The Boogeywoman

Aussie-Malay director James Wan is best known for his highly successful horror franchises such as ‘Saw,’ ‘Insidious’ and ‘The Conjuring.’  Having recently helmed mainstream blockbuster tent-poles such as ‘Fast & Furious 7’ and ‘Aquaman,’ the low-budget horror genre he started out in is now a bit anti-climactic, so he’s only attached as a producer in the latest entry, ‘The Curse of La Llorona,’ loosely set in ‘The Conjuring’ universe which also includes three ‘Annabelle’ films and ‘The Nun.’

 

'The Curse of La Llorona,’ the directorial debut of Michael Chaves (who dat?), is based on the traditional Mexican folk tale/urban legend of the “Weeping Woman,” the evil spirit of a vengeful 17th Century wife and mother who drowned her own children in a fit of rage after stumbling upon her husband doing the nasty with another woman.  La Llorona is a tale told to scare children into being good, much like how the Boogeyman will get unruly children who don't behave themselves.  Set in an atmospheric ‘70s-era Los Angeles, the curse of La Llorona plagues and terrorizes a widowed single mother (Linda Cardellini) and her two children, who in desperation enlists the help of an unconventional exiled Catholic priest (Raymond Cruz) to make La Llorona go away and leave her kids alone.

 

Being the jaded horror movie-watcher that I am, the R-rated  TCOL2 (don’t know why, it could easily have been PG-13 in my book) wasn’t particularly scary or even suspenseful.  It’s a rather unspectacular, by-the-numbers horror entry with the typical dreary atmosphere (rains on most days), easily anticipated jump scares and various other tropes you’ve seen before.  It’s not a terrible movie objectively speaking and might have been scarier if I haven’t seen its kind so many times before, but it offered nothing groundbreaking or particularly new.

Grade: C+ 
 

The Good Devil

It’s box office “hell” (pun fully intended) for ‘Hellboy,’ the hell-damned Neil Marshall-helmed reboot of the not-quite-franchise spanning two movies directed by Guillermo del Toro and starring Ron Perlman back in 2004.  Demonstrating with emphasis that just because something’s been moderately successful over 10 years ago doesn’t mean it will be moderately successful again, the new modestly budgeted ‘Hellboy’ (with a relatively frugal $50 million production budget) bombed badly in theaters in its opening weekend, managing a mere $14.3 million at the North American box office and $10.4 million internationally for a $24.7 million global cume.

 

Without GDT’s and Ron Perlman’s involvement and Marvel’s or DC’s label, ‘Hellboy 2019’ had little chance of success from the outset and lived up to being a dark horse (which is only appropriate since it originated from Dark Horse Comics).  C-listers David Harbour, Milla Jovovich and Ian McShane gave their best in their respective roles as Hellboy, the Blood Queen Nimue and Trevor Bruttenholm but all of it wasn’t enough, nor was the screenplay by Andrew Cosby and Hellboy creator Mike Mignola himself, proving that there is simply no place for third-rate comic book characters in today’s oversaturated superhero movie market.  Haven’t they learned anything from ‘Dredd,’ the equally ill-conceived box office dud in 2012 starring Karl Urban as some supercop/law enforcer in a dystopian future?  Do some market research to make sure people want to see your movie in the first place before making it next time.

 

Having said all that, I rather enjoyed this latest unabashedly R-rated ‘Hellboy’ reboot.  It’s got tongue-in-cheek humor and loads of blood, gory good fun for the entire family (okay, maybe not so much for the kiddies).  I don’t care if its Rotten Tomatoes rating is a paltry 15 percent.  I liked it anyway just as I liked the equally maligned (quite literally with an identical 15 percent RT score) 2013 fantasy gore-fest  'Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters' starring Jeremy Renner and my beloved Gemma Arterton.  So the critics can all suck it and go to “hell” (again, pun fully intended).

Grade: B+

The real Captain Marvel

Whaddayaknow?  There are two ‘Captain Marvel’ movies in theatres right now.  Just three weeks after Bree Larson’s CM gave us the latest chapter of the MCU and lead-up to the most highly anticipated movie of all time, ‘Avengers: Endgame,’ DC’s “Big Red Cheese” (aka the “original” Captain Marvel) dropped in theatres to the tune of $53 million in the US and $162 million worldwide, easily toppling that other Captain Marvel movie.  Well, that movie already made like a gazillion dollars.  Yawn.

 

Starring Zachary Levi of ‘Chuck’ fame, ‘Shazam!’ is the first big screen appearance of this classic “golden age of comics” superhero who, though most remember him as a DC character, originated under Fawcett Comics waaaaaaaaaaaaay back in 1939, making him about as ancient, by which I mean venerable, as Superman and Batman.  Shazam! is also what alter ego 14-year old Billy Batson yells to transform into the superhero (and vice versa), as well as the acronym of six “immortals” who are mostly Greek deities: Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles and Mercury.  Okay, enough trivia for now.

 

‘Shazam!’ continues the DCEU’s cinematic resurgence which began with WW and last seen in ‘Aquaman,’  It is funny, entertaining and even heart-warming.  Taking a humorous approach is the right move here, because the last thing we want or need is another superhero movie that takes itself too seriously.  ‘Shazam!’ is the ‘Big’ (as in the charming 1988 movie starring Tom Hanks) of superhero movies in more ways than one (there’s even the piano keys reference), and that’s about as good a compliment as I can give to this enjoyable film.

Grade: A-
 

Raising the Dead

Prolific storyteller Stephen King is perhaps the greatest Master of Horror of our generation, having written 58 novels and sold over 350 million copies in his remarkable career.  His stories are among the most adapted onscreen (movies and television) because, well, they’re perfectly suited for them.  Some stories are so good that they’ve even been given the treatment twice, like ‘It’ (TV miniseries and Hollywood film), ‘Carrie’ (Sissy Spacek and Chloë Grace Moretz versions) and now ‘Pet Sematary’ (three if you count PS2).  The most recent PS film is the subject of this review.

 

PS is the tale of a family who moved from the big city to a small rustic town in Maine (King himself is a Maine native who lives in Bangor and small towns are common settings in his books).  Thanks to a kindly old neighbor (Fred Gwynne of ‘The Munsters’ in the 1989 original but played by veteran actor John Lithgow here) who helped them with a cat problem, they discovered a not-so-hallowed burial ground for pets (Pet Sematary) that’s basically a zombie breeding ground.  After a terrible tragedy the family finds to their horror that bringing back a kitty cat is one thing, but zombifying a beloved child because you can't let go is something else altogether.

 

PS 2019 is a marginally better movie than its predecessor (which spawned a sequel believe it or not), owing largely to the believable performances of its cast including Jason Clarke, John Lithgow and newcomers Jeté Laurence (the resurrected daughter) and Amy Seimetz (the missus).  The build-up in suspense is also superior, courtesy of 30 years of progress in filmmaking techniques between the two movies. But it still begs the question: “Does ‘Pet Sematary’ really need to be rebooted?”  I’m not so sure.

Grade: B
 

Terror at "The Taj"

Movies based on real-life disasters or tragedies, whether man-made or natural, make for riveting drama and have long provided Hollywood a great source to mine for compelling stories without coming up with any new ideas.   Indeed, actors like Mark Wahlberg have literally made a career out of it in such films as ‘Lone Survivor,’ ‘Patriots Day’ and ‘Deepwater Horizon.’  Despite a few notable hiccups recently (e.g., ‘7 Days in Entebbe,’ ‘The 15:17 to Paris’), these movies often can’t go wrong because, well, there are many people who are drawn to them like a rubber-necking motorist near the scene of a terrible car accident.
 

The latest based-on-real life tragedy movie is ‘Hotel Mumbai,’ the critically acclaimed film based on the book ‘Surviving Mumbai’ which was in turn based on the Mumbai massacre of 2008 during which 10 Islamic terrorists perpetrated one of the worst terrorist attacks in India’s history.  The movie tells this riveting tale mainly through the POV’s of a handful of victims, among whom include a young couple played by Armie Hammer and Iranian beauty Nazanin Boniadi, a hotel staff waiter (Dev Patel of ‘Lion’ fame) and a sleazy billionaire/former Spetsnaz Afghanistan vet (Jason Isaacs), but the movie also puts a face on the terrorists, not to humanize them (they are monsters after all) as much as to avoid the pitfalls of so many other movies in portraying them simply as faceless, cookie-cutter bad guys.
 

In ‘Hotel Mumbai,’ Aussie director Anthony Maras’ debut effort is a solidly crafted film that’s uncompromising and somewhat painful to watch but utterly riveting, putting you right smack in the middle of this terrorist “active shooter” incident in Mumbai’s most luxurious hotel as if you were there yourself.  While not a pleasant movie to watch by any stretch of the imagination, it is a sobering experience that I would still recommend.

Grade: B+
 

This is "Us"

Like many people, I’ve been eagerly and impatiently awaiting comedian-turned-Master of Horror Jordan Peele’s highly anticipated follow-up to his critically and commercially successful horror debut ‘Get Out’ (which won an Oscar in the Best Original Screenplay category) with a bit of trepidation: Will his second release be as good as the first, or will he fall victim to a sophomore slump?  By the time the film’s trailer hit theaters, however, I was reassured that he has another winner in his hands.
 

‘Us’ follows a “typical” middle-class African-American family on a lakeside vacation in California, but their R&R gets rudely interrupted by (warning, spoilers ahead) another family, a family of maniacal scissors-wielding doppelgängers who terrorized and forced them to fight for their very lives.  Weird, huh?  The hapless family’s survival largely depended on the mom (played by the talented Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o) and how far she will go to protect her loved ones from the murderous doppelgängers.  And then there are rabbits, oh so many of them.
 

Just as ‘Get Out’ was a brilliant and frightening parable of race relations in our times, ‘Us’ is a tense and suspenseful reflection of our socio-economic divide that also manages to scare the bejesus out of us. The bizarro world which Peele portrays in his movies are wonderfully weird, alternate mirrors of our own that would fit right in “The Twilight Zone.”  Peele’s tightly plotted screenplay and the performances of the movie’s cast also grab our attention from the get-go and never let up, which is rare nowadays in horror because we’ve seen most of the usual tropes in the genre.  Well, at least I have.

Grade: A