Friday, February 7, 2025

Weekend Screen Scene: Heart Eyes, Love Hurts

Valentine's Day lends itself well to a horror movie plot, especially when you consider the violent origins of the holiday itself. The most well known V-Day horror is probably My Bloody Valentine, though my personal fave is a batshit crazy 1982 movie known as both Hospital Massacre and X-Ray

This year's entry into the Valentine's horror genre is Heart Eyes, which attempts to blend horror with romantic comedy but only partially succeeds at either. Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding star as Ally and Jay, two young professionals who meet cute but end up together on a platonic work date on Valentine's Day while Heart Eyes, a serial killer who targets couples is on the loose. When the killer sets his sights on Ally and Jay, they try to convince him they aren't actually a couple, to no avail.

Too much of the movie feels like a first draft, with jokes that fall flat more often than they hit, a weirdly paced plot with scenes that go one forever, all leading to an ending that's both obvious and dumb. Heart Eyes wants to be Scream so bad, but it isn't nearly as clever; it's a waste of a genuinely good concept for a slasher killer's mask, even if those heart eyes don't make a lot of sense when you think about it.

Before his return to acting and a Best Supporting Actor Oscar win for Everything Everywhere All At Once, Ke Huy Quan had been working behind the scenes choreographing fight sequences for a number of action films. Now he's the one doing the fighting in Love Hurts, this week's second Valentine's Day-themed film. And while not a horror movie, it definitely has as much, if not more, blood and violence as most of the V-Day horror movies out there.

Quan stars as Marvin, a seemingly mild-mannered real estate agent who finds himself called back into the crime world he left behind when Rose (Ariana DeBose), the woman he loves but was also supposed to kill years ago, returns to town.

Aside from that, the film really doesn't have much of a plot, and is instead scene after scene of fighting and shootouts, shootouts and fighting. As good as some of these sequences are - director Jonathan Eusebio does his best to place the camera in some unexpected places - it gets very repetitive very quickly, to the point of exhaustion. I fought the good fight and kept my eyes open, but I promise it wasn't an easy battle to win.

Friday, January 24, 2025

Weekend Screen Scene: Presence

Last year's In a Violent Nature was a unique approach to the slasher movie, an essentially POV movie that literally follows a killer around as he commits numerous murders one night in the woods. Steven Soderbergh's new ghost story, Presence, takes this POV approach one step further, as the whole film is "seen" through the eyes of a silent ghost in a haunted house.

POV movies seem to be having a moment. Last year also brought the (recently Oscar nominated) Nickel Boys, which is told entirely through the eyes of its two protagonists. This meant that often, other characters will be looking and speaking directing into the camera, as they interact with the two leads. But because the "presence" in Presence is an unseen entity, the film's characters, for the most part, do not know its there, and do not interact with it. In that respect, it balances a fine line, because when you think about it, the camera in most movies kind of behaves like an unseen ghostly entity floating around, capturing moments in time. 

The film's plot is pretty simple. Rebecca (Lucy Liu) and Chris (Chris Sullivan) and their teenage children Chloe (Callina Liang) and Tyler (Eddy Maday) all move into a house with a ghostly presence that takes a little while to make itself known to them. When it does, it focuses on Chloe, who is dealing with depression after the mysterious death of her best friend. Meanwhile, Rebecca and Chris are having some issues that may or may not involve something illegal on Rebecca's part, and Tyler is focused on swim meets, getting into college, and befriending the most popular boy in school.

The "ghost" pops in at random times in the family's daily lives, which means we, the audience, only get snippets of these characters interactions and conversations. As a result, some things remain pretty vague, while other things become painfully clear.

Soderbergh, as he often is, was also the cinematographer, and the handheld camerawork is smooth and suitably ghostly, like we're following the afterlife of a dead Steadicam operator. I would imagine having the director as, essentially, another cast member, albeit one holding a camera in your face, could be disconcerting to the actors, but all of the performances (save for one, near the end), feel completely real and natural.

Presence is not going to be everyone's cup of tea, and I could see it disappointing some horror fans, as it's not exactly a scare fest. It's a strange amalgam of traditional storytelling techniques, and experimental production. But at the hands of Steven Soderbergh, and at a brisk 90 minutes, it's an experimental movie that doesn't feel tedious.

Friday, January 17, 2025

Weekend Screen Scene: Wolf Man

Wolf Man, a reboot of the classic Universal character, was announced back in 2014, and was originally set to star Ryan Gosling. But when Universal's plans for a Dark Universe - a cinematic universe conceptually similar to Marvel and DC's cinematic universes - ended up dead on arrival with the 2017 reboot of The Mummy, plans to tie all these monster movies together were scrapped. Instead, Universal has released some stand-alone reboots of classic monster movies, including the aforementioned Mummy, Renfield, and The Invisible Man.

Which brings us back to Wolf Man, which also comes from The Invisible Man director Leigh Whannell. I enjoyed The Invisible Man, which I thought was a clever modern twist on "invisible" monsters, both literal and figurative. And I can see that Whannell is trying to do something similar with Wolf Man, turning it into a story about the horror of generational trauma, and also, you know, a werewolf. Unfortunately, it doesn't really work.

Christopher Abbott and Julie Garner star as Blake and Charlotte Lovell, San Francisco-based writers (we know they live in San Francisco because of the establishing shot of the skyline, and also because the one street scene - not actually shot in SF - includes a suspicious amount of homeless people on the sidewalk), who are parents to young daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth). When Blake gets news that his father, after disappearing years before, has been officially pronounced dead, he decides a visit to the remote cabin that filled his childhood with fear would be a great place to take his family.

Wolf Man wastes no time throwing the family into chaos; there's no settling into the cabin and getting comfy for this clan, and that's one of the film's biggest problems. Given no meaningful time to know these characters and care about them, when they're faced with danger and difficult decisions, we really have no investment in the outcome. And for a movie that's not even two hours long, stretches of it are incredibly boring.

There are some interesting aspects. We're given a glimpse into the world as the werewolf experiences it - in monochromatic color, eerily attuned to sounds in far off rooms, and suddenly unable to understand what people around him are saying, like a dog just hearing garbled sounds from its owner's mouth. And the transformation - every werewolf movie has to have one! - is gross in some surprising ways, and sticks primarily to practical effects, which is refreshing to see. I just wish those effects were a little...better. And that goes for the movie as a whole.