The Watchers: BUDDY and TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA

Two new horror pictures play like media studies seminars. That they manage to be both archly artificial genre commentary and functional entertainments makes for a fun time at the movies. Take Buddy, for instance. It has a great premise. What if there was an episode of Barney where the kid characters start to suspect Barney is a murderer? I can imagine a lot of ways for this hook to go awry. But there’s a total aesthetic commitment to the bit that makes the movie. It plays as a loop of episodes, squared-off, shot-on-video, late-90’s in look and feel. Everything from the primary-color sets, simple melodies, and vintage fashions down to the Comic Sans credits is just right. Buddy is a seemingly affable big orange unicorn mascot, living in a clubhouse on an astroturf soundstage. There he sings songs with and dispenses advice for a small group of kids. There’s a talking mailbox, a bunny in overalls, a nurse, a postman, and a googly-eyed train car. So far so normally absurd. That Buddy’s a murderer slowly reveals itself over the first episode, each subsequent entry becoming more deranged as the kids have to fight back and try to escape. The convincing mix of the form and content sells the curdled nostalgia at its core. 

It becomes a movie about the hidden abuses lurking beneath seemingly innocent programming, an exploded metaphor about what it feels like to watch an old show with fresh knowledge about behind-the-scenes nastiness. (Anyone successfully get through rewatching any random 20-year-old episode of a Nickelodeon sitcom since the documentary about creepy behavior toward those child stars?) The movie’s total absorption in its look and tone, like a nightmare you’d have after falling asleep on the couch with the TV on in the middle of the night, makes sense as the work of writer-director Casper Kelly. You might remember his short film Too Many Cooks, which was a viral sensation in 2014. That was a pitch perfect parody of 80s family sitcom theme songs that went on and on, mutating genres until it broke through the fourth wall into a slasher picture that finally collapsed in existential dread and apocalyptic context collapse. Buddy is a feature length version of the same impulse, stretched out with a few choice intentional swerves out of the style to create some breathing room, but always returning to the chamber of absurdity where laughs of incredulity accompany each splash of blood. 

Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s latest, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, is a similar hall of horror mirrors, a long self-reflexive trance state. It’s also about what it’s like to like horror movies, even, and especially, bad ones. It understands the strange formative psychic tremors that the right movie at the right time has on one’s sense of self. Star Hannah Einbinder plays a young director tasked with remaking a problematic cult slasher classic: Camp Miasma. Like the Friday the 13th franchise with a soupçon of Sleepaway Camp, it has a gender-bending villain named Little Death who perpetually wakes up from beneath the lake and goes on a killing spree. Einbinder’s earnest, awkward filmmaker is told to bring the dormant franchise’s views on gender up to date. Flush with an idea, she travels to find the reclusive star of the original (Gillian Anderson with an imperious honey-fried accent) in hopes of talking her into appearing in the reboot. The older woman lives at the abandoned summer camp that was the movie’s filming location. Now, in a matte-painting winter in the middle of nowhere, they have a tense meeting of increasingly entangled psychosexual conversation and bodily awareness. 

In the film’s centerpiece of reflexivity, the two have a discussion about gender, identity, perspective—and sex and violence, or, as the actress says, “flesh and fluids”—before and after screening the original picture. It becomes a film within a film that then further abstracts into muddled memories and flashbacks and sequences. Some feel authentically 80s in their scuzzy graininess. Others get slippery with anachronisms, half-remembered impressions rich with emotional baggage. They embody how horror fans toggle their identification between victim and predator, the penetrated and the perpetrator. If it all sounds artsy and academic, so it is. But it’s also so physical and fraught in its tensions between its leads that it’s hard to shake its dark undertow of confusion and discovery. It’s also constantly winking with meta asides, puncturing but not deflating the heavy mood. If you saw Schoenbrun’s other films you’re familiar with this sense of one’s identity tangled up in the media they consume. In We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, a vulnerable teenage girl gets lost in a spiral of internet influence. In I Saw the TV Glow, lonely teenagers get lost in the lore of a cult series that connects them. Another allegory of displacement and discovery, this new film is their broadest and narrowest, an intimate exposure and disclosure between two women desperate to filter the voids in their lives through the art that shapes them and drives them to new insights into their minds and bodies. 

Spirits Unlocked: INSIDIOUS: OUT OF THE FURTHER

James Wan’s Insidious is one of the great jump scare horror movies. It’s a haunting that leaps out and rattles you with sudden appearances and over-cranked sound design. Some people run down the very idea of a good jolt in a horror picture, calling it cheap and easy way to spike an audience’s attention. But, like all cinema techniques, it’s all in how you deploy it. Compare, for instance, how scary that movie is with how boring its sequels are. It takes a shivery execution and drains it of novelty and fright. It doesn’t help that the premise—a shadowy netherworld called “the further” where demons and spirits congregate hoping to be let into our world, and the living people who can travel there and back again—usually ends up in pretty dull climactic sequences. A sympathetic character wanders what’s essentially a black box theater with a fog machine pumping away off screen. They repeatedly scream the name of the person they’re saving while waving an old-timey lantern. Sometimes ghouls shamble forward and claw at them. It’s all a bit silly, and a bit empty. And this is how four whole sequels have attempted to resolve some standard-issue hauntings! At least the new one, Insidious: Out of the Further, finally comes up with something neat to do with the idea again. 

Writer-director Jacob Chase, new to the series, makes the early going merely a pretty good version of what these movies have done before. A single mom (Amelia Eve) is haunted by these spooky visions and hopes to stop them, and protect her daughter (Island Austin), before she goes totally off the deep end. She’s haunted not just by the spectral beings, but by the memories of her mother (Laura Hall) and her apparent psychotic break twenty years earlier. A psychic tells our lead she has a special gift that’s drawing unwanted ghostly attention. She can bring objects and spirits between these planes of existence and an evil ghost hopes to use her as a conduit to raise his dead acolytes. That’s good stuff! And gives a neat opening for reliable series regular Lin Shaye to reemerge as a spirited guide. (It’s always fun to see a woman above a certain age holding down a horror franchise.) The variables in play give the climax some earthier stakes and the emotional hook of mothers and daughters reconciling across generations and between life and death is nicely done. That our lead’s career in dentistry leads to some skin-crawling tooth business is just an added bonus on the tensions at play. It all adds up to a sixth Insidious that’s easily the best of the series since the original—small praise, perhaps, but a nice surprise, too. 

Working Man: SHELTER and MUTINY

I love that both 90-minute Jason Statham action thrillers released this year are one-word titles, and that they’re each a verb that could also be a noun. It speaks to the steady, sturdy reliability of Statham’s career as an action star. Of course he’ll be thrown into a predicament wherein he has to verb all the nouns until the villainous are dead and the innocent are safe. In Shelter, he’s an ex-military man who has to protect a little girl from a paramilitary conspiracy that wants him dead. In Mutiny, he’s an ex-military man who has to protect human trafficking victims from a corporate conspiracy that wants him dead. Let it not be said that Statham pictures lack range. They’re adept at finding infinite varieties of the same basic plot particulars. He’s been the star of these mid-budget action flicks for about 25 years now. Most of them are somewhere between good and pretty good. At this point it’s safe to say he’s had a longer run of quality control than most stars of his ilk.

I like Shelter’s emotional appeals, with Statham as a man living in exile on a remote British isle to hide from the special forces of which he used to be part, and now forced to care for a friend’s niece after a tragedy leaves her washed up on shore. It’s not exactly novel to see the tough guy melt a little under paternal figure pressures. But the tentativeness with which he plays it, and the deep, reasonable, suspicion the girl holds onto makes it all the more satisfying as they learn to trust each other. He hits some notes of warmth and sensitivity through his usual terse man-of-action gruff competence. And she, played with an unforced naturalism by Bodhi Rae Breathnach, the older girl in Hamnet, is neither too phony adorable nor too ready for violence. The movie’s a happy medium. Director Ric Roman Waugh (Angel Has Fallen) keeps the emotions handled with a light touch while pushing the momentum up. It jumps through some Bourne-adjacent set-pieces with determined hit men in the field and officials in suits stalking around control rooms. It races to exciting, melancholic conclusions, delivering exactly what you’d want from the premise in exactly the right proportions. You can trust Statham to do the right thing, even if it hurts. 

Mutiny is less outwardly emotional, but just as efficient and in a necessarily more contained plot. It’s largely set on a boat and uses every part of the vessel before it’s done. It uses our sense of Statham’s screen presence well. He first turns up at night, backlit in silhouette behind the wheel of a truck. Just from the shape of his head we know it’s him. How’s that for brand recognition? And even though he’s the driver of a vehicle that just purposely hit another, we just know he has a good reason. He’s out for justice. There’s never any doubt. The movie flashes back for some slightly convoluted setup to get his mild-mannered security guard on a cargo boat and in the know of the bad guys’ plot. But once he realizes that these guys murdered his nice CEO boss (suspend your disbelief!) and have shipping containers full of humans to sell, he knows he needs to take them all down. Director Jean-François Richet (Plane) makes crisp, clean use of the setting, and leans on Statham’s persona to fill in the gaps. We just believe he could navigate the tight turns and large pipes, the anchor and the harpoon gun. There are some thinly sketched characters around him, from a slimy captain to a sympathetic third-mate (Annabelle Wallis) to a navy vessel on the phone. But it’s largely his show and it’s fun to see him punch and stab his way through 20 villainous guys. He knows what his audience wants and just keeps delivering.

Girls Meet World: ROOMMATESand DON'T SAY GOOD LUCK

Wordsworth said the child is the father of the man. Consider the case of Adam Sandler. His early movies were certainly childish. They were boyish goofs, crude, rude, and ultimately harmless. They could be fun, too! That at their laziest they grew to become excuses to hang out with buddies on the studio’s dime is just symptomatic of those adolescent impulses. But time marches on. He’s a dad of two grown daughters now. They’re both actresses and he’s used his clout to help get them started. I’m glad he did. They give nepo babies a good name, with screen personas that are winningly sensitive and open-hearted. The older, Sadie, has a slightly distant and deeper vein of irony she’ll play around with. The younger, Sunny, has a more closely-held tremulous innocence. They’re similar instruments playing slightly different notes in the same timber. Their movies also happen to be the most emotionally intelligent Sandler’s Happy Madison productions has made. Turns out these children helped remake the man. It’s clear he’s proud of his daughters, and it’s nice that he holds their screenplays to a higher standard than his own. He co-starred with them in the charming tween comedy You’re So Not Invited to My Bar Mitzvah and they co-starred with him in the shaggy belated Happy Gilmore 2. The parent-daughter material of each elevated the projects, taking the former to terrific and the latter to passable. This summer has each daughter starring in her own movie, each without her father in the cast. Sadie Sandler has college comedy Roommates. Sunny Sandler has high school drama Don’t Say Good Luck. Both films are from terrific indie directors and are fitted perfectly to their strengths. Each has a nicely textured balance between emotional honesty and well-earned laughs, though in different proportions. 

Roommates is an unusually thoughtful college comedy, getting something truthful about friendship struggles into the usual moves for such a picture. It has crude humor, raucous parties, bad behavior, and other expected hijinks. But it also has a sharp understanding of the subtle shifts of power and insecurity in the pressure cooker setting of a freshman dorm room. Sadie Sandler plays a shy girl who never really made friends in high school, pinning her hopes on meeting new people at college. Her roommate (Chloe East) is a confident loose cannon, who wears revealing clothes and boldly struts toward whatever, and whomever, she wants. Sandler is drawn toward her charisma, wanting to be friends, but also a little nervous about her unpredictability. The movie is directed with a bright studio comedy aesthetic married to a perceptive attentiveness to character dynamics. Filmmaker Chandler Levack, whose indies I Love Movies and Mile End Kicks are similar sweet-and-sour character comedies about particular cultural spaces (the video rental store and music journalism, respectively), brings her casually insightful eye to a glossier studio product. She gets really terrific performances out of the cast—both the collegiate pals and adult figures (Natasha Lyonne, Nick Kroll, Janeane Garofalo, Carol Kane). Sandler makes an intensely sympathetic figure; we see why she’d want to go along out of her comfort zone, but it makes each little heartbreak all the more impactful. But it’s East—you might recognize her as one of the trapped missionaries in Heretic or Sammy’s Christian girlfriend in The Fabelmans—who makes the most out of what a lesser comedy would make a mere whirling dervish of party girl energy. Instead she brings out a brittle fragility just barely hidden beneath the bravado. It’s something her impressed new roomie easily misses until it’s too late. The movie gets a little broad and silly at times—the finale and frame story are especially goofy—but it never loses that believable core. 

Although it’s ultimately a tearjerker of a drama, Don’t Say Good Luck has some traditional high school comedy moves. It has warmly funny theater kid supporting players, some wise supportive teachers, and a sweet sentimental family life to surround Sunny Sandler’s main character. She’s a teenager excited to get the lead role in her school musical production of Waitress and is prepping for a hectic practice schedule. And then her mom gets a potentially fatal diagnosis. The movie becomes a breezy movie of usual high school problems consistently undercut by jackknifing emotional intrusions. Sudden jabbing grief cuts deep into what should be quotidian teenage concerns, making every usual problem—crushes, homework, friend drama—both heightened by her emotional rawness and diminished in comparison to the literal life and death problems at home. It’s a potent mix, getting some laughs in amid the gut-punch dramatic moments. As the mother, Melanie Lynskey brings such a deep well of maternal energy channeled into a fluttering between fear for herself and care for her family. And it’s all the more moving for her underplaying the lines that a heavier hand would’ve turned mawkish. Similarly, the movie as a whole, benefits from a gentle lived-in look and tone. It’s not a simple movie of Brave Suffering or a mere march through realistic misery. It’s just charmingly real in a polished studio movie way, refreshingly honest about the rough edges and crosscurrent pressures of its believable situations. As the mother’s condition worsens and the show’s opening night grows closer, you can start to see the outlines of moving moments ahead. But when it steers hard into them, it pays off with a succession of lump-in-the-throat scenes that are deeply felt and honestly portrayed. (If you’re already aware the songs in Waitress are moving, just wait for the climactic deployment here.) Director Julia Hart (Stargirl) knows how to make a small-scale, big emotion, broadly appealing movie, and trusts her cast to pull it off with subtle, but no less devastating, impact. She knows it’ll feel good to have such a genuine cry. 

Dino Might: THE END OF OAK STREET

We used to regularly have big summer special effects pictures with a light touch, lots of surprises, and a neat conclusion. The End of Oak Street makes it look so easy you’ll wonder why they've gone the way of the...well....dinosaur. If only all of its ilk were so simple and satisfying. Writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s working with an irresistible premise delivered quickly and confidently. It’s thin, but pays out with big results. The idea is this: a block of suburban Michigan is zapped from 1982 back to prehistoric times. The escalation is expertly handled from the early quotidian unease (maybe it’s just a power outage!), to the slow reveals (oh, it’s definitely not!), to the climactic tumbling out of variables that are both surprising and inevitable. We follow one family (mom Anne Hathaway, dad Ewan McGregor, and two teenagers) as they try to survive dinosaurs roaming their neighborhood. How do they get out of this predicament when their neighbors are getting chomped, and there seems to be no way home? The suspense is obvious here, but it’s no less exciting to see enormous creatures wandering down the asphalt, rummaging in trash cans, slipping through the forest, and towering over homes. What kid in a dinosaur phase hasn’t looked out the car window and wondered what that’d look like? The movie has the energy of imaginative wonderment driven into lean, effective survival thriller plotting. 

The movie has a playful mean streak and a sentimental core, a fun mix that works like jet fuel for its sequences’ thrills. No one’s safe from getting chomped, and the movie’s love of its lead family makes us flinch with every close call. Every time an enormous creatures comes stalking through the background of a shot is as effective as the last. (Watch out!) And each solution leads to another problem in fine roller coaster style. I enjoyed its overall sense of one-thing-after-another that works through every complication with gusto. And I appreciated the seriousness with which the characters take their dilemmas. They have doubts and stress, they slip and flail, they trial and error, they might even wet themselves when an enormous reptile is repeatedly slamming its head into the front door. But they also are animated by a clear love of one another that gets only tighter the more their lives threaten to slip away. That’s consistent with Mitchell’s strength with actors. He’s gotten earnest authenticity out of everything from awkward teen dramedy (The Myth of the American Sleepover) to arty horror (It Follows) and zany conspiracy thriller (Under the Silver Lake). And it’s consistent with the ease he has establishing widescreen mood and space while delineating high concepts. That’s enough on which to hang a quick and exciting genre picture. No need to load it up with extra metaphors or complicated twists. Just set it up cleanly and clearly, populate it with believable types, and let the blood start pumping. It may not be especially deep, but it’s a lot of fun. 

Web Sight: SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is the most straightforwardly entertaining Marvel movie in quite some time. It has no multiversal shenanigans or television tie-ins. It’s just a story about colorful characters colliding in the concrete canyons of New York City. Turns out Spidey’s at his best when he’s swinging between skyscrapers. That’s not to say the movie is without its Cinematic Universe trappings. It gets cluttered up with cameos and references and gives over most of its plotting in the back half to what is effectively a backdoor pilot for future comic book storylines with another character entirely. And yet it works pretty well, dovetailing with Peter Parker (Tom Holland) struggling with identity, while fueling some clever action sequences. We get lots of vignettes of crime-fighting, an attempt to stop a hijacked tank rumbling through the streets, a couple psychic chase scenes, and even some hopping among ninjas. Best is one that zips up, down, around, out, and through the top levels of a towering building while Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and Punisher (Jon Bernthal) alternately help and hurt our main hero. It does a good job juggling variables, and heights. Finally we get one of these MCU Spider-Man movies getting the full vertiginous effect out of his hometown. Even the establishing shots of magic hour skylines or twinkling nighttime windows have some much-needed specificity that the increasingly hermetic green screens and volume video walls lacked in previous entries. (It doesn’t always feel like New York, but it generally feels like a real city streets. Progress!) Is it setting the bar too low to say this one always looks and plays out like a real movie?

It helps that the focus is on Spider-Man himself, even in the midst of all the walk-ons, foreshadowing, references, and loose threads. He’s center stage here; other heroes are clear supporting players in his story. He’s put through an emotional trial, grieving a death from the previous film, as well as recovering from the aftermath of the spell that caused everyone to forget Peter Parker. The citizens still love Spidey, but he’s never been more alone. He’s in constant action, and losing his sense of self. The balance between those ideas is held well in Holland’s body language. He’s a believably more mature and stressed superhero than his high school days. And it’s held in the tone and style, which director Destin Daniel Cretton is well-equipped to pull off from his experience with both outsized acrobatics (Shang-Chi) and small character studies (Short Term 12). He gets good milage out of the chemistry with Zendaya’s MJ, strained by her not knowing their history but sparkling all the same. And he digs into a mysterious quasi-villain played by Sadie Sink, who gets some terrific scenes, even if they often wink and nod in the direction other movies might take. (If they stick to their burgeoning metaphors in later entries, they might be onto something.) The movie is doing a lot, and suffers a bit for it, but it’s intending more of a sampler platter to go along with its core Spidey splash panels. It also manages to not devolve into CG nonsense for its climax, finding instead character-driven motivations and payoffs to root its effects. It’s all pretty entertaining. I’d almost forgotten what it was like to enjoy one of these. 

Coming Home: THE ODYSSEY

Christopher Nolan loves to play with time. Think about the dual timelines of Oppenheimer, the three speeds of Dunkirk, the backwards-and-forwards in Tenet, the dream levels in Inception, and relativity in Interstellar. So of course a part of Homer’s Odyssey that appeals to him is structural. Here’s a story that starts with an absence: Odysseus is gone. It’s been twenty years since he left for the Trojan War and, though his wife and son have long ago heard that the conflict has ended, he’s yet to return home. The son (Tom Holland) sneaks away from his mother (Anne Hathaway) and heads out to discover what happened to his father (Matt Damon). The story of his father’s leaving is told by a blind old man (John Leguizamo). An explanation of what happened during that absence is partially filled in by anecdotes from those who were at Troy and since made it home. It’s also filled in with Odysseus’ recollections of his travels, recounted on a remote island to a mysterious woman (Charlize Theron) as the words of a broken man slowly reawakening to his own memories. There’s also, in a nod to the original work’s oral tradition, a bard (Travis Scott) who gets the first words in the film: A face. A fleet. A war. A man. It’s his “sing to me of a man of twists and turns…” The movie feels suitably big and sprawling. The big budget’s on the screen. But because of its winding and familiar narrative, and the ways in which the telling holds back the emotions, Nolan’s typical momentum here draws slack as Odysseus’ crew gets lost and the chronology aligns. 

It ends up one of Nolan’s most straight-forward narratives, a recounting of several of the epic poem’s most famous sequences: the Trojan horse, encounters with giants, sirens, sea monsters, a witch, a cyclops, the dead. It’s given the full over-sized Nolan effect. The cast is jam-packed with recognizable faces doing solid work in every small role. The frames of IMAX film stock are towering and detailed with extras and effects. The landscapes and waterways are vast and real. (We’re never far from the roar and expanse of the wine-dark sea.) The soundtrack pounds away with repetitive deep bass and tense strings. And the film stretches to nearly three hours, winding its long way to the expected climactic homecoming confrontation. Along the way, the film smooths over some of the original text’s thornier elements, while introducing new notes of darkness and ambiguity (or muddling) all its own. Nolan makes the gods largely absent, but the monsters very real, and the effects of each moral failing fraught. It becomes a down-beat journey through a movie about loss and disappointment, about suffering the consequences of one’s actions and struggling to find honor and acceptance in troubled times. It finds uneasy answers, opting to give a bit of relational hope in its final moments even as the larger picture of civilization seems poised to topple. It evokes a certain amount of melancholy to have ancient Greeks talk about “living in ruins.” This Odysseus is full of regrets, feeling deeply the poems early lines that promise “he could not save [his people] from disaster…” In bringing this ancient story back to life, Nolan seems to be making a case for recognizing the damage in breaking old societal bonds for short-term gains, and how it leaves us all lost, fighting back to level from disaster. That may not be fully Homer, but it’s definitely now. How’s that for playing with time?