The Outwaters / * (2022)

Somewhere in the vacant expanse that is the Mojave desert, four friends with unfledged verbal skills will partake in a sad, confusing ambush in the dark that culminates with lots of screaming and blood splatters, all to be barely spied by a camera lens that is always shooting at unflattering angles while a small flashlight ray attempts to zero in on thoroughly uninteresting findings. That is the central engine behind “The Outwaters,” yet another found footage yarn that comes to us with an even loftier promise: all that is about to happen will defy the very basic notions of this subgenre’s primary formula. Defy it does, but to what end? To confuse and sadden the audience? To get them thinking beyond ordinary horror movie trappings? I would have only welcomed that change. Alas, director Robbie Banfitch, obviously new to the fold of this form of storytelling, finds nothing in the dark other than our collective anger at having been left adrift in a confusing and listless story that ends with few certainties and even fewer solutions. There is nothing to think about on screen, no image to anchor curiosity or theme to create a sense of investment. All that might have been eased by the existence of characters who knew how to discuss their plight, but the movie only gives us simpletons who don’t seem to remember basic emotional cues, much less create a running dialogue about what may be lurking in the shadows of the desert.

Mandy / * (2018)

In theory, a movie like “Mandy” would be right up the same alley of brazen gorefests that have been known to captivate my morbid sense of voyeurism. Ripped from the familiar cloth as any number of audacious horror stories set in the lurid world of pulp fiction, the picture makes a bold promise from its very first frame: all that is about to happen will be unlike anything we have witnessed on screen – or, at the bare minimum, fresh enough to draw comparisons to Dario Argento and Mario Bava, the architects of the decadent excess we associate with Giallo. Indeed, countless critics and colleagues have hailed the picture as a triumph of its medium, a surrealistic experience where the framework of the familiar revenge formula is twisted into a fever dream of contemplative symbolism and thematic excess. And who wouldn’t want that, especially nowadays as the genre appears caught somewhere between the extremes of vague nuance and gratuitous overkill?

Terrifier / * (2017)

Marginal movie villains are in copious supply in the films of today, but plausible, convincing ones have become an increasingly rare breed: they now seem to persist more in theory than in practice, where they can be liberated from old formulas and allowed to wreak their sense of chaos in the untamed wilds of a perverse imagination. Once in a great while, one will even find its way in front of a film camera that earns the right to manifest them; if a skilled director or writer has the capacity to evolve their sense of animosity beyond the shackles of the ordinary narrative, we get captivating antagonists like Pennywise, Anton Chigurh and Agent Smith at the center of the chaos. For a brief time during the early minutes of “Terrifier,” we can sense the spark of the latter. Imagine the scene: a mute clown in white and black makeup with bleeding gums and inhuman teeth appears out of the shadows of Halloween night, follows two 20-something women into a late-night pizza parlor and ominously taunts them. Not a word or sound escapes his mouth, although his mannerisms reflect an unhinged insanity brewing beneath the exterior. Later, long after the clown has been tossed out of the establishment for vandalizing the restroom, the girls return to their car and discover their tire has been slashed, setting a chain reaction of events into motion that will end with immeasurable death and blood splattered all over the pavement of a run-down warehouse in the city.

Willy's Wonderland / * (2021)

Consider the fascinating dichotomy of this idea. A series of mysterious fatal accidents have closed the doors of a small-town children’s restaurant featuring those clunky animatronic characters that you usually see in Chuck E. Cheese establishments, and years later the residents of said town still harbor enough resentment against the building that they take to vandalizing the property, sometimes even trying to set fire to it. Within those walls, they say, are the remains of a terrible legacy. Then one day, when a mysterious hot-rod enthusiast crashes his car on a road just outside the city, his lack of money leads to a dubious offer: if he will clean up the interiors of the abandoned facility while locked inside for one whole night, his car will be fixed and ready to drive off by morning. Of course, that means his agreement will lead to the discovery of negative energies permeating throughout the dark halls and musty dining rooms, once the setting of events that imply the creepy-looking animatronics are far more than just stuffing and wires. In some circles this is the same sort of irony that led to our festering fear of clowns, also once seen as an innocent facet of childhood entertainment. And perhaps there is a lot of fun to be had with that setup, especially for those who indulge in the irreverent possibilities of the material. But the new film “Willy’s Wonderland” is an even stranger offense: a vehicle that takes those risks and robs them of all possible tension and enthusiasm. For 89 minutes, we watch on helplessly as eager people show up in front of a camera and slog their way through material that could not be any more listless if it had been written by zombies.

The Miranda Murders: Lost Tapes of Leonard Lake and Charles Ng / * (2017)

A movie like this is almost unbearable without a coherent running dialogue. “The Miranda Murders” belongs primarily to that ever-so-volatile subgenre of found footage horror films, but must be prefaced with an even graver emphasis: all the footage functions as a reenactment of an actual killing spree that took place in California during the mid-80s. For those well-versed in serial killer psychology, the names will be familiar: Leonard Lake and Charles Ng were like blood brothers destined for infamy, linked by the nihilistic world view that innocent young women were meant to be abducted and then molded into submissive sex slaves for their own perverse pleasures, often in front of a camcorder. When they acted out or misbehaved, the punishment would be severe – sometimes violent, sometimes intimidating, always ending in their untimely demises. Now comes this strange concoction of a film that attempts to fill a great void: namely, what exactly transpired in those turbulent months between 1983 and 85 when they lured victims to their compound, filmed them in fearful protest and then disposed of their remains throughout the property? Though some of the actual footage of their exploits survives, the gaps were apparently intriguing enough to inspire Matthew Rosvally to interpret the unknown on old-fashioned analogue tape. The result is one of the most poorly realized ideas of recent memory.

Children of the Corn / * (1984)

A great evil lurks in the fields of Gatlin, known only to a select few who have been ensnared by its mental claws. All those who do not accept it – mostly adults – are destined to become its famous first victims, as shown in an early sequence where the young narrator watches as rows of adolescents slaughter them at a local diner. Few beyond the town’s borders know of what transpired there, but a token mechanic living on the outskirts provides all the perfunctory warnings to those passing through. “Well, folks in Gatlin’s got a religion,” he tells a couple searching for a phone. “They don’t like outsiders.” And so the stage is set for the two oblivious leads to get lost on the road, wander into the abandoned town square and begin a bloody face-off with kids who otherwise would be carried off to youth detention centers in any normal reality. Piece all these elements together and you have the default premise for countless teenage splatter films; add in a few extra touches like excess violence with farm weapons, bad child actors mugging for screen time and a preacher who sounds like he is choking out his ponderous sermons, and what you have is the greater offense of “Children of the Corn.”

Under the Silver Lake / * (2019)

Early on in “Under the Silver Lake,” Andrew Garfield offers the first of what turns out to be countless stares of confusion, as he gets caught up in a mystery that lacks all obvious conclusions. It turns out his gaze will reflect the inevitable response of the audience observing him. That is not to say they will share the same intrigue or dedication to the cause, mind you, but instead will discover themselves trapped in an agonizing web of deceit that tests the very patience of their commitment. For what, you may be curious? Consider this scenario. Garfield plays a Los Angeles 20-something, wandering from one sensory experience to the next, who befriends a beautiful blonde woman living nearby. Then she mysteriously disappears – along with all her belongings – the morning after they share some innocent flirtation. Possessed by a suspicion that she vanished as a result of foul play, his journey to find her takes him into a maze of controversies, conspiracies, false leads, lurid fantasy, violence, death, long-winded monologues, inconclusive solutions, absurd puzzles, hidden messages, and virtually every possible detective device every utilized in a movie. That it is all made with a remarkably sense of craftsmanship only adds to the offense; this is an endeavor so overwrought, so obsessed with tossing the proverbial rug of chance out the window, that it never deserves the aesthetic of the man orchestrating it.

The Happytime Murders / * (2018)

Aren’t we well beyond the point of an idea this absurd? Isn’t there someone, somewhere, high up in the studio system who looks at the mere concept of a movie like this and is willing to ask, “hey, is it really that appealing for moviegoers to show up just to see puppets shouting obscenities and making awkward sex jokes for 90 minutes?” “The Happytime Murders” has the dubious distinction of being the most miscalculated idea for a film in many a moon, a sham of a concept saddled somewhere between obvious and juvenile, with the right mix of desperation thrown in for good measure. That would be all but a minor inconvenience, had it not also been one of the most unfunny comedies of recent years – but by coming across as such, the idea warrants the outright resentment of any who dare experience it. Dwell for a moment on the fact that a director with a background in this genre, two established writers, over a dozen well-known producers and countless talented men and women stood behind the scenes and actually put conscious effort into the material – how were so many willing to be freely associated with a movie that was doomed to unravel their credibility in 90 minutes of laughless, mean-spirited hogwash? The more ambitious onlookers might, I suppose, find entertainment in imagining how disastrous the early story conferences were, or if anyone sitting at the table was conscious long enough to wonder whether they were too caught up in cynicism to sense their integrity slipping.

The Emoji Movie / * (2017)

Imagine, if you will, a world in which images on a cellphone screen secretly possess free will. They don’t so much exist as they consciously regard themselves as tools in a grand purpose, which involves competing for popularity against those who are either eccentric or unconventional. By the most basic principle of an outline, what goes on in their small world is the equivalent the modern high school social structure – all about cliques and illusions instead of any sense of individualism. That makes it rough for anyone attempting to break free of that monotony, but teenagers at least have an outlet: those constraints come to an end after four years. What of the poor helpless beings that populate “The Emoji Movie,” who are resigned to live an unending existence of tedium for the sake of keeping pace with the demands of their owner’s anxious trigger fingers? What happens if someone can’t conform to the expectation? A conflict ensues when one of them shows emotions he ought not to be programmed with, leading to a suggested malfunction that could potentially destroy them all in a massive hard drive reboot. But if that will erase everything, including them, then why has no one bothered to inform them that most cellphones tend to die out after a three-year stint anyway?

Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland / * (1989)

It appears, quite likely, that I have simply misinterpreted the bloody jaunts orchestrated by one Angela Baker. After two movies in which we see her do away with nearly all her peers, usually in moments where awkward posture emphasizes her meek stature next to victims that otherwise ought to be able to overpower the situation, a reader has wisely chimed in that she may have just been kidding the whole time. “These movies are supposed to be funny!”, he confesses. Ok, let’s go with that for the sake of moving through “Sleepaway Camp III,” which occurs one year after the events of the previous, when the community seems to still permeate the stigma of tragedy. Yes, it is entirely possible to view the fact that this year’s roster of participants camping on the same grounds as the previous murders is hilarious – after all, who would be stupid enough to really allow the possibility, especially knowing that the culprit was still at large? Or how about the fact that the camp counselors function less like authorities and more like clueless caricatures, unwise to Angela’s mayhem until they are staring back at her instruments of death? How about that whopper of a development of a supporting player named Barney, who is actually a cop, and the father of a son who was beheaded by Angela the year prior? Normally we would assume he is there to be a protector to those who might face repeating history, but those clever old writers have stumped us; he doesn’t realize she is back on campgrounds until staring at the loaded end of a gun. What a romp of a good time all of us could have had, if we knew from the start that this was done with a tongue firmly planted in the filmmaker’s cheek!

Rock of Ages / * (2012)

Sometimes the great tradition of rock musicals comes down not to whether songs are staged with gusto, but whether they have been conducted with hands that understand the rebellious culture underlining them. Many of the key anthems of the 80s reflect a stranger possibility: they were written in that very narrow window of hair band trends, where the angry political motivations were temporarily subdued by sex, booze, and the harmless pomp of radio accessibility. No one complained all that much because a great spirit continued to move through the guitar riffs, and the bands were a testament to the versatile power of the genre. Those who were active listeners in those years, when the likes of Def Leppard and Bon Jovi were at the height of their popularity, often recall them with fondness. But what would they think of the attitude now, so many years later, when films like “Rock of Ages” paint a much more simplistic portrait of the times? Would they be comfortable with the fact that a handful of well-known songs have essentially been grinded through a karaoke jukebox? Or that the attitudes behind them have been reduced to one-note farce? Or that people who were alive (and even active) in those years have allowed themselves to be associated with the vulgar thinning of the standard?

The Initiation / * (1984)

A group of fresh-faced 20-somethings assemble in the halls of a sorority house to pledge their loyalties during hell week. One of them, seen in the early scenes waking from a violent nightmare, is to be the primary target of a series of impending pranks; being beautiful and wealthy are traits easily exploited by the more vain and narcissistic, especially while she seems oblivious to them. Dialogue is formal but laced with underlying resentment, as if more than mere looks and prestige divide the cliques. But these are not motions to imply more secrets between them – only gestures used by novice actors who have yet to formulate a plausible manner in front of the camera. In a way they acquire that behavior both from inexperience and from the misguided endeavors of their director, who was on his first (and last) film assignment here in the months preceding “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” which was credited with adding a potent psychology to the tired dead teenager formula. His “The Initiation,” which survives in the periphery of an inexplicable cult status, is one of the last genre excursions preceding that transition, and certainly one of the dumbest: every single scene exists not to stimulate the excitement of the audience, but to suggest a sense of laughable frustration on part of individuals who have no clue as to what they are doing.

Fifty Shades Darker / * (2017)

“Fifty Shades Darker” descends thoughtlessly into a web of intrigue spun with blender-like accuracy, primarily to move its characters, yet again, from one orgasm to the next with minimal interruption. More perceptive romances, even the more vulgar ones, might at least see this as a ploy to harness some level of plausible dramatic tension, however thin. But for the people behind the latest in a growing fad of seductive literary cheese aimed at the lower end of the payoff pool, it plays like a clothesline for the writers to hang their one-note fetishes on, concealing them from the greater realities of chemistry and foreplay. Is this what the concept of movie eroticism has come to? Have we finally abandoned the almost cheerful adolescence of human behavior and turned it into a cold scheme to reach climax? Centering on four primary catalysts to frame the impending affairs of Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey, the minds behind this highly-anticipated follow-up prove, if nothing else, that a lack of understanding in conflict resolution means squat when all one shows up for is the lust. After watching it I imagined Catherine Deneuve sobbing quietly in a dark room for the future of adult fantasy.

Basic Instinct 2 / * (2006)

Sharon Stone so persistently owns what she does on screen in “Basic Instinct 2” that one is likely to find her conviction admirable, even if she is basically a PR agent selling a defective product with a straight face. Far lesser sorts might have inspired a sympathetic gesture, but this is a woman in no need of such pity – with every wince of her stern gaze and gurgle of a monologue she sneers confidently back at the camera, as if fully aware of the punchline before her writers have formulated the joke. In some regards that allows many of her more sub-par pictures to rise above their mediocrity, if for nothing more than for the assuredness of her presence. But that also means we must test ourselves with the limits of witless screenplays and be willing to ask: how far is too far when descending into such lopsided mind games? Here is a film in which all those involved, even the ones who may be ambivalent, are contracted to enslave us in the grip of patronizing hogwash.

The Devil Inside / * (2012)

What an ordeal it must be when you’re among the ill-fated bystanders of a handheld horror film. As targets of influences that disobey the most fundamental laws of survival, they slog their way through a plot’s devious conventions with little time to react against the stampede of conundrums they encounter, as if their suffering is merely at the service of confusion. That’s because their hands possess cameras that facilitate the need for wall-to-wall uncertainty, most of which is driven by the conceit of filmmakers intoxicated by the endlessness of a scenario rather than the choreography of them. In most normal films we can at least expect the potential victims – however deep or shallow – to experience some reprieve from the terror long enough to deliberate their fates, or at least react in a way that opens narrow possibilities of endurance. But those endeavors of the “found footage” genre have usually abandoned those possibilities in favor of visual nihilism, no doubt because their characters are predestined to die out rapidly in a universe where the only survivor needs to be the lens of a cameraman.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer / * (2006)

Life began as a cold and desolate void for Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. Born in a moment of passive biological routine on the floor of a fish market, his cries of uncertainty were a sound unknown to an emotionless mother, who previously birthed four other children that were all stillborn. Confusion in the moment lead passers-by to assume the worst of his strange arrival, and soon his poor mother was sentenced to hang after others mistakenly assumed she tried to kill him. Fate then reduced his purpose to mere existence – first at an orphanage where young boys attempted to smother him, and later at a Tannery where 16-hour work days were interlaced with physical abuse – and all indications suggested he would die out well before his time, another lowly statistic in the unforgiving shadow of French poverty. But destiny seemed to intervene just as fortune evaded him, offering talents so precious they could have, quite substantially, given him the power and prestige to command a generation of thinkers eager for sensation. It was just that pesky notion of murdering women that would louse up all those lofty agendas as the years rolled on.

The Great Wall / * (2017)

“The Great Wall” adopts a philosophy that all famous wonders must be rooted in the legend of absurdist yarns, and that their endurance apparently comes at the expense of sacrifices too great for the respect of modern civilization. Of course, no one involved contemplates the scientific practicality of that suggestion, but no wonder – movies of this vain are far more devoted to their underlying cynicism than they are focused on creating believable worlds, even in the context of their rather elastic suggestions. But for the sake of getting through a basic plot description, let us suspend, for a brief minute, the disbelief that comes when we contemplate this ridiculous premise. Thousands of years ago, China’s great wall was constructed as a barrier to keep enemies away from the empire they hoped to dismantle, but the greatest of those threats was not human at all: it was a horde of ravenous beasts resembling alligators on stilts, who moved with ferocious speed, attacked with evolving precision and seemed to feed from the psychic energy of a queen who, I guess, desired to conquer all mankind in some karma-ridden crusade. The human characters regard this war with military precision and unsmiling focus (as they should), but it never dawns on anyone involved that maybe, just maybe, a future that must be saved from the dangers of an alien reptile onslaught may not be a future worth facing in the first place.

Basic Instinct / * (1992)

The most notable curse of time at the movies is the dulling of the proverbial edge of shock, the realization that a once-sensational gimmick can be annulled by the ongoing sensory expansion of more modern exercises. Erotic thrillers, perhaps the most notorious of testing grounds for these standards, have worn the most erosion. Once embraced with a certain apprehensive enthusiasm, they came and went in the latter half of the 20th century during a boom for suggestive imagery, when the marriage of sex and violence was seen as the most challenging of weapons for a director to wield. Nowadays it seems almost blasé to consider their work in a context of more ambitious shock value, especially given the rapid advance of both implications. It is rare to find any R-rated film now, for instance, that doesn’t celebrate the extremes of gore or the thrusting of excited human anatomy; they are as much a staple of pop culture trends as a mere cuss word or insulting gesture. Would a movie like “Fatal Attraction” work at all now against what has become the norm of genres intoxicated by the excess of human exposure?

Exorcist II: The Heretic / * (1977)

In reflecting on the experience of moviegoers present for original screenings of “The Exorcist,” one usually forgets the root cause of their trauma: specifically, the fact that so much fear and violence was being orchestrated in the body of an innocent little girl in a tangible reality. Horror films up to the point of the early 70s typically played as open season for the lurid fantasies of filmmakers obsessed with the supernatural and the monstrous, but William Friedkin’s legendary opus represented the unhinged collision of those sentiments, a world in which the demonic energies could manifest in a place as plausible as any number of human stories of the era. As disturbingly convincing as the material played, however, perhaps that represented too great a challenge for the more perceptive directors of the time; against the trend that it would inevitably inspire, a great many years of crude (and usually unsuccessful) experiments followed in its massive shadow, often to the point of box office saturation. Among those failed lessons was one obligatory experiment: a direct sequel, helmed by the great John Boorman, which would document the ongoing struggles of young Regan as she attempted to make it through adolescence while keeping the memories of her possession in some sort of context.

Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II / * (1987)

Mary Lou isn’t some innocent teenage girl caught in the throngs of high school lust and deception: she’s a vixen preordained to be one of those homicidal sorts frequently seen in mainstream horror movies. Or at least that is what the early trajectory suggests in “Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II,” until a disgruntled boyfriend tosses a lit stink bomb down the rafters and sets her on fire, forever cursing her to an afterlife without a prom queen’s crown. But as is the virtue of any living force destined to undo the happiness of others, goals so devious are only delayed instead of thwarted. And though it takes nearly 30 years of death to recharge her vengeful spirit, inevitably she will return to the sight of her demise and exact justice on others, whether they were participants in the tragedy or not. Audiences come to expect that sort of excursion ad nauseam in these sorts of pictures, but for a sequel that follows the footsteps of a rather ordinary teenage formula, what would have been the harm in changing it up a little? The scene of her death is so frustratingly passive that it creates rather persistent paradoxes: no one standing at the site of her demise seems eager to show the slightest interest in rescue, much less mere shock. Perhaps it would give too much credit to a teenage mind, but if I was killed in a fire and all of my classmates just stood by and watched me become a cinder, you can bet that every last one of them would be high priority on a revisit list the moment my ghost form returned to reality.