, and I think it was a bold choice on Shults’ part to leave it ambiguous and up to the viewer. I guess that, realistically, it doesn’t really matter WHO actually opened the doors. What matters is what happens after, when no one trusts anyone else, and no one knows who might be infected and who isn’t. We never actually find out if Andrew is infected, however we do find out by the end that Travis was. Therefore, at this point I think Travis is the most likely culprit. I think that Shults tries to lay enough clues to lead to this assumption, and if there is one weakness in the film, it is here- that perhaps a little more could have been done to make any of these inferences a little more likely. After all, why did Paul leave the doors unlocked at all in the first place? If Andrew opened the doors, why didn’t he mention the dog to his parents while Travis is eavesdropping? If Travis opened the doors, how is it that he didn’t react to his dog being in such a tragic state, even if he was sleepwalking? If it was someone else, how might it have happened if the latches were shut? I loved that this was left up in a dizzying, mysterious place, but I would have liked a slightly thicker trail of breadcrumbs for me to get there. 

At any rate, I think the creepiest part of the movie is that Travis essentially predicts his death, by dreaming about all the most impossible of horrors, even though the real threat seems so mundane and unlucky by comparison. It’s not a reanimated corpse that kills him. It’s SOME contact with the plague that we never see, because that’s how plagues work. I like that we never find out if Andrew was truly sick. I love how hopeless and depressing the whole thing is. It seems really fitting for the times we’re living in. 

I can’t recommend this movie enough if you like your horror movies atmospheric, preponderous, suggestive and difficult to digest. If you’re sick of artificial jump scares every eight and a half formulaic minutes, this might be right in line with your needs. If you need exposition and spoon-feeding, I wouldn’t spend a cent to watch it and recommend instead that you spend the evening screening Wonder Woman or Guardians of the Galaxy, which I’m sure are entertaining and likely to give you a good time. It Comes At Night may seem deceptively titled (I don’t think that it is) and deceptively marketed (absolutely). I think the title fits because Travis’s prophetic nightmares are where the horror is. It is still one of the most uncomfortable, effective horror movie experiences I’ve had in a while and would place it a shelf below the likes of The Witch and Get Out. It’s a straightforward movie with an unsettling score, photography that brings to mind the term “brain fog” (I’m a chronic sufferer, if it’s not evident in my scatterbrained reviews) in the best way, and it feels very vividly real. Not a single thing in this movie is outlandish or supernatural. While I appreciated the care taken to let me figure things out on my own, even I would have liked a few more definitives. I also would have liked a longer film; I think it wouldn’t have suffered from an extra 29 minutes, but all things considered it’s a minor complaint. I highly recommend it, if only to those who don’t mind the lion’s share of the detective work placed in their hands and those who are tired of the standard horror narrative. It’s not perfect but it’s pretty close to what this particular asshole likes in a movie. 

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆