Devil: 1. God: 0. Again.

A charlatan spirit medium discovers her daughter can actually contact spirits through a Ouija board. And all, uh, hell breaks loose.

OUIJA: ORIGIN OF EVIL is a prequel to 2014’s OUIJA; set in the late ‘60s, we meet the young family that would become the ghosts of the 2014 film, and we experience their harrowing haunting that caused the ghost daughter Doris in the 2014 film to have her mouth sewn shut. It’s the usual fare of jumpscares, indistinct whispering, ominous visuals and unnecessary uplighting under faces; it’s even got the blankets-being-pulled-off-your-sleeping-body gag! This movie has everything for the discerning nine-year-old!

Regardless of its trope-laden content, ORIGIN is better written and scarier than its predecessor, with a filmic look like it was shot in the 1960s (Kodachrome-type sheen, period cars and attire, and even cue marks on the filmstock – those oval-shaped blips in the top right-hand corner, to let the projectionist know when to change reels! Like I said, this movie has everything!)

Alice Zander (Elizabeth Reaser), a widowed mother, makes ends meet for her two daughters (teen Lina (Annalise Basso) who just wants to party with her friends, and young Doris (Lulu Wilson) who misses her dead daddy) by enlisting them to aid her fake seances. Her clients’ gratitude in “contacting” their loved ones make Alice feel she is not scamming them, but giving them closure.

Alice introduces a Ouija board into her tool set, setting it up with magnets to enable her to manipulate the planchette with her knees. She soon discovers Doris communicating effortlessly with the actual spirit world, joyfully watching the planchette fly across the board by itself, spelling out messages. Alice revels in using Doris’s newfound power with clients (“We can actually do what we’ve been pretending to do!”) – they all think it’s dad helping from beyond… until Elliott from E.T. tells them it’s NOT dad…

Henry Thomas (forever Elliott to me!) is the local priest, who tricks the demon possessing Doris into revealing itself. Not long before HE is possessed as well, because God is powerless against ACTUAL evil. Just ask any exorcist. Parker Mack is Lina’s new boyfriend, if he can avoid getting killed by Doris first. At one point, Doris describes to him what it’s like to be strangled. (In this film, it’s quite creepy, although someone must have learned that from someone actually going through the steps of strangulation! That’s even creepier.)

The team that brought you those atmospheric thrillers GERALD’S GAME, OCULUS and BEFORE I WAKE (writer-director Mike Flanagan and longtime writing partner Jeff Howard) have crafted ORIGIN along the same lines, although in trying to make it connect to the inferior source material, it does track into illogical:

For example, the demon inside Doris possesses her to have “a voice” (we presume that’s also why the demon likes to gape her mouth wider than humanly possible, reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, a visage made popular by Wes Craven’s homage film SCREAM). And that’s why Lina ends up stitching Doris’ mouth shut (in a scene reminiscent of a Hitchcock sequence, where we focus on the upraised hand with the needle in it over and over again), but why not try to exorcise the demon first, rather than stitching the poor girl’s mouth shut?!

And across the two movies, if you pay attention – character inconsistencies: y’see, everyone is redeemed in this movie’s climax (with mother Alice dying and seeing dad-ghost and Doris-ghost waiting for her in white clothes — oh, so this movie is a CATHOLIC grooming! Also, good thing CLOTHES have souls too, otherwise they’d be naked), yet in OUIJA, Doris is evil when they dig up her body. Lina is shown sewing up poor Doris’s mouth, yet when she calls on Doris in the final scene, Doris is prancing around upside-down on the ceiling like the demon has possessed her again… Explain yourself, Mr. Writer-Director.

The funniest thing about any possession movie is that in a storyline where the devil exists, God exists as well, as the counterpoint to evil, yet no man of God can ever stand up to the almighty evil of the low-rent demons possessing the antagonists. I mean, it’s never even major demons like Lucifer or Beelzebub; most of the time they are just nameless spirits, and the vessels that the Big Man Himself has called to represent him on Earth (i.e., priests) are always weak-principled impotent pawns that the evil spirit invariably has their way with. Now is that a commentary on God or the child-raping priests that represent him?

Ooooh, and that’s where we get the subtitle of the film: Priests – the Origin of Evil.

END

When dreams come true – run!

A couple discovers their adopted 7-year-old boy has dreams that become real. Which means his nightmares do too…

BEFORE I WAKE is a solid supernatural thriller, involving young couple Jessie (Kate Bosworth) and Mark (Thomas Jane) adopting enigmatic orphan Cody (Jacob Tremblay), after their own 7-year-old son Sean (Antonio Romero) has died in a bathtub drowning accident.

Cody brings his good manners, love of butterflies, and a tragic past of his own. He takes uppers to avoid sleeping as much as he can – we don’t know why – but Jessie and Mark assure him he can sleep peacefully under their roof. Upon Cody’s first night sleeping in their home, Jessie and Mark are enchanted by a flock of butterflies in their lounge room.

On Cody’s second night – they see Sean standing before them, alive!

Jessie, still fighting off the PTSD of seeing Sean drown, tragically welcomes this vision, but as she tentatively wraps her arms around Sean – he disappears! Cody appears at the foot of the stairs sheepishly, saying, “I’m sorry.”

It’s not long before Jessie and Mark deduce that Cody’s dreams are creating real life simulacrums. Anything he dwells on before sleeping becomes a three-dimensional physicality. While Mark frowns on this psycho-deception, Jessie embraces it as a way to see her dead son alive again, over and over, sending Cody to bed as quickly as possible, until one night she rufies him with a sleeping pill to ensure he sleeps long enough to enjoy Sean’s presence. That’s when Cody’s nightmare, the deformed “Canker Man,” slips into focus, hissing, “I will always be with you!” and raising the hairs on my little cucumber forearms.

When Cody inquires of his surrogate parents, “How did he die?” we realize that Cody’s dreams will soon conjure a lifelike vision of Sean drowning.

Co-written by Mike Flanagan and Jeff Howard (OCULUS), directed well by Flanagan, BEFORE I WAKE takes surprising turns, with a few genuine scares, before leaving us with a brave, unconventional resolution.

Thomas Jane looks ruggedly sexy in his Vitruvian Man hairdo, Kate Bosworth looks expressionless as always (a face on its way to perfection, but abandoned by the sculptor), and Jacob Tremblay (whose name reminds us of that stage name Zack Galifianakis dubbed himself in DUE DATE) is this generation’s “I see dead people.” Annabeth Gish brings her square man-jaw to the role of Cody’s social worker, and Dash Mihok is a bitter, traumatized, ex-foster parent of Cody’s who lost his wife to Cody’s “Canker Man” manifestation.

And I thought my Nortriptyline gave me bad dreams.

END

Freedom is just a handcuff away.

Vacation. Tote bag. Two pairs of chrome steel handcuffs.

Long-married couple Gerald (Bruce Greenwood) and Jessie Burlingame (Carla Gugino) are trying to revive their marriage with a new game. After Jessie is handcuffed to the bedposts, she loses her taste for the game and says No. Uncuff me. Gerald coyly says no. Then he gruffly says no. Then he taunts her to beg, as he mounts her violently. Then he has a heart attack…

From Stephen King’s gripping novel, GERALD’S GAME is a damnably intriguing thriller, director/co-writer Mike Flanagan’s grand What If.

What If you were in a vacation home, miles from where anyone could hear you scream, and inescapably handcuffed to a poster bed, with your dead husband five feet away on the floor, being eaten by a stray dog? Would you die of thirst first? Or insanity?

Flanagan and co-writer Jeff Howard have judiciously re-written small elements of King’s story. Usually a guarantee of movie failure when that happens, this time it modernizes and tightens the storytelling. Whereas novel-version Gerald is a tubby hubby with a nubby, the filmmakers have cast 60-year-old Greenwood, who is ripped like Crucifixion Jesus; whereas in the novel, Gerald’s game was a regular event, here it is the couple’s first experiment; whereas novel Jessie had to deal with phone wires being cut, here she must deal with a dead cellphone.

And the most innovative, constructive change from the novel: Jessie’s various inner voices are represented by only two people – Gerald and herself: At one point, Gerald rises from the floor and chastises Jessie on the ridiculous situation she is in. Despite her relief at Gerald being alive, we know it is not Gerald, but one of Jessie’s inner voices. Then she herself chimes in – another Jessie, clean and unmussed, logically reasoning how to survive. Soon both Live Gerald and Clean Jessie roam freely around the room, arguing all sides of the conundrum!

The stray dog entering the house and pulling bits of meat off Gerald’s arm and face is just gravy. But it all serves to trigger Jessie into understanding how to escape. In her delirium, Jessie has two visions: one is a tall man with a misshapen face, standing in the corner shadows with a bag of jewelry and small bones; the other is a flashback to her youth where she spent a glorious afternoon watching an eclipse with her father as he held her in his lap. And masturbated.

A brilliant performance by Young Jessie (15-year-old Chiara Aurelia), whose dad is Elliott from E.T. (Henry Thomas)! Jessie’s unsavory flashbacks hold more clues on escape. Blood. Menstrual blood. Jessie likens her father to the scavenger eating her husband; she started her period a month before the incident, “Maybe he smelled the blood and did what all dogs do.” She remembers her father visiting her in the bedroom after the eclipse (which we realize is such a heavy-handed metaphor, Stephen King might as well have written that Jessie was watching the darkening of her soul, the death of her childhood, the consumption of her innocence…) and psychologically manipulating his masturbation incident into her burden as being a secret to keep from mom.

Artist Unknown. A more authentic depiction of what might have been.

One element consistent with the novel and movie is how virulent the attack on the male gender. If you’re a sensitive sir, steer clear of this movie that makes men look like the pigs they are. A prime example of this is the fact they couldn’t even film this movie as written, because Jessie was originally topless. Would any of the men in the viewing gallery focus on anything else were Carla Gugino’s magnificent rotating harmonic balancers on display while bound and struggling and bouncing? I rest my case, Yeronner. (Yet stop calling us pigs. “Puppets to evolutionary genetics” is more correct. The poor pigs are taking a bad rap; they’re as prone to spreading their genetic seeds as all animals are.)

Surprisingly, they repeat the joke told in the novel, verbatim:

Q: What is a woman?
A: A life support system for a cunt.

(Pigs!)

Life support. Support life. Jessie exorcises the demons of her past, i.e. frees herself from her childhood burden, as she frees herself from her physical prison (even if you’ve read Gerald’s Game, nothing will prepare you for the cinematic rendition of Jessie with hand “degloved” – a word that sounds every bit as painful as what it might mean), even as she frees herself from the social stricture of marriage, with Gerald’s death. (In the novel, Jessie is actively involved in precipitating his heart attack, by kicking Gerald in the chest and balls. In the movie, a combination of stress and Viagra topples Gerald. So Flanagan actually missed the opportunity to make Jessie responsible for all three freedoms here).

With Netflix as a new force and platform for movies, director Flanagan found he could approach GERALD’S GAME more authentically, than if it was sacrificed to the Big Studio system. Like another lean adaptation of a compelling King story, “1922,” (released in October 2017, directed by Zak Hilditch, starring Thomas Jane), GERALD’S GAME is an excellent low-budget, big-reward adaptation, bucking Big Studio convention to bring us a solid, visceral tale that leaves us psychologically spent. Still, she should’ve been topless–

Pig!

END

Not your average horror flick: NOT walking around in the dark.

Illusion Occlusion.

It’s all done with mirrors!

A haunted mirror. A spinner redhead. A ship’s anchor. Things in a chilling, original, truly eerie horror movie. Is it real, or is it OCULUS? There is no escape from what you think you see. Kinda like TMZ.

Feisty Kaylie Russell (Karen Gillan) tries to destroy an antique mirror from her childhood, claiming it was the cause of her parents’ insanity and their violent deaths. She enlists the aid of younger brother Tim (Brenton Thwaites), recently released from a psyche ward for being hunky.

Poffulus

Kaylie has traced 45 mirror-related deaths back two centuries, up to her parents’ deaths, and this is where the film slips up slightly: she’s too clinical. As she documents her exhaustive research on video – which is commendable for its scientific method – we ask whether she had to do it all at once in this grandiloquent exposition-fest. Her manner is officious, she is overly talkative… But that hair! She knows. The filmmakers know. And YOU know as well. Those firestorm follicles – we’ll forgive damn near anything for a frolic in those lubricious locks. You wanna talk shop? Talk away, flamey!

Directed and co-written by Mike Flanagan, OCULUS comes at us with a plausible, scientific tone (which is why it obviously failed at the box office – people are idiots). Kaylie doesn’t arbitrarily accuse “the mirror” of killing people, but of some kind of influence the custom glass might have had on its owners, stating that the word “supernatural” has no place in a scientific study like this, but speculating that there might be inexplicable forces at work that she might not have any other name for. And look at my hair.

Hunky bro is the skeptic, having been brainwashed by The Man in an institution, all imagination leached out of him, so trying to conform to platitudinous “I am okay, everything’s okay” standards. Though he was also terrorized by the mirror as a child, ten years in an institution has occluded his fearful memories. They say he’s cured – but they’ve repressed him more than ever. (Kaylie: “You were normal when you went in – now you’re a nutjob!”)

Kaylie sets up an isolation room with cameras, computers, alarms, food, regular phone calls to her fiancé, and an anchor jerry-rigged to fall and smash the mirror if she doesn’t reset it at regular intervals. Now – I know what you’re thinking: If this mirror is as malevolent as she thinks it is, why not smash it RIGHT NOW? The answer is simple: no matter how many precautions Kaylie thinks she has taken against the mirror, it is already inside her mind; has been since she was a child…

I’m too sexy for my reflection…

Movie freely jumps back and forth in non-chrono order, showing Kaylie and Tim as kids (played with excellent terror by Annalise Basso and Garrett Ryan), where we see the fatal effects of Kaylie’s father bringing the mirror into their new home. (Rory Cochrane plays dad, whose casualness reminds us of Ron Livingstone from OFFICE SPACE.) Mom goes nuts by looking into the glass (Katee Sackhoff) and dad (who has also gone nuts with the mirror in his office) shoots her – and Tim shoots dad. And then goes nuts via natural means – by being sent to an institution.

It might seem like a gore-fest but it is not. It’s a classic horror tale that eschews serial killers (unless you count the mirror), avoids gore (unless you count the anchor through the skull), and is devoid of jump scares! That’s right, a modern psychological thriller with no bleating orchestra stabs whenever things appear unexpectedly from offscreen.