What Fresh Misery Is This? LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL, IN A VIOLENT NATURE, MAXXXINE, and LONGLEGS

In a recent Facebook post, writer-director Paul Schrader asserted that horror movies resist seriousness and are difficult to use for serious ideas, writing that “for the most part their raison d’être is horror itself.” This he says despite, or maybe because, of his own interesting flawed Cat People remake and Exorcist prequel. Regardless. It’s certainly true that the horror genre is one that easily tips over into empty gestures and routine imagery. Even some of the best somehow milk suspense afresh from the same small bag of tricks. Lights flicker. Frames swell with negative space. The score stings with a tremor of strings or a bleat of brass. Figures suddenly appear. Fog lingers. Grass cracks. Leather gloves stretch and crinkle. Blades shine and snicker-slice through air and flesh alike. Hey, I can like these tools of suspense as much as the next incorrigible horror frequenter. The masters of the form make these same basic moves manipulate responses for something pavlovian, if not pathological, in their ruthless effects. The masterpieces might lean on these, too, but on their way to burrow beneath the skin by turning the unease into an all-consuming nightmare of discomfort and lingering psychological doubt and distress. All that potential to find so many of the buzziest horror films lately are all empty gestures? Or at least they have wide gulfs between good ideas and unsatisfying execution.

Take the surprise sleeper hit of the spring: Late Night with the Devil. It sets itself up as found footage: a doomed episode of a 1970’s talk show wherein a possessed guest wreaked demonic havoc on live television. That’s an incredible premise, and with character actor David Dastmalchian in the lead role playing a kind of flop sweat Dick Cavett, has some unctuous charms. The way the intimations of real horror build along with the chummy surreality of a bleary-eyed half-imagined midnight talk show, segment by segment, has a nice sick logic to it as well. Where the movie loses me, and keeps it from fully activating its potential, is its craftsmanship. Writer-directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes fumble all the little details—from the too-digital faux-video look, to the vaguely modern phoniness of some performances, to the too-smooth gore effects—and break their own conceit with implausible and unnecessary behind-the-scenes photography and some nightmare-perspective shots in the back stretch cut into what could’ve stayed trapped in the diegetic. The longer it went on like that, the more frustrated I was that such a promising idea was whittled away one distracting choice after the next. It’s like they didn’t have the confidence to fully commit to their own idea.

If you want to give some credit for commitment to the bit, though, look no further than In a Violent Nature. It isn’t much of a movie, but as an excuse to sit in the dark and think about slasher movies, it’s not so bad. It’s basically a knockoff Friday the 13th from Jason’s perspective, or more accurately from a third-person camera following closely behind him. The trance-like pacing includes a lot of tromping around in the woods, the distant sounds of shallow young adults carousing and camping drawing nearer as a hulking brute slowly, steady stomps toward them. The eventual kills are so grotesquely over-the-top, even by the genre’s standards, that one watches them with a sick fascination. It’s not so much about the death on display as clocking where, exactly, the wound makeup and eviscerated dummies are digitally stitched into the shots of real actors, and trying not to vomit through one’s appreciation for all that macabre hard work making it look excessive and real when someone is literally pretzeled inside out and pushed down a ravine. Writer-director Chris Nash makes a patiently punishing movie that makes the audience wait and wait, listening to nothing but the crunch of leaves and twigs underfoot as the killer’s back ambles onward to excessive violence. The plot, such as it is, is bone-deep derivative, and any glimmers of genre critique are quickly squelched out by the flat-faced slasher logic taken too seriously. For however much it had me contemplating why people, myself included, even enjoy this hack-and-stab form, it had my mind wandering to all manner of other films of its kind—both better and worse—rather than focus on the increasingly dull one in front of me.

I had a similar sense of diminishing returns with the summer’s bigger art house horror efforts: Ti West’s MaXXXine and Oz Perkins’ Longlegs. Both from reliable modern auteurs of the genre, they nonetheless fall flat in the way strong starts peter out into predictability. They’re not without their surface charms of style, but they never truly satisfy like their inspirations. West’s film is the third in a trilogy he began with his fun 70s throwback X, in which an indie porn crew is killed off on a remote Texas farm, and then continued with Pearl, a flashback to the beginning of the century where a desperate farm girl hoped for stardom and decided to murder instead. MaXXXine is in a neon-and-synths 80s L.A. and finds the imaginary actress of the title role (Mia Goth) trying to transition from porn to horror. Too bad people she knows are being killed off by a giallo-styled leather-gloved perv. It makes for a rather simplistic movie with a mystery that’s limply deployed and violence sparingly splattered. It also introduces nothing new or nuanced about its character or the doomed death-drive to stardom we haven’t already picked up. By the time we get to the weirdly routine conclusion—in which a detective played by Michelle Monaghan gets one of the funniest exits in recent memory—I was wondering what all the empty pastiche was even supposed to be saying at this point. 

At least Longlegs has some truly terrifying moments punctuating a thick layer of dread. It’s a dimly-lit, coolly framed serial killer procedural that slowly sinks into a satanic spell. Maika Monroe does a good Jodie Foster, and Nicolas Cage brings a typically talented and engaging push-pull between outlandishness and underplayed creepiness. His grotesquely made-up face, shrill vocalizing and halting rhythms puncture the chilly restraint of the filmmaking, warping the texture of the tone and bending the whole movie toward his evil gesticulations. That makes for a great uneasiness at play in every scene, especially when photographed in precision anamorphic tracking shots tied to a figure in the frame. But it’s all so cramped and small, and ultimately way more pedestrian, even in its nightmarish magical realism, that I spent the last third in a shrug. But compared to some of these other horror movies this year, no wonder this one hit the box office with a bit of a jolt.

Promising Young Women: SHIVA BABYand THE CRAFT: LEGACY

Shiva Baby is so drenched in social anxiety — not to mention family obligations, professional frustrations, and sexual tension — that one could practically wring it out. The whole endeavor has a palpable feeling of discomfort, the camerawork close and ever-so-slightly trembling, the score spare stabbing strings, the dialogue surface pleasant, subtextually jabbing small talk of needling relatives gossiping and hesitant strangers networking. It takes place almost entirely at a shiva for a distant relative (someone’s second wife’s sister—that sort of thing) of our protagonist, a college senior (Rachel Sennott) whose various worlds are about to uncomfortably collide. Her future looks uncertain, graduating without good prospects, to the dismay of her mother (Polly Draper) who tells her to let the other mourners think she has interviews lined up. Her father (Fred Melamed) still pays her bills since her babysitting job is so erratically scheduled. And neither know that her alleged babysitting job is a cover story for her real meager source of income: meeting men on a sugar daddy app and getting some easy money for a good time. We start the movie at the end of her latest hookup with an older man (Danny Deferrari), the better to recognize him when he enters the house. Small world. His wife (Dianna Agron) and baby are meeting him there, too. The walls are closing in.

There’s a constant sense of teetering on the edge of potential embarrassment, and Sennott capably plays the squirm, blundering forward though her insecurities and realizing only too late each escalating cringe. The tension rises as she’s bolstered by craft that keeps her tightly framed and blocking that presses her into corners or into uncomfortable exposure. In this small gathering the rooms were already full of elderly family friends (like Jackie Hoffman) prying nicely or passive aggressively into her personal life, and her childhood best friend and first romantic partner (Molly Gordon) makes eyes at her, too. Now it's only more complicated. Writer-director Emma Seligman, in a striking debut feature, has the confidence to sustain this small, well-tuned picture — a mere 70-some minutes and just a wisp of plotting to carry it — by signaling the largely interior stakes through small gestures and flushes of discomfort. The movie’s all about eye lines and furtive glances, the cold sweat of conversational awkwardness and the tension between polite fictions and outright deceptions. All the while, the whole thing plays out like a prelude to a panic attack, emotionally edging right up to the brink of a psychological catastrophe that never quite erupts. It feels like an achingly real emotional state.

You never know where you’ll find that. For instance, I just caught up with writer-director Zoe Lister-Jones' The Craft: Legacy. Who’d have thought the couple decades belated sequel/remake of the cult teen coven classic would have some emotional truth in it? I didn’t. But there it is anyway. There’s a scene in the middle, a sort of Breakfast Club misfit confession circle, in which the star teen girls who dabble in witchcraft as a form of self-empowerment — but dangers lurk, because of course they do — talk with a former bullying boy from their school. He tearfully admits his closeted bisexuality and earnestly confesses to feeling stifled by gender norms. It’s a real bolt of interesting emotional valences that changes the temperature of the scene and resonates throughout the rest of the picture. The whole thing is an amiable teen flick, with lockers and house parties and cute montages and, befitting its horror roots, a bit of dark sinister intentions lingering underneath. There are a few good creepy moments, and fine parallel plots about our new-in-town lead girl (Cailee Spaeny) getting to know her new friends and her latent powers, and her single mother (Michelle Monaghan) finding a new beau, a masculinist self-help guru and maybe-cult-leader (David Duchovny). (Some shades of The Lost Boys, there, perhaps.)

So there’s decent contrast drawn between the girl-power witches and dark forces of misogyny, and there’s the usual stuff about crushes and classes and learning to grow into oneself inherent in the teen movie of any genre. It’s a consistent through line of inquiry connecting the boy’s troubles and the girls’, a frank admission that societal expectations can hurt everyone, even those who are theoretically built up by them. Even if the movie never quite leans all the way into horror — though there’s a bit with a figure in a mirror in a darkened bedroom that’s quite spooky — and there are fleeting moments where it feels like one of those featherlight Netflix Original buzzword Mad Libs pictures, the whole project has a consistent and pleasant earnestness about its characters that makes for a modestly enjoyable effort as it coasts to its routine conclusion.

Space Invaders: PIXELS

Eighties nostalgia is weaponized in Pixels, a light sci-fi comedy that sees unknown aliens send giant arcade games to invade the earth. Why? Apparently they picked up some thirty-year-old signals and they took it as a threat. The attacks start with an enormous Galaga game raining destruction on an Air Force base in Guam, reducing everything in sight to glowing piles of multicolored blocks. It’s clearly a crisis for bumbling President Kevin James, who was once just a kid in an arcade cheering on his good buddies in their quest to be champion gamers. Now he’s a buffoon no one likes, with plummeting approval ratings. How he got to be president in the first place is anyone’s guess. And now there are these aliens threatening to destroy the planet. What follows is a nonsense adventure out to flatter every nerd in the audience for merely recognizing the references.

James recruits a goofy and improbable ensemble to fight back the aliens in elaborate large-scale replications of classic games. He finds his old arcade pals – now an AV technician (Adam Sandler), a conspiracy nut (Josh Gad), and a prisoner (Peter Dinklage, looking like Billy Mitchell) – and forces them to train Marines in video game strategy. The gruff general (Brian Cox) is hopelessly confused, but reluctantly lets a lieutenant (Michelle Monaghan) get special tech prepared surprisingly quickly. Soon the dweebs and the military have giant phallic laser guns blasting away at Space Invaders, Centipede, and the like as aliens demand three contests, winner takes planet. If you already find yourself asking questions like, “How?” or “Why?” or “Who cares?” this is not your movie.

The nerds, we’re told repeatedly, are the only ones who know how to play the games, and therefore the world’s only hope. This seems to me a misunderstanding of video games’ popularity. You’d think a group of Marines would know a thing or two about joystick-eye coordination, and could grasp the basic strategy of these old games, especially since it boils down in practice to shooting at large glowing objects. Plus, it sets up a dated nerds-rule/jocks-drool underdog fight that doesn’t make sense in our world of unfortunately male-dominated Silicon Valley and other bro-ish tech enclaves where the simple power categories of dorks and sports have scrambled. But I suppose this isn’t exactly the movie to go looking for logic or coherence. It doesn’t even bother to show us the aliens behind the DayGlo lightshow attacks, expecting us to enjoy the sight of it all while chuckling at its cast’s antics and not thinking about it too much.

The movie’s idea of nerds is as old as the games they’re fighting. But the action is rather well done, like a lighthearted riff on a Transformers plot structure in which incomprehensible extraterrestrial conflict tears through some major cities and their landmarks. I enjoyed seeing the vibrant geometric shapes colliding with earthbound obstacles. At least it is action different from what we usually see, collateral damage chaos smashing apart solid matter into bits of glowing blocks. There’s some charm to seeing a towering Pac-Man chomping through a maze of New York City streets, or cavernous red alien scaffolding arranging itself into a King Kong-sized Donkey Kong setup. But it goes on and on without feelings of real danger, and the characters just aren’t funny or interesting enough to earn our investment.

Remaking a French short film by Patrick Jean, writers Tim Herlihy and Timothy Dowling (frequent Sandler collaborators) create podgy connective tissue for silly spectacle in the form of limp childish comedy and halfhearted relationships. The jokes largely fall flat, without a sharp sense of perspective or humor. We’re supposed to care if these guys earn validation despite learning little more than that they’re good at thirty-year-old video games. And it’s yet another movie where goofy guys stumble their way to greatness while patient women stand next to the fun, scowling or smirking. This one goes the extra mile, casting people like Jane Krakowski, Ashley Benson, and Serena Williams (!) to show up in a few scenes and smile, like prizes to be won or symbols to be displayed. Playing into pessimistic nerd culture inferiority and resentment, the movie sets itself up as wish-fulfillment for people who wish playing arcade games could be enough to 1.) earn a living, 2.) make you an important public figure, and 3.) get you ladies to objectify.

So the human stakes are unconvincing and vaguely insulting. But at least the zippy adventure moments largely work. It’s not an altogether unpleasant experience, which most definitely cannot be said for most Sandler comedies of late. The director here is Chris Columbus, whose work on the first two Harry Potter films shows his facility with bouncy effects work and convincing design. He has a competent eye for faux-Spielberg awe and workmanlike entertainment, and proves once more that, when given a director instead of an enabler, Sandler is a decent everyman. As a schlub shooting 8-bit aliens, we can almost believe it. The problem is only when he stands next to painfully wisecracking sidekicks, or when we’re asked to care if he gets to woo the lady in uniform, win over her moppet, and get the respect of the world. When the movie’s in motion, it goes down easily. But then it stops, and there’s that hollow aftertaste.

Strangers on a Train: SOURCE CODE

Duncan Jones’s directorial debut, 2009’s Moon, was a sci-fi study in loneliness and isolation anchored by a wonderful performance by Sam Rockwell as the one-man crew of a lunar mining platform coming to the end of his three-year shift. He slowly finds cracks in the corporate messages and, though he’s more than ready to go home, discovers that it might not be so simple. I didn’t see the film during its small release and didn’t catch up with it until it had been on Blu-ray for a few weeks. But when I had caught up, I found myself wishing I could have seen it on the big screen. It’s a strong effort, a quiet, grey film with which Jones manages to evoke an epic sense of endless emptiness on a relatively small budget.

Now here comes his sophomore effort, Source Code, another sci-fi effort focusing on a man stuck in a difficult job. Jake Gyllenhaal is that man, a soldier who wakes up on a Chicago-bound commuter train in the body of another man. The woman sitting across from him (Michelle Monaghan) seems to know him, or rather know that man that he sees when he spies his reflection. Before he can figure out what kind of displacement has befallen him, an explosion rips through the train.

But Gyllenhaal does not die. Instead, he wakes up in some kind of dark clammy capsule, receiving instructions from a mysterious military officer (Vera Farmiga) who has a suspicious-looking scientist (Jeffrey Wright) looking over her shoulder. They tell him that he is wired into a program they call Source Code. It is explained that he has become part of a baffling experiment that enables a person to relive the last eight minutes of a person’s life (making use of the brain’s post-mortem afterglow and some parabolic calculus, along with quantum mechanics, naturally).

It might not make a lot of sense but it enables the film to engage in narrative loops that send us spiraling back into the same time span with plenty of variation. The bomber must be found and identified since, Gyllenhaal is told, the explosion was only the first of a wave of attacks that have been threatened. The Source Code, however, is not time-travel. It merely creates an alternate space within reality for the participant to relive the past. What happened happened; there’s nothing that can be done to stop the explosion, to avert disaster. This is a prevention program, not a cure. This causes problems for Gyllenhaal, especially as he starts to fall for the woman on the train.

This is a swift, engaging film that’s a nice twisty puzzle that has a solid level of craftsmanship behind it, cleanly photographed, featuring some nice special effects and a using a likable score. I enjoyed its surface pleasures – it’s filled with pleasingly displayed technological gadgetry and, at times, a cool demeanor of confusion – but it’s hard to care too much about the situation. The ticking-clock is ill defined and the characters aboard the train were already dead (nothing can change that, we are often told) so every failure to stop the explosion was just like watching a friend fail a level on a videogame.

What imbue the situation with dramatic weight are the chemistry between Gyllenhaal and Monaghan and the growing frustration he feels with the futility of his mission. There’s a sense of dismay to be found in the pattern of events that make up the action of this thriller. It’s brisk and energetic but also fundamentally sad. Jones, working from a script by Ben Ripley, may not have equaled his debut feature but he’s managed to make a film that works fairly well on its own terms.

On the Road Again: DUE DATE

After last year’s runaway success with The Hangover, it’s not a surprise to see that director Todd Phillips’s latest film, Due Date, is cut from the same cloth. It’s an aggressive comedy that careens from one comic moment to the next. It spends the entirety of its runtime throwing vulgarity, violence and non-sequiturs at the audience in a nonstop onslaught. It’s comedy of shocks and giggles.

Unlike The Hangover, though, Due Date feels creakier. It’s lumpily formed around the same basic buddy-movie road-trip format that has been around since at least the time Bob Hope and Bing Crosby were always on the road to somewhere. This particularly iteration uses a plot device put to good use in John Hughes’s Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, a film Todd Phillips and his co-writers Alan R. Cohen, Alan Freedland and Adam Sztykiel, must know pretty well. Two dissimilar men are forced to drive cross-country on a deadline. It’s a nice hook on which to hang a plot.

Robert Downey, Jr. plays an architect, a mostly accidental jerk who has to get from Atlanta to Los Angeles to be with his wife (Michelle Monaghan) for the birth of their first child. We know he needs to be taught humility because he talks rapid-fire into a cell phone. Zach Galifianakis is a socially awkward weirdo who happens to be going through some painful grief on his way to L.A. to become an actor. We know he’s a potentially annoying combination of pretentious and oblivious because he wears a scarf.

The two of them get caught up in a misunderstanding that leads to their placement on the No Fly List. Naturally, they decide to rent a car and make the cross-country drive together. This only exaggerates their respective quirks. Downey grows meaner. Galifianakis seems ever stranger. Their personalities are on a collision course, but if you can’t tell by now that they’ll grow to respect each other, you’ve never seen a road trip movie before.

You’d think locking two of our most compelling actors, both of them equally blessed with the gift of seemingly effortless comedic timing, into a car for the duration of a film would produce better results. These two men, plenty funny on their own, display some nice chemistry, but the movie lets them down. It’s clumpy and episodic with the two guys interacting with cameo after cameo, but even worse, the characters never come to life. They begin as flat, one-dimensional types and end the same way, moving about from scene to scene with little change to be found. Along the route the movie is sloppily disengaged without control of tone, expecting the audience to quickly shift from laughing at the characters to feeling overpowering sympathy, often within the blink of an eye.

Even though it disappoints scene to scene, the movie nonetheless gives off a sufficiently pleasant feeling as it unspools. After all, though given little to work with, Downey and Galifianakis are fun to watch. Even when the movie is giving them ridiculously unbelievable episodes to act out, the two of them can almost make it work. It’s the kind of movie that’s just diverting enough to more or less keep me from realizing how much I wasn’t enjoying it. The instant the end credits started, the illusion collapsed.