For the week of October 14th, Paramount Home Media Distribution is bringing Crawl to Blu-ray. This was the summer's nicest surprise, an intense, gory, knowing carnival ride that wants only to scare you and hit the exits before it wears out its welcome. In a summer season of superhero team-ups and franchise addenda, unpretentious programmers like this feel all the more vital. For the most part, Crawl has no hidden agenda, no grand ambitions, no densely plotted mythology. We open in Florida just as a massive hurricane is bearing down. Amidst the rain and wind, our heroine (a very good Kaya Scodelario) goes looking for her missing father (Barry Pepper, who's just terrific). She finds him trapped in her family house's crawlspace alongside a horde of ravenous gators. And with all that established, we're pretty much off to the races for an hour and change. Michael and Shawn Rasmussen's script tends towards the functional when it comes to exposition (Scodelario has a sister who phones in from Boston to dump backstory about their relationship with Pepper), but in terms of plot, it's a model of formal construction. There's a pleasing causality to the way Scodelario finds Pepper, and credit to director Alexandre Aja: he keeps framing all the introductory material in visually distinctive ways, getting the most from DP Maxime Alexandre's fluid, textured cinematography. In fact, I might make the case for Aja as the great horror-movie sensualist. With films like High Tension or his sterling Hills Have Eyes remake, Aja brings this tactile, grueling sense of menace. He announces the arrival of Crawl's main gator in a nerve-shredding jump scare, and from then on out, the movie doesn't let up. Aja devises all sorts of ways to torment his leads that don't require too much suspension of disbelief. Scodelario and Pepper refrain from most stupid horror-movie decisions, and while I'd never call Crawl restrained (it has some snapped limb moments that put the fear of God in my audience), it's playing for funhouse thrills rather than punishing nihilism. We never feel like Scodelario and Pepper are dispensable - we just want to see them fight to survive, and the movie doesn't disappoint.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that the "production design is terrific. The basement setting is spacious but filled with twists and turns and obstacles and pipes and wires and odds and ends to allow for some maneuverability and opportunities for the characters to use the environment to their advantage, to outsmart the alligators who are running more on natural instinct - protecting their turf - rather than fighting to survive. But it's also unwelcoming, not just because it's slowly flooding and filled with alligators but because it's dank, dark, inhospitable. It's a classic horror movie setting: utilitarian, deteriorating, and somewhat claustrophobic. The supporting visual effects are not rushed or cheaply made; the alligators have an obvious mass and scale to them. They move with purpose and bite with strength. And the feeling of fear is obvious in the human characters. They largely run on authentically believable and terror-fueled adrenaline. Neither Scodelario nor Pepper shy away from the physical demands, both obviously game for what must have been a challenging shoot."
From Lionsgate Home Entertainment is Rob Zombie's latest grindhouse chiller 3 from Hell. I hated Zombie's last feature, the Kickstarted 31, so 3 from Hell comes as an all-the-more welcome surprise. It's his best film since 2013's underrated The Lords of Salem. Of course, Zombie has a secret weapon. He's working in the same sandbox as his horror masterpiece The Devil's Rejects, which followed the murderous Firefly clan (Sid Haig, Sheri Moon Zombie, and Bill Moseley) through a mad rampage that ended, seemingly, in their violent death by gunfire (to the strains of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Firebird." It's actually much cooler than it sounds). You need not worry about spoilers, though; 3 from Hell begins with the news that the Fireflys survived that hail of bullets and are now imprisoned for their crimes. While I'd never say that Zombie has gotten nostalgic in his older age (he's too big a fan of juvenile vulgarities), he's more cognizant of the passing of time than I would have expected. It's been fourteen years since The Devil's Rejects, and that amount of time has passed in the movie, so the Fireflies are a little wearier, a little more desperate. That worry gives them some interesting notes to play (especially Moseley, who's terrific here), and Zombie puts them through the ringer by changing 3 from Hell's tone every few minutes. My biggest problem with the movie is how piecemeal the whole endeavor is - you get the sense Zombie shot what he could when he could, gathering whatever actors were available (Haig is basically delivering an extended cameo performance, and the movie suffers from his absence) - but Zombie compensates by structuring the film as four or five genre exercises in one. For ten minutes, it's a deranged media satire; then it turns into a prison escape movie; Baby's stuff transforms the movie into a more lurid "Women in Cages" vibe. By the end, we could be watching a low-rent Peckinpah entry, especially once Emilio Rivera's fearsome Big Bad enters the picture. Zombie treats 3 from Hell as a genre playground, and if you're in on his wavelength, you'll have almost as much fun as he's having. The best kind of violent trash.
Almost as surprising was Netflix's 2018 sleeper hit: Mike Flanagan's terrifying Haunting of Hill House miniseries. If you're a horror fan and don't know that name, then you're missing out. Flanagan might be the most accomplished horror-movie director working today; his keen sense of psychological unease and his empathetic work with actors have galvanized anything he touches, turning otherwise disposable features like Gerald's Game, and Ouija: Origin of Evil into minor achievements. And for nine of its ten episodes, The Haunting of Hill House is Flanagan's masterpiece. I'm still stunned at how he improves on Shirley Jackson's classic ghost story. While preserving the central hook - a group of people find themselves in the thrall of Hill House, a New England mansion practically riddled with ghosts - Flanagan deepens the book's thematic and narrative scope. No longer are we limited to a group of paranormal investigators studying Hill House: no, Flanagan retrofits his version around the Crain family, who buy Hill House in the hopes that they can flip it and make a profit. The house, unfortunately, has other ideas, and after it extracts a terrible price from the Crains, the surviving family members splinter, all trying - and failing - to bury the trauma they experienced. Flanagan apparently pitched the series as This Is Us meets The Haunting. You might cringe at the overt brand synergy, but dammed if this mix doesn't work, with Flanagan expertly cutting between horrifying supernatural setpieces and finely wrought, emotionally intimate human stakes you might get from a This Is Us or Parenthood. However, Flanagan is just as indebted to Stephen King in terms of how The Haunting of Hill House unfolds. He borrows King's It structure whole-cloth, bouncing back and forth between the Crains at Hill House and their older, more tormented selves twenty years later. We feel the weight of the years and see in the performances (with Carla Gugino and Victoria Pedretti scoring MVP awards as the Crain's matriarch and youngest daughter, respectively) how Hill House has never really left the family, no matter how far away they try to get (in many ways, this is a better It adaptation than what Andy Muschietti just finished making). The show is so good that the ending hurts all the more. Like Stephen King, Flanagan is better at telling stories than he is at ending them, and he concludes The Haunting of Hill House on a cloyingly saccharine note that clangs against all the subtle misery that preceded it. Still, for horror-movie fans, this is essential viewing.
Martin Liebman wrote that "Flanagan, who directs all ten episodes, and his team of writers create a slowly paced and simmering tale of deeply seeded horror, born of both terrifying oddities and traumatic occurrences that might befall anyone, haunted house in their lives or not. The show delves into each character fully and carefully, often juxtaposing influencing moments from their youths with paralleling events in their presents. It can be confusing at the outset; the show introduces a number of characters and sets into motion several critical plot points right off the bat. It takes a full episode-plus to get a grasp on it all, but it is in turn a very rewarding exercise in psychological trauma, real and perceived terror, and perhaps most interestingly and engagingly an exploration of life paths as the audience bears witness to each character's pivotal, formative moments and how they greatly impact the individual arc through life and the collective relationships they share and build. This is not a haunted house show, per se. It's an exploration of siblings and souls, each of them defined by the paranormal but also by life and its inescapable and immutable realities that are so often thrust upon the young, before their time, before they're ready to absorb, process, and learn from it. This is a high point study in psychology for the screen that just so happens to be wrapped in tones of terror."
For roughly seventy of its 104 minutes, Riley Stearns' jet-black comedy The Art of Self-Defense (which arrives courtesy of Universal Studios Home Entertainment) provides as savage a criticism of toxic male entitlement as I've ever seen. Our entrance point is Jesse Eisenberg's beyond-milquetoast accountant Casey Davies, and Eisenberg's presence alone codes our initial reception of the character: he's stilted, nebbish, and alone, the kind of frightened husk Mark Zuckerberg might have been if he'd had less money and way fewer gadflies enabling him. Casey is afraid of everything, and Stearns throws his protagonist's anxieties into full meltdown after he's savagely beaten and almost killed one night. Casey decides he's had enough, and when he bristles at the waiting period necessary to buy a gun (in a nice touch, the salesman keeps rattling off statistics about how guns dramatically imperil the lives of those who own them, but all Casey can focus on is how nicely the weapon fits in his hand), he joins a karate dojo, thus bringing him into the orbit of the film's most inspired comic creation: the brusquely intimidating "Sensei." As played by the great Alessandro Nivola, the very American Sensei critiques Casey's "effeminate sounding name" and feeds his students a steady stream of inanities like "kick with your fists and punch with your feet." Sensei also senses Casey's latent rage, and he stokes it with clinical precision, sending the movie to places I wasn't expecting. Its brilliant midsection unfolds like American Yorgos Lanthimos: Stearns directs his performers to adopt an almost narcotized deadpan as they're committing the most antisocial atrocities against one another and the world around them. We don't know whether to be horrified or laugh when, say, Sensei graphically breaks the arm of his most fervent acolyte just to prove a point (or when he directs the dojo's night class to a beyond homoerotic "cool down" after combat), and that tension keeps us receptive to all the ways Casey uses violence to armor his masculinity and erode his humanity. Had Stearns maintained this air of nihilistic cool, I'd be talking about one of the year's best films...except he gets a little too clever for his own good, engineering a twist at the start of the third act that's just too convenient by half (you will probably suspect it early on and then dismiss it because the movie seems too smart to stoop that low). And what's worse, this plot device lets Eisenberg off the hook, excusing his amoral complicity and turning him into something the movie seemed to imply was a naïve delusion: a white knight who counters Sensei's terrible example. The ending is as big a letdown as John Wayne and Montgomery Clift not killing one another in Red River - there, too, does a subversion of the masculine ideal take a last-minute feint into blind affirmation. Pity, because The Art of Self-Defense could have been so special.