Be Kind, Rewrite
My thoughts on Monster Summer, The Outrun, The Radleys and V/H/S/Beyond
Set in the summer of 1997, an era chock-full of potential pop culture references to be dropped at a moment’s notice when needed, Monster Hunter tells the story of a mysterious entity that begins stalking the teens of Martha’s Vineyard, turning them into near-zombies who now just sit around listlessly, as though the lights are on but nobody is at home. Oddly, the adults in town don’t seem particularly perturbed by this development but Noah (Mason Thames)—a budding young journalist living with his widowed mother (Nora Zehetner) is not only convinced that there is something strange going on but that it may be the work of a witch who may have infiltrated the area. Although Noah struggles to convince best pals Sammy (Abby James Witherspoon) and Eugene (Julian Lerner) that something wicked their way has come, he is finally able to get Gene (Mel Gibson)—a former police investigator with a shrouded and tragic past that has made him a near-recluse—to believe his bizarre story and they band together to try to uncover the mystery and expose the evil in their midst before it can conclude its ghastly business and move on to another unsuspecting town.
From the basic story of kids battling a mysterious supernatural force in their quaint hometown to the title font, Monster Summer is a film that has clearly been influenced by Stranger Things and may well have been put in to production in order to temporarily sate that show’s massive fan base while they wait for the next season to finally arrive. Although the basic ingredients may be the same as Stranger Things, the film never quite figures out the right proportions and the result never really works. The screenplay by Bryan Schulz and Cornelius Uliano tries to blend together the eerie and otherworldly with more down-to-earth developments involving the tragic backstories of both Noah and Gene and the requisite amount of 90s-era references to things like T2 and The X-Files but they don’t really bring anything new or interesting into the mix. The younger performers do the best they can with their thinly written parts while more familiar faces like Kevin James and Lorraine Branco flounder in what amount to little more than distracting cameos. As for Gibson, although his character is weirdly conceived at times (he makes a bunch of dark wisecracks that don’t really land when you first hear them and become even more off-putting in hindsight when you get the gist of his tragic backstory), he gives a solid performance that reminds of what a strong screen presence he can be. For younger viewers who are becoming interested in the horror genre but aren’t quite ready for chainsaw murders and exploding heads, Monster Summer will serve as a passable excursion that allows some thrills and chills without any of the gore or ghastliness. For viewers who are, say, older than the youthful protagonists, it will prove to be an all-too-familiar tour of genre cliches that is ultimately more forgettable than anything else
.Based on the memoir by Amy Lipcot, The Outrun stars Saoirse Ronan as Rona, a young woman whose issues with alcoholism have ruined her once-promising career as a biologist, caused a breakup with long-suffering boyfriend Daynin (Paapa Essiedu) and put a tremendous strain on her relationship with her mother, Annie (Saskia Reeves). She has a better relationship with her father, Andrew (Stephen Dillane), perhaps in no small part because he is suffering from mental illness that at times throws him into the kind of emotional chaos that eventually sent Annie packing but which she recognizes as similar to her own issues. After numerous trips in and out of rehab that have convinced her that she “cannot be happy sober,” she has finally turned the corner and takes a volunteer position with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds that sends her back to her childhood home of Orkney, an archipelago off the coast of Scotland to assist in protecting corncrake habitats. Although the landscape is bleak compared to that of London, she perseveres through her work as she tries to continue on her path to sobriety while working on her relationship with her parents, particularly the question of whether she, for the sake of her own health, needs to cut ties with her father in the same way that her mother did.
Ronan is, of course, one of the best young actresses working today and if she has turned in a dud performance at any point during her screen career, it does not immediately leap to mind. (She has been in bad movies, such as the insufferable The Lovely Bones, but even in those clunkers, she has always been good.) The good news is that her work here as Rona is pretty spectacular—instead of indulging in the kind of melodramatic excesses that one normally finds actors in recovery drama narratives indulging in, she brings the character in life in ways that really allow you to understand and recognize her pain and confusion, her constant fear that she will once again succumb to her addiction and even the rare moments of pleasure that she finds back home keeping an eye on the corncrakes. The bad news is that the rest of the film fails to measure up to her work. Working from a screenplay that she co-wrote with Lipcot, director Fingscheidt has eschewed a straightforward narrative structure that veers back and forth between Rona’s past and present (with her hair color serving as the one real indicator of what period we are in at any given moment) and while that is certainly a bold approach, you get the sense as things progress that she has employed only so that the back-and-forth effect can cover up the fact that the story doesn’t really have much of anything to say about the issues that raises about addiction, mental illness or familial strife. There are some nice moments here and there—especially the scenes of her in Orkney with the other RSPS volunteers, portrayed by non-professional actors—and Ronan is, as always, a wonder but The Outrun, for all of its good intentions, never quite lives up to the efforts of its star
.The Radleys, a new British import from director Euros Lyn, is one of the more peculiar films that I have seen in a while and though I don’t think that it ultimately quite works, the weirdo blend of familial angst, repressed sexuality and gore kept me reasonably intrigued even as I realized that it wasn’t really going anywhere. The title refers to a suburban London family consisting of doctor father Peter (Damian Lewis), homemaker mother Helen (Kelly MacDonald) and teenaged children Rowan (Harry Baxendale) and Clara (Bo Bragason) and outside of a certain wanness in Clara following a recent conversion to veganism and Rowan struggling with his feelings towards new neighbor Evan (Jay Lycurgo), their lives seem perfectly normal. That changes rapidly when a creepy classmate of Clara’s tries to sexually assault her and she inexplicably sprouts fangs and goes for his jugular. After helping Clara hide the body, Peter and Helen are forced to make an admission to their children that they have put off for far too long—they are all actually vampires and while they are “abstainers” who have left the blood sucking behind, that urge to do it will always be a part of them. To help dispose of the body, Peter contacts his estranged twin brother Will (Lewis again), who continues to revel in his true nature and his presence sends the entire family dynamic into turmoil as they are forced to contemplate and perhaps even succumb to their true natures.
Though adapted from a 2010 YA novel by Matt Haig that was presumably intended to attract members of the Twilight fan base, the film moves the material into more overtly adult territories by amping up the sexual themes and laying on liberal amounts of gore throughout. While I have probably seen more than enough vampire movies and coming-of-age sagas to last me a lifetime and then some, the screenplay by Haig and Jo Brand is refreshingly low-key, if not exactly subtle in its metaphoric content, and finds some clever variations on both—when Rowan elects to finally rebel, for example, it comes by chugging an illicit bottle of blood, not beer. The performances are also quite good as well—Baxendale and Bragason are quite good as the kids coming to terms with their new reality (though the latter kind of gets pushed to the sidelines after the story is set up), Lewis is clearly having a blast in his dual role, especially in his scenes as the cheerfully malevolent Will, and MacDonald is wonderful as the seemingly staid housewife thrown in erotic turmoil by the twin lures of returning to vampirism and the return of Will, with whom she has a complicated relationship. The problem is that there is maybe a little too much story to comfortably fit into a two-hour running time—I haven’t even mentioned the subplot about Evan’s overprotective father (Shaun Parkes), a former cop and self-professed monster hunter who becomes increasingly convinced that something not right is happening next door—and the film ends up bogging down in the final reels as it tries to pull everything together. In the end, The Radleys doesn’t really come together in a completely satisfying way but there are enough individual bits that do hit to make it worth a look for the curious
.With V/H/S/Beyond, the producers of the long-running franchise (with this one marking the seventh installment) comprised of a number of found-footage-style horror shorts linked together by a common theme (specific years in the case of the last three) have decided to move away a bit from the norm with a collection of stories with more of an overtly sci-fi bent, thought still with plenty of blood, guts and weirdness on display throughout. Jay Cheel kicks things off with “Abduction/Adduction,” a faux documentary involving experts examining and attempting to debunk the history of a a house where an alien invasion took place by examining a purported video of the attack that serves as the overall framing device. Jordan Downey’s “Stork” follows a police unit busting into an abandoned building that is rumored to be the location of infant abductors, only to discover hordes of messed-up people (including one with a chainsaw) trying to prevent them from discovering their shocking secret. Virat Pal’s “Dream Girl” tells the story of a couple of sleazo paparazzi in India infiltrating the set of the new movie from the country’s newest and biggest star, the mysterious Tara (Narmada Sheth) and discovering her shocking secret. “Live and Let Dive,” from Justin Martinez, places us in an airplane filled with a bunch of friends whose plans to celebrate the birthday of one of them goes sideways when they have a mid-air encounter with a UFO. Inexplicably eschewing the alien concept, Christian and Justin Long’s “Fur Babies” goes the standard body horror route with a story in which two animal rights activists attempt to infiltrate the home of a dog obsessive (Libby Letow) that they suspect of animal cruelty, only to discover her shocking secret. In the final story (not counting the “Abduction/Adduction” wrap up), Kate Siegel’s 90’s-set “Stowaway,” an amateur documentarian (Alana Pierce) ventures out into the Mojave Desert to try to uncover the truth behind mysterious lights that have been seen there and winds up getting a lot more than she bargained for.
Like virtually all films of this type, especially the entries in this particular franchise, V/H/S/Beyond is a decidedly mixed bag and you mileage may vary greatly in regard to which sections work and which don’t. That said, I must confess that this is overall one of the weaker installments in the franchise—the stories run on way too long and mostly fail to come up with the kind of ingenuity that the best sections of the previous iterations have managed to conjure up. “Abduction/Adduction” has a couple of amusing moments here and there but the big climax, in which we see the purported video of the alien encounter, proves to be a dud that is especially disastrous at it serves as the conclusion to the whole thing. “Stork” and “Dream Girl” serve up plenty of gore but the stories themselves are not much to write home about—the former has the look and feel of a brutal video game and the latter has a couple of interesting ideas about class systems and the parasitic nature of the media but are abandoned too soon for the usual array of face-ripping. “Live and Let Dive” is the cleverest and most audacious of the stories on display and is the best of the bunch, even though the conclusion is a bit of a dud. “Fur Babies” is an absolute dud that finds Long essentially trying to redo Kevin Smith’s bizarre Tusk (in which he starred) in 20 minutes and somehow failing to reach even that modest artistic bar and the lack of any sci-fi elements make its inclusion all the more baffling. “Stowaway” is interesting for a while—it has a vibe not unlike the great Annihilation and contains a solid performance from Pierce—but once again, it has a letdown of an ending. Although “Live and Let Dive” and “Stowaway” are enjoyable enough and the clear highlights here, even the hardcore fans of the franchise will have to admit that this is perhaps the weakest overall collection to date. The overall concept is still solid and allows up-and-coming genre filmmakers to show their stuff—here is hoping that future installments in the series demonstrate a little more quality control in regards to the material.