Get Out and other, mostly horror, reviews

Best thing: Horror films love to make innocuous things terrifying. Anyone who makes scraping sounds in their teacup when stirring their tea can get the hell away from me. So creepy!

Worst thing: Perhaps it's because I'm so used to horror films ending on a downer. But the ending felt a little too soon. Are they leaving it open for a sequel?

There's a film I love called "Judgment Night". The premise is that a group of yuppies become stranded in the run-down dodgy area of town and find they cannot get out. The opening scene of "Get Out" is the exact opposite of this. The protagonist in that scene feels very uncomfortable walking in a fancy suburban area of town.

Get Out is reminiscent of other horror films too. The obvious comparison is The Stepford Wives which I admittedly haven't seen (unless you count the remake, of which the less said the better). The  black characters acting unnaturally happy as servants in an all-white community are an obvious parallel to the "perfect" submissive wives in that story.

Another comparison I want to make is to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Get Out isn't going for the same sort of oppressive tone as Tobe Hooper's movie (though admittedly Tobe Hooper always thought his film was hilarious). However, what Hooper's film did was to take something seemingly safe and wholesome and make it horrifying. Hooper's film puts a twist on "southern hospitality" and Peele's film puts a twist on embarrassing white liberals.

This isn't a film about racists per se. It's about liberal white people who are supportive of black people and mean well, but have some embarrassing residual racist sentiments. And Peele takes their faux pas comments and takes them to a genuinely horrifying place.

Part way through I thought I knew exactly where this was going and I couldn't have been more wrong. The fear comes from not knowing the nature of the threat but simply knowing that something is wrong. When I thought I understood the threat I briefly became a bit frustrated, but the film quickly got me back on board and I was soon horrified again.

There's a comic relief character here, played by Lil Rel Howery, who is mostly separate from the main action. He isn't as realistic as the other characters and displays some comedy tropes which somewhat at odds with the horror atmosphere of the rest of the film. When he's talking out loud to himself it's clearly playing up to an audience and the only audience is the one watching the film.

I'm very pleased to see Caleb Landry Jones back in top creepy form like we saw from him in thd underrated sci-fi body-horror "Antiviral". Allisom Williams from Girls is also very cool as the girlfriend. I think I'd only seen Daniel Kaluuya (our protagonist) before in Sicario, but he has to give a lot of subtle reaction shots here and he always helps us to clearly understand his character without any need to explicitly tell us his thoughts.

Get Out is clever, different, emotionally powerful, funny (and there are plenty of subtle jokes where I didn't even know they were setting up for a joke until later), dramatic, horrifying and generally everything you would want from an instant horror classic. If you love horror, you will love Get Out. And as a horror comedy fan I think all that is missing is lashings of gore, Evil Dead 2 style, but otherwise this is frikkin' perfect.

A+

Best thing: At a key moment a pile of naked bodies rise from under the church floor. It's spectacular imagery. I loved it. The Bahomet costume also looked very cool.

Worst thing: Some schoolchildren seem remarkably well-informed about this weird church. They even know that there is a device that will bring the whole building down. They also talk about some weird idea that if you go to sleep you will see your best friend who will have your face. Or something. This doesn't tie into the rest of the film and made no sense to me.

The Church is an Italian horror with the dream-like style with explicit gore you'd expect, but wow, some of the visuals are incredible.

Sure there are cheesy moments and admittedly the pacing in the middle isn't great. However, the opening third really impressed me and the visuals in the third act are often unbelievable. Okay so we could do with better characters and Hugh Quarshie should have been given more to do from the start, but the tension is always very skillfully driven up throughout the runtime and I had a lot of fun.

B+

Best thing: I really enjoyed the scene where she is making a fuss in the coffee shop because it isn't an abortion clinic any more and the coffee is bad.

Worst thing: I felt that the central grandma character should have had sense enough to realise that old books probably weren't going to get her as much money as she was hoping. Sure, she's deluding herself but when an old friend says they aren't giving that much for them she should realise she's on to a lost cause rather than going off her rocker.

Grandma is essentially an indie comedy and I'm sure I'm not the only one hearing warning bells at that prospect. But I really enjoyed the ideas explored here.

This is a grumpy traditional feminist responding to her granddaughter's distinct lack of female liberation. She's a free spirit, a bit of badass, and takes no sh*t from anyone. But she also has been left a bit of a cynic.

The eponymous Grandma sees her granddaughter as suffering from a lack of self-respect. But a central focus of the story is a pro-choice message and the grandma is determined that she not turn away her granddaughter when she is trying to have an abortion. The freedom to choose is a vital principle for her

It's a little sad that simply having a woman view a right to one's own body as a basic right without feeling any need to debate or question feels like a daring position for the character to hold. But this was a really uplifting film overall.

The film is also very funny with a satisfying simplicity. I very much enjoyed Grandma and the ending tied things up better than I thought it would.
                                 
B+

Best thing: Mark Duplass' performance is great in spite of the dearth of decent material. He's a real showman and is able to capture our attention well.

Worst thing: Someone clearly insisted that they needed to have jump scares in order to call this a horror film, so Duplass keeps on jumping out at the camera guy to scare him. It gets incredibly tiresome. And the decision to have a whole section of the film where we can't see anything was pretty bad too.

I'd heard mixed views on Creep, but positive reviews highlighted Mark Duplass's performance. Having now seen him in "The One I Love" I was intrigued.

I now know why the positive reviews mentioned Duplass. He's the only good thing about this film. Essentially Duplass has to show enough enthusiasm and be enough of a showman to keep us from noticing that there is absolutely no story and no payoff.

To be fair, Duplass actually is so good that this works for a while. But by the third act the jig was up. It became clear that we weren't really building up to a big climax and that the film was mostly just biding its time to reach movie length.

I also think this was intended to be a comedy. Certainly Duplass is a funny guy, but the script  (if they even wrote a script) doesn't give us gags with a build up and payoff. Duplass just occasionally says funny things as part of having a quirky character. By the very end the film had gone full-on goofy and it just didn't feel consistent with a found footage  (and therefore semi-real appearing) film about one quirky creepy figure.

A waste of talent and, if they just had some more inspired ideas on how to end this, it could have been far more satisfying and possibly even pretty good.

D-

Best thing: I actually cared about the characters and despite less than stellar acting and cheap-as-hell sets, I was pretty invested in the story as they explored the abandoned bunker/facility.

Worst thing: If you want to tease us that the monster is still alive at the end, it'd be nice if you didn't blatantly re-use the exact same shot as we saw earlier.

Well towards the end, we get something that looks like Chucky in Space. Mind you, that's not as good as it sounds.

This has a ridiculously low budget, but it's still quite fun. It almost even feels like there might be an interesting explanation for the monster. In the end this feels to me like a rip-off of Leviathan, which itself is often viewed as a rip-off of Alien.

Any fights with the alien are incredibly unconvincing. We have a monster with enormous claws, yet the fights just involve pushing and shoving. By the end of the movie I actually became bored by the protagonist consistently shoving the monster away over and over again.

For a trashy daft movie, this wasn't half bad. Not terribly good either, but not half bad. I wouldn't quite recommend it, but if you want something silly with some low budget charm you could do a lot worse.

C+