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charlie-grusin · 3 months ago

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I can’t help but wonder if there wasn’t some precedent to this settled as far back as Indiana Jones: the first two films pretty much followed up to the ambitions Spielberg had had in making his own James Bond, but once we got to The Last Crusade we started to see Indy procure some personal growth as a character, discovering there was more to life than artifacts and that there was more at stake than the preservation of history from those stinkin’ Nazis (that being, well, life; human documents; the living present). It was a complete far cry from what was typically the norm for most pulp/pulp-inspired heroes and that was the intention - this, after all, was meant to be a last great hurrah for Dr. Jones from Spielberg and Lucas, who at that point felt it was time to give rest to their brash little character of high adventure - yet it also became a problem whenever it was inevitably decided that Indy should return: there was this obligation that only S&L could be in charge of sailing the ship, that only Harrison Ford could play Indiana Jones because he has become so recognizable, so defined as a character from the last time, that any other face or voice to that name would be thought of as blasphemous.* They could give the Indy character as many adventures and scenarios as they wanted in tie-in books, comics, video games and what have yous (and they certainly have), but when it came to the films themselves they eventually couldn’t keep hold of that luxury - it also didn’t help how heated (ha) in controversy Temple of Doom became on its release with its over-the-top violence but still - as long as Spielberg, Lucas & Ford were deeply involved with the series they had no choice but to further age out the character, to mellow out its edges, to repeat those same notes of hurrah like a stuck vinyl record before it became too depressing to play. There was a bit of a tease near the end of Crystal Skull that perhaps Mutt could become a new star hero with his own set trajectory, but they not only since neglected to follow along that thread they also literally killed it off by having Mutt killed off-screen in Vietnam; unless they decide to really revitalize the series (like, I don’t know, maybe give Alden Ehrenreich a call back?) then it will either stay on the flatlines or worse, it will eventually find a few inches more to grind itself and everyone else away - what we are seeing now with the MCU, essentially, is that Indy stagnation being shifted over to maximum overdrive, powered not by the changing tides of its head creators but by a relentless churning corporate meat machine with a grind-em-till-you-drop mentality.

I was quite amused by the whole RDJ as Dr. Doom reveal as a moderate outsider looking in: it’s very much a cry of desperation but it’s also such an outlandish idea that I bet a lot of people are gonna latch onto it anyways in the same manner a train wreck involving nuclear materials can’t help but be seen (of which I may cry myself guilty on that charge). Then when I thought about it (about that feeling in particular) it was like, Well of course - Marvel Studios is pulling the same old schtick Lucasfilm had done with bringing Emperor Papaltine back for The Rise of Skywalker, complete with bringing along the same array of directors who have recently made Disney some strong bank! Abrams might as well start inviting the Russos over to some clubs at this point

It’s absolute damage control; they’re starting to see the smoke that’s been building up since 2019 and they’re willing to pull anything but the stops to stop it. That 2026 release date feels like it’s only delaying the inevitable.

* I don’t know exactly how inclined British pop culture is to maintaining a kind of spiritual status quo - I can only make vague hints and gestures, and because I’m an American who hasn’t traveled as far around the world as Florida I’m likely dead wrong on all of them - but considering how willing the British side has been with giving new faces and identities to the likes of The Doctor, James Bond, even Sherlock Holmes, and how we aren’t, I can’t help but get the feeling that (amongst other things) we have made our pop culture too religiously sanctified. No wonder we brew so many cults.

obviously there are a bunch of issues with the MCU and I'm not gonna sit here and try to convince everyone that MCU movies are cinema or whatever so don't get what I'm gonna say twisted. I do find their kinda mainstay in cultural media and the dominance they had to be interesting, especially now in an era where the MCU is undeniably falling off and struggling. just as like a cultural analysis I find that interesting and everyone has their opinions of why it happened.

my opinion/theory on why the MCU just crashed is because they sort of forgot what it means to be telling a comic book story, especially a marvel comic book story. Because I've read thousands of issues of various marvel series at this point, across tons of different eras and events, and the thing that makes them last (which is also a thing that drives me personally crazy and I hate so much) is that the status quo doesn't really change. Or when it does, it lasts for a few arcs or years at most and then gets reverted back to the norm eventually. Like the fact that everything is pointless and nothing is a risk is something I loathe, but it is admittedly what keeps them going. If someone just got into comics, they can pick up a modern issue and expect to find Spider-man or Captain America or whoever. They may be introduced to new characters, but the big ones will show up eventually.

And after the last Avengers movie, like half of the mainstay cast are just gone. Which as someone who likes good stories, I think is a good opportunity (which is arguably being wasted but idk I haven't watched any MCU thing in years) to actually shake things up and develop characters that mainstream people are less familiar with and give them a chance to shine and tell interesting stories. But that's not why people like marvel comics.

People like marvel comics because if they want to read about Iron Man, they can pick up any random issue about Iron Man and it will most likely be the Iron Man they know. People like the status quo, and Marvel has never been high literature and has always basically been pulp storytelling, and it gave people status quo and familiarity. And I think Marvel Studios figured this out waaayyy too late.

Because if Marvel actually understood what people like about the comics, they would have embraced recasting major roles from the start. They wouldn't have tied characters' identities so strongly to their actors and would have made it clear that characters can and will continue on with different faces. There is no reason why Tony Stark needs to be RDJ or Steve Rogers needs to be Chris Evans. They would have had plans to not write these characters out of existance the second actors wanted to exit or died or were fired or any of the various reason why actors are no longer involved with the MCU. Hell they had precedent. They didn't have a problem replacing Terrence Howard with Don Cheadle, who are very different looking people who give very different performances, but we know why they felt ok with that recasting but won't recast any of their boys named Chris...

Anyway it seems like they realized that general audiences don't actually like change if its permanent and are learning the wrong lessons with the Doom casting nonsense and the fact that they seem to keep changing what the new story is to fit what they think audiences want.

I'm fine with the MCU dying off and its probably better for media that it does, but again I'm just kinda interested in the fumble from like an objective standpoint because it seemed like they just locked themselves into eventual failure in such a stupid way. Like they could have told the same safe representative Avengers storylines for decades and wouldn't have a meltdown every time an actor in a major role needed to be removed from production if they just accepted that people would be recast as needed. It would be worse for actors and it would be worse for movies in general probably, but it would have kept the MCU churning out pulp like the comics do to this day. But now people are realizing its not just pulp but pulp they don't want and its gonna kill the MCU eventually.

#movies #mcu #marvel mcu #indiana jones #dr. doom #marvel studios #lucasfilm #disney #pulp #pulp fiction #franchise #pop culture #discussion #movietalk #consider the following

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charlie-grusin · 9 days ago

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Salem's Lot (2024) : Movietalk # 01

It’s not a good day to be a Red Sox fan.

It’s also October, the annual all-month-long midnight hour where all the beasts and ghouls and demo-goblins rise from their tombs and take it to the streets (jumping from fences with spidery claws, snarling through twisted snouts and even gnarlier rows of teeth, creeping at every corner in shadowy white fabrics just to slip away from sight, always looking (always watching) across the blocks (watching you) with round, wide, bulging-from-the-stocks-and-blazing-red eyes (I gotta tell you my name is Stevie / What's yours, baybee...!?)). It’s the month of caramel apples and cotton candy cobwebs, of plastic skeletons and rubber fang six-packs; the month where it’s absolutely positively illegal not to be scared out your socks lest you be trialed with the worm-n-roaches trick in the box; it’s the Christmas better than Christmas – it’s truer, more honest, more immediate to the human condition and lacks any further need for indoctrination – and it’s especially better than the month that follows which is often where the real monsters reside (the ones who adorn masks and three-piece suits too real in its wrinkles than in their truths, who weld inhuman values like bloodthirsty cleavers and swear they haven’t harmed a soul in their life though their viscera-garnished root cellars may prove otherwise). If all the years could end with Halloween Night as its climax then maybe (and perhaps without a doubt) the world could be a kinder, more understandable source of light and proof of goodness in this void of a careless placid universe. I am of the sincere belief that Halloween and Day of the Dead are humanist holidays: for all their collective frights and gaffs and initially grim danse macabres they are at their ends the most humbling and comfortable of traditions: it’s true that No One Lives Forever, but we must love the kindnesses who have left us and love the ones we still have yet in equal measure. It will do no good to stay strangers.

And yet, even as I saddled up to watch this latest rendition of maestro Stephen King’s soap opera bloodfe(a)st which was shamelessly cast adrift to fair the non-accountable oceans of streaming and direct-to-digital at the preluding dawn of this finest of seasons, I found myself feeling more anxious in discovering The Moment than the vampires to come: The Moment when the murderous armchair knucklebobb-ed overlords over at Warner Bros. Discovery decided to give this seemingly troublesome production a slim mercy of a release over at HBO Max rather than making it the latest in another tax write-off killing spree (a fate still likely forthcoming, by the way – after all, to them mercy is for the meek and pathetic). I don’t know whether I did come across That Moment in the viewing (and honestly I don’t think I ever wanna know), but it did take about forty minutes in to realize why they could’ve been so decisive; I may not be close to The Reasons (maybe it’s really just because that new Joker movie was too hot of a number to be mixing around the plates with some deprioritized Spooktober leftovers), but it’s the feeling – the possibility that I could’ve been right on the money about what the upperhead corporates had fuzzed about through those corrugated meat-pans of theirs – that frightened me more than whatever Mr. Barlow considers “fine dining”.

The major hurdle Warner Bros. had confronted when adapting 'Salem's Lot for the first time was whether or not the hefty tome (hefty in those pre-Stand, pre-Dark Tower days, mind) could be properly downsized as a two-hour motion picture; heavy notables like Larry Cohen and Stirling Silliphant took first-draft swings at the material but none had ever Got It packed down tight enough to keep its major juices intact, and like an aspiring misplaced youth tearing up the play turf after a few bad passes at the tryouts, the project had sulked off to another medium – that fortunately being the miniseries, which at the time was picking up iron-hot momentum with major production works such as Alex Haley’s Roots and Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth having already made a strong (and considerably) lasting impression with the networks. Two hours was a no-go, but at least a three-hour window could cast your net wide enough (good enough) to reel in much of the story’s essences for the taking. I have yet to see whether its international theatrical re-edit managed to maintain those essences even further, but it honestly doesn’t look so good when this rendition proves why 2004 chose well to heed ‘79’s advice.

Almost nothing about Salem’s Lot (2024) leaves any real impression: the characters are blips who barely register on the screen if only because they share the same names and traits of their more intriguing on-the-page counterparts; the plot beats come off more as plot thuds with the same intensity as your next door neighbors trying to move a new addition of furniture upstairs (swears, curses, the whole fucking thing); and whatever interesting new twists and ideas it offers on this occasion ultimately ring flat and dull due to a lack of meat on its bones to carry any real significance. Whatever you want to say about the It duology (and I might very well agree with most of them), at least they gave most of their characters (the ones most cared for, that is) some ounce of meaning and purpose – at least they had their own dynamics and depths to make them both relevant and believable to the story so that even while Pennywise’s haunted cart-ride schtick wears thin (and that shit wears quick), you’re still at the very least compelled enough in whether they’ll manage to shake out of this one scot-free; given that ‘Salem’s Lot is by and large a leading template for much of Stephen King’s other great works (whether it be IT, The Stand, Needful Things, Desperation, or even more out-there tomes (ha!) like The Tommyknockers and Under the Dome), it’s no surprise to find in the loose heroic ensemble of the Lot (Ben Mears, the Nortons, Mr. Burke, Mark Petrie and Father Callahan) a prototype to the more tightly-knit fighters from the likes of the Losers’ Club, the surviving flocks of Mother Abigail, and even all the way down to that greatest of gunslinging Ka-tets – yet it’s incredibly strange that while Gary Dauberman went so far as to make the Lot’s remaining good folk a more explicitly laid-out vampire hunting team (lending the film its iconographic all-for-the-posters moment of the posse facing Marsten House as if it was the House on Neibolt Street), he never instills them with any kind of living momentum that he once allowed in unequal measures with the It duology – instead the writing seems to have taken two-three steps back to a point where much of the dialogue stands so stiff and awkward and over-reliant on the expository that the characters can’t help but act like archaic questionnaire programs delivering each other command prompts.

Usually we tend to be conscious of this when we (the aspiring writers of the world, for we are legion) try to write our own works, not when we’re hearing/seeing it from others (and especially not when it’s baked so deep in a completed work it’s got its own food texture) and while you could easily argue that all stories – when obliterated down to their most structural technicality by way of the atom bomb – are merely informational exchanges with occasional endpoints, I also think (in all my humble naivety) that aside from that being as insightful of a viewpoint as any held to the heart by your local semi-professional-of-the-trade nitpicker, perhaps one of the greatest tricks in turning those exchanges into a compelling, engaging and perhaps downright damn good piece of fiction is not to make it seem as such. They had the right idea by introducing much of the Lot’s denizens and their accompanying skeletons-in-the-closets through the drive-in-as-microcosm, but it relies on telling us these anecdotes rather than showing them in moments, an approach which dictates much of the story’s beats and mysteries to the film’s painful detriment – it’s oh so dire that immediately after this its messenger (Susan Norton) proceeds to have a transaction of backstories that only has the barest attempt of natural progression (Susan nudging Ben that it’s his turn (i.e., que the executable!) to make this exchange distinguishable enough from a QnA interview session (a trick that unsurprisingly evaporates once emitted).

Now look back to 1979, in particular the scene when Burke and Mears play catch-up over dinner – it’s all table talk (a perfect time and place to peel the seals off those TV dinners) yet it’s still a dense and chilling scene that manages to be way more effective and involved in its procession than any of the scenes one can pull from this latest iteration: we start in medias res in reunion, recounting the past and present together through the lens of the never-ending annual Jerusalem’s Lot public school pageant before we smoothly transition over (“Why the Marsten House? I remember that figured in your pageant...”) to personal history – a recollection made through an adult, more retrospective perception – before we are then lead (as all great horrors must) to wade through the depths of a haunted house ghost story oozing thick with “every sound, every shadow...” a campfire tale made all the more chilling not because of the unlikely circumstances it has been recalled in (though that certainly helps) but also because it holds no definite conclusions in and of itself; Mears tries to latch onto a meaning behind it, the writer he is (“There was something, a feeling of-!”), then he and Burke try again by laying out the historical play-field of the dreaded Marsten House on the precipice of a hypothetical (“Can a thing be inherently evil?”), yet all they come up with is a dead end which leaves nothing but a great lingering thought for us, the viewers at home, to really chew on:

BURKE: “But if a house attracts evil men…?”

MEARS: “Why did it attract me?”

Nothing happens, yet everything happened; by the end of it you felt like you’ve been put through a great game of narrative snakes and ladders, walking away with more character and history and more wavering unease than you had coming in. It’s great, it’s awesome – it’s coming to the end of an excellent long chapter of a book and feeling so enlightened you can’t help but stop right there and go for a walk (weather permitting) – and it’s also the sort of thing Salem’s Lot (2024) questionably lacks in high strides: every scene runs on the extremely low octaves of an A-to-B rope-climbing exercise where the only objective is to ring the bell at the top and wiggle your way back down without dying in the process.

And perhaps that was the point, to cut it all-killer-no-filler to leave us nearly two hours worth of solid vampire goodness just in time for the holidays? Nevermind this sort of approach has often proven best with adapting novellas like The Mist and Cycle of the Werewolf than it has for any of King’s more weightier Americana epics, but I think a lot of the reason why that doesn’t work so well either is that, frankly, these vampires suck. Yeah yeah they’re not the sparkling supermen you and I have obsessively ridiculed on here and beyond from there to eternity, but just because these vampires are mean and ferocious and hiss and claw whenever you pull the Good Lord Christ’s switchblade on them they really are just that: they’re monsters with all the academic behaviors but without much of the actual horror (they’re just one calorie, not evil enough). And I say this as someone who has (slowly, but surely) become a born-again believer in the vampire.

I had long-held a childhood view that it was the zombies and the cannibals you really had to worry about. I mean, come on; they could chase you and grab you and cut and rip you right open, eating you alive over bread-n-butter or even right there on the spot, right before your fading, unbelieving eyes! I’d figured the worst thing a vampire could do was live the dull life of a mothball, doomed to have the physical capabilities of dozing off in belfries but forever restrained by the confines of strict orthodox faith from ever doing so; that the fear of coming face-to-face with a vampire in the dead of night was only a spiritual confrontation and as such an outdated and unaffecting one (especially for a budding agnostic youth such as I). To me they either moped unto unholy heaven about the existential dreads of forever and how sometimes love just… hurts… so much… or threatened you with the thought of having wicked canine teeth and forgetting to pray over bowls of instant oatmeal as if that was ever gonna stop me from a good time. I suppose I thought wrong, for though stuff like George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Jack Ketchum’s hybrid whiplash of a novel Off Season will forever stand supreme as monuments of abject carnivore terror, it’s not completely amiss that their final drips of dread are struck by those who at first glance don’t seem as imminent of a threat as the spotlighted monsters themselves. Zombies and cannibals are freakish, unstoppable forces running on the grooves of instinct, but they are also bears: for them there’s no need for disguises (their needs are entirely exterior, all business), and because you can sense their intentions a mile away (“me hungry you meat”) you can prep to either confront them at a considerable advantage or easily evade them altogether; with them you can manage a fair distance between you and them on your own accord, and if necessary you can act against them accordingly, no questions asked (knock ‘em with the spray, shoot ‘em in the head, the works). Vampires, however, are not at first betraying of their animalistic behaviors; by design they are natural born rapists: they can converse with a seeming aura of normalcy and lure you in a sense of security that wouldn’t think twice about inviting them over your place or vice versa; their dark thoughts creeping in the shadows as they become your deeply-embedded best friend and/or lover and/or anyone you can put your head on their shoulder to a soothing tune, a close partner-in-hand who only thinks of you as potential carrion comfort with its leash tightening down your neck by the day and night – a thought which may come too late (or come not at all) when, at the right opportune moment, it strikes, taking you body, soul and mind so that you shall never leave its orbits lest you face some merciless wrath of their own design or suffer one of the world’s accords for those who become victim. It’s why the vampire often reel in their prey by recognition of the personas they possess on the surface (recognition, familiarity, even nostalgia (one of ‘Salem’s Lot’s most active thematics, as with much of King’s ever-expansive oeuvre)), why they can hover by two-story windows and scratch at the glass and call out your name to let them take shelter from this unnatural coldness: they are perfect facades of malice that cannot help but hold comparisons to the demonic because they are by definition Evil: they mislead with love... they take advantage of that love… they corrupt and destroy you until you are but a husk of your former self. You do not die, but they kill you all the same.

And that’s also why the vampires of ‘Salem’s Lot have up to this point been truly terrifying: they had rolled with the traditions of the dreamy-eyed Carmillas and Draculas (your Varney the Vampires but we don’t talk about him) while optimizing them to a living contemporary setting where everyone knows your name, where you live, and what you do behind those closed doors – sure they may bite and snarl at you eventually, but they wouldn’t have to do that if seduction didn’t fall first now would they? And that’s also why 2024’s appeal to quick thrills turn hollow (not even damp), these vamps serving only in function what the zombified CGI vamps had served back in I Am Legend from 2007 (writhe around, banshee scream a lot, try to murder the leads in no exact order). But hey, wouldcha look at that, they decided to keep Mr. Barlow all pale and ugly from head to Nosferatoe like they did back in ‘79 – isn’t that at least something!? Not really; I for one wonder whether the effectiveness of the make-up work back in ‘79 had something to do with the already 70-something Reggie Nalder having to wear it or if it was just That Good, but at least there was an indistinction where it is hard to tell the seams of fantasy apart from the reality. Here however I get nothing of the ancient and archaic from Alexander Ward’s Barlow-ratu: his skin is not rustic and rough, way too slick and smooth, and the inclusion of him having blood-pulsed veins run along his back – though a neat parasitic visual – clocks him more alien leader than it does earth-bred master vampire (now that would’ve something!). They do make a distinction from ‘79 with the fact that this time Barlow speaks (!), but as with the rest of the cast the script makes an absolute misuse of this by never making anything worth its stylistic choice (they grant him one line, one line, and even then that single menacing note offers nothing more to Barlow except that sometimes the old neck-chomper is prone to let loose the occasional one-liner). And this is made even stranger considering how the ‘79 miniseries proved itself the better by making Barlow mute! The original on-screen Barlow had about a minute’s worth of runtime out of the miniseries’ 180+ minutes, but Tobe Hooper and screenwriter Paul Monash had made each of those seconds count: they had it first impressed that Barlow was but a supernatural beast that somehow been domesticated enough to wear a theatrical cape and garb, but not before also deciding that each and every one of his appearances would bring out something new of the character to shift him away from being a mere scary TV ghoul to an intimidating and intelligent being of centuries’ past (Barlow bursts out of his travel crate in the Marsten House off-screen through a rude, shard-ridden awakening, yet when he attacks Ned Tebbets in the jail cell he merely waves a hand over the lock with his own brand of presto-satanic magic; and while his nails run long and jagged enough to slash a few unsuspecting arteries and his teeth impressive in the way that only a mother could love he chooses not to eat the Petries and Father Callahan right then and there as this film lamely does – he instead SLAMS the unbelieving parents’ heads together to knock them dead cold and then towers over Father Callahan’s dwindling faith before tearing that material talisman of a cross out from his hand (then, presumably, eating him – it’s all in due course)). It certainly helps that the miniseries format allowed for such a steady build-up as that to take place, but that’s to imply the film even bothered to try: not even ten minutes in and it can’t help but peek its presents for you by teasing us a glimpse of its leading monster – as if it had no faith in itself to begin with.

But maybe I should’ve expected something was off once they opted to make its opening title card a close-to-the-margins duplicate of the design pulled from the novel’s very first Doubleday edition.* Or that they were really leaning on this being some sort of ‘70s throwback for that matter, going so far as to pull the stops by giving Lewis Pullman David Soul’s coiffure, bringing in some Gordon Lightfoot to bookmark the thing, and even going so far as to slip in Dog Day Afternoon at the double feature marquee (ooooh you remember the Warner Bros. major motion picture Dog Day Afternoon directed by Sidney Lumet ehh you remember Al Pacinooo you remember ATTICA ATTICA ATTICA!?!). Not that’s such a bad idea, mind, especially when there are people living today who believe that decade was the last great era of cinema before we succumbed to the commercialized coke bloats of the ‘80s and on – in addition to a number of people such as myself who at times can’t help but think they may’ve been right all along – but it is a kind of wish (a dream if you will) that easily unravels once you trace back its beats to find them, quite often enough, construed in slight distortions and overt mimicries ranging from the skewed interpretive to outright paper-mache slap-work. While I wouldn’t say it’s the kind of hackjob Todd Phillips managed to “muster” with the first Joker flick, I also can’t help but feel the point of making it a period piece come off as false and flimsy, no matter how creepier it makes everything look under its aged lenses – it’s the kind of time-warp that has the elegance of the back-info on Funko Pop boxes, the sort of return as insightful of itself as those by-fans-for-fans pop culture podcasters headed under conglomerate umbrellas and their twice-removed “satirical” mind-fuckers. I called it a lens but I think the word I was really looking for was “filter.” Perhaps Stranger Things was a mistake.

* The last Stephen King adaptation to do so was 2022’s Firestarter: to Salem’s Lot 2024’s relief that film borderlined on travesty by leaning its unique science-fiction thriller premise into the already over-saturated superhero territory (amongst other things), but still, maybe not the best call to pander to the extent of emulating jacket graphics unless you’re able to Really Bring It home.

Yet here’s the thing: they could’ve done something with setting it back in the grit-dirt ‘70s. Why I expected this from the writer of It Chapter Two I do not know, but perhaps I felt it was still in the cards once everyone involved got the word go to print the book back to celluloid; Dauberman and Andy Muschietti may’ve fumbled the pass hard with bringing forth some of IT’s most prominent themes of cyclical abuse on the run home, but goddamn they had it there the first half; sure it probably helped they were using Chase Palmer and Cary Fukunaga’s prior, more psychologically-driven drafts as some sort of clutch, but you could still catch an ounce or two of the duology’s continuing hero beats of overcoming childhood fears just as long as you tuned out the rest of Chapter Two’s overwhelming key-rattling horror fodder. They weren’t able to bring IT in full under a meager five hours runtime – now all the more spectacularly baffling since the release of Dune Part Two – but at least they managed to carry some of the novel’s kernels with them. Where in this new ‘Salem’s Lot are its concerns of religion and faith – you telling me a story told and set in post-Exorcist America is lacking even that? And where (where oh where oh where) is its textual razor wires beset on smalltown America – that microcosm of a culture that at the time of publication had become even more alienated with itself by the final unravelings of Richard Nixon’s criminal enterprise and the subsequent fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War (a time of discontent we are now faced with once again in all its more deranged and rabid mutation)? Where is all that sweet deep and poetic good shit from the novel that once flowed as ‘79’s undercurrent and came back swinging with full force in ’04? All this film can muster of its denser layers is (once again) one line towards the end when Sheriff Gillespie flees his traitor’s retreat; he tells Dr. Cody that the whole town is falling apart, can’t she see that? Maybe… I mean we already kinda know something of the why it’s falling apart... but you can’t help but feel like they’re only telling you things again. You never really sense that ghost town apocalypse which befalls the town toward the story’s very end, that strange disquieting effect where the narrative seems at once to truly be epic once all the yapping and carbon footprinting has been silenced and those streets are dead and desolate and lonely in time for the final showdown between meek and master; but just that line (that line!!) and never more. And it doesn’t bode well when the only moment that manages to have any bit of poignancy is the bitter (and surely) coincidental irony of its showdown taking place not in a house but at the aforementioned drive-in – now the final resting place of the vampires – and in how the antiquated undead of this direct-to-streaming afterthought are vanquished by our heroes having to tear the silver screen apart by the legs, showing those bloodsuckers the blue-lighted vengeance of some strange unknowable god. Again, coincidence, but it’s an aftertaste all the same – a mildly cruel joke of a miscalculation that shouldn’t have survived the blast but somewhere… somehow… It Lives.

At least Gary Dauberman is a decent director – that too you can take away. Visually it still has enough weight and color and playfulness to it to demand a much bigger screen presence than what it ended up with (even moreso than something like Evil Dead Rise, honestly). I suppose those living over in Ireland and the UK were fortunate enough to catch this the way the gods intended (hello there!), but for us over in the red white and busted we will have to make due. For this upcoming Halloween it’ll probably flow well with a crowd (just make sure you don’t get stuck-up with anybody over drinks), but if you don’t want to drag you and your fellow souls through this overall sleeper you can always go with an alternative: play a copy of this over a projector, get a set of one of those whirling projector light disco things with the ghosts or skeletons or pumpkins or whoever the fuck, and boom! you got yourself a nice little decorative display piece! Keeping the sound is entirely optional: just mute the audio, (you won’t miss much anyway), dub it over with whatever Carpenter Brut/Bauhaus/Goblin type of playlist you have on deck, and let the night burn away for it is still young and willing. And awaiting.

#salem's lot 2024 #gary dauberman #salem's lot #stephen king #horror #vampires #movies #warner bros #new line cinema #movie review #consider the following #movietalk #if you're reading this - hello!#happy halloween #more to come

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