Resurrection: ALIEN: ROMULUS

As a frightened character inserts a crackling electric prod into a dripping alien egg sac, I found myself thinking that Alien: Romulus will please those who love to read Freudian symbolism into these pictures. But then again, there’s something to please all sorts of Alien fans in this movie—a gripping little exercise in style and craftsmanship while playing the series’ greatest hits. It’s set between Ridley Scott’s original sci-fi horror Alien, in which long-haul space-trucker Sigourney Weaver barely escapes a close call with a nasty extraterrestrial infestation, and James Cameron’s slam-bang sequel of action escalation, Aliens. And so it naturally borrows from each of those in appearance and mood, while layering on nods and winks and tracing along motifs and plot threads from other prequels, sequels, and spin-offs. The leads are a group of young miners (capably led by Cailee Spaeny and Isabela Merced, and David Jonsson with a tricky robotic role-and-a-half). They’re stuck on a far-flung planet under an onerous corporate contract when they decide to heist a derelict company space craft drifting by. Once there they discover, oops, it was a secret research station abandoned upon getting overrun by the face-hugging, acid-bleeding, ruthlessly predatory Xenomorph Aliens we’d expect from this series. The following is mostly predictable, but done up with enough fine shorthand performances and cool effects and ominous sounds and a big score that it rattles and shakes with patient entertainments until it hits a surprising new gear in its finale.

The director is Fede Alvarez, who brings a knack for doing right by a franchise—his Evil Dead remake is one of the better, gnarlier, horror remakes of the last decade—as well as his ability to spin a claustrophobic vice-grip of tension—like his trapped-in-a-house-with-a-mad-blind-man Don’t Breathe. He’s a fine maker of images and can layer visual and sonic effects with a degree of teeth-rattling force, churning out resourceful pulp awe. Romulus looks and sounds sensational with endless dark corridors and shafts of light and creepy crawlies scuttling and scurrying. It’s freshly familiar, so its biggest success is always what keeps it from greatness: it simply can’t stop reminding us of all the other Alien movies. But maybe that’s fitting for a series that features, across its many iterations, evolutionary explorations, genetic manipulation, gene splicing, cloning, and mutations. What it lacks in originality—and I definitely would’ve trimmed its most thuddingly obvious homages—it makes up for in fun throwback appeal. Here’s a movie that’s built out of bits and pieces of the others in its tradition—a big eerie location elegantly framed, a desperate blue-collar ensemble, a ragtag colonial machine-gun set-piece, gooey body-horror eruptions, elaborate gore effects and expertly manipulated CG enhanced puppetry of the new protuberances and pustules on the attack. The whole thing moves with a fine sense of tension and release, slamming down with grave, bleak world-building in each new implication and crisp, legible action as piles on the complications. It’s a minor-key entry, but one built up out of enjoyable resonances. And I certainly found myself in the suspense of hoping the appealing characters could find their way out; it’s new to them, after all.

Don't Wake Baddie: DON'T BREATHE

In other years I’d call Don’t Breathe the most efficient thriller in recent memory. But coming on the heels of The Shallows, and Green Room, and 10 Cloverfield Lane it’s just another in a string of suspenseful genre outings that whittle their compelling concepts down to the bare minimum. Like those other films, Don’t Breathe spends almost no time at all on its setup, putting the plot in motion quickly, trapping its instantly-characterized protagonists in the cold, merciless clutches of its tension. We meet three thieves breaking and entering to makes ends meet and save up to move out of state, their sad Detroit neighborhoods their reality while the idea of sunnier California coastline is their dream. They learn about a house in an abandoned part of town where a blind man sits on a pile of cash. It’s irresistible, but when they go to take it, the robbery goes very wrong very fast. It’s a one-thing-after-another movie locked in a one-location nightmare, the walls closing in on our leads as the story springs its twisted surprises.

Writer-director Fede Alvarez, whose 2013 semi-remake Evil Dead was a skilled crescendo of intensity and gore, conducts the proceedings as an exercise in craftsmanship. The leads are sneaking into the house of a man who can’t see, and a great deal of the tension in the early going comes from their silence. Every creaky floorboard or muffled gasp is worth a wince as the filmmakers hold the sound design in creepy near-silence, goosed with stings of music and effective jump scares. (The sensation should be familiar to anyone who remembers the board game Don’t Wake Daddy.) But then their target wakes up, adding the eerie sensation of his presence. They can stand in front of him unseen, dodging out of the way as he barrels down a hallway. Or he aims a gun while they try desperately not to give away their positions before—BANG! — a ringing cell phone on the other side of the room is met with a sudden shot. It’s good stuff, Alvarez confidently and capably moving a smooth camera across the well-defined interior spaces with a sneaky sense of heavy quiet. It’s as if even one wrong camera move would alert the man to the others’ presence.

A mirror image of the 1967 blind-Audrey-Hepburn-menaced-by-burglars movie Wait Until Dark, Don’t Breathe somehow keeps the rooting interest in the people doing the menacing. The cast – a sad young woman (Jane Levy, so brilliantly multifaceted in Alvarez’s Evil Dead), her gruff boyfriend (Daniel Zovatto, It Follows), and an almost-innocent inside boy (Dylan Minnette, Goosebumps) – are all veterans of recent scary movies able to play a believable sense of mounting frustration and fear. The burglars are doing a bad thing, but it’s not hard to sympathize with their plight. Their target (Stephen Lang, intense as usual) is a blind man, a veteran, and, we learn, a grieving father. It’s hard not to feel some twinge of guilt over the movie’s setup. But he’s also living in a scarily locked-down house, with padlocks and bolts, bars on windows, hidden firearms, and a wall of saws, bolt cutters, and power tools. What’s he up to? And why, once he wakes up and hears the intruders in his house, does he lock them in and prepare to take them out violently instead of calling the cops? What is he trying to hide?

So it turns into a claustrophobic little chess match, with filmmaking that’s gripping and accomplished, if entirely disposable and less interesting the more surprises it unveils. The movie is too fast and lean to really grapple with its character’s personalities, instead choosing a narrow focus on their behaviors. Best is Levy, a great horror heroine on a moral sliding scale that allows her to do bad for the right reasons, while Lang brings more than what’s on the page to a man who may be a target but becomes more of a monster the more we see him do. As is so often the case the movie is better and more compelling when it’s all mysteries, suspense, and how-do-they-get-out-of-this-one? and less interesting the more literal its stakes and clear its motivations. Alvarez saves some sick shocks for the end – not so much the prodigious blood and gore kind, instead relying on truly messed up mental gymnastics of its villain’s plot – but the real fun is how sharply choreographed the simple premise is in its ruthless execution.

Dead Again: EVIL DEAD

You’d think evil spirits would get tired of doing the same things over and over for all eternity, but I guess that’s not the case. Where would horror franchises be if that were true? Here’s Evil Dead, a quasi-remake and implied sequel to Sam Raimi’s cult favorite horror film The Evil Dead (filmed on a shoestring budget in the late 70s, released in 1981) and his own quasi-remake/sequel Evil Dead II. The new picture, like those previous ones, takes place at a creaky cabin deep in a Michigan woods. Once again, a group of young people end up there for one reason or another and end up reading from the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, a creepy book with text helpful for activating a demonic spirit which then sets out possessing and/or dismembering the characters one by one in a frenzy of horror violence.

This new film doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel, but director Fede Alvarez brings the expected in fine fashion. It plays like the work of a superfan of the original turned giddy with the knowledge that he’s been let loose to make his own version. In a sharply drawn screenplay by Alvarez and Diablo Cody (in what represents her most restrained barbs), the young adults gather for an intervention. On a break from her studies at Michigan State, a sweet addict (Jane Levy) dumps her drugs down the well and swears to her brother (Shiloh Fernandez) and friends (Lou Taylor Pucci, Jessica Lucas, and Elizabeth Blackmore) that this time she’s quitting for real. Cold turkey. What follows can then be seen as a bloody metaphor for the violence of withdrawal symptoms.

With great visual nods to its predecessors, the film proceeds along its path of narrative escalation. It creeps forward, finding ever gooey, grosser, more violent scenarios with which to shred your nerves. Rare is the horror film of any kind that finds enough inventive terror to fill even a sequence or two. Rarer still is the horror film that climbs higher with every scene, a unity of grueling disturbances that squirms ever tighter. It’s predictable in its rhythms, but uncompromising in its commitment to playing those rhythms as intensely as possible. It’s a film full of creaking floorboards, mirrored medicine cabinets, chances to scream “Don’t go in there!” and seemingly defeated enemies suddenly snapping back into action. But in each case, there’s a satisfying go for broke attitude. If a new Evil Dead had to be made, it may as well be something this satisfying. Even sans Raimi’s deranged slapstick energy, it might as well look this slick and bloody.

Polished cinematography and confident performances stand in the place of the appealing amateurish edges in Raimi’s original film. This new effort is overflowing with practical effects that grow gooier as we near the climax. The characters sustain cringe-worthy injuries and tend to the wounds in ways that made the audience I saw it with squirm in unison. One gnarly scene that puts an electric carving knife to use in an impromptu emergency self-surgery is a particular over-the-top work of prosthetics that one may need to watch through half-closed eyes. Ditto a needle that punctures skin, comes perilously close to an eyeball, and then, inevitably, must be pulled back out. I won’t even being to hint to you what happens to one girl’s tongue. That you will have to brave for yourself.

The film is gory, gross, and unrelentingly suspenseful, scary, even. But it doesn’t get under the skin in the way the best horror movies do. There’s a sense that it’s all happening because that’s what happens in movies like this. That it’s well made and an impressive feat of effects work is undeniable. What ultimately elevates the experience from a shined-up homage is Jane Levy. Stretching acting muscles slightly different from the ones she uses on her ABC sitcom Suburgatory, she gives the kind of horror hero performance that should get more acclaim than it will. It’s a slippery piece of work, slipping in and out of demonic possession, alternating creepily between growling, giggling antagonist and terrified young victim, begging for it all to be over. Without giving it away, the transformation that she goes through in the film’s final sequence is hugely satisfying and indicative of the ways Alvarez has found to work within a standard formula, reference the films from which he draws inspiration, and still find memorable moments all his own.